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Alicorn comments on Less Wrong Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky: Ask Your Questions - Less Wrong
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What was the story purpose and/or creative history behind the legalization and apparent general acceptance of non-consensual sex in the human society from Three Worlds Collide?
Excellent; I was going to ask that myself. Clearly Eliezer wanted an example to support his oft-repeated contention that the future like the past will be filled with people whose values seem abhorrent to us. But why he chose that particular example I'd like to know. Was it the most horrific(-sounding) thing he could come up with some kind of reasonable(-sounding) justification for?
It's not at all clear to me that coming up with a reasonable-sounding justification was part of the project. One isn't provided in the story, one wasn't presented as part of an answer to an earlier question of mine, etc. etc.
here
This isn't an explanation at all.
The purpose was to test the waters for another story he was developing; there probably wasn't an in-story purpose to it beyond the obvious one of making it clear that the younger people had a very different worldview than the one we have now. He's been unwilling to give more detail because the reaction to the concept's insertion in that story was too negative to allow him to safely (without reputational consequence, I assume) share the apparently much more questionable other story, or, seemingly, any details about it.
I did upvote your question, by the way. I want to hear more about that other story.
I don't see it doing much good to his reputation to stay silent either, given the inflammatory nature of the remark. Sure, people will be able to quote that part to trash Eliezer, but that's a lot worse than if someone could link a reasonable clarification in his defense.
Yes, I voted Alicorn's question up. I want to know too.
Actually, there's a very good clarification of his views on rape in the context of our current society later in that same comment thread that could be linked to. It didn't seem to be relevant to this conversation, though.
That's certainly an explanation. "Very good" and "clarifying" are judgment calls here...
<non-sarcastic> <non-rhetorical> How could it be better? What parts still need clarifying?
I don't see the need for more than this:
I just figured that these humans have been biologically altered to have a different attitude towards sex. Perhaps, for them, initiating sex with someone is analogous to initiating a conversation. Sure, you wish that some people wouldn't talk to you, but you wouldn't want to live in a world where everyone needed your permission before initiating a conversation. Think of all the interesting conversations you'd miss!
And if that's what's going on, that would constitute a (skeezy) answer to my question, but I'd like to hear it from the story's author. Goodness knows it would annoy me if people started drawing inaccurate conclusions about my constructed worlds when they could have just asked me and I would have explained.
Alicorn: On the topic of your constructed worlds, I would be fascinated to read how your background in world-building (which, iirc, was one focus of your education?) might contribute to our understanding of this one.
Yes, worldbuilding was my second major (three cheers for my super-cool undergrad institution!). My initial impression of Eliezer's skills in this regard from his fiction overall are not good, but that could be because he tends not to provide very much detail. It's not impossible that the gaps could be filled in with perfectly reasonable content, so the fact that these gaps are so prevalent, distracting, and difficult to fill in might be a matter of storytelling prowess or taste rather than worldbuilding abilities. (It's certainly possible to create a great world and then do a bad job of showcasing it.) I should be able to weigh in on this one in more detail if and when I get an answer to the above question, which is a particularly good example of a distracting and difficult-to-fill-in gap.
If I understand EY's philosophy of predicting the future correctly, the gaps in the world are intentional.
Suppose that you are a futurist, and you know how hard it is to predict the future, but you're convinced that the future will be large, complicated, weird, and hard to connect directly to the present. How can you provide the reader with the sensation of a large, complicated, weird, and hard-to-connect-to-the-present future?
Note that as a futurist, the conjunction fallacy (more complete predictions are less likely to be correct) is extremely salient in your thinking.
You put deliberate gaps into your stories, any resolution of which would require a large complicated explanation - that way the reader has the desired (distracting and difficult-to-fill-in) sensation, without committing the author to any particular resolution.
Perhaps see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traumatic_insemination
Wouldn't cannibalism be an equally horrific thing to come up with? I can envision a future world in which Cannibalism is just as accepted as non-consensual sex in The Worlds Collide. I mean, with the recent invention of pork on a petri dish, it would be just as easy to grow human on a petri dish.
Or, if like in the movie(s) Surrogate and Avatar, if we have bodies that we drive from a distance, and these bodies can be replaced by just growing/building a new one, might not some people kill and eat others as a type of social comment (in the same way that some sub-cultures engage in questionable behavior in order to make a social comment. The Goth/Vampire thing for instance, or some shock artists like Karen Finley or GG Allin. I had to leave the GG Allin show(s) I attended as a kid, but sat in rapt fascination through Karen's song Yam Jam, and was really interested in just how she was going to remove those yams afterward or what might had driven her to explore that particular mode of expression to begin with)
I would not have any problems with eating human-on-a-petri-dish, as long as it never had any neurons. The problem with cannibalism is eating a person, not some cells with the wrong DNA. And cells in a petri dish are not a person.
The other problem with cannibalism is that you can get diseases that way far more easily than you can from eating non-human meat.
I know that, and you know that... But, what would the general population say about eating meat that was the product of Human DNA?
It seems to me that some of the general population would be horribly incensed about it.
Most of the general population is incensed about most things, most of the time. I've stopped caring. Why don't you?
If a group of people donated their bodies to cannibalism when they die for a group of cannibals to then consume them, I would have no problem with that. (I submit myself as an example of someone with moderate rather than extremely liberal views.)
I think the moral repugnance only comes in when people might be killed for food: the value of life and person-hood is so much greater than the value of an immediate meal.
Someone speculated earlier about a civilization of humans that had nothing to consume but other humans. Has it been mentioned yet that this population would shrink exponentially, because humans are heterotrophs, and there's something like only 10% efficiency from one step in the food chain to the next?
That's what was disappointing about The Matrix. If the aliens wanted to generate energy there would have been more efficient ways to do so (say, one which actually generated more energy than it required). I pretend the aliens were just farming CPU and the director got it wrong.
We already have moral repugnance towards the act of killing itself. I suspect that any feelings towards already-dead bodies exist independently of this. They may be rooted in feelings of disgust which evolved in part to protect from contamination (recently dead bodies can spread disease and also provide breeding ground for flies and parasites).
I don't locate feelings of disgust. Perhaps we are just genetically or culturally different with respect to this sensitivity?
I recall when my parakeet died, I felt a sense of awe while holding the body; and a moral obligation to be respectful and careful with its body. I suppose I wouldn't have enjoyed eating him, but only because I identified him as more of a person than food. If I thought he would have wanted me to eat him, I would. Except then I would worry about parasites, so I would have to weigh my wishes to make a symbolic gesture verses my wishes to stay healthy.
That was me who discussed a civilization that had nothing to consume but other humans. Thanks for bringing it up, but I had already dealt with that in the stories as soon as someone pointed out that problem when I was much younger (turned out to be easier to fix that I thought), but telling what the solution is would give away too much, and since I might actually be able to get these published now that cannibalism is not nearly so taboo as it was back in the 80s when I first tried to submit them (Zombie movies were not nearly so prevalent then as now). Once the solution is revealed... It makes for another grim and, some have said, twisted surprise.
I too have wondered about the whole matrix thing. There are some very good arguments against it, which I tend to give more weight to than the arguments in favor. Yet, the arguments in favor did not take into account the waste generated by the humans being used to support the generation of power, nor did they take into account any possible superconducting tech the AIs may have had. I cannot recall if any of them took into account that the AIs were also not using every human farmed as a battery, but were using many of the farmed humans as food for the living humans. There is also some evidence from the games that the AIs were also using algae as a supplement for the human batteries.
Also, on the point about people donating their bodies to cannibals when they die... I have often thought that it would be a horrible joke for some cranky rich old guy to play on his heirs to make them eat him if they wished to inherit any of his fortune.
Sod that, start a religion in which people have to symbolically eat your body and drink your blood once a week. Better yet, tell them that when they do it, it magically becomes the real thing!
I would love to stop caring. It is indeed a wonderful suggestion.
However, many of those people who would be offended by such things, also get offended by many, much less offensive things, things which often may cause a loss of liberty to others... And they vote.
I do think it would behoove me to maybe turn up my apathy just a bit, as my near term future will have a lot more to say about my survival and ultimate value than worrying about a bunch of human cattle who like to get all bothered about things as trivial as the shape of the moon (absurd example)
Does your worrying about and discussing what other people believe contribute more to changing the outcome of their voting, or to other things, like personal payoff of social interaction while having the discussions about people of lower status according to this metric? Overestimating importance of personally discussing politics for policy formation is a classical mistake.
See also: Dunbar's Function
I see that I may be caught up in this mistake a bit. Some of my discussing is simply to gather information about what a typical person of a demographic might believe. It's mostly confirming what I might have read about in a poll, or that data from a website shows.
Some times the discussion gets to the point where I try to change an attitude, and I keep tripping over myself when I do this, as few people will change their attitudes, political and/or religious without some form of emotional connection with the reason to change.
This is sort of why I am here. I wish to stop using my valuable brain time to convince people of things which I haven't a hope of changing, and do something else which may contribute to the good of society in a more direct way.
I am a mess of paranoid contradictions gathered from a mis-spent youth, and I wish to untangle some of that irrationality, as it is an intellectual drag on my progress.