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Comment by simpaticoder | Hacker News Reader

Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is" to quote Ian Banks' "Excession". It's also helpful to characterize a person not just by their character, tenacity or energy, or age, but also a number between 0 and 1 that indicates how much of their time they've spent in the real world, vs in their happy fun space. Call it the "imagination factor". A bright, capable mind of 40 with an imagination factor of .75 may only have the cumulative real-world experience of a 10-year-old.

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It's unclear to me what you're defining as real. Coal mining? Childcare? Community centers? Through hiking? Interesting theoretical realms can have enormous consequences in the physical/tangible world, as I'm sure you know :). Maybe it's more of a "presence factor" in relation to this story: a measure of how aware you are of the roles and responsibilities you have and how engaged with them you are.

Of course, there is disagreement on a person’s roles and responsibilities.

To someone, my responsibility might be answering the doorbell quickly when Amazon drops off a package.

To another, it might be how responsive I am to email.

These are in conflict, and sometimes it’s worth missing an Amazon package to finish an important email.

Absolutely, the concept of roles and responsibilities is highly subjective

I make no value judgement here. I thought the OP's post was interesting as an example of how humans can mediate their own "VR" experience, and have done so for all of human history. The "absent-minded professor" is a stereotype for a reason. It can be disconcerting for someone with high imagination factor to interact with someone with an imagination factor of 0, even if all other qualities (age, culture, language, etc) are the same, since the paths they have both walked are so very different. The error modes that arise from impedance mismatch go in both directions. It's not clear what nature will select for. Certainly over short periods of time, nature has selected for heavy abstraction and all the military/economic power it yields. The longer time frame has not yet played out.

The path everyone has walked is different from everyone else. You seem to be trying to reduce it to a formula, coin new terms, and literally apply numeric values to people. I don't think anyone is that simple in reality.

If you have struggled to interact with people who are different than you, that is also part of the human experience, not something we need to devise measurements for.

Your strawman assumes a reductive user who will replace a person with a number. This of course happens in real life, with IQ, Meyers-Briggs, and so on. This is wrong. It is a kind of wrongness exemplified by "Animal Farm", the nuanced ideals of revolution that eventually reduce to "4 legs good; 2 legs bad".

IF is a tool mostly to remind high IF people to cherish the value of both real and imaginary experience, and a tool to help people who dwell mostly in either realm to respect each other. If a high IF person forgets to respect the real, he's liable to forget his wedding. If a low IF person forgets, he's liable to miss out on the wonder and value of abstract thought.

> A bright, capable mind of 40 with an imagination factor of .75 may only have the cumulative real-world experience of a 10-year-old.

While provocative, that argument does not take into account the development of the brain. Processing early experiences are far different from the ones when the brain is fully developed. This includes the storage of memories (knowledge).

The fact that our identities are a path integral through a unique 4 dimensional spacetime curve does not undermine the utility of first-order characterizations of the resulting value. We do it all the time: where are you from? When were you born? What did you study? What's your favorite ice cream flavor? I am simply adding, and characterizing, an additional factor: how often do you dream? None of the answers to these questions tell the whole story of a person, but they are useful nevertheless.

I like the cut of your jib and I'm assuming your factor is north of 0.5?

You take a strange lesson from an anecdote about artificial super-intelligences. In the book, the AIs can spend time in a limitless virtual universe, better than reality.

Time spent in "infinite fun" (as they call it) has no value because it has no impact on what happens in the real world, hence the importance of remembering where the off-switch is. It's about having an effect on the world, not the world having an effect on you.

Someone who spends a lot of time (and in all likelihood is wired to spend a lot of time) thinking about their work is not wasting their time; they are preparing to have an effect on the world.

Where did you see a value judgment? The imagination factor is a trade-off, neither good nor bad in itself. It's normally distributed, and selection pressure will push the median up or down. The utility of the concept comes in personal interaction - those with high IF speaking with low IF people should respect the value of (perhaps multiples) of real-world experience that they have. In effect, the concept of IF is a tool of both humility and empathy.

"Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to remember where the off switch is."

And you didn't say anything about "real-worlders" having humility and respect for the other party.

I think a reasonable person infers a value judgment from those two things together.

> Those who spend their time flying through imaginary worlds do well to "remember where the off switch is"

If this world is a simulation, and someone among us is the player-character, forgetting that there is an off switch is a feature for them that increases immersion by making any failure to suspend disbelief (which I as a probable NPC suffer from regulary) a moot issue. As long as we think that this is reality, its believability is subordinate to its survivability.

"If this world is a simulation" then anything can follow, which makes it an uninteresting hypothetical.

You might be right but...

If this world is a simulation knowing the nature might let us work with it better. Hacking the universe (maybe or maybe not if a simulation). It would in some ways just become an extension of physics (in effect).

This gives me an opportunity to bring up a favorite story of mine.

Wang's Carpets by Greg Egan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang%27s_Carpets

Overall I find the "imagination factor" as an useful tool for self-reflection and understanding others

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