Timeline for How do you make your worldbuilding less utopian?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
10 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Sep 7, 2021 at 11:10 | comment | added | MolbOrg | " of people whom under no circumstances would one want to give any power" - may agree on that as well, to some extend. Jumped yesterday to write an answer for the q, but then no won't post it. Two reasons - too big of a thing to write, and my English is not enough to express all the stuff I would like to say on all that. The problem u mention - it has a solution and it does not abandon humans being humans, and technology allows it. And seeing that is the goal and achievement of a utopian author. | |
| Sep 7, 2021 at 3:58 | comment | added | user2352714 | @MolbOrg The problem is that although new technology gives us the power to do all sorts of wonderous things, it's disproportionately in the hands of people whom under no circumstances would one want to give any power. And this isn't even getting into general human selfishness. The only way to get rid of this problem would be...to basically cease being human (or even an organism), since these issues arises from a combination of biology and game theory. | |
| Sep 7, 2021 at 3:56 | comment | added | user2352714 | @MolbOrg The number is a lot higher than you'd think it would be (5% or higher of total population), and what's really terrifying is the fact that even though individuals like that represent a minority of society, they end up disproportionately in positions of power due to the power-craving nature of those disorders and the fact that the traits societies favors as signs of social dominance and leadership map really well onto cluster B personality disorders. High-empathy individuals tend to get excluded from positions of power. This has been a problem in almost every society throughout history. | |
| Sep 7, 2021 at 1:28 | comment | added | MolbOrg | Topic is clearly too big, but main point is that one who writes utopia he has to see the possibility for it to exist. Or identify some goal which is worth heading to. Challenge the problems you mention etc. Your message there no way to change things in good way, but for utopian guy - there is. And there is, technology capable to give us more than people typically recognise. Computerscience gives us understanding of complex systems, swarms, fuzzy logic, game theory, etc. And it way more than we had 50 year ago. We are at point in time when writing utopias is good if one is smart enough to see. | |
| Sep 7, 2021 at 1:15 | comment | added | MolbOrg | Idk, no interest in diving too deep, and agree on your 99.9% and more I would say percentage of all kinds of deviations is 10-15 of that 0.1%, but here is a thing or two, I do not count it as weakness but strength and it does not matter unless that minority can't swing good portion of society - it is good/bad sometimes, and if things are mostly good then it most likely would be not useful swing. Past 100 years are much different from all previous human history, technologies did come to qualitative changes and we have ability and knowledge to implement different managment approaches. | |
| Sep 6, 2021 at 22:57 | comment | added | user2352714 | @MolbOrg I don't like the dark tone of it either, but unfortunately that's what looking at history and sociology keeps seeming to show. Even if we lived in a Star Trek-style utopia, there would still be individuals who won't care about hurting others (sociopaths, psychopaths, narcissists, etc.), because science seems to indicate those individuals tend to be born that way. Even in utopia there is someone who will be dissatisfied and wants to burn the whole system down out of spite. And it does seem like where there are few consequences people tend to be more petty. | |
| Sep 6, 2021 at 10:32 | comment | added | nick012000 | "Orville Wright, who helped invent the airplane to free mankind from the ground, lived long enough to see his invention used to bomb cities into rubble (he died in 1948)." To be fair, there, the Wright Brothers had no compunctions about selling planes to the military. | |
| Sep 6, 2021 at 9:09 | comment | added | Rohan | A note regarding the Haber-Bosch process: while we may think of it being for feeding the world and being misused to make bombs, it was actually the other way around. Haber was trying to make bombs for Germany's war effort during WW1, and the same process also turned out to be good for making fertiliser. | |
| Sep 6, 2021 at 8:49 | comment | added | MolbOrg | Idk, do not like darkish message of the answer, especially the ending(proportions do matter, so as more robust and less robust systems do exists, and in technological society people do not lose cooperative motivation when they reach state when necessities are solved), but otherwise it is a quite good answer. | |
| Sep 6, 2021 at 1:14 | history | answered | user2352714 | CC BY-SA 4.0 |