It is time. The final challenge in the 7-week babble challenge series.
Let’s become stronger. Let’s go out with a bang.
On the table in front of you is a candle.
This candle will burn as a metaphor for the light of Science, a little beacon of rationality. It will represent the will to keep practicing and honing our Art.
Your task is simple.
Light it.
You have 1 hour to come up with 100 ways.
Looking back
Here are the rankings before the final round. (You gain a star for completing a challenge, and lose one for missing a week. I’m not including myself since I’m the gamemaster.)
Fantastic work, everyone.
★★★★★★ gjm
★★★★★ Yonge
★★★★ Slider
★★★ Bucky
★★ Tetraspace Grouping, supposedlyfun
★ NunoSempere, Elizabeth, Mark Xu
Overall, since starting on September 30th, there’s now been more than 100 completed babble challenges.
As a result, we have babbled over 5000 ideas.
I haven’t counted how many unique users joined, but plausibly more than 70. For many of them, the babble challenge was one of their first comments ever on LessWrong. Welcome to you all.
I want to thank everyone who joined this quest, it’s been an honor practicing creativity with you.
There were really too many good submissions over the weeks to list them all. What’s more, much of the value comes in just being able to think of many different ones, rather than a single idea being excellent. Nonetheless, to celebrate and inspire you for the final challenge, I gathered some great ones from previous weeks:
Ways of going to the moon
I leave it on Earth ; eventually, in 4 billion years, the sun will have absorbed both the thing and the Moon and hopefully some parts of both will mix. (Vanilla_cabs)
Break out of the simulation, then reprogram myself to be on the moon. (mr-hire)
Use CRISPR to make myself smarter. Do whatever plan smarter Neel comes up with (Neel Nanda)
Send spaceships out to the asteroid belt to collect asteroids and bring them to earth. Not to extract valuable minerals, just to make the earth bigger and heavier. Both the increased radius and the increased gravity will bring the moon closer. Eventually it will be close enough that I can just reach out and put my object on the moon. (gjm)
…and more than 1000 more ideas!
Ways of escaping a locked room
Metal bars on the windows? Pee on them, take apart the phone, then connect one terminal of the phone battery to the bar and the other to the urine, and wait for the bar to be eaten away. (johnswentworth)
If I find myself in this situation I hereby pre-commit myself to using all of my available resources not to escape but to reign down hellfire remotely on whoever put me in there (avoid getting put in this situation in the first place) (Bucky)
Or, the solution that probably at least 5 people arrived at...
Write a LessWrong question post about being trapped in a locked room, pretending it’s a challenge to practice rationality.
...and, again, more than 1000 more ideas!
Ways of hiding Einstein’s pen from evil forces for 50 years
Create a duplicate, hide it badly, and let it be stolen. Just keep the real one in a safe at your house. (Ericf)
Disguise it as, or hide it inside, something else, and then give that to someone else to hide, giving them an entirely false story about what it is and why it needs to be hidden. (gjm)
Sell the evil forces the pen for a high price. Invest the money. 50 years later, you will be rich and easily able to buy the pen back. (Mark Xu)
Memorize a binary sequence using a memory palace, which I use as an XOR cipher on a series of coin flips which indicate: "heads: go north 100 feet; tails: go east 100 feet". Flip 100 coins and write down the result, and then bury the coin in the place indicated by the flips XOR the sequence. (This is basically a one-time pad for north-eastern lattice paths) (TurnTrout)
Consequences on the world of the discovery of intelligent ant colonies
Small robots could be used to invade hive-minds and either spy on them or implant and manipulate thoughts (Slider)
Ants get good at hiding their colonies, but you can hire ants to find other ant colonies. (Elizabeth)
A lot of people think 'Oh that's interesting' - and then continue doing exactly what they would have done anyway. (Yonge)
Moving Forwards
This is it. Week 7 out of 7.
Following the excursions into different forms of babble, I’m returning to where we started. A simple, constrained task. I thought that was most fun, and also most useful in feeling like it actually pushed the limits of my creativity.
This will be the final babble challenge I host for now. But it won’t be the end of my attempts to build a culture of practice on LessWrong. I’m working on other plans, and hope to announce them soon.
Next week I might write a longer Babble post-mortem. But one of the core things I take away is what I wrote already in the 3rd week, after noting how many people had participated:
[The turnout] fills me with excitement and ambition.
We’ve made a discovery.
Who knew that there was all this latent excitement for doing weekly rationality challenges? That so many people were willing to actually roll their sleeves up, and show up every week to test the limits of our art?
There’s a spark here waiting to be fanned into a flame. Imagine where we could go if we keep this up.
If you feel the same, I invite you to join me. Find ways of practicing in your own life. Stay connected to that deliberateness and the relentless will to self-improve with your scientist hat on.
Run your own challenges on LessWrong.
In fact, there has recently been several things happening on LessWrong that move in this direction:
- abramdemski’s challenge to find top time travel interventions
- Isusr’s Darwin Game
- Ben Pace’s fermi challenge
- Raemon’s recent Sunday workshop on deliberate problem solving and tuning your cognitive algorithms
- Scott Garrabrant’s post and encouragement of puzzle games
- AdamShimi's unofficial LessWrong comment challenge
I'm excited to see where this will go.
Rules
- 100 answers or nothing. Shoot for 1 hour.
Any answer must contain 100 ideas to count. That’s the final babble challenge. We're raising the bar. Let's do this!
However, the 1 hour limit is a stretch goal. It’s fine if it takes longer to get to 100.
- Post your answers inside of spoiler tags. (How do I do that?)
- Celebrate other’s answers.
This is really important. Sharing babble in public is a scary experience. I don’t want people to leave this having back-chained the experience “If I am creative, people will look down on me”. So be generous with those upvotes.
If you comment on someone else’s post, focus on making exciting, novel ideas work — instead of tearing apart worse ideas.
- Not all your ideas have to work.
I've often found that 1 great idea can hide among 10 bad ones. You just need to push through the worse ones. Keep talking. To adapt Wayne Gretzky's great quote: "You miss 100% of the ideas you never generate."
It’s fine to say “build a volcano in my backyard and use it to light the candle”, “bribe a dragon to help me” or "rub my hands together real fast until they create fire".
- My main tip: when you’re stuck, say something stupid.
If you spend 5 min agonising over not having anything to say, you’re doing it wrong. You’re being too critical. Just lower your standards and say something, anything. Soon enough you’ll be back on track.
This is really, really important. I wrote this the first week. I still think it’s true, having now done 6 weeks of babble challenges. The freedom and lightness that comes with just babbling something, even if stupid, proves really helpful for also generating great ideas.
---
Now, go forth and babble! 100 ways to light a candle!
I didn't follow the rules...but I did walk around the house holding a candle and muttering to myself. Can't wait to see where I converged with others.
---
insert wick into your mouth (or your anus) for a minute. Pull it out, verify that it is emitting blackbody radiation at human internal body temperature. Declare it to be "lit" in the sense of "nontrivially emitting light"
simply de-identify with any version of yourself living in an everett branch in which the candle does not spontaneously combust. (you can use a similar anthropic trick to win the lottery)
put the candle in the heating chamber of your drip coffee machine
stick some slivers of tin foil into the wick and microwave the candle. or something. man, there's gotta be some household method of abusing microwave ovens to make fire.
bury the candle in Centralia, Pennsylvania.
rub your hands faster and faster and faster until they catch on fire. light candle with finger.
put the candle close but not too close to [contemporary icon of sex appeal]
hallucinate the candle being lit
wait for heat-death
define "lit" to include quark-gluon plasma, whether highly dense or highly sparse. wait for the Big Crunch, or the Big Rip.
butterflies
don your eye protection and reflective armor and walk around a hall of mirrors while holding out the candle and waving around a high-powered laser
start injecting steroids, grow a mustache, and keep buying merchandise from The Art of Manliness until your grip strength reaches superhuman levels. Replace the wick with a high tensile-strength metamaterial. remove the wax, grip each end of the wick with max strength, and pull apart.
wait for nanotechnology to become commonplace. go out into the neighborhood while parents are still at work but kids are home from school. follow the yelps of teenagers burning themselves on rapidly assembled sex dolls. pick a still-hot assembler array and press the wick against it.
just--idk put it underwater...
finally drop that single you've been incubating for the last five years. place candle in front of speakers. play.
undergo a self-esteem character arc, let go of your self-consciousness, consult a fashion advisor, put your chin up, let your hair down, and flash your best Blue Steel. Yes, YOU :D
forget everything you know about evopsych and find your soulmate. fall in love. show them your special, secret, inner life. bask in their loving acceptance release your emotional restraints, look them in the eyes, and let your chest swell with energy as you give into the heat of the moment. press the wick to your heart. ♡( ◡ ‿ ◡ )
arc flash
disable your fire extinguisher. bump your housemate's hand while they're cooking so that a grease fire starts. tell them to go get the fire extinguisher from the other room. close the door and don't let them back in until the candle has caught fire. divert all blame to another housemate.
wait for lightning to strike the candle
stop waiting and put the candle at the top of a lightning rod.
run a simulation which contains an identical world to our own except the candle is pre-destined for glorious candescence. run the simulation a bunch of times so that your version of events gets more of the magical reality fluid than the version that happens in your own layer of reality.
Make a little man out of clay, breathe life into him, and when he asks what you want of him tell him to light the candle.
swallow the candle
replace one arm with a cigar lighter and the other with a spark plug. Ask your friend to light the candle while you are recovering from this unholy cyborg surgery.
chew on it until it catches on fire
just beg the gods to light it
steal fire from the gods, and blame it on prometheus.
pump a bunch of oxygen into the room, wrap both hands in sandpaper, and clap
flint, steel, and a ripped up $100 bill for tinder
pyrokinesis
potassium and water
stick both ends of the wick into an electrical outlet?
squeeze a ziplock bag of water into a convex lens and focus sunlight onto the wick
rub chocolate onto the underside of a soda can to turn it into a concave mirror and focus sunlight onto the wick
become twitter famous. befriend elon musk. get him to put the candle on a spaceX landing pad "as a joke"
sniff candle to identify chemical composition. get chemistry textbook. find the relevant reaction with the lowest possible reaction energy. light candle really efficiently.
hang out with contrarians who smoke, and smugly announce that your candle is unlightable
stick it into the most chemically unstable layer of your disgusting, caustic laundry pile
use a cattle prod or a branding iron to light the candle. pivot into becoming a rancher. promote minimum-cruelty meat.
make your friend really mad and stick the candle in his ear
get into a fiery car crash while holding the candle (but sign up for cryonics beforehand, obviously)
post a gif of your unlit candle on r/UnnecessaryExplosions
conduct a psyop on world leaders, incite nuclear war, store the candle in or near the highest-risk target
Seduce....Apollo? Yeah, I think he's the right one. God of fire and...some other stuff. Then go ahead seduce his sister. She's purdy.
use one of those super-heated steam guns
put it next to your fireplace and keep poking the logs to make sparks fly out
turn the lights on and off really fast...
cover it in peanut butter
scan the news for grain silo explosions and haul ass over to the next one that happens in your area
build a network of dyson spheres and use them to broadcast "bring it on, weaklings" in english on the hydrogen line along with a corpus of english words. the aliens will probably figure it out. ehhh, but they might not set us on fire... okay, just use one of your dyson spheres to light the candle directly.
move to australia and just wait for a good firestorm (avoiding dropbears and other large, venomous animals in the meantime)
move to somewhere on the pacific rim and continually blaspheme pele-honua-mea until your house is swept away by a lava flow. obviously, you'll need to keep the candle in your house for this to work...
steel wool + battery
fresnel lens
Katon, Goukakyuu No Jutsu!
use your charisma to trick the candle into eating a ghost pepper
invite your friends over for a bbq. flex your status as grillmaster and alpha male by sticking your candle into the coals. Make sure not to be the first to break eye contact or else they become the grillmaster (and more importantly for the task at hand, you'll have to hand over the candle).
buy a set of identical candles and sneak them into your friend's petrov day ritual kit
same as above but for חֲנֻכָּה
discontent and radicalize the candle. convince it to self-immolate in front of parliament or city hall or wherever
take a vow of silence, open your third eye, and unlock combustionbending. combust candle.
pipe all your neighbors' air-conditioning exhaust into a chamber containing your candle. Have one wall of the chamber be a piston. Drop an elephant on the piston.
realize that "Danger: High Voltage" is just italian for "Free Sparks"
rub two candles together until one or both catch fire
shoot an arrow so that it passes through a torch before it hits the candle
ingratiate yourself with elon musk and bro it up with him while on drugs. get him to put the candle in space and drop it back to earth "as a joke"