sixes_and_sevens comments on Open Thread, June 16-30, 2012 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: OpenThreadGuy 15 June 2012 04:45AM

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Comment author: sixes_and_sevens 27 June 2012 01:55:26PM 0 points [-]

As it's the result of about two minutes thought, I'm not very confident about how internally consistent this idea is.

If finding non-trivial problems is tedious work, I imagine people with a preference for tedious work (or who just don't care about satisfying problems) would probably rather buy art/prostitutes/spaceship rides, etc. This is the bit I find hardest to internally reconcile, as a society in which most work has become trivially easy is probably post-scarcity.

I personally don't find the search for non-trivial problems all that tedious, but if I could turn to a computer and ask "is [problem X] trivial to solve?", and it came back with "yes" 99.999% of the time, I might think differently.