11 ms·

Laws of Fun (2009)

127 points by optimalsolver 5y ago

ginko 5y ago
These are more guidelines than laws.
- emmaLe 5y ago
  Did you really assume you'd see actual laws when you clicked on a link saying "31 laws of fun"?
  - hoseja 5y ago
    Maybe they also expected something other than a guide on how to write "eutopian" stories, perhaps an essay on inner workings of humor or entertainment. I certainly did.
- hungryforcodes 5y ago
  Also most of them are not particularly fun.
motohagiography 5y ago
> 15. Trying to compete on a single flat playing field with six billion other humans also creates problems. Our ancestors lived in bands of around 50 people. Today the media is constantly bombarding us with news of exceptionally rich and pretty people as if they lived next door to us; and very few people get a chance to be the best at any specialty. This is why I say social media isn't fun, and it has always been a cruel spectacle of what happens when you throw average people into the ring of elite competiton. Fun is when you can afford the stakes. I don't think most people can actually afford to lose.
- sixQuarks 5y ago
  Well, social media may be fun for those who are the worlds most beautiful and rich
  - elliekelly 5y ago
    Is it though? I’m really not convinced it’s fun even for wealthy and beautiful people.
    - tucosan 5y ago
      Imagine you're wealthy and beautiful, and the first thing that comes to your mind, is that you need to share it with the world. I think it's quite telling. I suspect l, that many interesting people are not on social media. They simply have better things to do, than waste their time on Instagram and tiktok.
      - coldtea 5y ago
        >Imagine you're wealthy and beautiful, and the first thing that comes to your mind, is that you need to share it with the world. I think it's quite telling. Not as telling as it seems. We are social animals. It's only natural to want to share it with the world. It would be more shallow to revel in having wealth and/or beauty alone. What people want instead is deeper, is love and recognition from others. That's where hapiness comes from (not some "peace with oneself" etc, that's just a prerequisite), and that's what those people try to get by sharing their wealth and beauty. Many of cause do it crudely, and will be unhappy nonetheless.
  - _tom_ 5y ago
    The ones best at appearing beautiful and rich. Google “Instagram reality” for the former and consider https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/style/baller-busters-online-scams.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/style/baller-busters-onli... for the latter.
- javajosh 5y ago
  >a cruel spectacle of what happens when you throw average people into the ring of elite competiton [sic] Good comment. I'm curious what your take on the use of social media as a means to share outrageous lies and engage in trolling behavior. Is this also an expression of a kind of status? Genuinely asking. I never thought of it that way.
  - motohagiography 5y ago
    While I haven't given trolls much thought because people who were on early IRC or Usenet, or predecessors in the BBS/fidonet scene (which pre-dates me) have a natural immunity to trolls. However, perhaps it's because we still think the internet isn't real life, where for an entire young middle class, it in fact is. Nobody expected to live in a future where the bourgoisie and their aspirants live in a zoo of their own making, and that geeks would become their zookeepers. The trolling today looks like a revolt against this game that isn't a game by people who sense there is something wrong but act out within it instead of stepping back. Flinging poop instead of orchestrating an escape, or less dramatically, just putting down the zoo and going for a walk. As long as people can be shocked, there will be people to shock them. In this sense, trolls aren't a problem for social media at all because it needs them to help keep people engaged and disatracted to preserve the illusion that it's meaningful and real.
- koboll 5y ago
  It's funny, this reminded me immediately of something I've experienced recently. I started making digital paintings on my iPad about a year and a half ago. And I'm not too bad; I've been drawing on and off all my life so I came to it already a decently talented artist. But there are so many artists I follow on Instagram who are so, so much more talented than me, to a degree I will never be. Thousands of them who were better than I am now way back when they were in high school, who have now catapulted beyond where I'll probably ever be and become professional artists with hundreds of thousands of followers who make a living off selling prints and merch. I post my art on Instagram but it feels like throwing mediocre work into a vast sea of bottomless excellence, and there's something fundamentally disheartening about that. However, it's okay, because I've found a little corner of the internet where I'm king. A tiny subreddit for a silly game I play on my phone sometimes. There are other people making fanart for it, too, but only a couple dozen, and in only a year I've become good enough that I'm probably the most talented artist making fanart for it. My posts there get fifty times as many upvotes there as they do Instagram likes, they linger at the top of the (slow-moving) subreddit for days, and people absolutely shower them with compliments. It's tremendously motivating. All I want to do is create fanart for this game. I think everyone can do this. Everyone has some talent, and there are so many diverse, fragmented communities out there that everyone can probably be king of some corner if they like. Social media can be demotivating if you think of it as one vast sea of seven billion people, but it also allows countless tiny niche communities to congregate and thrive. Go find one to conquer.
  - bob33212 5y ago
    No one is as good as you are at being you. An optimistic approach to life allows happiness like this. Similar themes in these posts. https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans http://paulgraham.com/re.html http://paulgraham.com/re.html
  - Agentlien 5y ago
    I am not an artist but I work with a lot of artists and I'm always amazed at their skills. I used to sit next to a few concept artists and it was a treat watching them work. I remember when two concept artists[0] were excitedly talking about how we'd just hired such an amazing concept artist, their big idol[1]. I looked up his stuff and it was of course astounding. But to be honest they're all just incredible to me. [0] one of them was Oliver Fetscher https://www.artstation.com/oliverfetscher https://www.artstation.com/oliverfetscher [1] https://www.artstation.com/zabrocki https://www.artstation.com/zabrocki
- coldtea 5y ago
  >I don't think most people can actually afford to lose. I think how you describe the problem is solid, but the situation is the opposite: Most people can totally afford to lose -- because they wont be losing anything that they have anyway. Not winning at being a famous and rich YouTube influencer still leaves you with what you had before (and the same need to hold a job, etc). What they can't really afford is to participate, because competition with all the elite people for things most have 1 in a million chances of ever achieving would just drive them mad.
joshgrib 5y ago
> 23. In general, tampering with brains, minds, emotions, and personalities is way more fraught on every possible level of ethics and difficulty, than tampering with bodies and environments. Always ask what you can do by messing with the environment before you imagine messing with minds. This makes me think of political ideologies that are more focused on how people should act than on changing the shared environment to work better for people as they are
- Something1234 5y ago
  I completely agree. So much of political ideologies are focused on the should, rather than how to change our state machines input. I usually try to think how can we change our environment to make ourselves more fulfilled, but it seems like no one else does.
- everdrive 5y ago
  This is itself an artifact of human nature. If you determine how people should act, you can start working towards tribal allegiance and unity.
sandrone 5y ago
I don't see the most important one: "Anything that's fun costs at least $8." Also known as the first law of physics. (South Park S09E12 - Trapped in the Closet)
sweetheart 5y ago
One thing I’ve surprised myself by discovering more than once: you have a very bad idea of what you will consider fun. Something can seem right up your alley on paper, and end up being extremely underwhelming in reality, or vice versa. Don’t talk yourself out of trying something because you think you’ll dislike it!
- LukeBMM 5y ago
  I'd guess that explains at least 50% of Steam's sales as well as the handful of gems that get embarrassing amounts of play time.
twodave 5y ago
As a Christian, it would be very sad/disheartening if this author's description of "Christian Heaven" were actually supported by scripture. Aside from that, many of these ideas assume people to be completely self-centered and un-altruistic, which is often true, but I'd expect the ultimate fun to be more about shaking those bonds than attempting to accommodate them. From my view that requires changes both in the environment and in the individual.
- wffurr 5y ago
  The article those draw from is a bit more charitable, though not much more so: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pK4HTxuv6mftHXWC3/prolegomena-to-a-theory-of-fun https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pK4HTxuv6mftHXWC3/prolegomen... As a side note, you can support just about anything you want with scripture, so it's not a great basis for an argument.
  - twodave 5y ago
    Certainly, though I personally draw a pretty large difference between "supported by scripture" and either "I can find a verse that helps me justify my opinion" or "I can find some famous idiot in the Bible who made the same mistake, therefore it's okay".
    - chris_st 5y ago
      That's brilliant, thanks. Also there's things "everyone knows" which are "supported by scripture" that are, in fact, nowhere in the Bible.
Xcelerate 5y ago
I’ve thought about this idea of what would make for a desirable utopia, and I can’t avoid the fact that either you would die at some point (which creates suffering due to the anticipation of the event) or live forever, which actually seems more horrific in a way — how could you possibly not go crazy after living trillions of years and thinking about the next trillion? The only real solution is to alter the human brain to no longer fear death or eternal existence. The point about the pleasure/pain imbalance is interesting. Think about how people slowly develop tolerance to drugs/medications that make you feel better and require more of it to get the same effect, but with pain we have the opposite situation, where constant suffering leads to experiencing even more suffering in the future through the process of sensitization (there are some theories that a lot of chronic pain is due to this rather than the original injury). It really doesn’t seem fair how massive this imbalance is. I’ve slowly realized that I probably won’t ever figure out exactly what will make me happy, but I definitely know what makes me unhappy, and it’s much easier to develop a life plan based on avoiding negative things than pursuing positive things.
- ben_w 5y ago
  You could go for what Iain M Banks did in The Culture: although death is theoretically optional, most people only live for a few hundred years because by that point they’re basically done with everything they care about doing.
- mLuby 5y ago
  > either you would die at some point (which creates suffering due to the anticipation of the event) or live forever, which actually seems more horrible in a way We know death causes suffering, but we don't know if immortality causes suffering. Don't knock it till you've tried it. #FableOfTheDragonTyrant
  - slowmovintarget 5y ago
    I've always thought of that trope in fiction of immortal beings wanting to die as being silly. It seems like a case of the fox considering the grapes to be sour because it couldn't reach them, on the part of writers.
javajosh 5y ago
These discussions are useful in a concrete way because it helps us to identify and prioritize our values with our imagination! Lesswrong is, in this case, cataloging my teenage thoughts on the matter, which is very cool. Buddhist cosmology has an interesting take on heaven. They believe only humans can become enlightened and achieve nirvana. Angels, demons and animals can't do it. Even heaven ends, in that system, and angels, although exceedingly powerful, happy, and long-lived, still experiences the suffering of attachment. Meanwhile, nirvana is explicitly defined as ultimately blissful, but not life, not death, not both, not neither - and a state the enlightened can enter into at will. (The major steps on the path are defined by touching nirvana N times, each time burns out some deep seated big category of reaction, like fear, where by the 4th time you conquer lust and anger, and boom, you're an arahant.) I like this. It tacitly accepts the difficulty of heaven as a self-consistent concept, which in turn challenges the assumption that there exists some combination of external circumstance which is perfect, forever, for anyone, and places the responsibility of ultimate bliss squarely on your shoulders. The implications seem bloodless and strange, unless you accept the fact that, as you become more enlightened, the more powerful your ability to love and act on that love becomes. BTW my favorite conventional utopia is the Culture from Ian M. Banks. It's fantasy couched in scifi rhetoric, but I think Banks does a great job looking at the implications of getting every material thing you ever wanted, every freedom, almost every power, the problems and drama that even a galaxy spanning, unimaginably powerful and benevolent society can run into.
- ekam 5y ago
  Very fascinating - there’s strong parallels here with the Sikh system and the stages reached in meditation
  - javajosh 5y ago
    Yes, all the vedic religions share the same overarching ideas - karma, rebirth, escaping the wheel of samsara, and so on. I'm not a religious scholar but it's fascinating history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Vedic_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Vedic_religion
cprecioso 5y ago
This article is reminding me so much of "The Good Place", which explores how the ideal conception of heaven of many people could perceivably be construed as a hell; and vice versa. I recommend it heartily - both for the laughs, and the thinking.
chris_st 5y ago
> 2. [...] Again, consider Christian Heaven: singing hymns doesn't sound like loads of endless fun, but you're supposed to enjoy praying, so no one can point this out. Clearly written by someone who's either never been to church, or goes to a boring one :-) If you've ever been to a fantastic (rock, jazz, whatever) concert, you know the amazing feeling of being caught up with others in the excitement of a shared musical experience. It's fantastic! Well, worship can be like this too... you may need to shop around to find an exciting church (and yeah, church is supposed to touch all your senses, not just your intellect, so excitement is OK.) And a ton of our popular ideas of heaven (walking on clouds in white robes playing lyres) doesn't come at all from the biblical account. Go read Revelation... heaven is going to be a city, the inhabitants will have jobs, etc. The biblical heaven looks interesting to me! See "Heaven" by Randy Alcorn for other interesting myths busted.
- DizzyDoo 5y ago
  I heard pastor/theologian John Piper recently say something like (this is my paraphrase): "The only way I can possibly be totally satisfied for an eternity, is in the presence of the infinitely good God." One of the biggest influences on my imagination in this regard has been NT Wright's focus on 'the new heavens and the new earth' - the redemption and bringing together of both - I haven't read Alcorn on this but I imagine there's a shared focus on the Bodily reality of things.
  - chris_st 5y ago
    Thanks, I keep hearing about NT Wright, I'll have to look into his stuff. It's hard to imagine a God bigger (in various non-physical dimensions) than us, and that "making God in our image" just is so limiting. Notably, Kushner's "Why bad things happen to good people" states as a matter of fact, "If God has a plan, I can understand it." All I can say is, he never took higher math :-)
- gjm11 5y ago
  The author of the OP is a Jewish atheist, so indeed probably hasn't attended a lot of Christian church services. I think "you may need to shop around" is too strong. A churchgoer may care about other things besides whether the music at their church is exciting to them, and it's not obvious that they should prioritize excitement over (say) theological agreement, or strength of community, or what if anything the church does outside its services. The white robes arguably do come from the biblical account. Revelation 7:9: "After this ... behold, a great multitude which no man could number ... clothed in white robes". This is describing specifically "they who have come out of the great tribulation", so it may not be meant to apply to everyone there, but there are a whole lot of other white robes in Revelation. The lyres, too, or possibly harps. Revelation 15:2ff: "And I saw ... those who had conquered the beast and its image ... standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands". Again, not obviously everyone, but harps none the less. No walking on clouds there, though. And in any case it's not clear that taking Revelation as a straightforward account of what to expect in some future existence really matches much with its actual intention. Those white robes and "harps of God" and all the rest are all there as symbols of purity and worship and the like, and arguably the author of Revelation was much more interested in commenting on contemporary persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire than in actually predicting the future. (Note: I'm not a Christian, though I was one for many years. Feel free to discount any of the above as a result, if that seems appropriate to you.)
GuB-42 5y ago
Reminds me of the premises of "The Matrix". The Matrix was originally designed as a utopia. It didn't work out, so they ended up copying the world we are living in today. Because to be fair, the description in the article is not that far from real life, at least for healthy people with enough resources to survive. That is: most of us on HN. And in fact even the poor and sick can often be unexpectedly happy. Maybe we are simply very well adapted to our world.
dave333 5y ago
To be achievable, utopia should be an attitude, not a place. The best attitude I ever came across is "Everything in moderation, including moderation itself."

Laws of Fun (2009)

127 points by optimalsolver 5y ago

ginko 5y ago

These are more guidelines than laws.

emmaLe 5y ago
Did you really assume you'd see actual laws when you clicked on a link saying "31 laws of fun"?
- hoseja 5y ago
  Maybe they also expected something other than a guide on how to write "eutopian" stories, perhaps an essay on inner workings of humor or entertainment. I certainly did.
hungryforcodes 5y ago
Also most of them are not particularly fun.

motohagiography 5y ago

> 15. Trying to compete on a single flat playing field with six billion other humans also creates problems. Our ancestors lived in bands of around 50 people. Today the media is constantly bombarding us with news of exceptionally rich and pretty people as if they lived next door to us; and very few people get a chance to be the best at any specialty. This is why I say social media isn't fun, and it has always been a cruel spectacle of what happens when you throw average people into the ring of elite competiton. Fun is when you can afford the stakes. I don't think most people can actually afford to lose.

sixQuarks 5y ago
Well, social media may be fun for those who are the worlds most beautiful and rich
- elliekelly 5y ago
  Is it though? I’m really not convinced it’s fun even for wealthy and beautiful people.
  - tucosan 5y ago
    Imagine you're wealthy and beautiful, and the first thing that comes to your mind, is that you need to share it with the world. I think it's quite telling. I suspect l, that many interesting people are not on social media. They simply have better things to do, than waste their time on Instagram and tiktok.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >Imagine you're wealthy and beautiful, and the first thing that comes to your mind, is that you need to share it with the world. I think it's quite telling. Not as telling as it seems. We are social animals. It's only natural to want to share it with the world. It would be more shallow to revel in having wealth and/or beauty alone. What people want instead is deeper, is love and recognition from others. That's where hapiness comes from (not some "peace with oneself" etc, that's just a prerequisite), and that's what those people try to get by sharing their wealth and beauty. Many of cause do it crudely, and will be unhappy nonetheless.
- _tom_ 5y ago
  The ones best at appearing beautiful and rich. Google “Instagram reality” for the former and consider https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/style/baller-busters-online-scams.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/11/style/baller-busters-onli... for the latter.
javajosh 5y ago
>a cruel spectacle of what happens when you throw average people into the ring of elite competiton [sic] Good comment. I'm curious what your take on the use of social media as a means to share outrageous lies and engage in trolling behavior. Is this also an expression of a kind of status? Genuinely asking. I never thought of it that way.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  While I haven't given trolls much thought because people who were on early IRC or Usenet, or predecessors in the BBS/fidonet scene (which pre-dates me) have a natural immunity to trolls. However, perhaps it's because we still think the internet isn't real life, where for an entire young middle class, it in fact is. Nobody expected to live in a future where the bourgoisie and their aspirants live in a zoo of their own making, and that geeks would become their zookeepers. The trolling today looks like a revolt against this game that isn't a game by people who sense there is something wrong but act out within it instead of stepping back. Flinging poop instead of orchestrating an escape, or less dramatically, just putting down the zoo and going for a walk. As long as people can be shocked, there will be people to shock them. In this sense, trolls aren't a problem for social media at all because it needs them to help keep people engaged and disatracted to preserve the illusion that it's meaningful and real.
koboll 5y ago
It's funny, this reminded me immediately of something I've experienced recently. I started making digital paintings on my iPad about a year and a half ago. And I'm not too bad; I've been drawing on and off all my life so I came to it already a decently talented artist. But there are so many artists I follow on Instagram who are so, so much more talented than me, to a degree I will never be. Thousands of them who were better than I am now way back when they were in high school, who have now catapulted beyond where I'll probably ever be and become professional artists with hundreds of thousands of followers who make a living off selling prints and merch. I post my art on Instagram but it feels like throwing mediocre work into a vast sea of bottomless excellence, and there's something fundamentally disheartening about that. However, it's okay, because I've found a little corner of the internet where I'm king. A tiny subreddit for a silly game I play on my phone sometimes. There are other people making fanart for it, too, but only a couple dozen, and in only a year I've become good enough that I'm probably the most talented artist making fanart for it. My posts there get fifty times as many upvotes there as they do Instagram likes, they linger at the top of the (slow-moving) subreddit for days, and people absolutely shower them with compliments. It's tremendously motivating. All I want to do is create fanart for this game. I think everyone can do this. Everyone has some talent, and there are so many diverse, fragmented communities out there that everyone can probably be king of some corner if they like. Social media can be demotivating if you think of it as one vast sea of seven billion people, but it also allows countless tiny niche communities to congregate and thrive. Go find one to conquer.
- bob33212 5y ago
  No one is as good as you are at being you. An optimistic approach to life allows happiness like this. Similar themes in these posts. https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans http://paulgraham.com/re.html http://paulgraham.com/re.html
- Agentlien 5y ago
  I am not an artist but I work with a lot of artists and I'm always amazed at their skills. I used to sit next to a few concept artists and it was a treat watching them work. I remember when two concept artists[0] were excitedly talking about how we'd just hired such an amazing concept artist, their big idol[1]. I looked up his stuff and it was of course astounding. But to be honest they're all just incredible to me. [0] one of them was Oliver Fetscher https://www.artstation.com/oliverfetscher https://www.artstation.com/oliverfetscher [1] https://www.artstation.com/zabrocki https://www.artstation.com/zabrocki
coldtea 5y ago
>I don't think most people can actually afford to lose. I think how you describe the problem is solid, but the situation is the opposite: Most people can totally afford to lose -- because they wont be losing anything that they have anyway. Not winning at being a famous and rich YouTube influencer still leaves you with what you had before (and the same need to hold a job, etc). What they can't really afford is to participate, because competition with all the elite people for things most have 1 in a million chances of ever achieving would just drive them mad.

joshgrib 5y ago

> 23. In general, tampering with brains, minds, emotions, and personalities is way more fraught on every possible level of ethics and difficulty, than tampering with bodies and environments. Always ask what you can do by messing with the environment before you imagine messing with minds. This makes me think of political ideologies that are more focused on how people should act than on changing the shared environment to work better for people as they are

Something1234 5y ago
I completely agree. So much of political ideologies are focused on the should, rather than how to change our state machines input. I usually try to think how can we change our environment to make ourselves more fulfilled, but it seems like no one else does.
everdrive 5y ago
This is itself an artifact of human nature. If you determine how people should act, you can start working towards tribal allegiance and unity.

sandrone 5y ago

I don't see the most important one: "Anything that's fun costs at least $8." Also known as the first law of physics. (South Park S09E12 - Trapped in the Closet)

sweetheart 5y ago

One thing I’ve surprised myself by discovering more than once: you have a very bad idea of what you will consider fun. Something can seem right up your alley on paper, and end up being extremely underwhelming in reality, or vice versa. Don’t talk yourself out of trying something because you think you’ll dislike it!

LukeBMM 5y ago
I'd guess that explains at least 50% of Steam's sales as well as the handful of gems that get embarrassing amounts of play time.

twodave 5y ago

As a Christian, it would be very sad/disheartening if this author's description of "Christian Heaven" were actually supported by scripture. Aside from that, many of these ideas assume people to be completely self-centered and un-altruistic, which is often true, but I'd expect the ultimate fun to be more about shaking those bonds than attempting to accommodate them. From my view that requires changes both in the environment and in the individual.

wffurr 5y ago
The article those draw from is a bit more charitable, though not much more so: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pK4HTxuv6mftHXWC3/prolegomena-to-a-theory-of-fun https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pK4HTxuv6mftHXWC3/prolegomen... As a side note, you can support just about anything you want with scripture, so it's not a great basis for an argument.
- twodave 5y ago
  Certainly, though I personally draw a pretty large difference between "supported by scripture" and either "I can find a verse that helps me justify my opinion" or "I can find some famous idiot in the Bible who made the same mistake, therefore it's okay".
  - chris_st 5y ago
    That's brilliant, thanks. Also there's things "everyone knows" which are "supported by scripture" that are, in fact, nowhere in the Bible.

Xcelerate 5y ago

I’ve thought about this idea of what would make for a desirable utopia, and I can’t avoid the fact that either you would die at some point (which creates suffering due to the anticipation of the event) or live forever, which actually seems more horrific in a way — how could you possibly not go crazy after living trillions of years and thinking about the next trillion? The only real solution is to alter the human brain to no longer fear death or eternal existence. The point about the pleasure/pain imbalance is interesting. Think about how people slowly develop tolerance to drugs/medications that make you feel better and require more of it to get the same effect, but with pain we have the opposite situation, where constant suffering leads to experiencing even more suffering in the future through the process of sensitization (there are some theories that a lot of chronic pain is due to this rather than the original injury). It really doesn’t seem fair how massive this imbalance is. I’ve slowly realized that I probably won’t ever figure out exactly what will make me happy, but I definitely know what makes me unhappy, and it’s much easier to develop a life plan based on avoiding negative things than pursuing positive things.

ben_w 5y ago
You could go for what Iain M Banks did in The Culture: although death is theoretically optional, most people only live for a few hundred years because by that point they’re basically done with everything they care about doing.
mLuby 5y ago
> either you would die at some point (which creates suffering due to the anticipation of the event) or live forever, which actually seems more horrible in a way We know death causes suffering, but we don't know if immortality causes suffering. Don't knock it till you've tried it. #FableOfTheDragonTyrant
- slowmovintarget 5y ago
  I've always thought of that trope in fiction of immortal beings wanting to die as being silly. It seems like a case of the fox considering the grapes to be sour because it couldn't reach them, on the part of writers.

javajosh 5y ago

These discussions are useful in a concrete way because it helps us to identify and prioritize our values with our imagination! Lesswrong is, in this case, cataloging my teenage thoughts on the matter, which is very cool. Buddhist cosmology has an interesting take on heaven. They believe only humans can become enlightened and achieve nirvana. Angels, demons and animals can't do it. Even heaven ends, in that system, and angels, although exceedingly powerful, happy, and long-lived, still experiences the suffering of attachment. Meanwhile, nirvana is explicitly defined as ultimately blissful, but not life, not death, not both, not neither - and a state the enlightened can enter into at will. (The major steps on the path are defined by touching nirvana N times, each time burns out some deep seated big category of reaction, like fear, where by the 4th time you conquer lust and anger, and boom, you're an arahant.) I like this. It tacitly accepts the difficulty of heaven as a self-consistent concept, which in turn challenges the assumption that there exists some combination of external circumstance which is perfect, forever, for anyone, and places the responsibility of ultimate bliss squarely on your shoulders. The implications seem bloodless and strange, unless you accept the fact that, as you become more enlightened, the more powerful your ability to love and act on that love becomes. BTW my favorite conventional utopia is the Culture from Ian M. Banks. It's fantasy couched in scifi rhetoric, but I think Banks does a great job looking at the implications of getting every material thing you ever wanted, every freedom, almost every power, the problems and drama that even a galaxy spanning, unimaginably powerful and benevolent society can run into.

ekam 5y ago
Very fascinating - there’s strong parallels here with the Sikh system and the stages reached in meditation
- javajosh 5y ago
  Yes, all the vedic religions share the same overarching ideas - karma, rebirth, escaping the wheel of samsara, and so on. I'm not a religious scholar but it's fascinating history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Vedic_religion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Vedic_religion

cprecioso 5y ago

This article is reminding me so much of "The Good Place", which explores how the ideal conception of heaven of many people could perceivably be construed as a hell; and vice versa. I recommend it heartily - both for the laughs, and the thinking.

chris_st 5y ago

> 2. [...] Again, consider Christian Heaven: singing hymns doesn't sound like loads of endless fun, but you're supposed to enjoy praying, so no one can point this out. Clearly written by someone who's either never been to church, or goes to a boring one :-) If you've ever been to a fantastic (rock, jazz, whatever) concert, you know the amazing feeling of being caught up with others in the excitement of a shared musical experience. It's fantastic! Well, worship can be like this too... you may need to shop around to find an exciting church (and yeah, church is supposed to touch all your senses, not just your intellect, so excitement is OK.) And a ton of our popular ideas of heaven (walking on clouds in white robes playing lyres) doesn't come at all from the biblical account. Go read Revelation... heaven is going to be a city, the inhabitants will have jobs, etc. The biblical heaven looks interesting to me! See "Heaven" by Randy Alcorn for other interesting myths busted.

DizzyDoo 5y ago
I heard pastor/theologian John Piper recently say something like (this is my paraphrase): "The only way I can possibly be totally satisfied for an eternity, is in the presence of the infinitely good God." One of the biggest influences on my imagination in this regard has been NT Wright's focus on 'the new heavens and the new earth' - the redemption and bringing together of both - I haven't read Alcorn on this but I imagine there's a shared focus on the Bodily reality of things.
- chris_st 5y ago
  Thanks, I keep hearing about NT Wright, I'll have to look into his stuff. It's hard to imagine a God bigger (in various non-physical dimensions) than us, and that "making God in our image" just is so limiting. Notably, Kushner's "Why bad things happen to good people" states as a matter of fact, "If God has a plan, I can understand it." All I can say is, he never took higher math :-)
gjm11 5y ago
The author of the OP is a Jewish atheist, so indeed probably hasn't attended a lot of Christian church services. I think "you may need to shop around" is too strong. A churchgoer may care about other things besides whether the music at their church is exciting to them, and it's not obvious that they should prioritize excitement over (say) theological agreement, or strength of community, or what if anything the church does outside its services. The white robes arguably do come from the biblical account. Revelation 7:9: "After this ... behold, a great multitude which no man could number ... clothed in white robes". This is describing specifically "they who have come out of the great tribulation", so it may not be meant to apply to everyone there, but there are a whole lot of other white robes in Revelation. The lyres, too, or possibly harps. Revelation 15:2ff: "And I saw ... those who had conquered the beast and its image ... standing beside the sea of glass with harps of God in their hands". Again, not obviously everyone, but harps none the less. No walking on clouds there, though. And in any case it's not clear that taking Revelation as a straightforward account of what to expect in some future existence really matches much with its actual intention. Those white robes and "harps of God" and all the rest are all there as symbols of purity and worship and the like, and arguably the author of Revelation was much more interested in commenting on contemporary persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire than in actually predicting the future. (Note: I'm not a Christian, though I was one for many years. Feel free to discount any of the above as a result, if that seems appropriate to you.)

GuB-42 5y ago

Reminds me of the premises of "The Matrix". The Matrix was originally designed as a utopia. It didn't work out, so they ended up copying the world we are living in today. Because to be fair, the description in the article is not that far from real life, at least for healthy people with enough resources to survive. That is: most of us on HN. And in fact even the poor and sick can often be unexpectedly happy. Maybe we are simply very well adapted to our world.

dave333 5y ago

To be achievable, utopia should be an attitude, not a place. The best attitude I ever came across is "Everything in moderation, including moderation itself."