domain:greyenlightenment.com
HermeneuticsOfVibes
24m ago
Field and institution are everything. Are you seeking a professorship at Yale in the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department? If so you'll be waiting for a cold day in hell. Are you seeking a professorship at Colorado School of Mines in Petroleum Engineering? If so you were never at risk.
As for whether or not a position is attainable, odds are grim, for multiple reasons. The evergreen issue of academia being a pyramid scheme where successful P.I.s and labs are built on the back of the dirt cheap labor of grad students and post docs still applies, and most of those people will still never hold a professorship, and most of those professors will never receive tenure. Things are slightly worse now because of the job market (when private industry tightens purse strings staying in academia always becomes more appealing), but only by degrees.
If you want to shoot for a professorship, be prepared to work very hard to compete against other people who are among the very best in the world at the very thing you are doing. The system nearly as much rigged in favor of woke types, as it is rigged in favor of people willing to nolife grind out a strong publication history early in your career.
confidentcrescent
25m ago
Technologically it's perfectly possible to let every user write their own algorithm
I think the technical hurdles to this are a lot higher than you expect. I'd like to see someone make a shot at doing it anyway, but I'm confident it will come with some significant trade-offs. A basic algorithm is probably more likely.
The main problem is that you need to run this somewhere and neither of your choices are good.
Running this on company hardware brings large performance and safety risks. Safety because some guy is going to try to get you to run an infinite loop or virus. Performance because search algorithms over large datasets are computationally intensive at the best of times, and code written by random strangers is not the best of times. Solving both of these without severely limiting the ability to create an algorithm would be a miracle.
Running this on a user's computer instead raises challenges around getting the data into the user's computer to be searched. If you're looking at Twitter and want to get today's tweets from accounts you follow that could be thousands of records. Download speed limitations will ensure you will never be able to run your algorithm on more than a tiny fraction of the full site.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
31m ago
What I don't understand is how absolutely swamped with shovelware and cheap scams every app marketplace seems to be.
Mobile app stores have been bad for a while -- any popular game will have tons of shitty knockoffs with similar names available for download almost immediately -- but in the last few years, even Nintendo of "Nintendo Seal of Quality" fame has their eshops flooded with low-effort sleaze like "Hentai Girls: Golf"
Clearly this is a solvable problem; Reddit and Facebook purchased armies of jannies to carry out "Anti-Evil Operations" against wrongthinkers. The depressing conclusion would be that there are enough slop enjoyers and straight-up cretins out there to make stricter app store curation a financially unwise decision even taking into account the reputational damage caused by this slop. But I'm hoping there's some other reason for it.
quiet_NaN
45m ago
While I get your point that once you allow everyone to basically wirehead, most people will happily wirehead and only stop playing RDR Infinite when their heart finally fails, I am not sure things are so bleak.
Over the past 50 years, the supply of cheap entertainment readily available has increased by orders of magnitude. Back then, you only got whatever was on any of a few channels on TV, everything else required some effort, like going into a video store. Where previous generations might have bought a porn video tape, today the main obstacle is to narrow down what genres and kinks you are looking for out of the millions of available videos. Video games offer all sorts of experiences from art projects to Skinner boxes. If you want resources on any topic under the sun, the internet has you covered. Entire websites are created around the concept of not having to pay attention to one video for more than 15 seconds.
Humanity has not handled this overly gracefully, but it has handled it somewhat. Personally, I am somewhat vulnerable to this sort of thing, but while I sometimes get sucked into a TV series, video game, or book series and spend most of my waking hours for a week or two in there, I eventually finish (or lose interest) and come out on the other side. I am sure there is some level of AGI which could create a world from which I would never want to emerge again, but it will require better story-telling than ChatGPT. Of course, I am typical-minding here a bit, but my impression is that I am somewhere in the bulk of the bell curve of vulnerability. Sure, some people get sucked into a single video game and play it for years, but also some people do waste a lot less time than I do.
anti_dan
50m ago
Steppe people have little in common with modern dissident states. The mongols and huns, by way of example, were masters of modern (for the time) military technology such as husbandry, siege craft, etc. Pretending they are analogues to the Taliban or Somalian pirates, is acting like those people have fleets of aircraft carriers and a host of ICBMs.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I tend to agree with one of the replies to @MonkeyWithAMachinegun ‘s post. I find the most damning thing about the discourse on political violence to be the enablement and incitement and lack of contrition by the left to be far more concerning than the actual numbers for a couple of reasons.
First of all. Because it does absolutely nothing to slow tge growth of such violence. If mainstream media sources are talking night after night about how conservatives are a threat to democracy, fascist, violent, and so on, this creates the radicalized people necessary (not necessarily sufficient, but necessary) to produce attacks. It also creates the environment that enables those attacks by normalization of the idea that certain parts of the political spectrum are too radical to be dealt with through the normal process. The modern cosmology of Fascism is that it occupies the place where Satan lives in the Christian world: a vile creature to be shunned and defeated by any means at your disposal.
Second because it reveals just how much support there is on the left for this sort of thing. Right wing rhetoric is sufficient to get advertisements pulled, people cancelled, and leave actors or other entertainers blackballed out of the industry. Left wing incitement and victim blaming doesn’t have the same effect. Kimmel basically victim-blamed the right. His “punishment” was a week of leave and a ton of media attention and the full support of the rest of Hollywood. Places like Bluesky are not losing advertisers, there are no calls for Facebook, Threads, TikTok, Bluesky, or Reddit to remove posts that victim blame or celebrate the Kirk assassination. Radical left podcasts are still widely available, and to my knowledge none of them carry a content warning.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
1hr ago
The correct grammar comes across a bit robotic though.
You know, this comes up surprisingly often. X will say to Y "no I want you to show me your true self" and Y, with a look of befuddlement, will reply "...but I already am showing you my true self". People have a hard time grasping that the "true self" can vary so wildly among different individuals, or that the "true self" within a single individual can take on such a fractured and polymorphous nature.
This is just how I naturally think and speak. What you see is what you get. My posts on TheMotte are a fairly direct mirror of my own internal thought process (or at least, they're an amalgamation of fairly accurate representations of various internal thoughts of mine, rearranged for the sake of presentation). Even in my most intimate and unguarded thoughts, to the extent that they're verbalized internally at all, their grammar is always "correct", because I'm fuckin' nice with it like that. I take pride in maintaining at least a minimal semblance of order.
In environments where social pressures dictate that I have to lower my manner of speech, I feel like I'm able to express less of myself, I have to put more of a mask on. I value TheMotte precisely because this is one of the only discussion forums where long-form writing is actually valued, and I can count on the audience here to possess a certain degree of intelligence, so that I don't have to constantly abase myself for them.
the reflection was started by the quality contribution about holocaust denial. I think it was a bit of a condescending and angry reply, and I imagine that people upvoted it because of that.
There appears to be a bit of a tension here.
On the one hand, you're decrying self-censorship, and you want people to take off their "masks". But on the other hand, you're uncomfortable with the fact that someone wrote an "angry" comment. It appears that you can't have it both ways? Anger is an authentic emotion too. If you want people to be authentic, then that is going to, at times, involve them getting authentically angry. Especially given the nature of the topics we tend to discuss here. (One of the few ways in which TheMotte actually does force people to put a mask on is that, due to the cordiality rule, people have to bite their tongues on certain issues and not express the full extent of their ire. But I think this is a perfectly valid tradeoff. If you want a literal free for all then just go to /pol/.)
For my part, I think the spirit of the old internet as exemplified by Erik Naggum is perfectly alive and well on TheMotte -- probably more alive here than it is almost anywhere else, with the exception of 4chan.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
1hr ago
I think this is the part that upsets me about the situation. I used to hope for this too, but that pretty heavily relies on a slow take-off. What happens when the friendly AI is simply better able to make your decisions for you? To manipulate you effortlessly? Or when you can't understand the upgrades in the first place, and have to trust the shuggoth that they work as claimed? You might not want to wirehead, but why do you think what you want will continue to matter? What happens when you can get one-shot by super-effective stimulus, like a chicken being hypnotized? Any takeoff faster than Accelerando probably renders us well obsolete long before we could adjust to the first generation of upgrades.
In most of the scenarios, there's literally nothing I can do! Which is why I don't worry about them more than I can help. However, and this might shock people given how much I talk about AI x-risk, I think the odds of it directly killing us are "only" ~20%, which leaves a lot of probability mass for Good Endings.
AI can be genuinely transformative. It might unlock technological marvels, and in its absence, it might take us ages to climb up the tech tree, or figure out other ways to augment our cognition. It's not that we can't do that at all by ourselves, I think a purely baseline civilization can, over time, get working BCIs, build Dyson Swarms and conquer the lightcone. It'll just take waaaay longer, and in the meantime those of us currently around might die.
However:
Or when you can't understand the upgrades in the first place, and have to trust the shuggoth that they work as claimed?
I think there's plenty of room for slow cognitive self-improvement (or externally aided improvement). I think it's entirely plausible that there are mechanisms I might understand that would give me a few IQ points without altering my consciousness too much, while equipping me to understand what's on the next rung of the ladder. So on till I'm a godlike consciousness.
Then there's all the fuckery you can do with uploads. I might have a backup/fork that's the alpha tester for new enhancements (I guess we draw straws), with the option to rollback. Or I might ask the smartest humans around, the ones that seem sane. Or the sanest transhumans. Or another AGI, assuming a non-singleton scenario.
And that ties back to the "meaningful work" stuff. We're not just souls stuck in a limited body, and it would be neat if the souls could be transplanted to awesome robot bodies. The meat is what we are. The substrate is the substance. Your cognition 1.0 is dependent on the hormones and molecules and chemicals that exist in your brain.
I'm the evolving pattern within the meat, which is a very different thing from just the constituent atoms or a "soul". I identify with the hypothetical version of me inside a computer as you do with a digital scan of a cherished VHS tape. The physical tape doesn't matter, the video does. I see no reason we can't also simulate the chemical influences on cognition to arbitrary accuracy, that just increases the overhead, we can probably cut corners on the level of specific dopamine receptors without screwing things up too much.
If you want an exhaustive take on my understanding of identity, I have a full writeup:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3094/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/362713?context=8#context
We are specific types of creatures designed to function in specific environments, and to seek specific goals. How much "upgrade" before we turn into those animals that can't breed in captivity because something about the unnatural environment has their instincts screaming? Again, it's one thing if we're slowly going through Accelerando, taking years to acclimate to each expansion and upgrade.
Some might argue that the former has already happened, given the birth rate crisis. But I really don't see a more advanced civilization struggling to reproduce themselves. A biological one would invent artificial wombs, a digital one would fork or create new minds de-novo. We exist in an awkward interlude where we need to fuck our way out of the problem but can't find the fucking solution, pun intended.
But fast takeoff, AGI 2027? That seems a lot more like "write your name on the Teslabot and then kill yourself" - as the good outcome. Maybe we can just VR ourselves back to a good place, live in permanent 1999, but why on earth would an AI overlord want to waste the resources?
Isn't that the whole point of Alignment? We want an "AI overlord" that is genuinely benevolent, and which wants to take care of us. That's the difference between a loving pet owner and someone who can't shoot their yappy dog because of PETA. Now, ideally, I'd want AI to be less an overlord and more of a superintelligent assistant, but the former isn't really that bad if they're looking out for us.
You talk about writing a character only as smart as yourself, but that's keying into the thing that terrifies me and missing the point. What happens when "smarter than you" is table stakes? Imagine life from the perspective of a pet gerbil - perhaps vaguely aware that things are going on with the owners, but just fundamentally incapable of comprehending any of it, and certainly not of having any role or impact. Even Accelerando walked back from the precipice of the full, existential horror of it all. You don't want to write a story about human obsolescence? Bro, you're living in one.
My idealized solution is to try and keep up. I fully recognize that might not be a possibility. What else can we really do, other than go on a Butlerian Jihad? I don't think things are quite that bad, yet, and I'm balancing the risk against the reward that aligned ASI might bring.
You don't want to write a story about human obsolescence? Bro, you're living in one.
Quite possibly! Which is why writing one would be redundant. Most of us can do little more than cross our fingers and hope that things work out in the end. If not, hey, death will probably be quick.
HermeneuticsOfVibes
1hr ago
I largely agree with you. I think the difference is probably (and we may never know for sure) what are they optimizing for now more than how they are going about it.
I think 2015/2016 social media companies were really optimizing for maximizing the attention as their one true goal. Whereas by the time we were deep in the covid years, they were seeking to metacognitively reflect their understanding of you back to you, while continuing to optimize for attention.
SkoomaDentist
1hr ago
What the hell is ”CRA”? Googling mostly turned up Cyber Resiliency Act and something from Canada.
FistfullOfCrows
2hr ago
You do have me there, the closest I can think of is the Khmer Rogue's cambodian genocide, but that genocide was ideological/classist and ethnic and only 25%
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
No doubt Saudi Arabia would see this as ‘just what happens. FAFO’. But the Latin American elites do not differ in worldview(or complexion) from Anglosphere and Western European elites, and there’s a butload of unstable countries with serious crime problems that really don’t want to set that precedent.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
2hr ago
My actual plan (modulo not dying, and having resources at my disposal) is closer to continuously upgrading my physical and cognitive capabilities so I can be independent. I don't want to have to rely on AGI to make my decisions or rely on charity/UBI.
I think this is the part that upsets me about the situation. I used to hope for this too, but that pretty heavily relies on a slow take-off. What happens when the friendly AI is simply better able to make your decisions for you? To manipulate you effortlessly? Or when you can't understand the upgrades in the first place, and have to trust the shuggoth that they work as claimed? You might not want to wirehead, but why do you think what you want will continue to matter? What happens when you can get one-shot by super-effective stimulus, like a chicken being hypnotized? Any takeoff faster than Accelerando probably renders us well obsolete long before we could adjust to the first generation of upgrades.
And that ties back to the "meaningful work" stuff. We're not just souls stuck in a limited body, and it would be neat if the souls could be transplanted to awesome robot bodies. The meat is what we are. The substrate is the substance. Your cognition 1.0 is dependent on the hormones and molecules and chemicals that exist in your brain. We are specific types of creatures designed to function in specific environments, and to seek specific goals. How much "upgrade" before we turn into those animals that can't breed in captivity because something about the unnatural environment has their instincts screaming? Again, it's one thing if we're slowly going through Accelerando, taking years to acclimate to each expansion and upgrade.
But fast takeoff, AGI 2027? That seems a lot more like "write your name on the Teslabot and then kill yourself" - as the good outcome. Maybe we can just VR ourselves back to a good place, live in permanent 1999, but why on earth would an AI overlord want to waste the resources? Your brain in a jar, at the mercy of a shuggoth that is infinitely smarter and more powerful than you, is the most total form of slavery that has ever been posited - and we would all of us be economically non-viable slaves.
You talk about writing a character only as smart as yourself, but that's keying into the thing that terrifies me and missing the point. What happens when "smarter than you" is table stakes? Imagine life from the perspective of a pet gerbil - perhaps vaguely aware that things are going on with the owners, but just fundamentally incapable of comprehending any of it, and certainly not of having any role or impact. Even Accelerando walked back from the precipice of the full, existential horror of it all. You don't want to write a story about human obsolescence? Bro, you're living in one.
RenOS
something is wrong
2hr ago
FWIW, several of my friends who don't plan on having kids explicitly state that part of the reason is that they will have more money for retirement. From a personal view this is sensible, from a societies' view it's pure insanity, and a point in Soterologian's favor, even if it's far from the only reason people have no kids.
RenOS
something is wrong
2hr ago
While I agree with Tractatus' reply as well, I've also had a recent post on a very related topic, namely the dissolution of marriage. Social changes are rarely actually instant; They are spreading & compounding. Just because something became legal, doesn't mean that everyone is doing it. Usually it's only a small community really taking advantage of the most recent change, while the majority just mostly carries on with what they grew up with, unless they have a very good reason.
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
I mean, isn’t wokeness at least partially responsible for the dems turn away from Israel?
hydroacetylene
2hr ago
No. The Journal of Creation already exists, you can read it right now if you’d like to.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
2hr ago
My preference, by the way, would be for a status hierarchy with a baseline that allows for real wireheaders to do what they do, but which provides superior status and more resources to those who embrace a more fulfilling, communal and meaningful existence, as defined in various but strongly overlapping ways by philosophers going back to Socrates.
Well, shit. Why didn't you say so at the start? Here I was going through your arguments paragraph by paragraph to be hit by this. If you want "softer" forms such as societal disapproval, or exclusion from status hierarchies, I have no beef with that.
I have no problem with a world where people who pursue pro-social, creative, or communal lives are rewarded with higher status. I can even envision a system, like a universal Patreon, where people voluntarily grant portions of their resources to others whose 'work' they admire. What I cannot accept is the state, the provider of the UBI baseline, making those judgments. The baseline must remain unconditional. Your neighbors are free to shun you for wireheading; the government is not.
The rest of my reply was written earlier, I'll leave it in since it expands on my understanding of your thought experiments and objections therein.
Say your son becomes a heroin addict. All he does all day is get high and waste his life. He has UBI and lives in social housing, so his financial situation isn't precarious. He has a sophisticated future chip implant for dosage that always just stops him from ingesting a fatal dose. He never goes outside, and he has a dark web supplier who delivers by mail (easily affordable on his UBI check), so he's no aesthetic or criminal or otherwise problem for the public.
Would you be happy for him? Would you be proud of him? Would you care about him doing that with his life?
You ask if I would be happy, proud, or even indifferent if my son spent his days in a haze of safe, state-sponsored heroin, no threat to anyone, just slowly dissolving into the furniture.
The honest answer is: I would not be happy. I would not be proud. Of course I would care. I would be upset, and I think almost anyone would. But the important part is why. As I grieve, I'd try many different things in an attempt to get him to change his ways. Those would include options like offering support, debate, cutting personal contacts, disinheriting him until he reconsiders and so on.
These are, as far as I'm concerned, legitimate forms of coercion. What I wouldn't do is ask for sweeping legislation against his behavior.
Many children do things that violate the norms and desires of their parents. Pre-marital sex, turning away from church, the occasional bender. Quitting the family job, dropping out of grad school to be a Bohemian layabout. Yet society does not, as a general rule, allow parents to bring about the use of force (at least after adulthood). Not even when such a breach represents immense pain and suffering from the parents.
I will grant that parents have the right to try and use legislation, everyone can vote after all, we hope that consensus establishes sanity. You can vote for your view of the future, and I'll vote for mine. If it gets too abhorrent, I'll vote with my feet.
So I would care, but I would not do everything within my power. Such options would include breaking into his house and taking him away at gunpoint, or paying someone to hack his system, and yes, a general prohibition against drug use or wireheading.
I would be open to at least making falling into such a state by accident immensely difficult or impossible, such an irreversible act might well require informed consent and the signing of strict waivers.
Were I do such a thing, I struggle to find a clean break between pure chemical or electrical stimulation and what most would consider productive or ennobling ways to engage with the world. It's a quantitative, not a qualitative difference in the world to come. Your work - at present - gives meaning and value because it makes a tangible difference. We agree that is unlikely to hold indefinitely.
There is also a quantitative blur here. In a world where baseline labor is mostly obsolete, the difference between heroin, hyper-tailored VR, and a perfectly gamified social platform is often intensity and bandwidth. If you legislate against one flavor of narrow reward, you will spend the next decade chasing reskins. Better to aim at the decision process.
The instinct to care, to want the best for everyone, is laudable. The issue is when your definition of caring and "best" faces earnest disagreement. Would you enjoy it if, out of genuine concern for the fate of your immortal soul, contraception was banned? If a Jihad was called to force you to repent at gunpoint and find solace in the arms of Allah?
Claiming the right to choose for yourself, as far as I'm concerned, necessitates the symmetrical extension of the same right to others. In this scenario, my son is an adult in his right mind. My hands are tied, and I am the one tying them.
But it's also an empathetic one. Most people don't have the agency and the time preference setup to be able to autonomously turn off the dopamine pump. We don't know if we would, which is why they tell you never to try heroin. Even plenty of people who want to quit tobacco never make it, even if they really want to. It seems to me supremely arrogant to assume that so many people, not least yourself, have that degree of control over their own happiness, their own destiny. This is likely a philosophical difference between us.
You are correct that it possibly represents a philosophical or fundamental values difference. I would hope it doesn't, which is why I'm attempting to show you that there is genuine risk of freedoms you hold dear being taken away from you if you endorse a nanny-state that stops people from spending too much time playing video games.
You are conflating your personal, aesthetic, and empathetic preference for a certain kind of life with a universal moral imperative. My objection is not to your preference. Your vision of a fulfilling post-scarcity life, filled with sports, community, craft, and family, sounds lovely. I might even choose it for myself. My objection is to the word "forced" and to the belief that your empathy grants you the right to make that choice for others.
The majority of people don't do heroin, don't gamble away their money or play so much RDR2 that they lose their jobs. Most adults can be trusted to that extent. I think the odds of my hypothetical son doing something like that is low, and it wouldn't remotely justify the breach of liberty it would take to categorically rule that out.
In general, I wish to treat myself like a trustworthy adult who can make their own choices and live with them. I think that's true for most. Where it's not, say by dint of mental illness or cognitive dysfunction, I'm happy to ask they get treated, including by force. But I don't want to shut down churches because they're a front for wireheading in heaven (one that's making false promises to boot).
You suggest that most people lack the agency to resist a sufficiently advanced dopamine pump. You cite tobacco addiction. This is a fair point, and the behavioral psychologists would call it a problem of akrasia, or executive dysfunction. We see it everywhere. People eat junk food when they want to be healthy, they procrastinate when they want to be productive. I am okay with making it harder to do dumb and personally counterproductive things (along the lines of wait times, waivers and all of that). I am against a "utopia" that only lets me choose among good options, especially when the value of good is not set by me but by committee.
Your proposed solution is a kind of societal pre-commitment strategy, a paternalistic structure that saves us from our own predictable irrationality. You want to remove the button.
I'd rather not build a cage around the button, but to upgrade the person pressing it. Then they can choose for themselves.
FtttG
2hr ago
When I was doing my master's, one of my lecturers was telling us about how the quality control standards on the Apple App Store are much stricter on the Google Play Store. After one too many instances in which some child was paying some scummy pay-to-win game on his parents' iPad and racked up four figures worth of "micro"transactions, Apple apparently established a blanket policy of banning games targeted at small children. (I may be misremembering this somewhat: obviously you can install games from the App Store meant for small children. I think the crackdown was targeting games which seem to be marketed towards children, but which contain microtransactions.)
All well and good, I thought: children's brains aren't fully developed, this is common sense. But what about people at the opposite end of the telescope? Elderly people being taken in by Indian call-centre scammers and Nigerian princes is already a known issue. Maybe eventually we'll get to the point where the App Store will simply prevent you from installing an app if you exceed some age threshold. Sure they'll be accused of ageism (that's literally what it is) or discrimination against people with dementia, but I'm sure they'd rather ride that wave of negative publicity than the much bigger wave of bad publicity associated with thousands of elderly people having their bank accounts drained because they mistakenly installed an app which looked like WhatsApp but was actually something else entirely.
Rosencrantz2
3hr ago
I kind of agree that the language of rights is obfuscatory as to what is really going on, sometimes implying that a right is something metaphysical, though I suppose this is true of a pretty wide range of concepts. However, I think that rights talk does accomplish something real. I see rights as a legit expression of commitment to/hope that there are some core rules of human morality that transcend any particular legal system and that deserve to be incorporated into every legal system by one means or another. It is of course true that people then change their mind about torture being wrong, for example, and go ahead and do it. But at least rights provide a clear stake in the ground that countries, having signed up to a bill of rights, must renege on, proving that the values they once claimed are no longer/never were their true values. This should be at least embarrassing though perhaps we have entered an age where double standards and reversals of this kind no longer incur any shame.
DradisPing
3hr ago
an older piece that has unicode hiccoughs
Younger coders have no idea how rough the CP-1252 to UTF-8 changeover was. It was complicated by writers who knew nothing about it but loved pasting in text from MS Word with curly quotes.
I won't call you sentimental, but you're clearly being tyrannical. That's none of our business.
I have no interest in pure wireheading or climbing into a thinly veiled Skinner Box, but I have little interest in stopping others from doing so.
Say your son becomes a heroin addict. All he does all day is get high and waste his life. He has UBI and lives in social housing, so his financial situation isn't precarious. He has a sophisticated future chip implant for dosage that always just stops him from ingesting a fatal dose. He never goes outside, and he has a dark web supplier who delivers by mail (easily affordable on his UBI check), so he's no aesthetic or criminal or otherwise problem for the public.
Would you be happy for him? Would you be proud of him? Would you care about him doing that with his life?
Call it empathy, but I do care, I do consider it my business, and I have interest in stopping others from doing so, whether they are my family or my community or my countrymen and women or just the wider human race. There are a lot of decent people out there who deserve better than a life as an addict, having never created anything. It doesn't have to be "of value", this isn't an economic question. In a post-scarcity world I think it better for people to play sports, socialize in person, work with their hands, craft, cook, construct, have children, raise them, fall in love (with each other). Is that an aesthetic preference? Sure.
But it's also an empathetic one. Most people don't have the agency and the time preference setup to be able to autonomously turn off the dopamine pump. We don't know if we would, which is why they tell you never to try heroin. Even plenty of people who want to quit tobacco never make it, even if they really want to. It seems to me supremely arrogant to assume that so many people, not least yourself, have that degree of control over their own happiness, their own destiny. This is likely a philosophical difference between us.
Sometimes people need to be saved from themselves. You acknowledge this in the way in which we often discuss it, homeless drug addicts threatening people on subways, feral children who never finish school, but it's not just about the negative externalities, not just about the fact that it makes things harder for me, or for you. It's about them too, and about us, because while we maintain a work ethic and some discipline today, who knows how that will hold up in the face of the entertainment that is coming?
Sure, maybe we can rewire ourselves to inject fake memories of an entire life well-lived, winters by the warm hearth, homes built by hand, children's clothes sewn, religious services attended, adventures had, and then cheat ourselves to fulfilment that way. But even that is a little sad, when so much of the promise of automated abundance is that finally we can take a step back (with our hopefully longer lifespans) and do all of these things. And yes, I think forcing people to do them is better, and will make them happier, than allowing them to press the pleasure button all day, which the vast majority of people, quite possibly pretty much everyone, will do if you let them and if the button is good enough - which you and I both agree it probably will be.
My preference, by the way, would be for a status hierarchy with a baseline that allows for real wireheaders to do what they do, but which provides superior status and more resources to those who embrace a more fulfilling, communal and meaningful existence, as defined in various but strongly overlapping ways by philosophers going back to Socrates.
It's not just /r/menwritingwomen, or the fact that King is profoundly porn-brained (although he is certainly both): he also has this pronounced vulgar streak, this urge to include gross details into his stories even when they add nothing:
One of the many ways the film adaptation of Shawshank improved on its source material was omitting the novella's repeated descriptions of inmates smuggling things in or out of prison by inserting them into their rectums. Some things are better left to the imagination. Early on in IT (which I never finished and don't intend to), the narrator recites an anecdote about a man whose car was washed away in a flood, and when they recovered his corpse, his penis had been bitten off by fish. Even as a child I was just like, why did you have to specify that? Just being gross for the sake of being gross.
Not to mention that one climactic scene from IT which neither adaptation has included and which far-right people always bring up when accusing King of being a closeted nonce.
But
in order to get your idea in front of other people who might line your idea, it has to distribute your message to a proportion of available people who might like it. My point is, this distribution, if it happens, is a bonus. You, or nobody, is entitled to this distribution. People who complain that their reach is getting throttled are complaining that they’re not getting wider distribution, and then complain that their freedom of speech is getting unlawfully restricted. It’s not, because they are not entitled to that distribution in the first place.
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