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

Rob Bensinger

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

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.

So what is Mr. Turing's computer like? It has these parts:

The long piece of paper. The paper has lines on it like the kind of paper you use in numbers class at school; the lines mark the paper up into small parts, and each part has only enough room for one number. Usually the paper starts out with some numbers already on it for the computer to work with.
The head, which reads from and writes numbers onto the paper. It can only use the space on the paper that is exactly under it; if it wants to read from or write on a different place on the paper, the whole head has to move up or down to that new place first. Also, it can only move one space at a time.
The memory. Our computers today have lots of memory, but Mr. Turing's computer has only enough memory for one thing at a time. The thing being remembered is the "state" of the computer, like a "state of mind".
The table, which is a plan that tells the computer what to do when it is each state. There are only so many different states that the computer might be in, and we have to put them all in the table before we run the computer, along with the next steps the computer should take when it reads different numbers in each state.

Looking closer, each line in the table has five parts, which are:

If Our State Is this
And The Number Under Head Is this
Then Our Next State Will Be this (or maybe the computer just stops here)
And The Head Should write this
And Then The Head Should move this way

Here's a simple table:

Happy   1   Happy   1    Right
Happy   2   Happy   1    Right
Happy   3   Sad     3    Right
Sad       1   Sad     2    Right
Sad       2   Sad     2    Right
Sad       3   Stop

Okay, so let's say that we have one of Mr. Turing's computers built with that table. It starts out in the Happy state, and its head is on the first number of a paper like this:

1 2 1 1 2 1 3 1 2 1 2 2 1 1 2 3

What will the paper look like after the computer is done? Try pretending you are the computer and see what you do! The answer is at the end.

So you can see now that the table is the plan for what the computer should do. But we still have not fixed Mr. Babbage's problem! To make the computer do different things, we have to open it up and change the table. Since the "table" in any real computer will be made of very many parts put together very carefully, this is not a good way to do it!

So here is the amazing part that surprised everyone: you can make a great table that can act like any other table if you give it the right numbers on the paper. Some of the numbers on the paper tell the computer about a table for adding, and the rest of the numbers are to be added. The person who made the great table did not even have to know anything about adding, as long as the person who wrote the first half of the paper does.

Our computers today have tables like this great table, and so almost everything fun or important that they do is given to them long after they are built, and it is easy to change what they do.

By the way, here is how the paper from before will look after a computer with our simple table is done with it:

1 1 1 1 1 1 3 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 3

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

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

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