Visualizing Utopia

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

I previously wrote that [describing utopia tends to go badly](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-describing-utopia-goes-badly/) - largely because utopia descriptions naturally sound:

* **Dull,** due to the lack of conflict and challenge. (This is the main pitfall noted in previous work on this subject,[1](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#fn1) but I don't think it's the only one.)

* **Homogeneous:** it's hard to describe a world of people living very differently from each other. To be concrete, utopias tend to emphasize specific lifestyles, daily activities, etc. - and this ends up sounding totalitarian.

* **Alien:** anything too different from the status quo is going to sound uncomfortable, at least to many.

In this post, I'm going to present a **framework for visualizing utopia that tries to avoid those problems**. Later this week I'll share some links (some from readers) on more specific utopias.

(Why care? See the beginning of the [previous post](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-describing-utopia-goes-badly/), or the [end of this one](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#so).)

The basic approach
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I'm not going to try for a highly specific, tangible vision. Other attempts to do that feel dull, homogeneous and alien, and I expect to hit the same problem. I'm also not going to stick to a totally [abstract](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-describing-utopia-goes-badly/#abstract-utopias) assertion of freedom and choice.

Instead, I'm going to lay out a set of possible utopias that **span a spectrum from *conservative* (anchored to the status quo) to *radical* (not anchored).**

* At one end of the spectrum will be a *conservative* utopia that is presented as "the status quo plus a contained, specific set of changes." It will avoid sounding dull, homogeneous and alien, because it will be presented as largely similar to today's world. And it will be a clear improvement on the status quo. But it won't sound amazing or inspiring.

* At the other end will be a *radical* utopia that doesn't aim to resemble today's world at all. It will sound more "perfect," but also more scary in the usual ways.

**I don't expect any single point on my spectrum to sound very satisfying, but I hope to help the reader find (and visualize) *some point on this spectrum* that they (the reader) would find to be a satisfying utopia.** The idea is to give a feel for the tradeoff between these two ends of the spectrum (conservatism and radicalism), so that envisioning utopia feels like a matter of finding the right balance rather than like a sheer impossibility.

I'll first lay out the two extreme ends of the spectrum: the maximally "conservative" utopia, and the maximally "radical" one. I'll then describe a couple of possible intermediate points.

Note that I will generally be assuming as much wealth, technological advancement and policy improvements as are needed to make everything I describe feasible. I believe that everything described below has at least a decent chance of eventually being feasible (nothing contradicts the laws of physics, etc.) But I'm certainly not trying to say that any of these utopias could be achieved today. If something I describe sounds impossible to you, you may want to check out my discussions of [digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/).

The maximally conservative utopia: status quo minus clearly-bad things
----------------------------------------------------------------------

This isn't really a utopia in the traditional sense. It's trying to lay out one end of a spectrum.

Start here:

> In this world, everything is exactly like the status quo, with one exception: cancer does not exist.

It may not be very exciting, but it's hard to argue with the claim that this would be better than the world as it is today.

This is basically the most conservative utopia I can come up with, because the only change it proposes is a change that I think we can all get on board with, without hesitation. Most proposed changes to the world would make at least some people uncomfortable (no inequality? No sadness?), but this one shouldn't. If we got rid of cancer, we'd still have death, we'd still have suffering, we'd still have struggle, etc. - we just wouldn't have cancer.

You can almost certainly improve this utopia further by taking more baby-steps along the same lines. Make a list of things that - like cancer - you think are just unambiguously bad, and would be happy to see no more of in the world. Then define utopia as "exactly like the status quo, except that all the things on my list don't exist." Examples could include:

* Other diseases

* Hunger

* Non-consensual violence (not including e.g. martial arts, in which two people agree to a set of rules that allows specific forms of violence for a set period of time).

* Racism, sexism, etc.

"Status quo, minus everything on my list" is a highly conservative utopia. Unlike literary utopias, it should be fairly clear that this world would be a major improvement on the world as it is.

I note that in my [survey on fictional utopias](https://holdenkarnofsky.wordpress.com/utopia-paper-2017/), it was much easier to get widespread agreement (high average scores) for *properties* of utopia than for *full utopian visions.* For example, while no utopia description scored as high as 4 on a 5-point scale, the following properties all scored 4.5 or higher: "no one goes hungry", "there is no violent conflict," "there is no discrimination by race or gender."

The maximally radical utopia: pure pleasure
-------------------------------------------

All the way at the radical end of the spectrum, there's a utopia that makes no attempt at preserving anything about the status quo, and instead consists of **everyone being in a state of maximum pleasure/happiness at all times.**

There are a number of ways of fleshing this out, as discussed in [this Slate Star Codex post](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/01/28/wirehead-gods-on-lotus-thrones/). The happiness could be a stupor of simple pleasure, or it could be "equanimity, acceptance and enlightenment," or it could be some particular nice moment repeated over and over again forever (with no memory of the past available to make it boring).

This "maximally radical utopia" is rarely even discussed in conversations about utopia, since it is so unappealing to so many. (Indeed, I think many see it as a dystopia). It's off-the-charts dull, homogeneous, and alien. I provide it here not as a tangible proposal that I expect to appeal to readers, but as a way of filling out the full spectrum from conservative to radical utopia.

An in-between point, erring conservative
----------------------------------------

Here's a world that I'd be excited about, compared to today, even if I think we can do better (and I do).

> In this world, technological advances have made it possible to create much more ambitious art, entertainment, and games than is possible today.
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> * One artistic creation might work as follows. The "viewer" enters into a realistic, detailed virtual recreation of some time in the 20th century. They experience the first ~50 years of a particular (fictional) person's life. Around age 25, they fall in love and get married. For the next 25 years, their marriage goes through many ups and downs, but overall is a highlight of their life. Then around age 50, their relationship slowly and painfully falls apart. Shortly following their divorce, they wander into a bar playing live music, and they hear a song playing that perfectly speaks to the moment. At this point, the simulation ends. This piece is referred to a "song," and evaluated as such.
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> * Another artistic creation might have a similarly elaborate setup for a brilliantly made and perfectly timed meal, and be referred to as a "sandwich."
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> * There are also "games" in virtual environments. In these games, people can compete using abilities that would be unrealistic in today's world. For example, there might be a virtual war that is entirely realistic, except that it poses no actual danger to the participants (people who are injured or killed simply exit the "game"). There might be a virtual NBA game in which each participant plays as an NBA player, and experiences what it's like to have that player's abilities.
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> Everyone in this world has the ability to:
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> * Subsist in good health, unconditionally. There is no need to work for one's food or medical care, and [violence does no permanent damage](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/#virtual-reality-and-control-of-the-environment).
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> * Have physical autonomy over their body and property. Nobody can be physically forced by someone else to do anything, with the exception that people are able to restrict who is able to enter their space and use their art/entertainment/games.
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> * Spend their time designing art, entertainment, or games, or collaborating with others designing these things, or engage in scientific inquiry about whatever mysteries of the universe exist at the time.
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> * Spend their time consuming art, entertainment, games or scientific insights produced by others.
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> * Additionally, everyone in this world has a level of property and resources that allows them to be materially comfortable and make art/entertainment/games/science along the lines of the above, if they choose to. That said, people are able to trade relatively freely, subject to not going below some minimal level of resources. People who work on creating popular art/entertainment/games/insights accumulate more resources that they're able to use for more creation, promotion, etc.
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> In this world, the following patterns emerge:
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> * There are a wide variety of different types of "careers." Some people focus on producing art/entertainment/games/scientific insight. Others participate in supporting others' work: promoting it, managing its finances, performing needed repairs, etc. (Creators who can't get others excited enough to help them with these parts of the job just have to do these parts of the job themselves.) Others are pure "consumers" and do not take part in creation. Between these options, **there is some option that is at least reasonably similar to the majority of careers that exist today.*** There is a wide variety of tastes. Some art/entertainment/games/lines of inquiry have large, passionate fan bases, but none are universally liked. As a result, people have arguments about the relative merits of different art/entertainment/games/insights; they experience competitiveness, jealousy, etc.; they often (though by no means always) make friends with people who share their tastes, make fun of those who don't, etc.
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> * Many people want to be involved in creating art/entertainment/games with a large, passionate fan base. And many people want to be a well-regarded critic, or repair person, or "e-athlete" (someone who performs well in a particular game), or scientist. Not everyone succeeds at these ambitions. As a result, many people experience nervousness, disappointment, etc. about their careers.
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> * **Most of today's dynamics with meeting romantic partners, raising families, practicing religion, etc. still seem applicable here.**
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This utopia is significantly more "radical" than the maximally conservative utopia. It envisions getting rid of significant parts of today's economy. I imagine that doing so would change the political stakes of many things as well: there would still be inequality and unfairness, but nobody would be reliant on either the government or any company for the ability to be comfortable, healthy and autonomous.

But it's still a fairly "conservative" utopia in the sense that it **seeks to preserve most of the things about today's world that we *might* miss if we changed them.** There is still property, wealth and inequality; there is still competition; most of the social phenomena that we're accustomed to still exist (jealousy, pettiness, mockery, cliques, etc.) Not all of the careers that exist today exist in this world, but it's hopefully still pretty easy to picture a job that is "similar enough" to any job you'd hope would stick around. **Whatever kind of life you have and would like to keep, it's hopefully possible to see how you could keep most if not all of what you like about it in this world.**

(I expect some readers to instinctively react, "It's nice that there would still be jobs in this world, but working on art, entertainment, games and science isn't good enough - I want to do something more meaningful than that, like saving lives." But most people today *don't* work on something like saving lives, and as far as I can tell, the ones that do aren't more happy or fulfilled in any noticeable way than the ones that don't.)

I expect most readers will see this world as far short of the ideal. But I also expect that most will see how this world - or something like it - could be a fairly robust improvement on the status quo.

Another in-between point, erring more radical
---------------------------------------------

> This world is similar to the one described [just above](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#an-in-between-point-erring-conservative). The main difference is that, through meditation and other practices like it, nearly everyone has achieved significantly greater emotional equanimity.
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People consume and produce advanced art/entertainment/games/science as in the [above world](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#an-in-between-point-erring-conservative), and most of the careers that exist today have some reasonably close analogue. However, people experience far less suffering when they fail to achieve their goals, experience far less jealousy of others, are less inclined to look down on others, have generally more positive attitudes, etc.

This utopia takes a deliberate step in the radical direction: it cuts down on some of the conflict- and suffering-driven aspects of life that were preserved in the previous one. In my view, it rather predictably has a bit more of the dull, homogeneous, alien feel.

A "meta" option
---------------

This one leans especially hard on things [digital people](https://www.cold-takes.com/how-digital-people-could-change-the-world/) would be able to do.

> In this world, there is a waiting room with four doors. Each door goes to a different self-contained mini-world.
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> Door #1 goes to the [maximally conservative utopia](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#the-maximally-conservative-utopia): just like today's world, minus, say, disease, hunger, non-consensual violence, racism, and sexism.
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> Door #2 goes to the [maximally radical utopia](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#the-maximally-radical-utopia): everyone lives in constant pleasure (or "equanimity, acceptance and enlightenment"), untroubled by boredom or material needs.
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> Door #3 goes to the [moderately conservative utopia](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#an-in-between-point-erring-conservative) described above. Material needs are met; people produce and consume advanced art, entertainment, games and science; there are many different careers; and most of the careers and social dynamics that exist today have some reasonably close analogue.
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> Door #4 goes to the [moderately radical utopia](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#another-in-between-point-erring-more-radical) described above. It is similar to Door #3 but with greater emotional equanimity, less suffering, less jealousy, more positive attitudes, etc.
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> Each citizen of this world starts in the waiting room and chooses:
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> 1 - A door to walk through.
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> 2 - A protocol for reevaluating the choice. For example, they might choose: "I will remember at all times that I have the ability to return to the waiting room and choose another door, and I can do so at any time by silently reciting my pass code." Or they might choose: "I will not remember that I have the ability to return, but after 10 years, I will find myself in the waiting room again, with the option to return to my life as it was or choose another door."[2](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#fn2)
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> Their natural lifespans are at least long enough to have about two 60-70 year tries behind each door if they so choose. (Perhaps much more.)
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> Finally: anyone can design an alternate utopia to be added to the list of four. This alternate utopia can itself be a "meta-utopia," e.g., by containing its own version of the "waiting room" protocol.
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Now that I've laid out a few points on the spectrum, this utopia makes a move in the [abstract](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-describing-utopia-goes-badly/#abstract-utopias) direction, emphasizing choice.

Personally, I find this utopia to feel somewhat plausible and satisfying, even though I wouldn't say that of any of the four utopias that it's sampling from.

Is a utopia possible?
---------------------

As stated above, I don't expect any of the options I've given to sound like a fully satisfying utopia, to most readers. I expect each one to sound either too conservative (better than the status quo, but not good enough) or too radical (too much risk of losing parts of our current world that we value).

What I've tried to do is give the reader an idea of the full spectrum from maximally conservative to maximally radical utopias; convince them that there is an inherent tradeoff here, which can explain the difficulty of describing a fully satisfying utopia; and convince them that there is *some point*, somewhere on this spectrum, that they *would* find to be a satisfying utopia.

There isn't necessarily any particular world that *everyone could agree on* as a utopia. For example, some people think it is important to get rid of economic inequality, while some think it's important to preserve it. Perhaps a world where everyone chooses their own mini-world to enter (such as the "meta" option [above](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#a-meta-option))[3](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#fn3) could work for everyone. Perhaps not.

In real life, we aren't going to design a utopia from first principles and then build it. Instead, hopefully, we will improve the world slowly, iteratively, and via a large number of individual decisions. Maybe at some point it will become relatively easy for lots of people to attain vast emotional equanimity, and a large number but not everyone will, and then there will be a wave of sentiment that this is making the world worse and robbing it of a lot of what makes it interesting and valuable, and then some fraction of the world will decide not to go down that road.

This is the dynamic by which the world has gotten better to date. There have been lots of experiments that didn't take off, and some social changes that look far better in retrospect than someone from 300 years ago would have expected. Many things about the modern world would horrify someone from 300 years ago, but most changes have been fairly gradual, and someone who got to experience all 300 years one step at a time might feel okay about it.

To give an example from the more recent past:

* Social norms around sex have in some sense gotten closer to what *Brave New World* feared (see [previous discussion](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-describing-utopia-goes-badly/#utopia-as-dystopia)): many people in many contexts treat sex about as casually as the *Brave New World* characters do.

* But in other respects, we haven't moved much in the *Brave New World* direction - people who want to be monogamous still don't generally face pressure (and certainly not coercion) against doing so - and overall it seems that the changes are more positive than negative.

* This is consistent with the general patterns discussed above: many changes sound bad when we imagine everyone making them, but are better when different people get to make different choices and move a step at a time.

* I think this explains some of why "radical" utopias don't appeal: it seems entirely justified to resist the idea of a substantially different world when one hasn't been through an iterative process for arriving at it.

I consider the real-life method for "choosing utopia" to be much better than the method of dreaming up utopias and arguing about them. So if, today, you can start to dimly imagine the outline of a utopia you'd find satisfying, I'd think you should assume that if all goes well (<- [far from a given](https://www.cold-takes.com/making-the-best-of-the-most-important-century/)!) the real-life utopia will be far better than that.

So?
---

Regardless of the ability or inability to agree on a utopian vision, I expect that most people reading this will agree that the world can and should get better year by year. I also expect them to agree on many of the specifics of what "better" means in the short run: less poverty, less disease, less (and less consequential) racism and sexism, etc.

So why do our views on utopias matter? And in particular, what good has this piece done if it hasn't even laid out a specific vision that I expect to be satisfying to most people?

I care about this topic for a couple of reasons.

First, I think **short-term metrics for humanity are not enough.** While I strongly support aiming for less poverty every year, I think we should also place enormous value on humanity's long-run future.

Part of why this matters is that I believe [the long-run future could come surprisingly quickly](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/). But even if we put that aside, we should value preventing the worst catastrophes far more than we would if we only cared about those directly affected - because we should believe that a glorious future for humanity is possible, and that losing it is a special kind of tragedy.

When every attempt to describe that glorious future sounds unappealing, it's tempting to write off the whole exercise and turn one's attention to nearer-term and/or less ambitious goals. I've hypothesized [why attempts to describe a glorious future tend not to sound good](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-describing-utopia-goes-badly/) - and further hypothesized that this does *not* mean the glorious future isn't there. We may not be able to describe it satisfyingly now, or to agree on it now, and we may have to get there one step at a time - but it is a real possibility, and we should care a lot about things that threaten to cut off that possibility.

Second, I believe that **increasing humanity's long-run knowledge and empowerment has a lot of upside ([as well as downside](https://www.cold-takes.com/transformative-ai-timelines-part-1-of-4-what-kind-of-ai/#misaligned-ai-mysterious-potentially-dangerous-objectives)).**

There is a school of thought that sees scientific and technological advances as neutral, or even negative. The idea is that even if we had all the power in the world, we couldn't use it to make the world *better*. Like the citizens of *Brave New World*, we're our own prisoners: if we successfully solve some problems (such as making ourselves happier) we'll create just as many to offset them (such as by losing the conflict and complexity that give life meaning). Some people concede that the poverty reduction we've seen to date is good, but think that once we reach a certain level of wealth, further advances won't help.

I think this is a tempting worldview, in an age when most futurism is found in fiction, and the dystopias are acclaimed masterworks while the utopias are creepy slogs. But ultimately I think this dynamic tells us more about the challenges of using our imagination than it does about the reality of utopia.

Personally, I don't consider myself able to imagine a utopia very effectively. But I do feel convinced at a gut level that with time and incremental steps, we can build one. I think this particular "faith in the unseen" is ultimately rational and correct. I hope I've made a case that the oddities of describing a utopia need not stop us from achieving one.

**Next in series:** [Utopia links](https://www.cold-takes.com/utopia-links/)

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Footnotes
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1. E.g., <https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/can-socialists-be-happy/>  [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#fnref1)- People who choose to remember the existence of the waiting room aren't able to tell - or at least, aren't reliably able to convince - people who don't, to protect the latter's choice not to remember. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#fnref2)- See also [this post on the "Archipelago" idea](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/06/07/archipelago-and-atomic-communitarianism/). [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9ad32442-b08c-49dc-bbc4-5d806cbdd737/#fnref3)


TV shows I wish I could watch: Intergalactic Immigration Wars

*Inspired by [One Billion Americans](https://smile.amazon.com/One-Billion-Americans-Thinking-Bigger-ebook/dp/B082ZR6827), which I have “[read](https://www.cold-takes.com/honesty-about-reading/).” (I [know the title and what people say about it](https://www.cold-takes.com/reading-books-vs-engaging-with-them/))*

I want to watch a space opera with a number of interplanetary civilizations locked in a centuries-long death match, knowing that whoever can wipe the others out will control the cosmos forever, and knowing that their odds of supremacy pretty much boil down to recruiting scientists, soldiers, etc. to leave the other civilizations and immigrate to theirs.[1](#fn1)

So like: the Va-arlox spend most of their energy thinking about how they can make their planets more welcoming and appealing for the J’ghaar, how they can create enticing compensation and benefits offers, how they can phrase their civilizational values and goals in terms that J’ghaar can feel OK with, how to run successful missions to make friends with J’ghaar and convince them to relocate to Va-arlox planets, etc. etc. When they get a bunch of J’ghaar to immigrate, they high-five knowing that they’ve just pumped up their long-term prospects of having more scientists, more soldiers, etc. and winning the interplanetary war.

(Hmm, minus the war part, this may be a world I’d like to live in as well as a show I’d like to watch.)

The battle scenes are pretty short. Whoever’s ahead in immigration generally has better and more spaceships, so they win the battle pretty easily.

My favorite episode is the one where a few Va-arlox fall into a wormhole and end up on today’s Earth, in the U.S. They visit the Pentagon and initially feel right at home with all the people furiously brainstorming about how to achieve American hegemony over China, Russia, etc. But then they ask some curious questions like “So how are you getting more Chinese people to relocate to America?” and they hear “Oh that’s not the goal at all, in fact we turn away almost everyone who wants to come here.” And they’re SO confused, the look on their faces is the best.[2](#fn2)

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Footnotes
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1. If you’re asking “Wait, why would someone immigrate to an alien civilization that is enemies with their home civilization?” think about real life instead of existing sci-fi shows. This is totally something individuals would do. [↩](#fnref1)- I focused on military consequences of immigration because sci-fi shows are usually about war, not because I think this is the only or best reason to increase immigration. [↩](#fnref2)
For email filter: florpschmop


Why Describing Utopia Goes Badly

*Click lower right to download or find on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, etc.*

A kind of discourse that seems pretty dead these days is: describing and/or debating potential utopias.

By "potential utopias," I specifically mean **visions of potential futures much better than the present,** taking advantage of hopefully greater wealth, knowledge, technology, etc. than we have today. (I *don't* mean proposals to create alternative communities today, or claims about what could be achieved with policy changes today,[1](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9e5d8d96-ab0e-40a7-85a6-57202e9cd7e1/#fn1) though those can be interesting too.)

It seems to me that there's little-to-no discussion or description of potential utopias (there's much more attention to potential dystopias), and even the idea of utopia is widely mocked. (More on this below.) As someone [interested in taking a very long-run perspective on humanity's past and future](https://www.cold-takes.com/why-talk-about-10-000-years-from-now/), this bothers me:

* When thinking about the value of [ensuring that humanity continues to exist](https://theprecipice.com/) and/or [successfully navigating what could be the most important century](https://www.cold-takes.com/most-important-century/), it seems important to consider *how good things could be if they go well*, not just how bad things could be if they go poorly.
	+ It seems pretty self-evident to me that failing to really consider both sides will skew our decision making in some ways.

	+ In particular, I think it's liable to make us *fail to feel the full importance of what's at stake.* If the idea of describing or visualizing utopia seems absurd, it's more tempting than it should be to write the whole question of humanity's long-term trajectory off and think only about shorter-term matters.* Speaking more vaguely, it just doesn't seem great to have very-long-run goals be absent from discussion about how things are going in the world and what ought to change. I know there's an argument that "The long-run future is too hard to reason about, so we should focus on the next few years," but I also resonate with the general idea that "[plans are useless, planning is indispensable](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/18/planning/)."

Below, I'll:

* Describe some of my own experiences looking for discussions of potential utopias, and the general contempt I perceive for such things in modern discourse.

* Hypothesize that one of the main blockers to describing utopia is that it's *inherently difficult to describe* in an appealing way. Pretty much by their nature, utopias tend to sound *dull* (due to the lack of conflict), *homogeneous* (since it's hard to describe a world of people living very differently from each other) and *alien* (anything very different from the status quo is just going to rub lots of people the wrong way).

* Look at *Brave New World* - which presents a "supposed utopia" as a dystopia - through this lens.

In the next post, I'll give a framework for visualizing utopia that tries to avoid the problems above.

Utopia is very "out"
--------------------

A few years ago, I tried to collect different visions for utopia from existing writings, and use Mechanical Turk polling to see how broadly appealing they are. (My results are available [here](https://holdenkarnofsky.wordpress.com/utopia-paper-2017/).) I learned a number of things from this exercise:

* I looked for academic fields studying utopia. I hoped I would find something in the social sciences: for example, analyzing what sorts of social arrangements might work well under the assumption of greatly increased wealth and improved technology, or finding data on what sorts of utopian descriptions appeal most to different sorts of people. However, the only relevant-seeming academic field I found ([Utopian Studies](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopian_Studies)) is rooted in literary criticism rather than social science.

* The main compilation I found for utopian visions, Claeys and Sargent's [Utopia Reader](https://smile.amazon.com/Utopia-Reader-Gregory-Claeys/dp/0814715710?sa-no-redirect=1), is nearly all taken from fiction, especially the readings from the 20th century.

* Most of the "utopia" descriptions I found there are very old, and are quite unappealing to me personally. In recent work, dystopia seems to be a more common topic than utopia. (Both dystopia and utopia are both considered part of "utopian studies").

* When I tried testing the most appealing utopias - as well as some I came up with myself - by surveying several hundred people (using [Positly](https://www.positly.com/)), none scored very well. (Specifically, none got an average as high as 4 on a 5-point scale).

I attended the [Society for Utopian Studies](https://utopian-studies.org/)'s annual conference. This was the only conference I could find focused on discussing utopia or something like it. It was a very small conference, and most of the people there were literary scholars who had a paper or two on utopia but didn't heavily specialize in it. I asked a number of people why they had come, and a common answer was "It was close by."

A lot of the discussion revolved around dystopia. When people did discuss utopia, I often had the sense that "utopia" and "utopian" were being used as pejorative terms - their meaning was something like "Naive enough to think one knows how the world should be set up." One person said they associated the idea of utopia with totalitarianism.

Rather than excitement about imagining designing utopias, the main vibe was critical examination of why one would do such a thing. I think that people thought that the analysis I'd done - using opinion polling to determine whether any utopias are broadly appealing to people - was pretty goofy, though this could've been for a number of reasons (such as that it is).

In a world with a large thriving social science literature devoted to [auction theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auction_theory), shouldn't there be at least a few dozen papers engaged in a serious debate over where we're hoping our society is going to go in the long run?

Why is utopia unpopular?
------------------------

If I'm right that there's little-to-no serious discussion of potential utopias (and general contempt for the idea) in today's discourse, there are a number of possible reasons.

**"Ends justify the means" worries?** One reason might be the idea that aiming at utopia inevitably leads to "ends justify the means" thinking - e.g., believing that it's worth any amount of violence/foul play to get a chance at getting the world toward utopia.

* This might be based on the history of Communism in the 20th century and/or the writings of people like Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin.[2](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9e5d8d96-ab0e-40a7-85a6-57202e9cd7e1/#fn2)* I'm not sure I understand the reasoning here: it also seems "risky" in this way to have strong views (as many do) about how people should live their lives and what should be legal/illegal *today.* The idea that policy has *high stakes* and is worth fighting over seems pretty widespread, and not so scorned. (Also, Communism itself seems much more warmly received in modern discourse than utopia.)

* I'm generally against "ends justify the means" type reasoning, whether about the long-run future or about the present. Many people focused on the present seem happy with "ends justify the means" type reasoning. So it seems to me that this is just a different topic from visualizing utopia.

This piece focuses on a different possible reason for utopia's lack of popularity: past **attempts to describe utopia generally (universally?) sound unappealing.**

This isn't just because utopia makes poor entertainment. For example, take these excerpts from [Wikipedia's summary](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walden_Two) of *Walden Two*, a relatively recent and intellectually serious attempt at utopia:

> Each member of the community is apparently self-motivated, with an amazingly relaxed work schedule of only four average hours of work a day, directly supporting the common good and accompanied by the freedom to select a fresh new place to work each day. The members then use the large remainder of their time to engage in creative or recreational activities of their own choosing. The only money is a simple system of points that buys greater leisure periods in exchange for less desirable labor. Members automatically receive ample food and sleep, with higher needs met by nurturing one's artistic, intellectual, and athletic interests, ranging from music to literature and from chess to tennis.

In one sense, each individual sentence of this sounds like an improvement on life today, at least for most people. And yet when I *picture* this world, I can't help but picture ... seeing fake-seeming smiles everywhere? Half-heartedly playing tennis while thinking "What's it all for?" Feeling a vague, ominous pressure not to complain?

And it gets worse as it gets more specific:

> As Burris and the other visitors tour the grounds, they discover that certain radically unusual customs have been established in Walden Two, quite bizarre to the American mainstream, but showing apparent success in the long run. Some of these customs include that children are raised communally, families are non-nuclear ...

Now I'm picturing having to be friends with everyone I don't like ...

>  ... free affection is the norm ...

That isn't helping.

> ... and personal expressions of thanks are taboo.
>
>
>
> Such behavior is mandated by the community's individually self-enforced "Walden Code", a guideline for self-control techniques, which encourages members to credit all individual and other achievements to the larger community, while requiring minimal strain. Community counselors are also available to supervise behavior and assist members with better understanding and following the Code.
>
>

And now it's sounding like an almost dead ringer for Brave New World, a dystopia written more than 10 years prior. Actually, it doesn't sound all that far off from [One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND31PWVW-TQ&ab_channel=Parfien). I'm basically imagining a world where we're all either brainwashed, or forced into conformity while pretending that we're freely and enthusiastically doing what we please. The comments about "individual self-enforcement" and lack of physical force just make me imagine that all my cooperative friends and I don't know what the source of the enforcement is - only that everyone we know seems pretty scared to challenge whatever it is.

I don't think this is a one-off. I think it's a common pattern for descriptions of utopia to feel either vague and boring, or oppressive and scary, if not both. The utopian visions that I perceive as most successful today are probably *Star Trek* and Iain M. Bank's "Culture novels," but both of these seem to revolve around advanced civilizations interacting with hostile ones, such that most of the action is taking place in the context of the (very non-utopian) latter.

But the world *can* get better, right?

What is it about describing a vastly improved world that goes so badly?

Utopias sound dull, homogeneous and alien
-----------------------------------------

When one describes a utopia in great detail, I think there tend to be a few common ways in which it sounds unattractive: it tends to sound **dull, homogeneous and alien**.[3](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9e5d8d96-ab0e-40a7-85a6-57202e9cd7e1/#fn3)

**Dull.** Challenges and conflict are an important part of life. We derive satisfaction and meaning from overcoming them, or just contending with them.

Also, a major source of value in life is our relationships, and we often form and maintain relationships with the help of some form of conflict.

* Humor is an important part of relationships, and humor is often (usually?) at someone's expense.

* Working together to overcome challenges - or sometimes, just suffer them - can be an important way of bonding.

* If you read guides to writing fictional characters who seem relatable, compelling and interesting to the reader, you'll often see conflict and plot stressed as essential elements for accomplishing this.

When I think about my life as it is today, I think a lot about the things I'm hopeful and nervous about, and the past challenges I've overcome or gotten through. When I picture most utopias, there doesn't seem to be as much room for hope and fear and challenge. That may also mean that I'm instinctively imagining that my relationships aren't the same way they are now.

(This "dullness" property seems closest to the one gestured at in [George Orwell's 1948 essay on why utopias don't sound appealing](https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/can-socialists-be-happy/).)

**Homogeneous.** Today's world has a large number of different sorts of people living different sorts of lives. It's hard to paint a specific utopian picture that accommodates this kind of diversity.

A specific utopian picture tends to emphasize particular lifestyles, daily activities, etc. - but a particular lifestyle will generally appeal to only a small fraction of the population.

This might be why utopias often have a "totalitarian" feel. It might also explain why there is perhaps more literature on "dystopias calling themselves utopias" (e.g., *Brave New World, The Giver*) than on utopias. **If you take any significant change in lifestyle or beliefs and imagine it applying to *everyone*, it's going to sound like individual choice and diversity are greatly reduced.**

**Alien.** More generally, we tend to value a lot of things about our current lives - not all of which we can easily name or describe. The world we live in is rich and complex in a way that it's hard for a fictional world to be. So if we imagine ourselves in a fictional world, it's often going to feel like something is missing.

I think most people have a significant degree of "conservatism" (here I'm using the term broadly rather than in a US political context). We improve things one step at a time, rather than by tearing everything down and building it back up from scratch. When a world that is "too many steps away" is described, it's hard to picture it or be comfortable with it.

I think a description of today's world could easily sound like a horrible dystopia to the vast majority of people living 1000 years ago (or even 100 or 50), even though today's world is, in fact, [probably much better on the whole](https://www.cold-takes.com/has-life-gotten-better-the-post-industrial-era/).

Utopia as dystopia: Brave New World
-----------------------------------

It's interesting to look at a dystopian novel like *Brave New World* through the "dull, homogeneous and alien" lens.

*Brave New World* presents a world of advanced technology, great wealth, and peace, which has enabled society to arrange itself as it wants to. These are conditions that "ought to" engender a utopia - and in fact many of the characters loudly proclaim their world to be wonderful - but that instead results in a dystopia. This "utopia as dystopia" formula is reasonably common (other fiction in this vein includes *Gattaca* and *The Giver*).

*Brave New World* heavily emphasizes **homogeneity** and lack of choice:

* All children are genetically engineered and raised by the state.

* Not only has monogamy disappeared entirely, but it seems all romantic choice has disappeared as well:

>
> “Has any of you been compelled to live through a long time-interval between the consciousness of a desire and its fulfilment?”
>
>
>
> “Well,” began one of the boys, and hesitated.
>
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> “Speak up,” said the D.H.C. “Don’t keep his fordship waiting.”
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> “I once had to wait nearly four weeks before a girl I wanted would let me have her.”
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> “And you felt a strong emotion in consequence?”
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> “Horrible!”
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> “Horrible; precisely,” said the Controller. “Our ancestors were so stupid and short-sighted that when the first reformers came along and offered to deliver them from those horrible emotions, they wouldn’t have anything to do with them.”
>
>
>

There's also a strong **alien** vibe created by this sort of thing, as people disparage things that are extremely basic parts of our lives, like bad emotions. (The people in scenes like this also just talk in a very strange, wooden way.)

*Brave New World* also heavily emphasizes a **lack of conflict** (implying a **dull** world):

>
>
> “But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
>
>
>
>
> “In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”
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> “All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”
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> “Not to mention the right to grow old and ugly and impotent; the right to have syphilis and cancer; the right to have too little to eat; the right to be lousy; the right to live in constant apprehension of what may happen tomorrow; the right to catch typhoid; the right to be tortured by unspeakable pains of every kind.” There was a long silence.
>
>
>
> “I claim them all,” said the Savage at last. [Including typhoid! - Ed.]
>
>
>

***Brave New World* is often thought of as clever for the way it transmutes a utopia into a dystopia. But maybe that's the kind of transmutation that writes itself.** Describe a future world in enough detail and you already have people worried about dullness, homogeneity, and alienness. *Brave New World* amplifies this with various incredulous quotes to demonstrate just how homogeneous and conflict-free everything is, and by describing the government policies that enforce such a thing.

"Abstract" utopias
------------------

To lay out a utopian vision that avoids the problems above, one might try presenting a more abstract vision, emphasizing freedom and individual choice and avoiding giving a single "picture of what daily life is like." By being less specific, one can allow the reader to imagine that they'll keep a lot of what they like about their current life, instead of imagining that they'll be part of a homogeneous herd doing something very unfamiliar.

An example of this approach[4](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9e5d8d96-ab0e-40a7-85a6-57202e9cd7e1/#fn4) is Robert Nozick's *[Anarchy, State and Utopia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchy,_State,_and_Utopia).*[5](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9e5d8d96-ab0e-40a7-85a6-57202e9cd7e1/#fn5)To take Wikipedia's summary:

> The utopia ... is a meta-utopia, a framework for voluntary migration between utopias tending towards worlds in which everybody benefits from everybody else's presence ... The state protects individual rights and makes sure that contracts and other market transactions are voluntary ... the only form of social union that is possible [is] fully voluntary associations of mutual benefit ... In Nozick's utopia if people are not happy with the society they are in they can leave and start their own community.

I note that in [my paper](https://holdenkarnofsky.wordpress.com/utopia-paper-2017/), the utopia that scored best among survey respondents was reminiscent of Nozick's:

> Everything is set up to give people freedom. If you aren't interfering with someone else's life, you can do whatever you want. People can sell anything, buy anything, choose their daily activities, and choose the education their children receive. Thanks to advanced technology and wealth, in this world everyone can afford whatever they want (education, food, housing, entertainment, etc.) Everyone feels happy, wealthy, and fulfilled, with strong friendships and daily activities that they enjoy.

(This was not what I expected to be the highest-scoring option, given that the survey population overwhelmingly identifies with the political left. By contrast, the "government-focused utopia" I wrote performed horribly.)

But this kind of "abstract" utopia has another issue: it's hard to picture, so it isn't very compelling.

I think this points to a kind of **paradox at the heart of trying to lay out a utopian vision.** You can emphasize the abstract idea of choice, but then your utopia will feel very non-evocative and hard to picture. Or you can try to be more specific, concrete and visualizable. But then the vision risks feeling dull, homogeneous and alien.

Don't give up
-------------

My view is that utopias are hard to describe because of structural issues with describing them - not because the idea of utopia is fundamentally doomed.

 In the next post, [Visualizing Utopia](https://www.cold-takes.com/visualizing-utopia/), I try to back this up by offering a framework for visualizing utopia that hopefully resists - or at least addresses - the "dull, homogeneous, and alien" trap. [Click here to read it](https://www.cold-takes.com/visualizing-utopia/).

---

Footnotes
---------

1. I'd put [Utopia for Realists](https://smile.amazon.com/Utopia-Realists-Build-Ideal-World/dp/0316471895?sa-no-redirect=1) in the latter category. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9e5d8d96-ab0e-40a7-85a6-57202e9cd7e1/#fnref1)- I'm not deeply familiar with their arguments, but here are some links giving a feel for them:

	* <https://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2018/01/poppers-critique-of-utopianism-and.html>* <https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6754011-the-utopian-attempt-to-realize-an-ideal-state-using-a>* <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13698230008403313>  [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9e5d8d96-ab0e-40a7-85a6-57202e9cd7e1/#fnref2)

- Some people try to get around this by describing utopia more abstractly. I'll address that later. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9e5d8d96-ab0e-40a7-85a6-57202e9cd7e1/#fnref3)

- Another example: Nick Bostrom's [Letter from Utopia](https://www.nickbostrom.com/utopia.html). [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9e5d8d96-ab0e-40a7-85a6-57202e9cd7e1/#fnref4)

- I am not saying that Nozick's utopian vision is fully satisfying, and I certainly don't agree with Nozick's politics overall. I'm just noting that it has some appealing features relative to the more specific utopias discussed above. [↩](https://www.cold-takes.com/p/9e5d8d96-ab0e-40a7-85a6-57202e9cd7e1/#fnref5)


Candidate for “highest-stakes question of the next several months” (rare hot take)

**Will the FDA (A) treat Omicron-specific booster vaccines like flu shots, or will it (B) impose more requirements and slow them down?**

So far, it looks like the default is (B), and it also looks like Omicron has a **significant chance of making the coming months at least as painful as the debut of COVID-19** (due to its high infectiousness and potential for major vaccine escape). The hypothesis here is that switching to (A) is the most promising single way to reduce that chance, by getting a fully effective vaccine for Omicron ASAP.

There's lots of uncertainty - Omicron might turn out to be mild (at least in vaccinated people), might turn out to be less scary than expected in other ways (less infectiousness, less vaccine escape), or manufacturing might be a big enough bottleneck that we're too slow even under option (A). But still, when you think about how bad a redux of early 2020 would be, (A) vs. (B) seems to have massive stakes riding on it. **If there’s anything you can imagine yourself doing to move us from a default of (B) to a world of (A), I think it would be good to drop whatever else is on your plate long enough to do that.**

---

You're done with the important part of the post. Here's a bit more detail
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

[This post from a Metaculus forecaster](https://www.metaculus.com/notebooks/8801/omicron-what-we-know-what-to-expect--what-to-do/) (“one of the best Covid forecasters there is” according to [this tweet](https://twitter.com/CharlesD353/status/1466982986692403206), which might be based on some quantitative metrics I haven’t easily found or might just not be right) reasons in detail to claims very much like the ones above. In particular, it concludes:

> This variant is much fitter than Delta and, as such, will overtake it almost everywhere by sometime in early 2022. Omicron will result in a much greater decrease in vaccine efficacy than anything we've seen so far. Vaccines will probably end up being updated to target Omicron, but even under optimistic scenarios Omicron-specific boosters won't arrive until sometime after the first Omicron-driven wave hits. Omicron-driven waves will peak fast and high. There is good reason to think the drop in vaccine efficacy against severe disease won't be nearly as drastic as the decrease in efficacy against infection or symptomatic disease, but it will still be a large drop …
>
>
>
>
> By far my most important recommendation is the one that is unfortunately the least likely to be heeded: given what we already know, vaccine manufacturers should immediately switch all production to begin making Omicron-specific doses — and governments should commit in advance (now!) to buying these doses. However, this doesn't seem like it'll happen …
>
>

Here are thoughts from the excellent [Michael Mina](https://twitter.com/michaelmina_lab) over email:
> We should do the least necessary checks of the new variant vaccines. Put them into 20 people and make sure they elicit the desired immune responses. Do NOT do any sort of efficacy study and these vaccines should be fast tracked like flu shots.
>
>
> Unfortunately FDA has essentially no ability to balance the cost of slowness and the cost of inaction with the benefit of action. The FDA viewpoint is that inaction and whatever cost comes from that is not on them. They are used to a system where it’s better to do nothing than act with any uncertainty. But that’s Bc the FDA is not designed for emergencies. It just isn’t. It is horribly inefficient and unable to effectively make calculations around public health vs medicine.
>
>
> To this day we still do not have a regulatory framework for products that have as a base use one of public health. Vaccines elicit ideas of public health but ultimately are evaluated and regulated as medicine. As far as safety this is important. But as far as efficacy and the regulatory approaches and data required, it’s entirely around individual benefit. Which at this point I hope everyone recognizes that’s the wrong angle in a pandemic.
>
>
> For example, we knew that a single dose vaccine would yield 90% or more protection from severe disease for at least a few months, yet we withheld first doses in order to give people second doses and importantly we have those second doses in a suboptimal manner just Bc that’s the hard data we had. But the soft data (the data from decades of immunology research across the world) allowed us to know that spacing the vaccines months apart would have been better both for individuals and for public health. We didn’t do that.
>
>

I’m not going to give a more detailed defense of my position for now - this is a snap take, and I expect that it will hold up pretty well if one digs into the claims, but I don’t have the time to write it up thoroughly and still put it out quickly. I will just give a couple more links to clarify exactly what is at stake in the “flu-shot-style approval vs. slower approval” distinction.

* This [recent WSJ article](https://www.wsj.com/articles/fda-aims-for-quick-review-of-omicron-vaccines-and-drugs-11638532801) talks about studying the vaccines in “hundreds of subjects” for immune response, and also mentions that “The FDA is still determining how much the effectiveness of current vaccines would need to drop to merit authorizing new ones.” The overall process is expected to take over 3 months (it's unclear how much of that is approval vs. manufacturing).

* This is a faster process than for the original vaccines, but it is **nowhere near the efficiency of the flu shot process,** which [goes like this](https://www.cdc.gov/flu/prevent/vaccine-selection.htm): the latest flu variants are used for a vaccine, and the vaccine is approved. No studies on whether it beats last year’s shot, no studies on immune response. (Apparently it takes 6 months to scale up manufacturing for flu shots, which is longer than COVID-19 boosters should take.)
* A big question I haven't run to ground is how much delay we're stuck with (regardless of approval) due to manufacturing scale-up. I wouldn't guess it's a huge delay since vaccines are already being made at scale, but regardless, it seems like the fastest possible version is the one where vaccines are pre-ordered yesterday.

Treat new boosters like a flu shot, and we might roll them out in time. Approve them more slowly than that, and it seems like we're much more likely to be dealing with something that looks more contagious than Delta, with significant vaccine escape, and targeted vaccines arriving too late. So if you can do something to push toward the former, please do.

P.S. Most people who write takes like this get flooded with "You’re not a doctor, you don’t know what you’re talking about" type reactions. I doubt my readers are going to do that, but if you’re curious about why I feel OK saying the above as a non-expert, it is basically that over the course of this pandemic, I have decided to [trust specific people and types of people](https://www.cold-takes.com/minimal-trust-investigations/#navigating-trust) more than the FDA/CDC/etc., based both on comparing what I could understand of their reasoning and on seeing how things played out over time. I'm not certain, but I'm comfortable making some bets. If you think this is ridiculous, you might be interested in [this website](https://www.twitter.com) that provides a handy way of insulting me in public - go check it out!


No need to click

I hate when people share articles based only on the headline. My rough guess is that this is 90% of article shares, even when the sharer [thinks they've read the article](https://www.cold-takes.com/honesty-about-reading/); [NPR's April Fools joke](https://gawker.com/npr-pulled-a-brilliant-april-fools-prank-on-people-who-1557745710) is a classic riff on this phenomenon.

But if you're into sharing articles based on headlines, here's a treat: a set of headlines that are so specific, wonderful and (as confirmed by me) supported by the main text that you can go ahead and enjoy them without clicking.

[Creator of McAfee Software has Disguised Himself as a Guatemalan Street Hawker with a Limp in Order to Avoid Police Seeking Him for Questioning in Murder of Neighbor](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9688101/John-McAfee-disguised-as-Guatemalan-street-hawker-with-a-limp.html).

['Creature' terrorizing Poland town turns out to be a croissant stuck in a tree](https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/creature-tree-poland-croissant-animal-control)

[Pig in Australia Steals 18 Beers from Campers, Gets Drunk, Fights Cow](http://gadling.com/2013/09/10/australian-pig-steals-beer/)

[Dwayne Johnson Rips Off Front Gate with His Bare Hands to Get to Work](https://people.com/movies/dwayne-johnson-rips-off-front-gate-bare-hands/).

[90-Year-Old Tortoise Whose Legs Were Eaten By Rats Gets Prosthetic Wheels And Goes Twice As Fast](http://www.boredpanda.com/90-year-old-tortoise-wheels-twice-as-fast-jude-ryder-wales/)

![Turtle with wheels for legs](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/2021/07/wheelturtle.png "image_tooltip")

[A Dutch metro train was saved from disaster Monday when it smashed through a safety barrier but was prevented from plummeting into water by a sculpture of a whale tail.](https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1205573.shtml) (OK, that one is the first sentence, not the headline)

![Photo of a train teetering over the track, supported by a sculpture of a whale tail](https://www.cold-takes.com/content/images/size/w1000/2021/07/whaletail.jpeg "image_tooltip")

 Got more in this genre? [Send them in](https://forms.gle/J4yCHcRL8VAC6mKR6).