@nazgulnarsil It is very unlikely people would give a lot more to charity just because their taxes are lower.
@Vladimir Golovin - Soviet state control over memes is vastly overstated, people are really good at adapting to bias in broadcast - some of it sticks, but not that much, and memes get primarily copied from person to person. Also what was broadcast was obedience toward the state, not independent cooperation between people, that was very much not welcome. See Pavlik Morozov story which was basically retold it Poland as "Soviet government are the worst scum of the Earth" tale - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavlik_Morozov
The "completely alternate universe where nothing is about status" is called 4chan (in b4: 4chan != /b/, also other chans), you can observe thousands of people posting on various subjects, and one thing they don't care about is social status because they're all anonymous (other than tripfags, pseudonimity combines worst of both worlds) so you cannot even have social status on chans.
You should try it Eliezer, full anonymity removes many of the biases you see in every other place in the world. Certainly chans have all kinds of other problems, but di...
0.9 correlations in psychological studies indicate either a massive bias in study design or some new deep truth about human nature that everybody missed up to this point, in either case - get this damn experiment reproduced asap!
It makes no sense to use Nikkei 225 or Dow Jones performance as indicators of economy performance, standard PPP GDP per capita is better than that in every imaginable way.
Japanese growth rates of 1-2% a year are historically still among the best performing human societies ever, even during industrial revolution we didn't get that much, and estimates for earlier times are of order of magnitude of 1% a decade or less.
Is this Utopia really failed or is it just a Luddite in you who's afraid of all weirdtopias? To me it sounds like an epic improvement compared to what we have now and to almost every Utopia I've read so far. Just make verthandi into catgirls and we're pretty much done.
People want to be high in the social hierarchy, it's an instrumental value stronger than almost all other human drives including sex (which is also an instrumental value). The civilization was developed only because of this drive.
Do you want to remove this strongest and most complex human drive, or populate the world with low status beings like catgirls so more people can feel they're high in the hierarchy than mathematics allows? There's no obvious third way, and catgirls seems to me like much less of a problem than drastically altering human nature by removing social status drive.
Michael G.R.: I'm not sure correlation between what possible future would do with cryo-suspended people, and how much you'd like it on utopia-dystopia scale, are much correlated. I think that unless you're revived very quickly after death you'll most likely wake up in a weirdtopia.
I should probably blog about it, but here's my opinion about cryonics:
What are chances that signing up for cryonics will work? I estimate it's really really tiny, 1% or less kind of chance, even if cryonics works some day I might die in a wrong way like in a car accident or by cancer metastasis that will make me lose too much information; or will be frozen in a wrong way; or I won't stay frozen for long enough due to hardware failure, economic crash, or whatever reasons; or future might decide not to unfreeze me; or to modify me too much upon unfreezing
Cyan: I cannot think of any strategy game where fog of war was a good idea. The surprise works well enough in FPS where people are actively trying to use that to outsmart each other, but in strategy games it's just stupid, and reduces fun of gaming. AI in strategy games universally ignores fog of war, so there's not even fun of using that as a cover.
I have no idea why you'd prefer not to know. Fun theory is mostly intuition, and my intuition says I really hate the feeling of loss of control that comes from not knowing important stuff, both in real life and while playing.
Another intuition is that irreversible decisions based on incomplete data feel horrible, in real life and while playing. Like deciding what temple to build in a city in Rome Total War without having any idea which one will be useful 30 turns from now when it starts to matter.
Economic Weirdtopia: Market is so efficient that nobody has to work, and everybody's basic needs can be sustained by just asking any charity. This prosperity hyperactivates everybody's social status chasing instincts, so people work harder and longer than ever, feeling inadequate if they don't earn more than their peers, and spending most of what they earn on making their 3d virtual avatars look better than other people's 3d virtual avatars.
Sexual Weirdtopia: Reproduction is completely separated from sex, children are taken care of by free market and gover...
Evolutionary argument against human enhancements is at the same time completely true and really really weak when you look closer at it.
In the most explicit form it would go something like "there are no easy ways without significant side effects to change a human being in a way that would make him produce more children while raised in a hunter-gatherer tribe in a Pleistocene savanna". Making kids in hunter-gatherer environment is what evolution optimized for, it didn't care about intelligence, health or anything unless it significantly contributed...
Can we have links to research on impact of television, Internet etc. on happiness etc.? This sounds interesting.
There's nothing wrong with going slow. OB generates valuable blog posts at a rate faster than any blog I know, even if it slowed down considerably it would still be a very good blog.
Speed doesn't matter that much on the Internet - you're not writing about politics or the latest Apple gadgets, so value of your blog posts lasts a very long time.
I think Star Trek TNG did a really good job at presenting alien protagonist culture. While most aliens were flanderized, Federation had a rich culture that was quite unlike modern human culture, with post-scarcity economy, Prime Directive and happy exploration as the main goal.
It probably didn't make a very good story, as DS9 make Federation a lot more human. It improved storytelling, but I still miss TNG Federation and its alien ways.
So that's how you end up if your first book ever is "Mary Sue Gets a Dragon" ...
I think we could test your claims. I'd guess different cultures and times show different kinds of fiction to children. It would surprise me a lot if that was much difference when it comes to traits like altruism, trust etc. - it seems to me that there are too strong genetic forces at work here for just a bunch of fiction to do much. Religions stick because they work with genetic forces, as a way to mark your own tribe against other tribes. Fashion and other silly pref... (read more)