just finished reading.
It's kind of sad in a... grand way.
No one remembering anymore what exactly being "human" means. But... what do we expect? I don't see any human values that are not statisfied, it just does not "feel like home" that much. But still, orpbzvat bar bs gur yrffre fhcrevagryyvtraprf naq fgvyy univat n fcrpvny cynpr va zvaq sbe fgne gerx? It's as heart-warming as it gets, in a cold, dark and strange universe.
(If only we could do this well.)
So Eliezer said in his March 1st HPMOR progress report:
So I read that and it was certainly very much worth reading - thanks for the recommendation! Obviously, the following contains spoilers.
I'm confused about how the story is supposed to be "terrifying". I rarely find any fiction scary, but I suspect that this is about something else: I didn't think Failed Utopia #4-2 was "failed" either and in Three Worlds Collide, I thought the choice of the "Normal" ending made a lot more sense than choosing the "True" ending. The Optimalverse seems to me a fantastically fortunate universe, pretty much the best universe mammals could ever hope to end up in, and I honestly don't see how it is a horror novel, at all.
So, apparently there's something I'm not getting. Something that makes an individual's hard-to-define "free choice" more valuable than her much-easier-to-define happiness. Something like a paranoid schizophrenic's right not to be treated,
So I'd like the dumb version please. What's terrifying about the Optimalverse?