The Up-Goer Five Game: Explaining hard ideas with simple words

Rob Bensinger

44 The Up-Goer Five Game: Explaining hard ideas with simple words

5th Sep 2013

2 min read

44

xkcd's Up-Goer Five comic gave technical specifications for the Saturn V rocket using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language.

This seemed to me and Briénne to be a really fun exercise, both for tabooing one's words and for communicating difficult concepts to laypeople. So why not make a game out of it? Pick any tough, important, or interesting argument or idea, and use this text editor to try to describe what you have in mind with extremely common words only.

This is challenging, so if you almost succeed and want to share your results, you can mark words where you had to cheat in *italics*. Bonus points if your explanation is actually useful for gaining a deeper understanding of the idea, or for teaching it, in the spirit of Gödel's Second Incompleteness Theorem Explained in Words of One Syllable.

As an example, here's my attempt to capture the five theses using only top-thousand words:

Intelligence explosion: If we make a computer that is good at doing hard things in lots of different situations without using much stuff up, it may be able to help us build better computers. Since computers are faster than humans, pretty soon the computer would probably be doing most of the work of making new and better computers. We would have a hard time controlling or understanding what was happening as the new computers got faster and grew more and more parts. By the time these computers ran out of ways to quickly and easily make better computers, the best computers would have already become much much better than humans at controlling what happens.
Orthogonality: Different computers, and different minds as a whole, can want very different things. They can want things that are very good for humans, or very bad, or anything in between. We can be pretty sure that strong computers won't think like humans, and most possible computers won't try to change the world in the way a human would.
Convergent instrumental goals: Although most possible minds want different things, they need a lot of the same things to get what they want. A computer and a human might want things that in the long run have nothing to do with each other, but have to fight for the same share of stuff first to get those different things.
Complexity of value: It would take a huge number of parts, all put together in just the right way, to build a computer that does all the things humans want it to (and none of the things humans don't want it to).
Fragility of value: If we get a few of those parts a little bit wrong, the computer will probably make only bad things happen from then on. We need almost everything we want to happen, or we won't have any fun.

If you make a really strong computer and it is not very nice, you will not go to space today.

Other ideas to start with: agent, akrasia, _{Bayes' theorem}, _Bayesianism, CFAR, cognitive bias, consequentialism, deontology, _{effective altruism}, Everett-style ('Many Worlds') interpretations of quantum mechanics, entropy, evolution, the Great Reductionist Thesis, _{halting problem}, humanism, law of nature, LessWrong, logic, mathematics, the measurement problem, MIRI, Newcomb's problem, Newton's laws of motion, optimization, _{Pascal's wager}, philosophy, preference, proof, rationality, religion, science, Shannon information, signaling, the simulation argument, singularity, sociopathy, the supernatural, superposition, time, timeless decision theory, transfinite numbers, _{Turing machine}, _{utilitarianism}, validity and soundness, virtue ethics, VNM-utility

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44 The Up-Goer Five Game: Explaining hard ideas with simple words

by Rob Bensinger

5th Sep 2013

2 min read

44

xkcd's Up-Goer Five comic gave technical specifications for the Saturn V rocket using only the 1,000 most common words in the English language.

As an example, here's my attempt to capture the five theses using only top-thousand words:

Intelligence explosion: If we make a computer that is good at doing hard things in lots of different situations without using much stuff up, it may be able to help us build better computers. Since computers are faster than humans, pretty soon the computer would probably be doing most of the work of making new and better computers. We would have a hard time controlling or understanding what was happening as the new computers got faster and grew more and more parts. By the time these computers ran out of ways to quickly and easily make better computers, the best computers would have already become much much better than humans at controlling what happens.
Orthogonality: Different computers, and different minds as a whole, can want very different things. They can want things that are very good for humans, or very bad, or anything in between. We can be pretty sure that strong computers won't think like humans, and most possible computers won't try to change the world in the way a human would.
Convergent instrumental goals: Although most possible minds want different things, they need a lot of the same things to get what they want. A computer and a human might want things that in the long run have nothing to do with each other, but have to fight for the same share of stuff first to get those different things.
Complexity of value: It would take a huge number of parts, all put together in just the right way, to build a computer that does all the things humans want it to (and none of the things humans don't want it to).
Fragility of value: If we get a few of those parts a little bit wrong, the computer will probably make only bad things happen from then on. We need almost everything we want to happen, or we won't have any fun.

If you make a really strong computer and it is not very nice, you will not go to space today.

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sixes_and_sevens13y110

I spent the better part of November writing miniature essays in this. It's really quite addictive. My favourites:

Parallax and cepheid variables (Dead stars that flash in space)
Basic linear algebra (four-sided boxes of numbers that eat each other)
The Gold Standard (Should a bit of money be the same as a bit of sun-colored stuff that comes out of the ground?)
The Central Limit Theorem (The Middle Thing-It-Goes-To Idea-You-Can-Show-Is-True-With-Numbers - when you take lots of Middle Numbers of lots of groups, it looks like the Normal Line!)
Complex numbers ("I have just found out I can use the word 'set'. This makes me very happy.")
Utility, utilitarianism and the problems with interpersonal utility comparison ("If you can't put all your wants into this order, you have Not-Ordered Wants")
The triumvirate brain hypothesis ("when you lie down on the Mind Doctor's couch, you are lying down next to a horse, and a green water animal with a big smile")
Arrow's Impossibility Theorem ("If every person making their mark on a piece of paper wants the Cat Party more than the Dog Party, then the Dog Party can't come out higher in the order than the Cat Party.")
The concept of "degenerate case" ("If your boyfriend or girlfriend has a different meaning for 'box' than you do, and you give them a line, not only will they be cross with you, but you will be wrong, and that is almost as bad")
The word "sublimate" ("When Dry Ice goes into the air, it is beautiful, like white smoke. There is a word for this situation, and we also use that word to talk about things that are beautiful, because they are perfect, and become white smoke without being wet first")

satt13y20

Complex numbers

I don't know why that one caught my eye, but here I go.

You've probably seen the number line before, a straight line from left to right (or right to left, if you like) with a point on the line for every real number. A real number, before you ask, is just that: real. You can see it in the world. If I point to a finger on my hand and ask, "how many of these do I have?", the answer is a real number. So is the answer to "how tall am I?", and the answer to "How much money do I have?" The answer to that last questio... (read more)

19twanvl13y

Does it really simplify things if you replace "limit" with "thing-it-goes-to" and theorem with "idea-you-can-show-is-true-with-numbers"? IMO this is a big problem with the up-goer five style text: you can still try to use complex concepts by combining words. And because you have to describe the concept with inadequate words, it becomes actually harder to understand what you really mean. There are two purposes of writing simple English: * writing for children * writing for non-native speakers In both cases is "sun-colored stuff that comes out of the ground" really the way you would explain it? I would sooner say something like: "yellow is the color of the sun, it looks like . People like shiny yellow metal called gold, because there is little of it". I suppose the actual reason we are doing this is * artificially constrained writing is fun. [...] "give them a line" and "be cross with you" are expressions that make no sense with the literal interpretation of these words.

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