. If I imagine trading extreme suffering for extreme bliss personally, I end up with ratios of 1 to 300 million – e.g., that I would accept a second of extreme suffering for ten years of extreme bliss. The ratio is highly unstable as I vary the scenarios, but the point is that I disvalue suffering many orders of magnitude more than I value bliss.
I also disvalue suffering significantly more than I value happiness (I think bliss is the wrong term to use here), but not to that level. My gut feeling wants to dispute those numbers as being practical, but I’ll just take them as gesturing at the comparative feeling.
An idea that I’ve seen once, but not sure where, is: you can probably improve the amount of happiness you experience in a utopia by a large amount.
Not through wireheading, which at least for me is undesirable, but ‘simply’ redesigning the human mind in a less hedonic-treadmill manner (while also not just cutting out boredom).
I think the usual way of visualizing extreme dystopias as possible-futures has the issue that it is easy to compare them to the current state of humanity rather than an actual strong utopia. I expect that there’s a good amount of mind redesign work, in the vein of some of the mind-design posts in Fun Theory but ramped up to superintelligence design+consideration capabilities, that would vastly increase the amount of possible happiness/Fun and make the tradeoff more balanced.
I find it plausible that suffering is just easier to cause and more impactful even relative to strong-utopia-level enhanced-minds, but I believe this does change the calculus significantly. I might not take a 50⁄50 coin for strong dystopia/strong utopia, but I’d maybe take a 10⁄90 coin. Thankfully we aren’t in that scenario, and have better odds.
I also disvalue suffering significantly more than I value happiness (I think bliss is the wrong term to use here), but not to that level. My gut feeling wants to dispute those numbers as being practical, but I’ll just take them as gesturing at the comparative feeling.
An idea that I’ve seen once, but not sure where, is: you can probably improve the amount of happiness you experience in a utopia by a large amount. Not through wireheading, which at least for me is undesirable, but ‘simply’ redesigning the human mind in a less hedonic-treadmill manner (while also not just cutting out boredom). I think the usual way of visualizing extreme dystopias as possible-futures has the issue that it is easy to compare them to the current state of humanity rather than an actual strong utopia. I expect that there’s a good amount of mind redesign work, in the vein of some of the mind-design posts in Fun Theory but ramped up to superintelligence design+consideration capabilities, that would vastly increase the amount of possible happiness/Fun and make the tradeoff more balanced. I find it plausible that suffering is just easier to cause and more impactful even relative to strong-utopia-level enhanced-minds, but I believe this does change the calculus significantly. I might not take a 50⁄50 coin for strong dystopia/strong utopia, but I’d maybe take a 10⁄90 coin. Thankfully we aren’t in that scenario, and have better odds.