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Hans comments on The Hero With A Thousand Chances - Less Wrong
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Comments (156)
So, is Aerhien's immortality the result of something like a quantum suicide? :)
This is a good piece of SF, but it suffers from a severe case of an ailment common to the genre, which is that someone who's never heard of X (in this case the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the anthropic principle) isn't going to have a clue what the hell you're talking about. Additionally, it's kinda hard to tell at first what elements of the story are made up (magic words, dust, summoning, etc) and what we're supposed to connect up with something from science (I would have figured out ahntharhapik principle eventually, probably).
"someone who's never heard of X (in this case the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics and the anthropic principle) isn't going to have a clue what the hell you're talking about."
Yeah, that must be why I didn't understand anything. But I got the tolkien reference!
I passed along the story that alien message to a friend of mine, and he thought it was an interesting story but completely failed to notice the AI connection, even though he was a little familiar with those ideas. I didn't disparage him for that, and I could see how unless you were familiar with Eliezer talking about AI boxes it wouldn't be be obvious, but here I really shared his experience. I actually thought for a bit "is Eliezer practicing for a side career in fantasy writing?" I know a little about the anthropic principle though, so when the concept was referenced most of the pieces fell together in a very felicitous way. Maybe that's actually an overall better effect, having the whole thing hit you '"at once"?
By the way, though I was able to scrounge up the Knuth UpArrow notatation, if it's convenient could someone point me to something explaining the scariest thing imaginable? I've yet to realize the soul-gnawing horror of 3^^^^3 dust specks going into Eliezer's eye.
Click on the photo.