[SEQ RERUN] Building Weirdtopia
Today’s post, Building Weirdtopia was originally published on 12 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Utopia and Dystopia both confirm the moral sensibilities you started with; whether the world is a libertarian utopia of government non-interference, or a hellish dystopia of government intrusion and regulation, either way you get to say “Guess I was right all along.” To break out of this mold, write down the Utopia, and the Dystopia, and then try to write down the Weirdtopia—an arguably-better world that zogs instead of zigging or zagging. (Judging from the comments, this exercise seems to have mostly failed.)
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Eutopia is Scary, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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Academics eventually found out that human beings were happiest as hunter-gatherers in the African savanna. It was Obvious In Hindsight that deviating from the environment evolution designed us for would only ever hurt us. All technological improvements ever did was raise the average human’s happiness set point, while making it harder to achieve ends necessary for long-term satisfaction, such as close companionship, sense of purpose in life, sense of overcoming challenges, belief in a higher power, freedom, etc.
When this fact was discovered, it was suggested that we smash all our technology and start over, but this seemed much too hard to actually do. The easier way was to develop virtual reality, plug everyone into the Matrix (MMORPG-style to prevent the everyone-i-ever-loved-was-a-lie problem), and allow humanity to live out our lives as Nature intended. Whenever anyone dies in the Matrix, they get to hang out in Heaven for a while, where the memory of all their many lives is given back to them and they are free to live a maximally hedonic existence full of sex, drugs, and good food. When this gets boring, they can choose to become Reincarnated. Their memory is wiped again and they go back into the savanna.
My sexual weirdtopia is that the majority of people self-modify (using some sort of technology) to eliminate their sexual attractions and romantic attractions. They still feel other kinds of love and affection, and they still desire closeness with others. They might choose to enjoy pleasures* as intense as sex together with someone they love, but it’s more like people eating delicious pie together; it’s not driven by attraction. Sexual and romantic love only remain to a minority of people who chose not to follow the trend.
(*Intense pleasures delivered via a little light wire-heading, perhaps, but not to the level that would cause you to ignore the rest of life.)
Surely you mean cake? (For those who don’t get it, the above post pattern-matches with certain asexual/aromantic relationship preferences.)
You’re right, cake would have been more appropriate. :) (Except I love pie way more.)
Now I don’t get it even more.
To the OP:
Can you explain the difference? To me eating delicious pie together looks like a good metaphor for sex.
Well, people usually enjoy yummy food even if they have no, uh… co-eating attraction? to the person they’re eating it with. Something like “co-eating attraction” could exist, maybe there are people out there who have that, where they experience an arousal of their gustatory desires in response to another person, but I don’t think that’s typical. (I hope it’s clear that what I’m talking about is different from the quite common phenomenon of food being more enjoyable when other factors, such as the company, ambiance, etc. are also enjoyable.)
Sexual attraction, on the other hand, is a common thing, and people’s enjoyment of sex is often strongly related to their attraction to the person they’re having sex with. Of course, it’s also possible for some people to enjoy sex without being at all attracted to the person they’re having sex with, but that’s not the typical scenario, is it? If I tried really hard for a long time, maybe I could learn to enjoy sex with a woman despite being exclusively androsexual, but I’m not at all confident that I could.
So yes, sex can be non-attractional like pie, but it’s more commonly thought of as being strongly attractional. It’s that attraction part that my weirdtopia doesn’t have. People in my weirdtopia could still enjoy sex, but why would they when they’ve got pie, I mean wire-heading?
What specifically are you confused about?
It is. In fact, a common meme in the asexual community is that cake is preferred over sex.
Funny—the example sexual dystopia would be an improvement over reality if that were all that was wrong with it.
(edited to add, since I’m guessing someone took my meaning backwards:)… by which I mean that all the bad things it lists are already true, and we have other problems on top of those
I think most of the dystopia options were actually just negative looks at what things are really like, except for the technological and the cognitive ones. And even in the cognitive one, there’s mention of “or the darned government banned everything again, and people are still getting Alzheimers due to lack of stem-cell research” which sounds like real life to me.
The others require stretching. The sexual one is just true.
This is a pretty extreme claim. Care to back it up?
“10% of women have never had an orgasm. States adopt laws to ban gay marriage. Prostitution illegal.”—doesn’t sound like modern Europe, say.
And surely if one would associate this description with the really existing societies in which this was true, like early 19th century Europe, there would be lots and lots of other trade-offs against the modern world to consider in the sexual sphere—so those problems being “all that was wrong with it” would be false in the face of historical comparison. Because a society where gay marriage and prostitution are illegal—yet there’s little or no socio-sexual domination of men and women (access to sex as a carrot in front of men’s noses), or pressure to fit into narrow heteronormative roles of masculinity and femininity, or aggression against people who don’t fit into those… doesn’t sound like it ever existed historically. I agree with the conventional social sciences/”women’s studies” narrative that all these problems and attitudes are linked, as is the backlash against them.
Now, you may contend the awfulness of those deeper systemic things that I presented as correlated with the symptoms in Eliezer’s “dystopia”—but I do not doubt that what’s really up for debate here is the dystopian aspect of those systemic things, and not some hardly-coherent “everything is wonderful unless you’re gay” state of sexuality.
Ah. Yes, spreading these problems worldwide would make things worse. I took the ‘States adopt laws’ to mean ‘US states’, not ‘independent nations’ as the more conventional meaning of state.
However, there are many places in the world where this is so. These places are dystopian in this fashion.
And yes, it’s difficult to imagine those problems existing in complete isolation. I suspect that our world does not provide these problems with the minimum level of support.
I don’t understand your last sentence at all.
I had a very hard time with this exercise. Subjectively it felt like thinking about utopia and dystopia first primed me excessively to think about utopia and dystopia instead of about weirdtopia. “Try not to think about grasshoppers or zebras” is a terrible way to get me to stop thinking about grasshoppers or zebras…
For a trick, try “the dystopia, except in a good way!” as a starting point. The reason this works is because most of the dystopias are built on opposing dreams of the future had by actual humans, which are usually not too bad, you just have to reconstruct that ideal in a way that wouldn’t suck.
Part of what makes dystopias dystopian is that they make people worse: they stifle their people’s tendencies towards compassion, wonder, creative problem-solving, and other “good” impulses; and develop people’s tendencies towards cruelty, deceit, submission to abuse, indolence, wireheading, or other “bad” impulses.
As such, I’m not sure how “dystopia, except in a good way” works out. What would We or 1984 be “in a good way”?
Let me try “1984 in a good way”: Everyone is pervasively monitored, but the information is also available to everyone; after a period of adjustment, everyone becomes comfortable with the elimination of privacy and returns to their hedonic set-points, but with a massive resulting increase in global productivity, and ultimately happiness, arising from the additional information available to everyone but the elimination of secrets.
It’s not so much “1984 in a good way” as it is “one negative-seeming aspect of 1984 rebuilt into a world that can arguably be seen in a positive light, and is clearly a weirdtopia”.
Well, what are some human dreams that would lead to 1984, and can we reconstruct them? Alternately, what are some activities that are prototypical of 1984 but can be changed slightly to good end?
My list of dreams would be something like conformity, letting other people make decisions for you, using language as a tool of thought, eternal conflict against outgroups.
Activities would be things like surveillance, revision of history, getting disappeared into a state prison.
Now, can we use these ingredients to make something good instead of something bad? Well, maybe not getting disappeared into a state prison. But mostly, sure.
Why should the future be united, why can’t we have factions like Eastasia and Oceania whose people view the other group as bitter enemies? What fun would the Horde be without the Alliance?
Why should the history of the world be readily accessible, rather than different groups revising history differently just to make it more awesome from their perspective, with true histories hidden and fragmentary? Herodotus thought it was a good idea to infuse his Histories with myth, maybe he was onto something, maybe it would make people nobler.
Or letting authority decide for you—this one’s pretty easy. What if Big Brother was smart enough to make a command economy work just fine? What if it turns out that most people lead lives as happy and valuable as any when the choice of where to live and what to do for a few hours a day is removed from them? Reversal test it—if we had consistently been assigned the perfect house for us, had been told to pick up and move to unknown locales only to find out they were amazing, would most people really want to switch over to house-hunting?
((discalaimer; I’m cheating, i’ve actually held most of the weirdtopia positions as just as plausible seeming or more than the utopia ones for a long time))
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Utopia: Immortality as monolithic godlike superpersons
Dystopia: death
Wierdtopia: threads of conciousness bubbling in and out of existence, splitting and merging, without any having a sense of continuity or personal identity, frequently ending but never in a way that could sensibly be considered death.
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Utopia: everyone has the Friendly utility function, or at the very least one of a highly altruistic human, and are completely stable.
Dystropia: an indifferent or even evil super intelligence tiles the universe with something worthless.
Weirdtopia: Utility functions are swapped around like clothing, frequently bizarre, extremely evil and/or tragic, either by choice of the previous utility functions or of one many iterations past that set up an exoself or even some random outside force. Since most utility functions differ from the powers that be they experience strong sincere regret and striving to correct what they genuinely see as faults in the world, which generates great stories and truly genuine meaning and striving.
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Utopia: Everyone wishes the best for everyone else, and there is only peace and cooperation, possibly friendly sports at worst.
Dystopia: Brutal, all-out war and hate continues. There is death and negative sum games of all kinds.
Wierdtopia: Conflicts of the same scale and emotional intensity as war continue, with genuine emotions of hate and spite, and causing real pain to the loser, over things we would consider extremely petty, such as which pairing of fictional characters is the cutest. However these conflicts are moderated by different mind design and culture to never be truly destructive, and to never allow those not involved in them to come to harm.
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Utopia: the original AI fixes up the worst problems, sets up a good system, and then mostly fades into the background allowing individual minds (or whatever the closest equivalent is) to mostly do their own thing.
Dystopia: the original AI micromanages everything, allowing for little individual agency.
Wierdtopia: everyone is deeply integrated with the central AI, such that the distinction becomes meaningless and everyone feels their personal agency is behind it’s actions, and are arguably right in doing so.
Here’s an idea: a world far in the future where everything is run by robots, and to keep humans out of the picture robots have anesthetized us and rewired our brains so that we are in a constant intense orgy of bliss, like sex or heroin times a hundred, totally unaware of anything else. The feeling of pleasure is constantly jacked up so that we never get used to it. It is also augmented with simulations (such as actual sex orgies or parties) so that we don’t get bored. Further, this is done against our will, and one of the modifications that they make is to our memories so we remember it as if we made the decision. Therefore we percieve of ourselves as willing participants.
There is no pain and suffering any longer, obviously. The robots keep us in this catatonic state until all of us eventually die.
[This is the best I could come up with right now. It’s not meant to be a realistic scenario, it’s just meant to be weird]