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Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

kirkcenter.org

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Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#31

Post by gowld »

shoguning wrote: post #21

I've heard the assertion that utopianism is bad, but what about it is bad? Certainly, we should be able to strive for improvement, in ourselves and society? The problem with utopianism is the desire to create a new society out of whole cloth, with no regard for the lessons of the past, or the structure of existing society. Drastic changes, like those of the communist revolutions, rarely bring about positive change (n…

Utopianism is Perfectionism, as opposed to Progressivism. It's unsound to believe that's possible to elminiate all problems, and someone having a belief that utopis is possible is s strong signal of either deceit or stupidity.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#32

Post by winchling »

afpx wrote: post #17

A Dystopia is only recognizable when juxtaposed against a state that is much different from it. That is, a Dystopia would develop over time, with many not even recognizing the gradual changes; it's not something that develops suddenly. For example, it's not hard to imagine that our world could be considered a Dystopia to some who lived hundreds or thousands of years ago. Or, it could even be considered a Utopia to ot…

>Utopias and Dystopias are only interesting as thought experiments to imagine what Humans could be possible about

They both have the property that progress has ended; that we have ceased learning about reality. An undesirable state to be in!

Yet ideas of utopias and dystopias have been used to advance the careers/interests/ambitions of the power-hungry, e.g. when they reluctantly accept power. they don't want power (allegedly) and will cede it when the utopia is achieved (it will never be achieved).

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#33

Post by _bxg1 »

I don't strongly disagree on any particular point, per se, but the fact that the author's thoughts are rooted in a religious worldview felt like it was snuck in there at the end:

"Moreover, this world is fallen, so it is by nature flawed...The utopian visions that animate real places...seek to remake humanity and society in someone’s image—and that is not the image of the Creator."

For further context, the website it's on is "The Russel Kirk Center for Cultural Renewal"; from its Wikipedia page: "The Center is known for promoting traditionalist conservatism and regularly publishing Studies in Burke and His Time and The University Bookman, the oldest conservative book review in the United States."

Not that these things invalidate it necessarily, but they're important context to place it in.

Overall I'd say the article is more an argument about semantic nuance than a grand social commentary. Probably a valid semantic critique, but nonetheless.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#35

Post by hugh4life »

"A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias." ― Oscar Wilde

"It is our utopias that make the world tolerable to us: the cities and mansions that people dream of are those in which they finally live." - Lewis Mumford

The sentiment is true if Utopia is persued at a mass level, but what we need are more attempts and experiments at small utopias.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#36

Post by User23 »

jd007 wrote: post #5

More generally speaking, when you optimize on a particular set of metrics to the extreme (when it comes to social issues this is what utopias try to do), you will inevitably cause another set of metrics to be correspondingly de-optimized to the extreme (which can be qualified as dystopian). There is no way to optimize everything simultaneously because many things are fundamentally inversely correlated with each other…

I put it more bluntly, the Smart People who have all the solutions greatly overestimate their own intelligence, to the detriment of the victims of their hubris. This is by and large independent of political leanings.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#37

Post by 0x262d »

Buldak wrote: post #13
petermcneeley wrote: post #6

An article brought to you by an institute that believes in: "There are certain permanent things in society: the health of the family, inherited political institutions that insure a measure of order and justice and freedom, a life of diversity and independence, a life marked by widespread possession of private property. These permanent things guarantee against arbitrary interference by the state. These are all aspects…

Yes, it's hard not to think that the subtext here is a kind of quietism in service to the status quo.

the only purpose of this article is to shut off the possibility of an alternative to the status quo.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#38

Post by ergothus »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #29
davidivadavid wrote: post #14

This amounts to arguing about definitions and it doesn't seem like the article proposes anything of real substance. In the introduction to The Utopia Reader , a compendium of utopian and dystopian literature, the following definitions are given: * Utopianism—social dreaming * Utopia—a nonexistent society described in detail and normally located in time and space * Eutopia or positive utopia—a utopia that the author i…

You're the one arguing definitions. This author is trying to make an actual argument, and you've introduced a non-standard vocabulary, and are judging the argument _with your vocabulary instead of the definitions the author made quite clear_. How do you pronounce "Utopia"? How does it differ from "Eutopia"? Your definitions are fine, internally consistent, and quite clear for serious in-depth discussion... But they a…

> This author is trying to make an actual argument

Is there such an attempt? I see a lot of discussion of Dystopia, a few restatements of the thesis, but I don't actually see anything attempting to prove the thesis. The logic is "Not everything bad is a dystopia. Dystopias really suck. Trust me, Dystopias come about from trying to achieve utopia.

The author DOES distinguish speculation from perfection, so your criticism of the above post is correct, but even with the author's provided definition, I don't actually see any ARGUMENT being made, just a claim with some disconnected but true statements around it.

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#39

Post by GauntletWizard »

wenc wrote: post #26
alexashka wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Utopias are not entities that do anything. It's a word, created to describe an imaginary island, by a fiction writer. [0] Who is optimizing metrics to an extreme, where did you get that definition? [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/utopia

From your linked definition, it is a word "coined by Thomas More (and used as title of his book, 1516, about an imaginary island enjoying the utmost perfection in legal, social, and political systems" Taken metaphorically, a utopia is a idealized state of affairs where perfection (optimality) is reached. This state of affairs is imaginary however, because the world in which such a perfection is attained is also imagi…

There was a discussion of the SR-71 a few months ago that I found excellent. One of the comments took the opposition approach - The SR-71 was an engineering failure, because it leaked fuel, it required tight tolerances and most of the parts were thrown out because of it, etc [1].

I think it's a correct view. I think they're absolutely right about the SR-71. I posted a comment arguing they're wrong, because I think my comment is also a correct view. The SR-71 is the wrong plane for many, many applications. For the few that needed it, it was an absolutely vital tradeoff. Engineering isn't just about optimizing a metric. It's about optimizing many metrics, and finding a set of tradeoffs that fits. It's about finding the point on the line where people are satisfied.

Perhaps - Engineering is about finding the proper fitness functions, and then finding the optimal solution from there. Both are hard problems. Having the right fitness function/requirements gathering is the most screwed up stage of any development, and software developers are no exception, but I feel our industry has gotten away with a lot. Optimizing globally is often an unbounded problem, so finding efficient approximations (like evolutionary algorithms or hill climbing functions) is often the right approach - But that doesn't mean you shouldn't try for the correct one.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17675996

Re: Dystopia Is What Results from the Attempt to Create Utopia

#40

Post by narrator »

Dystopia is when you get frustrated with your societal model not producing appropriate outcome metrics and up the learning rate of the algorithm so it happens faster and remove a lot of democratic metrics like elections that are hard to tweak effectively and get a horrible overfit to your small training set.
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