This is very interesting, I liked reading it. I am not sure I entirely agree with the analysis, but I think MPL may well be true, and if this is true leads to very different long term strategies (e.g. a need for more moral hedging).
I am less convinced that we cannot find high-value states, or that they have to be human-parochial.
A key assumption seems to be that not getting maximal value is a disaster, but I think one can equally have a glass-half-full positive view that the search will find greater and greater values.
This essay also fits with my thinking that there might be new values out there, as yet unrealized. Once there was no life, and hence none of the values linked to living beings. Then consciousness, thinking and culture emerged, adding new kinds of value.
I suspect this might keep on going. Not obvious that new levels add fundamentally greater values, but potentially fundamentally different values. And it is not implausible that some are lexically better than others.
… if we sample new values at a constant rate and the values turn out to have a power law distribution, then the highest value found will in expectation grow (trying to work out the formula, but roughly linearly).
Some nice and insightful comments from Anders Sandberg on X: