I mean, let’s be honest. You can conceivably have a great relationship with your significant other. Can you argue that it it is the best possible relationship?
Consider the dilemma of soulmates. If you actually have a soulmate—the single person who is the best match you could ever have—the chances of actually meeting them are incredibly small. If we include the entire world’s population and limit your actual dating processes to folk whose name you actually remember, we pit a cohort of a couple hundred people to one of 3.5 billion (twice that if you are bisexual). Even if we presume your soulmate shares your language and cultural background, that’s still a couple hundred people versus tens of millions.
And you don’t have to believe in soulmates for this to come forward. The desire breakdown of the genders is not identical : in the aggregate, you will find different political beliefs, sexual desires, and acceptable habits. Much and likely most of this is socially conditioned rather than biological, but that doesn’t change how it affects your emotions. Even if you specifically find someone that votes the same way that you do, doesn’t care about the position of a toilet seat, and thinks exactly the same thing about fluffy handcuffs, the average you will not. ((Nor is this limited to straights, although the gay and lesbian populations do seem to have a smaller gap between the desires distinct subcultures and the desires of their targets of desire.))
In the modern world, we sigh, and either don’t believe in soulmates or compromise. We don’t have the time or tools or resources to find the best possible relationship, there might /not be/ a perfect choice, and 99.9% of the best possible relationship (or even 50% or 10% or 5% or 1%) can still exceed the threshold costs of relationships to start with. You don’t get those excuses in a strongly transhumanist setting. You have eternity, or a reasonable approximation thereof—you can’t computationally distinguish the emotional costs of a breakup making you upset for a week or month, versus a millennium of once-a-decade severe disagreements, nevermind ten billion years of it. Finding a perfect, precisely-tailored-to-you lover becomes less difficult than a normal person with their faults and varying likes and dislikes, when the later requires you to leave your room.
I agree that this is a bad thing -- verthandi and their nonsexual counterparts are my biggest creep-factors in Friendship is Optimal—but I don’t think it’s bad because it makes people unhappy, or even because it makes them less happy than they could be, for any likely synonym of happy.
You can conceivably have a great relationship with your significant other. Can you argue that it it is the best possible relationship?
Yes, if there’s a ceiling on how good a relationship can be at a given point. Compare to eating food—you eat until you’re completely full (and aren’t feeling unwell). You wouldn’t claim that there would only be one best “soulmate meal” that can make you fuller than any other meal, because there is a variety of meals that can make you full and satisfied. The same can be (and, I think, is) true for relationships. There are relationships that are suboptimal, that don’t reach the ceiling, but there are multiple people who do reach the ceiling. If search costs were zero, many people would find several matches between whom they could be genuinely indifferent.
There is also the contrast between the potential quality of a relationship and the actual quality of an existing relationship. Often, your relationship improves as it progresses, so even if you’d meet someone with whom you’d also be hypothetically compatible (maybe even more compatible than with your current partner if you had known both for an equal amount of time), it can still be possible that a relationship with a new person could never catch up in quality compared to the old relationship. This is one of the problems with this scenario. Even if this vethandi would have been more compatible with Stephen had he known her for as long as he had known his wife, it doesn’t mean that their relationship would be better than the relationship with the wife would have been. There is also the effect of resentment to consider. I find it highly likely that at least for some people, replacing their spouses with vethandi would cause a permanent decrease in lifetime happiness.
But for relationships that aren’t as good as they could be—for relationships not at the ceiling, and those that could be surpassed by a vethandi—for people in such relationships, the vethandi replacement would be an improvement. Something on a more minor scale already happens today: people say things like, “My old relationship wasn’t bad, but it ended, and then I met this new guy/girl and they’re much better”.
FWIW, I didn’t think that anything in Friendship is Optimal was creepy.
The mistake wasn’t telling the genie to make people happy, the mistake was giving him wrong information about what makes people happy.
Is that the case?
I mean, let’s be honest. You can conceivably have a great relationship with your significant other. Can you argue that it it is the best possible relationship?
Consider the dilemma of soulmates. If you actually have a soulmate—the single person who is the best match you could ever have—the chances of actually meeting them are incredibly small. If we include the entire world’s population and limit your actual dating processes to folk whose name you actually remember, we pit a cohort of a couple hundred people to one of 3.5 billion (twice that if you are bisexual). Even if we presume your soulmate shares your language and cultural background, that’s still a couple hundred people versus tens of millions.
And you don’t have to believe in soulmates for this to come forward. The desire breakdown of the genders is not identical : in the aggregate, you will find different political beliefs, sexual desires, and acceptable habits. Much and likely most of this is socially conditioned rather than biological, but that doesn’t change how it affects your emotions. Even if you specifically find someone that votes the same way that you do, doesn’t care about the position of a toilet seat, and thinks exactly the same thing about fluffy handcuffs, the average you will not. ((Nor is this limited to straights, although the gay and lesbian populations do seem to have a smaller gap between the desires distinct subcultures and the desires of their targets of desire.))
In the modern world, we sigh, and either don’t believe in soulmates or compromise. We don’t have the time or tools or resources to find the best possible relationship, there might /not be/ a perfect choice, and 99.9% of the best possible relationship (or even 50% or 10% or 5% or 1%) can still exceed the threshold costs of relationships to start with. You don’t get those excuses in a strongly transhumanist setting. You have eternity, or a reasonable approximation thereof—you can’t computationally distinguish the emotional costs of a breakup making you upset for a week or month, versus a millennium of once-a-decade severe disagreements, nevermind ten billion years of it. Finding a perfect, precisely-tailored-to-you lover becomes less difficult than a normal person with their faults and varying likes and dislikes, when the later requires you to leave your room.
I agree that this is a bad thing -- verthandi and their nonsexual counterparts are my biggest creep-factors in Friendship is Optimal—but I don’t think it’s bad because it makes people unhappy, or even because it makes them less happy than they could be, for any likely synonym of happy.
Yes, if there’s a ceiling on how good a relationship can be at a given point. Compare to eating food—you eat until you’re completely full (and aren’t feeling unwell). You wouldn’t claim that there would only be one best “soulmate meal” that can make you fuller than any other meal, because there is a variety of meals that can make you full and satisfied. The same can be (and, I think, is) true for relationships. There are relationships that are suboptimal, that don’t reach the ceiling, but there are multiple people who do reach the ceiling. If search costs were zero, many people would find several matches between whom they could be genuinely indifferent.
There is also the contrast between the potential quality of a relationship and the actual quality of an existing relationship. Often, your relationship improves as it progresses, so even if you’d meet someone with whom you’d also be hypothetically compatible (maybe even more compatible than with your current partner if you had known both for an equal amount of time), it can still be possible that a relationship with a new person could never catch up in quality compared to the old relationship. This is one of the problems with this scenario. Even if this vethandi would have been more compatible with Stephen had he known her for as long as he had known his wife, it doesn’t mean that their relationship would be better than the relationship with the wife would have been. There is also the effect of resentment to consider. I find it highly likely that at least for some people, replacing their spouses with vethandi would cause a permanent decrease in lifetime happiness.
But for relationships that aren’t as good as they could be—for relationships not at the ceiling, and those that could be surpassed by a vethandi—for people in such relationships, the vethandi replacement would be an improvement. Something on a more minor scale already happens today: people say things like, “My old relationship wasn’t bad, but it ended, and then I met this new guy/girl and they’re much better”.
FWIW, I didn’t think that anything in Friendship is Optimal was creepy.