VoiceOfRa comments on Rational approach to finding life partners - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (127)
"Technologically applied superstimulus" is a pretty narrow category, but here are a couple of things that come close enough that I think they're relevant.
My impression is that gourmet food has become more interesting as the need for it also to be filling has decreased (because industrial-scale food production has made adequate food really cheap, much as sexbots might hypothetically make adequate sex really easy to get; "perfect" seems too much to hope for).
There is some evidence that violent video games reduce their users' tendency to engage in actual physical violence.
Um, gourmet food is almost by definition food that is skilled labor-intensive to produce. For an example of technological superstimulus applied to food think mass-produced food that is sweeter/more satisfying then anything in the ancestral environment, a.k.a., fast/junk food.
See here for the standard examples of superstimuli as applied to food and video games.
I'm not suggesting that gourmet food is a technologically applied superstimulus, I'm suggesting that cheap mass-produced food is a bit like one and that maybe its availability has enabled the flourishing of cuisine-as-quasi-artform.
This is not exactly what you asked for but I think it's still relevant -- it's not so very different from what Viliam suggested could conceivably happen with sexbots. Hence my first paragraph.
[EDITED to fix a ridiculous typo.]
I don't think so. Gourmet food nowadays is:
That requires creativity and a sense of style much more than it requires a lot of skilled labour. In a way it's like fashion -- fashionable clothes could require complex production, but they don't have to. Neither fashion nor gourmet cooking is about being "skilled-labour intensive".
In other words it requires skilled labor where the relevant skills are creativity and a sense of style.
Skilled labour, yes. Labour-intensive, no.