[ExI] taxonomy for fermi paradox fans:

[Stathis Papaioannou]

On 3 February 2015 at 14:34, John Clark <johnkclark at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 2, 2015  Stathis Papaioannou <stathisp at gmail.com> wrote:
>  .
>>
>> >You could always turn the knob that makes you seek out hard work and good
>> > deeds and makes you avoid the mindless happiness knob.
>
>
> Hard work by itself could be as useless as the happiness knob, you could end
> up digging holes and then immediately filling them up again. Your hard work
> needs to be part of achieving something important, but achieving important
> things is rare and so your related pleasure reward would be rare too, no
> match for just turning the old happiness knob.
>
>> > and good deeds
>
>
> It's the same problem. Curing cancer would be a good deed but its hard and
> doing something that great is rare. On the other hand performing bad deeds
> is easy and common, and I hate to think where that might lead.

Many people in our society actually do good deeds, work hard, exercise
and so on where it would be easier and more immediately rewarding to
sit in front of the TV eating potato chips and doing drugs. This is
because they have the type of mind that makes them behave this way.
Other people don't have this type of mind, but wish they did. In the
future, when everyone can reconstruct their mind the way they want, it
will be easier, not harder, to avoid the trap of the happiness knob.


-- 
Stathis Papaioannou