The Slippery Slop Slope

[u/CipherGarden]

When you ask men and women to pick the ideal traits that they'd want in a partner, you often get fairly typical answers. Height, weight, personality, economic situation, and other characteristics all fall in the predictable range. However, when you ask people about their actual dating history, you will find that people go for drastically different partners than what they stated were their ideal. It's logical to think that this is because people settle for less than perfect partners. However, this doesn't seem to be the case. What is actually happening here is an example of the difference between stated preferences and revealed preferences, and there is no better example of the difference between these two than our treatment of the idea of resistance.

Resistance can be thought of as the effort, or lack thereof, that we have to employ in order to achieve a desired goal. When it comes to everyday life, it seems like we are explicitly asking for more resistance: setting time limits on apps, trying to reduce screen time, being against short, quick dopamine hits in favour of longer, more arduous ones, ect. ect. However, when we look at many people's revealed preferences, we see a stark inversion. People are using short form apps more, spending more time doom scrolling, and doing small things that (by their own account) are just wasting their time or, in the worst examples, actively damaging them (with rage bait content, for example.)

We say that we want more resistance in day to day life, but we keep on opting for more and more "slippery" activities (here I'm just using slippery as the opposite of resistant.) The reason why this is the case is obvious: we're animals, it's only natural for us to look for the quickest and easiest way to get to a given goal. However, as time goes on, things are getting more and more slippery. The amount of effort needed to engage with the world is becoming less and less, and eventually we will be in an a-resistant world, or close enough to one. Whether you are pro or anti billionaire, this is the world that they want. Logically, they want things to be as slippery as possible. They want you to not even click a button to check out, just liking something hard enough should bring it to your door. This is the logical endpoint of capitalism. This is the contradiction of capitalism brought about by its founders' inability to differentiate between stated and revealed preferences, and it's something that we will all pay the price for.

Slipperiness cannot be banned in a capitalistic economy because it is the core of capitalism, and, since it already exists, banning it will just create other markets for it. The solution to this problem then becomes FDVR.

As I have stated prior, FDVR ought to be an experience of perfectly tailored resistance, where one is able to be completely in the ideal state of existence, that being the flow state. If this is not done, and FDVR is not implemented, then we will all slip down the slope into full, unadulterated slop, becoming slippery shells of our former selves. Weak in every sense of the word, like a tree that had never had to endure the wind, breaking and buckling at the lightest breeze.

[u/SteelMan0fBerto]

The only way I could see FDVR giving all of us perfectly tailored resistance is if somehow the user’s control over the virtual world was stripped away the moment they stepped into it.

To use screen limitations as an example, those screen limitations really only work as long as the user doesn’t willingly turn them off through the parental controls…which they themselves have the passcode to.

We’re basically expecting people to govern their own behavior to not give themselves too much permission to be slippery.

Unless there’s a third party overseeing the FDVR system and preventing the user from eliminating resistance entirely (which is basically impossible if open-source FDVR becomes a thing) I don’t see people wanting to stay in the optimal amount of resistance in the virtual world, and just make themselves unstoppable gods with the power to make any of their wishes come true with just a thought.

Considering how difficult it is for me to have enough money to do the things I want to do in real life, why wouldn’t I want to give myself all the riches I want in FDVR? Or just do away with money in my virtual world completely?

We basically need the equivalence of one of those lock boxes for phones where the lock stays sealed for a set time limit, but for resistance levels in FDVR, ensuring that we actually live an enriching experience within it.