I started reading the first page, and it looks like it's a fic about an engineered utopia with constructed simulated minds.
That's enough right there. Large scale manufacture of pony minds for a video game is exactly the kind of thing that Eliezer would call horrifying, even if it didn't wrench his guts with terror. Think of it as endorsing that you should feel horror in response to the Optimalverse, even though you probably won't because it's nicer than present reality in many respects and because human emotions don't properly reflect reality (scope neglect, hedonic treadmill, not crying when you walk through a cemetery until you reach the row of infant graves). Or maybe his guts do wrench. Different people get upset about all sorts of stimuli, from squirting blood to scraping nails to clicking computers to a microcosm inhabited by adorable inhuman sentients to whom no one gives proper moral consideration .
It also happens to serve Eliezer's interests to make it seem that he is an expert designer of utopias, against whose work everything else falls disastrously short. But that's not such a high standard.
I'm curious: why was this comment retracted? Have you changed your opinion?
So Eliezer said in his March 1st HPMOR progress report:
So I read that and it was certainly very much worth reading - thanks for the recommendation! Obviously, the following contains spoilers.
I'm confused about how the story is supposed to be "terrifying". I rarely find any fiction scary, but I suspect that this is about something else: I didn't think Failed Utopia #4-2 was "failed" either and in Three Worlds Collide, I thought the choice of the "Normal" ending made a lot more sense than choosing the "True" ending. The Optimalverse seems to me a fantastically fortunate universe, pretty much the best universe mammals could ever hope to end up in, and I honestly don't see how it is a horror novel, at all.
So, apparently there's something I'm not getting. Something that makes an individual's hard-to-define "free choice" more valuable than her much-easier-to-define happiness. Something like a paranoid schizophrenic's right not to be treated,
So I'd like the dumb version please. What's terrifying about the Optimalverse?