Real SimEarth Experiment

[_Gadianton]

Interesting question. I'd be tempted to make the following changes:

1- I'd make everybody put a really high value on exercise.

2- I'd make everybody put a really high value on eating healthy, quality food.

3- I'd make everybody some variant of a humanist.

4- I'd make everybody industrious, creative, skeptical, and hungry for knowledge and education.

5- I'd make social interaction in the form of getting together with your friends after work to be an important community ritual.

With a few changes like that, I'd be quite tempted to push the button.

Hi Analytics, thanks for answering. I think all your changes would be within the rules except in (4), I think the aliens would say that you can make people value creativity, industry, and skepticism but not necessarily guarantee they will succeed, along the same lines as restricting direct intelligence increases. Though, I'm not entirely sure the aliens should have these restrictions because it may just be that drastic intelligence/talent increase doesn't guarantee much.

[_Gadianton]

Under what criteria do we get to judge whether my ideas make the world better or worse? Is it something where everyone else has to vote?

Unfortunately, the beings that captured you will judge if the world is better or worse off. The satisfaction of the population is one of several criteria.

I'm sure no matter how I try to construct this however, that there is a way to beat the system. :)

[_Morley]

There’s a whole basket full of reasons why I’d pass, but I’ll give you one. If the aliens had the powers to do as outlined, why are they asking me? This plan sounds too cruel, too arbitrary, and way too umm... godlike.

[_asbestosman]

Unfortunately, the beings that captured you will judge if the world is better or worse off. The satisfaction of the population is one of several criteria.

I'm sure no matter how I try to construct this however, that there is a way to beat the system. :)

I can't game the system until I know the rules. ;) In fact, I can't even play the game the way it was intended to be played.

One of the biggest problems I see in creating Utopia is that people have conflicting goals. When one person feels better, another often feels worse--although this need not always be the case. The world as a better place under the view of Secular Humanism is different than the world as a better place under the view of God (or at least the LDS version of God). People may in some sense be happier in the dystopian society of Brave New World. However, judged from our point of view that world is scary.

Without knowing the aliens' paradigm I would not push the button. If I do know the aliens' standard I might or might not decide to make a plan. It make a huge difference as to whether the aliens dream about how to cook humans, how to cook for humans, how to cook forty humans, or how to cook for forty humans.

[_sock puppet]

If your ideas make the world 50% better than it would have been, then your reward is pretty much whatever you wish. You can become king of the world, go back to your normal life, or be immortalized and live in a paradise on another world -- pretty much whatever you want. If you make the world less than 50% better or up to 50% worse, then you are simply sent back in time to when the changes were put in place, your memory wiped, and you get to live in what you created. If you totally screwed up and made things more than 50% worse overall, you are tortured, and then sent back in time to when your changes begin to live in the very worst place you created.

Under what criteria do we get to judge whether my ideas make the world better or worse? Is it something where everyone else has to vote? If so, I suggest that everyone think that my ideas are wonderful and always make the world a better place. Problem solved.

You'd create a world and fill it with sycophants?

[_Gadianton]

Asb,

I could say that the aliens will tell you their criteria for judging whatever you create but ultimately, my interest is less in what their goals are and more about the confidence level of folks who have answers that will successfully direct the entire human species along with its habitat toward any kind of goal.

I actually don't think the "goal" issue is the main hurdle here and I imagine the aliens would say that their criteria represents the best imaginable arguments for human progress when taking an average from successful people of all religious persuasions. Personally, I don't think that there is a large enough variance between believers and non-believers to a difference in what would make for a successful society.

I think we'd all agree, for instance, that if the Third Reich were to have eliminated 3/4 of the world's population, thus solving a number of environmental issues and conflict issues, and establish a reasonably successful civilization without people starving, that this wouldn't count as a success. Minus the obvious human cost, the inbreeding alone would probably have screwed them down the road. And only the most fanatical would consider the prospect of a world of diverse race and religions, absent poverty an looming environmental catastrophes where everyone has basic liberty, to be an abject failure.

concentrate on your ability to achieve a goal within a complex system rather than the specifics about the goal itself.

[_asbestosman]

You'd create a world and fill it with sycophants?

Sure. Just think: I'd be able to get those sycophants to give me their hot wives (or their hot selves) as my new concubines.

I'm having trouble seeing a downside to this.

[_sock puppet]

You'd create a world and fill it with sycophants?

Sure. Just think: I'd be able to get those sycophants to give me their hot wives (or their hot selves) as my new concubines.

I'm having trouble seeing a downside to this.

My avatar ought to be a clue as to what might be the downside.

The yearning for power boils down to sex. One never has enough sex.

[_asbestosman]

concentrate on your ability to achieve a goal within a complex system rather than the specifics about the goal itself.

I would say that at this time I don't have the capability to do this. However, I could imagine a world where this might be possible. If we could get an accurate simulation of rules and outcomes, we might be able to get a high degree of confidence about various outcomes. The problems are finding a reasonable simulation of the complexity and secondly whether the complex system has enough inherent stability or points of attraction that we can make meaningful predictions.

The quantum world is very chaotic, but we can still make good predictions about the world due to statistical averages. Weather follows some well-known rules but is very sensitive to small changes. Even so, we can still make reasonable predictions about what the weather will be like over the course of the year from area to area without knowing the specifics of what days it will rain. The number of accidents and severity of them is the result of complex systems but engineers and insurance companies can make reasonable predictions based on several factors. I see no reason in theory that this could not be applied to the aliens. Indeed I would suspect that they already have superior technology for carrying out such calculations.

[_bcspace]

It would be reflexive on his part.

No it wouldn't. The op scenario expressly has time for detailed analysis as one describes one's plans and has dicussions with the various experts.