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Well, let's do a thought experiment. Suppose a civilization invents a technology that gives them an extreme competitive advantage but, for some contrived reason, it can only be powered by immense amounts of human suffering. Everyone gets plugged into the machine and subjected to intense unending physical torture, like an inverted hellscape version of The Matrix. Presumably, you would never choose to live in such a society, no matter how evolutionarily successful they were.
You could bite the bullet and say that, yes, because they survive and outlast, they are better - but this would only be the most abstract type of "better", because your revealed preferences would show that you could never actually accept such an arrangement.
You have the luxury of extolling the virtues of Darwinian competition because, coincidentally, the most dominant civilization on the planet right now is also the one that provides that most lavish opportunities for hedonism. The social organism itself becomes more competitive, while the individual is allowed to become more sedentary, more secure, increasingly protected from the vicissitudes of nature - a strange kind of "competition" indeed. If being competitive meant actually living the life of a drug cartel lackey or a post-apocalyptic warlord, if it meant actual physical competition and actual danger, then you would likely find that a reassessment of your fundamental values would be in order.
If the Pain Obelisk is inevitable, the Pain Obelisk is inevitable.
The only moral action is the minimization of entropy.
All we can do is pray that out creator isn't so cruel as to make this our destiny. But we can't change it.
Darwinian competition is natural law. It cannot be negotiated with. We can only irrationally hope evil doesn't win in the end.
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It's a pretty lame thought experiment if it requires made-up dynamics hugely divorced from common experience or conceivable logic. That nobody wants to build the Torment Nexus because it doesn't obviously create value is a strong argument for it not being competitive.
Industrialism was very unpleasant for some. You'd work long hours from a very young age in a polluted and unsafe working environment. But people still went to cities for jobs! Lots of people became richer and better off than before! Their children inherited the fruits of an advanced civilization and squandered much of it, yet there is much to squander and at least people aren't dying of tuberculosis much these days.
I won't get a choice, will I? If the Torment Nexus is on-path (for reasons I can't fathom), then it comes regardless of whether any individual wants it. My opinion does not matter at all. I wouldn't like it, nobody would like it but it would still be here and it would be better in the same way that machine guns are better than swords. Swords might be more aesthetic and manly and heroic and skill-intensive. They might be better socially, creating cultures where the best survive wars rather than the lucky... But none of that is nearly so important as the innate quality gap between the two.
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