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John_Maxwell_IV comments on Local Ordinances of Fun - Less Wrong
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Care to provide more than an argument by analogy to support that? What are specific mistakes you suspect fictional utopia designers would make?
By the way, if this is really true then instead of designing Fun Theory, we should work on Eutopia Interim Protocol, which could be something like everyone getting split into lots of little parallel universes to see what seems to be the most fun empirically. Or things change slowly and only by majority vote. Or something like that.
Total number of hours per lifetime people in every literally utopia ever printed spend watching videos of kittens doing cute things: 0.
Total number of hours per lifetime people in any real utopia would want to spend watching videos of kittens doing cute things: 100s or more.
Anecdotal evidence: Have you seen internet?
More seriously, Internet shows a lot about what people truly like, since there's so much choice, and it's not constrained by issues like practicality and prices. Notice total lack of interest in realistic violence and gore and anything more than one standard deviation outside of sexual norms of the society, and none of these due to lack of availability.
When people are given choice of just about anything (to watch or read that is), they prefer to watch cute things, and funny things, and stories about real and fictional individuals, and factual information about the world (Wikipedia), and connect with people they know etc. This is all so ridiculously mundane no self-respecting utopia writer would ever get near these things.
(and by historical standard of what humans lived like for 99% of their existence, modern society counts as an Utopia already)
Eh? Total lack of interest? Have you ever been on 4chan? Realistic violence threads crop up regularly over there, and it's notorious for catering to almost any kind of sexual deviance the average person can think of. (Out of curiosity: what would you consider "more than one standard deviation" outside the sexual norms of the society? How about two?) I say almost, because 4chan is regulated and it isn't the go-to place for quite everything; child pornography nets its posters permabans pretty quickly and it doesn't have the dedicated guro boards of its Japanese counterpart. Which is to say nothing of blood sports like traditional bullfighting or cockfights, for which even a quick search on YouTube can offer some clips (relatively mellow and barely containing any actual blood as they are).
Stuff like that may not match the tastes of the majority, but that hardly implies a lack of interest. There is a practical issue with availability and it comes from laws, regulation and prices (in the case of adult content that passes the legal filters). There are heavy selection effects at play here, since there are penalties for uploading and hosting certain kinds of content, penalties that aren't handed out for uploading cute kitten videos on YouTube.
I actually know various chans quite well, and they all pretend to be those totally ridiculous everything goes places, but when you actually look at them >90% of threads are perfectly reasonable discussions of perfectly ordinary subjects. Especially outside /b/. This generated far more interest on 4chan than all gore threads put together.
That's still not the same thing as a "total lack of interest."
Would you expect that people who use the Internet more also tend to be happier?
That's a difficult question to answer since amount of Internet use correlated with age, wealth, education level, location, language used, employment status, and a lot of things which might have very big impact on people's happiness.
I could give the cached answer that "if it didn't make them happier they wouldn't be using Internet", but there are obvious problems with this line of reasoning.
Especially since the chached answer fails to explain addiction, which is quite possible with the internet