Now it's finished, any chance of getting it into EPUB or PDF format?

Still puzzled by the 'player of games' ship name reference earlier in the story... I keep thinking, surely Excession is a closer match?

Speaking of Culture-style ship names (ref. Anonymous Coward above), this story btw inspires good new ones:

"Untranslatable 2" "Big Angelic Power" "We Wish To Subscribe To Your Newsletter" "Big Fucking Edward"

Aleksei, I don't know what you think about the current existential risks situation, but that situation changed me in the direction of your comment. I used to think that to have a good impact on the world, you had to be an intrinsically good person. I used to think that the day to day manner in which I treated the people around me, the details of my motives and self-knowledge, etc. just naturally served as an indicator for the positive impact I did or didn't have on global goodness.

(It was a dumb thing to think, maintained by an elaborate network of rationalizations that I thought of as virtuous, much the way many people think of their political "beliefs"/clothes as virtuous. My beliefs were also maintained by not bothering to take an actually careful look either at global catastrophic risks or even at the details of e.g. global poverty. But my impression is that it's fairly common to just suppose that our intuitive moral self-evaluations (or others' evaluations of how good of people we are) map tolerably well onto actual good consequences.)

Anyhow: now, it looks to me as though most of those "good people", living intrinsically worthwhile lives, aren't contrib... (read more)

Andrew, check back at Three Worlds Collide for PDF version, hope it works for you.

AC, I can't stand Banks's Excession.

Aleksei, you were an SIAI donor - and early in SIAI's history, too. If SIAI succeeds, you will have no right to complain relative to almost anyone else on the planet. If SIAI fails, at least you tried.

Eliezer, I've indeed been a hard-working Good Guy at earlier times in my life (though probably most of my effort was on relatively useless rather ordinary do-gooder projects), but from this it doesn't follow that my current self would be a Good Guy.

Currently I'm happily (yes, happily) wasting a huge chunk of my time away on useless fun stuff, while I easily could be more productive. It's not that I would be resting after a burn-out either, I've just become more selfish, and don't feel bad about it, except perhaps very rarely and briefly in a mild manner. I... (read more)

What I actually got from this story is that we shouldn't be selfish as a species. If the good of all species requires that we sacrifice our core humanity, then we should become non-human and be superhappy about it.

Never mind, I'm an idiot. I somehow read "relatively useless rather than ordinary", even though Aleksei wrote "relatively useless rather ordinary".

Anna, but good that you raised those very important points for the benefit of those readers to whom they might not be familiar :)

There is, of course, a rather large random/unknown component in the amortized present value of the amount of good any action of mine is going to do. Maybe my little contributions to Python and other open-source projects will be of some fractional help one day to somebody writing some really important programs -- though more likely they won't. Maybe my buying and bringing food to hungry children will enhance the diet, and thus facilitate the brain development, of somebody who one day will do something really important -- though more likely it won't. Land... (read more)

Anonymous, that sound you hear is probably people rushing to subscribe. http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=266 - note the comments.

Untranslatable 2: The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.

Good story, and a nice illustration of many of the points you’ve previously made about cross-species morality. I do find it a bit disturbing that so many people think the SH offer doesn’t sound so bad – not sure if that’s a weakness in the story, commenter contrarianism, or a measure of just how diverse human psychology already is.

The human society looks like a patched-up version of Star Trek’s bland liberal utopianism, which I realize is probably for the convenience of the story. But it’s worth pointing out that any real society with personal freedom and even primitive biotech is going to see an explosion of experimentation with both physical and mental modifications – enforcing a single collective decision about what to do with this technology would require a massive police state or universal mind control. Give the furries, vampire-lovers and other assorted xenophiles a few generations to chase their dreams, and you’re going to start seeing groups with distinctly non-human psychology. So even if we never meet “real” aliens, it’s quite likely that we’ll have to deal with equally strange human-descended races at some point.

I’ll also note that, as is usually the case with groups tha... (read more)

Tiiba: Somewhere between a Gundam nerd and a literature professor, I expect. Since the main real differences between the two in our current world are 1) lit profs get more cultural respect 2) people actually enjoy Gundam, the combination makes a fair amount of sense.

Tiiba said:

Untranslatable 2: The frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the byproduct of anal sex.

Then why didn't it just translate it as "santorum"?

Then the part about 'sixteen billion' just gets flushed away. And more importantly - you think it was the right thing to do. The noble, the moral, the honorable thing to do.

Like eating babies, then.

Aleksei: I hope you others feel that the character was primarily a victim way back when, instead of a dirtbag.

He was who he was. Labelling him "victim" or "dirtbag" or whatever says nothing about what he was, but a lot about the person doing the labelling.

Russell: Of course not. The victim was the girl he murdered.

If one person is a victim, it doesn't follow that another person was not.

Super! I read only as the installments came (even though I desparately wanted to download the pdf) so I could think about it longer.

Wouldn't it be fun to get 3(+) groups together, have each create value systems and traditions for itself subject to certain universals, and stage three-way negotiations of this sort? Planning, participating, and evaluating afterward could be fascinating.

Nikhil: Good idea. I've been also thinking about the best way to utilise computer technology for arranging that sort of role-playing game.

Please excuse the spacing on my previous post, Never quite sure how line breaks end up in various comment systems.

Nicholas, suppose Eliezer's fictional universe contains a total of 2^(10^20) star systems, and each starline connects two randomly selected star systems. With a 20 hour doubling speed, the Superhappies, starting with one ship, can explore 2^(t36524/20) random star systems after t years. Let's say the humans are expanding at the same pace. How long will it take, before humans and Superhappies will meet again?

According to the birthday paradox, they will likely meet after each having explored about sqrt(2^(10^20)) = 2^(510^19) star systems, which will take 510^19/(365*24/20) or approximately 10^17 years to accomplish. That should be enough time to get over our attachment to "bodily pain, embarrassment, and romantic troubles", I imagine.

"So does that mean," asked the Master, "that now your life is finally complete, and you can die without any regrets?"

Well. That is indeed ridiculous. It fails (I think) to realise the Lady Sensory's lesson that she no longer needs to be the person she always thought she needed to be. I am moved to quote the Quaker Isaac Penington: "The end of words is to bring men to the knowledge of things beyond what words can utter". The Master of Fandom's words are meaningless, an ideal of what people should be, they imagine, rather than how things actually are.

Robin, fiction also has the benefit of being more directly accessible; i.e., people who would or could not read explicit academic argument can read a short story that grapples with moral issues and get a better sense of the conflict then they would otherwise. Even with the extremely self-selected audience of this blog, compare the comments the story got vs. many other posts.

And while of course the story was influenced by Eliezer's beliefs, the amount of arguing about the endings suggests that it was not so cut and dry as simply "moving readers toward his beliefs".

I thought the story worked very well as a parable and broke down as it expanded into more conventional fiction. But I found scenario a very vivid way to imagine some of EY's issues. A gift for metaphor is the surest sign of intelligence I know. Based on this story and the starblinker, I'd agree his best chance of hitting the bestseller list as he plans may be on the fiction side.

As for academic work, I'd love to hear about the last piece RH read that made him question his views or change his mind about something. The links here all seem to reinforce.

Robin, that's one reason I first wrote up my abstract views on the proposition of eliminating pain, and then I put up a fictional story that addressed the same issue.

But what first got me thinking along the same lines was watching a certain movie - all the Far arguments I'd read up until that point hadn't moved me; but watching it playing out in an imaginary Near situation altered my thinking. Pretty sure it's got something to do with there being fewer degrees of emotional freedom in concrete Near thinking versus abstract propositional Far thinking.

I think that so long as I lay my cards plainly on the table outside the story, writing the story should fall more along the lines of public service to understanding, and less along the lines of sneaky covert hidden arguments. Do I need to remark on how desperately important it is, with important ideas, to have some versions that are as accessible as possible? The difficulty is to do this without simply flushing away the real idea and substituting one that's easier to explain. But I do think - I do hope - that I am generally pretty damned careful on that score.

Maglick, last piece RH wrote that changed my mind (as in causing me to alter my beliefs on questions I had previously considered) was the "Near vs. Far" one.

Interesting, and I must admit I am surprised.

Regardless of personal preferences though... it seems the closest match for the topic at hand. But hey, it's your story...

"Excession; something excessive. Excessively aggressive, excessively powerful, excessively expansionist; whatever. Such things turned up or were created now and again. Encountering an example was one of the risks you ran when you went a-wandering..."

Eliezer, I didn't find your explicit arguments persuasive, nor even clear enough to be worth an explicit response. The fact that you yourself were persuaded of your conclusion by fiction does not raise my estimate of its quality. I don't think readers should much let down their guard against communication modes where sneaky persuasion is more feasible simply because the author has made some more explicit arguments elsewhere. I understand your temptation to use such means to persuade given that there are readers who have let down their guard. But I can only approve of that if I think your conclusions are worth such pushing.

Robin, it looks to me like we diverged at an earlier point in the argument than that. As far as I can tell, you're still working in something like a mode of moral realism/externalism (you asked whether the goodness of human values was "luck"). If this is the case, then the basic rules of argument I adopted will sound to you like mere appeals to intuition. I'm not sure what I could do about this - except, maybe, trying to rewrite and condense and simplify my writing on metaethics. It is not clear to me what other mode of argument you thought I... (read more)

Robin: Well, to be fair, it was written well enough that lots of us are arguing about who was actually right.

ie, several of us seem to be taking the side that the Normal Ending was the better one, at least compared to the True Ending.

So it's not as if we were manipulated into taking the position that Eliezer seemed to be advocating.

Also - explaining complex beliefs is a fantastically difficult enterprise. To consider fiction as just a way of "sneaking things past the unwary reader's guard" is selling it far short. It verges, I fear, on too much respect for respectability.

I tried to make the Superhappy position look as appealing as possible - show just how strange our position would look to someone who didn't have it, ask whether human children might be innocent victims, depict the human objections as overcomplicated departures from rationality. Of course I wanted my readers to feel Akon's helplessness. But to call that "sneaking things past someone's guard" is a little unfair to the possibilities of fiction as a vehicle for philosophy, I should think.

I'm still conflicted and worried about the ethics of writing fiction as a way of persuading people of anything, but conflict implies almost-balance; you don't seem to think that there's much in the way of benefit.

Wei Dai, Sure I too could invent numbers large enough to make any calculation give me the result I want. But as it still stands I think that 2^(10^20) is impractically huge fore any universe, especially one that seems to be based in our own. Also I think it's hard to imagine that the starline topography to be completely random among the whole universe. So I stand by my stance that it is difficult to imagine a universe where the super happies do not come across the humans again in a relatively short period of time. And I figure the point about fiction is that you're trying to convince you're readers about a consistent world where a story takes place in.