Glad you’re fleshing this out and pushing the community to take variety/diversity more seriously as part of population axiology. I’ve had similar thoughts in this direction, and I think the core intuition is very compelling.
Caveat that I’ve only skimmed maybe a quarter of the full post so far, and I can already see that it goes well beyond the simple claim that “variety matters”: it adds a lot of context, formal structure, and specific assumptions/conditions. So I’m not trying to say this isn’t a much needed contribution.
My reaction is more about framing. I worry that the “new theory” framing + all the new words may make the central intuition feel more novel or exotic than it is. Many people, including/especially many who would not identify as utilitarians or EAs, already have the intuition that the value of a world depends not only on total welfare, but also on the diversity, richness, or non-redundancy of the lives/experiences it contains — roughly, that additional near-duplicate lives have diminishing marginal value.
So I’d find it helpful to separate, as clearly as possible, the widely shared motivating intuition from the more specific Saturationist implementation. Otherwise I worry the jargon makes the view feel more alien or proprietary than it needs to be, when the underlying motivation may actually be quite intuitive to many people.
Glad you’re fleshing this out and pushing the community to take variety/diversity more seriously as part of population axiology. I’ve had similar thoughts in this direction, and I think the core intuition is very compelling.
Caveat that I’ve only skimmed maybe a quarter of the full post so far, and I can already see that it goes well beyond the simple claim that “variety matters”: it adds a lot of context, formal structure, and specific assumptions/conditions. So I’m not trying to say this isn’t a much needed contribution.
My reaction is more about framing. I worry that the “new theory” framing + all the new words may make the central intuition feel more novel or exotic than it is. Many people, including/especially many who would not identify as utilitarians or EAs, already have the intuition that the value of a world depends not only on total welfare, but also on the diversity, richness, or non-redundancy of the lives/experiences it contains — roughly, that additional near-duplicate lives have diminishing marginal value.
So I’d find it helpful to separate, as clearly as possible, the widely shared motivating intuition from the more specific Saturationist implementation. Otherwise I worry the jargon makes the view feel more alien or proprietary than it needs to be, when the underlying motivation may actually be quite intuitive to many people.