When I first started thinking about politics, what struck me most is that idealists all had the same goal. People living in tight-knit communities, though free to leave; spontaneously sharing and cooperating in everyday life; working lightly to meet their needs, then devoting themselves to fulfilling, usually collective projects in their copious leisure time; swords hammered into plows, yadda yadda. The obvious flaw is that anyone slightly more selfish immediately ruins the system. There’s also coordination problems, where you can collect five of your friends to go build a house but never a large enough group to run a hospital.
The first step is to solve scarcity. We get behavior a lot like that Norman Rockwell utopia on various Internet communities, where information is copied at near-zero cost and time and skill are the only limited resources.
Well, that, and status. Here it’s harder; the small communities make egalitarian pressure possible, but that also creates conformity pressure which is not cool. Maybe take another leaf from the Internet and encourage people to self-sort into small ponds where they can be big fish.
Not literally all idealists. Like, transhumanists and hardcore libertarians and people who like war for its own sake exist. But yes, all idealists I met, read, or heard of in my first phase of political reasoning (like, from four to twelve, so nothing more advanced than the Communist Manifesto) wanted something like this. The commies and the socialists and the very optimistic social-democrats and the hippies and the extreme right-wing racists and the anarchists and the prairie muffins and the politically naive cultists and the wheel reinventors.
But yes, all idealists I met, read, or heard of in my first phase of political reasoning (like, from four to twelve, so nothing more advanced than the Communist Manifesto)
Zing!
The commies and the socialists and the very optimistic social-democrats and the hippies
See, those are the ones I was thinking of.
the extreme right-wing racists and the anarchists and the prairie muffins and the politically naive cultists and the wheel reinventors.
Not literally all idealists. Like, transhumanists and hardcore libertarians and people who like war for its own sake exist.
I’m not sure why you think transhumanists and hardcore libertarians would be part of the exception you’re making. I’m kind of both of those things, yet I think the idealist utopia you describe, modulo a few nitpicks, is roughly what I’m after as well.
Fair point, but that thing is opt-out. You’re born and raised (if people are still being produced) in one of the communities, are socially expected to share, and if you decide you don’t like it you have to leave. I suppose we can still make Proudhon cry by having shared resources be truly collectively owned, so that if you leave you’re given portable possessions equal to the value of your share of community resources like plots of lands and machines.
Interesting. If many idealists share the same goal, what exactly is stopping them from doing it? I am asking seriously. Is it just not being automatically strategic, is there a conflict between professed far-mode ideals and everyday near-mode wants, or which other problems are the greatest and most frequent?
I am not thinking about outright utopia, just about something that could improve the quality of my life by shifting it in the direction you described—finding people with the same values and similar hobbies as me, moving to live near each other, sharing and cooperating in everyday life… all that within the context of the existing society.
Technically, it would be relatively easy to do. Moving from one place to another is an inconvenience, but it would pay off in a long term. The real problem is finding the right people—a group of people with compatible values and goals, sympathetic to each other, and trusting each other enough to engage in such long-term project. For example, I am rather picky about people; I would prefer to live with people of near-LW levels of rationality. (On the other hand I would prefer to stay in my country, as opposed to moving near SI).
I don’t know how much this is just my personal problem (e.g. just a lack of social skills to find the right people), or how much this is the weak point of most utopias—you could imagine the utopia with the right group of people, but that group does not exist in the real life. It feels like it should exist, but that is a conjuction fallacy. You need people with similar goals and similar values and wanting to join the experiment and wanting it approximately at the same time and you need them to like and trust each other (for N people that means N×(N-1)/2 good relations and trust); and all this together is just too unlikely, especially for values of N equal to or greater than 10.
Or, if this does not seem like the greatest obstacle for you, then what (besides akrasia) is in your opinion stopping most people from better approximating their utopias?
Individuals can’t really do that, unless they’re willing to pay the cost of being cut off from the world. Hippies communes have few luxuries. Plus, these groups aren’t very stable, because of that pesky interpersonal conflict and freedom to leave.
What you can do is optimize your group of friends, which basically everyone already does. In ancient times people couldn’t guess where to move to to find good friends, except if a place got a reputation as a hotspot for a particular group which was unpopular elsewhere. (You’re a gay small town boy? Go to LA.) Now that the Internet exists, people can make friends and then move to be near them, though the improvement is rarely worth the cost of moving.
Globally speaking:
Magically creating this utopia would fail, because of conflicts over scarce resources. Taking scarcity out of the equation, you could still get huge fights and very unstable communities.
Getting from here to this utopia has been tried. Usually there’s some more or less dubious theory that points to a group of bad guys and jumps to the conclusion that removing the bad guys will create utopia. Various ideologies are distinguished by choice of bad guys and method of removal. (People currently in power are a popular choice, but you can always default to Jews.) While this method has produced poor results, I would be hard-pressed to think of a better one.
Moderate politicians could attempt to move incrementally along their preferred path to utopia. The optimistic view is that they wildly disagree on how to create utopia (e.g. will redistribution or trickle-down economics best solve hunger?) and are thus working at cross-purposes.
Getting from here to this utopia has been tried. Usually there’s some more or less dubious theory that points to a group of bad guys and jumps to the conclusion that removing the bad guys will create utopia. Various ideologies are distinguished by choice of bad guys and method of removal. (People currently in power are a popular choice, but you can always default to Jews.) While this method has produced poor results, I would be hard-pressed to think of a better one.
I kind of wish we had signatures here so I could put this in mine.
Taking scarcity out of the equation, you could still get huge fights and very unstable communities.
This is what I tried to say. The scarcity is a problem in itself, but it is not the true reason why we don’t have utopias.
Usually there’s some more or less dubious theory that points to a group of bad guys and jumps to the conclusion that removing the bad guys will create utopia.
Yes, this model is very popular, because it allows one to work altruistically for the benefit of humanity, while getting a lot of power and a freedom to kill people they dislike as a bonus.
But there are also othermodels. Having enough money, one could just build a new place and only let the good guys in. No need for killing, you just need one enthusiastic millionaire to sponsor the project. If the new place is small and not isolated from the rest of the civilization, the people can still participate in life as usual; they would just have their community as a bonus. Actually, people can cooperate and share their property even without a big investment, if they live reasonably close to each other. They just need to define that X, Y and Z are members of the community; they all share property with each other, but don’t share with the outsiders. That’s it.
Again, I think the true reason why this does not happen more often, are the interpersonal conflicts. People living in the utopia usually realize that they don’t like it… although they would like it, if they could replace their real human neighbors with the preferred kind of imaginary people.
Sometimes the utopia proponents admit that their utopia would require “education” of people. But to me it feels (maybe I am too ungenerous here) that they consider themselves ready for the utopia, and it is just the unenlightened masses who need some brainwashing. Also I see a problem here that without some “pilot project” how will we test whether the proposed education works for the utopia or not.
I would like to see more people who have their ideas of utopia, but who admit that they could be wrong and that their ideas need to be tested experimentally first. Then we could have a Scientific Utopiology, which would be a huge improvement from the usual “mass murders first, realize the obvious (for unbelievers) problems later”.
I’ve had many ideas for possible utopias, and read about many more, but I seem to always stumble on the same problems (or if I don’t, someone else usually points out (correctly) that my solution for one of these is flawed):
Expertise verification. How do I know that you know what the hell you’re talking about? (having members of the society all trained in hardcore bayesian rationality would help, but obtaining evidence that another rationalist has the evidence that they seem to have or claim to have is still costly, and arguing to an aumann agreement can waste tons of time depending on situation)
Scarcity of resources needs to be solved somehow, i.e. Sci-fi technology usually necessary.
Advanced cross-domain logistics involving math beyond the ken of most mortals. No, really. Counter-weighting evaluations of city design, efficient transport, short transit times, aesthetics, tribal / social proximity, local diversification, interpersonal relationships, all thrown into a big mess of predictive algorithms that are somehow supposed to take into account possible future desires of unknown people and unknown events.
Interpersonal relationships. Someone is going to seriously want to kill someone else eventually, period. None of my ideas nor the ideas I’ve seen so far even hint at a realistic solution. A good utopia should also encourage and help forging good social groups and meeting awesome people and making really great friends and so on… nope, still no solution there either. All my attempts at a solution for that last run into the “Wow, too hard maths” problems of logistics in the above point.
Memetic preference effects. When a certain project is really cool to work on, everyone wants to be working on that project. Just basic math and social science is more than enough to understand that making sure that enough people are working hard enough on the really important problems that need solving is hard, especially if you can’t just throw money at a few of them and tell them to shut up and work. To a lesser extent, people also simply usually just want the easier or more impressive tasks and jobs, so the important but non-mentally-available or “icky” stuff (like, say, sanitation technology AKA toilets and sewers) gets left very far behind.
When I first started thinking about politics, what struck me most is that idealists all had the same goal. People living in tight-knit communities, though free to leave; spontaneously sharing and cooperating in everyday life; working lightly to meet their needs, then devoting themselves to fulfilling, usually collective projects in their copious leisure time; swords hammered into plows, yadda yadda. The obvious flaw is that anyone slightly more selfish immediately ruins the system. There’s also coordination problems, where you can collect five of your friends to go build a house but never a large enough group to run a hospital.
The first step is to solve scarcity. We get behavior a lot like that Norman Rockwell utopia on various Internet communities, where information is copied at near-zero cost and time and skill are the only limited resources.
Well, that, and status. Here it’s harder; the small communities make egalitarian pressure possible, but that also creates conformity pressure which is not cool. Maybe take another leaf from the Internet and encourage people to self-sort into small ponds where they can be big fish.
Are you … sure that’s what idealists want?
Not literally all idealists. Like, transhumanists and hardcore libertarians and people who like war for its own sake exist. But yes, all idealists I met, read, or heard of in my first phase of political reasoning (like, from four to twelve, so nothing more advanced than the Communist Manifesto) wanted something like this. The commies and the socialists and the very optimistic social-democrats and the hippies and the extreme right-wing racists and the anarchists and the prairie muffins and the politically naive cultists and the wheel reinventors.
Zing!
See, those are the ones I was thinking of.
… and those aren’t. Thank you.
I’m not sure why you think transhumanists and hardcore libertarians would be part of the exception you’re making. I’m kind of both of those things, yet I think the idealist utopia you describe, modulo a few nitpicks, is roughly what I’m after as well.
Transhumanists usually lose the small communities, hardcore libertarians lose or tone way down the collectivism.
Libertarians don’t have any problem with voluntary, opt-in collectivism… I mean that’s kind of what corporations are.
Fair point, but that thing is opt-out. You’re born and raised (if people are still being produced) in one of the communities, are socially expected to share, and if you decide you don’t like it you have to leave. I suppose we can still make Proudhon cry by having shared resources be truly collectively owned, so that if you leave you’re given portable possessions equal to the value of your share of community resources like plots of lands and machines.
Interesting. If many idealists share the same goal, what exactly is stopping them from doing it? I am asking seriously. Is it just not being automatically strategic, is there a conflict between professed far-mode ideals and everyday near-mode wants, or which other problems are the greatest and most frequent?
I am not thinking about outright utopia, just about something that could improve the quality of my life by shifting it in the direction you described—finding people with the same values and similar hobbies as me, moving to live near each other, sharing and cooperating in everyday life… all that within the context of the existing society.
Technically, it would be relatively easy to do. Moving from one place to another is an inconvenience, but it would pay off in a long term. The real problem is finding the right people—a group of people with compatible values and goals, sympathetic to each other, and trusting each other enough to engage in such long-term project. For example, I am rather picky about people; I would prefer to live with people of near-LW levels of rationality. (On the other hand I would prefer to stay in my country, as opposed to moving near SI).
I don’t know how much this is just my personal problem (e.g. just a lack of social skills to find the right people), or how much this is the weak point of most utopias—you could imagine the utopia with the right group of people, but that group does not exist in the real life. It feels like it should exist, but that is a conjuction fallacy. You need people with similar goals and similar values and wanting to join the experiment and wanting it approximately at the same time and you need them to like and trust each other (for N people that means N×(N-1)/2 good relations and trust); and all this together is just too unlikely, especially for values of N equal to or greater than 10.
Or, if this does not seem like the greatest obstacle for you, then what (besides akrasia) is in your opinion stopping most people from better approximating their utopias?
Individuals can’t really do that, unless they’re willing to pay the cost of being cut off from the world. Hippies communes have few luxuries. Plus, these groups aren’t very stable, because of that pesky interpersonal conflict and freedom to leave.
What you can do is optimize your group of friends, which basically everyone already does. In ancient times people couldn’t guess where to move to to find good friends, except if a place got a reputation as a hotspot for a particular group which was unpopular elsewhere. (You’re a gay small town boy? Go to LA.) Now that the Internet exists, people can make friends and then move to be near them, though the improvement is rarely worth the cost of moving.
Globally speaking:
Magically creating this utopia would fail, because of conflicts over scarce resources. Taking scarcity out of the equation, you could still get huge fights and very unstable communities.
Getting from here to this utopia has been tried. Usually there’s some more or less dubious theory that points to a group of bad guys and jumps to the conclusion that removing the bad guys will create utopia. Various ideologies are distinguished by choice of bad guys and method of removal. (People currently in power are a popular choice, but you can always default to Jews.) While this method has produced poor results, I would be hard-pressed to think of a better one.
Moderate politicians could attempt to move incrementally along their preferred path to utopia. The optimistic view is that they wildly disagree on how to create utopia (e.g. will redistribution or trickle-down economics best solve hunger?) and are thus working at cross-purposes.
I kind of wish we had signatures here so I could put this in mine.
This is what I tried to say. The scarcity is a problem in itself, but it is not the true reason why we don’t have utopias.
Yes, this model is very popular, because it allows one to work altruistically for the benefit of humanity, while getting a lot of power and a freedom to kill people they dislike as a bonus.
But there are also other models. Having enough money, one could just build a new place and only let the good guys in. No need for killing, you just need one enthusiastic millionaire to sponsor the project. If the new place is small and not isolated from the rest of the civilization, the people can still participate in life as usual; they would just have their community as a bonus. Actually, people can cooperate and share their property even without a big investment, if they live reasonably close to each other. They just need to define that X, Y and Z are members of the community; they all share property with each other, but don’t share with the outsiders. That’s it.
Again, I think the true reason why this does not happen more often, are the interpersonal conflicts. People living in the utopia usually realize that they don’t like it… although they would like it, if they could replace their real human neighbors with the preferred kind of imaginary people.
Sometimes the utopia proponents admit that their utopia would require “education” of people. But to me it feels (maybe I am too ungenerous here) that they consider themselves ready for the utopia, and it is just the unenlightened masses who need some brainwashing. Also I see a problem here that without some “pilot project” how will we test whether the proposed education works for the utopia or not.
I would like to see more people who have their ideas of utopia, but who admit that they could be wrong and that their ideas need to be tested experimentally first. Then we could have a Scientific Utopiology, which would be a huge improvement from the usual “mass murders first, realize the obvious (for unbelievers) problems later”.
I’ve had many ideas for possible utopias, and read about many more, but I seem to always stumble on the same problems (or if I don’t, someone else usually points out (correctly) that my solution for one of these is flawed):
Expertise verification. How do I know that you know what the hell you’re talking about? (having members of the society all trained in hardcore bayesian rationality would help, but obtaining evidence that another rationalist has the evidence that they seem to have or claim to have is still costly, and arguing to an aumann agreement can waste tons of time depending on situation)
Scarcity of resources needs to be solved somehow, i.e. Sci-fi technology usually necessary.
Advanced cross-domain logistics involving math beyond the ken of most mortals. No, really. Counter-weighting evaluations of city design, efficient transport, short transit times, aesthetics, tribal / social proximity, local diversification, interpersonal relationships, all thrown into a big mess of predictive algorithms that are somehow supposed to take into account possible future desires of unknown people and unknown events.
Interpersonal relationships. Someone is going to seriously want to kill someone else eventually, period. None of my ideas nor the ideas I’ve seen so far even hint at a realistic solution. A good utopia should also encourage and help forging good social groups and meeting awesome people and making really great friends and so on… nope, still no solution there either. All my attempts at a solution for that last run into the “Wow, too hard maths” problems of logistics in the above point.
Memetic preference effects. When a certain project is really cool to work on, everyone wants to be working on that project. Just basic math and social science is more than enough to understand that making sure that enough people are working hard enough on the really important problems that need solving is hard, especially if you can’t just throw money at a few of them and tell them to shut up and work. To a lesser extent, people also simply usually just want the easier or more impressive tasks and jobs, so the important but non-mentally-available or “icky” stuff (like, say, sanitation technology AKA toilets and sewers) gets left very far behind.
Intentional communities do exist in the real world. It is not inconceivable that LessWrong meetup communities will eventually evolve along such lines.