Local Ordinances of Fun

To me, this post seems perhaps better-suited for the Discussion section. It's too long to be a comment but doesn't really strike me as necessarily meriting an independent mainpage post.

SarahC: I do like the idea of living by your own strength somewhat though... a sense of helplessness and lack of skill is incredibly demoralizing.

Alicorn: I don't want to stop people from doing that; I just don't really find it appealing and object to enforcing it

SarahC: actually, I often think that for me and a large number of people I know, the biggest negative factor in our lives is awareness that we're not good at much.

Alicorn: I'm good at some stuff. To do that stuff, I like to use tools. I don't want to eat bugs for fifty years in a fake savannah while I work out how to fire ceramics so I can cook.

SarahC: oh. yeah. that's undeniable.

Alicorn: Alicorn-who-has-to-live-by-her-own-strength has to get PHENOMENALLY bored before she ever picks up a flute again. She sings, when she wants to make music, because she hasn't come around to finding whittling interesting yet. And this is sad for Alicorn-who-has-to-live-by-her-own-strength.

SarahC: agreed.

I doubt I'd do an unassailable job. And an unassailable job is probably necessary, if everyone will abide by Laws of Fun forever.

...

Unless we plan to deceive them about the nature of the postsingularity universe, their not being allowed X will be known to be somebody's fault. Someone believed in some Laws of Fun that they programmed into an AI that determined that the best way to optimize for that kind of Fun was to disallow X.

One point of that sequence is that typical suggestions for Utopias are abominably flawed, that there are certain things that could be done much better, and that people don't spontaneously notice these flaws upon hearing a description of a Utopia. The sequence draws attention to certain problems of human judgment, and trains you to notice such problems whenever you see another proposed "Utopia", makes you less gullible.

It is emphatically NOT a suggested set of rules for an AGI to enforce, indeed one of the arguments that could be drawn from that sequence is that trying to manually construct such rules is a bad idea, that lists of issues such as that sequence or one given in this post will inevitably follow from any simplistic ruleset. You don't program rules into an AI, you program a way of figuring out what the rules should be (and those rules have to get down to the level of saying how to arrange atoms, so won't have much to do with verbal descriptions of human condition).

This isn't a very strong article. It belongs in Discussion.

Both this post and the one linked seem to be both about fictional utopias for literature, and actual optimal future utopias. These are completely unrelated issues the same way good fictional international conflict resolution is WW3, and good real world international conflict resolution is months of WTO negotiations over details of some boring legal document between 120+ countries.

I think the criticism of 6 is a misunderstanding. It doesn't say "the world resembles the ancestral savanna", it says "the world resembles the ancestral savanna more than say a windowless office". The best environment is unlikely to be anything like the ancestral savanna, but it's likely to be closer to that than to a windowless office, in terms of sensory experience. The point I think is not the specifics of the environment, but that it engages with our bodies and senses in a way that we, as evolved creatures, find satisfying, and in a way that the purely mental stimulation available in the office does not.

That's what I took away from the linked post.

This should be moved to Discussion I think.

In general, the post was about trying to design utopia. Both the real world, and most proposed utopias, fail miserably at both all of these things and your rejoinders.

Eliezer's world has small happy surprises. The current one has "Surprise! Your friends are all dead." While the "Laws of Fun" might need to be replaced entirely, something like Fun Theory really ought to exist.

my modification to the reedspace lower bound: your utopia should be at least as good as the one I could give myself with a star trek holodeck.

27 and 28 are useful tools for fiction and interesting thought exercises, but it is not how we build houses (mine is right-side-up and has its plumbing in its bathrooms rather than on the roof, thank you). It may not be how we should build eutopias in which we hope to actually live. I like comfort. I expect culture to change radically - the way cultures do when time passes and/or things change - once everyone has settled into transhumanity, but the form that transhumanity takes needn't itself be frightening, and trying to design this in sounds like a bad idea.

I think the point of including those 2 laws was that most people are made uncomfortable by almost all radical changes, in culture or in anything else...and the few radical changes that they think are obviously a good idea probably don't align with other people's sensibilities. But put them in that radically changed (but in some way truly better) culture, and they'll adapt and stop finding it scary/weird/disturbing/etc.

(On another note: this must be a place where our personalities/outlooks differ, because I find the idea of an initially-scary Eutopia kind of...well, exciting and appealing. It sounds like a situation where I would learn something and where I would become stronger, and I have a lot of warm fuzzies towards those concepts.)

9 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

Sorry, Alicorn, but you really are something of an anomaly here...

If I understand this post correctly, the main thesis seems to be something along the lines of "different people should live by different rules, with rulesets locally optimized for the person". Fine, but there still has to be some sort of metaruleset by which local ordinances are chosen. And, per 17/18, user customization is not necessarily the right choice here.

Upvoted for content (although the piece could be made more readable if it's going to be on Main). You might also post this as a comment on the "Laws" post, or at least a shorter version with link.

7 is the one I have the biggest problem with. The opposite of happiness is sadness, not boredom. Anyone who says otherwise fails at opposites, and should probably retake the first grade.

Yes, happiness and sadness are both sides of the same coin, as are love and hate, but they are sides that are as far away from each other as it is possible to be on that coin, and anything not on the coin isn't pertinent.

Opposites are not things with as few commonalities as possible. Black has more common with white than it does with ketchup, but that does not make black and ketchup opposites.

More relevantly, if you want to achieve happiness, achieving boredom constitutes failure, but achieving sadness constitutes an even greater failure. If advice that prioritizes avoidance of boredom with ample resources has anything going for it, it's that boredom is a more stable attractor than sadness.

This quote and its various derivatives constitute one of my pet peeves.

[Meta] Quick quibble about presentation, it would help if you quoted or summarised the laws rather than just the number, I'm flicking between tabs which is disorientating. [Otherwise good article.]

10 is just easily improved. It is good to be able to do for yourself, but it is also good to sometimes do for others and to let others do for you. If you don't fully understand that statement, go to burning man -- this is the first and best thing it can teach you.

A lot of people value making things, but the type of things I want to make is different from the type of things I want to use. Many people want to make art of various kinds, fewer would value making disposable plastic packaging. There is also the fact that if a non expert is making something for the fun of it, there is a good chance it just won't work. I might want to play a functional flute despite having made a flute that sounds like strangled cat. And if you want to build anything high tech, you can't easily work your way up from raw materials. Many people would like to do some programming without having to build microelectronic components.

People want change, and they want to have an effect on their world.

A utopia that actually satisfies people is going to change, so any particular vision of utopia is of a temporary state.

A lot of people also become very fond of things they've experienced, so a utopia will include retro-utopias.

I suggest that a utopia has to have resilience built in so that it can recover if it starts turning into something its members don't want, and that this is worth speculating on, rather than just listing the good things you want in a utopia.

Suggestions for a resilient utopia?

I always consider this to be The blunder Eliezer has ever made, and beneath that worried that it might not and that any words that'd not be hell to everyone except me would be hell to me. Thanks for releasing that worry a bit.

9 AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

You've never enjoyed a pleasant surprise? I can imagine not being pleasantly surprised at largish changes in your life, like where you live, work, have relationships, etc. But what about littler things? Like reading a book you thought would be good, but have it turn out to be GREAT instead? Or finding a five-dollar bill on the ground?

I think maybe a good corollary to 9 might be "Different people appreciate different scales of pleasant surprises. Some people will be delighted to find out they can switch to an awesome new career. Other would prefer something smaller-scale, like finding a little money on the ground. Adjust accordingly"

What makes people happy varies from person to person. I think the problem that we should be solving is how to help people make optimal decisions for their joys. Once we get a great solution to that problem, then we can just make a Utopia where people are totally free, except to physically harm others or their property.

Reflecting on all of this, it occurred to me that the world of the show "Adventure Time" keeps pretty close to Eliezer's laws (investigating this thoroughly is left as an exercise because it's my bed time)

I definitely think it would be a fun world to live in, but it's certainly not something that I'd force on the world.

That said, in direct contradiction to taw's comment, there are a number of episodes where they spend time having movie night, looking at cute things from the internet, playing video games all day, or having ice cream eating marathons.

Certainly humans should do things, but what if I want to play the flute now and only have flute-whittling down as my activity for century seventeen?

Well, what if you do? The whole point is that getting everything you want is not necessarily a proper utopia.

Sometimes - often - I just want people to tell me stuff.

Again, utopia does not necessarily consist of getting everything you want.