..fragments of a book that would never be written...
* * *
Captain Selena, late of the pirate ship Nemesis, quietly extended the very tip of her blade around the corner, staring at the tiny reflection on the metal. At once, but still silently, she pulled back the sword; and with her other hand made a complex gesture.
The translation spell told Hirou that the handsigns meant: "Orcs. Seven."
Dolf looked at Hirou. "My Prince," the wizard signed, "do not waste yourself against mundane opponents. Do not draw the Sword of Good as yet. Leave these to Selena."
Hirou's mouth was very dry. He didn't know if the translation spell could understand the difference between wanting to talk and wanting to make gestures; and so Hirou simply nodded.
Not for the first time, the thought occurred to Hirou that if he'd actually known he was going to be transported into a magical universe, informed he was the long-lost heir to the Throne of Bronze, handed the legendary Sword of Good, and told to fight evil, he would have spent less time reading fantasy novels. Joined the army, maybe. Taken fencing lessons, at least. If there was one thing that didn't prepare you for fantasy real life, it was sitting at home reading fantasy fiction.
Dolf and Selena were looking at Hirou, as if waiting for something more.
Oh. That's right. I'm the prince.
Hirou raised a finger and pointed it around the corner, trying to indicate that they should go ahead -
With a sudden burst of motion Selena plunged around the corner, Dolf following hard on her heels, and Hirou, startled and hardly thinking, moving after.
(This story ended up too long for a single LW post, so I put it on yudkowsky.net.
Do read the rest of the story there, before continuing to the Acknowledgments below.)
Acknowledgments:
I had the idea for this story during a conversation with Nick Bostrom and Robin Hanson about an awful little facet of human nature I call "suspension of moral disbelief". The archetypal case in my mind will always be the Passover Seder, watching my parents and family and sometimes friends reciting the Ten Plagues that God is supposed to have visited on Egypt. You take drops from the wine glass - or grape juice in my case - and drip them onto the plate, to symbolize your sadness at God slaughtering the first-born male children of the Egyptians. So the Seder actually points out the awfulness, and yet no one says: "This is wrong; God should not have done that to innocent families in retaliation for the actions of an unelected Pharaoh." I forget when I first realized how horrible that was - the real horror being not the Plagues, of course, since they never happened; the real horror is watching your family not notice that they're swearing allegiance to an evil God in a happy wholesome family Cthulhu-worshiping ceremony. Arbitrarily hideous evils can be wholly concealed by a social atmosphere in which no one is expected to point them out and it would seem awkward and out-of-place to do so.
In writing it's even simpler - the author gets to create the whole social universe, and the readers are immersed in the hero's own internal perspective. And so anything the heroes do, which no character notices as wrong, won't be noticed by the readers as unheroic. Genocide, mind-rape, eternal torture, anything.
Explicit inspiration was taken from this XKCD (warning: spoilers for The Princess Bride), this Boat Crime, and this Monty Python, not to mention that essay by David Brin and the entire Goblins webcomic. This Looking For Group helped inspire the story's title, and everything else flowed downhill from there.
Not Hirou, Vhazhar. For some reason, even as a very young child facing religious indoctrination, I couldn't quite accept that Abraham had made the right choice in trying to sacrifice Isaac upon God's command. That was one of my first moral breaks with Judaism. The Lord of Dark is - almost necessarily - actually visualizing situations and reacting to them as if seen, rather than processing words however the people around him expect to process them; there's no other way he could reject the values of his society to that extent, and even then, the amount of convergence he exhibits with our own civilization is implausible barring extremely optimistic assumptions about (a) the amount of absolute coherence (b) our own society's intelligence and (c) the Lord of Dark's intelligence; but of course the story wouldn't have worked otherwise.
Vhazhar's been working on it for some unknown number of years, having successfully realized that sucking the life from worms may be icky but doesn't actually hurt any sentient beings. (Though I wasn't assuming Vhazhar was ancient, he very well could be, and that would make a number of things more plausible, really.) Hirou has a whole civilization behind him and just needed to wake up and actually think.
Okay, Hirou has evidence that Vhazhar is a moral savant. But the reader, and Hirou, sees little evidence that Vhazhar has worked out a formal, rigorous theory of Friendliness. I thought that anything less than that, on your view, virtually guaranteed the obliteration of almost everything valuable.
But I draw a weaker inference from Vhazhar's ability to overcome indoctrination. Yes, it implies that he probably had a high native aptitude for correct moral reasoning. But the very fact that he was subjected to the indoctrination means that he's probably dam... (read more)