Huh, I’m surprised that some of the commenters expect to want to opt out. I’d love to live in a society free of status games, constant guessing of thoughts, feelings and intentions, relationship screwups, embarrassment… I am having trouble thinking of disadvantages of full telepathy+empathy. Well, maybe becoming too complacent or something. Assuming it’s a bad thing.
One is that you are basically defenseless. Your society of ems looks completely benevolent. May I suggest that in reality humans possess very considerably capability for malice and evil? You are making the assumption that future societies will enjoy considerate civil liberties, be democratic, etc. -- I see no good reasons for this assumption.
On a trivial level consider someone like a slightly psychotic disgruntled ex. She wants to make your life hell—and sure, you can see that in her thoughts, she’s not hiding that. But you can’t hide from her either—she can fine-tune her application of pain to you by watching real-time feedback: she wants you to suffer and she can see precisely what makes you suffer more.
On a less trivial level, consider what peer pressure looks like in the society without the privacy of your own thoughts. What if that society, for example, turns out to be religious (like the current societies)? Are you ready to be part of a shunned minority?
You’re imagining a society which consists of people who look like the circle of your friends, just more of them. And sure, all your friends are kind and reasonable people, there isn’t much to fear from them. But that’s not the society you will get—go read some popular media, some tabloids for a bit and imagine inhabiting the same mind space with these people.
On a trivial level consider someone like a slightly psychotic disgruntled ex. She wants to make your life hell—and sure, you can see that in her thoughts, she’s not hiding that. But you can’t hide from her either
Sure.
In the real world, my psychotic disgruntled ex has the physical ability to stand outside my front door and sing Barry Manilow songs all day, has the physical ability to throw bags of flaming poop at my head, has the physical ability to blow my limbs off with a shotgun. In shminux’ telepath-world, they also have the ability to fine-tune their abuse based on an accurate telepathic perception of my reactions, so they’re able to get even nastier than that.
But the thing is, in the real world, my ex is not actually limited by their inability to fine-tune their abuse based on an accurate telepathic perception of my reactions. Long before they get to that point, we’ve collectively stepped in and done something about it.
So the question becomes, can we do anything about it in shminux’ telepath-world? E.g., can incorrigible flaming-poop-throwers be exiled or otherwise intervened with?
You seem to be assuming they can’t, but I don’t see why that should be true.
Perhaps the problem is scale? I would agree, for example, that if it turns out that basically everyone is an incorrigible flaming-poop-thrower to everyone else in the privacy of our own minds and the only reason we don’t notice in the real world is that we’re ignorant of each other’s true thoughts… well, sure, in that case the telepathic society would suck incorrigibly.
Interesting. I will have to think more about it. My immediate reaction is that many of the situations you describe will not have a chance to occur at all, but I don’t have a good argument at this point, beyond “everyone can see your malicious intentions”.
Most people who act evilly have their evil motives opaque even to themselves. The overwhelming majority of people think they are good and believe their motives are pure.
On a less trivial level, consider what peer pressure looks like in the society without the privacy of your own thoughts. What if that society, for example, turns out to be religious (like the current societies)? Are you ready to be part of a shunned minority?
I think about this a lot, but my expectations are radically different from yours. Peer pressure depends critically on maintaining the illusion of a uniform mainstream position. The awareness of just how much variance there actually is in real populations tends to destroy its effectiveness.
I expect a telepathic society to experience much less in the way of peer pressure than my current society, where 90% of the population can claim to believe X, even though they really don’t, because they see that 90% of their neighbors are claiming X and they don’t want to be singled out for defection.
But sure, if I’m wrong and the telepathic society turns out to be the kind of narrow-minded thoughtpolice scenario you have in mind, I will be surprised and regret my choice.
go read some popular media, some tabloids for a bit and imagine inhabiting the same mind space with these people.
It’s possible that the reason I don’t find this sort of reasoning compelling is that I’m just an unusually unsavory person, but there’s nothing I find in popular media that doesn’t resonate with some part of my own psyche, or that I expect doesn’t have its analogs in my friends’ minds.
Those parts aren’t dominant, and I don’t endorse them, but they’re certainly there and I’m aware of them.
So the idea that it would be some kind of novelty to share a mind with such awful thoughts strikes me as sort of odd. I already do, I always have, I always will.
Sure, some of the awful thoughts will be novel… just as some of the brilliant, kind, and lovely thoughts will be novel… but I doubt it will be as much as a full sigma out from where I already am. I’m not some kind of unsullied snowflake whose purity ought not be besmirched.
And honestly, though I have no real way of knowing for sure, I doubt I’m all that unusual in this regard. I’m with Solzhenitsyn here: “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. ”
FWIW, I’m entirely with you here, but I’m unsurprised by the responses. I’ve had variations of this conversation with people for years, and the “that would be awful!!!” reaction is by far the most common one I get from people who think seriously about it at all.
I’m not really sure what the difference is, though I have some theories.
From my perspective, my mind is already a cobbled-together collective constructed from lots of distinct and frequently opposed subunits (set A) that reside in my brain, which interact in various ways with both each other and with subunits in other brains (set B).
Moving to a mode of living where the interactions between A and B are as high-bandwidth as the interactions within A and B probably means I would stop identifying so much as set A. In the limit, that implies that the construct “I” currently refers to would stop existing in any particularly important way. All of me would instead be participating in a vast number of different constructs, including but not limited to “I”.
That seems like a win to me, but I can sort of understand why people are averse to the idea.
You risk not only losing your identity, but also your values. Merging with people having other values than you (imagine: psychopaths) is not the same as merging with people who are very similar to you, just in different bodies.
Your old values could disappear like: “meh, that’s some nonsense one of my old bodies used to believe, but I don’t care about such stupid things anymore”.
I’ll add to the above that I run this risk in the no-telepathy scenario as well. I run that risk every day in the real world.. I am not a well-designed intelligence with fixed values; I am a human being and my brain experiences value drift in response to various inputs. This is perhaps a bad thing, but it’s nevertheless true.
Yes, the risk is intensified as the number of interactions increase, and as the bandwidth of those interactions increases… it’s easier to preserve the values I had as a child if I live in a small town with people who mostly share my values than if I move to a large heterogenous city, and the risk would intensify still further in a scenario like a telepathic collective.
But I choose to live in a heterogenous city rather than a homogenous small town. I choose to read blogs written by people who don’t share my values. Why would I not choose to live in a telepathic collective if that option were available? Is there some absolute threshold of acceptable risk of value drift I should avoid crossing?
Yes, I risk coming to identify as a mind that has different values than I currently identify with.
This doesn’t really change anything, though. Those other values exist out there already, instantiated in running brains, and they are already having whatever effects they have on the world. The only difference is that currently they are tagged as “other”, and that is enforced by the insulation between skulls. In the new world, they might get tagged as “me”.
While I appreciate the fact that for many people this distinction is incredibly important, it just doesn’t seem that important to me. To the extent that the existence of bad values in N distinct nodes of a system has bad consequences, it has the same bad consequences whether I tag one of those nodes as “me” or not.
These are very good points I wouldn’t have thought about.
I guess my preferences for 10% of people having an opinion X (where 90% have opinion non-X) over a hive mind which 10% believes and 90% disbelieves in X has two sources:
1) Overconfidence about the ability of those 10% of people to somehow outsmart the remaining 90%. For example, if we speak about rationality, I hope the rationalists are able to win.
2) An intuition that if you mix food with crap, the result is not half-food-half-crap but crap. Again, specifically for rationality, having a few rational and many insane people might be better than having everyone mostly insane, or even waist-deep in the valley of bad rationality.
But both of these objections are pretty dubious.
In other words, I believe that rationality (or any other value) can somehow benefit from being separated, from having a local power as opposed to being a tiny minority in a large place.
if you mix food with crap, the result is not half-food-half-crap but crap.
To the extent that this is true, then it follows that there are no rational humans, nor even half-rational humans, but simply irrational humans. After all, every human mind is a mixture of rational and irrational elements.
FWIW, I agree that rationality (or any other value) can benefit from being densely concentrated rather than diffuse, which seems to be what you’re getting at here.
To say that a little differently: consider a cognitive system S, comprising various cognitive agents. Let us label Sv the set of agents that are aligned with value V, and Snv the set of agents that oppose V. If I draw a graph of all the agents in S, how they interact with one another, and how strong the connections between them are, and I find that Sv has strong intra-set connections and weak inter-set connections with Snv, I expect S’s judgments and behaviors to be more aligned with V than if Sv has weak intra-set connections and strong inter-set connections with Snv.
I just don’t think it matters very much whether those connections are between-mind connections or within-mind connections. It matters enormously in the real world, because within-mind connections are much, much stronger than between-mind connections. But the whole point of telepathy is to make that less true.
And I think it matters even less where the label “Dave” gets attached within S, though in practice in the real world I tend to attach that label to a “virtual node” that represents the consensus view of the set of agents instantiated in my brain, thanks to that same within/between distinction. And again, telepathy makes that distinction less important, so where “Dave” gets attached within S is less clearly defined… and continues not to matter much.
Yes, it’s about concentration. I imagine that some things are multiplicative, for example traits like “learns a lot about X” and “spends a lot of time doing X” give better output if they happen to be the traits of the same person (as opposed to one person who learns a lot but does nothing, and another person who does it a lot but doesn’t understand it).
It’s not just about agents, but about resources like memory. I don’t know how well and how fast could the telepaths use each other’s memory, or habits, or mental associations, or things like this. Seems more efficient if “caring about X” and “remembering many facts about X” are in the same person, otherwise there are communication costs.
I don’t know how well and how fast could the telepaths use each other’s memory, or habits, or mental associations, or things like this.
Sure. To the degree that I assume that telepathy does not successfully bridge the distance between minds, such that between-mind operations remain less efficient than within-mind operations, then I agree with you… in that case, a telepathic society is more like the real world, where minds are separate from one another, and the between/within mind distinction matters more.
But (for me) the important issue is the degree of internode connectivity. Whether those nodes are in one mind or two is merely an engineering detail.
traits like “learns a lot about X” and “spends a lot of time doing X” give better output if they happen to be the traits of the same person (as opposed to one person who learns a lot but does nothing, and another person who does it a lot but doesn’t understand it).
Similarly to the above, I agree completely that they give better output if they are tightly linked than if they are loosely linked or not linked at all. I would say that whether this tight linkage occurs within one person or not doesn’t matter, though. Again, in the real world we can’t separate them, because tight linkage between two people is not possible (I can’t use your knowledge to do things), and if telepathy doesn’t help us do this then we also can’t separate them in the OP’s hypothetical.
Imagine being in a telepathic linkage with people who are habitually very angry (perhaps especially at people like you), depressed. cruel, unfocused, and/or have whatever mental/emotional traits especially get on your nerves.
Now, it’s possible that the telepathic society has ways of moderating those effects—this is suggested by the fact that most people who join it stay there, though it’s also conceivable that it has really strong propaganda. It may also be that a lot of mental dysfunction is caused by fear of being alone, and a telepathic society alleviates that.
It’s also possible that the telepathic society is good for most people, but there are some people who are just cross-grained to it. It actually wouldn’t surprise me if there’s more than one telepathic culture in addition to people who want to be like 21st century humans.
In short, it isn’t obvious to me that there’s something wrong with people who don’t want to live in the telepathic society.
Imagine being in a telepathic linkage with people who are habitually very angry (perhaps especially at people like you), depressed. cruel, unfocused, and/or have whatever mental/emotional traits especially get on your nerves.
I was unclear. Your own thoughts are public, but you are not forced to read everyone’s thoughts.
That’s intriguing, but I wonder how it would play out in practice. Suppose you’re concerned that some interaction is going badly because of malice towards you. You can check, and the good news might be that it was an honest mistake on someone’s part.
On the other hand, how would a limited telepathic society of the kind you describe handle malice?
On the other hand, how would a limited telepathic society of the kind you describe handle malice?
Presumably malicious people would naturally be shunned, as most others recoil in disgust from their thoughts. They are also unable to cause any serious harm, as their intentions are open to scrutiny. I imagine that in a society where people come to rely on routinely going through each other’s mental states being ignored is a big downside. Tight feedback loop.
Suppose you have some strong preference which is generally hated—imagine that your telepathy society had started before efforts had been made to make homosexuality socially acceptable.
There’s still quite a bit of prejudice, but it’s not universal.
It’s possible that telepathy would lead to the mainstream realizing that there’s nothing especially wrong with homosexuality, but that’s hardly guaranteed.
The thing you’re missing is that malice directed against people one doesn’t like can be quite a strong pleasure.
How would you characterize the process that resulted in homosexuality becoming socially unacceptable in the first place? And how would you characterize the process that resulted in homosexuality becoming increasingly socially acceptable?
In my experience, an important part of the former process is marginalizing the unacceptable minority and encouraging the “mainstream” to think of them as basically alien. “Othering” them, to use a bit of popular jargon. And an important part of the latter process is getting people to acknowledge the actual perspectives of the unacceptable minority.
I expect the former to be a lot more difficult and the latter easier when we can all experience their thoughts.
So, yeah, I expect it to be a lot harder in the shminux-telepathy scenario to get these sorts of arbitrary strong hatreds started in the first place, and a lot easier to get rid of them. Is it guaranteed? No, of course not. But I like my odds a lot better than in the “normal” society, where harmful prejudice is demonstrably possible. (To put it mildly.)
The thing you’re missing is that malice directed against people one doesn’t like can be quite a strong pleasure.
Sure, of course it is, agreed. Smashing people’s windows in the real world can be a hoot, too. And yet, despite the fact that we all have the physical ability to smash each others’ windows, it somehow turns out that most windows stay unsmashed. Why do you think that is?
For my part, I think it’s because most people are capable of abstaining from an act that would be pleasurable if the act is sufficiently antisocial, and generally choose to do so.
No, I’m not just saying “it might work”. As I said, I like my odds a lot better in the telepathic society than in the “normal” society, for the reasons I gave.
If you disagree with me, and think your odds are better in the normal society, that’s a good enough reason to opt out. Which is fine. But I’ve made a claim and you disagree with it.
I have no idea where “early adopter” comes from here; in this scenario both societies have existing members.
Huh, I’m surprised that some of the commenters expect to want to opt out. I’d love to live in a society free of status games, constant guessing of thoughts, feelings and intentions, relationship screwups, embarrassment… I am having trouble thinking of disadvantages of full telepathy+empathy. Well, maybe becoming too complacent or something. Assuming it’s a bad thing.
We have interestingly different baselines.
I am surprised anyone wants to opt in.
I’m still waiting for anyone here to articulate why not opt in.
Several reasons.
One is that you are basically defenseless. Your society of ems looks completely benevolent. May I suggest that in reality humans possess very considerably capability for malice and evil? You are making the assumption that future societies will enjoy considerate civil liberties, be democratic, etc. -- I see no good reasons for this assumption.
On a trivial level consider someone like a slightly psychotic disgruntled ex. She wants to make your life hell—and sure, you can see that in her thoughts, she’s not hiding that. But you can’t hide from her either—she can fine-tune her application of pain to you by watching real-time feedback: she wants you to suffer and she can see precisely what makes you suffer more.
On a less trivial level, consider what peer pressure looks like in the society without the privacy of your own thoughts. What if that society, for example, turns out to be religious (like the current societies)? Are you ready to be part of a shunned minority?
You’re imagining a society which consists of people who look like the circle of your friends, just more of them. And sure, all your friends are kind and reasonable people, there isn’t much to fear from them. But that’s not the society you will get—go read some popular media, some tabloids for a bit and imagine inhabiting the same mind space with these people.
Sure.
In the real world, my psychotic disgruntled ex has the physical ability to stand outside my front door and sing Barry Manilow songs all day, has the physical ability to throw bags of flaming poop at my head, has the physical ability to blow my limbs off with a shotgun. In shminux’ telepath-world, they also have the ability to fine-tune their abuse based on an accurate telepathic perception of my reactions, so they’re able to get even nastier than that.
But the thing is, in the real world, my ex is not actually limited by their inability to fine-tune their abuse based on an accurate telepathic perception of my reactions. Long before they get to that point, we’ve collectively stepped in and done something about it.
So the question becomes, can we do anything about it in shminux’ telepath-world? E.g., can incorrigible flaming-poop-throwers be exiled or otherwise intervened with?
You seem to be assuming they can’t, but I don’t see why that should be true.
Perhaps the problem is scale? I would agree, for example, that if it turns out that basically everyone is an incorrigible flaming-poop-thrower to everyone else in the privacy of our own minds and the only reason we don’t notice in the real world is that we’re ignorant of each other’s true thoughts… well, sure, in that case the telepathic society would suck incorrigibly.
I don’t think that’s likely, though.
Interesting. I will have to think more about it. My immediate reaction is that many of the situations you describe will not have a chance to occur at all, but I don’t have a good argument at this point, beyond “everyone can see your malicious intentions”.
Most people who act evilly have their evil motives opaque even to themselves. The overwhelming majority of people think they are good and believe their motives are pure.
There might be a whole new class of conformance pressure due to being able to clearly perceive how everybody else sees you.
I think about this a lot, but my expectations are radically different from yours. Peer pressure depends critically on maintaining the illusion of a uniform mainstream position. The awareness of just how much variance there actually is in real populations tends to destroy its effectiveness.
I expect a telepathic society to experience much less in the way of peer pressure than my current society, where 90% of the population can claim to believe X, even though they really don’t, because they see that 90% of their neighbors are claiming X and they don’t want to be singled out for defection.
But sure, if I’m wrong and the telepathic society turns out to be the kind of narrow-minded thoughtpolice scenario you have in mind, I will be surprised and regret my choice.
It’s possible that the reason I don’t find this sort of reasoning compelling is that I’m just an unusually unsavory person, but there’s nothing I find in popular media that doesn’t resonate with some part of my own psyche, or that I expect doesn’t have its analogs in my friends’ minds.
Those parts aren’t dominant, and I don’t endorse them, but they’re certainly there and I’m aware of them.
So the idea that it would be some kind of novelty to share a mind with such awful thoughts strikes me as sort of odd. I already do, I always have, I always will.
Sure, some of the awful thoughts will be novel… just as some of the brilliant, kind, and lovely thoughts will be novel… but I doubt it will be as much as a full sigma out from where I already am. I’m not some kind of unsullied snowflake whose purity ought not be besmirched.
And honestly, though I have no real way of knowing for sure, I doubt I’m all that unusual in this regard. I’m with Solzhenitsyn here: “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. ”
FWIW, I’m entirely with you here, but I’m unsurprised by the responses. I’ve had variations of this conversation with people for years, and the “that would be awful!!!” reaction is by far the most common one I get from people who think seriously about it at all.
I’m not really sure what the difference is, though I have some theories.
From my perspective, my mind is already a cobbled-together collective constructed from lots of distinct and frequently opposed subunits (set A) that reside in my brain, which interact in various ways with both each other and with subunits in other brains (set B).
Moving to a mode of living where the interactions between A and B are as high-bandwidth as the interactions within A and B probably means I would stop identifying so much as set A. In the limit, that implies that the construct “I” currently refers to would stop existing in any particularly important way. All of me would instead be participating in a vast number of different constructs, including but not limited to “I”.
That seems like a win to me, but I can sort of understand why people are averse to the idea.
You risk not only losing your identity, but also your values. Merging with people having other values than you (imagine: psychopaths) is not the same as merging with people who are very similar to you, just in different bodies.
Your old values could disappear like: “meh, that’s some nonsense one of my old bodies used to believe, but I don’t care about such stupid things anymore”.
I’ll add to the above that I run this risk in the no-telepathy scenario as well. I run that risk every day in the real world.. I am not a well-designed intelligence with fixed values; I am a human being and my brain experiences value drift in response to various inputs. This is perhaps a bad thing, but it’s nevertheless true.
Yes, the risk is intensified as the number of interactions increase, and as the bandwidth of those interactions increases… it’s easier to preserve the values I had as a child if I live in a small town with people who mostly share my values than if I move to a large heterogenous city, and the risk would intensify still further in a scenario like a telepathic collective.
But I choose to live in a heterogenous city rather than a homogenous small town. I choose to read blogs written by people who don’t share my values. Why would I not choose to live in a telepathic collective if that option were available? Is there some absolute threshold of acceptable risk of value drift I should avoid crossing?
Yes, I risk coming to identify as a mind that has different values than I currently identify with.
This doesn’t really change anything, though. Those other values exist out there already, instantiated in running brains, and they are already having whatever effects they have on the world. The only difference is that currently they are tagged as “other”, and that is enforced by the insulation between skulls. In the new world, they might get tagged as “me”.
While I appreciate the fact that for many people this distinction is incredibly important, it just doesn’t seem that important to me. To the extent that the existence of bad values in N distinct nodes of a system has bad consequences, it has the same bad consequences whether I tag one of those nodes as “me” or not.
These are very good points I wouldn’t have thought about.
I guess my preferences for 10% of people having an opinion X (where 90% have opinion non-X) over a hive mind which 10% believes and 90% disbelieves in X has two sources:
1) Overconfidence about the ability of those 10% of people to somehow outsmart the remaining 90%. For example, if we speak about rationality, I hope the rationalists are able to win.
2) An intuition that if you mix food with crap, the result is not half-food-half-crap but crap. Again, specifically for rationality, having a few rational and many insane people might be better than having everyone mostly insane, or even waist-deep in the valley of bad rationality.
But both of these objections are pretty dubious.
In other words, I believe that rationality (or any other value) can somehow benefit from being separated, from having a local power as opposed to being a tiny minority in a large place.
To the extent that this is true, then it follows that there are no rational humans, nor even half-rational humans, but simply irrational humans. After all, every human mind is a mixture of rational and irrational elements.
FWIW, I agree that rationality (or any other value) can benefit from being densely concentrated rather than diffuse, which seems to be what you’re getting at here.
To say that a little differently: consider a cognitive system S, comprising various cognitive agents. Let us label Sv the set of agents that are aligned with value V, and Snv the set of agents that oppose V. If I draw a graph of all the agents in S, how they interact with one another, and how strong the connections between them are, and I find that Sv has strong intra-set connections and weak inter-set connections with Snv, I expect S’s judgments and behaviors to be more aligned with V than if Sv has weak intra-set connections and strong inter-set connections with Snv.
I just don’t think it matters very much whether those connections are between-mind connections or within-mind connections. It matters enormously in the real world, because within-mind connections are much, much stronger than between-mind connections. But the whole point of telepathy is to make that less true.
And I think it matters even less where the label “Dave” gets attached within S, though in practice in the real world I tend to attach that label to a “virtual node” that represents the consensus view of the set of agents instantiated in my brain, thanks to that same within/between distinction. And again, telepathy makes that distinction less important, so where “Dave” gets attached within S is less clearly defined… and continues not to matter much.
Yes, it’s about concentration. I imagine that some things are multiplicative, for example traits like “learns a lot about X” and “spends a lot of time doing X” give better output if they happen to be the traits of the same person (as opposed to one person who learns a lot but does nothing, and another person who does it a lot but doesn’t understand it).
It’s not just about agents, but about resources like memory. I don’t know how well and how fast could the telepaths use each other’s memory, or habits, or mental associations, or things like this. Seems more efficient if “caring about X” and “remembering many facts about X” are in the same person, otherwise there are communication costs.
Sure. To the degree that I assume that telepathy does not successfully bridge the distance between minds, such that between-mind operations remain less efficient than within-mind operations, then I agree with you… in that case, a telepathic society is more like the real world, where minds are separate from one another, and the between/within mind distinction matters more.
But (for me) the important issue is the degree of internode connectivity. Whether those nodes are in one mind or two is merely an engineering detail.
Similarly to the above, I agree completely that they give better output if they are tightly linked than if they are loosely linked or not linked at all. I would say that whether this tight linkage occurs within one person or not doesn’t matter, though. Again, in the real world we can’t separate them, because tight linkage between two people is not possible (I can’t use your knowledge to do things), and if telepathy doesn’t help us do this then we also can’t separate them in the OP’s hypothetical.
Imagine being in a telepathic linkage with people who are habitually very angry (perhaps especially at people like you), depressed. cruel, unfocused, and/or have whatever mental/emotional traits especially get on your nerves.
Now, it’s possible that the telepathic society has ways of moderating those effects—this is suggested by the fact that most people who join it stay there, though it’s also conceivable that it has really strong propaganda. It may also be that a lot of mental dysfunction is caused by fear of being alone, and a telepathic society alleviates that.
It’s also possible that the telepathic society is good for most people, but there are some people who are just cross-grained to it. It actually wouldn’t surprise me if there’s more than one telepathic culture in addition to people who want to be like 21st century humans.
In short, it isn’t obvious to me that there’s something wrong with people who don’t want to live in the telepathic society.
I was unclear. Your own thoughts are public, but you are not forced to read everyone’s thoughts.
That’s intriguing, but I wonder how it would play out in practice. Suppose you’re concerned that some interaction is going badly because of malice towards you. You can check, and the good news might be that it was an honest mistake on someone’s part.
On the other hand, how would a limited telepathic society of the kind you describe handle malice?
Well, let’s start with what we know and build out from there: how would you characterize how our current societies handle malice?
Presumably malicious people would naturally be shunned, as most others recoil in disgust from their thoughts. They are also unable to cause any serious harm, as their intentions are open to scrutiny. I imagine that in a society where people come to rely on routinely going through each other’s mental states being ignored is a big downside. Tight feedback loop.
People who are different will be naturally shunned.
Don’t forget that all y’all here on LW are freaks from the “normal society” point of view.
Speak for yourself.
Suppose you have some strong preference which is generally hated—imagine that your telepathy society had started before efforts had been made to make homosexuality socially acceptable.
There’s still quite a bit of prejudice, but it’s not universal.
It’s possible that telepathy would lead to the mainstream realizing that there’s nothing especially wrong with homosexuality, but that’s hardly guaranteed.
The thing you’re missing is that malice directed against people one doesn’t like can be quite a strong pleasure.
How would you characterize the process that resulted in homosexuality becoming socially unacceptable in the first place? And how would you characterize the process that resulted in homosexuality becoming increasingly socially acceptable?
In my experience, an important part of the former process is marginalizing the unacceptable minority and encouraging the “mainstream” to think of them as basically alien. “Othering” them, to use a bit of popular jargon. And an important part of the latter process is getting people to acknowledge the actual perspectives of the unacceptable minority.
I expect the former to be a lot more difficult and the latter easier when we can all experience their thoughts.
So, yeah, I expect it to be a lot harder in the shminux-telepathy scenario to get these sorts of arbitrary strong hatreds started in the first place, and a lot easier to get rid of them. Is it guaranteed? No, of course not. But I like my odds a lot better than in the “normal” society, where harmful prejudice is demonstrably possible. (To put it mildly.)
Sure, of course it is, agreed.
Smashing people’s windows in the real world can be a hoot, too.
And yet, despite the fact that we all have the physical ability to smash each others’ windows, it somehow turns out that most windows stay unsmashed.
Why do you think that is?
For my part, I think it’s because most people are capable of abstaining from an act that would be pleasurable if the act is sufficiently antisocial, and generally choose to do so.
You’re giving reasons why it might work—I still think my reasons are strong enough for it to be reasonable to not be an early adopter.
No, I’m not just saying “it might work”. As I said, I like my odds a lot better in the telepathic society than in the “normal” society, for the reasons I gave.
If you disagree with me, and think your odds are better in the normal society, that’s a good enough reason to opt out. Which is fine. But I’ve made a claim and you disagree with it.
I have no idea where “early adopter” comes from here; in this scenario both societies have existing members.