Maybe they also expected something other than a guide on how to write "eutopian" stories, perhaps an essay on inner workings of humor or entertainment. I certainly did.
> 15. Trying to compete on a single flat playing field with six billion other humans also creates problems. Our ancestors lived in bands of around 50 people. Today the media is constantly bombarding us with news of exceptionally rich and pretty people as if they lived next door to us; and very few people get a chance to be the best at any specialty.
This is why I say social media isn't fun, and it has always been a cruel spectacle of what happens when you throw average people into the ring of elite competiton. Fun is when you can afford the stakes. I don't think most people can actually afford to lose.
Imagine you're wealthy and beautiful, and the first thing that comes to your mind, is that you need to share it with the world.
I think it's quite telling.
I suspect l, that many interesting people are not on social media. They simply have better things to do, than waste their time on Instagram and tiktok.
>Imagine you're wealthy and beautiful, and the first thing that comes to your mind, is that you need to share it with the world. I think it's quite telling.
Not as telling as it seems. We are social animals. It's only natural to want to share it with the world.
It would be more shallow to revel in having wealth and/or beauty alone.
What people want instead is deeper, is love and recognition from others. That's where hapiness comes from (not some "peace with oneself" etc, that's just a prerequisite), and that's what those people try to get by sharing their wealth and beauty.
Many of cause do it crudely, and will be unhappy nonetheless.
>a cruel spectacle of what happens when you throw average people into the ring of elite competiton [sic]
Good comment. I'm curious what your take on the use of social media as a means to share outrageous lies and engage in trolling behavior. Is this also an expression of a kind of status? Genuinely asking. I never thought of it that way.
While I haven't given trolls much thought because people who were on early IRC or Usenet, or predecessors in the BBS/fidonet scene (which pre-dates me) have a natural immunity to trolls. However, perhaps it's because we still think the internet isn't real life, where for an entire young middle class, it in fact is. Nobody expected to live in a future where the bourgoisie and their aspirants live in a zoo of their own making, and that geeks would become their zookeepers.
The trolling today looks like a revolt against this game that isn't a game by people who sense there is something wrong but act out within it instead of stepping back. Flinging poop instead of orchestrating an escape, or less dramatically, just putting down the zoo and going for a walk. As long as people can be shocked, there will be people to shock them. In this sense, trolls aren't a problem for social media at all because it needs them to help keep people engaged and disatracted to preserve the illusion that it's meaningful and real.
It's funny, this reminded me immediately of something I've experienced recently.
I started making digital paintings on my iPad about a year and a half ago. And I'm not too bad; I've been drawing on and off all my life so I came to it already a decently talented artist. But there are so many artists I follow on Instagram who are so, so much more talented than me, to a degree I will never be. Thousands of them who were better than I am now way back when they were in high school, who have now catapulted beyond where I'll probably ever be and become professional artists with hundreds of thousands of followers who make a living off selling prints and merch. I post my art on Instagram but it feels like throwing mediocre work into a vast sea of bottomless excellence, and there's something fundamentally disheartening about that.
However, it's okay, because I've found a little corner of the internet where I'm king. A tiny subreddit for a silly game I play on my phone sometimes. There are other people making fanart for it, too, but only a couple dozen, and in only a year I've become good enough that I'm probably the most talented artist making fanart for it. My posts there get fifty times as many upvotes there as they do Instagram likes, they linger at the top of the (slow-moving) subreddit for days, and people absolutely shower them with compliments. It's tremendously motivating. All I want to do is create fanart for this game.
I think everyone can do this. Everyone has some talent, and there are so many diverse, fragmented communities out there that everyone can probably be king of some corner if they like. Social media can be demotivating if you think of it as one vast sea of seven billion people, but it also allows countless tiny niche communities to congregate and thrive. Go find one to conquer.
I am not an artist but I work with a lot of artists and I'm always amazed at their skills. I used to sit next to a few concept artists and it was a treat watching them work.
I remember when two concept artists[0] were excitedly talking about how we'd just hired such an amazing concept artist, their big idol[1]. I looked up his stuff and it was of course astounding. But to be honest they're all just incredible to me.
>I don't think most people can actually afford to lose.
I think how you describe the problem is solid, but the situation is the opposite:
Most people can totally afford to lose -- because they wont be losing anything that they have anyway. Not winning at being a famous and rich YouTube influencer still leaves you with what you had before (and the same need to hold a job, etc).
What they can't really afford is to participate, because competition with all the elite people for things most have 1 in a million chances of ever achieving would just drive them mad.
> 23. In general, tampering with brains, minds, emotions, and personalities is way more fraught on every possible level of ethics and difficulty, than tampering with bodies and environments. Always ask what you can do by messing with the environment before you imagine messing with minds.
This makes me think of political ideologies that are more focused on how people should act than on changing the shared environment to work better for people as they are
I completely agree. So much of political ideologies are focused on the should, rather than how to change our state machines input. I usually try to think how can we change our environment to make ourselves more fulfilled, but it seems like no one else does.
One thing I’ve surprised myself by discovering more than once: you have a very bad idea of what you will consider fun. Something can seem right up your alley on paper, and end up being extremely underwhelming in reality, or vice versa. Don’t talk yourself out of trying something because you think you’ll dislike it!
As a Christian, it would be very sad/disheartening if this author's description of "Christian Heaven" were actually supported by scripture. Aside from that, many of these ideas assume people to be completely self-centered and un-altruistic, which is often true, but I'd expect the ultimate fun to be more about shaking those bonds than attempting to accommodate them. From my view that requires changes both in the environment and in the individual.
Certainly, though I personally draw a pretty large difference between "supported by scripture" and either "I can find a verse that helps me justify my opinion" or "I can find some famous idiot in the Bible who made the same mistake, therefore it's okay".
I’ve thought about this idea of what would make for a desirable utopia, and I can’t avoid the fact that either you would die at some point (which creates suffering due to the anticipation of the event) or live forever, which actually seems more horrific in a way — how could you possibly not go crazy after living trillions of years and thinking about the next trillion? The only real solution is to alter the human brain to no longer fear death or eternal existence.
The point about the pleasure/pain imbalance is interesting. Think about how people slowly develop tolerance to drugs/medications that make you feel better and require more of it to get the same effect, but with pain we have the opposite situation, where constant suffering leads to experiencing even more suffering in the future through the process of sensitization (there are some theories that a lot of chronic pain is due to this rather than the original injury). It really doesn’t seem fair how massive this imbalance is.
I’ve slowly realized that I probably won’t ever figure out exactly what will make me happy, but I definitely know what makes me unhappy, and it’s much easier to develop a life plan based on avoiding negative things than pursuing positive things.
You could go for what Iain M Banks did in The Culture: although death is theoretically optional, most people only live for a few hundred years because by that point they’re basically done with everything they care about doing.
> either you would die at some point (which creates suffering due to the anticipation of the event) or live forever, which actually seems more horrible in a way
We know death causes suffering, but we don't know if immortality causes suffering. Don't knock it till you've tried it. #FableOfTheDragonTyrant
I've always thought of that trope in fiction of immortal beings wanting to die as being silly. It seems like a case of the fox considering the grapes to be sour because it couldn't reach them, on the part of writers.
I'm somewhere in the middle - I think the human lifespan is miserably short and really wish it could be extended. The fact that I and everyone I love will likely die in the next 40 years sucks. I could probably easily fill 500 years without getting bored, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't suck.
I do think being immortal would eventually drive you insane though. Humans can't grasp the mindbending vastness of infinity. If a genie offered me true immortality, or death in 10 years, I'm taking the decade. It's just too risky. Thankfully, not a problem I'll ever have.
The Good Place (the show) took a try at this! It’s an exceptional show in many ways, and the final season spends a lot of time trying to solve this exact problem and grappling with its consequences.
(I won’t spoil it for you, but Wikipedia has a summary if you don’t want to watch.)
I'm not sure why it is common wisdom that a very long lifespan is supposed to be horrific. It seems to me like our lifespans inform many issues (e.g. lack of long-term planning on all levels of society, because YOLO, people being constantly afraid to "waste their best years" etc.)
IMHO "creates suffering due to the anticipation of the event" is not an axiom - if you know that the event won't be unwanted and forced upon you by circumstances or others, but will hapen iff and when you're satisfied with that, then the issue that people generally die does not need to invoke suffering.
There's quite a bit of evidence that meaning is what makes one happy. Pleasure is a very tiny component.
Avoiding suffering doesn't guarantee you gain meaning. Suffering can diminish happiness, but one can be happy while suffering. This is not because one enjoys suffering, but because one is able to see it as having a purpose.
Drug addiction and other addictive behaviors can be linked back to self-medicating processes that are attempts at avoiding the mental agony of purposelessness.
How one gains meaning and purpose is a much deeper discussion.
So true. I've experienced more than my share of addiction, and the dopamine hits, while intense, only bring momentary pleasure. Instead of happiness, feelings of shame are often the result.
Fortunately there are many things out there that both bring happiness and pleasure. But the pleasure happens at the appropriate time and place. For instance.
1. The high one experiences during or after strenuous exercise.
2. The satisfaction of a job well done (whether physical labor or not).
3. The feeling of relief after going through a difficult time.
4. Even sex, when it results from genuine emotional/spiritual connection with a spouse.
These things all involve a moderate-to-severe degree of pain. Yes, even the fourth one. It is hard to trust another person with our own personal darkness.
Those things (drugs, eating, shopping, porn, etc.) that attempt to isolate and repeat just the reward/pleasure sensations experienced in life not only cheapen the experience, but limit our capacity to enjoy real life fully.
These discussions are useful in a concrete way because it helps us to identify and prioritize our values with our imagination! Lesswrong is, in this case, cataloging my teenage thoughts on the matter, which is very cool.
Buddhist cosmology has an interesting take on heaven. They believe only humans can become enlightened and achieve nirvana. Angels, demons and animals can't do it. Even heaven ends, in that system, and angels, although exceedingly powerful, happy, and long-lived, still experiences the suffering of attachment. Meanwhile, nirvana is explicitly defined as ultimately blissful, but not life, not death, not both, not neither - and a state the enlightened can enter into at will. (The major steps on the path are defined by touching nirvana N times, each time burns out some deep seated big category of reaction, like fear, where by the 4th time you conquer lust and anger, and boom, you're an arahant.)
I like this. It tacitly accepts the difficulty of heaven as a self-consistent concept, which in turn challenges the assumption that there exists some combination of external circumstance which is perfect, forever, for anyone, and places the responsibility of ultimate bliss squarely on your shoulders. The implications seem bloodless and strange, unless you accept the fact that, as you become more enlightened, the more powerful your ability to love and act on that love becomes.
BTW my favorite conventional utopia is the Culture from Ian M. Banks. It's fantasy couched in scifi rhetoric, but I think Banks does a great job looking at the implications of getting every material thing you ever wanted, every freedom, almost every power, the problems and drama that even a galaxy spanning, unimaginably powerful and benevolent society can run into.
Yes, all the vedic religions share the same overarching ideas - karma, rebirth, escaping the wheel of samsara, and so on. I'm not a religious scholar but it's fascinating history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Vedic_religion
This article is reminding me so much of "The Good Place", which explores how the ideal conception of heaven of many people could perceivably be construed as a hell; and vice versa. I recommend it heartily - both for the laughs, and the thinking.
> 2. [...] Again, consider Christian Heaven: singing hymns doesn't sound like loads of endless fun, but you're supposed to enjoy praying, so no one can point this out.
Clearly written by someone who's either never been to church, or goes to a boring one :-)
If you've ever been to a fantastic (rock, jazz, whatever) concert, you know the amazing feeling of being caught up with others in the excitement of a shared musical experience. It's fantastic!
Well, worship can be like this too... you may need to shop around to find an exciting church (and yeah, church is supposed to touch all your senses, not just your intellect, so excitement is OK.)
And a ton of our popular ideas of heaven (walking on clouds in white robes playing lyres) doesn't come at all from the biblical account. Go read Revelation... heaven is going to be a city, the inhabitants will have jobs, etc. The biblical heaven looks interesting to me!
See "Heaven" by Randy Alcorn for other interesting myths busted.
I heard pastor/theologian John Piper recently say something like (this is my paraphrase): "The only way I can possibly be totally satisfied for an eternity, is in the presence of the infinitely good God." One of the biggest influences on my imagination in this regard has been NT Wright's focus on 'the new heavens and the new earth' - the redemption and bringing together of both - I haven't read Alcorn on this but I imagine there's a shared focus on the Bodily reality of things.
Thanks, I keep hearing about NT Wright, I'll have to look into his stuff.
It's hard to imagine a God bigger (in various non-physical dimensions) than us, and that "making God in our image" just is so limiting.
Notably, Kushner's "Why bad things happen to good people" states as a matter of fact, "If God has a plan, I can understand it." All I can say is, he never took higher math :-)
The author of the OP is a Jewish atheist, so indeed probably hasn't attended a lot of Christian church services.
I think "you may need to shop around" is too strong. A churchgoer may care about other things besides whether the music at their church is exciting to them, and it's not obvious that they should prioritize excitement over (say) theological agreement, or strength of community, or what if anything the church does outside its services.
The white robes arguably do come from the biblical account. Revelation 7:9: "After this ... behold, a great multitude which no man could number ... clothed in white robes". This is describing specifically "they who have come out of the great tribulation", so it may not be meant to apply to everyone there, but there are a whole lot of other white robes in Revelation.
The lyres, too, or possibly harps. Revelation 15:2ff: "And I saw ... those who had conquered the beast and its image ... standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands". Again, not obviously everyone, but harps none the less.
No walking on clouds there, though. And in any case it's not clear that taking Revelation as a straightforward account of what to expect in some future existence really matches much with its actual intention. Those white robes and "harps of God" and all the rest are all there as symbols of purity and worship and the like, and arguably the author of Revelation was much more interested in commenting on contemporary persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire than in actually predicting the future.
(Note: I'm not a Christian, though I was one for many years. Feel free to discount any of the above as a result, if that seems appropriate to you.)
>Clearly written by someone who's either never been to church, or goes to a boring one :-) If you've ever been to a fantastic (rock, jazz, whatever) concert, you know the amazing feeling of being caught up with others in the excitement of a shared musical experience. It's fantastic!
Yep, and besides that church hymns/music can be great fun, the part is written by someone with little knowledge of actual christian doctrine beyond cheap lore (and perhaps evangelical neo-christian imagery), because paradise is not about signing hymns and such (the same way hell is not some torture camp with tar pits and fires)...
The Matrix was originally designed as a utopia. It didn't work out, so they ended up copying the world we are living in today.
Because to be fair, the description in the article is not that far from real life, at least for healthy people with enough resources to survive. That is: most of us on HN. And in fact even the poor and sick can often be unexpectedly happy.
Maybe we are simply very well adapted to our world.
To be achievable, utopia should be an attitude, not a place. The best attitude I ever came across is "Everything in moderation, including moderation itself."
49 comments
[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 99.7 ms ] threadThis is why I say social media isn't fun, and it has always been a cruel spectacle of what happens when you throw average people into the ring of elite competiton. Fun is when you can afford the stakes. I don't think most people can actually afford to lose.
I think it's quite telling.
I suspect l, that many interesting people are not on social media. They simply have better things to do, than waste their time on Instagram and tiktok.
Not as telling as it seems. We are social animals. It's only natural to want to share it with the world.
It would be more shallow to revel in having wealth and/or beauty alone.
What people want instead is deeper, is love and recognition from others. That's where hapiness comes from (not some "peace with oneself" etc, that's just a prerequisite), and that's what those people try to get by sharing their wealth and beauty.
Many of cause do it crudely, and will be unhappy nonetheless.
Good comment. I'm curious what your take on the use of social media as a means to share outrageous lies and engage in trolling behavior. Is this also an expression of a kind of status? Genuinely asking. I never thought of it that way.
The trolling today looks like a revolt against this game that isn't a game by people who sense there is something wrong but act out within it instead of stepping back. Flinging poop instead of orchestrating an escape, or less dramatically, just putting down the zoo and going for a walk. As long as people can be shocked, there will be people to shock them. In this sense, trolls aren't a problem for social media at all because it needs them to help keep people engaged and disatracted to preserve the illusion that it's meaningful and real.
I started making digital paintings on my iPad about a year and a half ago. And I'm not too bad; I've been drawing on and off all my life so I came to it already a decently talented artist. But there are so many artists I follow on Instagram who are so, so much more talented than me, to a degree I will never be. Thousands of them who were better than I am now way back when they were in high school, who have now catapulted beyond where I'll probably ever be and become professional artists with hundreds of thousands of followers who make a living off selling prints and merch. I post my art on Instagram but it feels like throwing mediocre work into a vast sea of bottomless excellence, and there's something fundamentally disheartening about that.
However, it's okay, because I've found a little corner of the internet where I'm king. A tiny subreddit for a silly game I play on my phone sometimes. There are other people making fanart for it, too, but only a couple dozen, and in only a year I've become good enough that I'm probably the most talented artist making fanart for it. My posts there get fifty times as many upvotes there as they do Instagram likes, they linger at the top of the (slow-moving) subreddit for days, and people absolutely shower them with compliments. It's tremendously motivating. All I want to do is create fanart for this game.
I think everyone can do this. Everyone has some talent, and there are so many diverse, fragmented communities out there that everyone can probably be king of some corner if they like. Social media can be demotivating if you think of it as one vast sea of seven billion people, but it also allows countless tiny niche communities to congregate and thrive. Go find one to conquer.
Similar themes in these posts.
https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans http://paulgraham.com/re.html
I remember when two concept artists[0] were excitedly talking about how we'd just hired such an amazing concept artist, their big idol[1]. I looked up his stuff and it was of course astounding. But to be honest they're all just incredible to me.
[0] one of them was Oliver Fetscher https://www.artstation.com/oliverfetscher
[1] https://www.artstation.com/zabrocki
I think how you describe the problem is solid, but the situation is the opposite:
Most people can totally afford to lose -- because they wont be losing anything that they have anyway. Not winning at being a famous and rich YouTube influencer still leaves you with what you had before (and the same need to hold a job, etc).
What they can't really afford is to participate, because competition with all the elite people for things most have 1 in a million chances of ever achieving would just drive them mad.
This makes me think of political ideologies that are more focused on how people should act than on changing the shared environment to work better for people as they are
Also known as the first law of physics. (South Park S09E12 - Trapped in the Closet)
As a side note, you can support just about anything you want with scripture, so it's not a great basis for an argument.
Also there's things "everyone knows" which are "supported by scripture" that are, in fact, nowhere in the Bible.
The point about the pleasure/pain imbalance is interesting. Think about how people slowly develop tolerance to drugs/medications that make you feel better and require more of it to get the same effect, but with pain we have the opposite situation, where constant suffering leads to experiencing even more suffering in the future through the process of sensitization (there are some theories that a lot of chronic pain is due to this rather than the original injury). It really doesn’t seem fair how massive this imbalance is.
I’ve slowly realized that I probably won’t ever figure out exactly what will make me happy, but I definitely know what makes me unhappy, and it’s much easier to develop a life plan based on avoiding negative things than pursuing positive things.
We know death causes suffering, but we don't know if immortality causes suffering. Don't knock it till you've tried it. #FableOfTheDragonTyrant
I do think being immortal would eventually drive you insane though. Humans can't grasp the mindbending vastness of infinity. If a genie offered me true immortality, or death in 10 years, I'm taking the decade. It's just too risky. Thankfully, not a problem I'll ever have.
Although like with zombie-powered generators, it's fun to think of ways to exploit a monkey paw's downsides.
(I won’t spoil it for you, but Wikipedia has a summary if you don’t want to watch.)
Avoiding suffering doesn't guarantee you gain meaning. Suffering can diminish happiness, but one can be happy while suffering. This is not because one enjoys suffering, but because one is able to see it as having a purpose.
Drug addiction and other addictive behaviors can be linked back to self-medicating processes that are attempts at avoiding the mental agony of purposelessness.
How one gains meaning and purpose is a much deeper discussion.
Fortunately there are many things out there that both bring happiness and pleasure. But the pleasure happens at the appropriate time and place. For instance.
1. The high one experiences during or after strenuous exercise.
2. The satisfaction of a job well done (whether physical labor or not).
3. The feeling of relief after going through a difficult time.
4. Even sex, when it results from genuine emotional/spiritual connection with a spouse.
These things all involve a moderate-to-severe degree of pain. Yes, even the fourth one. It is hard to trust another person with our own personal darkness.
Those things (drugs, eating, shopping, porn, etc.) that attempt to isolate and repeat just the reward/pleasure sensations experienced in life not only cheapen the experience, but limit our capacity to enjoy real life fully.
Buddhist cosmology has an interesting take on heaven. They believe only humans can become enlightened and achieve nirvana. Angels, demons and animals can't do it. Even heaven ends, in that system, and angels, although exceedingly powerful, happy, and long-lived, still experiences the suffering of attachment. Meanwhile, nirvana is explicitly defined as ultimately blissful, but not life, not death, not both, not neither - and a state the enlightened can enter into at will. (The major steps on the path are defined by touching nirvana N times, each time burns out some deep seated big category of reaction, like fear, where by the 4th time you conquer lust and anger, and boom, you're an arahant.)
I like this. It tacitly accepts the difficulty of heaven as a self-consistent concept, which in turn challenges the assumption that there exists some combination of external circumstance which is perfect, forever, for anyone, and places the responsibility of ultimate bliss squarely on your shoulders. The implications seem bloodless and strange, unless you accept the fact that, as you become more enlightened, the more powerful your ability to love and act on that love becomes.
BTW my favorite conventional utopia is the Culture from Ian M. Banks. It's fantasy couched in scifi rhetoric, but I think Banks does a great job looking at the implications of getting every material thing you ever wanted, every freedom, almost every power, the problems and drama that even a galaxy spanning, unimaginably powerful and benevolent society can run into.
Clearly written by someone who's either never been to church, or goes to a boring one :-)
If you've ever been to a fantastic (rock, jazz, whatever) concert, you know the amazing feeling of being caught up with others in the excitement of a shared musical experience. It's fantastic!
Well, worship can be like this too... you may need to shop around to find an exciting church (and yeah, church is supposed to touch all your senses, not just your intellect, so excitement is OK.)
And a ton of our popular ideas of heaven (walking on clouds in white robes playing lyres) doesn't come at all from the biblical account. Go read Revelation... heaven is going to be a city, the inhabitants will have jobs, etc. The biblical heaven looks interesting to me!
See "Heaven" by Randy Alcorn for other interesting myths busted.
It's hard to imagine a God bigger (in various non-physical dimensions) than us, and that "making God in our image" just is so limiting.
Notably, Kushner's "Why bad things happen to good people" states as a matter of fact, "If God has a plan, I can understand it." All I can say is, he never took higher math :-)
I think "you may need to shop around" is too strong. A churchgoer may care about other things besides whether the music at their church is exciting to them, and it's not obvious that they should prioritize excitement over (say) theological agreement, or strength of community, or what if anything the church does outside its services.
The white robes arguably do come from the biblical account. Revelation 7:9: "After this ... behold, a great multitude which no man could number ... clothed in white robes". This is describing specifically "they who have come out of the great tribulation", so it may not be meant to apply to everyone there, but there are a whole lot of other white robes in Revelation.
The lyres, too, or possibly harps. Revelation 15:2ff: "And I saw ... those who had conquered the beast and its image ... standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands". Again, not obviously everyone, but harps none the less.
No walking on clouds there, though. And in any case it's not clear that taking Revelation as a straightforward account of what to expect in some future existence really matches much with its actual intention. Those white robes and "harps of God" and all the rest are all there as symbols of purity and worship and the like, and arguably the author of Revelation was much more interested in commenting on contemporary persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire than in actually predicting the future.
(Note: I'm not a Christian, though I was one for many years. Feel free to discount any of the above as a result, if that seems appropriate to you.)
And I didn't mean to be pushy about shopping around, but just to slightly counter the idea that church is, by definition, boring.
Thanks for the updates from Revelation... I'll correct my misconceptions :-)
Yep, and besides that church hymns/music can be great fun, the part is written by someone with little knowledge of actual christian doctrine beyond cheap lore (and perhaps evangelical neo-christian imagery), because paradise is not about signing hymns and such (the same way hell is not some torture camp with tar pits and fires)...
The Matrix was originally designed as a utopia. It didn't work out, so they ended up copying the world we are living in today.
Because to be fair, the description in the article is not that far from real life, at least for healthy people with enough resources to survive. That is: most of us on HN. And in fact even the poor and sick can often be unexpectedly happy.
Maybe we are simply very well adapted to our world.