All I’m saying is that those who are the most bullish on space colonization will colonize more space.
Sure, but that doesn’t tell you much about what happens afterwards. If the initial colonists’ values are locked in ~forever, we should probably expect value drift to be weak in general, which means frontier selection effects have a lot less variation to work with.
At the extreme lower limit with no drift at all, most agents within a mature civilization are about as expansionist as the most expansionist of the initial colonists—but no more so. And this might not be all that much in the grand scheme of things.
At the other end, where most of the space of possible values gets explored, maybe you do get a shockwave of superintelligent sociopaths racing outwards at relativistic speeds—but you also get a vast interior that favors (relatively speaking) long-term survival and material efficiency.
Sure, but that doesn’t tell you much about what happens afterwards. If the initial colonists’ values are locked in ~forever, we should probably expect value drift to be weak in general, which means frontier selection effects have a lot less variation to work with.
At the extreme lower limit with no drift at all, most agents within a mature civilization are about as expansionist as the most expansionist of the initial colonists—but no more so. And this might not be all that much in the grand scheme of things.
At the other end, where most of the space of possible values gets explored, maybe you do get a shockwave of superintelligent sociopaths racing outwards at relativistic speeds—but you also get a vast interior that favors (relatively speaking) long-term survival and material efficiency.