It's nice. It reminds me of home.

I mean, not exactly. Your world seems more advanced than we were in a lot of ways. Your shadarak seem to outclass our kvithion elith - although I'm just basing this on your assertion that you weren't up to shadarak level plus my opinion that you would have made an excellent Priest of Truth - maybe 70th, 80th percentile.

And then in other things it seems so primitive - high-level corruption or at least a media that profits off of scaring people into thinking so and which seems to discuss politics in the vernacular.

And then other things just seem silly. LOL at the giant worldwide skycrane grid when you could have just invented marginally better yurts (and the immense shelflike-treelike skyscraper-frames that allow yurt-sites to be stacked dozens high in dense areas with high land value). As the proverb says, "once you go yurt, you'll never revert".

But the part that hit home (no pun intended) for me the most was your feeling of why me. Like, if someone who actually knew the Risurion-silk backwards and forwards ended up on Earth, they could rewrite the important parts from memory and people could fill it in from there and then it would be smooth sailing and we'd probably have ended up properly manifesting God by this point.

(For a while I half-toyed with the idea that Derek Parfit was that person, but from what I could understand of Reasons and Persons and what I could understand of the Risurion-silk it didn't seem like a good fit)

But I have to hand it to you. Whatever you think your handicaps might have been, you've done a pretty awesome job creating an oasis of sanity with this community, someplace where people from any at-least-marginally competent dimension can go and feel at least sort of at home.

But the weird thing is that reading this comment thread I am starting to get the feeling that there are some people here who aren't from any other dimension at all. I mean, I thought we just never talked about it, on account of the decision theoretic reasons and meta-level concerns. But now I'm starting to consider it possible that many or even most of the commenters on this site, even some of the ones I really respect, actually grew up here.

That would be both really impressive and a little scary.

So after reading the comments, I showed this to a friend of mine to check if it would come across the way I expected to a (borderline) non-LWer. It was more or less what I expected ... my interjections are in brackets.

It's long, give me a few minutes ... Hmm. My initial reaction is "this guy sounds like a colossal prick".

[heh, I thought it might be.]

A greater work of masturbatory, self-important bullcrap I have not read in some time. Like, it's clear he's an intelligent guy, but not nearly as intelligent as he imagines himself.

[I mean, I've read his (non-technical) work, so I'm almost as impressed with him as he is...]

He has some good ideas [although I personally think the house-cables are dumb] but he wraps them up in a load of entitlement and self-importance and impracticality. Like instead of saying "you know, the medical profession would be better served by being organised like this" he says "if I'd be in charge then we would have organised the medical profession in a way better way like 50 years ago and anyone who disagrees with me is a bumbling idiot".

Perhaps he's slightly more polite than that

And he's shooting himself in the foot, because after reading that, mostly I just want to take him aside and explain to him how much his writing is going to make people hate him and want to slap him.

[oh, in fairness, he doesn't usually write like that. I assume this was his way of using some random ideas he hadn't written about because no-one will implement them this century.]

The thought of "huh, that's a good idea for organising diagnosis and treatment" is secondary and that's impressive because I'm more than a little pissed off at my doctor right now.

This is even more pronounced than the reaction of many commenters, as you'd expect. Definitely still room for improvement there, Eliezer!

But, and this I have not yet heard suggested here, you could solve that problem by having tunnels underground, instead of streets above, and all the cars auto-piloted. Then the AI problem would become vastly easier and could have been solved in the early 2000s of this Earth.

Current cars do not already travel through underground tunnels.

The biggest obstacle here is that underground construction is orders of magnitude more expensive than above-ground construction.

As to housing, I am very glad I do not live in a modular mobile-home grid city!

In my universe, houses are built with lots of different non-interchangeable designs to satisfy the owners.

And cities are laid out organically, according to topography and the vagaries of history. Not perfect, but in those cases that neighborhoods were quickly constructed in grids of modular, standardized (albeit often non-mobile) houses, it did not work out too well.

In my universe, modularity and mobility impose trade-offs like any other design characteristics, and although these things are actually available, non-mobile non-modular houses are often preferred.

One of Eliezer's first posts was "Archimedes's Cronophone".

It's ok Eliezer, I quasi-believe you.

I understand that you think this is one of your best literary works, Eliezer (based on having posted it on facebook, HPMOR notes, Lesswrong MAIN and even on your tumblr that has had no other posts in 4 months; sorry if I've missed something) but do you really think that this is Main material? Is it because you think that there are really important lessons in there (I admit to only skimming this rant) or is the Main/Discussion distinction becoming more and more arbitrary or?

I'm always amazed how Eliezer manages to show the world is completely broken while at the same time conveying an incredible sense of optimism.

+1

I was going to start my comment by pointing out the silliness of your real estate system. Namely, that if people/society were really that fast to adapt, they would almost all work remotely by now. But on second thought, I think this part was actually intended as April Fools material.

Then I was going to say that the BDSM reference is somewhat distasteful, at least to some people. Not to mention it smells of internet exhibitionism, even if untrue. You could easily pick something better overall.

Then I'd say that while your education and medical care ideas are good, they fail to account for the world-as-it-is. It's easy to imagine a world-as-it-should-be, especially if you assume that people/society are different. It's not enough. You have to design a smooth transition from a world-as-it-is to the world-as-it-should-be.

I'd finish by saying that I don't agree with you that the April Fools excuse will let you get away with as much as you think, especially not in the minds of people outside of LW. This post lowers my estimate of your sanity waterline and I'm accustomed to your writing. Linking here from bloody everywhere was a mistake.

Instead of elaborating on the above, I'll say this: Eliezer, you really need to get your ego below your IQ.

nobody in this world will take it seriously

Except for someone else from dath ilan. I hope you haven't just revealed yourself to an arch-nemesis.

That is a collection of rather common ideas from 1960-era futurism, which were considered, calculated , sometimes prototyped and found massively impractical since then.

Those cities and houses don't sound natural and livable. I'm not sure I could live there even if I thought that it might be more efficient for some higher goal.

If I had to envision an ideal humane architecture for countries, cities and houses I would follow the more than 200 architectural patterns of Christopher Alexander (that's the one who is so highly regarded in software engineering for inventing pattern languages) which do capture best practices and derive an utopia from that . Some patterns of course would have to be done away with or adapted - those related to streets maybe and some might be added e.g. in case of air traffic - or should it be economical - tunnels.

'A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction (Center for Environmental Structure Series)' by Christopher Alexander 1978 on Google Books

A website devoted to the work: www.patternlanguage.com (gives only an impression of the patterns; is more about selling the book)

A warning: The book is really expensive. Don't know why. But it is really great. I could easily apply some patterns in our house and garden and after reading it recognize working patterns in my municipality. If you want to learn what architecture really is I'd bet on this book.

EDIT: fixed typos, cleanup

Land is not a liquid asset. If you tax someone's income, the income is liquid so he can use it to pay the tax. If you tax someone's land, he may end up in a situation where if he loses his source of income, he also loses the land as well. Or a situation where the value of the land goes up, he can't pay the taxes, and so he loses the land.

There are also transaction costs involved--moving is expensive.

Of course, existing real estate taxes already have these problems, but they would get worse.

Huh, I sort of assumed without really thinking about it that your aesthetic sense preserves faint echoes of literary movements like Russian cosmism that were destroyed following the Revolution, updated to conform to 21st century American sensibilities. I think I made the association through the transhumanism connection. Even if I'm not totally wrong about aesthetic similarities, I'm not thinking about a direct transmission of traditions, more like an indirect osmosis of cultural values.

Keynesian notions of aggregate demand as a commons problem were not a thing I remember hearing about in dath ilan. NGDP level targeting definitely wasn't a thing. If somehow, someday, I jump back to dath ilan, I will introduce the idea that serious people don't need to coordinate to avoid crashes if there is NGDP level targeting because then everything happens automatically, and the shadarak-adjudicated peer review system will be swift to recognize this as a good idea and run experiments, and then, having stolen credit for Scott Sumner's ideas as I have stolen credit for so many others, I will be recognized enough to talk openly about BDSM.

What's more likely in a highly rational civilization?

a) their economists never thought of the concept of aggregate demand and affecting it with monetary policy

or

b) their monetary policy is so effective at eliminating demand shocks that the average person never hears about demand shocks or monetary policy, and only hears about supply shocks and supply side policies aimed at eliminating them

I imagine the dath ilan'ian in Eliezer's body might not get the reception he expects with those ideas if he returns home...

Was this inspired by Raikoth?

I quite like the idea of a society that is better than ours not because it is more technologically advanced/ has magic but because the systems in place are sensible. Its a shame most of the alternative society fiction is the opposite - dystopian.

working under the sunlight, shielded by a glass screen overhead

I'm visiting London, and I just noticed that a ordinary meeting room in an ordinary school had a translucent glass skylight; and likely a room in an ordinary residential house. Looks like London is just next-door to other planes of the multiverse, which would be no news to anyone who's read The Magician's Nephew, among many other books.

At some point you promised to give a post justifying your belief that "the world is mad" (although I can't find the comment where you made that promise). Should we take this to be the promised post, or will you argue the point more formally later?

The sky-cable idea seems wildly impractical, but the way moving works certainly could be radically improved.

Where I live, most residential buildings lack elevators and loading docks. Dealing with this is, by far, the largest single cost to moving: everything must be carried down a set of stairs, across a street and into a truck, then out of a track and up a set of stairs, and must be packaged to make this feasible. That means completely unloading all drawers and shelves into boxes, and makes wheels on furniture useless. Since furniture's going to have to be unloaded and disassembled anyways, people fail to look for other optimizations, like wheels on things that don't move often or drawers that latch shut.

At first I thought this looked rather lengthy, but now I've read it, I just have a vaguely nostalgic feeling.

I thoroughly enjoyed this post; it reminds me of the sequences.

Some people in this thread have claimed that such writing doesn’t appeal to the three-sigma crowd. However, I would prefer to read such a post every week. The difference between the sequences, HPMOR, and the contributions to LessWrong of people like Roko and Wei Dai, and the drab, insulting rubbish I encountered in the official education system, is day and night, and it would be sad if young people in 2014 were to lack that opportunity.

This advice could not be more false. Although I’m not fit to lick his boots, in my opinion the beauty of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s writing is quite that:

you’re doing it all wrong, you should be working on this stuff like this instead

Because it is true.

Incidentally, I believe in the existence of natural elites.

When I was first reading this post, I found myself half wanting to believe it was true. I then reminded myself that this was indulgent and that I really ought to bet about 10 nines to the contrary. I suppose this shows how far I've come as a rationalist.

At any rate, I want to thank you, Eliezer, for brightening my day.

The idea that Earth's future has less advanced physics and macroeconomics is certainly worrying. It suggests that some terrible disaster would happen which wipes out a lot of people and a lot of records.

Even considering it as a different world, as such, there are a couple of examples of potential trouble that I can see in dath ilan, from this description. (Mind you, none of them are certainly terrible; there may be perfectly reasonable explanations for many of them).

Both the tunnel system and the modular city suggest that someone, presumably the not-exactly-a-government, has access to both a great deal of resources, and appears willing to spend them on anything with an expected return above a certain threshold. While this is in itself praiseworthy, that threshold should be set pretty high and proposals very stringently checked before implementation (I don't see how the modular city makes sense anywhere that's not on a very flat mesa, for example, and even there is seems like there will be a lot of trouble once the parts start to get just a little bit worn; maintenance is going to be a nightmare; and all those cables will block out the stars at night, which seem very important to the dath ilan people. Putting all the houses on wheels may be a better idea) because, if there's a 90% chance of profit and a 10% chance of loss, then one in ten times the loss will come and these are very expensive infrastructure projects; those losses could really cause trouble.

A second thing that seems worrisome is the suggestion that CPU power might be being artificially throttled; that someone has enough power (political or economic) to sabotage any effort to produce a faster CPU and can exercise that power without being noticed would be the stuff of conspiracy theories. If it was known that the faster CPUs were a problem, and a lot of people trusted that and refused to build them, then that would be a lot less scary than the idea that there is something (nameless) that happens to people who try to sell a faster CPU.

Do you remember what hard drive sizes and bandwidth speeds were like? Those seem to be very similar economically and technologically to CPU speed, following very similar growth curves, but different enough that it's be easier to halt CPUs selectively. Thus, this could be an indicator to if CPUs were deliberately stopped, or if there was some other economic factor.

Could someone who knows a bit more about macroeconomics explain the full BSDM - macroeconomics pun?

To me it seems like there something in there for which I lack background economics knowledge.

I KNEW IT!

ahem

Why was this posted on April 2nd, anyway?

I'm just going to say I particularly liked the idea of the house cable transport system.

when it was realized in dath ilan that business cycles were a thing, the economists probably said "This is a coordination problem", the shadarak backed them, and the serious people got together and coordinated to try to avoid business cycles.

I think this is a feature of dath ilan, not a bug.

What I enjoy most about this, after getting past the odd fictional conceit, is its sheer scope - I haven't seen imagination on this scale in a long time, and I miss it.

Thank you, Eliezer.

Now we have to get to work.

It strikes me that someone could write a piece that takes essentially the opposite stance on all object-level issues yet still targets the same overall point. I say this as neither a positive nor a negative reflection on this piece, merely an interesting one.

200-year road to de'a'na est shadarak?

That's depressing. Might as well give up now.

Amusing post, thanks. It seems clear that life in advanced countries is indeed much worse than it could possibly be, and that failures to plan and cooperate are at least partly to blame. On the other hand, life is also much, much better than it could be (and was for most people in history), and I fully expect that it will continue to improve in the future. Maybe at some point we will be so rich, and coordinate so well, that some of your suggestions become commonplace.

Blocking out someone else's sun would be a serious transgression against them

Are you retelling this because some serious or would be serious person tried to build a skyscrapper where it would block the light that some designated hero would get?

It's quite a challenge if the only way you can write something or express who you are, is that most people who read what you write won't fully understand what you write.

All I have left are scraps and shadows and the stuff that everyone learns before they're 23.

Creating Friendly AI seems to be published in the beginning of 2001 given that Eliezer is born in 1979 he would be 21 years old so that doesn't fit right.

The other thing that 23 stands for would be the 23 enigma of Robert Anton Wilson. Maybe that's more fitting for what this confession is about?

Has anyone other ideas about what the number refers to?

Because your cars run on gasoline and would have filled the tunnels with choking fumes, without either (1) a big expensive ventilation system, or (2) expensive electrified rails that would...impose friction costs?

For 2) you can use magnetic levitation: Inductrack which now manifesting out as Skytran. (Costs are about 1/50th your transportation mass in magnets.)

Is Year 2000-era computing power your true estimate for a level of computing power that is significantly safer than what comes after?

As to education in short term units: So many variations on education have been tried in so many educational reform programs, that I don't think we can say that our part of the multiverse has ignored that possibility.

As to some of the simpler technical innovations, like automatic blinds, spectrum-shifting lights, and glass roofs, it seems that no barrier stands in the way in our universe. Certainly a rich or even a middle-class person could have these installed, no problem. So I don't think that this can be attributed to mass insanity.

... And now we'll forever suspect that anyone with a good idea is actually an alien invader masquerading in a human body.