Three Worlds Collide (0/8)
"The kind of classic fifties-era first-contact story that Jonathan Swift
might have written, if Jonathan Swift had had a background in game
theory."
-- (Hugo nominee) Peter Watts, "In Praise of Baby-Eating"
Three Worlds Collide is a story I wrote to illustrate some points on naturalistic metaethics and diverse other issues of rational conduct. It grew, as such things do, into a small novella. On publication, it proved widely popular and widely criticized. Be warned that the story, as it wrote itself, ended up containing some profanity and PG-13 content.
- The Baby-Eating Aliens
- War and/or Peace
- The Super Happy People
- Interlude with the Confessor
- Three Worlds Decide
- Normal Ending
- True Ending
- Atonement
PDF version here.
Loading…
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Comments (67)
In the ideal case, would you recommend reading each chapter separately, with the day-long pause in between to digest, or reading them all at once? Or perhaps you would like to hear feedback from people who have taken each approach to see which works better.
wellll.. it's kinda fun, Eleizer, I guess so I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and keep reading .... but....but... is this format quite right for OB?
Would this series not be better in - ooh, I don't know - a new and more open sister site of some kind, perhaps with the key points written up at the end and posted on to OB, if they seem popular? Or am I wrong.
When it's done, is there any chance you'll stick it online in an ereader compatible format? PDF is ok, but EPUB would be better.
I don't tend to read very long things on a computer, so having it in a more friendly format would be nice.
Andrew, will try to remember. Remind me when it's done.
Botogol, Less Wrong isn't ready yet, and now is when people are asking me about what sort of values aliens might have.
could you please make an EPUB version, as for your Harry Potter fanfiction? With PDFs you can't change font size, so it's a big pain to read with an ebook reader. thanks
yup. alien ones.
List of allusions I managed to catch (part 1):
Alderson starlines - Alderson Drive Giant Science Vessel - GSV - General Systems Vehicle Lord Programmer - allusion to the archeologist programmers in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep? Greater Archive - allusion to Orion's Arm's Greater Archives?
Good times!
Oh, on the subject of stories and that post about dreams, that reminds me: You had said to remind you to tell us about your "most philosophically interesting dream"
Three worlds collide?
As of part 1, we've seen two...
Excellent. I was reluctant to start reading at first, but when I did, I found it entertaining. This should be a TV series. :)
I too felt a bit anxious about reading this but was glad I did! It's entertaining to read and very interesting to think about.
Thanks.
@Eliezer - nope, sorry, 3/8 now, seems like 10,000 words of cod fiction and OB has truly jumped the shark.
There's load of good ideas there but praps you shoulda' waited until LessWrong was working AllRight.
really good writing. keep them coming :-)
botogol, what is cod fiction? Is COD an acronym for "capacity on demand" or "change of direction"?
Eliezer,
Personally, I liked the Babyeaters. At the outset of your story, I thought (1) that their babyeating would be held up as an example of the triumph of rationality (around population control), and (2) that their refusal to modify themselves would be based on their recognition that the specific act of babyeating nurtured and protected a more general capacity and respect for rational thought. I thought that Babyeating was being proposed as a bootcamp for overcoming bias. Maybe this idea would be interesting to explore?
In general, an interesting story. I did not find it possibly coercive or deceptive, as some other commentators did, and despite wide disagreement with what I take to be your own views; like your piece on truth, -- "The Simple Truth", I believe it was, -- I found it clear, deftly-made, and thought-provoking.
Even if one wishes to argue the virtues of mass murder as a method of intentional population control, which I find quite horrifying enough, I would hope that violent assault and month-long torture are not one's preferred methods.
The story is more of a way of toying with the subjective nature of morality. The takeaway of the story is not whether or not baby-eating is right or wrong - an objective answer to this question is impossible - but of the difficulties that arise during the interactions of moral agents with incompatible values.
Human conflicts between nations have been about conflicts of interest, political conflicts within nations are often about conflicts of values...but what happens when someones moral values are fundamentally alien to your own?
I thought this was very, very good, probably my favorite of your writings that I've read so far. I think it's quite a bit better than the Harry Potter fanfic--which is itself good fanfic, but "good for fanfic" is a much more forgiving category than "good fiction." When you mentioned trying to get a Hugo for HPMOR I thought you were revealing an embarrassing inability to self-calibrate your own skills as a writer: HPMOR is not good enough to be publishable (even leaving copyright issues aside), and it's very far from being at a Hugo-winning level. It is not, however, ridiculous to think that fiction of the "Three Worlds Collide" caliber could compete for Hugo-type prizes.
In summary, I'd like to see more of your original fiction, and if you chose to I don't doubt that you could publish stories in major-market genre magazines.
Really? What makes HPMoR not good enough to be publishable?
50 Shades of Gray was a twilight fanfiction, and apparently it was good enough to be publishable.
What does it actually mean for a piece of fiction to be 'good'? HPMoR can be an author tract at times, but it also has one of the most intricate plots I've ever read, specifically designed so that thinking about it with knowledge of bayesian cognition and rationality allows the reader to discover more things about the story. There aren't many stories like this.
What about the actual quality of the writing isn't good enough? I would say it is at least as good, in terms of whatever it is that makes me enjoy it, as 80% of all fiction I've ever read.
And sometimes when I read Humanism Part 3 I think it's better than 100% of other fiction I've read.
I've not read it, but I'm given to understand that it has more fucking in it than HPMOR.
Also, I'm under the impression that people read it out of curiosity because it's famous for having lots of fucking in it, but when they've read it they don't think it's actually that great. (I haven't read it either, and I'm not going to read it in the foreseeable future either.)
It's the first book I've ever had to put down after a few pages because the writing was so very awful.
Keep in mind that 50 Shades of Gray was "good" enough to be popular among roughly the same target audience that were already fans of Twilight.
That said, I'm also very curious about why Siduri thinks that HPMoR isn't good enough to be publishable. It's certainly not without its flaws, and I think a professional editor would improve rather than detract from it, but I've found it to be a more fun read than any published book I've read since before it even started being written. A book doesn't need to be flawless to be publishable, it just needs to be able to find an audience willing to buy it.
Unlike 50 Shades of Gray, it's almost certainly utterly unpublishable though, because removing it from the context of the Harry Potter setting would destroy the basis of the plot.
50 shades of gray WAS a twilight fanfiction. After it got adapted, it didn't have twilight in it. I don't think you could adapt HPMoR for non copyright infringing publication without ruining it.
All else being equal this is evidence that it is not publishable.
Honestly, I don't really understand what the grandparent could be thinking. I may be said to know something about literature at this point, and the literary level of HPMOR is far, far above 3WC. Maybe grandparent only read the first 10 chapters or something, I was still somewhat catching my stride then (not to mention writing chapters with much less editing and effort invested).
There was some interest from professional SF writers in 3WC (e.g. Peter Watts) but nowhere near the level of buzz at SF conventions that's been reported to me for HPMOR.
Much though I like HPMOR, it's simply too long to keep the same level of sustained awesome. 3WC is awesome all the way through. HPMOR is probably better at it's best, but on average it's simply not as good - although it's certainly better at times, it can also be worse at times, because it has more space to make mistakes and recover.
In my expert opinion.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's a genetic heuristic thing. Assuming that since HPMOR is a fanfic, and since most of the possible arguments for why a particular fanfic is good are wrong, arguments for why HPMOR is good must be wrong.
He also said it wasn't good enough to publish, but when asked why, said there were legal issues with publishing fanfiction, which isn't evidence either way for its 'goodness'. This makes me think he has no arguments addressing the actual goodness of the writing.
Just because someone has trouble articulating the issues inherent in something does not necessarily mean they are unable to recognize that said issues exist.
I think the argument, however, is moot - HPMOR is on the internet, and therefore already has been "published" in a sense.
HPMOR has several issues, however:
1) The writing has a very odd quality to it. After reading the comments on this site for a while, as well as the dialogue in this story, it is obvious that there is some sort of shared language amongst this group of rationalists that is employed by the author of HPMOR - or that many people here simply imitate his writing style. This strange quality to it leads it to feel somewhat strange and stilted.
2) The work meanders too much. It is not written concisely, and a paragraph is often used when a sentence would do.
3) The work is inaccessible to a general audience. There is a certain sort of person who enjoys works like that. I suspect that the internet is thusly an ideal medium for reaching them.
4) The work is a work of fanfiction, and thus is unpublishable.
5) The work is a work of fanfiction, and as such, creates certain expectations regarding the characters and the setting which can be disconcerting.
Indeed, the sheer amount of work that went into HPMOR kind of saddens me, like a great deal of fanfiction that I read. It is not that there cannot be good fanfiction, but that fanfiction has certain constraints on it (including inability to publish) which hurt it. I would have loved to have seen something like HPMOR which was a wholly original rather than a derived work, and it strikes me that many who write fanfiction are rather limiting themselves by not allowing themselves to go beyond such.
I would be surprised if fanfiction for a popular piece of media didn't get far more eyes looking at it than equally-good (or equally-poor) original work, even taking into account the larger number of eyes drawn to published work.
So if my goal is to maximize number of eyes looking at my words, the constraints of fanfiction might hurt it less (in terms of what I value) than the constraints of original work.
Fanfiction inherently limits the number of people who will ever look at it; an independent work stands on its own merits, but a fanfiction stands on both its own merits and the merits of the continuity to which it is attached. Write the best fanfic ever about Harry Potter, and most people still will never read it because your audience is restricted to Harry Potter fans who read fanfiction - a doubly restricted group.
While it is undeniable that it can act to promote your material, you are forever constrained in audience size by the above factors, as well as the composition of said audience by said people who consume fanfiction of fandom X.
Write an original work, and unless you are both very lucky and very good, the number of people who see it is more or less zero.
If you write an original work, then I am very sorry, but I probably will not read it. There is a barrier to diving into a new world, a trivial inconvenience, but nonetheless, a cost to high for the expected return, which by Sturgeon's Law is near zero. On the other hand, in fanfiction I already know the world, and that makes it easier to jump in.
Yes, for fanfiction there is an upper bound to the readership numbers, but in practice, that isn't what you should be worrying about when trying to get people to read your work. The hard part is separating yourself out from the Sturgeon's Law chaff surrounding you, and that is an easier task if your work is a work of fanfiction.
The second factor is much more important for most authors for most stories. I read a lot of fanfiction by people whose original works I never would have found, because their original works aren't stored in a fanfiction repository. It's like how you could go to DeviantArt and look at people's original works, but you're much more likely to come across drawings they've done of things you're both fans of.
Worrying that you are forever constrained in audience size seems odd; most people never read most stories. The question is how many you can get to read it, and when.
Using another rationalist fanfic as an illustration I've read Luminosity, but never twilight.
I agree that fanfic has a lower ceiling than original work. But it isn't necessarily better to raise my ceiling than to raise my average.
There's quite a number of HPMOR readers who've never read HP. Admittedly this may be a special case, and it's not HPMOR's original intended optimal use-case either (reading Philosopher's Stone first is a good idea if you can).
I tried the original after HPMOR, and it reads like mediocre fanfic :) Harry is just all wrong...
I was a lifelong HP fan before reading HPMOR - and I would almost certainly never have read it if it wasn't HP fanfiction. (Or popular on TVtropes, but that's another matter.)
Woah, I never though of it like that before.
We should be writing crossovers!
What have I done? ; ;
Relevant link is relevant:
The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover
I thought crossovers only appeal to fans of both works, and hence that works the opposite of the way you thought it would?
Huh. Now that you mention it, maybe they do. I've certainly read crossovers of series I don't read, but...
I feel like I'm missing out on most of the clever subtleties.
Is there a way to tell?
I'm also impressed, but not quite as impressed as I should be, for reasons just mentioned.
I actually liked it. Here are my reasons:
Oh, and a good friend of mine recommended reading it. But that's not a real reason, is it. ;-)
That sounds like it is a big part of the real reason. Just not part of the justification. :)
Damn you. ;-)
@Eliezer well that's to me looks very dystopian future... the principle of protection of human autonomy was tossed away already when they legalize 'non consensual' anything where it is legal for human being A to impose his notions of fun on human being B against human being B's will. So the mankind got raped very gently by superhappy - so what? They legalized this already, there's a legal precedent for a far worse case that in your universe everyone agreed on.
Plus you give zero thought to concept of human beings as autonomous, each an agent upon himself. What I have immediately thought of is that I would have told the superhappy that due to communication bottleneck and biodiversity humans do not share identical values, have massively different neural wirings and as such they would have to integrate the values of each human personally etc. Not three worlds colliding but hundreds billions. I'd tell that the human neural system is so wired in many of the people that absence of pain would lead to diminished pleasure or failure to achieve sentience. I'd have told them the truth that facing such choice or having alteration forced on you results in extreme psychological pain that can disable and/or destroy some of the individuals. That we see gross modification of existing individuals as death. Etc.
Plus, of course, the fair 'superhappy' aliens are extremely vulnerable to mechanisms that homo sapiens has evolved to take advantage of naivity. You take some clinical psychopath, the smooth talking one (a corporate executive will do fine), get him to talk with the superhappy, and they're toast. The 30x thought speed advantage won't save them. The tech won't save them. They'll get owned by first nigerian prince. We have evolved for cognitive predator-prey interactions; 99% of the bias [as in , vast majority of, not as in exact number] that you're overcoming here is the heuristics for those interactions, for surviving a smarter enemy who would convince you into doing something bad with arguments that are only subtly flawed, akin to proof that 1=2. Where do you think the bias and reluctance to accept reason comes from? Well guess what 99% of reason out there is predator's blinky lights trying to subvert neural system of the prey, as in some squid versus some shrimp. The shrimp learnt to close the eyes. Reader, once you take into your mind what I just said there, even to parse what I said, you have to effectively execute truing-complete code in your head. In wetware with no process boundaries. The rationalism is inherently vulnerable.
They're entirely toothless however, with no concept of biting and no carapace. Ditto for the babyeaters, really, sending off all their data, sending human data to the superhappy, and otherwise acting like total naive idiots instead of waging the cognitive warfare that humanity has perfected in the course of probably more than a million years. I say, in such an interaction, both of those alien races would get massively, massively exploited by humanity.
Non-consensual conversation is legal and socially approved. A society where non-consensual anything is illegal would look very interesting - explicit mentions of kind of interaction you're open to, long escalation of extremely subtle signals, people mostly ignoring each other all the time, ubiquitous go-betweens - but hardly the only non-dystopian one.
Meh. There are some differences, but not nearly as big as between two random minds.
Yes, but it's not that huge. It's a rather isolated preference change.
Bwahaha.
Can't see why. They understand treating language as a vending machine - vibrations go in, behaviors come out. The sounds "r-i-ch-b-a-n-k-er" need not be evidence of a person's finances. They didn't evolve for the same kinds of competition, but they have a concept of non-truthtelling. So I don't understand where you're coming from here.
The story is speaking of "non-consensual sex", the illegal kind (rape), that was legalized. Great many actions are deemed illegal without consent as to protect autonomy of humans from other humans; when you start legalizing those actions, you drop off the autonomy. Especially major things.
Conversation is not illegal and thus can't be "legalized". Also, try having conversation with someone against their will, or when they are obviously busy. It is deemed impolite, and is not illegal simply because it doesn't hurt too much - if you distract someone causing an injury you might very well get in trouble.
What the hell is a random mind, a Boltzmann brain? See http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/
In context of the story - clearly some people would embrace superhappy and some would commit suicide at the thought. Sounds significant enough to me. Hell, the humans are in reality more diverse in their views than the babyeaters and superhappy are in the story.
The story itself - the aliens act far too naive and in ways that are too exploitable and imply lack of understanding of untruth. The humans as well, though. That's because this whole rationalism thing gets really messy and complicated when you start being rational about what you tell. In particular, superhappy gone into nearly shock state (lost part of crew!) over something that the babyeaters told them, without slightest thought as to the possibility that the babyeaters could perhaps have engineered an input to the superhappy which would damage the superhappy. (which is precisely what happened, except the creator of the story had engineered what the babyeaters tell as to be shocking)
Even more than this, the superhappy, despite being in position of power, are going for some supposedly fair 1/3 1/3 1/3 thing where everyone adjusts. Frankly it makes absolutely no sense and is not in the slightest rational, plus is clearly based on some failed logic and as such prone to manipulation (like every single human treated separately and they all dissolve).
I've read this about half a year ago, enjoyed it, completely more or less agreed with Eliezer's point and filed it away.
Then, this morning, I literally woke up screaming. This is not an exaggeration, I must've dreamt of something that reminded me of 3WC, and my first waking thought was: "It's WRONG to be right!". I do believe that the human condition and human individuality are easily worth practically any number of lives (although holding ourselves hostage and threatening to voluntarily increase the amount of suffering customary for human culture unless the Superhappies give all people a choice in the matter might have worked as a third option - but wriggling out of the author's intent is pointless). I don't have a single problem with this logic.
What I have a problem with is myself. I was born with some brain damage (diagnosed only at 19, unfortunately for my teenage years) that, among other socially inconvenient things, strongly inhibits my instinctive empathy; I might value and respect individual people, but can feel very little compassion for them on a personal level, and I wouldn't hesitate in murdering someone if I believed it was right and necessary. In short, I exhibit traits of an actual sociopath. So I could see myself jumping at the decision, carrying it out and suffering from zero irrational guilt.
That caused a rebellion of sorts inside me. Suddenly I contemplated writing something really, really stupid, sending Eliezer a death threat, hated the thought of becoming transhuman or ever having to deal with a real Hard Choice, devoting the rest of my life to opposing, attacking, slandering and scaremongering against everything that Less Wrong and SIAI stand for. After about two hours it burned out, and now I feel more or less in control. I'm quite puzzled as to what the bloody hell that was. "Fear of having to grow up again" probably comes close.
I can't name a good reason for posting all this, except for suggesting that strong moral biases could shift into self-defense mode during a Hard Choice scenario, the very moment one would make an honest effort to examine and prioritize his values. Your beliefs could just shut everything down along with themselves to avoid being changed.
(as an aside, with all the shout-outs, it'd be cool if it chapter 8 was called "One More Final", as it has quite a few parallels with The End of Evangelion and its final scene),
Oh, to anyone who agrees with the decision but is still disturbed/looking for a 3rd option due2 those specific victims: THEY DIDN'T DIE AND WERE IN LITTLE DANGER, Eliezer told us an implausible lie to make us think. In fact, the ship was a flotillia and it sent a runner home for each developement, AND they didn't settle 15b people in a frontier system - because people had read previous centuries' good SF and heeded its warnings. Same goes for every scenario with simple precautions or hidden third options.
I'm a nervous, anxious, karma-whoring noob, that's why I retracted it after a downvote arrived within 5 minutes of posting. Would anyone please explain the downvote, so that I know why I shouldn't write statements like this one?
I wasn't the one downvoting (I didn't catch you before you retracted), but you're using numbers and characters to write words ("2" instead of "to", "15b" instead of "15 billion' --- I don't care if it's faster for you to write, it makes it harder for a hundred other people to read it), you're discussing a piece of fiction as if it was a reality that the author "lied" about, and you seem to be thinking that forum members are so emotionally frail that they need to delude themselves.
I'm downvoting this one, seems you seem to be abusing the "retract" system just to preserve your karma, not because you actually thought your previous comment ought have been retracted.
Sorry, I was posting that from my phone, and had to squeeze everything in the 512 character limit; didn't bother to edit it from the PC.
Well, I happen to be very emotionally frail myself (although 95% of the time I repress my emotions strongly) and, seeing as some of the fine folks here also have various personality disorders, I wanted to assist them with the emotional anguish that I knew they were facing.
Eh heh, absolutely right. If that's how the system works, people will whore for karma, and nothing can be done about that. I don't feel guilty in the slightest :)
That's not acceptable behavior here, and will generally get you downvoted no matter how good your excuse is. (Well, okay, hypothetically speaking there's probably a sufficiently good excuse. But given that you're not writing from some ridiculously oppressive country where you have to stick to a 512 character limit in order for your message to have a reasonable chance of getting out of that country undetected rather than triggering your internet connection getting cut, do it right.)
This... may not be the right forum for you. We're generally trying to go in the opposite direction from what you just described - making ourselves strong enough to deal with difficult truths, not figuring out ways to avoid those truths to stay comfortable.
Downvoting can be done about it. In a more abstract sense, status-based punishment can be done about it, too. You're not establishing a very good reputation, that way.
But I am trying to become stronger. I was hurt by changing my mind, and did value from it; afterwards, the hurt stopped being productive and I tried to mitigate it.
I could go about it in a sneaky way, or openly; which one do you think is worse? If it looks like a game, especially one of status and prestige, people are going to play it; the system should just tax such behavior with making the occasional genuinely valuable contribution essential for "selfish" strategies.
The nature of Alderson lines, as described, means that every system is a frontier system.
Ah. I skipped that bit. Thanks.
I have converted the book to epub and mobi. Download link: http://www.filedropper.com/3worlds
I haven't started reading it yet so let me know if you find any problems with the conversion.
Enjoy!
It seems beautiful, so far. Thanks!
This was an interesting thing to read about, though I have to say the start, with the baby eaters, was the best and most interesting part. The babyeaters were, by human standards, unconscionably evil, but ironically, were actually probably much less so than the happy-happy. Indeed, the sad irony was that the happy-happy were far, far less capable of understanding humanity than the babyeaters were - and I think that the humans could have found peace with the babyeaters. But the happy-happy lack what the other two races possess.
The sad thing is that humans could probably beat the happy-happy rather easily, though. The happy-happy were horrified to the point of nearly being broken by the babyeaters. Humans are capable of coming up with far, far worse things than the babyeaters. If you were to give that to them, wield it as a weapon, you could potentially make a basilisk - and if sufficiently clever in its design, it might well completely annihilate them due to their culture's inflexibility. Indeed, it is obvious that despite what they claimed, pain was not truly something that was so completely alien to them - they did not experience discomfort in the same way that humans did, but it was clear that they DID experience such things, as they had difficulty coping with what the babyeaters fed them and retreated to their happy fun time chamber "as a reward".
Of course it would be insanely dangerous, but they hardly had many good options, did they? The other problem is that leaving the happy-happy be could potentially expose other races similar to humanity to them.
Sadly humanity never had the chance to get anything from the happy-happy; the poor babyeaters ruined that for them. It might have helped.