Tag Archives: Fiction

Limits of Imagination

By Robin Hanson · October 20, 2011 9:45 am · Comments (36)

Me:

Our finite universe simply cannot continue our exponential growth rates for a million years. For trillions of years thereafter, possibilities will be known and fixed, and for each person rather limited.

Bryan Caplan:

He’s probably right for physical goods. But why couldn’t the quality of life in virtual reality grow at 4% [per year] for ever? Serious virtual reality wouldn’t be like toothpicks; it would be a vast array of virtual goods and experiences. And since these goods and experiences would be imaginary, there’s no reason they couldn’t grow forever. Laugh if you must: Imagination really is infinite!

Let me try to explain (again).

Imagine that in a million years, our descendants occupy all the 1070 atoms in our galaxy and its surrounding volume, and that it will take another million years to grow that number by a factor of ten, to 1071. They’ve spend a million years searching the space of possible physical devices: signal senders & processors, radiators, nuke & black hole power plants, etc. They’ve found some very good designs, and in another million years of searching don’t expect to find designs that are overall a hundred times more efficient. Even if computational capacity grew as the square of available mass (such as might be possible with black holes), for the next million years they expect their total computational capacity to grow by less than a factor of ten thousand, or 0.001% per year.

Over the last million years they’ve also been searching the space of enjoyable virtual reality designs. From the very beginning they had designs offering people vast galaxies of fascinating exotic places to visit, and vast numbers of subjects to command. (Of course most of that wasn’t computed in much detail until the person interacted with related things.) For a million years they have searched for possible story lines to create engaging and satisfying experiences in such vast places, without requiring more computational resources behind the scenes to manage.

Now in this context, imagine what it means for “imagination” to improve by 4% per year. That is a factor of a billion every 529 years. If we are talking about utility gains, this means that you’d be indifferent between keeping a current virtual reality design, or taking a one in a two billion chance to get a virtual reality design from 529 years later. If you lose this gamble, you have to take a half-utility design, which gives you only half of the utility of the design you started with.

If you spend all your time in virtual reality, and if your utility were your years of life times the virtual reality design quality, then you’d be indifferent between a 310 year life in your current design or a ten second life in the 529 year future design.

And 529 years is tiny on a cosmological scale. Over a million years 4% annual growth produces a factor of 1017,000. Could you really be indifferent between taking that infinitesimally small a chance of moving to a million year future virtual reality, where if you lose the gamble you have to accept a half-utility virtual reality? Would you really keep repeating this gamble as your utility fell to zero? And the universe will survive for many trillions of years — in a trillion years 4% annual growth gives a factor of over 101010.

It may be possible to create creatures who have such strong preferences for subtle differences, differences that can only be found after a million or trillion years of a vast galactic or larger civilization searching the space of possible designs. But humans do not seem remotely like such creatures. We like stories, to be sure, but most of us are pretty satisfied with simple variations on standard story lines – we just don’t get billions of times more value from the very best stories, over pretty good stories.

It is also very hard to see how creatures with such subtle preferences would have adaptive advantages in a competitive future scenario. And in a non-competitive scenario I for one don’t see much point in trying to populate our universe with such extremely picky creatures.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: ,

Science Fiction Isn’t About Understanding The Future

By Robin Hanson · October 11, 2011 9:00 am · Comments (35)

Why do people read (or watch) science fiction? Yes, motives are mixed – they usually are. But what are the main motives?

Perhaps science fiction readers are eager to understand the future. After all, the future is extremely far, in a near-far sense, and science fiction offers a near-experience that can complement abstract far descriptions.

Consider, however, the extremely low demand for abstract analysis of the future. Not only are books devoted to future analysis in far less demand than science fiction books, it is possible to turn science fiction stories into abstract contributions, yet this is almost never done. Let me explain.

The main contribution of a science fiction story to our abstract understanding of the future is its setting – the situation in which its characters enact its plot. What techs are used how, what jobs and liesure activities are common, etc. Yet one could take most any science fiction story, and summarize its setting in a far shorter space, and with far less effort, than the author took for the story.  I’d guess that setting summaries could be read in ~5% of the time it takes to read the story, and written with even less than 5% of the effort.

Yet almost no such summaries are written, presumably because writers and publishers anticipate that almost no one wants to read them. So the fraction of folks who read science fiction primarily to better understand the future must be very small. Alas, because I would love to just read setting summaries, especially with compare and contrast commentary, and educated critiques of their plausibility.

Added 2p: I should also mention that most science fiction settings seem clearly to have compromised realism for story benefits. The fraction that can be considered mostly good faith efforts to forecast a future is quite small.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , ,

We Live, Unequally

By Robin Hanson · September 9, 2011 8:00 pm · Comments (46)

They Live (1988) is a celebrated message movie:

John Nada, a generic drifter who finds his way to Los Angeles as the film begins. … Nada wanders through Los Angeles, gets a job as a construction worker, and is led by a new buddy named Frank to a shantytown. …

Once Nada stumbles upon a package of special sunglasses, the secret is out. When he wears these glasses, he sees subliminal messages everywhere. ”Marry and Reproduce,” says a billboard on which a bikini-clad woman pitches vacations in the tropics. ”Consume,” says a sign advertising a close-out sale. ”This Is Your God,” says a dollar bill, and on the newsstands magazines put forth slogans like ”Honor Apathy” and ”Obey.”

What’s more, the glasses enable Nada to see just who ”they” are: the rich and powerful who, through these lenses, become skeleton-faced ghouls with glittering metallic eyes. (more)

Naturally Nada immediately goes on a murder-all-aliens rampage. Wouldn’t you?

I sure hope not. The movie seems to suggest that one should murder all non-kin elites in any society where elites use psychological tricks to keep non-elites from feeling outraged and going on murderous rampages. (Like pretty much every society ever known.) You might argue that the movie only suggests mass murder for non-kin who are ugly very-distant relations. But then why celebrate this as a “message” movie? Are we supposed to see murdering elites as a metaphor for, say, frowning at them?

The movie tries to transfer xenephobia of space aliens to elites within a city, even when there are no obvious signs that these elites aren’t paying their way, by being more productive. In the movie, aliens bring world peace, let humans continue to live peaceful lives, bring advanced tech, and integrate Earth’s economy with distant planets to achieve gains from trade. None of which, according to this movie, excuses them:

What do these things want?
They’re free-enterprisers.
The earth is just another developing planet. Their third world.
Deplete the planet, move on to another,
They want benign indifference,
We could be pets or food,
But all we really are is livestock.
We need an assault unit.
Someone to hit them hard. (more)

Look, there is a vast space of possible societies, with an incredible number of possible dimensions. Yes, humans are primed to watch for and resist dominance, and to be suspicious of outsiders. And yes maybe more equal societies are better, all else equal. But an overwhelming focus on that one dimension of inequality risks neglect of the other dimensions, which taken together are vastly more important. We should seek social arrangements to help us search this vast space for more productive possibilities, including the possibility of peaceful mutually beneficial trade with outsiders. Even if that increases, horrors, inequality. Or, double horror, subliminal advertising! Really.

Imagine a movie depicting a hero upset by some lazy poor folks on welfare, who then goes on a rampage murdering poor folks. Would this be celebrated as a thoughtful message movie, reminding us all of the importance of hard work? Not a chance.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , ,

Three Writing Styles

By Robin Hanson · September 9, 2011 9:00 am · Comments (13)

Status-minded folks write more formally, vs. analytically or narratively:

We analysed hundreds of essays written by my students and we identified three very different writing styles: formal, analytic and narrative.

Formal writing often appears stiff, sometimes humourless, with a touch of arrogance. It includes high rates of articles and prepositions but very few I-words, and infrequent discrepancy words, such as “would”, and adverbs. Formality is related to a number of important personality traits. Those who score highest in formal thinking tend to be more concerned with status and power and are less self-reflective. They drink and smoke less and are more mentally healthy, but also tend to be less honest. As people age, their writing styles tend to become more formal.

Analytical writing, meanwhile, is all about making distinctions. These people attain higher grades, tend to be more honest, and are more open to new experiences. They also read more and have more complex views of themselves.

Narrative writers are natural storytellers. The function words that generally reveal storytelling involve people, past-tense verbs and inclusive words such as “with” and “together”. People who score high for narrative writing tend to have better social skills, more friends and rate themselves as more outgoing. (more; HT Amara Graps)

So do readers assign more status to formal writers? If so, that would explain a common to-me-puzzling lack of interest in being good at analysis or story-telling.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: ,

Is Selfless Evil Far?

By Robin Hanson · September 6, 2011 8:10 pm · Comments (16)

Brainstorming came from Osborn in 1939 as a method for creative problem solving. He was frustrated by employees’ inability to develop creative ideas individually for ad campaigns. … Osborn claimed that two principles contribute … “1. Defer judgment,” and “2. Reach for quantity.” (more)

In the last decade or so, psychologists have confirmed one of the most robust mind patterns ever seen: construal level theory, which I call near vs. far thought. In brief: humans think more abstractly, and in less detail, about things far away in time, space, social contact, and probability, and assume that things near or far in some ways are also near or far in other ways.

Since far mode thoughts tend to have weaker decision consequences, I’ve suggested that far mode is better adapted to managing social images, relative to making helpful choices. This fits with far mode being more associated with confidence, high power/status, positive moods and reasons, pride and shame, self-control, trusting others, resisting conformity pressure, supporting underdogs, love over sex, words over sounds, polite speech over slang, and ideal values over practical constraints.

But even if its greater role in managing social images makes far mode beliefs less accurate, far mode is built too deeply in us to do without it. If we must use it, how can we best use it, to avoid bias? My tentative answer starts from the observation that in far mode we are better at creativity, while near mode we are better at analysis.

Mental tasks can be roughly divided into generation and evaluation. Our minds must search a vast space of possible thoughts, generating possible thoughts to explicitly consider. We must also evaluate such explicit thoughts. Since far mode is better at creativity, while near mode is better at analysis, we should prefer to generate in far mode, and evaluate in near mode. First see if idealism can be made practical, before resorting to cynicism. This fits with claims that groups create better when they temporarily avoid criticism and evaluation.

Of course we can’t make this a strict rule; circumstances will often force us to evaluate in far mode, and to generate in near mode. But we should at least be aware of our handicaps in such situations. Which brings us to the subject of evil.

Humans evolved a sense of morality, helping us to coordinate to discourage many specific forms of selfish behavior that hurt groups. We thus evolved to tell stories of evil villains who engaged in such harmful behaviors, and of good heroes who opposed them. Such stories often depicted villains who are tempted in near mode by concrete personal gain, such as loot or sex, and heroes who thought in far mode about a wider good.

But today, most evil is probably not of this selfish sort. Instead, very bad things are caused more by far thinking. Consider the prototypically-evil Nazis. Their urge to exterminate Jews came less from unhappy personal experiences with individual Jews, and more from abstract fears gone wrong – killing Jews probably hurt Germans overall. Similarly, most xenophobia comes less from personal interactions and more from abstract, and largely incorrect, fears. People tend to have satisfactory and mutually advantageous relations with immigrants, even as they politically support policies to prevent such relations.

Similarly, democratic regulation usually goes wrong by supplanting direct consumer evaluations of products, services, and practices, which tend to be made in near mode, with abstract public opinions about good policy, which tend to be formed in far mode. Autocratic regulation goes wrong similarly, since power tends to put leaders in a far mode. I’m not saying that there should never be regulation, but rather that an important and neglected cost of regulation is displacing reliable near mode evaluations with unreliable far mode evaluations.

We can’t think without far mode, but we can use it most where it works best: to suggest candidate actions, products, policies, theories, etc. We should minimize biases from a far mode system designed more for social image management, by using near mode where it works best, to analyze and evaluate these candidates. Science experiments, computer engineering demos, policy trials, prediction bets, and business profits all offer such crucial concrete near-mode feedback. We need these to avoid the all-too-common selfless evil of far mode evaluation errors.

Added 8Sept: There is some tension between this post and my older post on The Felt & The Unfelt.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , ,

Indulging In Indirection

By Robin Hanson · August 14, 2011 8:00 am · Comments (7)

Readers actually enjoy stories more when authors are less coy:

Subjects significantly preferred the spoiled versions of ironic-twist stories, where, for example, it was revealed before reading that a condemned man’s daring escape is all a fantasy before the noose snaps tight around his neck. Subjects read stories as-is and with introductory paragraphs that gave away the endings, or spoilers. In almost all cases, they preferred the “spoiled” stories. The same held true for mysteries. … Subjects liked the literary, evocative stories least overall, but still preferred the spoiled versions over the unspoiled ones. (more; study; HT Patrick Salsbury)

Students also learn from teachers who are more direct:

When Detterman began teaching…

I thought it was important to make things as hard as possible for students so they would discover the principles for themselves. … Now … I try to make it as easy for students as possible. Where before I was ambiguous about what a good paper was, I now provide examples of the best papers from past classes. Before, I expected students to infer the general conclusion from specific examples. Now I provide the general conclusion and support it with specific examples. (more; HT Bryan Caplan)

If readers enjoy stories without surprises better, and if students learn better from teachers who are similarly direct and unsurprising, why are authors and teachers so often indirect, and why do readers and students support them?

Two obvious complementary explanations stand out:

1) Readers and students prefer to signal their cleverness at figuring out what an author or teacher is saying. Overly direct authors or teachers insult us via visibly presuming our inability to follow subtleties.

2) Homo hypocritus is in the habit of speaking indirectly:

It is easier to use play talk to evade talk rules if groups develop a very local culture and language – particular words and associations that have particular meanings due to the local history. This makes it harder to clearly convince outsiders that something illicit was communicated. (more; see also)

I recently read Pride & Prejudice, and noticed how much the author flatters the reader, and how much the characters flatter each other, by speaking indirectly yet presuming that listeners understand the intended meanings. Only fools speak directly when indirection is possible, it seems.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , , ,

A Galaxy On Earth

By Robin Hanson · July 28, 2011 9:00 am · Comments (34)

Our galaxy has about three hundred billion stars, and Earth today has about seven billion people. Assuming only half as many useable planets as stars, we could combine these two numbers into an initial crude guess for the size of a galactic civilization, and define a “galaxy of people” to be a thousand billion billion (or 1021) people. Now consider some famous galactic civilizations in science fiction.

One of the most popular science fiction stories ever was Issac Azimov’s Foundation series. It tells of the fall and rise of a galaxy-wide civilization, whose capital, Trantor, was a planet-wide city a kilometer deep into the ground. Trantor’s population was said to be forty billion, in a galaxy with millions of populated planets and a total population of a million billion (or one millionth of a “galaxy” as defined above).

Star War‘s Coruscant is also a planet-wide city and capital of a galaxy wide civilization, with planetary population of a thousand billion, in a galaxy also of millions of planets and a total population of a million billion. Some say Coruscant’s buildings averaged two kilometers tall. In Star Trek‘s Federation of 150 planets a few centuries hence, which controlled a few percent of the galaxy, each planet had no more than about our Earth’s seven billion, though some say the Federation held ten thousand billion people.

These all seem like dramatic underestimates to me. If Earth were paved over with a city the density of Manhattan today (1.6 million in 59 square kilometers), Earth would have a population of 14 thousand billion. Since Manhattan now has an average building height of 25 meters, a two kilometer deep version could hold a million billion people, and a two thousand kilometer deep version (Earth’s radius is 6400km) could hold a billion billion people.

There is roughly another thousand times as much useable material nearby, in other planets, comets, and the sun itself, allowing a solar-system population perhaps a thousand times larger. This brings us to a thousand billion billion, or a “galaxy” of people, the same as my initial crude population estimate for an entire galaxy above, and vastly larger than most science fiction galaxy estimates.

Furthermore, android ems (whole brain emulations in simulated bodies) could take up a lot less space than humans. I once somewhat conservatively estimated that an em might stand at 1% of human height (and run one hundred times faster). Since such an em would take up only one millionth of a human’s volume, a two kilometer deep Earth city could hold a “galaxy” (or thousand billion billion) of ems. And a solar system civilization might fit a billion billion billion ems, or a million “galaxies.”

Of course we have a long long way to go, not only to generate such huge populations, but also to develop the energy, manufacturing, heat-dumping, etc techs to allow us to support them. And yes, eventually we would run out of energy and material near our Sun, and need to go elsewhere to grow.

But we have strong economic reasons to stay close to one another as long as there is enough energy and material nearby, and especially as long as we continue to innovate. So most of our descendants’ economy should stay close to our sun until congestion here gets severe. We may well have a solar system population of a billion billion billion before the time comes when most of our descendants are closer to other stars.

Most science fiction seems to vastly underestimate the population that a single planet or star can hold, and the strength of the economic pressures to keep an economy close together, rather than spread across vast distances. Someday we will learn to tell stories that treat planets and stars as the vast spaces of possibilities that they really are.

Added 11a: Even an unmodified sun radiates enough energy to cover the calorie consumption of over a hundred “galaxies” of humans, and far more ems.

The timescale to grow from today’s population to a “galaxy” of descendants would be 600 years at an industry-style 15 year doubling time, 40 millennia at a farming-style thousand year doubling time, and four years at at next-singularity-style monthly doubling time.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , , , ,

Why Magic + Nostalgia?

By Robin Hanson · July 16, 2011 11:00 pm · Comments (27)

I don’t usually care for fantasy, though I like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Rewatching the first Harry Potter movie, I was reminded of the puzzling correlation in fiction between magic and traditional social orders. Even though the wizards in Harry Potter live among modern folks, they still prefer Victorian era garb and interior decoration. More generally, stories with magic tend to be nostalgic – containing and accepting older social orders. Why?

I went looking for clues and found:

The core thing about fantasy tales is that, after the adventure is done and the bad guys are defeated… the social order stays the same. It may be the natural genre … but should we be proud of that? Science fiction, in sharp contrast, considers the possibility of learning and change. (more) Continue reading "Why Magic + Nostalgia?" »

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , ,

Industry At Home

By Robin Hanson · May 31, 2011 4:30 pm · Comments (7)

Reading The Hunger Games (2008) and watching Visioneers (2008) recently reminded me that last year I read We (1921) and Pictures of the Socialistic Future [POTSF] (1891). Recent social commentary (i.e., utopian and dystopian) fiction seems to me much less interesting than these older treatments. The reason: 1891 and 1921 were still relatively early in the industrial revolution, when folks were far more uncertain about where this revolution would ultimately lead.

Today the developed world has relatively stable politics, gender and employee relations, leisure activities, etc. So dystopian commentary must get people to see their familiar world from an alien perspective, where they might like it less. Such commentary may try to get people to see themselves as being illicitly dominated, or as pitifully weak and unimpressive, or as insensitive jerks. But this mostly fails, as people are already pretty comfortable with seeing their world in their usual way.

Early treatments like We and POTSF, however, could far more plausibly suggest that quite visible then-current trends would lead to alien worlds that would actually be their grandkids’ future. Some of these fears were of course centered on politics – imagining illicit dominators telling people what to do, be they capitalist oligarchs or socialist bureaucrats. But far more important, I think, were fears that industrial style regimentation and conformity might spread out of workplaces into homes, food, love lives, leisure activities etc. For example:

We is set in the future. D-503 lives in the One State, an urban nation constructed almost entirely of glass, which allows the secret police/spies to inform on and supervise the public more easily. … Life is organized to promote maximum productive efficiency … People march in step with each other and wear identical clothing. There is no way of referring to people save by their given numbers. … D-503′s … friend R-13, a State poet, is employed to write songs in praise of the State.D-503 meets I-330, a woman who dresses erotically and teases and entices him instead of sleeping with him in an impersonal fashion. … He begins to have dreams at night, which disturbs him, as dreams are irrational. … At the novel’s end, D-503 is subjected to the “Great Operation” that has recently been mandated for the whole population of the One State. This operation removes the imagination by striking a certain region of the brain with x-rays. After this operation, D-503 watches the torture and execution of I-330 with equanimity.

I’d love to know what 1800 era folks really think about our lives, relative to these fears. I suspect they’d be somewhat horrified by just how far we have taken workplace regimentation, but they’d be relieved to see us mostly rejecting it in our homes, food, love lives, and leisure activities. Relative to our farmer ancestors, we have become hyper-farmers at work, but have used the resulting wealth to return to forager styles the rest of the time.

Our robot/em descendants, however, may well not have the wealth to afford forager styles outside work. So they may change to more efficient non-work lives, and become workaholics with far less such lives. Such descendants may better realize some of the fears of these early visions of an industrial future. That makes this scenario as interesting to me as those early industrial social commentaries.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: , ,

Heroes Of Heroes

By Robin Hanson · December 15, 2010 10:00 pm · Comments (19)

What do we do when we at last come together [at Christmas]? We watch TV.  To some, this sounds awfully tragic. Shouldn’t we be gathered around the piano instead of the Wii? … All that Christmas idealism is sustained by television. Everything we know about how Christmas should appear and feel, we learned from watching Christmas happen on TV to people who don’t exist. Have a look at the pretty, pretty trees in all those living rooms and in all those diamond necklace ads and in Hallmark specials. What’s the one thing missing from these people’s homes? Correct: No TVs are on. The people we see on television at Christmastime have chosen to put their tree up in a formal living room, safely away from the television. (more)

It may be reasonable to be skeptical of stories, preferring to live a real life with real friends, problems, careers, etc. And it may be reasonable to enjoy stories, to embrace the ideals they embody, and to find life-lessons in their exaggerations. But if you approve of your habit of spending time and energy admiring story heroes and exemplars, then consistency suggests that your heroes and exemplars should also devote their own time and energy to stories, admiring their own heroes. If your heroes don’t waste much time with stories, why should you?

So make up your mind. If you think it good for your family to spend holidays together watching inspirational stories, well then the families in those stories should also think it good to spend holidays together being inspired by other stories.  And if you can’t really admire heroes who much time watching TV, well if your want to admire yourself maybe you shouldn’t spend much time watching TV either.

Here’s a related post by Katja.

GD Star Rating
loading...
Tagged as: ,