LW's first job ad
A friend of the Singularity Institute is seeking to hire someone to research trends and surprises in geopolitics, world economics, and technology - a brainstorming, think-tank type job at a for-profit company. No experience necessary, but strong math and verbal skills required; they're happy to hire out of college and would probably hire out of high school if they find a math-Olympiad type or polymath. This is a job that requires you to think all day and come up with interesting ideas, so they're looking for people who can come up with lots of ideas and criticize them without much external prompting, and enough drive to get their research done without someone standing over their shoulder. They pay well, and it obviously does not involve sales or marketing. They're interested in Less Wrong readers because rationality skills can help. Located in San Francisco. Send résumé and cover letter to yuanshotfirst@gmail.com. Writing sample optional.
Memetic Hazards in Videogames
Hello, player character, and welcome to the Mazes of Menace! Your goal is to get to the center and defeat the Big Bad. You know this is your goal because you received a message from a very authoritative source that said so. Alas, the maze is filled with guards and traps that make every step dangerous. You have reached an intersection, and there are two doors before you. Door A leads towards the center; it probably takes you to your destination. Door B leads away from the center; it could loop back, but it's probably a dead end. Which door do you choose?
The correct answer, and the answer which every habitual video game player will instinctively choose, is door B: the probable dead end. Because your goal is not to reach the end quickly, but to search as much of the maze's area as you can, and by RPG genre convention, dead ends come with treasure. Similarly, if you're on a quest to save the world, you do side-quests to put it off as long as possible, because you're optimizing for fraction-of-content-seen, rather than probability-world-is-saved, which is 1.0 from the very beginning.
If you optimize for one thing, while thinking that you're optimizing something else, then you may generate incorrect subgoals and heuristics. If seen clearly, the doors represent a trade-off between time spent and area explored. But what happens if that trade-off is never acknowledged, and you can't see the situation for what it really is? Then you're loading garbage into your goal system. I'm writing this because someone reported what looks like a video game heuristic leaking into the real world. While this hasn't been studied, it could plausibly be a common problem. Here are some of the common memetic hazards I've found in video games.
The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover
So I'd intended this story as a bit of utterly deranged fun, but it got out of control and ended up as a deep philosophical exploration, and now those of you who care will have to wade through the insanity. I'm sorry. I just can't seem to help myself.
I know that writing crossover fanfiction is considered one of the lower levels to which an author can sink. Alas, I've always been a sucker for audacity, and I am the sort of person who couldn't resist trying to top the entire... but never mind, you can see for yourself.
Click on to read my latest story and first fanfiction, a Vernor Vinge x Greg Egan crackfic.
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