This was fun to read, but also a little awkward. This feels less like “The world if everyone was an economist” and more “The world if everyone agreed with Eliezer Yudkowsky about everything”.
Some thoughts:
I don’t care how strong your social norms are, you’re not enforcing that pornography ban. Forget computers, it’s unworkable as long as people have paper.
Same thing with sad people not reproducing. People would go “fuck social norms” and have kids anyway. People who respect the norms would be pushed out of the gene pool. I don’t see how you could enforce those norms without totalitarian violence.
I don’t see how you could have both a self-repairing culture of transparency and also a completely secret conspiracy that suppresses technological development (in a free market with its own evolutionary pressures) without anyone realizing it. The company that makes the fastest computers drives everyone else out of business. You can only stop Moore’s law if everyone coordinates to not build better computers, but that’s not subtle.
I’m not sure EY missed that (the guy is usually really good with this stuff), so maybe the joke is that an AGI already took over their world or something.
I feel like the first two are enforceable with culture. For example I think many Muslim countries have a lot of success at preventing pornography (or at least, they did until the internet, which notably dath ilan seems to not quite have). I also have a sense that many people with severe mental/physical disabilities are implicitly treated as though they won’t have children in our culture, and as a result often do not. But I agree it’s hard to do it ethically, and both of the aforementioned ways aren’t done very ethically in our civilization IMO.
For the latter, remember, Eliezer says he’s an average guy in dath ilan. I think there are loads of ideas the average person on Earth hasn’t heard about that are world-shaking and that only get discussed in quiet corners, like iterated embryo selection. I think with a culture where intellectuals much more get that this shouldn’t be discussed publicly, even the fringes would go quiet.
(But FYI for me this was the least realistic part of dath ilan, until I started writing this comment and thought about it properly.)
For example I think many Muslim countries have a lot of success at preventing pornography
Citation needed.
My default assumption for any claims of that sort is “they had a lot of success at concealing the pornography that existed in such a way that officials can pretend it doesn’t exist”.
Yes, all societies are identical except insofar as what the officials pretend about it. People in very religious societies are having just as much sex as in modern secular societies, they just do it in a way that allowed officials to pretend it didn’t exist.
Yeah I like a lot of EY’s stuff (otherwise I wouldn’t be here) but he does have a habit of treating his own preferences as universal, or failing to appreciate when there might be good reasons that the seemingly obvious solution doesn’t work, as is common with people commenting on areas outside their expertise
This was fun to read, but also a little awkward. This feels less like “The world if everyone was an economist” and more “The world if everyone agreed with Eliezer Yudkowsky about everything”.
Some thoughts:
I don’t care how strong your social norms are, you’re not enforcing that pornography ban. Forget computers, it’s unworkable as long as people have paper.
Same thing with sad people not reproducing. People would go “fuck social norms” and have kids anyway. People who respect the norms would be pushed out of the gene pool. I don’t see how you could enforce those norms without totalitarian violence.
I don’t see how you could have both a self-repairing culture of transparency and also a completely secret conspiracy that suppresses technological development (in a free market with its own evolutionary pressures) without anyone realizing it. The company that makes the fastest computers drives everyone else out of business. You can only stop Moore’s law if everyone coordinates to not build better computers, but that’s not subtle.
I’m not sure EY missed that (the guy is usually really good with this stuff), so maybe the joke is that an AGI already took over their world or something.
I mean, surely Eliezer is going to have somewhat dath-ilan typical preferences, having grown up there.
I feel like the first two are enforceable with culture. For example I think many Muslim countries have a lot of success at preventing pornography (or at least, they did until the internet, which notably dath ilan seems to not quite have). I also have a sense that many people with severe mental/physical disabilities are implicitly treated as though they won’t have children in our culture, and as a result often do not. But I agree it’s hard to do it ethically, and both of the aforementioned ways aren’t done very ethically in our civilization IMO.
For the latter, remember, Eliezer says he’s an average guy in dath ilan. I think there are loads of ideas the average person on Earth hasn’t heard about that are world-shaking and that only get discussed in quiet corners, like iterated embryo selection. I think with a culture where intellectuals much more get that this shouldn’t be discussed publicly, even the fringes would go quiet.
(But FYI for me this was the least realistic part of dath ilan, until I started writing this comment and thought about it properly.)
Citation needed.
My default assumption for any claims of that sort is “they had a lot of success at concealing the pornography that existed in such a way that officials can pretend it doesn’t exist”.
Yes, all societies are identical except insofar as what the officials pretend about it. People in very religious societies are having just as much sex as in modern secular societies, they just do it in a way that allowed officials to pretend it didn’t exist.
Can’t tell if sarcastic
It was sarcastic! Sorry for the ambiguity.
Yeah I like a lot of EY’s stuff (otherwise I wouldn’t be here) but he does have a habit of treating his own preferences as universal, or failing to appreciate when there might be good reasons that the seemingly obvious solution doesn’t work, as is common with people commenting on areas outside their expertise