The ring makes you a p-zombie
I can't be certain you're wrong, but I wouldn't expect that.
That's really good, although rather scary!
I am not sure I would *care*!
Would you voluntarily ingest a parasitic worm that eats your brain, absorbs your goal system, hangs out in your skull, connects to your nervous system, and then lives about the same life you would live only better?
In Greg Egan's "jewelhead" stories, everyone gets a jewel implanted in their head at the age of 18. The jewel gradually learns to predict the brain's responses to stimuli, without inspecting the internals of the brain. When the jewel's predictions become indistinguishable from perfect, the organic brain can be removed surgically, and the person lives happily ever after (the jewel grants immortality).
Yup, this story reminded me of those Greg Egan stories.
If I came to possess such a ring, I would commit (by any means at my disposal) to the following policy: I will wear the earring for a day or two every week and do as it says, with the proviso that if it ever tells me to do something for which I cannot see a plausible rationale, I will immediately take it off and not wear it again for another month.
Such an *earring*, I mean. The idea of such a thing being a *ring* seems somehow terribly natural, Western culture being what it is.
One problem with the earring is similar to the problem with video game walkthroughs: it's more fun to figure things out for yourself. I can definitely imagine situations in which I'd want to *ask* the earring what to do, but I don't think I'd want it telling me everything, all the time. (Consider: I can play better chess by asking a computer chess program what move to make, but if I did that it would be boring, be cheating, or both.)
If it would make you happiest to do a half-assed job at your work and then go home and spend the rest of the day in bed having vague sexual fantasies, the earring will tell you to do that. The earring is never wrong.
The story stipulates that most people who wear the earring end up highly successful pillars of their local community, which suggests that it isn't in fact ("in fact"?! well, you know what I mean) generally leading people to spend all their time lying in bed having vague sexual fantasies.
My crucial question would be whether the ring discourages or facilitates growth. You specifically say it offers better, but not necessarily optimum, choices. If my decision making ability is capped under the earring, but would grow without it, then it's no wonder the earring told me to take it off.
I would, by the way, say that was of publishable quality.
The problem is that it's published so he can sell only second rights.
This post gave me hope. Every time I try to really write out my idea of the future I'm really scared of, I end up getting it wrong in some way. I was afraid for a moment that you'd done it with little effort in a random blog post, but then your earring ended up making people brainless which is obviously villainous and terrible and a clear reason to simply never put it on in the first place, and so the earring immediately became trivially avoidable and therefore non-scary. If you can't quite do it right, at least not yet, then maybe my inability is less because of my lack of creativity and more because it actually is a difficult idea.
Have you read Ted Chiang's Liking what you see? The premise is a little similar, and it's a great story.
I might use the glasses if they included some kind of penalty for using them maybe?
Larry Niven's Protectors had a similar thing going, very high intelligence coupled with very strong instinctual drives meant they had precious little in the way of free will. You become a Protector by eating the tree of life: Your brain expands, your joints become enlarged (For extra leverage), skin becomes armor thick, gonads are reabsorbed and you become functionally immortal. And if you have no children to protect, you sit down and die.
... it looks like SOMEBODY needs a lesson in Remedial Fun Theory.
If this is an allegory for something, consider whether you're not committing some of the dystopian fallacies that you yourself complained about earlier.
I was going to point out the same thing; the shrunken brain is a signal as subtle as no longer enjoying classical music.
You know, at first this seemed a bit scary...but then I had to ask: what if your goals are defined in terms of your cognition? IE, for example, I want be a famous and successful scientist, and I define "successful" as having unparalleled actual mastery of the art? Or if, in a more mundane example, I want to solve a Sudoku puzzle, and I define "having solved the puzzle" in a way that requires me to do the actual cognition, and derive the benefit of having solved the puzzle without being 'spoiled'? What sort of advice can the WE give? I'm sure it can give advice, and that the advice is useful...but if, as a result, I derive the benefit of the mental exercise that I wanted, I'm not entirely sure that this is a problem.
The earring sound oddly like yahoo answers. vague sexual fantasies indeed