Happy Petrov Day

9 Eneasz 26 September 2015 03:41PM

It is Petrov Day again, partially thanks to Stanislaw Petrov.

"Today is September 26th, Petrov Day, celebrated to honor the deed of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov on September 26th, 1983.  Wherever you are, whatever you're doing, take a minute to not destroy the world."

http://lesswrong.com/lw/jq/926_is_petrov_day/


The Person As Input

9 Eneasz 08 July 2015 12:40AM

I. Humans are emotion-feeling machines. 

I don’t mean that humans are machines that happen to feel emotions. I mean that humans are machines whose output is the feeling of emotions—“emotion-feeling” is the thing of value that we produce.

Not just “being happy." Then wireheading is the ultimate good, rather than the go-to utopia-horror example. But emotions must be involved, because everything else one can do are no more than a means to an end. Producing things, propagating life, even thinking. They all seem like endeavors that are useful, but a life of maximizing those things would suck. And the implication is that if we can create a machine that can do those things better than we can, it would be good to replace ourselves with that machine and set it to reproduce itself infinitely. 

I recently saw a statement to the effect of “Art exists to produce feelings in us that we want, but do not get enough of in the course of normal life.” That’s what makes art valuable – supplementing emotional malnutrition. Such a thing exists because “to feel emotions” is the core function of humanity, and not fulfilling that function hurts like not eating does.

This is why (for many people) the optimal level of psychosis is non-zero. This is why intelligence is important – a greater level of intelligence allows a species to experience far more complex and nuanced emotional states. And the ability to experience more varieties of emotions is why it’s better to become more complex rather than simply dialing up happiness. It’s why disorders that prevent us from experiencing certain emotions are so awful (with the worst obviously being the ones that prevent us from feeling the “best” desires)

It’s why we like funny things, and tragic things, and scary things. Who wants to feel the way they feel after watching all of Evangelion?? Turns out – everyone, at some point, for at least a little bit of time!

It is why all human life has value. You do not matter based on what you can produce, or how smart you are, or how useful you are to others. You matter because you are a human who feels things.

My utility function is to feel a certain elastic web of emotions, and it varies from other utility functions by which emotions are desired in which amounts. My personality determines what actions produce what emotions.

And a machine that could feel things even better than humans can could be a wonderful thing. Greg Egan’s "Diaspora" features an entire society of uploaded humans, living rich, complex lives of substance. Loving, striving, crying, etc. The society can support far more humans than is physically possible in meat-bodies, running far faster than is possible in realspace. Since all these humans are running on computer chips, one could argue that one way of looking at this thing is not “A society of uploaded humans” but “A machine that feels human emotions better than meat-humans do.” And it’s a glorious thing. I would be happy to live in such a society.

 

II. God Mode is Super Lame

Why not just wirehead with a large and complex set of emotions?

I’m old enough to have played the original Doom when it came out (sooo old!). It had a cheat-code that made you invincible, commonly called god-mode. The first thing you notice is that it’s super cool to be invincible and just mow down all those monsters with impunity! The next thing you notice is that after a while (maybe ten minutes?) it loses all appeal. It becomes boring. There is no game anymore, once you no longer have to worry about taking damage. It becomes a task. You start enabling other cheats to get through it faster. Full-ammo cheats, to just use the biggest, fastest gun nonstop and get those monsters out of your way. Then walk-through-wall cheats, so you can just go straight to the level exit without wandering around looking for keys. Over, and over, and over again, level after level. It becomes a Kafka-esque grotesquery. Why am I doing this? Why am I here? Is my purpose just to keep walking endlessly from Spawn Point to Exit, the world passing around me in a blur, green and blue explosions obscuring all vision? When will this end?

It was a relief to be finished with the game.

That was my generation’s first brush with the difference between goal-oriented objectives, and process-oriented objectives. We learned that the point of a game isn’t to get to the end, the point is to play the game. It used to be that if you wanted to be an awesome guitarist, you had to go through the process of playing guitar a LOT. There was no shortcut. So one could be excused for confusing “I want to be a rock star” with “I want to be playing awesome music.” Before cheat codes, getting to the end of the game was fun, so we thought that was our objective. After cheat-codes we could go straight to the end any time we wanted, and now we had to choose – is your objective really just to get to the end? Or is it to go through the process of playing the game?

Some things are goal-oriented, of course. Very few people clean their toilets because they enjoy the process of cleaning their toilet. They want their toilet to be clean. If they could push a button and have a clean toilet without having to do the cleaning, they would.

Process-oriented objectives still have a goal. You want to beat the game. But you do not want first-order control over the bit “Game Won? Y/N”. You want first-order control over the actions that can get you there – strafing, shooting, jumping – resulting in second-order control over if the bit finally gets flipped or not.

First-order control is god mode. Your goal is completed with full efficiency. Second-order control is indirect. You can take actions, and those actions will, if executed well, get you closer to your goal. They are fuzzier, you can be wrong about their effects, their effects can be inconsistent over time, and you can get better at using them. You can tell if you’d prefer god-mode for a task by considering if you’d like to have it completed without going through the steps.

Do you want to:

Have Not Played The Game, And Have It Completed?  or Be Playing The Game?
Have A Clean Toilet, Without Cleaning It Yourself? or Be Cleaning The Toilet?
Be At The End of a Movie? or Be Watching The Movie?

If the answer is in the first column, you want first-order control. If it is in the second column, you want second-order control.

Wireheading, even variable multi-emotional wireheading, assumes that emotions are a goal-oriented objective, and thus takes first-order control of one’s emotional state. I contest that emotions are a process-oriented objective. The purpose is to evoke those emotions by using second-order control – taking actions that will lead to those emotions being felt. To eliminate that step and go straight to the credits is to lose the whole point of being human.

 

III. Removing The Person From The Output

How is the process of playing Doom without cheat codes distinguished from the process of repeatedly pushing a button connected to certain electrodes in your head that produce the emotions associated with playing Doom without cheat codes? (Or just lying there while the computer chooses which electrodes to stimulate on your behalf?)

If it’s just the emotions without the experiences that would cause those emotions, I think that’s a huge difference. That is once again just jumping right to the end-state, rather than experiencing the process that brings it about. It’s first-order control, and that efficiency and directness strips out all the complexity and nuance of a second-order experience.

See Incoming Fireball -> Startled, Fear
Strafe Right -> Anticipation, Dread
Fireball Dodged -> Relief
Return Fire -> Vengeance!!

Is strictly more complicated than just

Startled, Fear
Anticipation, Dread
Relief
Vengeance!!

The key difference being that in the first case, the player is entangled in the process. While these things are designed to produce a specific and very similar experiences for everyone (which is why they’re popular to a wide player base), it takes a pre-existing person and combines them with a series of elements that is supposed to lead to an emotional response. The exact situation is unique(ish) for each person, because the person is a vital input. The output (of person feeling X emotions) is unique and personalized, as the input is different in every case.

When simply conjuring the emotions directly via wire, the individual is removed as an input. The emotions are implanted directly and do not depend on the person. The output (of person feeling X emotions) is identical and of far less complexity and value. Even if the emotions are hooked up to a random number generator or in some other way made to result in non-identical outputs, the situation is not improved. Because the problem isn’t so much “identical output” as it is that the Person was not an input, was not entangled in the process, and therefore doesn’t matter.

I actually don’t have much of a problem with simulated-realities. Already a large percentage of the emotions felt by middle-class people in the first world are due to simulated realities. We induce feelings via music, television/movies, video games, novels, and other art. I think this has had some positive effects on society – it’s nice when people can get their Thrill needs met without actually risking their lives and/or committing crimes. In fact, the sorts of people who still try to get all their emotional needs met in the real world tend to be destructive and dramatic and I’m sure everyone knows at least one person like that, and tries to avoid them.

I think a complete retreat to isolation would be sad, because other human minds are the most complex things that exist, and to cut that out of one’s life entirely would be an impoverishment. But a community of people interacting in a cyberworld, with access to physical reality? Shit, that sounds amazing!

Of course a “Total Recall” style system has the potential to become nightmarish. Right now when someone watches a movie, they bring their whole life with them. The movie is interpreted in light of one’s life experience. Every viewer has a different experience (some people have radically different experiences, as me and my SO recently discovered when we watched Birdman together. In fact, this comparing of the difference of experiences is the most fun part of my bi-weekly book club meetings. It’s kinda the whole point.). The person is an input in the process, and they’re mashed up into the product. If your proposed system would simply impose a memory or an experience onto someone else wholesale* without them being involved in the process, then it would be just as bad as the “series of emotions” process.

I have a vision of billions of people spending all of eternity simply reliving the most intense emotional experiences ever recorded, in perfect carbon copy, over and over again, and I shudder in horror. That’s not even being a person anymore. That’s overwriting your own existence with the recorded existence of someone(s) else. :(

But a good piece of art, that respects the person-as-input, and uses the artwork to cause them to create/feel more of their own emotions? That seems like a good thing.

(*this was adapted from a series of posts on my blog)

First(?) Rationalist elected to state government

63 Eneasz 07 November 2014 02:30AM

Has no one else mentioned this on LW yet?

Elizabeth Edwards has been elected as a New Hampshire State Rep, self-identifies as a Rationalist and explicitly mentions Less Wrong in her first post-election blog post.

Sorry if this is a repost

In the grim darkness of the far future there is only war continued by other means

26 Eneasz 21 October 2014 07:39PM

(cross-posted from my blog)

I. PvE vs PvP

Ever since it’s advent in Doom, PvP (Player vs Player) has been an integral part of almost every major video game. This is annoying to PvE (Player vs Environment) fans like myself, especially when PvE mechanics are altered (read: simplified and degraded) for the purpose of accommodating the PvP game play. Even in games which are ostensibly about the story & world, rather than direct player-on-player competition.

The reason for this comes down to simple math. PvE content is expensive to make. An hour of game play can take many dozens, or nowadays even hundreds, of man-hours of labor to produce. And once you’ve completed a PvE game, you’re done with it. There’s nothing else, you’ve reached “The End”, congrats. You can replay it a few times if you really loved it, like re-reading a book, but the content is the same. MMORGs recycle content by forcing you to grind bosses many times before you can move on to the next one, but that’s as fun as the word “grind” makes it sound. At that point people are there more for the social aspect and the occasional high than the core gameplay itself.

PvP “content”, OTOH, generates itself. Other humans keep learning and getting better and improvising new tactics. Every encounter has the potential to be new and exciting, and they always come with the rush of triumphing over another person (or the crush of losing to the same).

But much more to the point – In PvE potentially everyone can make it into the halls of “Finished The Game;” and if everyone is special, no one is. PvP has a very small elite – there can only be one #1 player, and people are always scrabbling for that position, or defending it. PvP harnesses our status-seeking instinct to get us to provide challenges for each other rather than forcing the game developers to develop new challenges for us. It’s far more cost effective, and a single man-hour of labor can produce hundreds or thousands of hours of game play. StarCraft  continued to be played at a massive level for 12 years after its release, until it was replaced with StarCraft II.

So if you want to keep people occupied for a looooong time without running out of game-world, focus on PvP

II. Science as PvE

In the distant past (in internet time) I commented at LessWrong that discovering new aspects of reality was exciting and filled me with awe and wonder and the normal “Science is Awesome” applause lights (and yes, I still feel that way). And I sneered at the status-grubbing of politicians and administrators and basically everyone that we in nerd culture disliked in high school. How temporary and near-sighted! How zero-sum (and often negative-sum!), draining resources we could use for actual positive-sum efforts like exploration and research! A pox on their houses!

Someone replied, asking why anyone should care about the minutia of lifeless, non-agenty forces? How could anyone expend so much of their mental efforts on such trivia when there are these complex, elaborate status games one can play instead? Feints and countermoves and gambits and evasions, with hidden score-keeping and persistent reputation effects… and that’s just the first layer! The subtle ballet of interaction is difficult even to watch, and when you get billions of dancers interacting it can be the most exhilarating experience of all.

This was the first time I’d ever been confronted with status-behavior as anything other than wasteful. Of course I rejected it at first, because no one is allowed to win arguments in real time. But it stuck with me. I now see the game play, and it is intricate. It puts Playing At The Next Level in a whole new perspective. It is the constant refinement and challenge and lack of a final completion-condition that is the heart of PvP. Human status games are the PvP of real life.

Which, by extension of the metaphor, makes Scientific Progress the PvE of real life. Which makes sense. It is us versus the environment in the most literal sense. It is content that was provided to us, rather than what we make ourselves. And it is limited – in theory we could some day learn everything that there is to learn.

III. The Best of All Possible Worlds

I’ve mentioned a few times I have difficulty accepting reality as real. Say you were trying to keep a limitless number of humans happy and occupied for an unbounded amount of time. You provide them PvE content to get them started. But you don’t want the PvE content to be their primary focus, both because they’ll eventually run out of it, and also because once they’ve completely cracked it there’s a good chance they’ll realize they’re in a simulation. You know that PvP is a good substitute for PvE for most people, often a superior one, and that PvP can get recursively more complex and intricate without limit and keep the humans endlessly occupied and happy, as long as their neuro-architecture is right. It’d be really great if they happened to evolve in a way that made status-seeking extremely pleasurable for the majority of the species, even if that did mean that the ones losing badly were constantly miserable regardless of their objective well-being. This would mean far, far more lives could be lived and enjoyed without running out of content than would otherwise be possible.

IV. Implications for CEV

It’s said that the Coherent Extrapolated Volition is “our wish if we knew more, thought faster, were more the people we wished to be, hard grown up farther together.” This implies a resolution to many conflicts. No more endless bickering about whether the Red Tribe is racist or the Blue Tribe is arrogant pricks. A more unified way of looking at the world that breaks down those conceptual conflicts. But if PvP play really is an integral part of the human experience, a true CEV would notice that, and would preserve these differences instead. To ensure that we always had rival factions sniping at each other over irreconcilable, fundamental disagreements in how reality should be approached and how problems should be solved. To forever keep partisan politics as part of the human condition, so we have this dance to enjoy. Stripping it out would be akin to removing humanity’s love of music, because dancing inefficiently consumes great amounts of energy just so we can end up where we started.

Carl von Clausewitz famously said “War is the continuation of politics by other means.”  The correlate of “Politics is the continuation of war by other means” has already been proposed. It is not unreasonable to speculate that in the grim darkness of the far future, there is only war continued by other means. Which, all things considered, is greatly preferable to actual war. As long as people like Scott are around to try to keep things somewhat civil and preventing an escalation into violence, this may not be terrible.

Petrov Day Reminder

8 Eneasz 26 September 2014 01:57PM

9/26 is Petrov Day. It is the time of year where we celebrate the world not being destroyed. Let your friends and family know.

 

A reason to see the future

18 Eneasz 05 September 2014 07:33PM

I just learned of The Future Library project. In short, famous authors will be asked to write new, original fiction that will not be released until 2114. First one announced was Margaret Atwood, of The Handmaiden's Tale fame.

I learned of this when a friend posted on Facebook that "I'm officially looking into being cryogenically frozen due to The Future Library project. See you all in 2114." She meant it as a joke, but after a couple comments she now knows about CI, and she didn't yesterday.

What's one of the most common complaints we hear from Deathists? The future is unknown and scary and there won't be anything there they'd be interested in anyway. Now there will be, if they're Atwood fans.

What's one of the ways artists who give away most of their work (almost all of them nowadays) try to entice people to pay for their albums/books/games/whatever? Including special content that is only available for people who pay (or who pay more). Now there is special content only available for people who are around post-2113.

Which got me to thinking... could we incentivize seeing the future? I know it sounds kinda silly ("What, escaping utter annihilation isn't incentive enough??"), but it seems possible that we could save lives by compiling original work from popular artists (writers, musicians, etc), sealing it tight somewhere, and promising to release it in 100, 200, maybe 250 years. And of course, providing links to cryo resources with all publicity materials.

Would this be worth pursuing? Are there any obvious downsides, aside from cost & difficulty?

Roles are Martial Arts for Agency

140 Eneasz 08 August 2014 03:53AM

A long time ago I thought that Martial Arts simply taught you how to fight – the right way to throw a punch, the best technique for blocking and countering an attack, etc. I thought training consisted of recognizing these attacks and choosing the correct responses more quickly, as well as simply faster/stronger physical execution of same. It was later that I learned that the entire purpose of martial arts is to train your body to react with minimal conscious deliberation, to remove “you” from the equation as much as possible.

The reason is of course that conscious thought is too slow. If you have to think about what you’re doing, you’ve already lost. It’s been said that if you had to think about walking to do it, you’d never make it across the room. Fighting is no different. (It isn’t just fighting either – anything that requires quick reaction suffers when exposed to conscious thought. I used to love Rock Band. One day when playing a particularly difficult guitar solo on expert I nailed 100%… except “I” didn’t do it at all. My eyes saw the notes, my hands executed them, and no where was I involved in the process. It was both exhilarating and creepy, and I basically dropped the game soon after.)

You’ve seen how long it takes a human to learn to walk effortlessly. That's a situation with a single constant force, an unmoving surface, no agents working against you, and minimal emotional agitation. No wonder it takes hundreds of hours, repeating the same basic movements over and over again, to attain even a basic level of martial mastery. To make your body react correctly without any thinking involved. When Neo says “I Know Kung Fu” he isn’t surprised that he now has knowledge he didn’t have before. He’s amazed that his body now reacts in the optimal manner when attacked without his involvement.

All of this is simply focusing on pure reaction time – it doesn’t even take into account the emotional terror of another human seeking to do violence to you. It doesn’t capture the indecision of how to respond, the paralysis of having to choose between outcomes which are all awful and you don’t know which will be worse, and the surge of hormones. The training of your body to respond without your involvement bypasses all of those obstacles as well.

This is the true strength of Martial Arts – eliminating your slow, conscious deliberation and acting while there is still time to do so.

Roles are the Martial Arts of Agency.

When one is well-trained in a certain Role, one defaults to certain prescribed actions immediately and confidently. I’ve acted as a guy standing around watching people faint in an overcrowded room, and I’ve acted as the guy telling people to clear the area. The difference was in one I had the role of Corporate Pleb, and the other I had the role of Guy Responsible For This Shit. You know the difference between the guy at the bar who breaks up a fight, and the guy who stands back and watches it happen? The former thinks of himself as the guy who stops fights. They could even be the same guy, on different nights. The role itself creates the actions, and it creates them as an immediate reflex. By the time corporate-me is done thinking “Huh, what’s this? Oh, this looks bad. Someone fainted? Wow, never seen that before. Damn, hope they’re OK. I should call 911.” enforcer-me has already yelled for the room to clear and whipped out a phone.

Roles are the difference between Hufflepuffs gawking when Neville tumbles off his broom (Protected), and Harry screaming “Wingardium Leviosa” (Protector). Draco insulted them afterwards, but it wasn’t a fair insult – they never had the slightest chance to react in time, given the role they were in. Roles are the difference between Minerva ordering Hagrid to stay with the children while she forms troll-hunting parties (Protector), and Harry standing around doing nothing while time slowly ticks away (Protected). Eventually he switched roles. But it took Agency to do so. It took time.

Agency is awesome. Half this site is devoted to becoming better at Agency. But Agency is slow. Roles allow real-time action under stress.

Agency has a place of course. Agency is what causes us to decide that Martial Arts training is important, that has us choose a Martial Art, and then continue to train month after month. Agency is what lets us decide which Roles we want to play, and practice the psychology and execution of those roles. But when the time for action is at hand, Agency is too slow. Ensure that you have trained enough for the next challenge, because it is the training that will see you through it, not your agenty conscious thinking.

 

As an aside, most major failures I’ve seen recently are when everyone assumed that someone else had the role of Guy In Charge If Shit Goes Down. I suggest that, in any gathering of rationalists, they begin the meeting by choosing one person to be Dictator In Extremis should something break. Doesn’t have to be the same person as whoever is leading. Would be best if it was someone comfortable in the role and/or with experience in it. But really there just needs to be one. Anyone.

cross-posted from my blog

TED Prize Nomination

4 Eneasz 02 January 2014 04:47PM
I started the process of a TED Prize Nomination:

 Nominate an individual — or yourself — to envision and execute a high-impact project that can spur global change. Our TED Prize winner will have an ambitious wish — and the vision, pragmatism and leadership to turn it into reality. Every self-nomination will include a proposal for a world-changing and achievable wish. 

Fairly obvious who I'm nominating.
But then came across a few things that made me suspect I'm not the best person to do this. Such as:

* We weigh each single nomination as heavily as multiple nominations and we strongly discourage multiple nominations. 
* The heart of the TED Prize is the wish. Though it's small in size, it is the most important element of your nomination. It's worth investing your time refining. At its most basic, a wish = who + what + how = a better world. In other words, who are you going to engage on what issue and in what way for what kind of improvement?
* Imagine your nominee is on the stage at the TED Conference announcing their wish and inviting the wider community--everyone from corporate and nonprofit leaders to TED fellows doing grassroots work in developing countries--to get involved. In a few sentences, what is your nominee's ask?

I have absolutely no idea what Eliezer would write as his wish, and I don't think I'm even remotely qualified to take a stab at it. Would someone who knows Eliezer better, or perhaps Eliezer himself, be willing to take this on?

To reduce the amount of time needed to complete the application, here are two outside-source articles about Eliezer that I googled up while I was doing this (they ask for links to such articles in Step 3)
http://www.cnbc.com/id/48538963

Video: What is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

5 Eneasz 30 September 2013 03:28AM

So a friend of mine took over running MALcon in Denver this year. She asked me to do a presentation on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. I said ok and put together the following little talk. It's about 25 minutes. I tried to cover what rationality is, why it makes fiction cool, and what HPMoR is. For the non-initiated. It was my first time doing public speaking, and I was nervous and, ok, borderline terrified. I hope I didn't screw anything up too badly. I recorded the presentation and I'm putting it up for critique. There's several chunks that, in retrospect, I think should have been placed differently in the talk, they didn't flow well. I need more eye-contact, less notes, and overall just a LOT more practice doing public speaking. Any suggestions are welcome.

Video on YouTube

 

The text I was reading from is below, although I deviated from it a bit, of course.
(bolding was to draw my eye, not for emphasis)

 

Hello. You’re all here for the Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality thing? OK. This is my first time doing public speaking so please make allowances for my noob mistakes. Also, for the same reason, please hold your questions until the end. You may wish to write down any that come to you so you don’t forget.

To start - I’m going to assume everyone here knows what fanfic is. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is fanfic written by decision theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky and it’s one of the most popular Harry Potter fanfics online. It’s the most reviewed and followed HP work on fanfiction.net and it’s received praise by award-winning authors. I don’t really have much to do with it, I’m mainly  just a fan. I am big enough of a fan that I record and produce the audio-book version of it though, so I was asked to do this presentation. Plus I live a few blocks away. So that’s why I’m here.


You’re here because you all want to know what the big deal is.

Part of the big deal is that it’s a really good story, but there’s lots of good fanfic and generally they don’t have their own panel to discuss them. The thing about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality – which I’ll just be calling Methods for short – is that it captures the heart of the rationality movement. Maybe you’ve heard of this “rationality” thing, maybe not, but it’s a growing movement among certain types of geeks. And when a geek subculture latches on to some fictional work and says “OMG, this is US!” it’s usually pretty damn good in it’s own right. My Little Pony wouldn’t have the fandom it does if the show itself wasn’t great. So the Rationality part of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is pretty important to the whole.

Therefore before we get into the fic itself I’ll briefly touch on – what is Rationality, and why does it make a cool story?


Rationality is the study of general methods for good decision-making, especially when the decision is hard to get right. Of knowing what errors in thinking are common so we can avoid them. Of realizing when we are confused, or when we’re motivated by bad instincts. If you want to make good decisions you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.


This makes a story interesting because watching someone put in high-stress situations where making a good decision is the difference between life and death, when a good decision is hard to find, and seeing them frantically navigate through that mess is pretty exciting.


Now, to make good decisions we also need true beliefs about the world around us. Rationalists assume that we can know true things about the real world. (I know that seems like really obvious assumption, but you’d be surprised). However our beliefs about reality are imperfect. The model we have of reality in here doesn’t exactly match up with what’s really out there. The map of the world we have in our brain isn’t entirely accurate. In some places it’s completely wrong. What we need is a way to verify what we think we know and discover true things about the real world… a way of separating fact from delusion. If only someone would come up with a way to do that...


Waitaminnit, you’re saying to me - they did, it’s called the scientific method! I’m pretty sure I don’t have to tell you all how awesome science is - We all love science yeah? GO SCIENCE! So naturally Rationality incorporates the scientific method. The truth about how reality works has to be part of any effective decision-making process. And anyone who’s read good science fiction knows how great a story that struggle to find the truth can be. The search to find out what’s going on, and why. The discovery of an underlying principle of how the universe works, and the power that comes from harnessing that knowledge.


Harry Potter may be set in a typical fantasy setting, but The Methods of Rationality is a Science Fiction story.


Now, sometimes discovering a truth is not enough. Sometimes it doesn’t match with what you knew before, with assumptions and habits that guided your actions. We don’t think through every little thing we do in our day-to-day lives, we rely mainly on our reflexive biases and habits. You couldn’t cross a room if you had to think through and plan each step. So rationality isn’t just about finding out what is true about the world - if that’s all you wanted, you have the Scientific Method. Rationality is also about updating your implicit beliefs to more accurately match what you’ve discovered is true.


And it turns out that’s not so easy. It’s especially hard when what we discover conflicts with our hard-wired instincts. Our bodies and our instincts have evolved to grab all the calories and resources we can find, pass on our genes, and die. And so while we may consciously know that that bag of potato chips is bad for us, we still eat it, cuz it tastes good. We may consciously understand that the roller coaster is completely safe, engineered so that you’d have to really work hard at getting hurt, we are still terrified when we go over that initial drop. If you really want to effect a change in your behavior it isn’t enough to simply “know” something. You have to feel it. And to do that you usually have to play dirty. There’s an old Keanu Reeves movie where he plays a hacker, and at the climax he’s told he needs info that’s hidden in his own brain. He has to HACK HIS OWN BRAIN. DUN DUN DUN! We have to do the same thing, a lot. Rationality gives you the tools to hack yourself.


And that’s another great aspect of Rationality stories. Many great stories are about man vs man or man vs nature, some of the best stories are about man vs himself, man vs his own flaws. Thing is most people don’t have the weapons to wrestle with themselves effectively, most authors don’t even know those weapons exist. So the traditional “wrestle with oneself” is a grunting bare-nuckled back-alley fight. Which is fun, like that great brawl in They Live. But a story that incorporates rationality, upgrades this to a duel between cyber-ninjas with laser swords. It’s freakin’ cool and you don’t get to see that in most books, so it’s a hell of a show!


So, that’s rationality, and that’s how it makes stories awesome and unusual. But - why Harry Potter? After all, it was probably that name recognition that brought you here, and not the term “Methods of Rationality”.


To start with, the Potterverse is very fertile soil for fanfiction. There’s a reason some settings have only a trickle of fanfic, while others explode with it. Some settings really lend themselves to further exploration by fans. These settings provide a rich history in a living world that goes beyond just the characters in the story. There are allusions to events that have happened before or are happening outside the scope of the book - the rise of Grindelwald, the first wizarding war against Voldemort, the whole first generation backstory. And since in Harry Potter the action takes place in the modern day in and around our muggle world, there are a lot of practical implications that can provide speculation and plot-hooks for days on end. The more rich and complex the setting is, the greater the potential it has for fanfiction to explore and grow from it, and Harry Potter has a very rich world.


Of course there are many worlds ripe for fanfiction - why Harry Potter specifically? MLP, Twilight, and Star Trek all have thriving fanfic scenes. Probably the biggest reason can be summed up in the title of the second chapter - Everything I Believe Is False.


I mentioned at the start that Yudkowsky is a decision theorist. A lot of sci-fi writers have a background in the sciences, and they explore “what-if” scenarios from their field in their fiction. Lets say you want to write a sci-fi piece that revolves around decision theory. To make it really captivating you want a character who already knows how to use these skills. Training is ok, and the many years of training that a ninja or a demon-slayer goes through can be interesting, but the real action is when they are near the peak of their mastery and they have to face down the Big Bad villain in a fight to the death. Most of the time the training is alluded to in flashbacks, or covered in a montage. It’s just not that fun.


To facilitate this, there is one major change between this fanfic and canon. In Methods of Rationality Petunia marries a kind University Professor instead of an ignorant jerk, and he teaches Harry about the Scientific Method and gives him the full set of Enlightenment skills and ideals so the story can just right into the action.


Now to really test a character’s skills and resolve you thrust them into a completely novel situation, one in which they didn’t prepare for and never dreamed they’d be tested, but which still relies on those skills. Which in the case of decision theory would mean revealing to the character that everything they thought they knew was false. They have been lied to all their lives, and the world doesn’t really work the way they thought it did. Now they have to re-examine everything they thought they knew, test every assumption they had. Is this thing I believe a true fact about reality, or was it part of the conspiracy to keep me ignorant? What beliefs can I keep and what must I change? Of those, which beliefs do I have to dump entirely, and which can I simply modify a bit? How do I internalize this new knowledge so that I act unconsciously on what I’ve discovered, rather than defaulting to old habits?


If you ask people to name settings in pop culture where there is such a radical revelation, where the protagonist learns that the world is mostly a lie, the two most common answers you get are “Harry Potter” and “The Matrix”. The Matrix is really cool, but the characters aren’t as interesting - they don’t have parents or relatives or backstory. Neo, as his name alludes, is New and completely disconnected from the surrounding world, which works for the story they’re telling of the isolated loner, but that doesn’t make for very fertile fanfic soil. Also - the Matrix world doesn’t have magic. No one there is forced to say “I just saw a human turn into a cat, but she kept thinking using her human brain. What does this mean for what I thought I knew about brains?”


Plus Yudkowsky was a reader of Harry Potter fanfic, not Matrix fanfic, so it was natural to write in the same world he enjoyed reading.


I should probably get into the meat of the story itself.


Methods of Rationality takes place during Harry’s first year at Hogwarts. It starts with Harry getting his letter and initially follows the structure of the first book, with a trip to Daigon Alley, Platform 9 and ¾, the sorting, the conflict with Snape, even the Troll. But it does it all with a rationalist slant, which makes it a unique sort of story, and the differences between it and the original are really cool to watch. This slant results in some parodies of the original, like when it sorts Hermione into Ravenclaw because - as Harry comments - if Hermione Granger doesn’t qualify as Ravenclaw, there’s no reason for Ravenclaw House to exist. But the parodies aren’t mean-spirited - the author really likes the Potterverse. They’re just fun.


In terms of genre It’s hard to classify Methods of Rationality into any one category, but large parts of it are comedy. If you watch anime and enjoy that sort of over-the-top, falling-on-your-face, winking-at-the-audience style of humor, you will love Methods of Rationality. It has TONS of that. It has Boy-Who-Lived Fangirls trying to get Harry Potter to fall in love with them. It has someone trying to summon Harry with an epic straight-out-of-Lovecraft Elder God summoning ritual which goes… not quite how they expected.


But it isn’t all comedy. Harry is attacked by a Dementor and re-lives seeing his parents murdered. He goes to Azkaban and meets a tortured Bellatrix Black. Like, literally being tortured. There’s blood debts and ransoms, and all the while Voldemort’s minions are trying to destroy him and kill his friends. So there’s drama and action and pathos as well as comedy. And it flows very nicely, Yudkowsky handles mood-switches extremely well, moving from comedy to drama to action and back to comedy with a skill that rivals professional authors.


Even though the story takes place only in Harry’s first year, it does draw in elements from the entire Potter timeline. There’s a time-turner. Remus Lupin, Rita Skeeter, and Mad-Eye Moody all make appearances. The three Deathly Hallows and the Peveral Brothers are a major plot point. Luna Lovegood doesn’t show up, since she’s too young to be at Hogwarts in the first year, but she is mentioned and several issues of The Quibbler show up.


I did mention the major change from canon - In canon Harry’s step-parents are evil and keep him locked up. That wouldn’t really work for this story, because Harry can’t be locked away from the muggle world, he has to have the knowledge and expectations about it in order for them all to be shattered. So But since almost all the action takes place at Hogwarts, the content of the story isn’t drastically altered by that. It’s mainly altered by the application of rationality.


The question sometimes comes up - what if I haven’t read the original Harry Potter books, or seen the movies? There are people who’ve heard the story is great and want to read it, but don’t have much desire to read the Potter books. I ain’t gonna lie - you won’t enjoy it quite as much. There are a lot of in-jokes that will go right over your head if you haven’t at least seen the movies. For example, the references to the Weasley pet rat will probably be confusing. But it’s not as bad as you might think, because there are A LOT of references in Methods of Rationality to tons of things outside the Potterverse. There’s references to anime, old sci-fi books, internet memes… there’s shout-outs to Star Wars and even to Gargoyles. So everyone will miss something. The in-jokes are great when you get them, and no big deal when you don’t, and if the in-jokes you don’t get happen to be Harry Potter in-jokes, that’s not a tragedy. To be honest, I hadn’t read the last two potter books when I started on Methods of Rationality myself. And I loved it.


In the end, you don’t actually need to have read the Potter books to enjoy Methods of Rationality. Characters are still introduced in a coherent way, the plot is internally consistent, and the knowledge you need to understand and enjoy the story is presented in the text. So if you’re on the fence, go ahead and give it a try. You really don’t have to plow through seven books you aren’t excited about. But if you can find the time to watch at least the first movie, it does make it more enjoyable.


Some of you may have realized that there is a problem with giving Harry a major rationality upgrade. For a story to be exciting there must be a real conflict, not a one-sided beatdown. There’s a law of good fanfic that says “If you give Frodo a lightsaber, you must give Sauron the Death Star.” Fortunately this IS a good fanfic, and Voldemort gets a huge upgrade in intelligence and rationality. The way he wraps the entire Wizard World into knots, even seducing Harry, is epic. And Draco Malfoy gets an upgrade as well, and turns from an egotistical bully to a shrewd plotter. This makes for really good reading for those of us more interested in power grabs and back-stabbing than broomstick-based sports. Not that there’s anything wrong with that...


Personally, the plotting really is phenomenal. There is foreshadowing everywhere, things you’ll read that seem like throw-away jokes when you first encounter them, but that are clearly signs saying “This is what is going to happen next!” that blow you away when you read through a second time. There are chekov’s guns that are laid out early on that aren’t fired until 50 chapters later (chapters aren’t that long). The way little plot points and comments are woven in and out, tieing early tiny actions back to huge events much later is stunning.


Obviously I’m a big fan.


There is one other thing about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality that makes it unusual. It’s not just a novel. It’s also a deliberate instructional mechanism. Humans learn things by story-telling. Imagining something is mentally analogous to remembering something that didn’t actually happen. Yudkowsky uses this intentionally to direct his audience into developing stronger rationality skills. Almost every chapter, or group of chapters, is specifically designed to teach a technique or skill of rationality. The technique to be taught is right there in the chapter title. Chapter 26: Noticing Confusion. Most of the time a character, often Harry, will at some point explicitly explain what the technique is or how it is to be used. The chapter will also contain at least one example of someone succeeding or failing in the use of the technique. Sometimes multiple examples. Sometimes multiple examples of both.


The really crazy thing is, you generally don’t notice. The writing is strong and the story really pulls you in, so it’s integrated seamlessly into the plot progression. It isn’t until I go back and read a chapter a second time, referring back to the chapter title and really keeping my eyes open for all examples of it, that I realize just how central that particular idea is in that chapter. It makes me wish all books were written like that.


And as a final bonus for anyone who likes to really dig deep into their novels, Yudkowsky’s stated that Methods is a puzzle that’s meant to be solvable. That all the clues are laid out within it, and a reader who really wants to can work it out before it’s revealed at the end. Toward that end there are a number of places online where people discuss Methods of Rationality and what they think is happening. There’s a thread on TVTropes, and an HPMoR sub-reddit, as well as just people blogging about it now and then. So if you’re into that sort of puzzle-solving, this is right up your alley. The final arc will be released later this year, so there’s still time to get in on the action.


OK, all that being said, this fanfic isn’t for everyone. There are some people who dislike how Harry talks to adults. Most of these people are parents. /shrug I’m not a parent, I don’t know. Some people just never get into the story, which is fine. The humor doesn’t appeal to everyone, and some of the dark parts are pretty dark. And I really wouldn’t recommend this to anyone who isn’t at least in their teens yet. The terminology and some of the more complex ideas are probably too daunting for younger readers. Also the story does touch on more adult subject matter a few times.


I’ll wrap up with some final info on where you can find this. The official home is at FanFiction.Net. You can go there and search for Harry Potter And The Methods of Rationality. Or just google Harry Potter And The Methods of Rationality. The cleanest site, with a table of contents and resource links and everything, is HPMOR.COM. That’s the site I use when I read it. There’s also the audio-book version, which is at HPMORpodcast.com. I run that one. And of course all of it is free.


*breath*

 

Alright, that’s my presentation, and I hope you’ve learned whatever you wanted to learn. Give it a shot and maybe you’ll love it as much as I do. I’ll now open the floor to questions.

Happy Petrov Day

14 Eneasz 26 September 2013 03:08PM

9/26 is Petrov Day

Take a moment today to not destroy the world.

Petrov Day

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