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Friendship is Optimal: A My Little Pony fanfic about an optimization process

63 iceman 08 September 2012 06:16AM

[EDIT, Nov 14th: And it's posted. New discussion about release. Link to Friendship is Optimal.]

[EDIT, Nov 13th: I've submitted to FIMFiction, and will update with a link to its permanent home if it passes moderation. I have also removed the docs link and will make the document private once it goes live.]


Over the last year, I’ve spent a lot of my free time writing a semi-rationalist My Little Pony fanfic. Whenever I’ve mentioned this side project, I’ve received requests to alpha the story.

I present, as an open beta: Friendship is Optimal. Please do not spread that link outside of LessWrong; Google Docs is not its permanent home. I intend to put it up on fanfiction.net and submit it to Equestria Daily after incorporating any feedback. The story is complete, and I believe I've caught the majority of typographical and grammatical problems. (Though if you find some, comments are open on the doc itself.) Given the subject matter, I’m asking for the LessWrong community’s help in spotting any major logical flaws or other storytelling problems.

Cover jacket text:

Hanna, the CEO of Hofvarpnir Studios, just won the contract to write the official My Little Pony MMO. She had better hurry; a US military contractor is developing weapons based on her artificial intelligence technology, which just may destroy the world. Hana has built an A.I. Princess Celestia and given her one basic drive: to satisfy values through friendship and ponies. What will Princess Celestia do when she’s let loose upon the world, following the drives Hanna has given her?

Special thanks to my roommate (who did extensive editing and was invaluable in noticing attempts by me to anthropomorphize an AI), and to Vaniver, who along with my roommate, convinced me to delete what was just a flat out bad chapter.

A rationalist My Little Pony fanfic

12 DataPacRat 10 August 2012 08:53PM

For the past two months, I've been writing, and posting, roughly two thousand words a day of "Myou've Gotta be Kidding Me", a story set in a "My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic" fanfic universe, "Chess Game of the Gods". Outside of the sheer NaNoWriMo-like exercise of pushing out near-daily chapters, I've also been trying to keep in mind the various principles I've learned from Yudkowsky and LessWrong, and to try to present them in a way that people who like reading MLP fanfics might be able to appreciate.

I've just come to something of a minor climax with chapter 60, and while I'll definitely be continuing the story, this seems like a good time to mention it here, for whatever feedback and constructive criticism anyone cares to offer.