All of Salivanth's Comments + Replies

Salivanth130

I believe this lesson is designed for crisis situations where the wiser person taking the time to explain could be detrimental. For example, a soldier believes his commander is smarter than him and possesses more information than he does. The commander orders him to do something in an emergency situation that appears stupid from his perspective, but he does it anyway, because he chooses to trust his commander's judgement over his own.

Under normal circumstances, there is of course no reason why a subordinate shouldn't be encouraged to ask why they're doing something.

elharo120

I'm not sure that's the real reason a soldier, or someone in a similar position, should obey their leader. In circumstances that rely on a group of individuals behaving coherently, it is often more important that they work together than that they work in the optimal way. That is, action is coordinated by assigning one person to make the decision. Even if this person is not the smartest or best informed in the situation, the results achieved by following orders are likely to be better than by each individual doing what they personally think is best.

In less ... (read more)

It's a comment on one of Eliezer Yudkowsky's Facebook posts. I got permission to post it here, as I thought it was worth posting.

Salivanth360

The Courage Wolf looked long and slow at the Weasley twins. At length he spoke, "I see that you possess half of courage. That is good. Few achieve that."

"Half?" Fred asked, too awed to be truly offended.

"Yes," said the Wolf, "You know how to heroically defy, but you do not know how to heroically submit. How to say to another, 'You are wiser than I; tell me what to do and I will do it. I do not need to understand; I will not cost you the time to explain.' And there are those in your lives wiser than you, to whom you could ... (read more)

2[anonymous]
I honestly cannot see how the mere existence of people wiser than myself constitutes a valid reason to turn off my brain and obey blindly. The vast majority of all historical incidences of blind obedience have ended up being Bad Ideas.
4MarkusRamikin
Nice. Where did you find that? Either Uncle Google is failing me, or I am failing Uncle Google.

Welcome to Less Wrong!

This is an old topic. Note the title: Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012). I'm not sure where the new topic is, or even if it exists, but you should be able to search for it.

I recommend starting with the Sequences: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Sequences

The sequence you are looking for in regards to "right" and "should" is likely the Metaethics Sequence, but said sequence assumes you've read a lot of other stuff first. I suggest starting with Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions, and if you enjoy that, move on to How to Actually Change Your Mind.

1cowtung
Thank you, I have reposted in the correct thread. Not sure why I had trouble finding it. I think what I'm on about with regard to "deserve" could be described as simply Tabooing "deserve" ala http://lesswrong.com/lw/nu/taboo_your_words/ I'm still working my way through the sequences. It's fun to see the stuff I was doing in high school (20+ years ago) which made me "weird" and "obnoxious" coming back as some of the basis of rationality.

In that case, I pre-commit that if I win, I'll spend it on something leisure-related or some treat that I otherwise wouldn't be able to justify the money to purchase.

I co-operated; I'd already committed myself to co-operating on any Prisoner's Dilemma involving people I believed to be rational. I'd like to say it was easy, but I did have to think about it. However, I stuck to my guns and obeyed the original logic that got me to pre-commit in the first place.

If I assume other people are about as rational as me, than a substantial majority of people should t... (read more)

0Calvin
I am not sure I follow. If you predict that majority of 'rational' people (say more than 50%) would pre-commit to cooperation, then you had a great opportunity to shaft them by defecting and running with their money. Personally, I decided to defect as to ensure that other people who also defected won't take advantage of me.
0Oscar_Cunningham
That's the correct response when playing against rational players who are also trying to win, but if you actually look at the comments you'll see that most people are deciding to cooperate or defect for a variety of reasons. So I think in this case cooperation is (sadly) not the best move.
5alicey
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0pgbh
Sure other survey-takers may be roughly as rational as you, but that doesn't mean they're likely to do something as specific as precommitting to cooperation on prisoner's dilemmas.
3FourFire
My reasoning on this is in complete agreement of yours.

I wanted to thank you for this. I read this post a few weeks ago, and while it was probably a matter of like two minutes for you to type it up, it was extremely valuable to me.

Specifically a paraphrase of point B, "The point where you feel like you should give up is way before the point at which you should ACTUALLY give up" has become my new mantra in learning maths, and since I do math tutoring when the work's there, I'm passing this message on to my students as well.

So, thank you very much for this advice.

The main technique I used was bypassing the "trying to try" fallacy, as well as some HPMOR-style thinking; Obstacles mean you get creative, rather than give up. The most important thing was just not giving up upon finding the first reasonable-sounding solution, even if it's chances of success wasn't particularly high.

As to how I applied it, that was the best part, and what the second paragraph alluded to; it was my default response, to the point where I was briefly stunned when my friend was throwing up easily circumventible roadblocks to my idea... (read more)

I got to use rationality techniques to not only solve a friend's problem that had been ongoing for months, but also managed to completely change the way he thought about problem-solving in general. Not sure if that second part will actually stick.

On a related note, that was when I found out that I've internalised the basics of how to REALLY approach a problem with the intent of solving it, to such a degree that I'd forgotten that my thought process was unusual.

3therufs
What techniques did you use, and how did you apply them?

How'd it go?

EDIT: My bad, I thought this was posted on 22 January 2013, not 22 January 2012. I'll leave this up just in case though.

What I've found that the spoilt version of Nethack tests, more than anything else, is patience. Nethack spoilt isn't about scholarship, really. You don't study. You have a situation, and you look up things that are relevant to that situation. There is a small bit of study at the beginning, generally when you look up stuff like how to begin, what a newbie-friendly class/race is, and how to not die on the second floor.

But really, it's patience. I once did an experiment where players who were relatively new to Nethack were encouraged to spoil themselves as ea... (read more)

Oh, no, I have no problems with people spoiling themselves for Nethack. That's pretty much the only way to actually win. But if your aim is to improve rationality, rather than to do as well as possible within the game, it might be better to play it unspoiled. After all, Morendil mentioned "hypothesis testing" as something that was taught by Nethack: The spoilt version doesn't really test that.

0wedrifid
It teaches the virtue of scholarship.

I'm assuming this only applies if you aren't using spoilers for NetHack?

4Morendil
I'm using all the spoilers I can find, and still find it a challenging game. Feel free to mock me. :) A "spoiled" game of NetHack means you have precise numerical values of the upsides and downsides of various actions, e.g. rubbing a magic lamp. Or reading a scroll that you know from a shopkeeper's offer can be one of N scrolls, some of which have beneficial effects and others harmful. That definitely requires probabilistic decision-making - indulge in wishful thinking and you'll die often; play too cautiously (ignoring positive EVs of some actions with nasty downsides) and, well, you'll die often. I suppose playing it "unspoiled" is even better, as you'd have to infer the frequencies from observation as opposed to having them delivered on a silver platter, as it were. (ETA May 10th: finally Ascended as a Knight.)

I'm not sure about it's rationality testing or improving abilities, but I find it very fun :)

3Swimmy
I doubt it will much improve anyone's rationality. It does nicely illustrate a few issues on how science is done, and could be a fun way of explaining for the layman.

But this is a rather interesting example of rationality at work. It's useful for a couple of reasons.

1) There's a clear indication here of incorrect beliefs leading to unwanted consequences. In this case, a downplay of the importance of cup holders is leading to the loss of profit that could otherwise be gained.

2) It's fairly trivial and simple, which is actually a good thing in it's favor. It's not technical, meaning we can all understand what's going on, and it's extremely unlikely anyone is going to have an entrenched belief about cup holders already th... (read more)

1Thomas
It is not that simple and trivial at all. Some pointed out that fact, the problems with safety, all the measures and so forth. We don't want a hot coffee spill over the driver, for example. I think, the auto industry is telling us - it's better to stop and refresh yourself. It will be another story in fully automated cars.

Thank you. I apologise for not asking you for verification sooner. My downvote is revoked and I've upvoted your post.

I learnt that I should have asked for verification sooner, either immediately, or as soon as you informed me you had reasons for wishing to keep said verification private. I also learnt that I should assign a higher initial probability to claims made by LessWrong members I don't know, which is a lesson I'm very glad to have learnt, since I do enjoy trusting people.

-14hankx7787

You're right.

In this case, assuming immortals had perfect memories and would eventually work out that you didn't, assuming you were an immortal who can't remember if you've played that particular opponent before (But can vaguely remember an idea of how often you get defected on vs. co-operated with by the entire field) what do you think your optimal strategy would be?

0Elithrion
It's pretty complicated! I think you'd need to write down equations to figure it out properly and it would be very non-trivial. That said, assuming there's only games and no communication, you probably want to start off cooperating or randomising between cooperation and defection (depending on pay-offs), and then shift to more and more defection over time until you always defect in the end. Meanwhile, the immortals with memories would probably want to start off mostly cooperating but sometimes defecting to figure out who, if anyone, doesn't have memories. (Disclaimer: while this sounds like a plausible set of equilibrium strategies, there may be more complicated equilibria that I didn't think of or some other weird cases.)

Okay, I've sent a PM asking you for verification.

-28hankx7787

I never actually claimed you were making this up, merely that the likelihood of your story being true was low. You inventing the story is only one possible reason why your story might be false. You could also simply be mistaken, have witnessed actions that looked much worse out of context (For example, maybe your friends did something to deserve their treatment, but didn't tell you because it would make them look bad) or some other reason I haven't thought of.

In addition, you ask why I care so much about lack of transparency when I can think of reasons why... (read more)

0[anonymous]
silly question.
-6hankx7787
Salivanth160

That's how it looks like from your perspective. From a reader's perspective, it looks like someone who isn't a notable community figure on LessWrong (At least, I assume this, based on your karma scores and the fact that I have never heard of you. If I'm wrong, I apologise.) has suddenly made a claim with a significant burden of proof on it, and not provided any concrete evidence, despite apparently sitting on some. "I have evidence but am not going to include this in this post, nor will I explain why I cannot include the evidence in this post." i... (read more)

-17hankx7787
Salivanth110

If you have references, and you want to get potentially helpful information to rationalists, why on earth would you not just post these references to begin with? If you have a good reason for not making the references public, why didn't you say so in your initial post?

-19hankx7787

If you have an imperfect memory and you think they don't, wouldn't you want to pre-commit to attempting co-operation with any immortal entities you face, given they are very likely to remember you, even if you don't remember them? This is of course assuming that most or all other immortal entities you're likely to face in the Dilemma do in fact have perfect memories.

5Luke_A_Somers
If you can't remember, and they can work that out, then they can defect on you every time and get more points, at no penalty other than making you less and less optimistic about cooperation with rarely-encountered entities. That could eventually cut into their profits, but it becomes a tragedy of the commons, with you being the commons.

As far as I understand it, causality is just the relationship between cause and effect. If I'm right, saying it tries to avoid paradoxes is like saying gravity acts whenever someone falls off a cliff to prevent them from flying.

If I really needed to explain away time travel in this fic, I'd probably have a future Twilight show up and say "Whatever you do, do NOT use time travel. I don't care how bad it is. Even if Equestria is going to be destroyed if you don't. DO. NOT. MESS. WITH. TIME."

Fortunately, I don't see any situation in this fic where T... (read more)

-2MugaSofer
That was a somewhat anthropomorphic allusion to the Novikov self-consistency principle. But yes, it is. Fair enough. EDIT: You realize the canonical example of time travel was a stable loop, right? As was that pinkie-sense business.

It does, in fact, weaken the anti-alicorn argument (Different from the pro-death argument, even though they still wind up the same) but with the amount of ammunition I've gotten from LessWrong, the anti-alicorn side is no longer weak in the slightest.

Good point. Shining would be a good one as well, because I already figured out he'd probably be the next alicorn if alicornism won.

1) He's a very skilled unicorn, so he can transform other alicorns. 2) He has a strong relationship with not one, but two of the royal alicorns. 3) He's very important in the defense of the realm.

Hell, I'm pretty sure Shining is technically a prince now anyway. It wouldn't be much of a stretch, and he could certainly appear in the same settings as the other four where other potential characters can't. (Say, eating at the royal dining room at Canterlot Castle.)

...I hadn't thought of that. Congratulations. You win. No, seriously. In the event that ponies can become immortal WITHOUT being alicorns, there simply isn't a good enough argument for deathism, period.

For the sake of the story, however, when the argument gets brought up by Twilight, it'll have to be shown to be magically impossible to do it. I'm going to have to make something up. Because the argument is literally too good. It actually makes the story a lot worse, because there's no longer a meaningful conflict between the two ideologies.

Since it's a stor... (read more)

Your assumption is correct. The alicorn transformation can only be granted to ponies.

I'm not sure what you mean by the danger, in point 2. I can't think of a danger that fits all the criteria you mentioned. Military threat wouldn't affect other ponies, and envy would affect other races regardless of alicorn rule or not.

Point 4 is good, though it has a fairly easy answer: Ponies would have to be approved by someone (or multiple someones) trustworthy in order to be upraised, not merely by any alicorn. So, you would need to trust the pony to adhere to the law... (read more)

For what it's worth, I'm now taking pro-alicornism arguments, having strengthened the anti-alicornism side significantly. Anti-alicornism arguments are still acceptable.

6Alicorn
I feel like I imagine Plato would feel if he traveled to the current era and saw someone talking about "platonism".

That's an excellent backup plan. Fortunately, with all the other replies in this thread, I'm unlikely to need a backup plan. That said, for the purposes of strengthening both sides, I'm likely to look for arguments to strengthen alicornism at some stage, and if that makes alicornism too powerful, I shall consider your idea as a way to bring parity back to the sides.

"If you are Christian, then you probably know the Bible in detail, you are probably familiar with a range of theological and apologetic texts"

I'll admit I don't have any statistics here, but from what I've seen heard, both first-hand and second-hand, Christians tend to be quite poor on average at knowing the Bible. I've never heard any evidence suggesting the average Christian has a detailed knowledge of the contents of the Bible, even if the kind of Christians who like to argue Christianity are more informed than most. (Similarly, argumentative atheists tend to have a better knowledge of the atheistic arguments than the average atheist.)

0ygert
But it's exactly the type that likes to argue religion that participates in such a test. The test is comparing argumentative atheists to argumentative theists. Non-argumentative atheist and non-argumentative atheists are simply not involved. It is hard to test what non-argumentative folk believe, simply by the fact that they are not argumentative, and thus very unlikely to look at such tests.

It's not even really about magical power. Within the world, it's about political power, and the fact that the alicorns are royalty. In reality, it's about the nature of the fanfiction. Much of the fanfiction is about the discussion and debate between the four princesses of Equestria. Therefore, any pony that isn't an alicorn tends to fade into the background a bit, taking the role of a driving force on the main characters. The main power that the alicorns have is the literary device of being major characters.

I spent two minutes arguing about why Discord w... (read more)

That...is actually pretty brilliant. I was originally going to have Celestia be opposed to the idea of alicornification, but I may have Celestia change her mind to this. Cadence has the view of "We should make absolutely sure we've concluded things will work before proceeding", which is likely to take decades, but not millenia. Twilight starts out with the view of "We should start right now, why the hell are we even hesitating?"

This is partly because of the big red flag of having the protagonist share my personal beliefs. In this fanfic... (read more)

0ModusPonies
If you want a fifth main character, Shining Armor could fit the bill. His sister and his wife are both alicorns, so you could easily justify having uplifted him. Even if he's still mortal, Twilight and Cadence would give his words a lot of weight.
2Xachariah
I can see the problem with a powerless entity trying to advance arguments against those vastly more powerful than them. What about an equally powerful entity to alicorns? Discord for example, might be opposed to it for his own reasons but adopt any argument that makes it less likely. (Though he, stylistically, may not fit at all into your fic anyhow.) Although, I can see how people may not like that evil guy is advancing the opposing argument. There are other immortal entities. Dragons perhaps. Whatever employs Cerberus or Ahuizotl. Or political opponents like Zebra or Gryphon could have reasons to disagree with the plan (like I assume they would dislike the pony hegemony that would occur if everypony became alicorns tomorrow.) They wouldn't be strictly equal to alicorns on the same power level, but would have some ability to back up their arguments with force, unlike a social representative. As a side note, I'm a bit confused about Cadence and Twilight. I know that Twilight is sometimes heroically compulsive, but isn't Cadence the avatar of love or something? I would imagine she'd be a lot more empathetic about suffering ponies and that Twilight would be more disposed to studying.

Fortunately, I now have enough arguments against alicornification to turn the fanfic into a good fight while still having the world the way I originally envisioned it. I doubt many people are going to say I'm making it too easy, what with all the arguments about social pressure, overpopulation, and potential for magical abuse. Plus, I'm adding something that we don't see often enough: At the beginning of the fic, the protagonist is simply WRONG. Twilight's belief is "We should charge ahead and turn everypony into alicorns as quickly as possible" ... (read more)

Definitely possible. After all, I'm not going to ignore technical constraints. I just don't intend to invent them. Hell, I don't have to. The problem is hard enough as it is. (For example, overpopulation is a very difficult technical constraint, and it arises naturally from the logic inherent to the canon setting.)

I don't intend to write it in the fashion described (I.e, a largely linear story where Twilight and friends solve various technical constraints of alicornification in turn, being rewarded with immortality each time, until there aren't any left) b... (read more)

For the purpose of this fanfiction, Celestia is able to uplift alicorns at a significantly higher rate than she currently is and other alicorns can either cast it, or learn to cast it. So logistically, it's possible to increase alicornification at an exponential rate. Call it somewhere between 6 and 12 casts a year, for now: The exact rate isn't all that important, what's important is that it can be done, which means arguments then shift to "Should it be done?"

As for the power vs. safety thing, I agree, that's definitely true, but what I was aski... (read more)

1Xachariah
If I were in Celestia's shoes, my strategy would be to take the top .001% 'friendliest[*]' of the population each generation and turn them into alicorns. Fewer if some generations don't have good candidates, and more if some generations are exceptional. The number of alicorns would grow exponentially as the population experienced exponential growth. From the other end of the equation, I'd use my influence as the God Empress to gradually raise the 'friendliness waterline' so that I could gradually lower the requirements from top .001% to top 1% to top 10% to eventually allowing everyone in. Though this would be a process that could take, literally, millennia to fully complete (though it could probably be accelerated to 'only' a couple hundred years safely). I could easily envision Celestia seeing it utterly reasonable to have a multi-thousand year plan where pony wellfare steadily increases, the proportion of immortal ponies gradually increase as a fraction of the population, and risk is as minimized as possible. The plan is benevolent, meritocratic, and safe. ... but if I were Twilight? I'm not sure I would be comfortable waiting that long or seeing most of my family and acquaintances die first, (even assuming my friends, the other elements of Harmony, eventually become alicorns too). The plan is slow, needlessly callous, and accepts millions of unnecessary deaths. Shifting my point of view from one side to the other drastically changes how acceptable I find each strategy. I suppose that is the mark of a good disagreement. [*] Friendly as in FAI friendly or friendship=magic in pony terms. Not just the most effusive ponies.

I'll have to check out that comic if the Chrysalis argument comes up, I suppose.

I'm not sure what you mean by trying to exploit closed-loop time travel through travelling to the future. Do you mean using future sight to see a desirable future and then trying to get there?

As for time travel, in this particular fic, my best answer is simply "Hell no." If it comes up, Twilight and the alicorns can simply decide it's a Really Bad Idea to use it, and they're right, since nobody actually understands how the hell it works, because it violates causality ... (read more)

1MugaSofer
My favorite explanation: since causality tries to avoid paradoxes, most time-travellers get squished by large rocks or natural disasters before they can act, because they would have tried to change things. Even if they were going to try and avoid changing the past, they would have inevitably made mistakes, so the only consistent result is either ignorance and co-incidence or dyeing almost immediately. Or the time spell failing due to unforseen problems, if you're feeling generous.

Well, this argument of mine was made before you pointed out the priority-based nature of magic in the show, based on the idea that more alicorns actually equals reduction of existential risk via the villain of the week. That particular argument is much weaker now.

If one doesn't have a need to increase the alicorn numbers in order to protect Equestria, then you're right. The bar should, in fact, be set extremely high. Even Cadence, the alicorn of love of all things, has tremendous power. She basically has the ability to mind-control ponies, and she can send... (read more)

2Xachariah
The weaker alicorns are, the safer it is to create them and the more wiling Celestia would be to make them. If every alicorn could literally control the rotation of the entire planet with telekinesis on the first day, I think Celestia would probably be even more discerning than uplifting Twilight. Twilight might be a paragon of virtue, but she's still the type of filly who will cast a spell given to her even when she has no idea what it does and it's labeled as powerful and experimental. Conversely, if alicorns were just immortal winged unicorns with no extra powers, I assume the name of the show would be My Little Alicorn, with 99%+ of the population being alicorns. At least, I'd hope that would be the case given how benevolent Celestia seems. For each level of power, there's a different maximally safe rate of alicornification. Whether or not Celestia is already uplifting at that rate is a point of debate. (As a side note, the idea of Twilight discovering there's a new magic to turn ponies into alicorns and then just casting it right away is such a Twilight thing to do.) It's an interesting analog to one of the ethical problems of uploading. Imagine a known serial killer is released from jail on his 100th birthday since he's not a danger to the populace anymore. He knows he's going to die soon, so he comes to your newly successful upload company. Do you allow him to upload? If you don't he'll die within ~5 years, if you do, he'll do god-knows-what on the system. My willingness to upload him would be based on how much damage he could do. I wouldn't let him upload 1st for sure, or even within the top 10. But I probably wouldn't be distressed after 10,000 uploads and we've already had a chance to see what hostile uploads can do (and it turns out not-so-bad).

Well that's a relief, considering that neither of them overlap what I want to do by as much as I feared. There's definitely room for this fanfiction to be unique. I hadn't thought of Friendship is Optimal as being about transpony/transhumanism, and being more of an AI story, but the theme is definitely there, I agree.

So, given that we have two stories currently, and three constitutes a genre, that means that the entire existence of a genre is now dependent on me writing this :P But no pressure, right?

3Eliezer Yudkowsky
Oh, and by default, anything I say can be stolen. :)

How do we decide who to give mansions? Especially if the "finite" is real and it never comes back. Then you can virtually always make an argument for waiting. When you're literally immortal, there's no such thing as the perfect time to use an irreplacable resource. If you wait long enough, it's basically a lock that somepony better will come along, if not this millenium then maybe the next one.

As for eugenics: Dragons take up a hell of a lot more space than ponies.

Yeah, I'd rather not add hard technical constraints. Simply put, it ruins the entire story I have in mind. A story about the emotions of accepting the mortality of one's friends isn't a bad idea for a fanfiction, and I'm sure there'll be plenty of them, but it's simply not what I want to write.

8[anonymous]
Edit: You actually address some of this in your original post. I'll leave it all here for reference, but in general, if the Deathists are periodically making valid arguments, I don't think you have to worry as much about them seeming like strawponies. It occurs to me that it's entirely possible to have Celestia argue for a (looks hard to her but is actually soft) technical constraint, and rather than arguing against her, for Twilight to solve the technical problem. I.E: Celestia: "Twilight, I can't make everyone an immortal Alicorn. As the first of many reasons, Equestria would run out of Food." Twilight: "Could you make one of my friends an immortal Alicorn if they could solve the problem of Equestria running out of Food?" Celestia: "Of course, my little pony." Twilight gets Applejack to solve the food problem inherent in a exploding population of Immortals. Impressed, Celestia grants Applejack Alicorn Immortality. Luna: "I am amazed at the creativity of my sister's most faithful student. But we still can't make everyone an immortal Alicorn. Eventually, there would be clannish infighting.... I know that all to well." continues Added bonus: this fits in with the theme of "Alicorn Acension is about solving problems noone else ever could." I mean, it seems like a lot of Deathism is "Given these unstoppable technical constraints, this is the best way to live." So if you want Deathism to not feel like a strawpony, you have to let it bring up the technical constraints, and you can solve each one by either refuting the constraint, or refuting the argument. This allows a Deathist to sometimes make a perfectly valid argument, which is then solved once the constraint is resolved, so the Deathist is sometimes making valid arguments (which are then rendered obsolete) and sometimes making invalid logical arguments.

Interestingly, the destiny thing has been something I'd thought about in the past. I thought about an idea for a short fanfiction designed to teach some of the basics of rationality, wherein Twilight was totally clueless about how to fix Starswirl's spell in the Season 3 finale. Twilight would be forced to learn the basics of rationality in some fashion, specifically the portion about mysterious answers, noticing that "destiny" didn't actually ANSWER anything, forcing her to clarify her true answers. By working on that, she discovers the true nat... (read more)

I'd say you've got two out of three there. Based on lines Chrysalis says (When she beats Celestia, she says "Ah! Shining Armor's love for you is even stronger than I thought! Consuming it has made me even more powerful than Celestia!"), her power doesn't depend on the magical strength of the pony she's feeding off, it's all about love, and alicorns don't necessarily love any more intensely than other ponies. The changelings would have been more powerful taking on alicorn forms, but it's clear that that isn't enough to win in one-on-one combat: Th... (read more)

0Luke_A_Somers
She could have a variant of the Pinkie sense - uncontrolled limited precognition. Or it could be that there are feedbacks such that in order for it to work she needs to avoid all involvement in the proceedings (which is why she works through agents so much) - and introducing an endemic threat would require her to basically recuse herself from her own civilization, which seems a bit much.
0Xachariah
(There's actually a comic regarding Chrysalis' return. I haven't read it, but from what I understand Chrysalis specifically targets Twilight to feed on her magic because she recognizes her as unusually powerful. Judging by how much magic in the MLP universe is modified by emotions, my guess is that it's an additive or multiplicative factor for changlings when they feed. (As an aside, I'd totally choose Rainbow Dash in a fight. She punches houses into rainbow explosions.)) I'd assume that any future sight is extraordinarily limited, magically costly, and marginally useful. I'd guess Celestia uses it is the first episode, maybe uses it in Dragonshy, then notably doesn't use it for 1st Discord or Chrysalis, then uses it again for the Crystal Empire and 2nd Discord. In both episodes we see causality-breaking effects (Pinkie Keen and It's About Time), it results in closed loop time travel. I haven't invested too much thought into it, but can closed loop time travel be exploited via traveling to the future? It seems a very risky proposition, since we've already determined that time-travel can and will force paradoxes. You may only get one shot at seeing a future (and you can't avoid the consequences), rather than being able to pick-and-choose possible futures. In this case, the more vague the future is, the better. As an aside...I just remembered Twilight can already time travel. Yeah... that would make for some confusing debates.

Thanks for the inspiration for this idea, by the way :) I might not have thought of it if not for Luminosity and Radiance.

And, speaking of which, something I was wondering about: Is your name actually inspired by the alicorns from MLP? Believe it or not, I only thought of the association a few weeks ago, but I wasn't curious enough to PM you about it.

3Alicorn
My name a) predates MLP:FiM and b) refers to an older meaning of the word, just the horn of a unicorn or the substance it's made from, but it's not unrelated.

Wait, this is a thing? I've only ever seen one small one-shot that had a transhumanist vibe to it. (Mortality Report) All the other "Reactions to immortality" ones I've seen have been all about how terrible it was. If there's already a few well-written explorations of this exact concept, is there even a good reason to write this one?

Also, does anyone have some links to these, or at least names/authors? Whether my writing this fanfiction is still worth doing or not, getting more ideas is unlikely to be a bad thing.

I was referring to the concept as... (read more)

2Eliezer Yudkowsky
"Mortality Report" and to a lesser extent "Friendship is Optimal" (not pro-life, but somewhat transponyist). Three stories constitute a genre.

A large amount of the things you mention become less dangerous in the event of greater alicorn presence in Equestria, not more. Nightmare Moon, Discord and Chrysalis ALL almost won, and if even just a few dozen alicorns had existed, they wouldn't have stood a chance in hell.

Now, the whole existential risk angle...is a very interesting point, since based on what I've just argued, the logical meeting-ground between the two would be to have a task force of alicorns, say, at least a dozen, but no more than a hundred, all comprised of ponies Celestia trusted su... (read more)

-2MugaSofer
Wouldn't that weaken the already-weak pro-death argument?
5ModusPonies
Based on canon, the optimal size for such a task force would probably be six. I estimate a one in five chance that this actually happens in season four.
Xachariah100

all comprised of ponies Celestia trusted sufficiently

You're a god. You've got the ability to make other gods. You've got literally a million years to find people trustworthy enough. A single failure is a possible extinction event, and that nearly happened once already. How high do you set the bar for 'trust sufficiently'?

She's already working on the problem (and communicating with other alicorns about it, as seen at the end of S3Ep2). She's increased the number by two within the last couple decades or so (Twilight, and I assume Cadance is young). ... (read more)

3Xachariah
The extinction-level battles portrayed in the show do not seem to run off of the rules of warfare, but off of an entirely binary system. None of the situations people were in trouble with would have been helped by having more Alicorns. Queen Chrysalis gains her strength from feeding off the emotions of others, and the more magically powerful her subjects are, the more powerful she becomes. She became a God tier threat by feeding off Cadence/Shining. More alicorns would have only meant more super powered pegacorn changlings. She won initially because she acted first, then she was destroyed by a spell which was uncounterable (seemingly, as she doesn't attempt to counter it). Discord was infinitely more powerful than Celestia, until the Elements of Harmony came out then he was infinitely weaker. He invaded her own sanctum, took the Elements, then proceeded to wreck whatever he felt like. Later, Celestia's magic protection on the Elements completely trumps Discord's magic. In none of these cases do they seem to battle it out; they just understand that magic has a priority order. Whoever's magic has higher priority, wins. King Sombra, as a unicorn, singlehoofedly dominated then eliminated an empire full of unicorns. Again, offense beats defense. What's the alicorn version of that after given time to reach full potential ... a solar system? It's a universe where everypony could already have an atomic bomb in their head. And then grant the option to add an order of magnitude more power by making them an alicorn. The only occasion where a squad of alicorns would be useful would be in dealing with Nightmare Moon. And arguably things could have come out far worse if Nightmare Moon had been able to sway more alicorns to her side (NB: mind control magic exists in MLP universe). Also from Celestia's perspective, the only other alicorn[*1] she ever knew almost succeeded at killing everything on the planet 1000 years before show start. She doesn't know if the friendliness chan

Good point. It also makes Celestia look like a much more credible character. One of my biggest problems was "Why the hell hasn't Celestia come up with this solution a thousand years ago?" and by making it genuinely really difficult to make the mass alicornification work properly, I can come up with a plausible answer for this that isn't "Celestia isn't rational.".

For what it's worth, I think I'm going to keep the particular thing you quoted, because I think it makes significantly more logical sense for alicorns, which are supposed to em... (read more)

0Baughn
I was thinking along the lines of "Jack of all trades, master of none". It's not that they'd lose their abilities, it's that they'd lose precision. They might regain what they had and more, given a thousand years to work on it, but they'd lose out now.
0Kindly
Fair enough. I know close to nothing about how the different flavors of ponies work.

That's...an interesting point. I never actually thought that Celestia and Luna could move the celestial bodies because they were alicorns. I always just thought they could move them because it was their special talents, and it was unique magic they could do because of their knowledge or talent, not because only they had the brute force to do it. After all, the only fight Celestia was ever in canonically, she lost, and it wasn't even all that climactic either.

In the event that all alicorns have royal-sister levels of power (Again, my assumptions have blinde... (read more)

5Kindly
Given that your own opinions fall squarely on one side of the debate... you should be very careful about using your powers as an author to make the world itself support your point of view. In every such case (earth pony talents, alicorn power levels, etc.) you could make either option the rule. But if every such decision favors your argument, readers may feel that you're making things too easy for yourself.

Then I choose the torture. I've grown a bit more comfortable with overriding intuition in regards to extremely large numbers since my original reply 3 months ago.

You might be right. I'll have to think about this, and reconsider my stance. One billion is obviously far less than 3^^^3, but you are right in that the 10 million dollars stolen by you would be preferable to me than the 100,000 dollars stolen by Eliezer. I also consider losing 100,000 dollars less than or equal to 100,000 times as bad as losing one dollar. This indicates one of two things:

A) My utility system is deeply flawed. B) My utility system includes some sort of 'diffiusion factor' wherein a disutility of X becomes <X when divided among several ... (read more)

Actually, I ended up resolving this at some point. I would in fact pick the dust specks in this case, because the situations aren't identical. I'd spend a lot of time in my 3^^^3 lives worrying if I'm going to start being tortured for 50 years, but I wouldn't worry about the dust specks. Technically, the disutility of the dust specks is worse, but my brain can't comprehend the number "3^^^3", so it would worry more about the torture happening to me. Adding in the disutility of worrying about the torture, even a small amount, across 3^^^3 / 2 lives, and it's clear that I should pick the dust specks for myself in this situation, regardless of whether or not I choose torture in the original problem.

1AnotherIdiot
This is sort of avoiding the question. What if you made the choice, but then had your memory erased about the whole dilemma right afterwards? Assuming you knew before making your choice that your memory would be erased, of course.

Ben Jones didn't recognise the dust speck as "trivial" on his torture scale, he identified it as "zero". There is a difference: If dust speck disutility is equal to zero, you shouldn't pay one cent to save 3^^^3 people from it. 0 3^^^3 = 0, and the disutility of losing one cent is non-zero. If you assign an epsilon of disutility to a dust speck, then 3^^^3 epsilon is way more than 1 person suffering 50 years of torture. For all intents and purposes, 3^^^3 = infinity. The only way that Infinity(X) can be worse than a finite number is if X is equal to 0. If X = 0.00000001, then torture is preferable to dust specks.

3inemnitable
This doesn't follow. Epsilon is by definition arbitrary, therefore I could say that I want it to be 1 / 4^^^4 if I want to. If we accept Eliezer's proposition that the disutility of a dust speck is > 0, this doesn't prevent us from deciding that it is < epsilon when assigning a finite disutility to 50 years of torture.
Hul-Gil192

Well, he didn't actually identify dust mote disutility as zero; he says that dust motes register as zero on his torture scale. He goes on to mention that torture isn't on his dust-mote scale, so he isn't just using "torture scale" as a synonym for "disutility scale"; rather, he is emphasizing that there is more than just a single "(dis)utility scale" involved. I believe his contention is that the events (torture and dust-mote-in-the-eye) are fundamentally different in terms of "how the mind experiences and deals with [the... (read more)

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