I'm going to assume the evil forces knew I had it, but can't read my mind or know everything I did to hide it. They'll spend a reasonable amount of resources looking, but not an infinite amount, and they won't torture me to find out where it is (they know how unreliable torture is as information gain!).
Then move from 13. and the move back in 20. was something that you managed to do but I struggled and failed to do. It was good move that grows important skills.
#7 is simultaneously right up my alley, and also opens up an entire area I barely explored except by accident. You mine that vein pretty good. Well done!
Assumptions: (1) I need to do something that at least slightly decreases the chance that these "evil forces" get hold of the pen in the next 50 years, compared with some baseline that may or may not be consistent from one idea to the next. (2) I need to keep it reasonably likely that in 50 years' time I can still get hold of the pen so I can sell it to Einstein. (3) What I do needs to be at least in some sense possible in 1855, so e.g. "put it on a rocket in a highly eccentric orbit around the sun that will make it crash into the earth in 50 years' time" is no good because there are no such rockets yet. Maybe I can get fairies to hide it because fairies were "known" about in 1855, but I can't pull any time-dilation tricks using black holes because no one knew about black holes or time dilation in 1855. (4) I do actually have to be hiding the pen, in some sense; bribing the forces of evil to do a different kind of evil, or saying "screw it, there's no such thing as magic, so I don't care whether this pen is lost" won't do. (5) The forces of evil have some idea that I have the thing and what is special about it, but probably don't know too exactly what it looks like or have the ability to spy on me at all times or read my mind. -- All of this does restrict the options somewhat, so there will be some cases of Variations On A Theme below.
Remark: I'm having trouble figuring out any concrete set of assumptions about the forces of evil that doesn't rather break the puzzle. If they know who I am, they can find me and torture me or something of the sort, and although torture notoriously doesn't work very well they've got at least a good chance of figuring out where the pen is -- unless I have e.g. delegated the task of hiding it to someone else, which is a reasonable thing to do but doesn't really have 50 meaningfully different variants. And if for some reason they can't do that, then instead the problem is too easy; it doesn't seem as if I need to do anything at all. I hope the list below is at something like the intended level of paranoia.
Remark: If it means anything to say that the pen rather than Einstein is magical, perhaps I should forget about hiding it and start using it to write physics papers myself, and see what happens. (Hmm... Am I by any chance James Clerk Maxwell? The timing kinda checks out.)
Many beautiful ones! I particularly liked #6 and #21, among others.
Also, I have some intuition there might be more torture-resistant solutions than you suggest, like #9, but actually without magic.
Though, overall, it could be nice to try a week with a challenge that's engineered to be well-balanced. I've found getting to 50 challenging enough to be fun regardless of the fact that all challenges thus far having had breaking flaws or impossibilities. But it's certainly less elegant than a more constrained puzzle that also enforces the constraints.
Assumptions: Evil Forces are a small cabal (20) people who will be searching for it, starting in a few months. They know you were the one who hid it, but are not willing to torture you. They can spend 50 years searching, but will then give up, and let you retrieve & sell it in peace.
#20 reminded me of a bizarre experience where I attempted to pass a hacky-sack through the open windows of a car to a friend of mine, and it disappeared. We looked inside and outside the car for a full 15 minutes before realizing it had landed, balanced, on the narrow handle above the window. We never looked up!
I like two things about this list aside from the ideas: one, the assumptions at the top (I think I will steal this for next time); two, the sub-lists, because it made for easier reading of the ideas even if it messed up the numbering.
Also I got a solid chuckle out of #19 and #20.
~1h 30 min
safeties
38. plans to fail: Make the pen an object of national or international pride. Make everybody attack anybody that tries to mess with it.
45. answers a different prompt: Assume a "ink is dry" universe. Ask from your departure time details about how the events nearby the writing happen. (remembering to ask before departure is good but can use some kidof temporal letter system (depends on how the future can communicate with the past, past to future letters are easy))
46. Fails to have an active component how things are better: Ask a person to hand the your pen to somebody else and make the same request making it sail from person to person whit each person makinhg independent decisions on who to hand it to. Make a termiation condition that makes it more likely to be handed back to you or just wait for it to be given back and make ti recirculate if it is too early. (hard to track but evil can also just wait for it to be handed)
49. plans to fail: Use time travel method to directly move the pen to handoff event so that vulnerability laying around the timeline is minimized
51. is a partial repeat of 31. The remaining "get convinced" factor feels separate enough to stand on its own. Additionally it can be used for moral confusion and distraction (as in Ur-quan masters the move can be used to avoid a dangerous fight)
~2 hours
Aw, man! I didn't think of anything even adjacent to doing a value-handshake with the bad guys.
This is a buffer.
This is a buffer.
This is a buffer.
This is a buffer.
This is a buffer.
2. Keep it on your person for fifty years, and travel constantly.
3. Convince companies to mass-manufacture model of pen, and then hid it in warehouse full of same model.
4. Build time machine and entangle the pen's existence with time period of Einstein's miracle papers a la HPMOR.
5. Ship it by train, then when it arrives at a destination, have it be shipped from that place to a new, random location. Repeat.
6. Join an aboriginal tribe out-of-contact with the rest of the world and keep the pen with you until fifty years pass.
7. Time travel Albert Einstein back in time so that he writes series of miracle papers now instead of then. Create extravagant mock setup for him to live in while in the wrong time period.
8. Launch it into the stratosphere in a weather balloon that will drift around the sky for a while.
9. Have it be apparently publicly destroyed, in a way that convinces the evil forces that the pen was destroyed, when in reality, it was just a fake that was destroyed.
10. Kill the evil forces with your military might. Or maybe vigilante might.
11. Discover glitch in simulation that allows you to make infinite copies of the pen.
12. Convince government that you are from future and have them protect pen.
13. Fake the deaths of Albert Einstein's parents/grandparents.
14. Plant evidence of terrorism in evil forces so that governments attack them.
15. Hire someone to take pen from you, and then hide it for you. Then let yourself be captured with fake pen.
16. Drop pen in river and use divination to make sure that it returns to you safely.
17. Threaten family of evil forces.
18. Leave pen in your grandmother's flower vase in hospital.
19. Hide it in camouflaged tent in forest.
20. Make many large pens and place them around the world, then hide pen in random place like mountainside.
21. Send pen to space and have it hover in earth's detritus field that isn't there yet.
22. Ransom fake pen to evil forces and then it explodes, while you still have real pen.
23. Destroy all information of pen in evil force's lair, convince them that there was no pen in the first place.
24. Destroy that earth, and then travel to alternate earth where there aren't any evil forces and give pen to Einstein later.
25. Atomically disassemble pen and then reassemble when 1905.
26. Destroy pen and make albert einstein brain-model that models albert einstein having the pen in 1905. Use that instead of original.
27. Cover pen in mountain of shit, and make many mountains of shit.
28. Make the pen giant and put it on top of the whitehouse, turn it into national monument so that gov has to defend it.
29. Go back in time and kill parents of evil forces.
30. Hide pen as exhibit in museum.
31. Grow a test tube animal around the pen, and then kill animal and take pen out when 1905.
32. Convince evil forces that info is wrong, and that some other pen is the one they're looking for, and that it's a different guy who has the pen.
33. Make ai that optimizes for making pen.
34. Hide it in various dumps.
35. Smuggle into other country and start new life.
36. Send Evil forces into bankruptcy.
37. Cryogenically freeze yourself with pen under clone's supervision.
38. Make pen factory, and then become so successful with pen making that everyone has same model.
39. Tell evil forces that you destroyed pen already.
40. Hide it in nature preserve.
41. Find other important item that evil forces want to get their hands on and offer information about the guy hiding that. (Think the microphone that MLK used during his speeches, or something similar.) //really bad idea lol since it incentivizes people in similar situations to yours to rat you out
42. Turn it into an anime character, make baby anime pens with it, turn babies into pens for einstein.
43. Send it out of universe via teleportation.
44. Start a cult of worship for the pen and gather sponsers to safeguard it.
45. Give pen to Haruhi suzumiya and she will make sure nothing happens to it.
46. Provoke aliens to safeguard it.
47. Graft it to your body, and then make yourself member of evil forces group.
48. Put in giant box of steel in middle of germany and then when time comes get gov to get it out.
49. Start wars in countries where evil forces are.
50. Use pen to kill one or two of evil force's forces and use intimidation to get them to give up.
Done in 55 minutes? I had to redo one because I realized it was a copy. I also feel like I went a little too hard on the... surrealism(?) of my answers? I kind of thought to many answers of the form "Hide it in a volcano, hide it in the ocean, hide it in the marianas trench, hide it in a whale's body" seemed too same-y, but now that seems silly to me.
That was fun.
Ordered chronologically. In retrospect, I've assumed some pretty weak evil forces here, and mostly gone for variations on a needle-in-a-haystack type theme.
Constraints:
Resources:
Other thoughts before diving in:
Actual answers:
1. If there are evil forces, their are good forces; bargain with them for security.
2. Get rejected by good forces because of those paper’s role in the development of nuclear weapons; sneak it into their compound so they don’t know they are protecting it for me.
3. Prison smuggling.
4. Purchase lots of decoy pens, and put them around the world in medium security locations. Put two of them in conspicuously-higher security locations. They will never believe the second highly secure location is not the real pen.
5. The future is fixed. Do nothing unusual, because I know Einstein will get the pen anyway.
6. Infiltrate the evil forces’ security and/or archives establishment. Allow the pen to be obtained by them, and then entrusted to my care for the next 50 years. Plus, evil benefits package!
7. Throw the pen into the pile which is being sorted into boxes for sale, such that even I do not know where it winds up. Then buy all the pens of that type for sale in the shops between Einstein’s home and the patent office in 1905.
8. Get into the office supplies business, and secure the contract for supplying the patent office with pens and stationary. Even evil forces must cower in the face of bureaucracy. Engineer a retroactive sale by providing Einstein the pen, and bill him for losing it later.
9. Let evil obtain the pen, and then provide Einstein a better pen, yielding even more miraculous papers.
10. Lean on whatever mechanism granted me knowledge of the future to allow me to consistently foil the evil force’s plans.
11. Bargain with other evil forces to protect the pen, based on the argument it is necessary for the development of nuclear weapons.
12. Whine to whoever gave me the pen until they lower the requirements and I can get an A.
13. Tie the pen into a lambskin condom, and throw it on a lesser-used beach. No one examines used condoms too closely.
14. Safety deposit box. Dare they challenge the bank?
15. Hide inside a reliquary, and donate to the Vatican. Dare they challenge the Church?
16. Use the pen as collateral for a loan. If Evil obtains the pen, default on the loan on purpose, and have the repo man fetch it back.
17. Tell everyone the purpose of the pen and the situation with the evil forces. Almost no one will believe me, but it will be good enough to start a low-grade tourist attraction, allowing me to use the public eye to deter the evil forces.
18. More people will believe me than I thought. Use the credulous followers to form a militant order dedicated to the protection of the pen.
19. Put the pen in a steel container, then grow a tree around the container. For fast growing varieties, after the first few years the container will be concealed. When 1905 arrives, chop down the tree.
20. Bury the pen deeply. Much more shallowly, build a latrine on top of it. Dare they challenge the potty?
21. Skip the latrine. If I tell no one else it will be powerful difficult to find anyway.
22. Seal the pen in wax, then in a water-tight container. Bury it in diving distance off the coast.
23. Hide it in the concrete of a building being constructed, that I know will still have foundations in 1905.
24. Put the pen inside a different pen case, thus disguising it as a different kind of pen.
25. Put the pen in the mail, and ship it to a distant location. Travel to that location simultaneously, then ship it back. Repeat for 50 years. Dare they challenge the post office?
26. Put the pen inside a slightly larger pen body, thus disguising it as a different specific pen.
27. Sneak into a museum and put the pen in with some famous “Pen Used to Sign the Treaty of X” exhibit, and let the museum do the heavy lifting.
28. Create an elaborate series of treasure maps depicting the location of the pen. The maps are false, the pen is in my sock drawer.
29. Under the floorboards of my fabulous 19th century home.
30. If evil draws too close, get a 19th century home in Prague, and use the vampires to dissuade the evil forces.
31. Get to America and persuade Tesla to build an electric security system for the pen.
32. Join the military, spend the next 50 years surrounded by devoted comrades-in-arms. Carry pen in boot. Try not to accidentally win the Franco-Prussian War for France.
33. Persuade Otto von Bismarck of the importance of this pen to securing the place of the German Empire in history, and peace in future Europe.
34. Identify which part of the world is least vulnerable to the forces of evil. Immigrate there.
35. Accidentally choose the Congo Free State, realize this is evil forces headquarters. Flee north to become a hermit in the desert.
36. Become a rancher or pastoralist, and hide the pen inside several generations of livestock.
37. Become a dirigible pilot, and store the pen on an airship that spends most of its time in the sky.
38. Melt the components of the pen down into several different, small items. In 1904, commence reconstruction of these items into the original pen.
39. Pen of Theseus: replace the parts systematically over time, but never use the pen. Keep the old parts, and then build the old pen again. In this way there will be more then one genuine pen.
40. Hide the pen on the body of someone who is to be buried. Preferably not friend or family; grave robbing kith and kin is not cool.
41. Go on offense, and systematically murder every member of said evil forces.
42. In case of supernatural evil forces, learn sorcery and systematically bind or banish the evil forces.
43. Join up with whoever the evil forces arch-nemesis is. Presumably good.
44. Join up with whoever the evil forces chief rivals are. Presumably evil, and better at offense as a result.
45. #18, but dedicate the militant order to exterminating the evil forces.
46. #4 and #28 at the same time, but some maps lead to decoy pens and some lead nowhere, and some decoy pens have no map. Evil gives up in frustration.
47. Go into the pen business, and manufacture the decoys myself. Have just one prominently displayed as “Pen #1”, wail and gnash my teeth when it is stolen. The real one is still in the sock drawer.
48. Give or sell the pen to a series of other geniuses, like Kelvin, Cournot, and Gibbs. Retrieve the pen in 1905, it having absorbed their powers and put thermodynamics on a MUCH better footing early on.
49. The dead hand: put the pen in a series of explosive devices, upgrading as improvements become available (black powder -> dynamite -> munitions). I win, or everyone loses. Avoid house fires.
50. Join navy, spend next 50 years on a ship.
The whole line of reasoning of:
Do they dare X?
Especially moral restrictions like X would be sacrilidge.
Had a lot of stuff that didn't register for me at all. In general making it possible for them to fail rather than make it impossible to succeed.
The main thing I noticed doing this is that my brain really wants to come up with clever solutions. A lot of obvious but non-clever solutions came later.
1) Dig a hole in the garden and hide it there.
2) Put it in a waterproof pouch at the bottom of the local pond
3) Put it in the same container I use to store the pens I normally use for writing
4) Put it in a pen museum
5) Hide it under the floorboards in my house
6) Put it in a safe in a bank
7) Leave it permanently in my trouser pocket
8) Have a risky surgical operation to open a cut in my body, insert the pen then seal the wound, and cut it out in 50 years time
9) Hide it in a cave
10) Go and live as a hermit in Antarctica for 50 years. Keep pen with me at all times
11) Have it stored with the crown jewels
12) Sew it into my coat
13) Put it into a puzzle box
14) Hide it at the top of a tree in a forest
15) Break into the villains den and attach it to the bottom of their leaders throne
16) Hide it under the altar in the local church
17) Hollow out a flagpole, insert pen into hole
18) Hide it under some rocks at the top of a hard to climb mountain
19) Hide it at the bottom of a barrel of beer in the cellar
20) Remove a stone from a wall, insert pen, then cover it up with a narrower stone
21) Bury it in a grave
22) Put it on a fishing boat, and sink the boat out at sea
23) Start a pen making company. Make lots of identical pens. Hide it amongst the masses.
24) Put in down the back of the sofa
25) Hide it under my bed
26) Hide it in a priest hole
27) Let the villains find a fake copy of the pen so they give up and stop looking. The real pen can then be left on display on my mantlepiece.
28) If a small piece of a pen is removed and replaced it is still considered to be the same pen. Repeat this many times until there is nothing of the original left. As there is nothing of the original left the villains won't recognise it as the pen they are after and it can be left in plain sight.
29) Dismantle the pen into its component pieces. Put them into a container. The villains are too stupid to recognise they are the components of the pen so they can be left in the open. Reassemble the pen in fifty years.
30) Join the villains. Use position of influence within their organisation to misdirect their search in the wrong direction.
31) Spread rumours that it has been hidden somewhere else to misdirect their search.
32) Build a model of a ship. Hide pen inside the model.
33) Hide it down the spine of a book.
34) Use the pen as the pointer on a weather vane, and put it on the roof.
35) Create an early modern art style exhibition. Amongst all the junk no one will notice the pen.
36) Incorporate the pen into a wind chime in the garden.
37) Frame the villains for murder, they won't be finding the pen after they've been hanged.
38) Just make a pre-emptive strike and kill all the villains myself.
39) Add some decorations to the pen so in no longer looks like what they are expecting. They can be removed in 50 years time.
40) Give the pen to a trusted friend the villains don't know about to hide it, then go on an expedition travelling around the world to lead them on a wild goose chase.
41) Join the army, and keep the pen on me. The villains will have a hard time searching for it whilst I am surrounded by a lot of heavily armed people.
42) Join an expedition to explore the Amazon at the last moment. taking the pen with me; they will have a hard time following me.
43) Bury it in the zoo in a cage containing a lot of extremely dangerous animals. Even if they figure out where it is hidden they may be too frightened to risk going after it.
44) Bribe the local police to hide it in the police station
45) In an emergency it could be temporarily hidden up someones bottom
46) As absolute dictator of my country I will ban pens, and require that they are all handed over to me, and buried in a secure vault under my palace. Even if the villains can breach security they will have a hard time finding the one they want amongst all the confiscated pens.
47) Just hand it over to them. They refuse to believe that this is the real pen because I would never hand it over to them and throw it away so I can recover it later. As a result they look everywhere for the pen except where it actually is.
48) Let them have the pen, then steal it back from them later, replacing it with a fake. As they believe they have the pen they won't search for it so hiding it from them is trivial.
49) Hide it inside a grandfather clock
50) When they come to interrogate me try and engage them in a long conversation, preferably one which involves them boasting about their future plans; whilst my friend goes out the back door to take the pen to a safer location.
Phew, this was hard! 50 is pretty hard, there's a lot of value in pushing yourself to do even 30. Another option for next time is to time limit instead: "you have 15 minutes, how many ways can you think of?"
Here are my 50:
Dig a hole and bury it
Disassemble it and give each piece to a trusted family
Place it into a lockbox at a reputable bank
Store it in a drawer and include detailed instructions in my will
Find Einstein's parents and give them the pen
Place it in a drawer with a sealed letter describing what should be done if found
Put it in a tree's branches
Carve a hole in a tree trunk and place it in the hole
Seal it in a chest and drop it in a lake with an anchor
Glue it to one of those tortoises that lives a long time
Photograph or draw it, make a replica in 50 years
Keep it in an important document like my passport, moving it each time I renew
Convince the Pope the pen is holy and must be preserved
Convince a museum the pen is fine art and should be displayed
Carry it everywhere I go
Give it to a stranger with a promise to pay them if they return it in a year. Repeat 50 times
Become a head of state and pass a law to protect the pen
Start a pen manufacturing company and produce millions of copies of the pen
Start a pen-worshipping cult
Negotiate with the evil forces to return the pen to me later
Convince the evil forces to give the pen to Einstein
Place it in a sewer
Start a family and teach my kids to protect the pen
Join the evil forces, work my way to power, and change the organization's objective
Infiltrate the evil forces and assassinate their leadership
Give the evil forces a counterfeit pen
Change my name so the evil forces can't find me
Become a hermit living in a cave
Learn self-defense to protect the pen if attacked by evil forces
Hand the evil forces the pen and then take it back, as they "obtained" it
Give the evil forces the part of the pen they want and replace it
Invent time travel and send the pen to the future
Invent space travel and send the pen to space
Place the pen in a body to be buried
Place the pen in the foundation of a new building
Shoot the pen high into the atmosphere so that it circles the earth for 50 years before landing
Place at the bottom of a jar of pennies
Place at the bottom of a chewing tobacco spittoon
Disguise as a record player's needle
Just keep it on my desk amongst my regular pens
Hide it in a residential attic
Hide it in a mattress
Hire a private security team to guard the pen
Protect the pen in a secure facility with booby traps
Convince the evil forces they don't really want the pen
Hide the pen in the handle of a sword
Ass pen (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w12RKy966OU)
Start a foundation and place the pen in trust
Tag someone else "it", now they have to hide the pen
Forget about the pen, Einstein will probably write his papers anyway
The annotations that some other people have put on their lists to show their thinking process as well as the list of assumptions at the start, have been interesting - I haven't done this this time, but it seems like something worth trying next time.
Keep it in my pocket the whole time.
Locked safe down the Marianas trench.
Am I a time traveller? Is that how I know? If so, hide it in dinosaur times, long before the evil forces lived.
Or hide it in the far future, long after the evil forces lived.
Send it into orbit.
Land it on the moon. Can't quite think of a way to achieve this, though. Any ideas?
Bury it in a geologically stable location and dig it up later as if it were nuclear waste.
Hide it in a gangster's treasure box hidden under some foliage, a la 20200.
Start a pen manufacturing company and create many, many identical pens. They won't be able to tell which one it is.
Eat the pen. Repeatedly, each time it passes through. For 50 years.
Find the guy with 10 years' worth of energy. Lock them in a room. Offer them their freedom if and only if they vow to protect the pen.
Surgically implant the pen under my skin (hope it's not made of biologically active materials).
Hidden safe in the walls of the house.
Hidden safe in the attic of the house.
Swiss bank vault (we had those in 1855, right?).
Inside a bottle of wine that will be aged to become a 50-year vintage in 1950.
Write a book on effective altruism (using the pen, of course) - there are probably some good cause areas around in 1855 to use as examples. They will read it, and cease to be evil, thus removing their motivation to acquire the pen.
Give Babbage some pointers on making his difference engine not suck, beginning an early steampunk cybersingularity, and ask the Great Brass Mind how to hide the pen.
Give the pen to my well-connected close friend, [famous person who lived in 1855], providing them with the same evidence I used to find that Einstein would need it.
Select, completely randomly, a point on the surface of the Earth. Bury it under a small amount of earth. Security through obscurity!
Replace each component of the pen, one at a time, until you have two pens: the old pen, and a new pen that's atom-for-item identical to the original pen. Let the evil forces find the new pen.
Create a replica of the first pen and let the evil forces find it, so that they stop looking.
Bribe every grunt of the evil forces who comes looking for your pen.
Like 10), but the other end; at that point they won't want to find it, even if they know where it is.
Find Einstein's parents. Offer them this treasured family heirloom. They will keep it safe and Einstein will inherit it.
Paint the pen black and put in in a soot-filled chimney.
Find Oliver Twist and Fagin, or some other group of Victorian urchins, who are ubiquitous in this age. Hire Fagin's street urchins to come up with and then red-team test 50-year security plans for the pen.
Become a miserly industrialist, refusing even to give my workers a day off for Christmas. When three ghosts come to visit, use information from the Ghost of Christmas Future to divine the manner in which the evil forces retrieve the pen, and make countermeasures.
All of these plans have some chance of failing, so I can obviously tolerate that. Hence, bet my money at very, very long odds - in the small sliver of timelines in which I succeed, use my money to buy out the evil forces entirely.
Call my friends at the time commission for backup. C'mon, we can't just forget about protocol here.
Go on an expedition to the Arctic and hide it in the inhospitable ice; I could probably talk some guys in pith helmets into giving me backup.
Or to the deepest jungles of the dark continent of Africa; likewise with the pith helments.
Or to the source of the Nile.
Or to the summit of the Mt. Everest or K2 or whatever's going to be most awkward for the evil forces..
Or to the Antarctic, which is colder than the Arctic in the middle part.
Or to the deserts of Australia.
Found a cult of Defending the Pen, perhaps using song lyrics from the future as substitute mystical wisdom.
Ask the longer-haired, wiser, and older version of myself who just gave me this quest for advice, since they're still standing there. Follow their advice.
Bury the pen deep in a coal mine.
Keep your head down and don't tell anyone that it's -you- who has the pen - it's not like the evil forces have any reason to suspect that, unless you give them a good reason to, like boostrapping the world to nanotech using future knowledge or something. Haha. Heh.
Hide the pen under my top hat; since it's 1855, that won't look unusual.
Dismantle the pen and hide the seven components throughout the world using techniques described above and below; being smaller, they'll be harder to find.
Join the evil forces as a simple masked minion; working for them, they won't suspect you have the pen, until one day as the second-in-command you usurp the leader (as it tradition).
Message in a bottle to the North Sentinel Island, who will repel outsiders including the evil forces.
Give a speech that's something like "evil forces, you really want to mess with me? I can leap to the moon in a single bound, and that's just to save me pulling it to ground, which I can also do. You once tried to trap me in a room and I took down your mothership's entire network before tearing it to shreds. This planet, and this pen specifically, is under my protection. Return to your galaxy," probably with dramatic orchestral music playing in the background, and then the evil forces will leave.
Check your Messing-with-Time-Wongle, standard issue equipment for all time travellers with missions to defend artefacts that are important to the timeline. Notice that the LED on it flashes green. Precommit to only sending a "green" signal to your MwTW in 50 years if the pen reaches Einstein successfully. Now Time will bend to ensure the pen is not found.
Freeze the pen in liquid nitrogen. It will now be too cold for the evil forces to touch.
The evil forces that I'm leader of, remember. Obviously my disloyal second-in-command will take umbrage if I seem not to be looking for the pen at all - I'm fairly sure they're a time traveller here to prevent Einstein from laying the physics foundations for the nuclear weapons that will destroy the world in the mid-20th century or something like that, and they keep scribbling notes on this list of about 50 items - but I can still direct them to the wrong place for 50 years. Hey, I think I saw the pen-keeper go into the middle of the Antarctic to launch a rocket!
Bury the pen in a large heap of explosives that only I know how to disarm - WWII mines are still dangerous so them being stable for 50 years should work.
Tie the pen to my ankle, everywhere I go - the traditional mores of the 19th century would make it scandalous for the evil forces to retrieve it from there!
Melt down the pen into a block of ordinary looking gunk. Remake the pen when needed years later.
So, my first "actual" comment:
I hope this is okay :)
Welcome to LessWrong and great job completing your first babble challenge! #8 and #47 are hilarious.
Edit: Here's some buffer text, because the sidebar shows things even inside spoilers. Buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, buffer text, and more buffer text.
Time: 47 minutes
Notes:
A couple of times I found myself adding an 'honourable mentions' box, and then finding a way to include it in the main list ('Gift it to someone -> that's not exactly hiding it -> disguise it first' and 'Hide it underneath a bin liner -> bin liners weren't invented yet -> invent bin liners first'). I used some somewhat absurd solutions the previous two challenges, and inspired by the more down-to-earth answers of others so I tried to limit myself to the possible (nothing outside the technology range available to me, so no inventing AIs to do the job for me) although in the spirit of babble I generally tried to make every idea somewhat workable.
Places to hide:
Ways to make sure it gets to him if I die:
Ways to confound evil forces:
Other:
Time was 41 min.
Thanks for doing these. They're really fun.
So many good ones!
I'm a fan on the ones turning traditional story tropes on their head, and find various clever ways of interacting with evil forces instead of just escaping them, like #32, #46 and #47
3 minutes late, but significantly more coherent.
Keep in pocket. Bury it. Lock it away. Hide inside a belt buckle. Hide inside large public statue. Submerge underwater. Hide in taxidermized fish wall mount. Hide inside hollow brick at home. Hide in the roof, no one ever looks up. Entrust to neighbors. Entrust to local priest. Cut part of one foot and hide pen inside prosthetic. Push it through someone's nose Homer Simpson style. If I know where I'll sell it to him, bury nearby. Research if there's a way to get in jail and keep the pencil (and hopefully something to write on and another pencil, so as to not appear suspicious). Use tree shaping to grow tree around metal box containing pen. Use knowledge of the future to amass money and personnel. Buy (through cut-outs) massive amounts of similar pens. Dye pen. Switch one of the pieces so that it looks different, hopefully a piece that can be hidden inside the actual pen. Hide fake pens (maybe the real one with low probability) inside buried safes. Hide fake pieces inside all the fake pens so they're still indistinguishable. Spread misinformation among enemies. Spread disinformation among enemies. Infiltrate enemies, generate goose searches. Infiltrate enemies, fully subvert them. Use passwords that can be decrypted but will divert significant enemy resources. Entrust fake pens to allied organizations without telling them. Make a ballpark guess on the value of Einstein's knowledge, minus whatever parts I can reconstruct by memory, multiply by two and ask that much for the pen. Give fake pen anyways. Travel all over the world, dropping fake pens as a means to divert enemy resources. Switch places with agent through gruesome WWI plastic surgery in case I'm caught and tortured for the pen. hide fake pens inside all of my belongings. Leak fake information about my retirement, again switch places with agent, except now the real one is still working and the fake one is going undercover. Hire agents through cut-outs to steal the pen, ultimately making it come back to me to test for information leaks and weaknesses. Execute dummy plans that are just regular enterprises to divert suspicion. Stage fake destruction of the pen in case it ever comes close to being captured and the enemy needs it rather than wants to destroy it. Feign defeat if one of the fake pens is particularly convincing. Disappear enemy agents who come for the pen and establish fake searches for them to make the enemy think the agent has the pen. Keep multiple fake pens on my person. Sometimes keep none but have someone with multiple fake pens nearby. Make advertisement campaigns to make pens a more palatable fashion accessory. Create agencies tasked with keeping track of particular sets of pens. One day just go innawoods for a while with little preparation and without telling anyone for a few years, may or may not have pen. Bury some pens while I'm at it. Bury some extra pens in places where major WWI battles will take place so they can't be checked for a while. Research where the identity of the pen itself lies, Ship of Theseus shenanigans are sure to arise. If enemy is human organization (I've been assuming so for most of this but whatever) spread disinformation about them and make them public enemies. Research artifacts that can be built using all the parts from the pen. Research how the pen is supposed to cause the writing of the papers, if replacements are possible, how much I can change the pen, etc. Hide in sock under mattress.
This one has the most "do X with the enemy" posts so far, which I really like. I need to branch out of my "slash 'em, smash 'em, skin 'em alive!" reflex when people say evil forces.
First get some special case for the pen so it will survive any of the scenarios.
I really enjoy these. Is the next phase going to be a series of prune challenges? It would be pleasingly symmetric, and in future iterations of these symmetric challenges we could pick something that would be RL actionable, like 50 business ideas, or ways to prepare for the next pandemic, or things to help NASA or whatever.
At the current rate of participation, that'd be 1300 ideas of each type, with access to the same thoughtful criticism that put us ahead of the curve on COVID.
I'll tell you what else I notice: I sometimes have the urge to continue babbling after being inspired by the other answers, particularly with respect to variations on a particular theme. There might be some merit to re-babbling on old lists later, even the ones just for fun like these.
There's a question of how to design prune challenges well. I care a lot about these exercises being grounded in reality -- that they give you clear feedback about whether you have succeeded or not.
I think babbling does this reasonably well. The ideas don't have to be good or workable; but it seems very hard to reach 50 without actually displaying some creativity. (Excluding obvious hacks like "1. Hide pen in US, 2. Hide pen in UK, 3. Hide pen in France, 4. Hide pen in ...")
For a prune challenge, I'm worried about it just being a filibustering challenge, or a pundit challenge. Paul Graham and Peter Thiel talk a lot about how the best startup ideas are ones that seem bad initially. " 'Rent out air mattresses on your floor and make breakfast for people' -- hah, that doesn't sound like a $20B company!"
Suppose we listed 100 startup ideas and tried pruning them. I have no idea how we'd tell whether we were actually becoming stronger, as opposed to just getting more confident in our rants.
Though some pruning that might work is like "I have designed this plan to safeguard the pen from the evil forces. You are the evil forces. Figure out how my plan breaks."
What I initially had in mind was doing a babble exercise, and then later come back to prune that same babble exercise, which is what I meant by symmetric.
I agree that doing pruning is a different question. I did an entrepreneurship capstone at university, and for our projects they used a method similar to babble and prune. We got into teams, and had to generate 124 ideas, which predictably involved a lot of nonsense filler. For the prune side of the exercise, we applied a series of filters to narrow it down. These were:
Then, of the ideas that had a reasonable market size and could be executed by the team, an option was chosen.
This leads me to think that a good prune prompt would consist of some reasonable filters with which to prune the earlier babble.
That being said the counter-babble idea is also good. I strongly recommend attempting it at least as an experiment.
Yeah, I can imagine there being interesting startup evaluation exercises like that. Partially, though, I feel it begs the question. How do you know the heuristics are any good? (For one thing, Peter Thiel again thinks 4 is a bad one (Lecture 5 here).) I expect venture capital to a fair amount of anti-inductive properties.
I strongly recommend attempting it at least as an experiment.
Roger that! Experiments are great.
Also, it should be noted that even though the "official" babble challenges have some momentum now, I'd be really excited for other people posting challenges of their own :)
The heuristics are pretty good within their scope, which I believe because I watched them work. That being said, the scope was limited - the explicit target of the project was something in mode of "As Seen On TV" and it had to get to a working prototype in two semesters, so the goal for heuristic 4 simultaneously became make sure no one else is doing this thing and people doing something similar is evidence of the market and investor interest. The best ones (in my opinion) were those which chose a different method for tackling a known-but-not-solved problem.
That being said, I did still sit through ENTIRELY too many coffee and/or headphone ideas. As a consequence of this experience I have concluded that solve a problem you have is pretty terrible advice when you are university student.
I hereby commit to doing at least 3 of the remaining 4 of these (I don't know if I'll have time every week).
I don't like measuring things by streaks - if you want to do a list I think doing it by total number of challenges completed is better. Streaks are a less accurate indication of effort put in or potential gains achieved and have more potential to create unhealthy incentives.
(I think this instinct comes from something like Noticing the Taste of Lotus, although I'm not really sure how strongly it applies here)
Really excited to have you onboard.
I don't like measuring things by streaks
I've mulled over this a bit, and think I disagree, and will keep doing streaks.
One of the goals of the challenge is building a culture of practice. I think consistency is an incredibly important part of that. That's how you get compound returns. A portfolio that grows 7% every year will grow ~30x over fifty years. But a portfolio that grows that much only every other year will only grow about ~5x. (Even though the first one only put in "twice as much effort".)
I also think many rationalists could benefit a lot from practicing consistency.
Now, if someone does 49 babble challenge but misses one in the middle, sure, it seems annoying for them to fall down the ladder. But maybe we could allow people to miss one week per month, or something, without hurting their score? Similar to the "never miss twice" mindset for habits, which is more important than "never miss".
I think compound returns is the wrong model as it stands - logarithmic growth seems more appropriate with the current setup. I would expect completing 5 babble challenges to give 80-90% of the benefit of doing 7.
If we practice both babble and prune then the benefits of the two probably do compound somewhat with each other such that doing 2 babble and 2 prune is significantly better than doing 4 of either but this doesn’t really justify streak measuring.
If consistency rather than direct benefit is the target then streaks make some sense. I would say in that case that I would need to be persuaded that this is the correct exercise to learn consistency. At the moment I would categorise it as definitely worthwhile (hence the 3 out of 4 commitment) but not enough to super-prioritise it enough to make a streak-worthy commitment.
Might be good to have people add buffer text to the beginning of their answers. Sidebar previews tend to give away the first 1/2 answers.
Here we go again. Time to become stronger.
This week’s challenge:
The year is 1855. You’ve been given a pen that Albert Einstein will use in 1905 to pen his series of “miracle papers” — after you’ve sold it to him. You know this.
Yet evil forces are conspiring to obtain the pen.
You must hide it, for fifty years.
You have 1 hour to come up with 50 ways.
Looking back
Here are the champions who made it to 50 last week, with stars indicating their streak:
★★ gjm, Vanilla_cabs, Slider, Tetraspace grouping, Harmless, jacobjacob
★ ursusminimus, haydenblord@gmail.com, Bucky, johnswentworth, Yonge, Mark Xu, Jay Anthony, Richard_Kennaway, CptDrMoreno, arxhy, magfrump, athom, ike, Dan Weinand, Jsevillamol, Ericf, ryan_b
Big kudos to everyone.
We did it again.
In fact, we did even more last week — 26 answers — compared to 25 in the week before. That’s a lot. In fact, I went through the archives, and I think the babble challenges are among the top 3 most popular LessWrong questions ever. Together they even have more answers than the massive covid thread.
This fills me with excitement and ambition.
We’ve made a discovery.
Who knew that there was all this latent excitement for doing weekly rationality challenges? That so many people were willing to actually roll their sleeves up, and show up every week to test the limits of our art?
There’s a spark here waiting to be fanned into a flame. Imagine where we could go if we keep this up.
Moving forwards
I’m now entering week 3 out of the 7-week babble streak I committed to. If you want more regularity in practicing your creativity, feel free to post a comment committing to also going all the way to 7.
I have some interesting plans for future weeks. But for now, my model is that for this technique to really affect my cognition, I just have to do it a lot. So, the goal of this week is simply to build up routine and consistency.
A bit more on that model:
First, I think I must build a stable “mental button”. I want to get to the point where, if it’s needed, I can choose to babble. I can press the button to generate ideas even if I feel stuck. And I can trust that they will come.
Then, I must practice pressing the button until it becomes automatic. Such that whenever I find myself in a situation where it’s needed, my mind reflexively starts babbling. I never need to turn it on. It’s just always there.
It’s like reading. Children start by an exhausting, deliberate process of verbalising weird squiggles. They have to slow down. Focus. Put in excruciating effort to slowly extract meaning from letters. But then it all becomes automatic. When they’re adults, they are unable to not read a sentence. They can swim freely in this new medium. They have acquired this power and made it a true part of them.
If you tell this to some children they don’t believe you. They just can’t imagine that it’s possible to get to that automatic and effortless level. Yet, lo and behold.
In the past I have successfully done this with rationality techniques. I did it with a CFAR technique called “Murphyjitsu”, that’s about drawing upon your intuitions and experiences of the world to figure out how things will fail before you try them. Sort of like supercharging the “Ugh, I should have known!” feeling and deploying it in advance.
Now this is one of the crucial ways in which I manage my life and work. I always have a metaphorical advisor perched on my shoulder, sending helpful alerts whenever it makes a concrete prediction for how a project will fail. And I can fix it before it fails.
So, a basic model of rationalist self-improvement is that you simply go through this process with a list of important skills. We’ll see how well that pans out.
Rules
Any answer must contain 50 ideas to count. That’s the babble challenge. We’re here to challenge ourselves.
However, the 1 hour limit is a stretch goal. It’s fine if it takes longer to get to 50.
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.
Reward people for babbling — don’t punish them for not pruning.
I might remove comments that break this rule.
The prompt is very underspecified. You don't know what kind of pen it is. You don’t know how you obtained your knowledge. You don’t know what the evil forces are. Use your creativity — feel free to come up with solutions that only work in some of those scenarios.
If it helps, imagine that you're a fiction writer. You're searching for interesting ways to continue the above story.
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. It’s the only way I’m able to complete these exercises.
—
Now, go forth and babble! 50 ways of hiding Einstein’s pen for 50 years!