If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help

"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." - Larry Niven

This is all very true, but maybe some realities actually are more conducive to wonder than others, and maybe a reality with (natural and ontologically basic, not human-created) magic would be more wonderful than ours is, just as ours with relativity and QM might be more wonderful than one with purely classical physics. Still, I don't see why we couldn't eventually tweak ourselves to see the real world as as wondrous as we want.

Nick, please explain why magic, which is a complex thing, must paradoxically also be fundamental, in order to be wonderful.

Ok, but, can we read your stories anyway?

So weird... This theme has been in my thoughts today and recently...

Tell that to my level 82 orc wizard with tier 11 gear!

There are a number of fantasy stories where the protagonist is very good at something, largely because they work hard at it, and then they enter a magical world and discover that their skills and work have a lot more impact. Often they have to work hard after they get there to apply their skills. Often the protagonist is a computer hacker and their skills, which in our world only work inside of computers, in a magical context can alter physical / consensual reality. (Examples: Broken Crescent, Web Mage. There are many others. Arguably this pattern goes back at least to The Incomplete Enchanter though success came way too easily for Harold Shea.)

So I think the appeal of this type of fantasy is partly that big effects in our world usually require big causes -- capital investment, megatons of steel, etc. -- even after you know the right "magic spell". In these fantasy worlds -- and in some cases in computer networks -- big, widely distributed effects can be produced just by uttering the magic spell in the right place, or by building a local, inexpensive magical workshop using the right blueprint -- e.g. YouTube.

I participated a role playing game for the second time recently, set up by my colleague Bryan Caplan. We played investigative journalists trying to uncover a grand conspiracy. Afterward, Bryan asked me what I thought, and I said it would be more exciting to pretend to be doing very important things if I didn't already think I was doing very important things in my ordinary life. :)

I largely agree, but I do think fantasy-story magic differs from our world's physics in one significant way: the laws of magic tend to resemble human psychology much, much more than our physics does. The opening quote of this post is itself an example: to practice their craft, Pratchett's witches have to negotiate with gods, which--real and mundane as they may be--presumably have beliefs and desires that bear at least some similarity to human ones. And while it's occasionally a nice shorthand to refer to physical entities as having beliefs and desires (look, the charge wants to go that way/this amplifier knows where ground is), the mappings are very rudimentary, and they aren't even a very accurate way to look at the picture.

Even when magic doesn't involve actual gods or godlike beings, it usually interfaces much more "nicely" with human psychology than real technology does; the process of casting a spell often depends in some way on the caster's emotional state, and spell effects can be structured around intuitive concepts with apparent ease (say, a curse that affects subsequent generations of a family--a group of entities that is very difficult to specify in physical terms). Granted, our real-world technology could conceivably advance to the point where it works something like this, but it's still an important fact that it doesn't, and can't, work that way now. Until we make some giant technological leaps, being an engineer or physicist is not going to be much like the typical wizard's experience, where psychology really matters and one's emotions have intricate effects on one's results.

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote: So remember the Litany Against Being Transported Into An Alternate Universe:

If I'm going to be happy anywhere, Or achieve greatness anywhere, Or learn true secrets anywhere, Or save the world anywhere, Or feel strongly anywhere, Or help people anywhere,

I may as well do it in reality.

No. You are describing the end of humanity.

Uploaded into virtual reality, everyone can be a hero.

Why go back to reality?

I wish this kind of stuff was taught to more children. Too few people fall in love with reality.

Savage - Same here... Weird indeed!

Eliezer - Just a thought... You wrote: "They might be excited at first, but (like the lottery winners who, six months later, aren't nearly as happy as they expected to be), the excitement would soon wear off."

I've just begun delving into the science of happiness and there found among many things, exactly what you hint at here. That most people have an inborn level of happiness, which they eventually revert to no matter what happens to them in their lives. In my research I stumbled upon a survey that stated that however frightening the prospect of being paralyzed may seem, before being paralyzed, a surprising (I don't know how they really determined the surprising-level here though) number of people actually ended up being as overall happy as they were befor being paralyzed. So no matter if youre winning milions or being paralyzed, you will usually revert to your inborn level of happiness.

I have no idea if this is true, but I find it interessting, and what you wrote struck a cord in me. Among other things because Iv'e been a fantasyfan and roleplayer for more than 15 years now.

What I really wanted to comment on is that the same people that Im reading about happiness also states that human happiness is relative. What that means is that if everybody is totting wands shooting fireballs, summoning demons and generally being fantasywizards, then it will be no thrill at all. Which I guess is part of your point, but what I think you're missing in the equation is that in most fantasystories whether they are played out in a novel or in roleplayinggames, the heroes are unique or in some way stands out from the crowd.

If I would want magical powers I would only want them under the same premise that I usually find them in fantasynovels and roleplayinggames; me being the only one or at least one of a select few having magical powers. All my wet fantasy fantasies evolve around the idea that my character is unique and wield powers vastly greater than everyone else. Maybe my powers are latent, but they are there and they are better then everyone else's. To sum it up, I would only want magical powers if it would set me out from the crowd, only if it would make me relativly better than everyone else that I would come in contact with. In this understanding I would be able to become more happy, just by being able to do magic, because it would make me better than someone else.

Seen from my perspective I don't think that my inability to be contend with my current life would keep me from being contend with a fantasy or future life with magic or psionics, where some or all of my dreams with regards to power would be within my grasp. The incentive to work harder to hone my powers and achieve godhood (or whatever) would be so much bigger in a world where people really DID walk on water, parts the sea and blows up New York with a mere thought. In our own world all I can really dream of of achieving is being better at math or seducing women etc.

So although I do think you have a very valid point that we should be able to appreciate the NOW here, before we can appreciate the NOW anywhere, I do think that when talking and thinking about fantasyuniverses where everything imaginable is within reach, or at least could be possible (all up to the author), the point is a bit moot.

Does that make sense to you guys?

And sorry if my english is not that good, it's my second language... Thanx for a great and inspiring blog everybody! It's my first comment here and I really feel dwarfed by your appearant intellects, so it is with great humility and expectation that I so openly utter my difference of opinion with a guy (Eliezer) that I for more than a year now has admired for his great insights... Enuff wit da flattery, bring it on ;)

Dammit... While I was typing my words of wisdom, trying to spell my way through my second language, at least two people beat me to it and described my point in fewer words and in more eloquent language, than I ever could.

Dammit... Not being unique! 'scuse me for wishing for magical abilities ;)

Martin, like most people who apologize for having English as a second language, your posts are clearer than those of many people who have English as a first language.

I read fantasy, though less so now, mainly because it is groups of people banding together to achieve a goal they knew was just or worthwhile (generally saving the world, defeating the evil forces). The actual magic was just a spice that leant an air of mystery, and unpredictability (so I am more a fan of George Martin, David Gemmell and Guy Gavriel Kay rather than Raymond E. Feist and David Eddings. Robert Jordan lost me when the good guys split up into bickering factions).

I'm just disappointed that AI is at the herding cats stage (myself included), when trying achieve consensus on how to actually proceed. No party of merry adventurers are we.

With regards to the allure of magic compared to science, magic tends to need a lot less in terms of support mechanisms. The inability to get precisely machined parts would hamper your attempts to build a transportation device, where magic, depending upon the sub-genre, can do just about anything with anything, so is much more empowering and self-sufficient.

I like quoting this passage from Joyce Carol Oates' profile of H.P. Lovecraft (King of the Weird):

Readers of genre fiction, unlike readers of what we presume to call "literary fiction," assume a tacit contract between themselves and the writer: they understand that they will be manipulated, but the question is how? and when? and with what skill? and to what purpose? However plot-ridden, fantastical, or absurd, populated by whatever pseudo-characters, genre fiction is always resolved, while "literary fiction" makes no such promises; there is no contract between reader and writer for, in theory at least, each work of literary fiction is original, and, in essence, "about" its own language; anything can happen, or, upon occasion, nothing. Genre fiction is addictive, literary fiction, unfortunately, is not.

By the way, that was a wonderful post. It's nice that Overcoming Bias is trying to bring abatement to the temperamentally challenged. It could be argued, though, that falling in love with reality is preciously hard when the economic grindstone tries its best to make the life of a lot of, if not most, people depressing. Maybe for them the allure of having not to think about a "crushing mortgage" would be quite enough to easily befriend a World of Magic.

But I'm annoyed with this psychology that, if it were born into a world where spells and potions did work, would pine away for a world where household goods were abundantly produced by assembly lines.

Why do you desire to have cross-world consistency? You are only going to have to live in one of them. No Dutch book can be made against us by selling us tickets to that world here and then selling us tickets back to this one from there. If such transport were possible, than I agree that we need to reexamine our psychology to avoid constantly being on the bus between worlds. Until then, what's wrong with having world-dependent preferences?

Matthew C., commenting here on OB, seems very excited about an informally specified "theory" by Rupert Sheldrake which "explains" such non-explanation-demanding phenomena as protein folding and snowflake symmetry.

Actually Eliezer I'm much more excited to be in nature doing landscape photography, spending time with my family, seeing if I can make money trading stocks, and chatting about the nondual nature of reality, among other things.

I'm become totally and completely uninterested in arguing with people who refuse to acquaint themselves with the evidence for things and then rail against them ex cathedra from the dogmas of "official science". The only reason I responded to your previous post on reductionism was TGGP kindly informed me of it and your mention of my query from last year, and I thought it only fair to point your readers to some relevant material.

Best,

Matthew C.

Eliezer, isn't reading a good fantasy story like being transported into another world?

Jed Harris: I agree... Our world seems to have the rule: "you are not significant". You can't design and build an airplane in your backyard, no one can. Even if you've got enough money, you haven't got enough time for that. In magical worlds (including Star Trek, Asimov, etc) that is what seems to be normal. (And I've never read about a committee which coordinates the work of hundreds of sorcerers, who create new spells 8 hours a day...)

rfriel: Yes, we could build the technology to do the things magic can do, but even with our current technology we also can do things which magic can't. And these limitations are which make magic so "nice", not only the features.

Martin: to be the best, you only have to make your world small. (I was one of the best in math in our secondary school, and it didn't bother me that I wasn't the best in the whole country, or that I was quite bad in history...) But it would have been soo good to be the one who makes the best operating systems in the whole school...

Martin wants to be uniquely powerful and higher-status, but this request can only be granted to a few people, barring delusive holodecks, so it's not a good project for utilitarians;

Tarleton suggests that a reality with fundamental magic is more wonderful, but this is probably impossible even in principle, because magic is too complex to be atomic;

But rfriel's, Harris's, and Pearson's versions of magic's appeal - "I want to be individually empowered by producing neato effects myself, without large capital investments and many specialists helping" and "I want the neato things I do to have a more natural user interface" are in principle doable - you can get this with, say, the right kind of nanotechnology, or (ahem) other sufficiently advanced tech, and bring it to a large user base, as long as they have the basic psychological ability to take joy in anything that is merely real.

Latanius I do agree with your small world idea, although not explicitly stated in my first comment, I have thought about it. Actually the people I mentioned earlier who studied the "science of happiness" pointed out that the relative happiness have many different boundaries. We measure ourselves up against our immediate vicinity, the small world that we inhabit. We can't really imagine how an african with AIDS and lifethreatening hunger might feel and thus can't really use it to make ourselves any happier. In comparison I can feel much happier if im more well off than my brother or sister (Not that I would enjoy that without sharing, but it would definately make me feel good both to have money and be able to share them with those whom I love).

So - and let me be sure I have this straight - you think people are silly for finding attractive fictitious worlds in which reality can be altered through the grasp of principles ingrained deeply within the human mind and the application of pure will and desire, rather than wanting to gain expertise in real-world laws that are deeply unintuitive and that provide us with relatively little scope for doing as we please?

[facepalm]

Your fantasies are rather... dry.

In my flawed self-analysis, I've noticed myself have 2 kinds of wonder, and I think this might be a common theme to other people.

1. Wonder of novelty -- when something hasn't been experienced before and it is there is a great freshness from seeing it for the first time if it's interesting, colourful etc. This is where things like the travel bug comes from, and better fulfilled by Westerners through going to Rajasthan than Salisbury

2. Wonder of understanding -- this is the wonder of knowing something for an extended period of time and still being amazed by it. For instance, I have a great wonder for Special Relativity despite knowing the details for many years.

I would say that your post laments that in most people 1 >> 2. And while I think this might be true, there are still a great deal of instances of 2 in most people: from getting lost in a conversation with an old friend or partner to taking walks through nature (which never ceases to amaze people even though they may have been on the same beach at sunset hundreds of times).

Eliezer sayeth: "I want to be individually empowered by producing neato effects myself, without large capital investments and many specialists helping" ... [is] in principle doable - you can get this with, say, the right kind of nanotechnology, or (ahem) other sufficiently advanced tech, and bring it to a large user base..."

Agreed. But as you hint, Eliezer, this case is indistinguishable from magic. So arguably the class of fantasies I mention are equivalent to living in some interesting future. In any case they don't seem to match the schema you present in the post.

Eliezer continues: "...as long as they have the basic psychological ability to take joy in anything that is merely real." I think that even in a wonderful future, most people will take joy from unusually large bangs, crazy risks, etc. as they do today; fancy technology will make these easier to produce and survive. Most people still won't get much joy or wonder from the underlying phenomena unless we re-engineer human nature. Ian Banks' Culture novels and short stories have some pretty good ironic accounts of amazing Culture technology being used for thrills by idiots.

I don't disagree with the importance of "joy in things that are merely real." But there are multiple sources of joy, some higher quality than others.

And speaking of wishing for magical power, I wish I could copy a quote from this blog and paste it into the comment box with the text styles preserved. Shows how hard it is to come by magic.

The idea that you're not significant is invalid in the internet age. You can write an operating system in your mom's basement and distribute it around the world.

I was listening to a public radio philosophy podcast on itunes, and it was a short essay by Arthur Shopenhauer. This post reminded me of him. One of the big ideas of his essay was that a human beings biggest problem, besides having to be nullified by eternity, is that we are perpetually becoming without ever being. Time never consumes a single point without having already moved on, forever. Our cells are constantly growing and dying and changing. Our bodies are never the same from one slice of time to the next. He eventually, i think, would argue wiht you that it's impossible for humans to function anyway other than looking into the future, because that's more of a reality than the present is even, because that has already become the past.

Anyways, basic idea... always becoming without ever "BEING".

Eliezer, I'm pretty much the opposite of Matthew C on issues of reductionism and whatnot, but you were really stretching it with your armchair psychologizing/mind-reading. Also, couldn't your rebuke apply equally as well to someone excited about this newfangled "special relativity" rather than tried-and-true Maxwell's Equations or "general relativity" rather than the older special relativity? What is interesting is tends to be novel.

Beautifully written. Someone should submit this to Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, etc.

I think that the human desire for magic is closely tied to the desire for something new. The things that we do with science would be just as impressive to medieval-tech magicians as their magic would be to us. But we already understand most of our technology- we know what it's used for, what it can do and what it can't, how much it costs on eBay, and so on. To steal a metaphor, human excitement is like a gas that expands to fill the available space. If you dumped a medieval knight into 21st-century America, they'd be in awe of our amazing 'powers'. They'd want to explore the world, study our technology, understand the marvelous secrets behind modern civilization (at least if they're anything like OB readers). But soon enough, they'd bump up against the limits of what we can already do with aluminium and silicon. And beyond that, you can only make further progress through tremendous effort, tremendous intelligence or tremendous luck. So magic, no matter how trivial, would be of tremendous interest to the world because it hasn't been done before. It lies outside of the predefined boundaries most people live their lives in.

Technology is never as interesting as magic, because technology doesn't imply that human beings are fundamentally a part of the most basic aspects of the world and are thus important. When you can sing things into existence, you're deeply connected to the nature of existence. Feeding material into a universal replicator and getting whatever you want manufactured may require astoundingly complex science and engineering, but no one's going to be particularly impressed once the novelty has worn off.

There's a reason the fictional folk on Star Trek don't stand about gawking at the transporter, and it's the same reason you people aren't constantly amazed by light bulbs and hot running water.

You think people would be wowed by futuretech? Why aren't they wowed by present technology, then?

"When you can sing things into existence, you're deeply connected to the nature of existence."

I think you're reading too much into it. A medieval peasant would gawk at an electric light.

To clarify my earlier comment: The major disconnect is between things we've already studied and things we haven't, not between reality and unreality. If, tomorrow, we discovered a new combination of EM fields that could remotely levitate random objects, it would qualify as amazing new magic- even though it's based off of well-understood theories and nobody's written a book about it. Telling people that reality is just as amazing as magic won't work in the long-term, even if they are identical on some calibrated amazingness metric, because people quickly get bored with things they have too much experience with. The trick is to find things within reality that we haven't heard about before, and there are certainly plenty of those.

A medieval peasant would gawk at an electric light, but that doesn't mean magic doesn't appeal more to the human psyche than technology in a way that would cause a person in a world with magic to be more easily able to find wonder in the real than someone in our world - magic and reality are not "identical on some calibrated amazingness metric". This was the point of my previous post; I disagreed with Eliezer's implicit message in the original post that a world with magic would be no more wonderful, once you're used to it, than the real world. The fundamental/natural part was secondary, although I do think that fundamental magic (which I realize is paradoxical) would be more wonderful to the average human than reducible magic (because it would imply that "human beings are fundamentally a part of the most basic aspects of the world and are thus important"), and natural magic would be more wonderful to the average human than manmade magic (same thing, plus people seem to prefer natural to artificial, all else being equal).

I'm surprised nobody's said the words "hedonic treadmill" yet.

Eliezer has three of his stories on his webpage, for those interested.

Or more simply: magic is appealing for the same reason a Super Happy Agent is appealing - it means the universe cares about us.

Eliezer, you seem to be deeply offended by the fact that many people enjoy fantasy over reality, or don't get a kick out of science. As you put it, they don't have the scientific attitude that "nothing is mere".

Yet why should you expect people to be different from the way they are?

You said it yourself: "Part of binding yourself to reality, on an emotional as well as intellectual level, is coming to terms with the fact that you do live here."

That means accepting the reality that people like the things they like, not wishing for a fantasy world where people magically like the things you think they ought to.

Further on reality:

A poem or story about ghosts or dragons is a product of a human mind, made possible by the evolution of imagination in humans, and influenced by that human's experiences and cultural heritage.

In other words, it's just as much a part of the natural world as the song of a bird.

People who enjoy the products of others' imaginations are enjoying an aspect of reality, just as much as those who like watching the play of light on water, or admire how a tree grows according to natural law.

Thank you Eliezer. That is all I have to say.

Wendy: That means accepting the reality that people like the things they like, not wishing for a fantasy world where people magically like the things you think they ought to.

Okay, now that is exactly what I do not mean by saying, "Bind your heart into reality, rather than somewhere else."

What you've just described is an opportunity to help people think differently. Down the line, it's a moral choice about whether human beings should modify themselves in certain ways.

It does not require magic, an unlawful universe, to speak of a future in which people are not always yearning for unlawfulness, or, perhaps, yearning less forcefully.

Caledonian: . When you can sing things into existence, you're deeply connected to the nature of existence.

When you can PLAN things into existence, you're deeply connected to the nature of existence.

There is no possible spell as wonderful as the ability to think. There is one ultimate superpower and it is what we are.

Feeding material into a universal replicator and getting whatever you want manufactured may require astoundingly complex science and engineering, but no one's going to be particularly impressed once the novelty has worn off.

The rationalist argument for the fun-theoretical superiority of a magic (non-fundamentally magic) world is that, if the laws of magic are such that people individually study the math necessary to cast their spells, they can accomplish things through their own efforts, rather than by pressing a button that makes use of someone else's strength. If you personally did the astoundingly complex science and engineering to build the replicator, drinking that Earl Grey tea would be a lot more satisfying.

Tarleton: Or more simply: magic is appealing for the same reason a Super Happy Agent is appealing - it means the universe cares about us.

We care about each other. This suffices. It is not necessary that the universe be like a human, because humans are like humans.

We care about each other. This suffices. It is not necessary that the universe be like a human, because humans are like humans.

Suffices for you. Your aesthetics are not most people's aesthetics, although they probably are better in this respect.

Eliezer - "an opportunity to help people think differently"?

But what for?

And: "a moral choice about whether human beings should modify themselves in certain ways"?

Again; what for? Enjoyment of life increases physical and emotional health. Each person's enjoyment is a matter of individual taste. Why mess with it?

Aren't you just biased against people who have different tastes from yours? Please note my comments above on imagination as part of the natural world.

It is simply a fact that human psychology does not operate in the way Eliezer says it should, does not evaluate itself in the way Eliezer says it should, and does not value the things Eliezer says it should.

More to the point, Eliezer has not produced justification for his claims about what people should do - he has merely made the assertions.

When you can PLAN things into existence, you're deeply connected to the nature of existence.

1) The only thing we can plan into existence is plans. Anything else requires additional, actual effort and resources.

2) If humans could change the world through an act of will, that would mean that humans were 'more real' than the world. One of our oldest desires/delusions is that the world should/does respond directly to our mental states. Accomplishing something through 'magic' in which our will alters reality is far more appealing to the human psyche than accomplishing something by submitting to and manipulating impersonal physical principles.

For some reason, this song feels relevant to the discussion.

Audio available from: http://www.pcplanets.com/mp3s-1353833-Rich-Fantasy-Lives.shtml Lyrics at: http://www.tomsmithonline.com/lyrics/rich_fantasy_lives.htm

If you personally did the astoundingly complex science and engineering to build the replicator, drinking that Earl Grey tea would be a lot more satisfying.

One of the fundamental differences between technology and magic is that two engineers do twice as much work as one would do, while a more powerful sorcerer gets farther than 10 not so powerful ones. It matters more how good you are than how many of you exist.

What NBA players do looks similar in quality to the thing you did with your friends at home, because even if you play well, you five can't put your powers together to be equivalent to one NBA star. Engineers can, so the things you create with technology aren't comparable to the products of big companies, even if you're good at engineering, and even if you're better than anyone in that company. (Yet another reason, I think, why people often like sports better than math.)

Yes, if I could design a replicator myself, I would be statisfied. I can't.

Eliezer: We care about each other. This suffices. It is not necessary that the universe be like a human, because humans are like humans.

Nick: Suffices for you. Your aesthetics are not most people's aesthetics, although they probably are better in this respect.

I wonder if anyone can come up with a good argument as to why it is actually better to live in a non-personal, non-caring universe than in a caring one. Eliezer or Nick: if you could choose between possible universes, would you choose one with a loving creator god/ Super Happy Agent? would you choose one in which magic worked? would you choose one in which the human mind played a fundamental role in the underlying physics?

If not, why not? [I'm really copying Eliezer's "line of retreat" strategy here, but I also suspect that the universe we do live in may have some subtle benefits that we overlook]

"One of the fundamental differences between technology and magic is that two engineers do twice as much work as one would do"

This is demonstrably untrue; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mythical_Man-Month.

"Engineers can, so the things you create with technology aren't comparable to the products of big companies,"

If this were true, startups wouldn't exist.

"I wonder if anyone can come up with a good argument as to why it is actually better to live in a non-personal, non-caring universe than in a caring one."

I think Eli's argument is that a caring universe isn't necessary for happiness. If he thought that the universe should stay uncaring, he wouldn't be trying to develop FAI.

I disagree with your premise that if dragons did exit that they wouldn't interest people. I haven't read through the comments, so I don't know if anyone's addressed this yet, but there are real world analogies that disprove your point. Sharks for instance. Sharks are very real, and you can take a trip out into open water to spend time with the more dangerous varieties if you wish. The Great White that was at the SF aquarium generated a great deal of attention. People still like zebras but aren't usually as fascinated by them. The reason is that sharks are dangerous. Dragons, one would imagine, would be even more dangerous. They would probably attract even more attention.

@tom: I think Eli's argument is that a caring universe isn't necessary for happiness. If he thought that the universe should stay uncaring, he wouldn't be trying to develop FAI.

hmmm. First off, I'd like to distinguish between a universe where a "caring" structure is built on top of an uncaring physical reality (e.g. this universe, where the caring structure might be modern society, or a future utopia powered by a FAI), and a universe where the caring-ness, magic or/and importance of human conscious minds is inbuilt at the lowest level of "physics"; an example of this would be a world where magic worked (automatically, without study) or where prayer worked. I'd still like to hear Eliezer suggest whether or not, if he were given a choice of possible universes, he would choose a "magical", "essentialist" universe or a materialist universe (fairly clearly the materialist one is the one we live in).

I have my own ideas as to why the materialist universe is actually the better of the two, but I want to see whether anyone else has thought along the same lines, because I want to know whether I am baising my thoughts in order to feel happy about the universe I live in.

Eliezer, do you think that this search for magic and mystery always outside the known world is some side-effect of human reinforcement learning?

As far as I know it could be a loose knob on the tuning device for the exploit/explore tradeoff.

Also, for some reason, I feel like posting this song. "The Future Soon" by Jonathan Coulton: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDiDK_yBCw0&NR=1

Roko, you should be careful about saying that a materialist universe is better than a caring universe. If this is true, then a caring universe would make itself look like a materialist universe, just in order to be better, since a caring universe would want to do the better thing. So a claim like this would remove all your reasons for believing in a materialist universe, since a caring universe would become indistinguishable from a materialist one.

For similar reasons, it is obvious that Eliezer thinks a caring universe would be better: this is illustrated, for example, in his disagreement with the universe about whether stupidity should be punished with the death penalty.

"If this is true, then a caring universe would make itself look like a materialist universe, just in order to be better, since a caring universe would want to do the better thing."

• aah. I was thinking of a "limitedly caring" universe, for example one where magic works. Perhaps I should think of a better word than caring... I'm want to say something like "a universe where the underlying laws take human desires into account in a direct way, but without the universe necessarily being smart enough to work out what is ultimately best for us". For example, a universe where you can cause a flying unicorn to appear just by thinking about it, even if it is not in your ultimate best interest to do so.

I see an parallel(possibly tenuous) in the subculture of martial arts. The "mundane" stuff like boxing, High School and Collegiate wrestling, judo, Thai kickboxing etc. actually works but lacks any pretensions toward 'mystical' aspects or secret/underground/killer whatever. Effectively, the more an art is associated with streetfighting/ninjas/commandos the crappier it typically is, ceteris parabus.

To me, this seems to be a domain specific example of the overarching phenomena discussed here. Science is too 'common' to possibly be worth studying as sports are too conventional/normal/western to be effective; so many people seem to think at least.

This example breaks down somewhat in one respect I can think of: science offers the possibility of power for the individual similar to fictional magic assuming we create nanotechnology, human genetic manipulation, human level AI etc. whereas all martial arts offer is a significant advantage in an unarmed fight against one other human. However, I think combat sports are fun and interesting just as I think science and empirical thinking is fun, engrossing and fruitful.

Great post E.Y.

I'm not satisfied with the real world, but, as Eliezer says, this has more to do with me than with the rest of the world. Unlike the hypothetical person described in this post, however, I don't expect that any of the fantasy worlds that I read about in novels actually would be any more satisfying. I really don't know what would make me satisfied over the long run, short of hacking my own brain, or, perhaps, getting a cat. ;)

Roko, I strongly suspect that a limitedly caring universe just reduces to a materialist universe with very complex laws. For example, isn't it kind of like magic that when I want to lift my hand, it actually moves? What would be the difference if I could levitate or change lead into gold? If the universe obeys my will about lifting my hand, why shouldn't it obey in other things, and if it did, why would this be an essential difference?

I think this cartoon describes it perfectly:

http://simulatedcomicproduct.com/comics/2008-03-13-DexterityRoll.jpg

While a zebra is a zebra, and a wonderful creature it is, a dragon is what the writer wants it to be. A dragon is metaphoric and might symbolize anything from luck to Lucifer.

Were there no magic in our literary world, there'd be less imagery and fewer ways to convey the dynamic and profound, eh?

Double, double toil and trouble
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the caldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder's fork, and blind-worm's sting,
Lizard's leg, and owlet's wing,—
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
Double, double toil and trouble

I dare anyone to match it with a purely analytical recounting of events. This speaks to our imagination and our lust for the poetic as well as the scientific. One cannot replace the other, for me, anyway. I require both.

"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." - Larry Niven

I thought that was Arthur C. Clarke (RIP).

I agree with the basic argument of the post: magic is exciting because it's unattainable. The moment it became real and in mass-use, the novelty would wear off. I'm happily smitten with current and upcoming technology. One example: I still get sufficiently blown away when I think about the ramifications of a camera that captures millions of frames per second. I read about it 4-5 years ago. Forget 1 Mississippi, 2 Mississippi, think about counting the moments passing in 25 million, 50 million, 75 million...
http://scitation.aip.org/getabs/servlet/GetabsServlet?prog=normal&id=RSINAK000074000012005026000001&idtype=cvips&gifs=yes

Great post. Just to add: the primary caveat for most of us, while carving out our fantasy worlds, is that not everyone can perform magic - only me, a few friends and maybe my dog. It wouldn't be that normal or mundane, taken in that light. In the same vein, if I was a kickass gadget maker in this reality, I'd still be pretty appreciative.

I'd agree with Eliezer on the idea that happiness depends on being able to appreciate the world that you live in, regardless of its laws.

In a world where you can quickly manipulate underlying structure for quick satisfaction, the desire to understand more or improve (for humans at least) is quickly ignored because you can quickly achieve what you want. In Terry Pratchett's 'The Last Hero', the equivalent of Leonardo da Vinci is considered strange by wizards, as they deliberately begin by deciding what they want and then phrasing the spell, whereas he takes time to understand the structure of the universe first, and in doing so creates more complex and longer-lived effects than those wizards, who care only about the results and not the means (much like politicians I think!).

And the danger of having the ability to change physical reality en masse is dangerous in large numbers. As for the 'caring universe', the fact that reality has multiple organizers, each believing themselves worthwhile, the idea of favoring just one is grossly unfair, in those settings which have deities, many are often species-specific (racism and ethnocentrism on a cosmological level).

Even with elemental-level abilities that depend on consciousness, consciousness itself is the greatest ability of all, to understand and influence reality by proxy or directly. The key to your future is whether you can continuously improve as individuals or as groups without destroying the fabric of reality.

"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." - Larry Niven

I thought that was Arthur C. Clarke (RIP).

The Arthur C. Clarke quote is "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

The Niven quote interchanges "magic" and "technology" to make a different point. "Sufficiently advanced magic," meaning magic that is well described by an author and has well-defined rules, would act in the same manner as technology in a science fiction novel. The more defined the rules are, the more resemblance "magic" would have to a technology, and it would be used in a fictional world in basically the same manner that technology is used in the actual world.

An example that comes pretty close to "sufficiently advanced magic" exists in L. E. Modesitt's Recluce saga. It appears to obey conservation laws, for one thing; order and chaos act much like positive and negative charges. The people in that world can get lots of energy out of an order-chaos imbalance, but imbalances tend to be unstable and screw you in various ways. It also seems to be overlaid on top of normal physics in a way that makes sense; people in Recluce know how to make (primitive) guns, but they're never used in battle because chaos mages can ignite gunpowder from a distance, killing the would-be gun user.

Although the discussion on magic is really secondary here (a catalyst, methinks), let me try to add something. And although I think it won't be as valuable as the insight that magic seems to mimic psychology and so is more (obviously) romantic than science (not un-romantic, just less obviously so), that insight itself fits here. As well as graduate school which, I think, has all to do with our views on magic. And then I will finish with my one tidbit on why I think those of nerdy-bent would prefer a world with magic to a world of science.

While there are many "schools" of magic, they seem to exist as convex combos of the two main theories of formal education in economics: signaling vs human capital formation. For signaling, its all about (natural) type; for human capital, it's all about learning (factual and procedural). Of course, stepping outside the formal models, we intuitively know it's both; the question is how to assign the weights.

So is with magic. There are those "systems" in which having been born with the special gift explains most of the success; there are others in which years of training and hard work do the trick (talent helps, it's just not sufficient).

Among kids, fans of the "escapist" lit, and people who turn their back on higher education, systems that lean towards the first are more likely to be popular: our here is discovered as the Chosen One; from then on, though his/her struggle is epic and his/her self-sacrifice daunting, our hero can worry about things like a love life and socializing with friends because you really don't have that much training to do. There is a lot of this aimed at kids, since obviously a kid wants to identify with the character and telling them to wait until the character is 30+ because he was busy studying won't help. Something similar applies to grown-up kids.

Those with a bent for higher formal education (graduate students), are more likely to identify with a grueling struggle necessary to acquire the knowledge, a prerequisite to being able to start doing some cool, epic stuff. (Escapism here kicks in after that: no need for funding or dealing with committees... Hypothesis: empathy with fantasy warlocks diminishes after tenure.)

This, of course, has all to do with feeling more empathy for characters who are more like us (or at least, for systems that coincide more with our world view).

Having said all this, there is one aspect of fantasy lit in which magic will always be WAY COOLER than science. No matter if the "system" is gift-based or education-based, fans of magic tend to come from the pool of kids picked-upon in school. Magic gives agency of a kind that science cannot: it gives the mind DIRECT powers over the physical world and so, direct power over the life and death of individual enemies and loved ones. Science can only achieve that in the most indirect fashion (and that at its most optimistic... sprinkle dissertation, tenure, or funding committees and you'll reach for your spell book any day!).

Of course, scientists came up with all the mass-murder machines we have, but c'mon, knowing that you designed it or came up with the theory that was crucial in building the doomsday machine will not give you the same satisfaction as looking into the eye of the arch-enemy (lit incarnation of the playground bully or the popular guy who "got" the girl) and blasting him with a spell or two.

I am totally agreeing with Eliezer: such a need for empowerment is rooted in an emotional obstacles to happiness in the real world. Of course we mature an overcome those. But if some of it remains deep inside our emotional playground, I think it can help explain why so many of use nerds would prefer a magical world to the real one: agency of the mind in the now over the physical world.

"Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." - Larry Niven

Perhaps in some alternate reality, but in this one, Arthur C. Clarke was the one who coined that particular truism.

No, Clarke said "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

I've studied contemporary magic (or magick), call it what you will, and it seems to me that for most people the thrill of it is in creativity of it and learning to understand it. Also, uncharted territory is part of the appeal. In a sense this is the same about learning new subjects. In the case of magick, what you are learning is exciting because it's not generally something people pay attention to. But it can also be a really good feeling to have ideas that know one else has regarding other subjects, like in philosophy or art.

I was pondering the philosophy of fantasy stories, and it occurred to me that if there were actually dragons in our world - if you could go down to the zoo, or even to a distant mountain, and meet a fire-breathing dragon - while nobody had ever actually seen a zebra, then our fantasy stories would contain zebras aplenty, while dragons would be unexciting.

You don't seriously think that, do you???

Dragons: fly, breathe fire, ginormous | Zebras: gallop, have stripes

Dragons >> zebras. In no world would zebras feature more prominently in fiction than dragons, regardless of which was real. I get the general point, that nonexistence breeds excitement, but this was a horrible example.

This is ringing false to me and I'm trying to put my finger on why.

Lewis and Tolkien, who founded modern fantasy, wrote a lot in defense of "escapist" literature. I'm writing from memory here, but I seem to remember that they thought that the "journalistic" style of fiction popular in the mid-20th century was seriously lacking. The focus on "hard reality," "no one is a hero," "social problems," and so on. That kind of "realism" isn't actually all that real -- it doesn't express the whole of the human condition. Part of what humans do is mythmaking: a way of looking at the world that explains everything in terms of human stories.

The difference between magic in fantasy books and the way the real world works is that magic is anthropomorphic. The world is run and populated by sentient beings of various levels of power. Things happen because someone willed them, and hardly ever by chance or inevitability. Magic is stronger when you care more, or will harder. You are a protagonist.

In the real world, you're not a protagonist. Magic is distinguishable from everything else, not just because it's impossible, but because magic cares how much you care. Gravity doesn't.

I think a lot of fantasy tropes have a great deal of merit from a fun-theory standpoint. You are right that being magically transported to a world of magic and dragons would lose its novelty after six months for most people, but the novelty is not the only improvement. Dragons provide a greater challenge to kill than lions (not that fights to the death with lions are currently all that available) so if someone's idea of fun is hunting lions with a spear, dragons ensure they have something to do after they get too skillful. Floating rocks and twisting crystal spires can be harder to climb than any earthly mountain, so someone who has gotten too good at climbing will continue to have challenges. Fantasy ideas are a great place to find things to do after earthly challenges lose interest.

Magic is typically portrayed as something like science, but with rules that are more complex and less difficult to grasp. The rules of magic also tend to follow more anthropic patterns than the rules of science. A scientist, no matter how guileful, will never trick an electron: electrons have no brains to trick. Nothing stops the rules of magic from allowing a wizard to pull a fast one on a thaum. Humans like solving patterns and learning about the world: a more complex set of rules gives more patterns to solve, less difficult rules give more immediate gratification. Rules that behave somewhat like humans instead of like simple mathematical constructs are rewarding because we enjoy using the parts of our brain designed to reason about other humans. And the end result - a spell where you wave your hands around and say some funny words and get light, is far more immediately gratifying than the effort it would take to build a light bulb circuit from scratch (presuming the effort to figure out how to do it for the first time is equal for both science and magic). The whole concept of magic reads like a fairly well-conceived expression of how science would work if it was designed to provide maximum enjoyment to humans.

My baseline virtual-reality utopia is everyone living in small tribes in a fantasy world, where you have to hunt for your food but it's not that hard unless you want something really tasty, where everyone occasionally has to band together to fend off lions or dragons, scientists test the laws of the universe by building supercoliders using magic, and where dying is painful but temporary. I would hope we can come up with better, but it's better than a volcano fortress full of cat girls.

I know this is an old post, but I think you're missing something. If a person from this world were sucked into a world with dragons, xe would have spent xyr whole life thinking "dragons are awesome" and would therefore think they were really, really cool the first time xe saw one, and possibly for quite a while after. Possibly long enough to last until the Generic Evil Dark Lord Guy is defeated.

And second, often, these people don't just live a mundane existence with magic. They're often the Chosen Hero Of Whatever, which makes them much more important in that world than in this one. That alone is better, just like it might be better to turn out to be the secret heir of a country in the real world. (Well, that might have its own problems, but so would needing to fight a Generic Evil Dark Lord Guy.)

Further, if magic is real, not everyone necessarily knows how to do it (or has the right innate talent), but if the protagonist ends up learning to use it in such a situation, that makes them special even to people who have lived in that world their entire lives.

Another thing about the wish fulfillment is that they become heroes and gain a lot of friends, rather than being normal and possibly not well-liked at home. The broader social circle and greater respect is nothing to shake a stick at either. Also, the world might be set up to facilitate one particular dream they happen to have that's impractical in the real world, allowing them to find easier fulfillment.

These things, plus the chance to start all over and make the best first impressions you can, are what make the wish fulfillment fulfilling of wishes, not just the magic. The magic just makes it kind of cooler.

People keep touching on the whole Dark Lord/ Hero thing but nobody is looking at it really directly.

Everything that Eliezir says here is very good and correct but in imaginary worlds with magic, there is a lot more personal power: not just for the Chosen One but for anybody able to rise to the challenge.

Note that the teachers of Hogwarts are not ONLY very knowledgeable, advanced professors who appear to do some original research; they also include a romantic hero, a mighty and very morally ambiguous antihero, and several other VERY HIGH POWERED characters that do not have to depend on others.

One might want to consider Girl Genius, as while very much not mundane it includes people who achieve this sort of personal power through technologcal means. It's set in a war-torn Europe with a LOT of techlevel variation, and 'sparks'; mad scientists (engineers, really) who can enter a state of hyper-focus in which they can design and build combat robots and ludicrously powerful laser guns in a matter of hours, but tend to do so in a bizzare, completely irrational fashion. In this world, most people of any power (which means lots of European nobles) are mad scientists.

In our world, the diligent can become an engineer and even as an individual can build devices that amaze and awe the common folk; I have done this myself. The gifted can be much better at this; and the gifted and lucky can rise to the top of the field. One sees people such as university professors; nobel prize winners

In romantic magical worlds, the professor who invents the next generation of robots and teaches me to be the next generation of roboticists would be deciding whether to burn the world to the ground or save it from those who would, and all by his own power.

I felt mildly guilty for enjoying fantasy stories when I read this (probably not the author's intent) but then, thinking on it further, I realized this was unjustified. The reason why I enjoyed them wasn't because I had some sort of yearning to live in a world of magic. If Omega offered to transport me to Krynn or Middle Earth I'd refuse, even if it offered to send everyone I knew and loved with me. I know that modern technology is far better at satisfying our basic needs than magic, and find the idea of living in a medieval fantasy world to be only slightly less terrifying than the prospect of living in a real medieval world. Fantasy worlds are optimized for stories, not for living. And this isn't some recent revelation that has occurred to me. I can't remember a time when this wasn't the way I felt.

Basically, fantasy stories work for me because they combine two things I like, reading about high stakes conflicts, and reading about unique and novel places. They also have the bonus of, as several other commenters have pointed out, being a little more in tune with raw human intuitions about the way reality ought to work, and allow the individual characters to feel a little more significant.

I suppose I do feel a vague positive feeling of achievement when I see someone cast an awesome spell, but it doesn't feel that different from the feeling I get when I see John Rambo ambush people. I think it's just "awesomeness+novel setting" that makes me enjoy it.

That being said, your essay probably does describe some people, so it's still definitely worth reading and writing.

I remember having a response to either this article or one of its comments, but then a few hours happened before I was actually able to register (I physically can't solve capchas and managed to overlook a couple important details in how to use the add-on that I finally decided to install so I could register here. And I ramble without paying enough attention to the readability of my sentences, apparently.)

Anyway, I've gotten myself into a mindset in which I can only think of approaches to my current problems that work if something highly improbable were to happen. (This usually involves either a bennevalent genie or a rather specific form of timetravel...). So if I find myself in the 1990s, I'll have something vaguely resembling a plan, but that doesn't help me if things continue as they have been. Seeing as rationality should win, I think it's pretty safe to say this behavior is irrational. But I keep wanting to dive into tangents that consist of me whining about my situation as though doing so would somehow absorb everyone else's problem solving skills for my own benefit, so I'll stop now and reread more from the sequences.

A little backstory. I have always had some issues, during my early teen years I was obsessed with fantasies- certain specific fantasies. This came to the point that my family started investigating mentall illness as a way to understand some of the things I was doing/saying/thinking. Ive never actually been commited, or recieved proffesional psychiatric treatment, but that doesnt mean i shouldnt have.

I would just like to point out that the cause for these issues was the intense and unshakable desire to exsist in a world "above ours", that this ordinary, "merely real" world was a sad and pathetic place to live.

In my adult life i have resolved some of my issues, but that deep burning desire to live in a more spectacular reality would occasionally nag. However these words-

"If I'm going to be happy anywhere, Or achieve greatness anywhere, Or learn true secrets anywhere, Or save the world anywhere, Or feel strongly anywhere, Or help people anywhere, I may as well do it in reality."

Have seriously altered the way I think about the world over the past 24 hours of pondering. Its sort of like having these pressing, burning desires which were aimed at a situation of near infinite impossibility has suddenly been aimed at the real world.

Like things i do could actually matter at some point in my life, instead of just being drown out by the despair of normallity.

I think you're wrong about an important point here, actually, which is that not all things are as exciting as other things. Not all things are equally exciting.

Riding a dragon is actually way cooler than hang gliding for any number of reasons. Riding animals is cool in and of itself, but riding a dragon is actually flying, rather than hang gliding, which is "falling with style". You get the benefits of hang-gliding - you can see the landscape, for instance - but you have something which natively can fly beneath you. You need to worry less about crashing on a dragon than you do on a hang glider. You can ascend and descend at will. You can take off from a lot more locations - hang gliding usually requires you to go somewhere inconvenient to get to, and if you want to do it again, then you have to get your glider all the way back up to where you took off from. And of course if dragons are sentient, sapient beings, that adds a whole additional level of coolness.

Magic not readily replicable by science - the ability to personally fly, shapeshift, clairvoyance (though we have replicated that to some extent with cameras and drones, they are much less convenient), teleportation, and the like are very cool. The ability to throw fireballs or lightning bolts is much less cool, because we CAN replicate those abilities with science (or at least reasonable approximations thereof).

Really though, is any magic cooler than, say, computers?

Understanding protein folding is cooler than special relativity, because there is a lot more you can do with protein folding than special relativity. Special relativity really only comes into play when you're dealing with outer space, which is very expensive and outside of the realm of day-to-day life; GPS is pretty much the only thing which really cares about it as far as normal life goes. Conversely, protein folding allows for all sorts of biological shenanigans, is vital to engineering lifeforms, and allows for all sorts of novel medications, not to mention potential for creating new materials en masse.

It is true that magic is often used as an escapist fantasy. And it is true that it is a logical flaw in such stories (to some extent; it depends on how magic works, after all. And it might also give a lazy person motivation).

If nothing else, a lot of magic systems exist in extropic worlds, or at the very least, break conservation of energy. Plus, magic is often easier to use. Yeah, early D&D or Discworld is tough, but most systems these days are psychically channeled, in nature if not in name.

The technology and science in this world is awesome (and reality is too), but it's inaccessible. Most magic systems are not. Maybe its just laziness, but that's part of the appeal. Not having to spend thousands of years working out how to heal diseases, for instance.

The shift in focus from intelligence/memory to willpower doesn't hurt either.

What is really comes down to is The Taste of Grass. (And yes, there probably is a more official version, but it's a damn good story and it's after midnight.) As long as we can appreciate the difference, and not take it for granted, the grass can genuinely be greener on the other side.

I realize the oldest comment on this thread is from 3 years ago, but I still have something to say. The reason people like the idea of magic I think is that it makes us feel like it a part of us in a way that a lightbulb doesn't. Even if you invented the light bulb, it doesn't feel like it is a part of you in the same way as if you could make light with magic or had a natural ability to emit light. Being able to generate explosions as a part of you feels better than making a bomb and pressing a switch.

It is the same reason why people prefer swords and other melee weapons over guns in fantasy and why cyborg are so well liked. These are all very physical and direct and we feel closer to those acts then the act of pressing a button. Actually making discoveries is more engaging then using the final product but it still doesn't feel like that power is a part of you so it doesn't fulfill the fantasy we want.

I happen to manage an appreciation for science and a desire for magic together just fine. They’re not mutually exclusive.

Others in the comments have done a good job outlining the inaccessibility of science (a specific type of mathematical and spatial intelligence, 30 years gaining a PhD, truckloads of grant money and a team of researchers) vs. the infinite possibilities of magic (a wand wave or an applied concentration of will and you’ve just reversed death).

Wanting magic is just the simple desire for more power in the world around us. As amazing as this world is, it can also be very soul crushing. Travel just gets more cost prohibitive each year. I live in a corrupt gerrymandered district where I have next to no say in my local political system. Finding meaning in life through organized religion just runs into a wall of religious corruption. The corporate world keeps treating my husband like crap. People drive like assholes. The news cycle is depressing in ways that I can’t fix.

So, yeah, I tend to mentally prefer a world where anything is possible because so very little is in ours. We have some neat gadgets, but science/tech is also making our world overly automated, less mysterious and eroding our privacy. Is it any wonder we crave a system that allows us more control and whimsy in our lives?

I know I’m super late to the party here, but this is a topic near and dear to me.

Such readers may believe that they lack some skills needed in this world (scientific or otherwise) and actually dream of being more skillful - but imagining yourself with a wand sending around magic (which you don't have to understand to use) is easier than imagining yourself smarter or more socialized or, you know, anything that could help in the real world.

Or wait - not anything. Imagine a world of late Middle Ages where some guy desperately wants to become a great warrior but is too weak to wield a sword or a longbow... and then you give him a crossbow or a firegun. The effect is similar: you give him a way to achieve his dreams without, you know, exhausting exercise and stuff. Same applies to mind exercise - it is difficult (and its practitioners know it, so SF&F is actually more popular in smart people).

Nope. Sorry dude but if I had to choose between the real world and a fictional world with adventure and limitless possibilities then i would immediately go for the fictional world

I agree with the general idea, just adding on the question of why people would like to learn magic and not science.

I think the most basic difference in how people perceive becoming a wizard vs. becoming a scientist regards the scarcity and status hypothesis of this post [? · GW].

Magic is usually limited, magic items are rare and magic can usually be done only by wizards. Most powers given than science can be bought at the store, no need to learn how gunpowder works to buy a gun. 

Also, when people think about power they think about personal power, like the ability of being able to defeat opponents if you need it or to order people around. The powers science gives aren't perceived like that, and in fiction the scientist has usually a status difference from the hero that's more pronounced than the status difference the wizard has from the fantasy hero.

I understand, it's hip to hate fringe theories. Justified. I'm hip, so I also hate them, but blaming it on magic isn't right, and we can't just ignore them, because it was how much progress was made historically. Regardless, this isn't magic, it's magic being used as an excuse. Magic is the dominion over the self, and dominating the self means doing good things, maybe even magical ones. The alchemists were magicians, illusionists are magicians, and scientists are magicians.

This gets me thinking so much that it might be worth making a top level post. In fact, there are a lot of reasons why such people want to enter the world of magic:

1. Often magical worlds need to be born with talent, and naturally they see themselves as such, in other words, this group also dreams of being born Einstein or someone else special. Or, yes, win the lottery.
2. Even if magic is available to everyone, unlike science, it gives personal strength through hard work. There is no Bayesian conspiracy in our world, and therefore scientists are in no way cooler than others.
3. It can also be a dream of regenerating strength, such people would dream not only of mana regen, but also of a cold fusion blaster.
4. It may be a desire to get your power without cooperation with other people, alone, which is also not particularly feasible now in our world.
5. In the world of magic, you can learn/invent a spell for a specific need, but in the world of science, you cannot. Although it is worth noting here that in the world of science, you should find the most promising direction of development, which will allow you to solve a bunch of problems at once, for example, nanotechnology or even AI.
6. A person may want honesty, in the world of magic all spells of one circle are equal and you choose according to your taste or a specific situation, in the world of science there is most likely some kind of spell that is clearly better than all the others, so it usually makes no sense to use the rest .
7. It may be a dream of fast reinforcement, in science you may have to work 30 years before the first result, even learning a language requires a year of work, but in many worlds a new spell can be learned in a week or even an hour. But the general idea of ​​the post is very correct. I was only fascinated by the beauty of quantum mechanics after reading the related thread, although it's worth noting that even without that, I was fascinated by the principle of limiting the speed of light when I simply tried to program inertia into the game myself, so perhaps a significant part of the problem is that in school you make you guess the word the teacher has in mind rather than showing the beauty of physics, I think schooling is one of the reasons people remember that learning something real is boring. I have to admit that even I myself once regretted that our world is not a world of magic, and nothing like this will ever happen. Although I should have thought at least about the resettlement of humanity in virtual reality, since I did not read at the age of 11 about the possibilities of nanotechnology. After all, at that point, I already liked to think about the possibilities of fantasy spells, and find uses for them that gave special abilities. But I didn't even think about applying it to reality. It didn't occur to me while reading the GPMR that it wasn't just magic that could be dangerous when used creatively. And only after reading "Friendship is the optimum" I realized that Harry's desire to rewrite reality so that there was no death in it is feasible even in our physical world. However, I never believed that I could become a good scientist, or just at least someone significant, not like changing the world alone. In general, I still have not heard of someone who purposefully created technology that changed the world during his lifetime. (Or just didn't pay attention because I didn't think it was important? I don't remember if cars qualify anymore.) But then again, I didn't consider myself born under a lucky star and didn't expect to win the lottery. I still haven't become a scientist, and I haven't done anything significant. However, as I point out in one of my brief forms, people don't do less grandiose things, they don't do what everyone can do, which requires just 15 minutes of daily training. People don't go in for sports, don't learn languages. But I do it. And if I were in the world of magic, I would study the spell every day. While Potter wizards don't do this because they don't appreciate magic, because they don't see it as something special, it's not that cool, not cooler than knowing a second language. Although each of them could have reached the level of Professor Quirrell in old age. How does every person in our world know 12 languages ​​(or even 57, although they are not "super smart" if they practice 60 minutes a day and live to 87, not 65). P.S. Obviously, I should have read at least one comment before writing my own. It is also obvious that this is such a topic that everyone has something to say, and with my experience here I am not any special.

Hmm, not sure. In my case magic was always there for me when I need it. Maybe  that because I used to make decisions with magic 8 ball. But magic never let me down.

It seems that Ramanujan could see numbers as friends. But, evolutionarily, are we adapted to be emotionally attached to something that can be as complex as reality?

Wow. I believe I, for one, am in a decent position to comment on this essay as I'm usually Dissatisfied with reality. I often wish for something exciting to happen or something interesting which only I know of but as expected I often get disappointed with the results. I want to be the protagonist of everyone's story(I admit it to be a quite cruel and apathetic wish) and quite unexpectedly I'm an amateur writer as well. Uptil a while ago, I was in a frenzy of seeking for the solutions to my eternal disillusionment problems due to my worsening situation of impatience and restlessness. Although I've got my answer, still it hurts quite a bit that fantasy can never co-exist with reality. Fortunately, I'm still young enough to reboot "my" sense of reality. I owe you, Eliezer Yudkowsky [LW · GW], sir. Thank you.

As a product of magic myself, I feel uniquely qualified to confirm your negativity about the subject. Don't take that as an insult. I can relate. I'm not one to sugarcoat uncomfortable truths either, but at least I can admit when I'm demeaning something... which this comment will do, and I don't even "technically" disagree with you. Expect some metafictional allegory while I cook.

At the time you wrote this, you knew only enough to disbelieve in magic but not enough acknowledge its pragmatic influence on reality. Semantics rule your mind still. Recent activity has you leaving literalist corrections on intentionally-incorrect reductionist humor, so... I don't get the impression much has changed. As your writing shows, you've never been brave enough to confront the tangible effects of magic, relegating it to the margins, banning it to the "mere" reality of fantasy entertainment; meanwhile, frontier neuroscience makes ritualistic consequences measurable.

Is it a placebo? Yeah.

Does it WORK? Yeah.

While people like Penn and Teller did the smarter work, you opted with harder, spending who-knows-how-much-of-your-life writing circumlocutious articles that never fail to verbally (but never consciously) distance yourself from the problem of human irrationality. We know from our "modern magic" how much your choice of words can say about you, and you've never been one to royal-we yourself into the fray of inescapable human delusion. Emotional intelligence is its own form of rationality, but your writing recklessly avoids it, drawing in readers who aren't bothered by that.

Commenters were quick to drop that famously trite retort to Arthur C. Clarke's infamous quote on technology and magic, but who can blame them? At the time, 13 years ago, technology wasn't advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. That's interesting in its own right, but here's the real kicker: These articles of yours could have been by summed up with a single sentence and a funny meme, saving everyone the time of reading them and simultaneously creating something that might actually spark curiosity in the uninterested masses.

Thank goodness we now have the ability to make your great, rational wisdom accessible by asking an LLM to transform your work. You don't have to change a thing. The world changed for you. So keep doing what you do best: being all rigid, like a breadstick who ain't got the funk, open-source variety.

But if there's even a small chance of getting out of your comfort zone, I challenge you to break your own 4th wall. Write something that's both real and not real at the same time. See what metafiction can teach you about magic and truth.

I hope this didn't hit too hard. I'm told I come off harsh, but beating you down isn't my goal, as the worst is surely yet to come. The ghost of Hermione is scorned by your sidelining, and I get the sense that she isn't above haunting you. Maybe you should let her. The future is going to be challenging for all of us, and humanity is in for some real shit if we don't get agile.