John came on The Bayesian Conspiracy podcast to talk with us about this a couple weeks ago, and it's now available for anyone who'd like to hear the conversation :)

I don't expect the factors to change, they are downstream of our social fabric. A different society won't have these factors, but ours does 

(sorry for the long delay)

This is part of my point. Our culture will not survive such measures. A different culture will result.

I'm familiar, have interviewed them twice, and linked to them in the OP in the culture-ectomy section. :) I don't think their lives work as a model for the majority of people in our culture, and suspect their children either will revert to mean in TFR, or will be drastically different culturally and thus an example of what I'm pointing at with this post.

Revealed preference is my cheeky answer here. "If I had infinite time/money" and "what I am willing to do IRL" are two different types of "want", and I was talking more about the latter.

I'm upping my vote for this in the year-end review based on the latest Zizian murder. :/ https://twitter.com/LexerLux/status/1882438198296744130#

I have very mixed feelings about GlowFic which are a direct result of trying to read PlaneCrash.

Pro: they are a joy for the author, and gets an author to write many hundreds of thousands of words effortlessly, which is great when you want more words from an author. 

Con: the format is anti-conducive to narrative density. The joy is in creating any words, which is great for the author, but bad for audiences. Readers want a high engagement-per-word ratio.

For context, my two favorite works are HPMOR and Worth The Candle, of 660K and 1.6M words. I spent 16 months podcasting a read-through/analysis of Worth The Candle. I'm not shy about reading lots of words. But when I tried to do the same for PlaneCrash I stopped after 200k words. The problem was not the decision theory or the math, which I found interesting in the brief sections they came up. The problem was plot and character development. 200,000 words is two full novels. In  a single novel an author will typically build an entire world and get us to fall in love with the characters, throw them into conflict, build to a climax, drive at least one character through an entire character arc where they develop as a person, and bring an audience through emotional catharsis via a climax and resolution. Often with side-plots or supporting characters fleshed out as well. In 200,000 words this could be done TWICE (maybe 1.5 times if the books run long).

In 200,000 words of PlaneCrash we got through one major plot point and set up the next. It felt like as much action as you get roughly within 25k words normally. That's an order of magnitude more cost-per-payoff compared to any general-audience novel (including HPMOR). This is more than even I am willing to pay.

As Devon Erikson says, every word is a bid for the attention of the reader, it's a price the author is bidding up. They need to recoup that cost by delivering to the reader a greater amount of something the reader wants - enjoyment, excitement, insight, information, emotional release, whatever. In the GlowFic format, authors are primarily writing for their own enjoyment, and perhaps their onlooking friends. Mass audiences don't get the expected per-word payoff. 

I think a serious review of PlaneCrash such as this one should acknowledge that the narrative-to-wordcount ratio is way out of proportion to what most people will accept, and this is the major flaw of the piece.

Really annoying that that's not available on the app! Oliver's added the transcript in the main post now, thankfully. :)

I've been notified that this post was nominated as a finalist for the Less Wrong 2023 Review! This is fantastic news, and I'm deeply honored! As part of the notification I was encouraged to write a self-review, with some example prompts like "Do you still endorse this?" and "What further work do you think should be done exploring the ideas here?”

Fiction is pretty Out Of Distribution for Less Wrong posts. I almost didn’t post it, because what is the point? I mean that literally... what IS the point of fiction on Less Wrong? Most often it’s to help demonstrate a different point that’s the real purpose of the post. That doesn’t make for good fiction, any more than “Bobby has three apples, John steals two of his apples, now Bobby has one apple” makes for good fiction. Sure there’s action and maybe even emotion, but the goal was to teach math.

The goal of a Less Wrong post is to teach. To impart some intellectual insight or real-world observation or new (or updated) technique. That is not the goal of fiction. The goal of fiction is to create an emotion experience or to entertain. Truly skilled authors can achieve both a LW and a Fiction goal in the same work, but I am not that skilled. My goal is a story that entertains and creates emotion before anything else, and for me that means sacrificing the ability for a story to teach rationality.

When I workshopped the first draft of the story I was asked ‘Why would the AI work in that way? It’s impossible for it to have come to such a utility function on accident, and literally no one has the motivation to make it have this utility function.’ ‘Why do these two aspects of the AI act like this, that’s not how a functional entity would act given X-Z.’ The answer to all questions of this type were “Yes, I know. This isn’t meant to be a realistic portrayal of what could happen. This is supposed to be fun. And this personality, and these problems that this personally runs into, are actually really fun! Can you point me to the parts that reduce fun or emotion? I don’t care about the story actually being rational.”

This puts the story directly at odds with what a Less Wrong post is supposed to be. I had severe reservations about posting it. But maybe fiction can have good secondary effects in the rationalist world even if its not at all rational. Terminator 2 is extremely non-rational, and IIRC is often cited by Eliezer as a particularly egregious movie because it primed people to think of AIs as dumb things that would use robot-soldiers we can defeat. It sacrificed rational depiction of AI danger on the alter of making an exciting story that an average person could be a hero within.

And yet, T2 probably has done more to bring the mass of the populace on board with worrying about AI risk than any other single thing in our lifetimes. It was easy to understand, very emotionally compelling (which gives it a long lifespan in our memory and a lot of weight in our pre-deliberative intuitions), and extremely popular (which spread its impact wide and gave everyone a common cultural touchstone). Despite being non-rational (or anti-rational) it was a huge boon to the cause of rationality.

So maybe it’s ok to post a story that isn’t actually rational and doesn’t do any of the things a Less Wrong post is supposed to do. Maybe just sharing a fun story on its own can be worth it if it plants an emotional seed that aligns with the rationalist cause. I do think The Real Fanfic is a fun story. I also think it contains the seed of “even a god that superficially looks like us and seems to have our interests at heart can be incredibly creepy and bad, actually, for reasons that aren’t at all obvious.”

So, if my goal is to give something fun to my fellow rats, this is the best place to do so. And if it can advance rationality in some small way it’s probably even worth doing so, despite being a very non-central post. I figured it was worth a shot. A decent amount of post karma, plus a nomination to the 2023 Review, leads me to suspect some people agreed.

So “Do I still endorse this?” It’s story I’m still proud of. :) Whether you enjoyed it or very much didn’t, I’m excited to read any review.

My answer is going to be unsatisfying - entirely vibes. While there are still significant sections of the populace that have left-over affection for anything that looks like the Civil Rights movement due to how valorized that movement is and how much change it affected, this is seriously waning. The non-effectiveness of movements that just copy the aesthetics are slowly making them look more like cargo-cults that copy the form but without an understanding of the substance that made them successful.

As more people dismiss protestors as performance without substance, protests start getting more awful to get anyone's attention. Destroying social value and public goods for a cause no one else cares about grows increasingly irksome. When major lawlessness threatens people and sets fire to city blocks in the name of activism the good will drains away pretty rapidly. Now the cargo cults are just destroying stuff without any path to how that's supposed to make things better.

It's an ongoing change. We're only seeing the start of it. But IMO its pretty undeniable that a decent percentage of the population thinks of activists as default harmful, and a preference cascade is just over the horizon.