The case for turning glowfic into Sequences

Rational actors don’t respond to threats

I'm currently reading planecrash, and just today read a scene that could plausibly have prompted this bullet point:  Keltham is confused about teachers punishing students, and makes an argument about how if someone threatens to break your arm unless you give them your shoes, you should fight back, even though having your arm broken is worse than losing your shoes.

But my interpretation of this scene was "Keltham has lived all his life in dath ilan, where Very Serious people have done a lot of work specifically to engineer a societal equilibrium where this would be true, and has utterly failed to grasp how the game theory changes for the circumstances in this new world (partly because culture gap, partly because lies)."  I don't think it's actually true in general that's it's irrational to respond to threats (though judging when it's rational is more complicated than just deciding whether a broken arm is worse than losing your shoes).

(The glowfic characters don't have cause to directly address this point, because "teachers punishing students" isn't actually about threats at all; it's reinforcement, which is a different thing, and they are arguably still doing it wrong but for totally different reasons, so Keltham's parable about shoes turns out to be irrelevant.)

I...guess I could probably turn my interpretation of the scene into a post, if that has noticeable expected value?  Which it probably does if this scene is commonly being interpreted as "Keltham correctly argues that it is never rational to cave to a threat", but I'm not actually sure if this is the scene you had in mind or if your interpretation of it is common.

Well, I tried reading mad investor chaos, and even though I loved hpmor, I couldn't make it through the first thread page of that story, it just feels extremely pedantic, though that's not exactly the right word. The density of terminology makes it all unpleasant, even though I understand what every term means, it just feels like a horribly stilted form of human communication. This might be appropriate in-universe, but it doesn't make it any less annoying to read.

One fun thing about the stories is that they are nuanced and express positions as beliefs of the characters and because there is such a variety the authors can't personally be backing everything. And for the same reason its hard to argue what is the correct takeaway. Making everything super complicated keeps things interesting and is mentally stimulating but doesn't provide the most clarity. I am pretty sure that "people should regard Evil as a supreme virtue" is not a correct takeaway but there is something to the direction of "don't be Stupid Good".

Althought the explicit learnings of cognition are very condenced the context of them being practised immediatly before or after is a kind of thing I suspect to be pretty central to the things and harder to make shorter.

It did occur to me that I would totally read through "virtues and their layers" and Tolkien style specification of Baseline.

Is there any Eliezer glowfic besides "mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus"? Which work is gigantic enough, but because it's so gigantic I find myself unmotivated to read any more of it now that I've more or less got the framework of that world.

Also, is that work a collaboration between Eliezer and one or more others? While reading it, for some reason I took Eliezer to be writing Keltham's part and someone else GM-ing all the other characters, but I'm not sure I have any reason to think that.

Re: no e-book version: here's a script for downloading glowfic posts and continuities into epub format: https://github.com/rocurley/glowfic-dl

Perhaps this is a stupid suggestion, but if trolls in the comments annoy him, can he post somewhere where no comments are allowed? You can turn off comments on wordpress, for example.

A free full-cast Audiobook of Planecrash is currently in production at https://shows.acast.com/project-lawful-aka-planecrash, using AI-generated voices. It is quite excellent, albeit missing a few of the glowfic-specific elements such as character portraits and reaction tags (posts with no text, only character portraits). I highly recommend it for anyone.

There is a parallel analysis podcast and book club hosted by myself and members of The Bayesian Conspiracy's discord channel, formerly It Makes Sense If You Understand Decision Theory, now We Want Headbands (in homage to We've Got Worm). As we go, I'm sectioning it into shorter Books and Chapters, with somewhat-descriptive titles. The podcast-aligned table of contents and links to the podcasts are available at http://www.imsiyudt.com/ 

If somebody has time to pour into this I'd suggest recording an audio version of Mad Investor Chaos.

HPMOR reached a lot more people thanks to Eneasz Brodski's podcast recordings. That effect could be much more pronounced here if the weird glowfic format is putting people off.

I'd certainly be more likely to get through it if I could play it in the background whilst doing chores, commuting or falling asleep at night.

That's how I first listened to HPMOR, and then once I'd realised how good it was I went back and reread it slowly, taking notes, making an effort to internalize the lessons.

I would be glad if stories from there were straight up crossposted to here (and perhaps formatted/edited a bit), because several times already I went to the site to read something when I saw a recommendation, and just couldn't navigate there and understand what I'm supposed to read.

I'm offering a $300 bounty to anyone that gets 100 karma doing this this year (without any vote manipulation).

Manifold market for this:

Planecrash is really cool, but also I am allergic to reading fantasy proper nouns, let alone remembering what they refer to and the relationships between them.

Some fantasy is easier for me to absorb because it's either highly visual (in non-HPMOR HP, they mostly shoot colorful firebolts at each other), and/or are based on existing intuitive concepts (in ATLA, it's easy to learn what "waterbending" is, and suddenly you can quickly figure out "metalbending").

Tempted to make an Anki deck and/or cheatsheet for the things in Planecrash that I'd want to have on hand (e.g. the names of different Gods), but I'm open and eager for easier/better solutions. Is there a character sheet somewhere?

EDIT: 2 ideas I had, not sure if plugins for this exist already:

1. browser extension that replaces words with some short custom definition and highlighting. So I can replace [godname] with [god of mad experimentation].
2. browser extension that lets you hover over words to get a custom, user-set definition. I think this might do that?

"Create glowfic characters for top AI researchers, and have Eliezer critique their ideas by role-playing with them (mostly a joke)" It looks interesting

utopia

It's a protopia. It is a word better than ours. It is not perfect. It would be advisable [LW · GW] to keep this in mind. dath ilan likely has its own, separate problems.

cure Eliezer's chronic fatigue so he can actually attempt to grant humanity a couple more bits of information-theoretic dignity save the world

Possibly relevant: I know someone who had chronic fatigue syndrome which largely disappeared after she had her first child. I could possibly put her in contact with Eliezer or someone working on the problem.

Was the "glowfic excerpts" link supposed to be Self Integrity and the Drowning Child [LW · GW]?

With so much apparently available energy/effort for eliezer-centered-improvement initiatives (like the $100,000 bounty mentioned in this post), I'd like to propose that we seriously consider cloning Eliezer. 

From a layman/outsider perspective, it seems the hardest thing would be keeping it a secret so as to avoid controversy and legal trouble, since from a technical perspective it seems possible and relatively cheap. EA folks seem well connected and capable of such coordination, even under the burden of secrecy and keeping as few people "in the know" as possible. 

Partially related: (in the category of comparatively off-the-wall - but nonviolent - AI alignment strategies): at some point there was a suggestion that MIRI pay $10mil (or some such figure) to Terence Tao (or some such prodigy) to help with alignment work. Eliezer replied thus [LW(p) · GW(p)]: 

We'd absolutely pay him if he showed up and said he wanted to work on the problem.  Every time I've asked about trying anything like this, all the advisors claim that you cannot pay people at the Terry Tao level to work on problems that don't interest them.  We have already extensively verified that it doesn't particularly work for eg university professors.

I'd love to see more visibility into proposed strategies like these (i.e. strategies surrounding/above the object-level strategy of "everyone who can do alignment research puts their head down and works", and the related: "everyone else make money in their comparative specialization/advantage and donate to MIRI/FHI/etc"). Even visibility into why various strategies were shot down would be useful, and a potential catalyst for farming further ideas from the community. (even if - for game theoretic reasons - one may never be able to confirm that an idea has been tried, as in my cloning suggestion)