[SEQ RERUN] Visualizing Eutopia
post by MinibearRex · 2013-01-04T04:46:34.293Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 3 commentsContents
3 comments
Today's post, Visualizing Eutopia was originally published on 16 December 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Trying to imagine a Eutopia is actually difficult. But it is worth trying.
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 For The People Who Are Still Alive, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
3 comments
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comment by advancedatheist · 2013-01-04T15:31:21.273Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I would suggest some obvious tweaks and see what happens. For example, raise everyone's IQ by ten points according to current metrics. I suspect that would revolutionize our world for the better, not by making the smartest people marginally smarter, but by raising the intelligence of billions of dumbasses above some critical threshold so that they would start to function better in life. They would become: more educable, more employable in more productive jobs, better at taking care of their health, better at understanding causality, better at planning for the future, less accident prone and so forth. James D. Miler references the scientific literature supporting this outcome in the middle section of his book Singularity Rising, about the only part of his book which struck me as defensible and empirically grounded.
Replies from: gwern, ewang↑ comment by gwern · 2013-01-05T01:17:12.942Z · LW(p) · GW(p)
I would suggest some obvious tweaks and see what happens. For example, raise everyone's IQ by ten points according to current metrics.
There are probably country level differentials that high already. For example, some African countries and Japan would probably have that much of an average difference. Japan has a lot of faults, but in many ways it's a pretty good place to live.
(I just finished watching the anime Thermae Romae; I was shocked to see that this extremely quirky manga had also become a $79m grossing live-action movie. I can't help but wonder if that's related to higher IQ, since I have a hard time imagining anything like it being a success pretty much anywhere else in the world, except maybe the US or Europe.)