Introducing AI-Powered Audiobooks of Rational Fiction Classics

"No rescuer hath the rescuer. No Lord hath the champion, no mother and no father, only nothingness above." What is the right way to try to become good at the things Eliezer is good at? Why does naive imitation fail? There is a theme here, one which has corners that appear all over Eliezer's work - see Final Words [LW · GW] for another thing I'd call a corner of this idea. What is the rest? How does the whole picture fit together? Welp. I started with writing a conversation in the form of Godel Escher Bach, or A Semitechnical Introduction to Solomonoff Induction [LW · GW], where a version of me was having a conversation with an internal model of Eliezer I named "Exiezer" - and used that to work my way through connecting all of those ideas in an extended metaphor about learning to craft handaxes. I may do a LessWrong post including it, if I can tie it to an sufficiently high-quality object-level discussion on education and self improvement.

This is a section titled "the meeting of their minds" where Keltham and Carissa go full "secluded setting, radical honesty, total mindset dump." I think it is one of the most densely interesting parts of the book, and I think represents a few techniques more people should try. "How do you know how smart you really are?" Well, have you ever tried writing a character smarter than you think you are doing something that requires more intelligence than you feel like you have? What would happen if you attempted that? Well, you can have all the time in the world to plan out every little detail, check over your work, list alternatives, study relevant examples/material..m etc. etc. This section has the feeling of people actually attempting at running the race they've been practicing for using the crispest versions of the techniques they've been iterating on. Additionally, "have you ever attempted to 'meet minds' with someone? What sort of skills would you want to single out to practice? What sort of setting seems like it'd work for that?" This section shows two people working through a really serious conflict. It's a place where their values have come seriously into conflict, and yet, to get more of what they both want, they have to figure out how to cooperate. Also, they've both ended up pretty seriously damaged, and they have things they need to untangle.

This is a section called "to earth with science" and... Well, how useful it is depends on how much it's going to be useful to you to think more critically about the academic/scientific institutions we have on this planet. It's very much Eliezer doing a psuedo-rant about what's broken here that echoes the tone of something like Inadequate Equilibria. The major takeaway would be something like the takeaways you get from a piece of accurate satire - the lèse majesté which shatters some of the memes handed down to you by the wiser-than-thou people who grimly say "we know it's not perfect, but it's the best we have" and expect you not to have follow-up questions about that type of assertion.

This is my favorite section from "to hell with science." The entire post is a great lecture about the philosophy and practice of science, but this part in particular touches on a concept I expect to come up in more detail later regarding AIs and agency. One of the cruxes of this whole AI debate is whether you can separate out "intelligence" and "agency" - and this part provides an explanation for why that whole idea is something of a failure to conceptualize these things correctly.

This is Keltham lecturing on responsibility, the design of institutions, and how to critique systems from the lens of someone like a computer programmer. This is where you get some of the juiciest takeaways about Civilization as Eliezer envisions it. The "basic sanity check" of "who is the one person responsible for this" & requisite exception handling is particularly actionable, IMO.

"Learn when/where you can take quick steps and plant your feet on solid ground." There's something about feedback loops here, and the right way to start getting good at something. May not be terribly useful to a lot of people, but it stood out as a prescription for people who want to learn something. Invent a method, try to cheat, take a weird shortcut, guess. Then, check whether your results actually work. Don't go straight for "doing things properly" if you don't have to.

Keltham on how to arrive at Civilization from first-principles. This is one of the best lectures in the whole series from my perspective. The way it's framed in the form of a thought-experiment that I could on-board and play with in spare moments.