Three Worlds Collide (0/8)

In the ideal case, would you recommend reading each chapter separately, with the day-long pause in between to digest, or reading them all at once? Or perhaps you would like to hear feedback from people who have taken each approach to see which works better.

wellll.. it's kinda fun, Eleizer, I guess so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and keep reading .... but....but... is this format quite right for OB?

Would this series not be better in - ooh, I don't know - a new and more open sister site of some kind, perhaps with the key points written up at the end and posted on to OB, if they seem popular? Or am I wrong.

When it's done, is there any chance you'll stick it online in an ereader compatible format? PDF is ok, but EPUB would be better.

I don't tend to read very long things on a computer, so having it in a more friendly format would be nice.

Andrew, will try to remember. Remind me when it's done.

Botogol, Less Wrong isn't ready yet, and now is when people are asking me about what sort of values aliens might have.

yup. alien ones.

List of allusions I managed to catch (part 1):
Alderson starlines - Alderson Drive Giant Science Vessel - GSV - General Systems Vehicle Lord Programmer - allusion to the archeologist programmers in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep? Greater Archive - allusion to Orion's Arm's Greater Archives?

Good times!

Oh, on the subject of stories and that post about dreams, that reminds me: You had said to remind you to tell us about your "most philosophically interesting dream"

Three worlds collide?

As of part 1, we've seen two...

Excellent. I was reluctant to start reading at first, but when I did, I found it entertaining. This should be a TV series. :)

I too felt a bit anxious about reading this but was glad I did! It's entertaining to read and very interesting to think about.

Thanks.

@Eliezer - nope, sorry, 3/8 now, seems like 10,000 words of cod fiction and OB has truly jumped the shark.

There's load of good ideas there but praps you shoulda' waited until LessWrong was working AllRight.

really good writing. keep them coming :-)

botogol, what is cod fiction? Is COD an acronym for "capacity on demand" or "change of direction"?

Eliezer,

Personally, I liked the Babyeaters. At the outset of your story, I thought (1) that their babyeating would be held up as an example of the triumph of rationality (around population control), and (2) that their refusal to modify themselves would be based on their recognition that the specific act of babyeating nurtured and protected a more general capacity and respect for rational thought. I thought that Babyeating was being proposed as a bootcamp for overcoming bias. Maybe this idea would be interesting to explore?

In general, an interesting story. I did not find it possibly coercive or deceptive, as some other commentators did, and despite wide disagreement with what I take to be your own views; like your piece on truth, -- "The Simple Truth", I believe it was, -- I found it clear, deftly-made, and thought-provoking.

I thought this was very, very good, probably my favorite of your writings that I've read so far. I think it's quite a bit better than the Harry Potter fanfic--which is itself good fanfic, but "good for fanfic" is a much more forgiving category than "good fiction." When you mentioned trying to get a Hugo for HPMOR I thought you were revealing an embarrassing inability to self-calibrate your own skills as a writer: HPMOR is not good enough to be publishable (even leaving copyright issues aside), and it's very far from being at a Hugo-winning level. It is not, however, ridiculous to think that fiction of the "Three Worlds Collide" caliber could compete for Hugo-type prizes.

In summary, I'd like to see more of your original fiction, and if you chose to I don't doubt that you could publish stories in major-market genre magazines.

I feel like I'm missing out on most of the clever subtleties.

Is there a way to tell?

I'm also impressed, but not quite as impressed as I should be, for reasons just mentioned.

I actually liked it. Here are my reasons:

• I'm comfortable with the setting (I'll call it "philosophy in space")
• The three worlds are intelligently designed (forgive the pun) and fit nicely together (from a dramatic point of view)
• The stereotypical characters each play a nicely defined and important role
• The main characters (Akon and the Confessor) develop nicely
• There are two endings (I'm a sucker for choice :3 )
• The differences between the future world and our present world are noticable and important to the plot (and not just decoration)

Oh, and a good friend of mine recommended reading it. But that's not a real reason, is it. ;-)

@Eliezer well that's to me looks very dystopian future... the principle of protection of human autonomy was tossed away already when they legalize 'non consensual' anything where it is legal for human being A to impose his notions of fun on human being B against human being B's will. So the mankind got raped very gently by superhappy - so what? They legalized this already, there's a legal precedent for a far worse case that in your universe everyone agreed on.

Plus you give zero thought to concept of human beings as autonomous, each an agent upon himself. What I have immediately thought of is that I would have told the superhappy that due to communication bottleneck and biodiversity humans do not share identical values, have massively different neural wirings and as such they would have to integrate the values of each human personally etc. Not three worlds colliding but hundreds billions. I'd tell that the human neural system is so wired in many of the people that absence of pain would lead to diminished pleasure or failure to achieve sentience. I'd have told them the truth that facing such choice or having alteration forced on you results in extreme psychological pain that can disable and/or destroy some of the individuals. That we see gross modification of existing individuals as death. Etc.

Plus, of course, the fair 'superhappy' aliens are extremely vulnerable to mechanisms that homo sapiens has evolved to take advantage of naivity. You take some clinical psychopath, the smooth talking one (a corporate executive will do fine), get him to talk with the superhappy, and they're toast. The 30x thought speed advantage won't save them. The tech won't save them. They'll get owned by first nigerian prince. We have evolved for cognitive predator-prey interactions; 99% of the bias [as in , vast majority of, not as in exact number] that you're overcoming here is the heuristics for those interactions, for surviving a smarter enemy who would convince you into doing something bad with arguments that are only subtly flawed, akin to proof that 1=2. Where do you think the bias and reluctance to accept reason comes from? Well guess what 99% of reason out there is predator's blinky lights trying to subvert neural system of the prey, as in some squid versus some shrimp. The shrimp learnt to close the eyes. Reader, once you take into your mind what I just said there, even to parse what I said, you have to effectively execute truing-complete code in your head. In wetware with no process boundaries. The rationalism is inherently vulnerable.

They're entirely toothless however, with no concept of biting and no carapace. Ditto for the babyeaters, really, sending off all their data, sending human data to the superhappy, and otherwise acting like total naive idiots instead of waging the cognitive warfare that humanity has perfected in the course of probably more than a million years. I say, in such an interaction, both of those alien races would get massively, massively exploited by humanity.

I've read this about half a year ago, enjoyed it, completely more or less agreed with Eliezer's point and filed it away.

Then, this morning, I literally woke up screaming. This is not an exaggeration, I must've dreamt of something that reminded me of 3WC, and my first waking thought was: "It's WRONG to be right!". I do believe that the human condition and human individuality are easily worth practically any number of lives (although holding ourselves hostage and threatening to voluntarily increase the amount of suffering customary for human culture unless the Superhappies give all people a choice in the matter might have worked as a third option - but wriggling out of the author's intent is pointless). I don't have a single problem with this logic.

What I have a problem with is myself. I was born with some brain damage (diagnosed only at 19, unfortunately for my teenage years) that, among other socially inconvenient things, strongly inhibits my instinctive empathy; I might value and respect individual people, but can feel very little compassion for them on a personal level, and I wouldn't hesitate in murdering someone if I believed it was right and necessary. In short, I exhibit traits of an actual sociopath. So I could see myself jumping at the decision, carrying it out and suffering from zero irrational guilt.

That caused a rebellion of sorts inside me. Suddenly I contemplated writing something really, really stupid, sending Eliezer a death threat, hated the thought of becoming transhuman or ever having to deal with a real Hard Choice, devoting the rest of my life to opposing, attacking, slandering and scaremongering against everything that Less Wrong and SIAI stand for. After about two hours it burned out, and now I feel more or less in control. I'm quite puzzled as to what the bloody hell that was. "Fear of having to grow up again" probably comes close.

I can't name a good reason for posting all this, except for suggesting that strong moral biases could shift into self-defense mode during a Hard Choice scenario, the very moment one would make an honest effort to examine and prioritize his values. Your beliefs could just shut everything down along with themselves to avoid being changed.

(as an aside, with all the shout-outs, it'd be cool if it chapter 8 was called "One More Final", as it has quite a few parallels with The End of Evangelion and its final scene),

Oh, to anyone who agrees with the decision but is still disturbed/looking for a 3rd option due2 those specific victims: THEY DIDN'T DIE AND WERE IN LITTLE DANGER, Eliezer told us an implausible lie to make us think. In fact, the ship was a flotillia and it sent a runner home for each developement, AND they didn't settle 15b people in a frontier system - because people had read previous centuries' good SF and heeded its warnings. Same goes for every scenario with simple precautions or hidden third options.

I have converted the book to epub and mobi. Download link: http://www.filedropper.com/3worlds

I haven't started reading it yet so let me know if you find any problems with the conversion.

Enjoy!

This was an interesting thing to read about, though I have to say the start, with the baby eaters, was the best and most interesting part. The babyeaters were, by human standards, unconscionably evil, but ironically, were actually probably much less so than the happy-happy. Indeed, the sad irony was that the happy-happy were far, far less capable of understanding humanity than the babyeaters were - and I think that the humans could have found peace with the babyeaters. But the happy-happy lack what the other two races possess.

The sad thing is that humans could probably beat the happy-happy rather easily, though. The happy-happy were horrified to the point of nearly being broken by the babyeaters. Humans are capable of coming up with far, far worse things than the babyeaters. If you were to give that to them, wield it as a weapon, you could potentially make a basilisk - and if sufficiently clever in its design, it might well completely annihilate them due to their culture's inflexibility. Indeed, it is obvious that despite what they claimed, pain was not truly something that was so completely alien to them - they did not experience discomfort in the same way that humans did, but it was clear that they DID experience such things, as they had difficulty coping with what the babyeaters fed them and retreated to their happy fun time chamber "as a reward".

Of course it would be insanely dangerous, but they hardly had many good options, did they? The other problem is that leaving the happy-happy be could potentially expose other races similar to humanity to them.

Sadly humanity never had the chance to get anything from the happy-happy; the poor babyeaters ruined that for them. It might have helped.

I've created a new EPUB as the earlier link was dead. This one has a table of contents and improved typography. You can download it from my Dropbox (68kb).

I asked a friend of mine to read the story. He's a reincarnationist and he liked it a lot, although he preferred the first ending to the second. He sent me an interesting commentary on the reasons for this preference, which I'm copying and pasting below. I guess the few reincarnationist observations he made won't be of much interest to most here, but the other considerations are very well worth the reading:

This is one of the most amazing and uplifting stories I have ever read – at least in the ending one scenario.

I am glad that the superhappies want to end the suffering of the babyeater children. Making them eat the children at an age before sentience is a solution that could be achieved in the present day, but uplifting the other species to not feel pain is an even more important solution in the case that these beings become sentient before expected.

The idea that the superhappies would adopt babyeating and force it into humanity was disturbing at first, but being a reincarnationist, I can actually relate to the radical shift of desires. In previous lives, I have eaten cockroaches and considered them delicious, but in this life with social conditioning, I consider the idea disturbing and disgusting. The superhappies have a method of instantaneously zapping that very repulsion away, so I don't understand why the people in the story are so resistant to this change knowing that after the zap they will have no disgust for this act, and will on some level desire it.

I have imagined myself in the position of an uplifted baby who in the very rare instance gains sentience before expected, and whether eaten whole or cut to pieces first, being slowly or quickly digested, without the ability to feel pain or fear, and without worldly experience to demonstrate that something was wrong, the experience of being eaten would be like falling asleep and would be thankfully, boring.

The process of being zapped by the superhappies from a normal human into an uplifted human comes across as fearful because the individual doesn't know how they are going to be afterward. The idea of removing so much fear instantly is itself a big change, which strangely causes fear. It is the same reason why people who suffer from anxiety are often afraid of taking medicine to remove their anxiety. Yet as scary as the moment of having these fears removed may be, most should be able to come to terms with it knowing that as soon as it's over, they will not fear again. For some it may be more comfortable to be sedated before being changed.

A philosophical argument could be made that the act of eating babies becomes pointlessly arbitrary at best, and that the other species shouldn't adopt it because it serves no purpose, but the fact is it does serve a purpose: to better relate to the babyeaters. In the last sections we see that the superhappies changed the design of their ship to better appeal to human and babyeater aesthetic. This raises the willingness of the two species to work with them. When the uplifting process is complete, all three species will be in many ways one species. I believe that when any one of the new super-species meets another alien race, the babyeating tradition will be removed from all of their societies to be replaced with some other aspect of the new species encountered because the meaning for its tradition will have been lost through history, but even if this doesn't happen the super-species will continue to change and grow without fear.

Fear is the resistance to change and the extent to which a person resists change is the extent to which a person fears it, or so sayeth the psychology books. Progress is rapid change for the better. After the uplifting the species will trust each other enough to share their scientific progress, while on a spiritual level, the beings within each society can exist happily through the progression of their lives. To a far deeper extent, if it should somehow happen that a spirit born from one species would find their incarnations in the bodies and societies of either of the other two species, that spirit would be just as happy and satisfied in that life as they would in their original species, which even for the superhappies and especially for the babyeaters would be a greater satisfaction than before the time of the three's contact, and that is beautiful.

An interesting ethical exercise. It seems to me that it would benefit from cutting some slack, such as the entire pseudoreligious Confessor's line (I understand he's one of the more alive protagonists, but hey, it's largely drama out of nothing) and the superfluous "markets" (I understand the author is fond of prediction markets, but here they add nothing to the story's core, only distract). The core, on the other hand - the two alien races and their demands - is drama out of something and would do well with some elaboration.

For one thing, while the Babyeaters are pretty well established (and have some historic analog in the Holocaust, as mentioned in the story itself), the Superhappies look much more muddled to me. Why exactly should I be outraged by them? An overabundance of sex? Sorry, doesn't work. Lord Acon is somehow disgusted to look at their true bodies, all slimy and tangled? Pardon me, have you looked at your own guts or brain? They're pretty slimy too. Lack of humour and inability to lie? Well, that may be something to marvel at but hardly something to find morally unacceptable. I think the author missed a good opportunity here - he could have called the second aliens Babyfuckers (which they most likely are, it's just not highlighted enough in the story) instead of the bland "Superhappies," so that the humans' moral outrage looks more justified - and the story's premise becomes more nicely symmetric.

The only real reason to abhor the Superhappies does not appear until much later in the story when they reveal their plan to rework the human race. That, at least, is genuine conundrum. Is pain always bad? If not, when and why can it be good? If it's only good because it helps us understand sufferings of others and therefore be altruistic, will pain become useless in a world where (sentient) others don't suffer anymore? Where's the line between improving someone and killing-and-recreating-from-scratch? Is this line drawn differently for the body and for the brain? There's a lot to ponder.

Author's non-solution of "run, you fools" (which is the same in both endings, only one ending's escape is more successful than the other's) is sad and silly, but at least it's believable. We people are just like that, alas. We so want to improve the imperfect Others, yet we're so horrified at the thought that some still more perfect Others may want to improve us. Today's world is abrim with examples. Apparently centuries of mandated rationalism didn't do much to change that in the crew of the Impossible.

But the biggest problem I have with this story is not with the specific solution the author offers; rather, it is with the conception of "solution" itself. I am not an ethical realist (or at least not an ethical naturalist), so I don't believe ethical dilemmas work as mathematical puzzles where one answer is correct and all others are wrong. Ethics only exists within and between ethics-capable beings, and it only works via constant deliberation, negotiation, experimentation, building up trust. It's slow, it's painful, it's highly uncertain, but that's how live ethics works in real life. Going to space or conversing with aliens will hardly change that; if history shows us anything, it's that the more advanced a culture has become, the less likely it is to speak in ultimatums. So, I think I reject the very premise of this story; something vaguely like that may happen, but in real life it would be much less drastic, much more boring (in general, real life is more boring than fiction), with lots and lots of openings for compromise that all three parties will try to exploit. It doesn't mean the end result would be rosy and mutually satisfying; it may well happen that some of the civilizations will gobble up, or transform unrecognizably, others. But that's not going to happen overnight, and it's not something you can ensure or avoid too far in advance. Rationalism helps you think but it can't make the world completely predictable.

Actually I am nearly completely on the side of the Super Happies on this one. It is not as if the humans are moral with rape legalized. I'd support the Happies provided: 1. The utility function will not diverge from the goals of a) spreading truth, and eliminating delusion, b) spreading happiness, and eliminating suffering, c) growing, and not dying. With the negative statements taking precedence over the positive ones. 2. That accordingly the babies they will eat to accommodate the Baby Eaters are not only not sentient, but also incapable of suffering of any kind. I.e. have the moral status of a rock. 3. That a negative behaviour feedback is available for things like putting hands on stoves. A painless equivalent needs to be available to prevent anti-utility behaviour.

So, in short I kind of have to admit I dislike both endings.

I agree that killing billions on the off chance that the Superhappies won't find you is a horrific gamble. This is the sort of behavior we find in super villains in all sorts of fictional stories. That the ones making the choice sacrificed their own lives does not make it better. Atonement? Yeah, maybe he enjoyed every minute of it the same way he did torturing and raping a girl to death. Maybe that is what the laughter was really about.

Read Xenogenesis by Octavia Butler. It is a better story. We need to evolve and change. We don't get to refuse evolution. That is a dead end path. There are singularities. That is reality.