Final Words
Sunlight enriched air already alive with curiosity, as dawn rose on Brennan and his fellow students in the place to which Jeffreyssai had summoned them.
They sat there and waited, the five, at the top of the great glassy crag that was sometimes called Mount Mirror, and more often simply left unnamed. The high top and peak of the mountain, from which you could see all the lands below and seas beyond.
(Well, not all the lands below, nor seas beyond. So far as anyone knew, there was no place in the world from which all the world was visible; nor, equivalently, any kind of vision that would see through all obstacle-horizons. In the end it was the top only of one particular mountain: there were other peaks, and from their tops you would see other lands below; even though, in the end, it was all a single world.)
"What do you think comes next?" said Hiriwa. Her eyes were bright, and she gazed to the far horizons like a lord.
Taji shrugged, though his own eyes were alive with anticipation. "Jeffreyssai's last lesson doesn't have any obvious sequel that I can think of. In fact, I think we've learned just about everything that I knew the beisutsukai masters know. What's left, then -"
"Are the real secrets," Yin completed the thought.
Hiriwa and Taji and Yin shared a grin, among themselves.
Styrlyn wasn't smiling. Brennan suspected rather strongly that Styrlyn was older than he had admitted.
Brennan wasn't smiling either. He might be young, but he kept high company, and had witnesssed some of what went on behind the curtains of the world. Secrets had their price, always, that was the barrier that made them secrets; and Brennan thought he had a good idea of what this price might be.
The End (of Sequences)
This concludes the final sequence on Overcoming Bias / Less Wrong. I have not said everything I wanted to say, but I hope I have said (almost) everything I needed to say. (Such that I actually could say it in these twenty-one months of daily posting, August 2007 through April 2009.)
The project to which Less Wrong is devoted - the art and science and craft of human rationality - is, indeed, important. But the calculus of choosing among altruistic efforts is, in some ways, a calculus of who can take your place. I am more easily replaced here, than elsewhere. And so it has come time for me to begin pulling my focus away from Less Wrong, and turning toward other matters, where I am less easily replaced.
But I do need replacing - or rather, the work that I was doing needs replacing, whether by one person or by many people or by e.g. a karma system.
And so my final sequence was my letter that describes the work that I can already see remaining to be done, gives some advice on how to configure the effort, and warns direly against standard failure modes.
Any idea that can produce great enthusiasm is a dangerous idea. It may be a necessary idea, but that does not make it any less dangerous. I do fear, to a certain extent, that I will turn my focus away, and then find out that someone has picked up the ideas and run with them and gotten it all wrong...
But you can only devote your whole life to one thing at a time. In those ways I have thought to anticipate, at least, I have placed a blocking Go stone or two, and you have been warned.
I am not going to turn my attention away entirely and all at once. My initial plan is to cut back my posting to no more than one post per week.
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