I had a very hard time with this exercise. Subjectively it felt like thinking about utopia and dystopia first primed me excessively to think about utopia and dystopia instead of about weirdtopia. "Try not to think about grasshoppers or zebras" is a terrible way to get me to stop thinking about grasshoppers or zebras...
For a trick, try "the dystopia, except in a good way!" as a starting point. The reason this works is because most of the dystopias are built on opposing dreams of the future had by actual humans, which are usually not too bad, you just have to reconstruct that ideal in a way that wouldn't suck.
Today's post, Building Weirdtopia was originally published on 12 January 2009. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Eutopia is Scary, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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