Status Updates From The Age of Em: Work, Love, ...

Is this a good or bad scenario? Would we want to encourage or discourage having this world replace our world? What small changes might make this world better?

Even though the universe is almost 13 billion years old, everything we've seen outside Earth looks completely dead. We continue to have great success in explaining what we see by assuming that everything outside Earth has always been completely dead. If there are any civilizations out there more advanced than us, they have not yet made a noticeable difference to anything we can see.

A recent study found that group intelligence is better predicted by individual social sensitivity, such as abilities to read internal attitudes from facial expressions and the ability to take turns in conversation, rather than by the average or maximum of individual intelligence as usually defined.

we often use a concept of "smart" intended to control for all of these effects.

Religions today often use a talk-to-God-in-your-head strategy to encourage trust in God.

In lower class cultures, people more often demonstrate physical strength and toughness via dangerous dares, fistfights, and excessive drinking. People in these cultures also tend to make more direct and aggressive verbal challenges, and to use more swearing, insults, teasing, and taunting.

Similarly, upper classes have often nurtured polite language, avoidance of direct insult, and a heightened sensitivity and squeamishness on topics such as sex or excrement.

Traditioanlly, lower classes did hard physical labor, and as a result tended to wear tough work clothes, and had skin that was callused, tanned, and wrinkled. The upper classes tended to show that they were too rich or skilled, for such work by wearing fragile clothes and having soft, smooth, untanned skin.

Rituals and religion have long been used to help people accept their social roles, and to mark key transitions between such roles. So religious-style rituals, perhaps with music and dance, may be especially useful in helping ems to copy, end and retire.

Further doctrinal clarifications may be required because ems on average are much smarter than ordinary humans, and may not tolerate blatantly illogical or contradictory religious doctrines.

However, today more religious geographic regions are less innovative, and more religious individuals hold views less favorable to innovation. So if the innovation effect is important enough, ems will be less religious; otherwise they'll be more religious.

ems are also likely to be more farmer-like. Because of this, ems tend to believe more in good and evil, and in powerful gods who enforce social norms. All of these considerations suggest that ems are more religious.

Further doctrinal clarifications may be required because ems on average are much smarter than ordinary humans, and may not tolerate blatantly illogical or contradictory religious doctrines.

However, today more religious geographic regions are less innovative, and more religious individuals hold views less favorable to innovation. So if the innovation effect is important enough, ems will be less religious; otherwise they'll be more religious.

ems are also likely to be more farmer-like. Because of this, ems tend to believe more in good and evil, and in powerful gods who enforce social norms. All of these considerations suggest that ems are more religious.

Today, religious people tend to be happier, healthier, and more productive. They live longer, smoke less, exercise more, earn more, get and stay married more, commit less crime, use less illegal drugs, have more social connections, donate and volunteer more, and have more children. Intensity of religion and strength of religious belief tends to increase with age, especially on retirement.

Religions and their rituals often help to bond people to groups. By following seemingly arbitrary rules restricting behavior and beliefs, members can credibly signal their attachment to a group, relative to other groups with conflicting rules. Groups with stronger arbitrary rules tend to be more strongly attached to each other.

People, things, and beliefs that are the mutual focus of attention in such rituals acquire added importance and emotional energy, and become able to increase the passion of subsequent rituals.

During rituals, synchronized feelings and body movements of people who are adjacent to one another become especially potent. Such group synchronization shows participants that they feel similarly to others in the group, and know each other well.

Nostalgia, that is, a sentimental longing for one's past, fosters, a sense of being socially connected with others, and a sense of connection with one's past selves. This sense of being the same person over time increases well-being and perceptions of youthfulness.

Thusa niche ems are somewhat like people today who move to a new apartment every year, whereas mass ems are like people who only move 3 times in their lifetime. The latter identify more strongly with their homes.

We tend to create stronger memories about life events that we experience between the ages of 10 and 30, memories that we see as central to forming our identity.

Intellectual status has come much less from innovation, and much more from privately teaching and advising the powerful, from gaining wider attention via popular writings, from mastering classic literature in great detail, and from being the first to be visibly associated with new intellectual fashions.

The repairman who fixes a product might literally be the guy who invented it.

To preserve this illusion, ems may avoid looking carefully at the lives of retirees, just as most of us do today. Ems may also believe that outsiders or bosses have less influence on their activities than they actually do, to feel, like we do today, that they have higher status by feeling more in control of their lives.

Because marriages were central to farmer era property and production, parents often took control over and arranged their children's marriages. These parents usually took less control over their children's friends. For foragers, in contrast, less went wrong when pair bonds failed, and so foragers were freer to choose and break both friends and pair bonds than were farmers.

Geographic regions that are more religious are less innovative, and more religious individuals hold views less favorable to innovation.

Many see preventing popular revolutions as an important function of democracy. Over the last few centuries, a group popular enough to mount a revolution is usually also popular enough to win or dominate elections, as long as votes are distributed in at least rough proportion to the inclinations and abilities to participate in a revolution.

It is possible that clans of vert like-minded copies suffer more from "group think," that is, from converging too quickly on a consensus before considering other points of view.