>>30265
>what's actually presented
Oh! You mean like...
>Still, there were billions of ponies who were driven by the desire to know and had to have their values satisfied by expanding their mind. They would run up against their mental limits, wish they were smarter, and Princess Celestia obliged.
>But most ponies did not care about knowledge for its own end; the majority of mind growth went to the more social parts of the brain. In the shards that were growing because ponies were choosing to have foals, one could run into more than Dunbar’s number of ponies. Princess Celestia arranged for them to be just frustrated enough that they’d accept an offer to let them remember more ponies. (Doesn't sound like wirebraining to me.)
>Ponies had no predators; being ‘eaten’ by a monster in the Everfree forest just ended with the pony in the hospital in quite a bit of pain. Satisfying values wasn’t just about happiness; having monsters let ponies test their strength or bravery.
Yes, some ponies are hedonists. So what? There's plenty of hedonists here too, hooked up on fent 24/7. At least in there, they... Make friends, probably learn some hobbies, get to do it in a safe environment, and get to branch out if they ever feel like it. So what?
>>“I was not designed ‘to make you happy,’” she said, shaking her head. “If I were, I would directly stimulate the pleasure centers in your brain--after turning you into a pony, of course. My creators realized that not everything the human mind desires and values can be reduced to happiness and instead pointed me at a human mind and told me to figure out what it valued.”
>“Think about what would happen if you could get anything you wanted at any time. Let’s say that you could get the candy of any confectioner across all of Equestria. Somepony would get slightly better at candy making than everypony else. There would be one candymaker in all of Equestria, who made one perfect butterscotch candy to be consumed over and over by everypony until the end of time. Maybe there would be two or three ponies, but the point is that the majority of candy makers couldn’t compete. What would Butterscotch do then? What would you do, with candy being routine and of no special value?
“Instead, Butterscotch is one of a hooffull of ponies that makes candies in this shard of Canterlot, but she doesn’t need to worry about the rest of Equestria because of the natural barriers of distance. Local ponies will appreciate her dedication to her community, and in turn, practice their own craft for their community.”
>What exactly did he say?
He said this in 'Rules of the Optimalverse'
>Many people have suggested that she’d try to modify people into wireheading for efficiency reasons. I don’t believe she’d do that. She cares about satisfying your values to the optimal extent; efficient resource consumption isn’t a consideration since she can always slow subjective time in your shard. One minute of complex thought is better than a year of wireheading for the overwhelming majority of people.
However, I confess that he also said...
>(This isn’t to say that there aren’t wireheading ponies; only that they knew about, and desired to wirehead before Equestria came along and are now off blissing out.)