It's strange to have this as my first comment on LW but I'd like to mention that the fanfic's author is currently being targeted by Internet trolls due to her transhumanist stories, among which this one, to the point of receiving death threats. See this blog post of hers for details.
That is sad on many levels. It is horrible that someone can be attacked in real life for writing a pony fanfiction. That's just... totally fucked up.
Unfortunately, she blames the website for having upvote and downvote buttons, because those -- using her words -- encourage antagonistic behavior. I support her right to not be harassed, but I don't agree with her conclusion. At least I don't think the presence of upvote and downvote buttons made LessWrong a hostile place... so obviously, there is something beyond the buttons. Buttons are just a community's to...
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?