Fun Theory is an attempt to actually answer questions about eternal boredom that are more often posed and left hanging. Attempts to visualize Utopia are often defeated by standard biases, such as the attempt to imagine a single moment of good news ("You don't have to work anymore!") rather than a typical moment of daily life ten years later. People also believe they should enjoy various activities that they actually don't. But since human values have no supernatural source, it is quite reasonable for us to try to understand what we want. There is no external authority telling us that the future of humanity should not be fun.
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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 Visualizing Eutopia, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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Today's post, Prolegomena to a Theory of Fun was originally published on 17 December 2008. 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 Visualizing Eutopia, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day's sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.