Okay, so this feels like a good place to pause the AI conversation, and there’s many other things to ask you about given your decades of writing and millions of words. I think what some people might not know is the millions and millions and millions of words of science fiction and fan fiction that you’ve written. I want to understand when, in your view, is it better to explain something through fiction than nonfiction?
Eliezer Yudkowsky3:44:17
When you’re trying to convey experience rather than knowledge, or when it’s just much easier to write fiction and you can produce 100,000 words of fiction with the same effort it would take you to produce 10,000 words of nonfiction? Those are both pretty good reasons.
Dwarkesh Patel3:44:30
On the second point, it seems like when you’re writing this fiction, not only are you covering the same heady topics that you include in your nonfiction, but there’s also the added complication of plot and characters. It’s surprising to me that that’s easier than just verbalizing the sort of the topics themselves.
Eliezer Yudkowsky3:44:51
Well, partially because it’s more fun. That is an actual factor, ain’t going to lie. And sometimes it’s something like, a bunch of what you get in the fiction is just the lecture that the character would deliver in that situation, the thoughts the character would have in that situation. There’s only one piece of fiction of mine where there’s literally a character giving lectures because he arrived on another planet and now has to lecture about science to them. That one is Project lawful. You know about Project Lawful?
Dwarkesh Patel3:45:28
I know about it. I have not read it yet.
Eliezer Yudkowsky3:45:30
Most of my fiction is not about somebody arriving on another planet who has to deliver lectures. There I was being a bit deliberately like, — “Yeah, I’m going to just do it with Project Lawful. I’m going to just do it. They say nobody should ever do it, and I don’t care. I’m doing it ever ways. I’m going to have my character actually launch into the lectures.” The lectures aren’t really the parts I’m proud about. It’s like where you have the life or death, deathnote style battle of wits that is centering around a series of Bayesian updates and making that actually work because it’s where I’m like — “Yeah, I think I actually pulled that off. And I’m not sure a single other writer on the face of this planet could have made that work as a plot device.” But that said, the nonfiction is like, I’m explaining this thing, I’m explaining the prerequisite, I’m explaining the prerequisites to the prerequisites. And then in fiction, it’s more just, well, this character happens to think of this thing and the character happens to think of that thing, but you got to actually see the character using it. So it’s less organized. It’s less organized as knowledge. And that’s why it’s easier to write.
This was essentially what he told Dwarkesh: