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While reading your article I had trouble continuing to take your perspective in good faith after I got to this point:
"For instance, suppose you're given a choice between the following two options: 1: Humanity grows into a vast civilization of 10^100 people living long and happy lives, or 2: a 10% chance that humanity grows into a vast civilization of 10^102 people living long and happy lives, and a 90% chance of going extinct right now. I think almost everyone would pick option 1, and would think it crazy to take a reckless gamble like option 2. But the Linear Utility Hypothesis says that option 2 is much better. "
It seems like selectively choosing a utility function that does not weight the negative utility of the state of 'anti-lives' that having NO civilization of people living long and happy lives at all in the entire universe would represent.
I think you could tune a linear relationship of these negative values and accurately get the behavior that people have regarding these options.
This seems a lot like picking the weakest and least credible possible argument to use as way to refute the entire idea. Which made it much more difficult for me to read the rest of your article with the benefit of the doubt I would have prefered to have held through out.
In table top gaming terms you just described a good GM. I find it very interesting that there would be such a particular overlap.
I refused to use anything but capital letters in my hand writing until I took calculus because I saw no functional difference between A and a as far as writing was concerned and A was easier to write.
In hind sight that seems like it would be evidence of low status valueing.
1. Take apart the earth, use it to build a fleet of smaller habitats that make use of the materials to generate maximum sustainable habitat space.
2. Distribute these habitats into combinations of nature preserve biomes, agricultural systems and urban centers.
3. All habitats should be given sufficient technological infrastructure to power all their life support with some extra. All habitats should have internet capabilities and backup stores of all human knowledge.
4. Redistribute the population of earth into their preferred habitat with the kinds of people they would prefer to be around, pole them if needed.This includes isolating ideologies that cannot abide any other ideologies away from other habitats.
5. Dedicate a small portion of habitats to ferry services that take regular routes between other habitats. Arrange routes so that individuals with ideological incompatibility are separated from those they cannot tolerate by longer routes.
6. Sit back and let the chips fall where they may. Live in a habitat with people of like mind, eventually die but know that humanity has been given a head start to interstellar colonization and the biospheres of earth have been preserved as redundantly as possible without dismantling any worlds beyond earth.
I'm authoring/managing this collaborative fiction project.
The format I'm using for this project is one that is ultimately yoked to reader input. So I feel it would be valuable if a few rationalists inclined and entertained by the content contributed some input of their own.
The ultimate goal of this piece is to be an exemplar of the world and creatures I constructed, which I intend to make available as a complete visual/cultural element available for free creative commons use by anyone who has need of beings to fill various roles in the drama.
Compensating over duplicitous behavior in models can tend to clog up simulations and lead to processing halting.
I generally would take all statements as reflective of exactly what some one means if at all possible.
Its also great fun to short circuit sarcasm in a similar way.