Is there something fundamentally wrong with the Universe?

But isn't it also quite the leap to claim that assigning systematically too much responsibility to the people and systems around you, will lead to an increase in effectiveness and competitiveness?

Oh, that depends on the mechanism by which you "assign responsibility". I mean that in the fully abstract sense of tracking the causality from outcomes to the parts of the system that contributed to them and and adjusting the subsystems to improve the outcomes, which should by definition improve the system performance.

I don't mean some specific implementation of this mechanism like "shame people for underperforming and moral failings", if that's what you're reading into it — I mean the kinds of credit-assignment that would actually work in practice to improve performance.

It isn't only a question of if we can reach the end, but also if we should try. 

I think we're either going to get an unqualified utopia, or go extinct, with very little probability on "an eternal hellscape". So giving up right away can only decrease expected utility, never increase it: we won't be turning away from a gamble of "X% chance of 3^^^3 utility, (100-X)% chance of -3^^^3 utility", we'd be going from "Y% chance of 3^^^3 utility, (100-Y)% chance of 0 utility" straight to "100% chance of 0 utility".

Ah, I see.

Well, first I grew up reading fiction where the heroes had no choice but to win and make things better in an uncaring or outright-antagonistic universe, and subconsciously internalized the idea that everything is my/our responsibility, whether it's my fault or not, and whether it's within my power to change or not.

Then in a meandering discussion I had a biology professor freshman year of college I brought up the determinism/randomness dilemma I posed previously and he asked me, "Well, what is it you want from your free will?" After which I read a whole bunch of philosophy books and majored in physics. Along the way I had one philosophy professor say, in a lecture on moral philosophy, that, "A truly virtuous person would not have friends, just a general disposition to friendliness." AKA that valuing any one person, including yourself, above others is a moral error (Note: I still believe this would be great in a world where everyone believed it and acted accordingly, but I don't live in that world).

Along the way the mindset from the first paragraph, plus a few other things, led to me subconsciously suppressing my ow emotions. That slowly drove me into a depression over the course of about eight years, which it's taken seven years of therapy and five years of antidepressants to break out of. It involved accepting that large parts of the world are just not my problem. Not that I won't make an effort to improve them anyway, but rather that it's ok, and necessary, for that effort to be bounded. And that feeling bad about this fact is a pure loss, to me, to those around me, and to my ability to enact the types of positive change I care about.

One positive note I'd add is that the more I learned about the physical world, the more I was able to see how much improvement is actually possible with the right knowledge and enough time and coordination to build stuff. As many problems and horrors as the world has, the laws of reality contain more than enough possibility for us to reduce, eliminate, or harness them and create a truly amazing future. Most people in daily life seem to think the world is bounded by what they're familiar with, and I can't even count how many times I've had people tell me that things that have already been done are either impossible or many decades away. It's sad how many opportunities we've missed by just not trying or coordinating to make them happen faster, but that's a temporary problem as long as we manage not to destroy ourselves.

I read, I think in one of Daniel Dennett's books, that "The devil is the unfortunate amount of time it takes for sinners to evolve into saints." I would add, "and learn to build angels." But we're getting there. I think this was maybe easier to see and believe a century  or more ago, when physical progress was newer and we were less bombarded with images of every horror. The people who were alive to watch the Niagara Falls power plant being built and turned on could appreciate it without thinking about how America was still massacring the native Americans out west, and could feel and notice the wonders it brought to their own lives. But it's really even more true today. For a number of years Nicholas Kristof would publish an end-of-year NYT column about how humanity had just had it's best year ever, highlighting all the amazing progress that'd been made. And it's not that hard, if you look in the right places, to see how we go from where we are today, technologically and infrastructurally, to a future where we've eradicated all infectious disease. solved aging, ensured abundant water and healthy food for everyone, dramatically reduced all forms of waste and pollution, and replaced all dirty energy sources while making everyone much richer. We already know that these will have huge downstream effects on other types of problems (political, social, personal, distributional) and will also let us redirect and target our future efforts on the many problems that will remain. I think it's likely that my nieces and nephew will live for millennia, and at least possible that my parents might as well. In the long run, there's no reason we can't make the Goddess of Everything Else win.

It may very well be that there are different universes where conscious beings are having a blast and not being tortured and killed as frequently as in this universe that gave rise to this situation. There is no real proof that says existence should be so painful. It could just be the random bad luck of the draw.

Well, evolution's indifference seems pretty fundamental, rather than contingent. So I suspect that any average creator-less universe would involve similar amounts of suffering. To quote a shortened passage from An Alien God [LW · GW]:

Why is Nature cruel? You, a human, can look at an Ichneumon wasp, and decide that it's cruel to eat your prey alive... Or what about old elephants, who die of starvation when their last set of teeth fall out? These elephants aren't going to reproduce anyway. What would it cost evolution—the evolution of elephants, rather—to ensure that the elephant dies right away, instead of slowly and in agony? What would it cost evolution to anesthetize the elephant, or give it pleasant dreams before it dies? Nothing; that elephant won't reproduce more or less either way.

If you were talking to a fellow human, trying to resolve a conflict of interest, you would be in a good negotiating position—would have an easy job of persuasion. It would cost so little to anesthetize the prey, to let the elephant die without agony! Oh please, won't you do it, kindly... um...

There's no one to argue with...

There's no advocate for the elephants anywhere in the system.

Humans, who are often deeply concerned for the well-being of animals, can be very persuasive in arguing how various kindnesses wouldn't harm reproductive fitness at all. Sadly, the evolution of elephants doesn't use a similar algorithm; it doesn't select nice genes that can plausibly be argued to help reproductive fitness. Simply: genes that replicate more often become more frequent in the next generation. Like water flowing downhill, and equally benevolent.

To get a benevolent evolution (or an evolution-less mechanism which creates life), you need some already-benevolent entity to steer it. I.e. an intelligent designer, a god, the programmer of a universe simulation, or similar. Barring those, there's no mechanism to make the system intrinsically benevolent. And even then, since a value like benevolence is too complex to arise by pure accident, those entities must in turn have evolved to develop benevolence (arising via mechanisms like kin selection etc.), and must thus themselves have started out in an amoral universe.

I think the point was that if you assume that the space of possible universes is vast and completely random, it's already an infinitesimal fraction of them that will allow life to exist at all, never mind intelligent life. And depending on how you define that space, you could imagine universes more "intelligently designed" than ours towards being good, but also universes more designed towards being bad: actively malevolent and hell-bent on keeping alive sentient beings and still inflicting suffering, not just being indifferent. So in that sense, in expectation, our universe might actually be pretty middling. It's honestly hard to say without a bigger frame of reference.

Each person's actions are as benevolent or not as they choose, in whatever direction they choose. I do not believe there is any larger collective force behind them, no collective goal that we are unwittingly striving for.

ETA: This looks pretty chaotic. H/T today's APOD.

Thank you!

Yes, our system react by fighting against everything external, as long as it's harmful or unaligned with us.
And the baseline of struggle is not zero, whenever life gets too peaceful, we get bored, or invest problems and games.
But you can change this by internalizing eastern philosophies. You can even kill your ego if you want.

But I think that this struggle of ours is "living". I might have misunderstood, but it seemed to me that statements like "There's something wrong with the universe" is what people say when they're dissatisfied with the struggles of life, if not just 'life'.

I don't think it's bad to struggle or be unhappy, and I think that renunciation of this is likely a kind of illness or profound exhaustion.
And this is a bit of a tangent, but all engagement with philosophy might be a form of illness. Perhaps it's pathology to think logically about life and to reflect on it, rather than just being engaged in the moment. People like us probably have a bad balance between system 1 and system 2 thinking, and thinking in an objective manner like this kind of dominates and destroys the aesthetic, subjective and sensual parts of life.

Anyway, you can choose to struggle or not to struggle, to be or not to be. Both ways of living have their advantage, neither is more correct than the other (but from a biological perspective, one of them looks like an illness). So I'm not siding with either, I just think it's in error to try having both at the same time, and I think that the "problem" people are trying to solve in the first place is a psychologial one rather than a logical one. They're unhappy not with struggle itself, but the struggle that they're facing lacks personal value to them, so they rightly question it. "He who has a why can bear almost any how", but we can't find proper reasons externally nor by thinking logically, they'll feel empty if they don't reasonate with us.

You can make enlightenment your goal, but I think that's similiar to looking for the "exit" button of a video-game. There's more fun things you can do if you give the game a chance. And I think you can make anything your goal, there's no wrong or correct goal. The mere feeling of progress and advancement in life feels great, even if it's progress towards enlightenment. I think it's this feeling that people are actually after. Even in the pursuit of knowledge, there's the feeling of growth. According to Nietzsche, what we aim for is an increase in power, and I don't think that he is wrong.

I think that everything which exists "fundementally" is ourselves, and that human nature and biology is thus our axiom, our "truth". The rest of the conclusions and truths here can only be drawn from the assumptions that we make. So "Attachment is the root of suffering" and "suffering is bad" leads to "enlightenment and the escape from  samsara is good". These relate to eachother, it's only locally true. I don't think any truth exists except this kind. I believe that truth is something finite, a relation between things, and not some underlying law of the universe. At least, I think there's no need to bring in such a concept here.

I suppose that what I consider wrong is merely what's impossible. Whenever this takes place, I think that there's a hidden contradiction somewhere.

"Isn't it like creating the game, and then just pretending you didn't, but follow the rules you made without questioning them enough to reach a point where you can create the game yourself?" I think that this is what we ultimately end up doing. But the only real alternatives to this that I can see is avoiding the game entirely, or to be aware that we're creating the game. But if you know that you're the creator, it's hard to believe that the game is "real".

You can choose what's natural, or you can choose to go against it. I don't even think a reason is required, for at this point, "why not?" becomes just as valid of a question as "why?".
When something goes wrong, I think there's a friction between you and the world around you, or between you and another part of yourself. And you can define yourself by what's distinct in you, even though you're part of the world and thus not an isolated, separate entity. Being different is not a danger as long as you have enough "power", whatever that might mean (perhaps that you internal coherence is not destroyed or disturbed by outside forces). If so, then weakness can be defined as the degree to which outside things influence us without us wanting them to.

And I did say that we can make the game ourselves, but I don't think that this is true to a higher degree than perspectivism and our ability to evaluate and categorize things. We can't change the laws of physics, and changing ourselves is difficult as we generally resist change.
And if I were to say that life was wrong because I felt that way, it would probably be a feeling like understimulation or overstimulation, that the outside world relates to me in a uncomfortable manner. Or perhaps I had made up a "rule" in my mind, and then felt that the universe went against this rule, that things didn't go "how they should". I think that morality is a set of such rules. We say that the universe is wrong for breaking our rules, we don't seem to think that our rules are wrong, but perhaps this level of egoism and ignorance is what makes us healthy human beings. (One should not confuse what's true with what's best, it seems to me that life needs error and imperfection in order to exist at all)

I like your idea that we should "direct the latent energy towards something productive". I think this is more or less what's creation is about, and that creation is more 'divine' than complaining about what currently is.

I don't think we can go much higher in terms of abstraction levels without abstracting away that which we talk about. If you get rid of free will, or the idea that we are different from that around us, then nothing can really be said at all. On the days that my brain works well and I'm more intelligent than now, I get the feeling that talking about these things is pointless. Perhaps we only talk about what we don't understand fully, as that which we already understand seems uninteresting and trivial.

Anyway, I have something important to say now: Be careful about not wanting to ignore anything. You can't incorporate too many things at once. It would likely be like trying to make a piece of music which is every genre all at once. Or trying to reconcile 10 different philosophical system at once. Or making an environment in which any species could live. Do you see how all of these are worse than any specialized instance? How you're merely exchanging depth for width, and gaining nothing from it? I think what you're doing is taking the union of things, keeping all parts. But not you're not keeping the best parts of everything (and 'best' is subjective). And you could take the intersection instead, but if the beliefs you are trying to tie together are mutually exclusive, then the intersection is empty. Taking the average would also be reductive, and it would not necessarily give you the best solution.

You must become an individual person, something specific. You cannot become everyone all at once. "Everything" and "Nothing" are both useless. You said yourself that we need a "better fit", so we must be looking for something specific rather than something which is too general. Also, it's fun to think on this level of abstraction, but I'm a specific human being so this level of correctness and impersonality should not be a person ideal for me, otherwise it would lead me to destroy myself. What I can use from philosophy and biology is to allow myself to be human, and convince myself that it's okay, that life is game to be played, and that all the "bad" things which exist are necessary in order to make the best game possible. Most philosophizing is probably a personal fight against self-doubt in the first place.

I think that self-doubt and such issue stem from common wisdom and philosophies which aim to reduce dangers and negative consequences in our everyday lives, but which goes overboard when the population doesn't thrive well, so that we eventually become afraid of ourselves, the outside world, and of taking any action at all.
As long as one is healthy, I think it's possible to just create according to ones own preferences, and not bring about too much damage. We could teach them our findings, but I know people who would only be harmed from reading messages like this, so I usually only share these things with average people if they're suffering from their current beliefs.

Apologizes for the directionless nature of my reply, and possibly for repeating myself?

It's not a utility monster scenario. The king doesn't receive more happiness than other beings per a unit of resources; he's a normal human being, just like all the others. While utility sum allows utility monsters, which seems bad, your method of "if some of the people are happy, then it's just subjective" allows a reverse Omelas, which seems worse. It reminds me a bit of deontologists who criticize utilitarianism while allowing much worse things if applied consistently.
Regarding the second part, I'm not against rules or limits or even against suffering. I just think that a much better game is possible that respects more conscious beings. No more bullshit like kids that are born with cancer and just spend their life dying in misery, or sea turtles that come into existence only to be eaten by predators, and so on and so forth.
Video games are a good example; they have rules and limitations and loss conditions, but they are engineered with the player in mind and for his benefit, while in life, conscious beings are not promised interesting or fair experiences and might be just randomly tortured.

Thank you for your response, Caerulea. Many of the emotions and thoughts you mentioned resonate with me. I truly hope you find peace and a sense of belonging. For myself, I've found solace in understanding that my happiness isn't really determined by external factors, and I'm not to blame or responsible for the way the world is. It's possible to find happiness in your own bubble, provided you have the necessary resources – which can sometimes be a challenge