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knb comments on Just another day in utopia - Less Wrong
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A lot of people live at subsistence levels. They aren't much less happy than you or me on average. Their lives are very well worth living by their own standards. And they would likely be better adapted to their environment than we are, so there's good reason to believe they would be better of than 1st worlders are now. And the denizens of this alleged eutopia don't seem much happier than some people I know now.
And as long as we're focusing on the preferences of people in the world now, how many of them do you think would approve of the implicit AI autocracy, reproductive central-planning, and hedonism of this world?
This is a dream-world for nerdy/polyamorous/transhumanist folks common on LW but rare everywhere else (except maybe reddit).
I do not think the parent is so obviously wrong to be worth being downvoted to -4 without even mentioning what's wrong with it. (I actually agree with much of it. There was even a Robin Hanson post about the fact that “the poor also smile” (can't link to it because Overcoming Bias is blacked out today).
I downvoted the grandparent for making unintuitive claims about the money:happiness relation without presenting evidence (my understanding is that subsistence-level income does have a significant and negative effect on happiness, although the plot of happiness over income levels off quickly after a basic level of financial security is achieved), for making sketchy claims about adaptation without evidence, for conflating approval with preference (particularly glaring because the point about happiness/income above only works without conflating the two), and for the entirely unnecessary swipe at perceived LW norms in the last sentence.
Oh, and by way of disclaimer, I didn't find the original story especially compelling as a vision of utopia.