I don't think this future society was intended to be perfect or utopian or a recommendation for how we should develop. I don't think that EY is seriously (or non-seriously) suggesting that society would be better with decriminalized rape.

Rather, this is most likely an expression of the principle that the future will contain things that we would consider a moral outrage, just as every century in recorded history so far has contained things that the people of one or two centuries previous to them would have considered a moral outrage.

There's a lot of discussion in this comment thread already looking at the question from different angles, and I recommend you take the time to look through it.

I agree, though, that the logical implications are not well-thought-out. Can I delay or prevent someone from getting from point A to point B by accosting them in the hallway for sex? What if three people all decide they want sex with the same person at once? Twelve people? A hundred? At a certain point, sexual intercourse is an unavoidably rivalrous good this side of forking uploads.

It occurs to me that in Evil Plutocrat, you can get what you want in a simpler way, by just going to the majority party and saying "unless you make the bill pass, I will donate a large amount of money to the other party" which shows that what makes the evil plutocrat powerful is not his clever use of game theory, but again his unique ability to make credible precommitments.

In Hostile Takeover, although you're right, doesn't that just pass the problem on to whoever you sell it to? At some point the shareholders either have to decide not to sell the company (thus passing up the deal to get $101 for their stock) or sell the company to one of the two bidders.

You can keep the shares and its associated stream of future dividends, which presumably is worth $100 in present value. (If the 50% owner intentionally does something to reduce the value of future dividends, he would be violating minority shareholder rights, which is why I asked whether we're assuming that such rights don't exist.)

You're right; these seem to be more parables on what happens if one side has strong ability to coordinate among itself and keep precommitments and the other side does not.

My problem is that these examples seem designed (but perhaps not consciously) to oversell the power of game theoretic thinking, by obfuscating the fact that the side that appears to be winning through clever use of game theory is also given other strong and unrealistic advantages. Unless maybe the author intended them to be puzzles, where we're supposed to figure out what element hidden in the setup is responsible for the counterintuitive/unrealistic outcomes?

Some of the books also contain statements that, as far as you can tell, are outright nonsense. One suggests that the only reason you or Fred have any problems is that you weren’t praised enough as children. You try on that perspective as well, but it feels yucky and nothing new clicks into place, and so you move along to the next part.

I don't think the problem with that statement is that it's outright nonsense. The problem is rather that it isn't actionable and doesn't tell you something you can do about the situation.

I know someone who drives across the country on long trips, rather than flying. Air travel scares him. Statistics, naturally, show that flying a given distance is much safer than driving it. But some people fear too much the loss of control that comes from not having their own hands on the steering wheel. It's a common complaint.

If that's their true rejection, they should be scared of getting into a car driven by someone else too.

There's a rather serious problems with that philosophy: It makes you a liar, which is often morally a bad thing to be. If you really eliminate all your discomfort with lying, you have converted yourself into a sociopath and probably become a scam artist to boot. You'll be like the guy selling "healing crystals" who knows full well that the crystals are bunk, but is making too much money to care.

My own solution is to think of disapproval as a relatively mild pain. We evolved to think that disapproval is one of the worst things in the universe, because back on the savannah it was: getting shunned meant getting killed.

But in a modern liberal society, you can be an atheist, a Singularitarian, a lesbian, a furry, and be disapproved of... and not actually die from this. In fact, usually it hurts about as much as a papercut. And since there may in fact be benefits to telling people you are these things---a more secular and pro-Singularity society for the former, more tolerance for your fellow lesbians and furries on the other---then speaking the disapproved belief is often precisely the right thing to do.

In some rare circumstances you can still die from disapproved beliefs---e.g. in Iran you can be hanged for being an atheist---in which case I honestly have no qualms about lying. I'll lie to torturers and murderers all day long if I have to.

It's a bit harder in intermediate cases, where the disapproval has real consequences but not fatal ones. But even then, one can escape most of the feelings of moral guilt by reminding oneself: I wouldn't be lying if they weren't bigots.

I mean, think about it; what's the best possible tax code? It takes about a page:

• A list of tax-brackets, linked to the GDP deflator, and their (progressive) rates; e.g. "Under $5k: no tax; $5k-$1k: 10%; $10k-$20k: 15%; $20k-$40k: 20%; $40k-$80k: 25%; $80k-$160k: 30%; $160k-$320k: 35%; over $320k: 40%"

• A list of important deductions, such as charitable donation and capital loss

And... that's about it frankly. This would raise revenue in a simple and fair way, and effectively eliminate the tax-filing and tax-compliance industry. And we could do it tomorrow by an act of Congress. But we won't.

And likewise, a video game can be so much more engaging than mere reality,

If we can make a game that way, shouldn't we be able to add bells and whistles to reality to make it more engaging? Maybe we should be making our lives into video games.