Strange7 comments on Building Weirdtopia - Less Wrong

27 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 January 2009 08:35PM

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Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 02 February 2012 04:08:38PM 26 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Strange7 12 November 2013 11:43:07PM 2 points [-]

They can't die or be seriously hurt in the sim.

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.

Comment author: Risto_Saarelma 13 November 2013 08:37:32PM 3 points [-]

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.

Comment author: Strange7 26 November 2013 06:41:38AM 3 points [-]

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?