Articles Tagged ‘writing’ - Less Wrong

Great Explanations

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 10:58:38 +1100

Submitted by lukeprog • 23 votes • 107 comments

Explaining is a difficult art. You can explain something so that your reader understands the words; [I try to] explain something so that the reader feels it in the marrow of his bones.

Richard Dawkins

My private school taught biology from the infamous creationist textbook Biology for Christian Schools, so my early understanding of evolution was a bit... confused. Lacking the curiosity to, say, check Altavista for a biologist’s explanation (faith is a virtue, don’t ya know), I remained confused about evolution for years.

Eventually I stumbled across an eloquent explanation of the fact that natural selection follows necessarily from heritability, variation, and selection.

Click. I got it.

Explaining is hard. Explainers need to pierce shields of misinformation (creationism), bridge vast inferential distances (probability theory), and cause readers to feel the truth of foreign concepts (quantum entanglement) in their bones. That isn’t easy. Those who do it well are rare and valuable.

Textbook writers are often skilled at explaining complex fields. That’s why I called on my fellow Less Wrongers to name their favorite textbooks (if they had read at least two other textbooks on those subjects). The Best Textbooks on Every Subject now gives 22 textbook recommendations, for fields as diverse as scientific self-help and representation theory.

Now I want to jump down a few levels in granularity. Let’s pool our knowledge to find great explanations for each important idea (in math, science, philosophy, etc.), whether or not there is equal value in the rest of the book or article in which each explanation is found.

Great explanations, in my meaning, have four traits:

A great explanation does more than report facts; it uses analogy and rhetoric and other tools to make readers feel the target idea in their bones.
A great explanation is not a single analogy nor a giant book. It is, roughly, between 2 and 100 pages in length.
A great explanation is comprehensible at best to a young teenager, or at least to a 75th percentile college graduate. (There may be no way to seriously explain string theory to an average 13-year-old.)
A great explanation is exciting to read.

By sharing great explanations we can more often experience that magical click.

List of Great Explanations

I’ve barely begun to assemble the list below. Please comment with your own additions!

(The list below is exclusive to written explanations, but feel free to share your favorite explanations from other media. My favorite explanation of BASIC programming is a piece of software from Interplay called Learn to Program BASIC, and of course many people love Khan Academy’s videos and The Teaching Company’s audio courses.)

Epistemology

Aumann’s agreement theorem: Landsburg, The Big Questions, chapter 8.
Occam’s razor: Yudkowsky, Occam’s razor.

Math and Logic

Bayes’ Theorem: Yudkowsky, An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem.

Physics

Special relativity: Wolfson, Simply Einstein, chapters 2–12.
General relativity: Hawking, The Universe in a Nutshell, chapters 1–2.
Infinite, flat universe: Greene, The Hidden Reality, chapters 1–3.
Timeless reality / block universe: Greene, The Fabric of Reality, chapter 5.
Inflationary cosmology: Greene, The Hidden Reality, chapter 3.
Rainbows: Dawkins, The Magic of Reality, chapter 7.

Biology

Tool use in animals: Zimmer, 50 Years of Animal Technology.

Psychology

Anchoring: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, chapter 11.
Availability heuristic: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, chapters 12–13.
Prospect theory: Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow, chapters 25–26.
Modularity of mind: Kurzban, Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite, chapters 1–4.

Economics

The Pareto Principle: BetterExplained, Understanding the Pareto Principle.

107 comments

Rhetoric for the Good

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 05:52:24 +1100

Submitted by lukeprog • 45 votes • 288 comments

The topics of rationality and existential risk reduction need their own Richard Dawkins. Their own Darwin. Their own Voltaire.

Rhetoric moves minds.

Students and masochists aside, people read only what is exciting. So: Want to make an impact? Be exciting. You must be heard before you can turn heads in the right direction.

Thus, I've decided to try harder and actually put effort into the quality of my writing instead of just cranking stuff out quickly so I can fill in inferential gaps and get to the cutting edge of the research subjects I care about.

That's why I asked LWers for their picks of best nonfiction writing on Less Wrong.

It's also why I've been reading lots of good science writing, focusing on those who manage to be exciting while covering fairly complex subjects: Dawkins, Sagan, Gleick, Zimmer, Shermer, Ramachandran, Roach, Sacks, Hawking, Greene, Hofstadter, Penrose, Wilson, Feynman, Kaku, Gould, Bryson, Pinker, Kurzban, and others.

I've also been re-reading lots of books and articles on how to write well: Keys to Great Writing, Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Elements of Style, On Writing Well, The Classic Guide to Better Writing, The Book on Writing, Telling True Stories, Writing Tools, Ideas into Words, The Chicago Guide to Communicating Science, A Field Guide for Science Writers, Six Rules for Rewriting, Writing, Briefly, and Singularity Writing Advice. (Conversations with Eliezer also helped.)

I don't know if I can become the Voltaire of rationality and existential risk reduction, but it seems worth a shot. Every improvement in writing style is beneficial even if my starry goal is never met. Also, it appears I produce better writing without really trying than most people produce with trying. (If you've ever had to grade essays by honors English seniors, you'll know what I mean.) I expect to gain more by striving where I already excel than by pushing where I have little natural talent.

(I won't try to write everything well. Sometimes I should just crank things out. To be honest, I didn't spend much time optimizing this post.)

My other hope is that a few other writers decide they would like to be the Voltaire of rationality and/or existential risk reduction. May this post be useful to them. It's a list of recommendations on writing style pulled from many sources, in no particular order.

Begin in medias res (in the middle of things). Begin with movement. Excitement. Humor. Surprise. Insight. Explosions.
Open with a question, and make your readers want to know the answer. Give the answer near the end.
Outline with punchlines, not topics. A punchline is something that makes the reader feel: "Aha! I sure am glad I read that sentence."
Tell stories about characters taking actions. Make the reader laugh and cry and sit in suspense at what will happen next.
Every sentence should make the reader want to read the next sentence. End each paragraph in a way that makes the reader want to continue. End each section by posing an intriguing question answered in the next section. The moment your reader becomes bored is the moment she jumps to YouTube. Cats and skateboard accidents are more exciting than science and philosophy, even for Judea Pearl.
Prefer brevity. Cut what isn't needed, or at least move it to an endnote.
Always be wary of how much disbelief you're creating in the average reader, and keep that level low. You may need to add words and paragraphs to satisfy his or her skepticism. Don't merely state facts that your reader may disbelieve. Briefly describe an experiment that supports the fact. If you must say something that will trigger serious skepticism, build up lots of credibility first.
Think through the post's emotional arc. In most cases, you'll want to keep readers happy, excited, and hopeful. In an article about effective charity, do not open with an example from Africa, because the words "Africa" and "charity" bring up feelings of guilt and hopelessness.
Make positive points, not negative ones. Avoid "Someone is wrong in a journal!" Say instead: "Here's a solution to an old problem."
Use a concrete-then-abstract pattern to pull readers forward. Start with a concrete example, probably more concrete than you feel it needs to be, and then make the more general point.
When possible, let sentences point not just to the next sentence or paragraph, but to future sections.
Favor surprise, as long as it doesn't engender too much disbelief. Avoid anything that lets the reader think, "I could have written that sentence." Avoid clichés.
Write in the active voice when possible.
Almost always list things in threes, in ascending order of the word length of the list item.
Make sure your readers always know that the next paragraph and section will be valuable and exciting.
Know your intended audience. Learn how they think and what they like to read. Tailor your writing to them.
Beware the illusion of transparency and unexpectedly large inferential gaps. Due to these errors, writing aimed at high schoolers will hit university seniors.
Use pictures.
Avoid Engfish.
Check the readability score of your writing. I aim for a Gunning Fog score between 8 and 13.
Shorten your sentences and paragraphs. Replace semicolons with periods.
Today's readers do not read. They scan. Make your text scannable.
Distill significant ideas into potent, quotable sentences: "The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made of atoms it can use for something else."
Identify every verb and ask if you can improve it, preferably in a way that lets you kill nearby adjectives and adverbs.
Avoid simple mistakes of spelling, tense, etc.
Find graceful ways to route around the horrors of the English language, like its lack of a gender-neutral personal pronoun.
Write in plain talk. When possible, use small, old, Germanic words.
Say aloud, to a friend or a stuffed animal, what you want to write. Write down what you said. After revising, read aloud and revise whatever sounds weird when spoken.
Write and revise weeks in advance. Avoid the piece for a week. Then come back and revise again.
As Paul Graham says: "Write for a reader who won't read the essay as carefully as you do, just as pop songs are designed to sound ok on crappy car radios." Hold their hand every step of the way. Remind them of what you just said, and tell them how each section fits into your larger points.
Include human dialogue where possible. Spoken words are more natural to us than crafted prose, even though spoken words are inefficient.
Show a very late draft to friends and ask which parts bore or confuse. Revise. If you find a good reader, bribe them to do you this favor again and again.
Put the most impacting words at the end of a sentence.
Follow the SUCCESS formula. Express your ideas with Simple (find the core), Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional Stories.
Imitate great writers who write to your audience.
Build the reader's stake in your subject by writing about things that relate to their own lives, goals, dreams, and fears.
Shape your reader's expectations so that when you get to Part B, you know what their next question is, and you can answer it. Otherwise they may have number of possible next questions or next objections, and you can't possibly answer them all.
When introducing a new idea, open the sentence with old information and put the new stuff at the end.
Obey these rules before you obey grammarians who say things like "Don't split infinitives" or "Don't begin sentences with And or But" and "Don't end a sentence with a preposition."

And, just one piece of process advice. Do not apply any of these rules while drafting. Instead, write down whatever horrible shit comes out of you and do it quickly. Then revise, revise, revise.

Now: What are your favorite pieces of writing advice?

288 comments

Building Weirdtopia

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 07:35:27 +1100

Submitted by Eliezer_Yudkowsky • 19 votes • 286 comments

Followup to: Eutopia is Scary

"Two roads diverged in the woods. I took the one less traveled, and had to eat bugs until Park rangers rescued me."
—Jim Rosenberg

Utopia and Dystopia have something in common: they both confirm the moral sensibilities you started with. Whether the world is a libertarian utopia of the non-initiation of violence and everyone free to start their own business, or a hellish dystopia of government regulation and intrusion—you might like to find yourself in the first, and hate to find yourself in the second; but either way you nod and say, "Guess I was right all along."

So as an exercise in creativity, try writing them down side by side: Utopia, Dystopia, and Weirdtopia. The zig, the zag and the zog.

I'll start off with a worked example for public understanding of science:

Utopia: Most people have the equivalent of an undergrad degree in something; everyone reads the popular science books (and they're good books); everyone over the age of nine understands evolutionary theory and Newtonian physics; scientists who make major contributions are publicly adulated like rock stars.
Dystopia: Science is considered boring and possibly treasonous; public discourse elevates religion or crackpot theories; stem cell research is banned.
Weirdtopia: Science is kept secret to avoid spoiling the surprises; no public discussion but intense private pursuit; cooperative ventures surrounded by fearsome initiation rituals because that's what it takes for people to feel like they've actually learned a Secret of the Universe and be satisfied; someone you meet may only know extremely basic science, but they'll have personally done revolutionary-level work in it, just like you. Too bad you can't compare notes.

Disclaimer 1: Not every sensibility we have is necessarily wrong. Originality is a goal of literature, not science; sometimes it's better to be right than to be new. But there are also such things as cached thoughts. At least in my own case, it turned out that trying to invent a world that went outside my pre-existing sensibilities, did me a world of good.

Disclaimer 2: This method is not universal: Not all interesting ideas fit this mold, and not all ideas that fit this mold are good ones. Still, it seems like an interesting technique.

If you're trying to write science fiction (where originality is a legitimate goal), then you can write down anything nonobvious for Weirdtopia, and you're done.

If you're trying to do Fun Theory, you have to come up with a Weirdtopia that's at least arguably-better than Utopia. This is harder but also directs you to more interesting regions of the answer space.

If you can make all your answers coherent with each other, you'll have quite a story setting on your hands. (Hope you know how to handle characterization, dialogue, description, conflict, and all that other stuff.)

Here's some partially completed challenges, where I wrote down a Utopia and a Dystopia (according to the moral sensibilities I started with before I did this exercise), but inventing a (better) Weirdtopia is left to the reader.

Economic...

Utopia: The world is flat and ultra-efficient. Prices fall as standards of living rise, thanks to economies of scale. Anyone can easily start their own business and most people do. Everything is done in the right place by the right person under Ricardo's Law of Comparative Advantage. Shocks are efficiently absorbed by the risk capital that insured them.
Dystopia: Lots of trade barriers and subsidies; corporations exploit the regulatory systems to create new barriers to entry; dysfunctional financial systems with poor incentives and lots of unproductive investments; rampant agent failures and systemic vulnerabilities; standards of living flat or dropping.
Weirdtopia: _____

Sexual...

Utopia: Sexual mores straight out of a Spider Robinson novel: Sexual jealousy has been eliminated; no one is embarrassed about what turns them on; universal tolerance and respect; everyone is bisexual, poly, and a switch; total equality between the sexes; no one would look askance on sex in public any more than eating in public, so long as the participants cleaned up after themselves.
Dystopia: 10% of women have never had an orgasm. States adopt laws to ban gay marriage. Prostitution illegal.
Weirdtopia: _____

Governmental...

Utopia: Non-initiation of violence is the chief rule. Remaining public issues are settled by democracy: Well reasoned public debate in which all sides get a free voice, followed by direct or representative majority vote. Smoothly interfunctioning Privately Produced Law, which coordinate to enforce a very few global rules like "no slavery".
Dystopia: Tyranny of a single individual or oligarchy. Politicians with effective locks on power thanks to corrupted electronic voting systems, voter intimidation, voting systems designed to create coordination problems. Business of government is unpleasant and not very competitive; hard to move from one region to another.
Weirdtopia: _____

Technological...

Utopia: All Kurzweilian prophecies come true simultaneously. Every pot contains a chicken, a nanomedical package, a personal spaceship, a superdupercomputer, amazing video games, and a pet AI to help you use it all, plus a pony. Everything is designed by Apple.
Dystopia: Those damned fools in the government banned everything more complicated than a lawnmower, and we couldn't use our lawnmowers after Peak Oil hit.
Weirdtopia: _____

Cognitive...

Utopia: Brain-computer implants for everyone! You can do whatever you like with them, it's all voluntary and the dangerous buttons are clearly labeled. There are AIs around that are way more powerful than you; but they don't hurt you unless you ask to be hurt, sign an informed consent release form and click "Yes" three times.
Dystopia: The first self-improving AI was poorly designed, everyone's dead and the universe is being turned into paperclips. Or the augmented humans hate the normals. Or augmentations make you go nuts. Or the darned government banned everything again, and people are still getting Alzheimers due to lack of stem-cell research.
Weirdtopia: _____

Part of The Fun Theory Sequence

Next post: "Justified Expectation of Pleasant Surprises"

Previous post: "Eutopia is Scary"

286 comments

Eutopia is Scary

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 16:28:34 +1100

Submitted by Eliezer_Yudkowsky • 25 votes • 104 comments

Followup to: Why is the Future So Absurd?

"The big thing to remember about far-future cyberpunk is that it will be truly ultra-tech. The mind and body changes available to a 23rd-century Solid Citizen would probably amaze, disgust and frighten that 2050 netrunner!"
—GURPS Cyberpunk

Pick up someone from the 18th century—a smart someone. Ben Franklin, say. Drop them into the early 21st century.

We, in our time, think our life has improved in the last two or three hundred years. Ben Franklin is probably smart and forward-looking enough to agree that life has improved. But if you don't think Ben Franklin would be amazed, disgusted, and frightened, then I think you far overestimate the "normality" of your own time. You can think of reasons why Ben should find our world compatible, but Ben himself might not do the same.

Movies that were made in say the 40s or 50s, seem much more alien—to me—than modern movies allegedly set hundreds of years in the future, or in different universes. Watch a movie from 1950 and you may see a man slapping a woman. Doesn't happen a lot in Lord of the Rings, does it? Drop back to the 16th century and one popular entertainment was setting a cat on fire. Ever see that in any moving picture, no matter how "lowbrow"?

("But," you say, "that's showing how discomforting the Past's culture was, not how scary the Future is." Of which I wrote, "When we look over history, we see changes away from absurd conditions such as everyone being a peasant farmer and women not having the vote, toward normal conditions like a majority middle class and equal rights...")

Something about the Future will shock we 21st-century folk, if we were dropped in without slow adaptation. This is not because the Future is cold and gloomy—I am speaking of a positive, successful Future; the negative outcomes are probably just blank. Nor am I speaking of the idea that every Utopia has some dark hidden flaw. I am saying that the Future would discomfort us because it is better.

This is another piece of the puzzle for why no author seems to have ever succeeded in constructing a Utopia worth-a-damn. When they are out to depict how marvelous and wonderful the world could be, if only we would all be Marxists or Randians or let philosophers be kings... they try to depict the resulting outcome as comforting and safe.

Again, George Orwell from "Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun":

"In the last part, in contrast with disgusting Yahoos, we are shown the noble Houyhnhnms, intelligent horses who are free from human failings. Now these horses, for all their high character and unfailing common sense, are remarkably dreary creatures. Like the inhabitants of various other Utopias, they are chiefly concerned with avoiding fuss. They live uneventful, subdued, 'reasonable' lives, free not only from quarrels, disorder or insecurity of any kind, but also from 'passion', including physical love. They choose their mates on eugenic principles, avoid excesses of affection, and appear somewhat glad to die when their time comes."

One might consider, in particular contrast, Timothy Ferris's observation:

    "What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is—here's the clincher—boredom...
    The question you should be asking isn't 'What do I want?' or 'What are my goals?' but 'What would excite me?'
    Remember—boredom is the enemy, not some abstract 'failure.'"

Utopia is reassuring, unsurprising, and dull.

Eutopia is scary.

I'm not talking here about evil means to a good end, I'm talking about the good outcomes themselves. That is the proper relation of the Future to the Past when things turn out well, as we would know very well from history if we'd actually lived it, rather than looking back with benefit of hindsight.

Now... I don't think you can actually build the Future on the basis of asking how to scare yourself. The vast majority of possible changes are in the direction of higher entropy; only a very few discomforts stem from things getting better.

"I shock you therefore I'm right" is one of the most annoying of all non-sequiturs, and we certainly don't want to go there.

But on a purely literary level... and bearing in mind that fiction is not reality, and fiction is not optimized the way we try to optimize reality...

I try to write fiction, now and then. More rarely, I finish a story. Even more rarely, I let someone else look at it.

Once I finally got to the point of thinking that maybe you should be able to write a story set in Eutopia, I tried doing it.

But I had something like an instinctive revulsion at the indulgence of trying to build a world that fit me, but probably wouldn't fit others so nicely.

So—without giving the world a seamy underside, or putting Knight Templars in charge, or anything so obvious as that—without deliberately trying to make the world flawed -

I was trying to invent, even if I had to do it myself, a better world where I would be out of place. Just like Ben Franklin would be out of place in the modern world.

Definitely not someplace that a transhumanist/science-advocate/libertarian (like myself) would go, and be smugly satisfied at how well all their ideas had worked. Down that path lay the Dark Side—certainly in a purely literary sense.

And you couldn't avert that just by having the Future go wrong in all the stupid obvious ways that transhumanists, or libertarians, or public advocates of science had already warned against. Then you just had a dystopia, and it might make a good SF story but it had already been done.

But I had my world's foundation, an absurd notion inspired by a corny pun; a vision of what you see when you wake up from cryonic suspension, that I couldn't have gotten away with posting to any transhumanist mailing list even as a joke.

And then, whenever I could think of an arguably-good idea that offended my sensibilities, I added it in. The goal being to—without ever deliberately making the Future worse —make it a place where I would be as shocked as possible to see that that was how things had turned out.

Getting rid of textbooks, for example—postulating that talking about science in public is socially unacceptable, for the same reason that you don't tell someone aiming to see a movie whether the hero dies at the end. A world that had rejected my beloved concept of science as the public knowledge of humankind.

Then I added up all the discomforting ideas together...

...and at least in my imagination, it worked better than anything I'd ever dared to visualize as a serious proposal.

My serious proposals had been optimized to look sober and safe and sane; everything voluntary, with clearly lighted exit signs, and all sorts of volume controls to prevent anything from getting too loud and waking up the neighbors. Nothing too absurd. Proposals that wouldn't scare the nervous, containing as little as possible that would cause anyone to make a fuss.

This world was ridiculous, and it was going to wake up the neighbors.

It was also seductive to the point that I had to exert a serious effort to prevent my soul from getting sucked out. (I suspect that's a general problem; that it's a good idea emotionally (not just epistemically) to not visualize your better Future in too much detail. You're better off comparing yourself to the Past. I may write a separate post on this.)

And so I found myself being pulled in the direction of this world in which I was supposed to be "out of place". I started thinking that, well, maybe it really would be a good idea to get rid of all the textbooks, all they do is take the fun out of science. I started thinking that maybe personal competition was a legitimate motivator (previously, I would have called it a zero-sum game and been morally aghast). I began to worry that peace, democracy, market economies, and con—but I'd better not finish that sentence. I started to wonder if the old vision that was so reassuring, so safe, was optimized to be good news to a modern human living in constant danger of permanent death or damage, and less optimized for the everyday existence of someone less frightened.

This is what happens when I try to invent a world that fails to confirm my sensibilities? It makes me wonder what would happen if someone else tried the same exercise.

Unfortunately, I can't seem to visualize any new world that represents the same shock to me as the last one did. Either the trick only works once, or you have to wait longer between attempts, or I'm too old now.

But I hope that so long as the world offends the original you, it gets to keep its literary integrity even if you start to find it less shocking.

I haven't yet published any story that gives more than a glimpse of this setting. I'm still debating with myself whether I dare. I don't know whether the suck-out-your-soul effect would threaten anyone but myself as author—I haven't seen it happening with Banks's Culture or Wright's Golden Oecumene, so I suspect it's more of a trap when a world fits a single person too well. But I got enough flak when I presented the case for getting rid of textbooks.

Still—I have seen the possibilities, now. So long as no one dies permanently, I am leaning in favor of a loud and scary Future.

Part of The Fun Theory Sequence

Next post: "Building Weirdtopia"

Previous post: "Serious Stories"

104 comments

Serious Stories

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:49:35 +1100

Submitted by Eliezer_Yudkowsky • 29 votes • 94 comments

Every Utopia ever constructed—in philosophy, fiction, or religion—has been, to one degree or another, a place where you wouldn't actually want to live. I am not alone in this important observation: George Orwell said much the same thing in "Why Socialists Don't Believe In Fun", and I expect that many others said it earlier.

If you read books on How To Write—and there are a lot of books out there on How To Write, because amazingly a lot of book-writers think they know something about writing—these books will tell you that stories must contain "conflict".

That is, the more lukewarm sort of instructional book will tell you that stories contain "conflict". But some authors speak more plainly.

"Stories are about people's pain." Orson Scott Card.

"Every scene must end in disaster." Jack Bickham.

In the age of my youthful folly, I took for granted that authors were excused from the search for true Eutopia, because if you constructed a Utopia that wasn't flawed... what stories could you write, set there? "Once upon a time they lived happily ever after." What use would it be for a science-fiction author to try to depict a positive Singularity, when a positive Singularity would be...

...the end of all stories?

It seemed like a reasonable framework with which to examine the literary problem of Utopia, but something about that final conclusion produced a quiet, nagging doubt.

At that time I was thinking of an AI as being something like a safe wish-granting genie for the use of individuals. So the conclusion did make a kind of sense. If there was a problem, you would just wish it away, right? Ergo—no stories. So I ignored the quiet, nagging doubt.

Much later, after I concluded that even a safe genie wasn't such a good idea, it also seemed in retrospect that "no stories" could have been a productive indicator. On this particular occasion, "I can't think of a single story I'd want to read about this scenario", might indeed have pointed me toward the reason "I wouldn't want to actually live in this scenario".

So I swallowed my trained-in revulsion of Luddism and theodicy, and at least tried to contemplate the argument:

A world in which nothing ever goes wrong, or no one ever experiences any pain or sorrow, is a world containing no stories worth reading about.
A world that you wouldn't want to read about is a world where you wouldn't want to live.
Into each eudaimonic life a little pain must fall. QED.

In one sense, it's clear that we do not want to live the sort of lives that are depicted in most stories that human authors have written so far. Think of the truly great stories, the ones that have become legendary for being the very best of the best of their genre: The Iliiad, Romeo and Juliet, The Godfather, Watchmen, Planescape: Torment, the second season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or that ending in Tsukihime. Is there a single story on the list that isn't tragic?

Ordinarily, we prefer pleasure to pain, joy to sadness, and life to death. Yet it seems we prefer to empathize with hurting, sad, dead characters. Or stories about happier people aren't serious, aren't artistically great enough to be worthy of praise—but then why selectively praise stories containing unhappy people? Is there some hidden benefit to us in it? It's a puzzle either way you look at it.

When I was a child I couldn't write fiction because I wrote things to go well for my characters—just like I wanted things to go well in real life. Which I was cured of by Orson Scott Card: Oh, I said to myself, that's what I've been doing wrong, my characters aren't hurting. Even then, I didn't realize that the microstructure of a plot works the same way—until Jack Bickham said that every scene must end in disaster. Here I'd been trying to set up problems and resolve them, instead of making them worse...

You simply don't optimize a story the way you optimize a real life. The best story and the best life will be produced by different criteria.

In the real world, people can go on living for quite a while without any major disasters, and still seem to do pretty okay. When was the last time you were shot at by assassins? Quite a while, right? Does your life seem emptier for it?

But on the other hand...

For some odd reason, when authors get too old or too successful, they revert to my childhood. Their stories start going right. They stop doing horrible things to their characters, with the result that they start doing horrible things to their readers. It seems to be a regular part of Elder Author Syndrome. Mercedes Lackey, Laurell K. Hamilton, Robert Heinlein, even Orson Scott bloody Card—they all went that way. They forgot how to hurt their characters. I don't know why.

And when you read a story by an Elder Author or a pure novice—a story where things just relentlessly go right one after another—where the main character defeats the supervillain with a snap of the fingers, or even worse, before the final battle, the supervillain gives up and apologizes and then they're friends again—

It's like a fingernail scraping on a blackboard at the base of your spine. If you've never actually read a story like that (or worse, written one) then count yourself lucky.

That fingernail-scraping quality—would it transfer over from the story to real life, if you tried living real life without a single drop of rain?

One answer might be that what a story really needs is not "disaster", or "pain", or even "conflict", but simply striving. That the problem with Mary Sue stories is that there's not enough striving in them, but they wouldn't actually need pain. This might, perhaps, be tested.

An alternative answer might be that this is the transhumanist version of Fun Theory we're talking about. So we can reply, "Modify brains to eliminate that fingernail-scraping feeling", unless there's some justification for keeping it. If the fingernail-scraping feeling is a pointless random bug getting in the way of Utopia, delete it.

Maybe we should. Maybe all the Great Stories are tragedies because... well...

I once read that in the BDSM community, "intense sensation" is a euphemism for pain. Upon reading this, it occurred to me that, the way humans are constructed now, it is just easier to produce pain than pleasure. Though I speak here somewhat outside my experience, I expect that it takes a highly talented and experienced sexual artist working for hours to produce a good feeling as intense as the pain of one strong kick in the testicles—which is doable in seconds by a novice.

Investigating the life of the priest and proto-rationalist Friedrich Spee von Langenfeld, who heard the confessions of accused witches, I looked up some of the instruments that had been used to produce confessions. There is no ordinary way to make a human being feel as good as those instruments would make you hurt. I'm not sure even drugs would do it, though my experience of drugs is as nonexistent as my experience of torture.

There's something imbalanced about that.

Yes, human beings are too optimistic in their planning. If losses weren't more aversive than gains, we'd go broke, the way we're constructed now. The experimental rule is that losing a desideratum—$50, a coffee mug, whatever—hurts between 2 and 2.5 times as much as the equivalent gain.

But this is a deeper imbalance than that. The effort-in/intensity-out difference between sex and torture is not a mere factor of 2.

If someone goes in search of sensation—in this world, the way human beings are constructed now—it's not surprising that they should arrive at pains to be mixed into their pleasures as a source of intensity in the combined experience.

If only people were constructed differently, so that you could produce pleasure as intense and in as many different flavors as pain! If only you could, with the same ingenuity and effort as a torturer of the Inquisition, make someone feel as good as the Inquisition's victims felt bad—

But then, what is the analogous pleasure that feels that good? A victim of skillful torture will do anything to stop the pain and anything to prevent it from being repeated. Is the equivalent pleasure one that overrides everything with the demand to continue and repeat it? If people are stronger-willed to bear the pleasure, is it really the same pleasure?

There is another rule of writing which states that stories have to shout. A human brain is a long way off those printed letters. Every event and feeling needs to take place at ten times natural volume in order to have any impact at all. You must not try to make your characters behave or feel realistically —especially, you must not faithfully reproduce your own past experiences—because without exaggeration, they'll be too quiet to rise from the page.

Maybe all the Great Stories are tragedies because happiness can't shout loud enough—to a human reader.

Maybe that's what needs fixing.

And if it were fixed... would there be any use left for pain or sorrow? For even the memory of sadness, if all things were already as good as they could be, and every remediable ill already remedied?

Can you just delete pain outright? Or does removing the old floor of the utility function just create a new floor? Will any pleasure less than 10,000,000 hedons be the new unbearable pain?

Humans, built the way we are now, do seem to have hedonic scaling tendencies. Someone who can remember starving will appreciate a loaf of bread more than someone who's never known anything but cake. This was George Orwell's hypothesis for why Utopia is impossible in literature and reality:

"It would seem that human beings are not able to describe, nor perhaps to imagine, happiness except in terms of contrast... The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem. Dickens can describe a poverty-stricken family tucking into a roast goose, and can make them appear happy; on the other hand, the inhabitants of perfect universes seem to have no spontaneous gaiety and are usually somewhat repulsive into the bargain."

For an expected utility maximizer, rescaling the utility function to add a trillion to all outcomes is meaningless—it's literally the same utility function, as a mathematical object. A utility function describes the relative intervals between outcomes; that's what it is, mathematically speaking.

But the human brain has distinct neural circuits for positive feedback and negative feedback, and different varieties of positive and negative feedback. There are people today who "suffer" from congenital analgesia—a total absence of pain. I never heard that insufficient pleasure becomes intolerable to them.

Congenital analgesics do have to inspect themselves carefully and frequently to see if they've cut themselves or burned a finger. Pain serves a purpose in the human mind design...

But that does not show there's no alternative which could serve the same purpose. Could you delete pain and replace it with an urge not to do certain things that lacked the intolerable subjective quality of pain? I do not know all the Law that governs here, but I'd have to guess that yes, you could; you could replace that side of yourself with something more akin to an expected utility maximizer.

Could you delete the human tendency to scale pleasures—delete the accomodation, so that each new roast goose is as delightful as the last? I would guess that you could. This verges perilously close to deleting Boredom, which is right up there with Sympathy as an absolute indispensable... but to say that an old solution remains as pleasurable, is not to say that you will lose the urge to seek new and better solutions.

Can you make every roast goose as pleasurable as it would be in contrast to starvation, without ever having starved?

Can you prevent the pain of a dust speck irritating your eye from being the new torture, if you've literally never experienced anything worse than a dust speck irritating your eye?

Such questions begin to exceed my grasp of the Law, but I would guess that the answer is: yes, it can be done. It is my experience in such matters that once you do learn the Law, you can usually see how to do weird-seeming things.

So far as I know or can guess, David Pearce (The Hedonistic Imperative) is very probably right about the feasibility part, when he says:

"Nanotechnology and genetic engineering will abolish suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is hugely ambitious but technically feasible. It is also instrumentally rational and morally urgent. The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved because they served the fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They will be replaced by a different sort of neural architecture—a motivational system based on heritable gradients of bliss. States of sublime well-being are destined to become the genetically pre-programmed norm of mental health. It is predicted that the world's last unpleasant experience will be a precisely dateable event."

Is that... what we want?

To just wipe away the last tear, and be done?

Is there any good reason not to, except status quo bias and a handful of worn rationalizations?

What would be the alternative? Or alternatives?

To leave things as they are? Of course not. No God designed this world; we have no reason to think it exactly optimal on any dimension. If this world does not contain too much pain, then it must not contain enough, and the latter seems unlikely.

But perhaps...

You could cut out just the intolerable parts of pain?

Get rid of the Inquisition. Keep the sort of pain that tells you not to stick your finger in the fire, or the pain that tells you that you shouldn't have put your friend's finger in the fire, or even the pain of breaking up with a lover.

Try to get rid of the sort of pain that grinds down and destroys a mind. Or configure minds to be harder to damage.

You could have a world where there were broken legs, or even broken hearts, but no broken people. No child sexual abuse that turns out more abusers. No people ground down by weariness and drudging minor inconvenience to the point where they contemplate suicide. No random meaningless endless sorrows like starvation or AIDS.

And if even a broken leg still seems too scary—

Would we be less frightened of pain, if we were stronger, if our daily lives did not already exhaust so much of our reserves?

So that would be one alternative to the Pearce's world—if there are yet other alternatives, I haven't thought them through in any detail.

The path of courage, you might call it—the idea being that if you eliminate the destroying kind of pain and strengthen the people, then what's left shouldn't be that scary.

A world where there is sorrow, but not massive systematic pointless sorrow, like we see on the evening news. A world where pain, if it is not eliminated, at least does not overbalance pleasure. You could write stories about that world, and they could read our stories.

I do tend to be rather conservative around the notion of deleting large parts of human nature. I'm not sure how many major chunks you can delete until that balanced, conflicting, dynamic structure collapses into something simpler, like an expected pleasure maximizer.

And so I do admit that it is the path of courage that appeals to me.

Then again, I haven't lived it both ways.

Maybe I'm just afraid of a world so different as Analgesia—wouldn't that be an ironic reason to walk "the path of courage"?

Maybe the path of courage just seems like the smaller change—maybe I just have trouble empathizing over a larger gap.

But "change" is a moving target.

If a human child grew up in a less painful world—if they had never lived in a world of AIDS or cancer or slavery, and so did not know these things as evils that had been triumphantly eliminated—and so did not feel that they were "already done" or that the world was "already changed enough"...

Would they take the next step, and try to eliminate the unbearable pain of broken hearts, when someone's lover stops loving them?

And then what? Is there a point where Romeo and Juliet just seems less and less relevant, more and more a relic of some distant forgotten world? Does there come some point in the transhuman journey where the whole business of the negative reinforcement circuitry, can't possibly seem like anything except a pointless hangover to wake up from?

And if so, is there any point in delaying that last step? Or should we just throw away our fears and... throw away our fears?

I don't know.

Part of The Fun Theory Sequence

Next post: "Eutopia is Scary"

Previous post: "Emotional Involvement"

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If You Demand Magic, Magic Won't Help

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 05:10:47 +1100

Submitted by Eliezer_Yudkowsky • 45 votes • 101 comments

Followup to: Explaining vs. Explaining Away, Joy in the Merely Real

Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.
—Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad

Once upon a time, I was pondering the philosophy of fantasy stories—

And before anyone chides me for my "failure to understand what fantasy is about", let me say this: I was raised in an SF&F household. I have been reading fantasy stories since I was five years old. I occasionally try to write fantasy stories. And I am not the sort of person who tries to write for a genre without pondering its philosophy. Where do you think story ideas come from?

Anyway:

I was pondering the philosophy of fantasy stories, and it occurred to me that if there were actually dragons in our world—if you could go down to the zoo, or even to a distant mountain, and meet a fire-breathing dragon—while nobody had ever actually seen a zebra, then our fantasy stories would contain zebras aplenty, while dragons would be unexciting.

Now that's what I call painting yourself into a corner, wot? The grass is always greener on the other side of unreality.

In one of the standard fantasy plots, a protagonist from our Earth, a sympathetic character with lousy grades or a crushing mortgage but still a good heart, suddenly finds themselves in a world where magic operates in place of science. The protagonist often goes on to practice magic, and become in due course a (superpowerful) sorcerer.

Now here's the question—and yes, it is a little unkind, but I think it needs to be asked: Presumably most readers of these novels see themselves in the protagonist's shoes, fantasizing about their own acquisition of sorcery. Wishing for magic. And, barring improbable demographics, most readers of these novels are not scientists.

Born into a world of science, they did not become scientists. What makes them think that, in a world of magic, they would act any differently?

If they don't have the scientific attitude, that nothing is "mere"—the capacity to be interested in merely real things—how will magic help them? If they actually had magic, it would be merely real, and lose the charm of unattainability. They might be excited at first, but (like the lottery winners who, six months later, aren't nearly as happy as they expected to be), the excitement would soon wear off. Probably as soon as they had to actually study spells.

Unless they can find the capacity to take joy in things that are merely real. To be just as excited by hang-gliding, as riding a dragon; to be as excited by making a light with electricity, as by making a light with magic... even if it takes a little study...

Don't get me wrong. I'm not dissing dragons. Who knows, we might even create some, one of these days.

But if you don't have the capacity to enjoy hang-gliding even though it is merely real, then as soon as dragons turn real, you're not going to be any more excited by dragons than you are by hang-gliding.

Do you think you would prefer living in the Future, to living in the present? That's a quite understandable preference. Things do seem to be getting better over time.

But don't forget that this is the Future, relative to the Dark Ages of a thousand years earlier. You have opportunities undreamt-of even by kings.

If the trend continues, the Future might be a very fine place indeed in which to live. But if you do make it to the Future, what you find, when you get there, will be another Now. If you don't have the basic capacity to enjoy being in a Now—if your emotional energy can only go into the Future, if you can only hope for a better tomorrow—then no amount of passing time can help you.

(Yes, in the Future there could be a pill that fixes the emotional problem of always looking to the Future. I don't think this invalidates my basic point, which is about what sort of pills we should want to take.)

Matthew C., commenting here on LW, seems very excited about an informally specified "theory" by Rupert Sheldrake which "explains" such non-explanation-demanding phenomena as protein folding and snowflake symmetry. But why isn't Matthew C. just as excited about, say, Special Relativity? Special Relativity is actually known to be a law, so why isn't it even more exciting? The advantage of becoming excited about a law already known to be true, is that you know your excitement will not be wasted.

If Sheldrake's theory were accepted truth taught in elementary schools, Matthew C. wouldn't care about it. Or why else is Matthew C. fascinated by that one particular law which he believes to be a law of physics, more than all the other laws?

The worst catastrophe you could visit upon the New Age community would be for their rituals to start working reliably, and for UFOs to actually appear in the skies. What would be the point of believing in aliens, if they were just there, and everyone else could see them too? In a world where psychic powers were merely real, New Agers wouldn't believe in psychic powers, any more than anyone cares enough about gravity to believe in it. (Except for scientists, of course.)

Why am I so negative about magic? Would it be wrong for magic to exist?

I'm not actually negative on magic. Remember, I occasionally try to write fantasy stories. But I'm annoyed with this psychology that, if it were born into a world where spells and potions did work, would pine away for a world where household goods were abundantly produced by assembly lines.

Part of binding yourself to reality, on an emotional as well as intellectual level, is coming to terms with the fact that you do live here. Only then can you see this, your world, and whatever opportunities it holds out for you, without wishing your sight away.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I've found no lack of dragons to fight, or magics to master, in this world of my birth. If I were transported into one of those fantasy novels, I wouldn't be surprised to find myself studying the forbidden ultimate sorcery—

—because why should being transported into a magical world change anything? It's not where you are, it's who you are.

So remember the Litany Against Being Transported Into An Alternate Universe:

If I'm going to be happy anywhere,
Or achieve greatness anywhere,
Or learn true secrets anywhere,
Or save the world anywhere,
Or feel strongly anywhere,
Or help people anywhere,
I may as well do it in reality.

Part of the Joy in the Merely Real subsequence of Reductionism

Next post: "Mundane Magic"

Previous post: "Bind Yourself to Reality"

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