These challenges deserve a lot of credit for pushing me to make an account and finally start posting and commenting, so I'm glad I caught one before they go dark for a bit.
Okay, this was by far the hardest one yet, and I certainly didn't do it in just 1h. Very rewarding though -- especially as I tried introspecting on my cognition as I was doing it. (I learnt some new things, though I've redacted those notes here.) I also found it helpful to answer the nearby question of "do things that cause the world to end up in a state where the candle is lit", as well as just reaching the subgoal "create fire".
I also wrote some I didn't feel counted, but included them anyway just to keep the babble going, and so overshot the target a bit.
(The Roam template I use only goes up to 50, so at this point the numbering restarts)
Stop anything showing up in the spoilers.
1) With a match.
2) Use a magnifying glass to focus the suns rays onto it.
3) Fire a laser beam at it.
4) Use a cigarette lighter.
5) Use a bunsen burner.
6) Strike flints against one another to generate sparks to light the candle.
7) Dip it in a lava pool.
8) Use a heater to increase the temperature in the room till it self ignites.
9) Attach the wick to two wires, then use them to put a large amount of electrical power through it.
10) Take it to a bonfire, and put the candle in it.
11) Rub sticks together to start a fire, then use it to light the candle.
12) Detonating some explosives might light it if you are lucky.
13) Position the candle under a space rocket and wait for the rocket to launch.
14) Send the candle into a solar flare.
15) Send the candle into the accretion disk of a black hole.
16) Find a burning building, and light the candle from it.
17) Put it in the overn, and turn the heat up to maximum.
18) Wait till the news reports a heathland fire, then head to the fire to light it.
19) Put the candle at the edge of a nuclear fireball.
20) The candle might be electrically powered, in which case it can just be switched on.
21) Use another candle that is already lit.
22) Put it at the top of a lightning conductor, and hope it gets hit by lightning.
23) Put the wick in the way of a discharge from a Van De Graph generator.
24) Soak it in water, bombard it with an intense beam of microwaves, and hope it is heated up enough to ignite.
25) Put the candle in a solar furnace.
26) A telescope could be used to focus sunlight onto the candle.
27) Buy a lot of mirrors, rig up a complicated system to focus sunlight onto the candle.
28) Smash a lightbulb while it is switched on and use the hot filament to ignite the candle.
29) Douse the wick in hydrochloric acid, then drop a piece of potassium on it.
30) Cover the wick in phosphorus powder, take it to the Sahara desert where the high temperature will cause it to self ignite.
31) Take it to a steam train and use the fire in it to ignite the candle.
32) Hire a hot air balloon, use the flame that generates the hot air to ignite the candle.
33) Position the candle under a firework when it is launched.
34) Use the flame that burns above oil rigs to ignite it.
35) Put it in the fire burning in my fireplace.
36) Go to a fossil fuelled power station and use its fire to ignite it.
37) Go to a blast furnace and dip the candle in the molten metal.
38) Leave it in an experimental nuclear fusion power plant before it is switched on should do the trick.
39) Find part of a jungle that is going to be slashed and burned and leave it in the fires path.
40) Use a camping stove to ignite it.
41) Wait for the random motion of air molecules to cause it to spontaneously ignite.
42) Bore a hole down to the mantle and lower the candle down.
43) Mass burn all of the planets fossil fuels, eventually global warming will get so bad it will self ignite.
44) Put it in a box and send it to Venus where the high temperature will cause it to spontaneously ignite.
45) Would putting it in a room where the atmosphere was made of 100 percent oxygen ignite it?
46) Extract the gunpowder from several party poppers, detonate them at once near the candle and hope this ignites it.
47) Light a sparkler, and use the sparks given off to ignite the candle.
48) Use the spark generated by a spark plug in a car to ignite the candle.
49) Dip the candle in chlorine, replace the atmosphere in the room with hydrogen, and warm until it self ignites.
50) Fire an intense X ray beam at the candle.
51) Put the candle in a jet engine.
52) Putting the candle in a particle accelerator might work.
53) Use an intense neutrino beam to light it.
54) If the wick is laced with metal wires moving a strong magnet rapidly above it may induce currents which heat it up and cause it to light.
55) Drop the candle from the top of the atmosphere. The heat generated during renetry will light it.
56) Use the flame from an oil lamp to light it.
57) Use a burning compost heap to light it.
58) Take it to a neighbour and light it from their barbecue.
59) Light it from a burning torch.
60) Take it to a kiln.
61) Pour some molten lead on the candle.
62) Get a fire breather to breathe on it.
63) Use a welder to light the candle.
64) Dip it in a vat of boiling oil.
65) Compress the atmosphere in the room until it heats up enough that the candle self ignites.
66) Drop a minuscule amount of anti matter on the candle.
67) Use virtual quantum particles to transfer heat from a nearby hot object to the candle.
68) Drop a meteorite on the earth, light the candle from the resulting fireball.
69) Use the dynamo effect between Jupiter and Io to light it.
70) Leave the candle in the vicinity of a supernova.
71) Focus the energy generated by the northern lights onto it.
72) Go on an expedition to the Amazon in the search of a previously unknown fire breathing animal.
73) Maybe the current generated by an electric eel could light it?
74) Use some Greek fire.
75) Give it to a friend who has some means of lighting it for me.
76) Leave it in a rack of candles in a church, at some point someone will come along and light it.
77) If I throw it out in the rubbish, and the rubbish is burnt in an incinerator, it will in some sense be lighted.
78) Wait for the sun to expand to swallow the earth, which will inevitably light the candle.
79) Use a flame thrower.
80) Start a war and position it in a target likely to be targeted by incendiary bombs.
81) Use the hot air generated by politicians speeches to light it.
82) Return it to the place it was bought from, hopefully someone else will buy it and light it for me.
83) The Trojan candle stratagem: Claim that the candle is a gift from the Gods, and that the city that lights it will never be conquered. Hope this tricks someone into lighting it for me.
84) Use an oxyacetylene torch.
85) Use some nano technology that will bring atoms in the candle together with oxygen atoms in such a way that the candle will light.
86) Maybe dark matter could be used to light it some how?
87) Or maybe dark energy could be used instead?
88) Firing a high energy beam of muons at it would probably do the trick.
89) Leave the candle next to a battery that is known to catch fire. Wait for the battery to catch fire and light the candle.
90) Wait for the next scheduled witch burning. Insert the candle in the pyre, and wait for it to be lit.
91) Or wait for the next mock Viking ship to be burnt, and hide it in there.
92) Break into a shop that sells candles, add this one to the collection, leave someone else to buy it and light it for me.
93) Pour some sulfuric acid on it, then deposit a piece of sodium on it.
94) Carbonic acid and lithium should also work.
95) Soaking it in water, then pumping fluorine gas into the room should also work.
96) Pay someone else to light it for me.
97) Focus several sound waves on the candle to cause it to warm up and light.
98) Attach the candle to springs at either end, use them to pull it back and forth very fast so that air resistance causes it to heat up and light the candle.
99) Put it in a computer driven car. Program the car to drive into something at high speed. Hope that the resulting crash starts a fire that lights the candle.
100) Post a babble challenge on Less Wrong asking for 100 ways to light an candle, then use the best one.
Filler text for preview
I feel like a large number of my ideas wouldn’t leave much candle for being a metaphor for anything but hey-ho.
Legal text: results not guaranteed. May result in destruction of candle, severe burns, loss of limbs, spontaneous appearance of Boy Scouts, property damage, and/or loss of life. Do not attempt without supervision by a properly licensed candle lighter. No pistachio nuts were harmed in the compilation of this list.
Some of the first images about candles burning would be to make it burn for long. But challenge here is to start it and a particular candle.
Safeties
5. combines with later point to a general throwing option: Place candle as part of state symbolic institution and let anarchics burn it in political arson.
13. is separte enough. Internal separate powersource vs external energy riding
15. is a only a side point of 14 and can stand as separate method by itself
20. indeed samey with 2: Use as Pablov day collateral and actively try to make it fail
22. cure as "just smash it with enough force, evenwith materials not conductive to sparks"
25. indeed samey with 10: launch a solar farm into space with the candle inthe hotspot (not 2 because we are being more active than passive, not kitchen appliance because we are not using internal energy sources)
30 and 31 do not fail
45 and 46 are separate enough. 45 is not in physcial sense so it is not samey
56 is not a throw option is not samey
63 if not samey with 2 would be with cure for 25: Make the candle glow-in-dark and let it charge sunlight
72 you lack personal knowledge and thus is not enlightment. You can appeal to emotions other than pity or grace so is not pray.
75 this covers nuclear fuels, 17 is for the social
77. Is the start of fuel I don't personally know how they would work so they don't combine with previous fuel points into one mega "fuel" point but stand for all hypothetical fuels.
79. Placing it under something and collapsing on itself are two different things
86. Previous points refer to indivudalised mechanisms known to exist. This covers mechanism that are unkown or canonlybe reasoned that there is reason to believe that something like that existsw without knowing the specifics. Fuel mechanics are separte, this doesn't combine into fuel points.
89. The party is not comparable to a sourcde code developer in previous point (in-world vs out-world entity)
96 is samey: Fall into delusion where the candle in your opinion is lit.
101. Makes different ontological assumptions than force, source code developer or elemental.
I'm using the markdown editor, so maybe my attempt at redacting will take this time.
Match
Lighter
Build Boy Scout-approved fire and stick candle in it
Flint and striker
Take it to California and use an existing wildfire
Put Crysis on Ultra, run the benchmark, and put the wick on my video card
Parabolic mirror
Find a smoker and hold it up to their cigarette
Buy a sketchy laptop, wait for the battery to catch on fire, use that
Use positive thinking
Wait for quantum uncertainty to lead to a state where it’s lit
Sneak onto an aircraft carrier and hold it up to the exhaust of a jet taking off
While on aircraft carrier, detonate a bomb and use that flame
While on aircraft carrier, borrow an M9 from a sailor and use propellant explosion
Make a potato battery using a giant potato, run it through highly resistant wire that gets really hot
Move a magnet near a wire so it gets really hot
Drill a hole in my car engine to reach combustion chamber
Hook spark plug up to car battery
Find a Tesla that just crashed and is on fire
Travel back in time to a Spanish Inquisition auto-da-fe and use that fire
Fly to the sun in a rocket and get close enough to light the candle
Use the rocket’s exhaust to light the candle
Use a toy rocket engine to light the candle and also launch a toy rocket
Call my genius engineer friend and use the craziest idea he comes up with
Learn some chemistry and come up with a really baroque way to make purple fire
Go back in time, learn how Greek Fire was made, use that
Go back in time, use any of these methods to light the candle, and presto--the candle is lit in the present
Shoot incendiary bullet at the candle
Throw a white phosphorous grenade at the candle
Light my dog’s fart on fire in the direction of the candle
Stationary bike hooked to a generator
Striker on gas stove
Attend dyno test of F1 engine; use red-hot headers to light candle
Go to Bonneville Salt Flats during rocket-car test, use rocket-car exhaust
World’s most badass capacitor generates spark
Arc welder
Oxy welder
Plasma torch
Magnifying lens
Pray to Prometheus
Turbocharge a record player, replace CD with flint, replace needle with striker
Fabricate evidence of WMD in dictatorship country, send in the military, use a burning building or tank to light candle
Tweet at Elon Musk that the candle needs to be lit in order to avoid AI X-risk
Tweet at Donald Trump that it’s sad that the candle isn’t lit
Stake out the Olympic Torch route in Japan
Put match on end of barbell and strike surface near Lasha Talakhadze during world-record snatch attempt
Order a kid’s chemistry set and start mixing until I find an exothermic reaction by accident
Go to an import tuner illegal street race, find the person with the biggest exhaust flame
Go to an Italian restaurant with the little red candle covers, remove the cover to access the flame within
At same Italian restaurant, throw candle into their pizza oven
Crash neighbor’s weekend barbecue and use grill flame
Funeral home incinerator
Get matches from an old MRE
Put match in sole of my track flats, sprint past striker and candle next to track
Put candle in 100% heat-insulating box, then kick the box until the kinetic energy converted into heat gets hot enough to light candle
Sneak into transformer substation and start swinging a bat around until something sparks
Borrow flame from hobo trashcan fire
Make hologram of signal fire; go to next station where they’ve lit an actual signal fire
Conceive a desire that the candle be lit; future AI has this as part of its utility function, sends a time traveler back to light the candle
Put striker surface near candle, teach my cat to scratch the striker rapidly after giving him cool metal claws
Climb natural gas well plume and use that fire
Visit set of anti-fracking documentary where someone has lit their contaminated drinking water on fire, and use that fire
Harness power of fracking-induced earthquakes in Oklahoma
Bathysphere to active underwater magma eruption
Hike to active magma eruption in Hawai’i
Overcharge the flash on my camera
EDM festival subwoofer vibrations
Road flare “borrowed” from police officer
Throw paper in a hot oven
Follow a smoker around to gas stations until they light up and something catches on fire. Administer first aid and call 911
Take a hammer to my cell phone until it starts sparking
Toss lithium in water
Don’t clean out lint trap in dryer; keep running dryer; use flame from burning dryer
Old-timey chemical camera flash, on steroids
Biceps curl machine that charges a capacitor
Get a PhD in oxidative chemistry and pick the absolute simplest possible reaction that will work
Pilot light
Go to church just before ceremony starts but after altar kids have lit the candles already
Visit friends in the country on burn day
Cigarette lighter in car
Purple flame is already burning outside Gozer the Gozerian’s lair
Disconnect Pornhub server from cooling system until it catches on fire
Take tour of coal-burning power plant, sneak into area with fire
Get a job as a short-order cook, use their grill
Attend Texas A&M; use their bonfire
Strip club in city of previous residence had fire sconces outside, wouldn’t even have to go in
Dumpster fire caused by 2020
Genetically engineer myself to be able to breathe fire like the dragons in Reign of Fire
Use hot coals at a firewalking seminar
Crash a holiday party; use their fireplace
Use police scanner to listen for location of fire caused on Thanksgiving by someone putting a turkey in a deep fryer without thawing it first; use existing fire
Go to Scientology center and offer to use E-Meter if they’ll light candle for me
Invading aliens’ blasters
Airstrike on candle
Orbital kinetic bombardment using rods made of striker; target flint near candle
Douse wick in oil with low flame point, then touch wick to fancy steak as it comes out of steakhouse’s 500-degree finishing oven
Breathe really, really, really hot breath on candle
Convince PhD optics student to give me access to the good lasers
Tour whiskey distillery that makes its own barrels, put candle in front of the fire they use to get the barrels ready
Snap really, really hard
Nice! I like these ones for being quite straightforward, yet I didn't think of them myself!
Cigarette lighter in car
Douse wick in oil with low flame point, then touch wick to fancy steak as it comes out of steakhouse’s 500-degree finishing oven
So close! I added line breaks to the entries, since markdown doesn't actually parse soft line breaks.
I didn't follow the rules...but I did walk around the house holding a candle and muttering to myself. Can't wait to see where I converged with others.
---
insert wick into your mouth (or your anus) for a minute. Pull it out, verify that it is emitting blackbody radiation at human internal body temperature. Declare it to be "lit" in the sense of "nontrivially emitting light"
simply de-identify with any version of yourself living in an everett branch in which the candle does not spontaneously combust. (you can use a similar anthropic trick to win the lottery)
put the candle in the heating chamber of your drip coffee machine
stick some slivers of tin foil into the wick and microwave the candle. or something. man, there's gotta be some household method of abusing microwave ovens to make fire.
bury the candle in Centralia, Pennsylvania.
rub your hands faster and faster and faster until they catch on fire. light candle with finger.
put the candle close but not too close to [contemporary icon of sex appeal]
hallucinate the candle being lit
wait for heat-death
define "lit" to include quark-gluon plasma, whether highly dense or highly sparse. wait for the Big Crunch, or the Big Rip.
butterflies
don your eye protection and reflective armor and walk around a hall of mirrors while holding out the candle and waving around a high-powered laser
start injecting steroids, grow a mustache, and keep buying merchandise from The Art of Manliness until your grip strength reaches superhuman levels. Replace the wick with a high tensile-strength metamaterial. remove the wax, grip each end of the wick with max strength, and pull apart.
wait for nanotechnology to become commonplace. go out into the neighborhood while parents are still at work but kids are home from school. follow the yelps of teenagers burning themselves on rapidly assembled sex dolls. pick a still-hot assembler array and press the wick against it.
just--idk put it underwater...
finally drop that single you've been incubating for the last five years. place candle in front of speakers. play.
undergo a self-esteem character arc, let go of your self-consciousness, consult a fashion advisor, put your chin up, let your hair down, and flash your best Blue Steel. Yes, YOU :D
forget everything you know about evopsych and find your soulmate. fall in love. show them your special, secret, inner life. bask in their loving acceptance release your emotional restraints, look them in the eyes, and let your chest swell with energy as you give into the heat of the moment. press the wick to your heart. ♡( ◡ ‿ ◡ )
arc flash
disable your fire extinguisher. bump your housemate's hand while they're cooking so that a grease fire starts. tell them to go get the fire extinguisher from the other room. close the door and don't let them back in until the candle has caught fire. divert all blame to another housemate.
wait for lightning to strike the candle
stop waiting and put the candle at the top of a lightning rod.
run a simulation which contains an identical world to our own except the candle is pre-destined for glorious candescence. run the simulation a bunch of times so that your version of events gets more of the magical reality fluid than the version that happens in your own layer of reality.
Make a little man out of clay, breathe life into him, and when he asks what you want of him tell him to light the candle.
swallow the candle
replace one arm with a cigar lighter and the other with a spark plug. Ask your friend to light the candle while you are recovering from this unholy cyborg surgery.
chew on it until it catches on fire
just beg the gods to light it
steal fire from the gods, and blame it on prometheus.
pump a bunch of oxygen into the room, wrap both hands in sandpaper, and clap
flint, steel, and a ripped up $100 bill for tinder
pyrokinesis
potassium and water
stick both ends of the wick into an electrical outlet?
squeeze a ziplock bag of water into a convex lens and focus sunlight onto the wick
rub chocolate onto the underside of a soda can to turn it into a concave mirror and focus sunlight onto the wick
become twitter famous. befriend elon musk. get him to put the candle on a spaceX landing pad "as a joke"
sniff candle to identify chemical composition. get chemistry textbook. find the relevant reaction with the lowest possible reaction energy. light candle really efficiently.
hang out with contrarians who smoke, and smugly announce that your candle is unlightable
stick it into the most chemically unstable layer of your disgusting, caustic laundry pile
use a cattle prod or a branding iron to light the candle. pivot into becoming a rancher. promote minimum-cruelty meat.
make your friend really mad and stick the candle in his ear
get into a fiery car crash while holding the candle (but sign up for cryonics beforehand, obviously)
post a gif of your unlit candle on r/UnnecessaryExplosions
conduct a psyop on world leaders, incite nuclear war, store the candle in or near the highest-risk target
Seduce....Apollo? Yeah, I think he's the right one. God of fire and...some other stuff. Then go ahead seduce his sister. She's purdy.
use one of those super-heated steam guns
put it next to your fireplace and keep poking the logs to make sparks fly out
turn the lights on and off really fast...
cover it in peanut butter
scan the news for grain silo explosions and haul ass over to the next one that happens in your area
build a network of dyson spheres and use them to broadcast "bring it on, weaklings" in english on the hydrogen line along with a corpus of english words. the aliens will probably figure it out. ehhh, but they might not set us on fire... okay, just use one of your dyson spheres to light the candle directly.
move to australia and just wait for a good firestorm (avoiding dropbears and other large, venomous animals in the meantime)
move to somewhere on the pacific rim and continually blaspheme pele-honua-mea until your house is swept away by a lava flow. obviously, you'll need to keep the candle in your house for this to work...
steel wool + battery
fresnel lens
Katon, Goukakyuu No Jutsu!
use your charisma to trick the candle into eating a ghost pepper
invite your friends over for a bbq. flex your status as grillmaster and alpha male by sticking your candle into the coals. Make sure not to be the first to break eye contact or else they become the grillmaster (and more importantly for the task at hand, you'll have to hand over the candle).
buy a set of identical candles and sneak them into your friend's petrov day ritual kit
same as above but for חֲנֻכָּה
discontent and radicalize the candle. convince it to self-immolate in front of parliament or city hall or wherever
take a vow of silence, open your third eye, and unlock combustionbending. combust candle.
pipe all your neighbors' air-conditioning exhaust into a chamber containing your candle. Have one wall of the chamber be a piston. Drop an elephant on the piston.
realize that "Danger: High Voltage" is just italian for "Free Sparks"
rub two candles together until one or both catch fire
shoot an arrow so that it passes through a torch before it hits the candle
ingratiate yourself with elon musk and bro it up with him while on drugs. get him to put the candle in space and drop it back to earth "as a joke"
Use a fire lighter
Thanks a lot for setting these up! I'm really looking forward to the new upcoming practice challenges.
It took me 72 minutes. The 101 isn't for swag, I just miscounted somewhere and decided to leave it, since the last one is a lot more practical than many.
Woah, I thought long and hard but this is so much better than mine! I thought #53 to #60 were great, among many others.
The next practice thing is probably going to be the LessWrong Review (which will be announced within a few hours), so my plans for the next challenge might only be launched after that.
1. Light candle from candle that's already burning.
2. Strike match. Light candle.
3. Use butane lighter to light candle.
4. Light candle using burning stick.
5. Hold candle over a burner on a gas range that's on.
6. Use old-fashioned Zippo ligher like dad used to have to light candle.
7. Light candle using gas welding rig.
8. Take plate of t-bone steaks to a neighbor with a BBQ grill. Offer to trade for him lighting candle.
9. Use MAPP gas torch with trigger to light candle.
10. Toss candle into the glory hole (used by glassblowers).
11. Hold candle while insulting Homelander.
12. Start a fire with a magnifying glass. Light candle.
13. Rub 2 sticks together to make a fire. Light candle.
14. Wrap nichrome model rocket igniter around wick. Connect igniter to model rocket launch control. Press "Launch". Candle lights.
15. Launch a model rocket trailing a thin copper wire into a thunderstorm cloud. On the ground run the wire into a bucket of flamable liquid. Lightening strikes rocket, travels down wire, ignites liquid. Light candle.
16. Live an evil life. Die and be buried holding the candle. If there really is Heaven and Hell, then wherever you end up, insult the gatekeeper. You'll probably end up in Hell. In the event that you *CAN* take it with you, then both you AND the candle will light up.
17. Travel to west coast. Find the nearest forest fire. Light candle from forest fire.
18. Travel to Hawaii. Find nearest active volcano. Light candle from magma.
19. Soak rags in flammable material. Put into container in such a way that they will initiate spontaneous combustion. Light candle.
20. Find a person who is subject to spontaneous human combustion. Let them hold the candle.
21. Attach candle to heavy weight and drop into atmosphere from space. Candle will ignite and burn up on re-entry.
22. Aim powerful laser at candle wick until it ignites.
23. Toss candle into operating firebox of old steam locomotive.
24. Wait 5 billion years until sun expands into red giant.
25. Set off roman candle firework. Use it to light candle.
26. Find Santa's house at North Pole. Fireplace will surely be operating. Use it to light candle.
27. Open nozzle on tanker truck carrying liquid oxygen and drain contents onto asphalt road. Let liquid oxygen soak into asphalt. Ignite with spark. Ignite candle from whatever happens.
28. Find a Southern Babtist church in Alabama. Release a story to local paper and social media of a "Down with Trump" rally at church featuring Hillary Clinton. Wait for the church to be set on fire.
29. Ask family member to light candle using steps 1-28 detailed above. That makes 56.
30. Ask neighbor to light candle using steps 1-28 above. That makes 84.
31. Have neighbor ask one of THEIR family members to light candle using steps 1-28 above. That makes 112
I'm curating this final post as a celebration of the overall Babble Challenge series.
I'm happy about this sequence for at least three reasons:
Follow up: @elityre asked to discuss doublecrux ideas and I spent a little more than an hour spewing forth topics. There were 74 in the first 30 minutes and its slowed down from there. I don't think I would have done that nearly as easily without the babble challenges.
It turns out these were answers to the slightly wrong question, so we had to do a prune pass. I'm not sure if it would have been better to clarify first, or if the absolute babble freedom ended up leading to better post-pruning ideas.
From my perspective, it seemed good to answer slightly the wrong question. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(Is it it...tonally incongruous to use a an shrug emoticon on lesswrong?)
Presumably if Eli had checked in every 10 minutes or so he could have noticed and helped course-correct?
(When I do babbles like this I do definitely sometimes pursue things that aren't the original question, to see if they unlock new interesting avenues. I'm guessing the ideal outcome here is "Babbler feels totally entitled to violate the question, but, also, they do understand the question.")
Eli was in fact checking in while I babbled, in retrospect he was putting out feelers for redirection but I was so happy with how generative I was being I wasn't that responsive, and I think he was reluctant to push back because what if strict separation of babble and prune was the best process? It also might not have been obvious how much transformation my babbled ideas needed to be usable until we did the next step.
It is time. The final challenge in the 7-week babble challenge series.
Let’s become stronger. Let’s go out with a bang.
On the table in front of you is a candle.
This candle will burn as a metaphor for the light of Science, a little beacon of rationality. It will represent the will to keep practicing and honing our Art.
Your task is simple.
Light it.
You have 1 hour to come up with 100 ways.
Looking back
Here are the rankings before the final round. (You gain a star for completing a challenge, and lose one for missing a week. I’m not including myself since I’m the gamemaster.)
Fantastic work, everyone.
★★★★★★ gjm
★★★★★ Yonge
★★★★ Slider
★★★ Bucky
★★ Tetraspace Grouping, supposedlyfun
★ NunoSempere, Elizabeth, Mark Xu
Overall, since starting on September 30th, there’s now been more than 100 completed babble challenges.
As a result, we have babbled over 5000 ideas.
I haven’t counted how many unique users joined, but plausibly more than 70. For many of them, the babble challenge was one of their first comments ever on LessWrong. Welcome to you all.
I want to thank everyone who joined this quest, it’s been an honor practicing creativity with you.
There were really too many good submissions over the weeks to list them all. What’s more, much of the value comes in just being able to think of many different ones, rather than a single idea being excellent. Nonetheless, to celebrate and inspire you for the final challenge, I gathered some great ones from previous weeks:
Ways of going to the moon
I leave it on Earth ; eventually, in 4 billion years, the sun will have absorbed both the thing and the Moon and hopefully some parts of both will mix. (Vanilla_cabs)
Break out of the simulation, then reprogram myself to be on the moon. (mr-hire)
Use CRISPR to make myself smarter. Do whatever plan smarter Neel comes up with (Neel Nanda)
Send spaceships out to the asteroid belt to collect asteroids and bring them to earth. Not to extract valuable minerals, just to make the earth bigger and heavier. Both the increased radius and the increased gravity will bring the moon closer. Eventually it will be close enough that I can just reach out and put my object on the moon. (gjm)
…and more than 1000 more ideas!
Ways of escaping a locked room
Metal bars on the windows? Pee on them, take apart the phone, then connect one terminal of the phone battery to the bar and the other to the urine, and wait for the bar to be eaten away. (johnswentworth)
If I find myself in this situation I hereby pre-commit myself to using all of my available resources not to escape but to reign down hellfire remotely on whoever put me in there (avoid getting put in this situation in the first place) (Bucky)
Or, the solution that probably at least 5 people arrived at...
Write a LessWrong question post about being trapped in a locked room, pretending it’s a challenge to practice rationality.
...and, again, more than 1000 more ideas!
Ways of hiding Einstein’s pen from evil forces for 50 years
Create a duplicate, hide it badly, and let it be stolen. Just keep the real one in a safe at your house. (Ericf)
Disguise it as, or hide it inside, something else, and then give that to someone else to hide, giving them an entirely false story about what it is and why it needs to be hidden. (gjm)
Sell the evil forces the pen for a high price. Invest the money. 50 years later, you will be rich and easily able to buy the pen back. (Mark Xu)
Memorize a binary sequence using a memory palace, which I use as an XOR cipher on a series of coin flips which indicate: "heads: go north 100 feet; tails: go east 100 feet". Flip 100 coins and write down the result, and then bury the coin in the place indicated by the flips XOR the sequence. (This is basically a one-time pad for north-eastern lattice paths) (TurnTrout)
Consequences on the world of the discovery of intelligent ant colonies
Small robots could be used to invade hive-minds and either spy on them or implant and manipulate thoughts (Slider)
Ants get good at hiding their colonies, but you can hire ants to find other ant colonies. (Elizabeth)
A lot of people think 'Oh that's interesting' - and then continue doing exactly what they would have done anyway. (Yonge)
Moving Forwards
This is it. Week 7 out of 7.
Following the excursions into different forms of babble, I’m returning to where we started. A simple, constrained task. I thought that was most fun, and also most useful in feeling like it actually pushed the limits of my creativity.
This will be the final babble challenge I host for now. But it won’t be the end of my attempts to build a culture of practice on LessWrong. I’m working on other plans, and hope to announce them soon.
Next week I might write a longer Babble post-mortem. But one of the core things I take away is what I wrote already in the 3rd week, after noting how many people had participated:
If you feel the same, I invite you to join me. Find ways of practicing in your own life. Stay connected to that deliberateness and the relentless will to self-improve with your scientist hat on.
Run your own challenges on LessWrong.
In fact, there has recently been several things happening on LessWrong that move in this direction:
I'm excited to see where this will go.
Rules
Any answer must contain 100 ideas to count. That’s the final babble challenge. We're raising the bar. Let's do this!
However, the 1 hour limit is a stretch goal. It’s fine if it takes longer to get to 100.
This is really important. Sharing babble in public is a scary experience. I don’t want people to leave this having back-chained the experience “If I am creative, people will look down on me”. So be generous with those upvotes.
If you comment on someone else’s post, focus on making exciting, novel ideas work — instead of tearing apart worse ideas.
I've often found that 1 great idea can hide among 10 bad ones. You just need to push through the worse ones. Keep talking. To adapt Wayne Gretzky's great quote: "You miss 100% of the ideas you never generate."
It’s fine to say “build a volcano in my backyard and use it to light the candle”, “bribe a dragon to help me” or "rub my hands together real fast until they create fire".
If you spend 5 min agonising over not having anything to say, you’re doing it wrong. You’re being too critical. Just lower your standards and say something, anything. Soon enough you’ll be back on track.
This is really, really important. I wrote this the first week. I still think it’s true, having now done 6 weeks of babble challenges. The freedom and lightness that comes with just babbling something, even if stupid, proves really helpful for also generating great ideas.
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Now, go forth and babble! 100 ways to light a candle!