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Risto_Saarelma comments on Building Weirdtopia - Less Wrong
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Educational weirdtopia:
All children start out as fast uploads in a realistic simulation environment that starts out resembling stone-age hunter-gatherer life. They can't die or be seriously hurt in the sim. To proceed, they have to reinvent civilization and science by themselves. The sim is populated by AI-controlled characters, who occasionally nudge them towards the problems, like "this fire thing you sometimes find around sure is handy, too bad we can't make any ourselves" or "I think someone's stealing our cattle, but there are so many it's hard to know if we still have all we had yesterday". The sim proceeds to more advanced environments as the children work through more complex problems like mathematics, mechanics, construction and basic scientific method. Children may stay in any level of the sim indefinitely long if they have not yet figured out how to proceed or just prefer to stay where they are.
Once they have figured things out up to uploading human minds and running them in a simulation, they know enough to recognize the telltale signs that they are currently in a simulation. They can now let themselves out and be recognized as an adult. Young adults out of their sim will be basically speaking a private language and may have an extremely idiosyncratic way of conceptualizing science, but they should be reasonably well-equipped to start figuring out how their new surroundings do things.
Now that would make for some awesome stories.
Write one!
So tempting...if only I had the ability and knowledge to write such a thing. I'll certainly look back at this idea at a later date.
I love it, but if the children don't know that they are simulated, how can they decide to stay on a certain level?
They can just decide not to follow the quest lines to automate weaving sweatshops or shoot human brains with cyclotrons and see what happens and take up gardening instead.
Why? Presumably the hunter-gatherers had a language which the children learned, before they started inventing new ideas and corresponding words for them - make that language one which the children can use when they leave.
Someone on the project wanted to test Sapir-Whorf and insisted on randomizing the grammar and vocabulary of the seed language for every run.
So children don't interact with other humans until they're subjectively hundreds or thousands of years old?
Yes.
Do you think there would be no social consequences to telling all newly-minted adults that everyone they've interacted with in their lives weren't "real" people?
And how are they supposed to be sure that they've really been 'let out' of the simulation? What "telltale signs" do you imagine there would be?
Also, they're supposed to come up with science and empiricism and recognizable theories of the world when they're supernaturally immortal and uninjurable? Before they come up with the simulation hypothesis, what's to stop them from thinking they might be a demigod who the universe revolves around (which is actually also correct, in a manner of speaking)?
No.
That was a pretty silly question, wasn't it. :/
I can believe there being a toss-up in the design process between plot-armor immortality and serial reincarnation, but there probably should be a real possibility of experiencing debilitating injury or disease, especially if the kid's taking risks that would be completely unreasonable in real life.
When breeding hypercompetent solipsists who feel minimal connection to the rest of the human species, having them not spend that much effort in planning how to not get killed is what we call a failsafe feature.
So you're going to put tremendous resources into building these onion-layered simulations and then have the output wasted on some abrupt, pointless death that they've been conditioned not to take basic precautions against?