Obviously I would desire some amount of novelty, but it’s mostly in the context of slotting into a roughly stable daily or weekly routine, rather than the routine itself varying much. (e.g. Thursday evening is for games, the games may vary and becoming increasingly complex, but they are still generally played on Thursday evenings).
The point about typical mind fallacy is well-taken but I don’t really see how you can be confident in preferences like the one quoted above given that the timeframes we’re talking about are much longer than your lifespan so far. I mean, many people have midlife crises after only a few decades of such routines. I have a strong intuition that after several centuries of games every Thursday evening, almost anyone would get very bored.
At the very least, I would want a mostly stable “island of calm” where things mostly remained the same, and where I would always return when I was tired of going on adventures.
This isn’t ruled out by my proposal; note that “progress” doesn’t mean discarding every aspect of the past. However, I am suspicious of this sort of island of calm, for roughly the same reason that I doubt it’s valuable to most adults to regularly visit their childhood treehouse. (Also, if there are other people in this ‘island of calm’, then you can’t force them to stay the same just for your sake...)
[This] reads to me like you’re saying that it’s a problem if people like me have the freedom to choose stability if that makes them happier than variety does.
People get stuck in local maxima, and often don’t explore enough to find better options for themselves. The longer people live, the more valuable it is to have sufficient exploration to figure out the best option before choosing stability.
The point about typical mind fallacy is well-taken but I don’t really see how you can be confident in preferences like the one quoted above given that the timeframes we’re talking about are much longer than your lifespan so far.
I’m not highly confident in them, but then your proposal also seems to make several assumptions about the nature of the preferences of very long-lived people. While “people will eventually get bored with routine” is plausible, so is “people will eventually get bored with constantly trying out new stuff, preferring more stability the older they get”. At least the latter hypothesis doesn’t seem significantly less likely than the former one, particularly given that currently-living humans do seem to shift towards an increased desire for stability the older they get.
In the face of uncertainty, we should be allowing people to engage in a variety of different approaches, rather than having entire society locked into one approach (e.g. age stratification). Maybe it empirically turns out that some people will in fact never get bored with their Thursday routine (or prefer to pre-emptively modify their brains so that they never will), while others do prefer to modify their routine but less than would be implied in your proposal, while others still end up creating a subculture that’s similar to the one you’ve outlined.
People get stuck in local maxima, and often don’t explore enough to find better options for themselves. The longer people live, the more valuable it is to have sufficient exploration to figure out the best option before choosing stability.
Certainly, but there are many ways of encouraging exploration while also letting you remain stable if you so prefer: e.g. AIs doing psychological profiling and suggesting things that you might have neglected to explore but would predictably enjoy, human-computer interfaces letting you view the experiences and memories of others the way that we watch movies today, etc.
The point about typical mind fallacy is well-taken but I don’t really see how you can be confident in preferences like the one quoted above given that the timeframes we’re talking about are much longer than your lifespan so far. I mean, many people have midlife crises after only a few decades of such routines. I have a strong intuition that after several centuries of games every Thursday evening, almost anyone would get very bored.
This isn’t ruled out by my proposal; note that “progress” doesn’t mean discarding every aspect of the past. However, I am suspicious of this sort of island of calm, for roughly the same reason that I doubt it’s valuable to most adults to regularly visit their childhood treehouse. (Also, if there are other people in this ‘island of calm’, then you can’t force them to stay the same just for your sake...)
People get stuck in local maxima, and often don’t explore enough to find better options for themselves. The longer people live, the more valuable it is to have sufficient exploration to figure out the best option before choosing stability.
I’m not highly confident in them, but then your proposal also seems to make several assumptions about the nature of the preferences of very long-lived people. While “people will eventually get bored with routine” is plausible, so is “people will eventually get bored with constantly trying out new stuff, preferring more stability the older they get”. At least the latter hypothesis doesn’t seem significantly less likely than the former one, particularly given that currently-living humans do seem to shift towards an increased desire for stability the older they get.
In the face of uncertainty, we should be allowing people to engage in a variety of different approaches, rather than having entire society locked into one approach (e.g. age stratification). Maybe it empirically turns out that some people will in fact never get bored with their Thursday routine (or prefer to pre-emptively modify their brains so that they never will), while others do prefer to modify their routine but less than would be implied in your proposal, while others still end up creating a subculture that’s similar to the one you’ve outlined.
Certainly, but there are many ways of encouraging exploration while also letting you remain stable if you so prefer: e.g. AIs doing psychological profiling and suggesting things that you might have neglected to explore but would predictably enjoy, human-computer interfaces letting you view the experiences and memories of others the way that we watch movies today, etc.