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Decius comments on Mortal: A Transponyist Fanfiction - Less Wrong
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Comments (65)
I feel like you didn't steelman the deathists' arguments, and you failed to reinforce the 'Equestria is the sum of all equines, and one cannot harm Equestria by helping an equine' theme. That discussion could easily take place between Twilight and Celestia after the former decides to save everypony but before she starts doing so, in a desperate bid to not become estranged.
Luna stepping in with "I will not let you" was a nice addition.
This is accurate. I tried to base the story on emotion first and reason second*, since I think most readers' objections to deathism are based on emotion, and because emotional persuasion is the comparative advantage of a story over an essay. I remember someone else was working on a similar fic that's much more strongly based on debate and argument.
I tried to steelman deathism's emotional position. For example, when Syhggreful qvrf, vg ybbxf yvxr snyyvat nfyrrc juvyr fheebhaqrq ol ybivat snzvyl. Guvf vf va funec pbagenfg gb zl bja rkcrevrapr jvgu qrngu. V'ir jngpurq guerr tenaqcneragf qvr, naq abg bar bs gurz xarj zl anzr, ng gur raq.
*Emotion and reason are not opposites, but they are different things. Substitute "system 1" and "system 2" if you like.
Did you optimize your emotional arguments for death, or did you simply use the stock emotional basis? Celestia is smart enough to use every dark art known in order to convince others (including afterlife), rather than going straight to aggressive blackmail.
I'm still not sure why the new alicorns put up with Celestia's rules; once she resorted to threats of violence, it seems like it should have been pointed out she would lose a contest of violence.
I wanted to make the narrative support deathism to the point where it didn't seem like an obviously false position to the reader. I tried to do this by making the deathist advocates the characters who the fandom associates with reason and wisdom, by making the anti-deathist advocate aggressive and uncompromising, and by emphasizing that most everyone liked the status quo just fine. I stopped doing this sort of thing in the last act. (In hindsight, "steelman" is the wrong term for what I did. Sorry about that.)
I think I was successful at the above. Readers who didn't start as transhumanists were unable to tell what my own position was.
Smart enough, but not vicious enough. This characterization of Celestia wouldn't do anything she felt was dishonest. My intent was to show her as a tragic character doing the wrong thing for understandable reasons.
Partly because they are happy colorful ponies and they prefer not to solve problems through force. Partly because Twilight still craves Celestia's approval.
Thanks for all your feedback; this is a useful conversation. I am strongly considering taking your earlier suggestion and adding the "it's just ponies" theme to the big confrontation with Celestia.
I don't think Celestia could be not vicious enough to fail to use dark arts of persuasion, but still be vicious enough to threaten a thousand years of solitude.
I agree that violence is not appropriate to the genre, but the threat is also inappropriate. Perhaps explicitly communicating 'we respect you, but we think that you are mistaken on this one issue' would help make Celestia seem like the Bad Guy in the end, for demanding banishment and other unreasonable things of the new alicorns.
That spoilered part was pro deathist? I cried for like half an hour after that, and I read all of Background Pony without crying.
How would you have steelmanned the deathist argument here (without altering the technical facts about immortality in the universe)? Some positions are hard to steelman.
I would create an immortal who saw so many of her friends die that she didn't care about anything anymore, or some other specific example of a pony who should not have been made immortal. I would try to make the attempted discussion with the insane alicorn disturbing to the reader. I would also have some mortal ponies explicitly choose death now rather than risk that specific fate in the future.
Hmm. I think it's dubious that someone would go insane and not care about anything anymore after watching their friends die. That might or might not be altering the facts of the situation, and therefore providing evidence that isn't part of the deathist position either in real life or in the story.
But witnessing death driving people insane doesn't seem like an argument in favor of death to me.
Ponies knowing about the big rip wouldn't make sense, also I don't think the author intended for it to be a part of the universe. So to the extent that this is supposed to be a fair treatment of a position in universe, it's kind of wrong to bring the big rip into it. To the extent that this is supposed to be a fair treatment of a position in real life, it also doesn't make sense to bring endless torture because of the big rip into it, because in real life there couldn't be any indestructible immortals.
It's not necessary that it be likely, only that is has happened once. The argument would be that immortality given to ponies who do not deserve it causes insanity.
But the reader would think about how likely it was in terms of the availability heuristic. So it would be changing what the reader believed about the facts, not just arguing in a particularly coherent way about the implications of the reader's current beliefs, or about the "facts" in the story, or pointing out implications of those beliefs or facts that they hadn't seen before, which is what I would call steelmanning.
It makes no sense to attribute potential future insanity to potential future insanity, because the choice Twilight is making is essentially "will most people be immortal, or will most people die." People she makes immortal, if she chooses mass-alicornification, should not expect to see a lot of people die.
"Deserve" is a strange word to use. Is "capable of handling it" more what you're thinking? Or are you saying you deserve to die if you can't stand to watch people too many times?
I'm saying that I though that Celestia used those concepts in that manner. The counter-argument to 'seeing death won't cause insanity if ponies no longer die' could be 'some will still choose natural life, for whatever reason, and watching it will be enough to drive the weakest alicorn mad'.
I can't convince myself, but I think that the arguments that Celestia presents to her position should believably convince her.
I can believe that they would convince her. But steel manning her argument should go no further than having her point out what you just said, and should not include adding unrealistic or unusual evidence to the story.
And that's if it is indeed a strong thing to point out, but even if some ponies will still choose death, alicorns can easily avoid watching them. There's nothing to say an alicorn has to hang out with non-alicorns. (The most deaths an alicorn might see in waiting for their non-alicorn friends and family to die off is probably less than the amount a particularly long-lived human might see, and I've never heard of an centenarian who stopped caring about everything because of witnessing deaths.) If non-alicorns were still choosing death all throughout the future, their deaths could be mere faceless numbers to alicorns that didn't want to think about it. Much like the millions of humans dying today in real life, and the billions who have died throughout history don't emotionally traumatize me.
Actually, I can respond to the biggest reason why I wanted to introduce someone broken by immortality inherently: "There are no such people, because I have carefully avoided creating them. It would be the most irresponsible thing imaginable to cause someone to suffer such a fate!"
This isn't a restriction on fiction. I chose to make immortality irrevocable and suicide impossible because otherwise the deathists would've been too wrong to make a good story. (Before anyone raises the obvious objection: if immortality is literally permanent, then the second law of thermodynamics is already broken, so the heat death of the universe isn't necessarily inevitable.)
I know. I wanted to rule out a different set of facts about immortality than there were in the story, because deathism under those conditions would basically be a different position from deathism in the story, or deathism in real life. Changing the subject of the argument to make a side right is not steel manning that side, and it's not required by any reasonable rules of fairness.
Also, does it really matter if the deathists are too wrong in our eyes to make a good story? I would think that they just have to have a reasonable position in they eyes of the audience. By making this something of a genuine conflict from the perspective of LessWrongers, maybe you've made it settled in favor of deathism from the perspective of a large fraction of the readers.
Thermodynamics isn't the obvious objection IMO, it's the big rip. Alicorns may be able to create matter around them, but perhaps they are the only things that can't be torn apart by expanding space. And maybe they can almost be torn apart, but not quite. So an eternity of feeling like you're suffocating, being almost torn apart, and almost frozen, and being alone awaits every alicorn eventually.
Hopefully the physics in this world are sufficiently dissimilar from real life that that won't happen.
Entirely possible. I might edit that detail out.
Here's a question that could be asked in that case: Such a fate awaits the immortals. Should mortals with full knowledge of the consequences (and Yhan'f bcvavba ba jurgure be abg n gubhfnaq lrnef fbyvghqr jnf jbegu vzzbegnyvgl) be allowed to choose immortality?
Given that cost, would you choose immortality?
No and no. I read it last morning and didn't have time to respond (literally busy all day with last 2 weeks before graduation), and the way I remembered it, I thought it was (if not a hard question), at least the kind of question that tears at your heartstrings to answer, even if you are dead certain your answer is not changing. (Like the "Torture the terrorist's innocent family to stop the ticking bomb in the city" question). Then I came back and read (or re-read) the rot13'd part (I have no idea why it's rot13'd). And was like: this is easy.
The hard-but-not-really-hard question would be: ponies who think they can stand being torn apart, frozen, suffocated, isolated, without food or water in utter darkness forever want to become alicorns. Ponies without Luna's attitude. Let them? My answer would still be no.
The one way I would say yes is if some kind of extreme mind-hacks that alicorns could unlock would let them endure it.
Okay, so infinite suffering is not a fair trade for a finite nonsuffering life; suppose that there was an infinite lifetime either before or mixed with infinite suffering.
Is it permissible to create somebody that has an infinite amount of life that isn't torture if they also must experience an infinite amount of life that is? Is the relative fraction of time and intensity of the periods of torture relevant?
Yes and yes.
The idea of infinite lifetime and then you start suffering doesn't make sense. There is no time where infinity is over, so I answered for the "mixed with infinite suffering" alternative.
Given the expansion-> torture effect, can you objectively determine when happy life stops and when endless torture begins, or is it possible that for any time C, there could be an alicorn who is not being tortured?
You say "objectively," but unless you confirm that's what you meant, I'll assume you meant "with sufficient evidence to justify," because I think the latter is what you meant.
There is some uncertainty as to when happiness would end and pain would begin (we're dealing with a fictional universe with unknown (and probably undecided) physical laws, for Adun's sake), but the wikipedia article on the big rip says that if it is indeed the fate of the universe, space will stretch infinitely much in a finite amount of time. If that's the case, then it ind of makes no sense for an alicorn to survive. It's like an unstoppable force and an immovable object. But if alicorns are alive at the moments leading up to that point, the stretching on them will grow to whatever level it needs to (and quickly) for it to be torturous. And if they are somehow alive after that point (not sure what that would mean even) "The torture gets less then" sounds like the least sensible option.
So maybe you can't say exactly when every alicorn is getting tortured, but given that the big rip happens, every possibility is bad. And even if a few alicorns weren't tortured (while most were), unless back in Equestria billions of years earlier you could foresee which ones they were gonna be and only make those ones immortal, it's better to kill everyone (or everyone except Luna, Celestia, Cadence, and Twilight, who are fortunately all female and perhaps unable to continue ponykind (unless magic works like it does in a certain fanfic I read...)) than to let that happen.
I only bring up the second law in nonfictional contexts; clearly, the cosmos behaves in the manner that Celestia tells it to, so we shouldn't have to worry about the stars going out.