ProjectLawful.com: Eliezer's latest story, past 1M words
ProjectLawful.com: Eliezer's latest story, past 1M words
Is the forum format important, with the separation between posts and the profile pic and info on the side of each post? Cause if not I would love to have an epub version of this so I can read it on my kindle, might even find a way to create it myself if it doesn't exist yet.
I liked how the epub strips out unnecessary UI from the glowfic site, but downloading and moving epubs around is a pain...
So I built a web reader on top of this code! Check it out here: https://share.streamlit.io/akrolsmir/glowflow/main
It'll work for any Glowfic post actually, eg https://share.streamlit.io/akrolsmir/glowflow/main?post=5111 Would probably be simple to add a download button to get the epub file; source code here.
Somewhat. The profile pic changes based on the character's emotions, or their reaction to a situation. Sometimes there's a reply where the text is blank and the only content is the character's reaction as conveyed by the profile pic.
That said, it's a minor enough element that you wouldn't lose too much if it wasn't there.
On the other hand, it is important for you to know which character each reply is associated with, as trying to figure out who's talking from the text alone could get confusing in many scenes. So any format change should at least preserve the names.
If you don't want to bother using the glowfic downloader yourself, here's the epub so far. My intention is to update it every day, but no guarantees.
I don't get much out of the glowfic format, but I'd be interested in posts that basically excerpt out the parts that are like "here's how Dath Ilan works and why it's good", or that impart particularly neat rationality/coordination lessons. Some people have already been doing that, but I wanted to flag my own appreciation.
There's actually quite a bit about dath ilan exposed in planecrash-- they've screened off their history from their citizens, not from readers. Also many of the ways dath ilan is good doesn't depend on its history, and many of the rationality lessons in planecrash aren't directly about dath ilan.
There are a few principles I'd be interested in people extracting, but two things I'd be particularly excited about (minor spoilers):
- "Lawfulness" and its facets: Bayes, expected utility, the ability to coordinate and trade, etc.
- How Keltham analyzes everything to try to understand it as an equilibrium between rational actors, whether this works in real life, and how to do it (partially covered in Inadequate Equilibria)
Does anyone know if there's work to make a podcast version of this? I'd definitely be more willing to listen even if it is just at Nonlinear library quality rather than voice acted.
Here is an alternative for generating the epubs, adapted from a version I wrote a few weeks ago. The format is similar to Glowfic, but with images/characters to the right. This way (imo) the text flows better, and the image hints at who is talking in the corner of the eye without having to read their name.
I would be up for setting up the planecrash posts to be added and auto-updated in the repo above for easy downloading if the authors want that.
A note for anyone else writing scripts: Glowfic has an API, you can check the linked code or their repo for specifics.
How much of the story and world-building was developed in advance, and how much arose through the process of telling it? Do the co-authors currently plan things out together off-forum, or is what we read both the story and the process of creating it?
As I understand it, the setting of Golarion and Cheliax is Lintamande's take on the world from the Pathfinder RPG system. She'd already written lots of glowfic stories in that setting by the time Planecrash came to be. Meanwhile, Eliezer had already written about dath ilan in some other places (like the original April Fool's post, and later on in some shorter glowfic threads). So there was definitely lots of pre-existing worldbuilding.
But whenever the story demands it, the world is further fleshed out. Eliezer even occasionally posts Twitter questions on things like "what's the best way to do X" as inspiration for dath ilan's Civilization.
I feel like Project Lawful, as well as many of Lintamande's other glowfic since then, have given me a whole lot deeper an understanding of... a collection of virtues including honor, honesty, trustworthiness, etc, which I now mostly think of collectively as "Law".
I think this has been pretty valuable for me on an intellectual level—I think, if you show me some sort of deontological rule, I'm going to give a better account of why/whether it's a good idea to follow it than I would have before I read any glowfic.
It's difficult for me to separate how much of that is due to Project Lawful in particular, because ultimately I've just read a large body of work which all had some amount of training data showing a particular sort of thought pattern which I've since learned. But I think this particular fragment of the rationalist community has given me some valuable new ideas, and it'd be great to figure out a good way of acknowledging that.
Thank you very much!
As I understand, a part of the enjoyment from reading this kind of creative work is to observe the interactions between the co-authors. Thus, the forum format.
Nevertheless, I predict that many readers (myself included) would prefer a plain-text book, devoid of the usernames, forum formatting etc.
If there is a plain-text rendering, please kindly provide a link. If there is no such rendering yet, I think I may be able to automatically generate it.
I would prefer plain text, or at least dramatically more compact. I find glowfic, including this one, to be borderline unreadable because of the format.
I don't think this would fit into the 2022 review. Project Lawful has been quite influential, but I find it hard to imagine a way its impact could be included in a best-of.
Including this post in particular strikes me as misguided, as it contains none of the interesting ideas and lessons from Project Lawful, and thus doesn't make any intellectual progress.
One could try to do the distillation of finding particularly interesting or enlightening passages from the text, but that would be
- A huge amount of work[1], but maybe David Udell's sequence could be used for that.
- Quite difficult for the more subtle lessons, which are interwoven in the text.
I have nothing against Project Lawful in particular[2], but I think that including this post would be misguided, and including passages from Project Lawful would be quite difficult.
For that reason, I'm giving this a -1.
Consider: after more than two years the Hanson compilation bounty still hasn't been fulfilled, at $10k reward! ↩︎
I've read parts of it (maybe 15%?), but haven't been hooked, and everytime I read a longer part I get the urge to go and read textbooks instead. ↩︎
Darn, there goes my ability to use Iarwain as a really unusual pseudonym. I've used it off and on for almost 20 years, ever since my brother made me a new email address right after having read the LOTR appendixes.
Reading Project Lawful (so far, which is the majority of Book 1) has given me a strong mental pointer to the question of "how to model a civilization that you find yourself in" and "what questions to ask when trying to improve it and fix it", from a baseline of not really having a pointer to this at all (I have only lived in one civilization and I've not been dropped into a new one before). I would do many things differently to Keltham (I suspect I'd build prediction markets before trying to scale up building roads) but it's nonetheless extremely valuable to read someone's attempt at this.
The thing I dislike most about it is that every interaction is suffused with highly adversarial deceptive analysis. I find this pretty hard to do in real life and kind of distasteful and is not a skill I aspire to have. I understand Keltham finds himself in a highly adversarial environment, but I still don't like it.
I really wish it had chapters or similar units of chunking. I bounced off like 4 times before being able to read this book, having to learn the practice of "this is about enough reading for now / this is probably a good place to stop" which most books help me with themselves.
Overall +9 as an assessment of the quality of the contribution, though I agree that I'm not quite sure how this would fit in the review. Perhaps we could just include a select few pages of it for flavor then link to the website.
Love accidentally glancing at the content warnings at the top of the post and getting massive spoilers. Like these are seriously the most spoilery content warnings I've ever seen in my life. "Hey so here's some really specific info about some shocking stuff that happens later, which the beginning of the story doesn't hint at in the slightest." I'm not against the warnings existing, but could they at least be under some button or other barrier that says they're enormous spoilers?
May I ask what the copyright status of this work is? This could be relevant if someone wants to publish a spinoff or something set in the same universe. (to be clear, I have no plans to do that, but it seems worth asking)
I don't think that putting in the guide was a very good idea. It's the unfamiliarity that makes people click away, not any lack of straightforwardness. All that's required is a line that says "just read downward and it will make sense" or something like that and people will figure it out on their own nearly 100% of the time.
Generally, this stuff needs to be formatted so that people don't click away. It's lame to be so similar to news articles but that doesn't change the fact that it's instrumentally convergent to prevent people from clicking away.
In his dialogue Deconfusing Some Core X-risk Problems, Max H writes:
...Yeah, coordination failures rule everything around me. =/
I don't have good ideas here, but something that results in increasing the average Lawfulness among humans seems like a good start. Maybe step 0 of this is writing some kind of Law textbook or Sequences 2.0 or CFAR 2.0 curriculum, so people can pick up the concepts explicitly from more than just, like, reading glowfic and absorbing it by osmosis. (In planecrash terms, Coordination is a fragment of Law that follows from Validity, Util
Was Pathfinder only used for worldbuilding, or did you actually roll dice as part of generating the story?
I am not a connoisseur of Harry Potter, as I am of D&D/Pathfinder (22 years playing, 19 years DMing / designing / participating in the community), so I cannot be sure of the comparison’s validity, but—yes, I think it is different.
Project Lawful falls into that category of fiction (overwhelmingly, but not quite exclusively, represented by fan fiction) which can be roughly described as “person find himself in world which is governed by rules of tabletop roleplaying game, must now exploit those rules to survive/win”.
Such works vary, of course, but what is common to all of them is that in order to be… interesting, “valid”, “fair”… they have to, to the maximum extent possible, take as given the actual rules of the game in question, as they are experienced by actual characters when the game is actually played; and likewise, to the maximum extent possible, the fictional setting should be taken as it is exists in the actual game as played.
Why is this? Because the unique appeal of this genre, and the primary value of an instance of it, is similar to (but—IMO—much better than!) the value of a “whodunit” detective story: it presents a challenge for the main character(s), which also double...
Yup! I originally didn't understand how Message works very well. Having misunderstood it, I played it consistently from there.
If you think this is Terrible then you're holding the story to a standard it's not particularly intended to meet.
I found the sandbox thread but hurting people is wrong, and found the part about Quiet Cities, and I nearly cried because I can't describe how badly I want something like that and would move to one immediately if it existed.
I'd also like an EPUB version that is stripped as possible. I guess it might be necessary to prepend the characters name to know who is saying what, but I find the rest very distracting. I find it makes it hard to read.
I'm looking for the discord link! It was linked at some point, but I was catching up then, so I didn't want to see spoilers and didn't click or save the link.
But now I'd like to find it, and so far all my attempts have failed.
Is there a dedicated Wiki (or "subject-encyclopedia") for Project Lawful? I feel like collecting dath ilan concepts (like multi-agent-optimal boundary) might be valuable. This could both include an in-universe summary and context of them, and out of universe explanation and references to introductory texts or research papers if needed.
There are a lot of interesting ideas in this RP thread. Unfortunately, I've always found it a bit hard to enjoy roleplaying threads that I'm not participating in myself. Approached as works of fiction rather than games, RP threads tend to have some very serious structural problems that can make them difficult to read.
Because players aren't sure where a story is going and can't edit previous sections, the stories tend to be plagued by pacing problems- scenes that could be a paragraph are dragged out over pages, important plot beats are glossed o...
So if you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and thought...
"You know, HPMOR is pretty good so far as it goes; but Harry is much too cautious and doesn't have nearly enough manic momentum, his rationality lectures aren't long enough, and all of his personal relationships are way way way too healthy."
...then have I got the story for you! Planecrash aka Project Lawful aka Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus, is a story in roleplay-format that I as "Iarwain" am cowriting with Lintamande, now past 1,000,000 words.
It's the story of Keltham, from the world of dath ilan; a place of high scientific achievement but rather innocent in some ways. For mysterious reasons they've screened off their own past, and very few now know what their prescientific history was like.
Keltham dies in a plane crash and ends up in the country of Cheliax, whose god is "Asmodeus", whose alignment is "Lawful Evil" and whose people usually go to the afterlife of "Hell".
And so, like most dath ilani would, in that position, Keltham sets out to bring the industrial and scientific revolutions to his new planet! Starting with Cheliax!
(Keltham's new friends may not have been entirely frank with him about exactly what Asmodeus wants, what Evil really is, or what sort of place Hell is.)
This is not a story for kids, even less so than HPMOR. There is romance, there is sex, there are deliberately bad kink practices whose explicit purpose is to get people to actually hurt somebody else so that they'll end up damned to Hell, and also there's math.
The starting point is Book 1, Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus. I suggest logging into ProjectLawful.com with Google, or creating an email login, in order to track where you are inside the story.
Please avoid story spoilers in the comments, especially ones without spoiler protection; this is not meant as an "ask Eliezer things about MICWOA" thread.