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.
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.