Emile comments on The Strangest Thing An AI Could Tell You - Less Wrong

81 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 July 2009 02:27AM

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Comment author: Emile 16 July 2009 08:21:51AM 27 points [-]

"Your perception of the 'quality' of works of art and litterature is only your guess of it's creator's social status. There is no other difference between Shakespeare and Harry Potter fanfic - without the status cues, you wouldn't enjoy one more than the other."

Comment author: atucker 23 March 2011 03:46:33AM 10 points [-]

Reading this comment is kind of funny after HPatMoR.

Comment author: Nisan 14 January 2012 08:02:26AM 3 points [-]
Comment author: Anubhav 14 January 2012 09:11:36AM *  12 points [-]

Parodies a public domain work, inspired by a free fanfic, and locked behind a paywall.

Am I the only one who thinks that that's just wrong?

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 15 January 2012 06:13:10AM 11 points [-]

The only one? No. But you're not in a majority, either. What people can be paid to do, they are more likely to do.

Comment author: Anubhav 15 January 2012 07:30:19AM 1 point [-]

Hmm, hadn't thought of the arrow of causality pointing that way.

Of course, if the prospect of making money significantly pushed up the probability of him writing it, then I can't complain... I'd rather have it exist behind a paywall than not exist at all.

But I'll have to question if the antecedent is really true. Is the money really more motivating than the prestige of having written an awesome work?

Comment author: DanielLC 23 June 2014 05:36:15AM 0 points [-]

Do you consider selling written works in general to be just wrong?

Comment author: gwern 14 January 2012 05:49:09PM 2 points [-]

It wasn't behind a paywall for me or many LWers.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 January 2012 07:46:25PM 0 points [-]

It wasn't? Why was it not behind a paywall for you and your privileged fellows? My (extensive 4.6 second long) search just showed me a page with a download link that asked for paypal login.

Comment author: gwern 14 January 2012 07:52:23PM 3 points [-]

http://lesswrong.com/lw/86m/fiction_hamlet_and_the_philosophers_stone/

If you don't have a bank account and you have 50+ karma on this site, send me a private message with your email address.

Anubhav has 50+ karma, incidentally.

Comment author: Anubhav 15 January 2012 02:30:36AM 2 points [-]

Still strikes me as wrong. IMO, you do not create something based on public domain works and then lock it up and demand people pay for it. The social norm isn't there because fanfiction is illegal, the social norm is there to prevent a tragedy of the commons. *

... But clearly, not everyone feels that way.

*(not quite; the original work is still there for anyone to partake of, but they're left with hardly any derivative ones to build upon. It's like starting with the wheel every time you want to build a car.)

Comment author: gwern 15 January 2012 02:40:40AM 3 points [-]

IMO, you do not create something based on public domain works and then lock it up and demand people pay for it.

So... it'd be fine for authors to create something based on still-copyrighted material, which they need to license, and then they can sell their new work? (And what did those authors base their works on, and hence forth to infinity...)

Comment author: Anubhav 15 January 2012 04:03:37AM 0 points [-]

I'd say the only works that deserve to be paywalled are ones that sprang from a vacuum with no inspiration whatsoever.

Of course, such works do not exist. Therefore, nothing deserves to be paywalled.

But there are different shades of gray. Consciously basing your work on two works of free literature and then paywalling it is wronger IMO than paywalling a work that was created by means of unconscious 'inspiration' from your general cultural ecosystem.

Comment author: wedrifid 14 January 2012 08:30:36PM 0 points [-]

Ahh, I see - a previous mention. It is of course behind a paywall for me given that I do, in fact, have a bank account but I'll be sure to buy it at some stage. Just as soon as the trivial inconvenience stops getting in the way.

Comment author: Anubhav 15 January 2012 07:29:39AM 0 points [-]

I'll buy it when I can figure out how to make an international payment with my account... Knowing banks, there will probably be a very elaborate set of hoops to jump through.

Comment author: gwern 15 January 2012 02:20:49PM 1 point [-]

Or you could, like me, just ask the author for a copy, as I already pointed out. If you are feeling guilty, you can contribute a review back (also like me).

Comment author: ArisKatsaris 16 January 2012 02:51:35AM 1 point [-]

Am I the only one who thinks that that's just wrong?

Am sure some people think that selling anything is wrong.

Comment author: Anubhav 16 January 2012 04:05:08AM 0 points [-]

Oh, spare me the straw men.

Comment author: MugaSofer 25 February 2013 09:23:33PM 0 points [-]

Pretty sure that's a real position.

Comment author: Normal_Anomaly 03 July 2013 09:12:58PM 2 points [-]

But it's irrelevant to Anubhav's point.

Comment author: MugaSofer 31 July 2013 03:52:27PM 2 points [-]

... but it's not a straw man.

Comment author: MBlume 16 July 2009 08:25:18PM *  8 points [-]

"Harry Potter fanfic" carries a very high variance in terms of quality. 90% of anything is crap, of course, but there's some excellent work. Off the top of my head:

Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past -- Time Travel fic in which an adult Harry Potter, with memories of the defeat of Voldemort and the death of everyone he cares for, is transported into the body of his 11-year-old self to do everything over again, and hopefully get everything right. Harry's actually a pretty decent rationalist in this fic, I think.

(Warning, this is a work in progress, and the author posts a chapter about every six months. You may find this frustrating.)

Of a Sort, by Fernwithy -- Series of vignettes over the course of a couple centuries describing the journey to Hogwarts and Sorting ceremonies for various important characters. Fernwithy's done a lot of brilliant work fleshing out backstories for various minor characters in the series, and this story is a good starting point.

Comment author: Alicorn 16 July 2009 08:27:32PM 5 points [-]

Seconded that there is good fanfic; sadly, my favorites are all unfinished or have unfinished sequels, so I won't do anyone the disservice of linking to them here.

Comment author: MBlume 16 July 2009 08:31:43PM 2 points [-]

Crap, thanks for reminding me -- Nightmares is a WIP and updates about once every six months.

Comment author: Alicorn 16 July 2009 08:33:06PM 5 points [-]

Too late, I already started it. Darn you.

Comment author: MatthewBaker 05 July 2011 06:36:57PM 0 points [-]

I have trouble suggesting unfinished Fanfics to other people anymore. Especially since i caught up with Forward :P

Comment author: JGWeissman 16 July 2009 10:22:44PM 12 points [-]

There is no other difference between Shakespeare and Harry Potter fanfic

Of course there isn't.

Comment author: Alicorn 16 July 2009 08:25:57PM 7 points [-]

This is interesting, but since I actively dislike Shakespeare and a lot of other works that project lofty signals, it's not clear to me that it could apply across the board.

Comment author: lessdazed 23 March 2011 03:43:28AM 3 points [-]

Consider this: with no other author who wrote books about war do I have so small an intuition about what the author himself or herself thought. I find his characters and plots pure in this respect, and I see every bit as a point hard on the edge and axis of the Paretto curve such that he couldn't have let intrude his thoughts about war without lessening other positive aspects of his works.

It's possible the great distance between our times is what gives me this void when I think of the man's opinions, or that these feelings and thoughts are idiosyncratic to me, or that they are irrelevant in judging him.

But it's pretty obvious to me what earlier Chaucer thought about a lot of things, and with every author but Shakespeare I find the author leaking through his or her work, preventing characters from standing on their own. Reading Shakespeare, imagining what he thought about things provides me with a unique way to focus. Reading HPatMoR, I have to do the opposite and expend focus thinking of Harry as a character and not an AI researcher.

Comment author: anonym 16 July 2009 08:09:00PM 4 points [-]

If there's really no other difference, then it's never the case that one person is more skilled a writer than another and it's never the case that practicing for decades results in improved skills.

Comment author: taelor 15 January 2012 04:26:18AM 1 point [-]

Alternately, they don't actually become better writers; they just get better at signalling their high status to the reader.

Comment author: Galap 17 March 2015 04:48:24AM 2 points [-]

Am I the only one who thinks that there's some kernel of truth in this? that many people's perception of 'quality' is very strongly influenced by the perceived social status of the creator?

Comment author: RichardKennaway 17 March 2015 11:54:05AM 1 point [-]

There is "some" kernel of truth in everything. There's a large distance between "only your guess" and "no other difference" on the one hand, and "many people's perception" and "very strongly influenced" on the other.

Besides which, status cannot be the whole explanation of status.

Comment author: [deleted] 17 March 2015 01:43:23PM 0 points [-]
Comment author: RichardKennaway 17 March 2015 02:12:53PM 0 points [-]

Was EDSC discussed on LW before?

It's been mentioned here, and also appears in HPMOR. In fact, the idea seems to be taken for granted as part of the LW memeplex.

I don't know if there's any evidence for it.

Comment author: Vaniver 17 March 2015 02:55:02PM *  0 points [-]

In fact, the idea seems to be taken for granted as part of the LW memeplex.

I think I see more people believing in the "social brain" hypothesis than the EDSC hypothesis; the overly simplistic version of EDSC seems to be "brains help you build tools, and tools help you reproduce" which most LWers don't agree with, since tools seem easy to copy and we don't see much tool innovation until after humans developed modern-ish levels of intelligence. The overly simplistic version of the "social brain" hypothesis is "brains help you manage alliances and social challenges in a larger group, and larger groups help you tackle harder ecological problems," which does seem to agree with what we think the early human environment looks like.

Comment author: RichardKennaway 17 March 2015 03:37:30PM *  0 points [-]

I think I see more people believing in the "social brain" hypothesis than the EDSC hypothesis

I took these to be the same thing. From the section of the Wikipedia article cited:

As a result the primary selective pressure for increasing human intelligence shifted from learning to master the natural world to competition for dominance among members or groups of its own species.

The question I have is whether intelligence foomed because it's useful for everything, or primarily because it's useful for social skills ("competition for dominance").

Comment author: Vaniver 17 March 2015 06:21:33PM 0 points [-]

I took these to be the same thing.

Ah, I think I misread the "to" as "for," but the second paragraph makes clear that my initial impression wasn't the intended one.

The question I have is whether intelligence foomed because it's useful for everything, or primarily because it's useful for social skills ("competition for dominance").

So, the more selection pressure, the better--so I think the fact that intelligence is useful for everything can only help. But is social skills enough to cause a foom by itself? It seems possible.

Comment author: Emile 17 March 2015 08:53:47AM 0 points [-]

I think that for the specific case of Harry Potter Fanfic, this hypothesis has been disproved by [Yudkowsky, 2010].

Though for "many people's perception of 'quality'", there's probably some truth there.