FYI, if people want to look into what aliens might value, an interesting direction might be to think about convergent evolution. One (the only?) existing book on the topic: The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy/ Quanta magazine article. Geoffrey Miller mentioned related work in a comment a few months ago.
Is this pointless speculation? I suspect knowing about what aliens might value would be useful in understanding how to better implement Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds (ECL) (right now, right here, on Earth) although some people may disagree with me on that.
I’ve also encountered thinking that this could help avoid/reduce conflicts with aliens (which may motivate work on it from various longtermist perspectives).
I guess this kind of stuff would be particularly suited for people with an evolutionary biology/related field background but it also seems like people can pick these things up quickly/use AI assistants to help out.
FYI, if people want to look into what aliens might value, an interesting direction might be to think about convergent evolution. One (the only?) existing book on the topic: The Zoologist’s Guide to the Galaxy/ Quanta magazine article. Geoffrey Miller mentioned related work in a comment a few months ago.
Is this pointless speculation? I suspect knowing about what aliens might value would be useful in understanding how to better implement Evidential Cooperation in Large Worlds (ECL) (right now, right here, on Earth) although some people may disagree with me on that.
I’ve also encountered thinking that this could help avoid/reduce conflicts with aliens (which may motivate work on it from various longtermist perspectives).
I guess this kind of stuff would be particularly suited for people with an evolutionary biology/related field background but it also seems like people can pick these things up quickly/use AI assistants to help out.