I originally downvoted because I couldn’t figure out the point. The title definitely contributed to that, though not for the reason you suggest: rather, the title made it sound like this fact about a fictional world was the point, in the same way that you would expect to come away from a post titled “Rowling: Wizarding Britain has a GDP of 1 million Galleons” pretty convinced about a fictional GDP but with possibly no new insights on the real world. I think the new title makes it a bit clearer what one might expect to get out of this: it’s more like “here’s one (admittedly fictional) story of how alignment was handled; could we do something similar in our world?”. I’m curious if that’s the intended point? If so then all the parts analyzing how well it worked for them (e.g. the stuff about cryonics and 97%) still don’t seem that relevant: “here’s an idea from fiction you might consider in reality” and “here’s an idea from fiction which worked out for them you might consider in reality” provide me almost identical information, since the valuable core worth potentially adopting is the idea, but all discussion of whether it worked in fiction tells me extremely little about whether it will work in reality (especially if, as in this case, very little detail is given on why it worked in fiction).
The “dying with dignity” ups the pattern that Elizer uses Aprils Fools for things which can not be constructively discussed as fact. With sufficiently low plausibility fact, maintaining the belief in the other partys rationality is infeasible so it might as well be processed as fiction. “I am not saying this” can also be construed as a method of making readers sink more deeply into fiction in trying to maintain plausibility. It does trigger false positives for using fiction as evidence.
I do not want that gathering evidence for UFOs would be impossible because it would be binned into fiction. “I didn’t see anything but if I would have seen something here is what I would have seen...”. If there were an alien injuction I wish it to be possible to detect. But in the same vein people do process very low odds bad enough that “stay out of low probablity considerations” is a prime candidate to be the best advice about it.
I think the case for why dath ilan is relevant to the real world basically rests on two pieces of context which most people don’t have:
Yudkowsky mostly writes rationalfic, so dath ilan is his actual expectations of what would happen if he were the median person, not just some worldbuilding meant to support a compelling narrative.
Yudkowsky tries pretty hard to convey useful thoughts about the world through his fiction. HPMOR was intended as a complement to the Sequences. Glowfic is an even weirder format, but I’ve heard Yudkowsky say that he can’t write anything else in large volume anymore, and glowfic is an inferior substitute still meant to edify. Overall, I’d guess that these quotes are roughly 30% random irrelevant worldbuilding, and 70% carefully written vignette to convey what good coordination is actually capable of.
I originally downvoted because I couldn’t figure out the point. The title definitely contributed to that, though not for the reason you suggest: rather, the title made it sound like this fact about a fictional world was the point, in the same way that you would expect to come away from a post titled “Rowling: Wizarding Britain has a GDP of 1 million Galleons” pretty convinced about a fictional GDP but with possibly no new insights on the real world. I think the new title makes it a bit clearer what one might expect to get out of this: it’s more like “here’s one (admittedly fictional) story of how alignment was handled; could we do something similar in our world?”. I’m curious if that’s the intended point? If so then all the parts analyzing how well it worked for them (e.g. the stuff about cryonics and 97%) still don’t seem that relevant: “here’s an idea from fiction you might consider in reality” and “here’s an idea from fiction which worked out for them you might consider in reality” provide me almost identical information, since the valuable core worth potentially adopting is the idea, but all discussion of whether it worked in fiction tells me extremely little about whether it will work in reality (especially if, as in this case, very little detail is given on why it worked in fiction).
The “dying with dignity” ups the pattern that Elizer uses Aprils Fools for things which can not be constructively discussed as fact. With sufficiently low plausibility fact, maintaining the belief in the other partys rationality is infeasible so it might as well be processed as fiction. “I am not saying this” can also be construed as a method of making readers sink more deeply into fiction in trying to maintain plausibility. It does trigger false positives for using fiction as evidence.
I do not want that gathering evidence for UFOs would be impossible because it would be binned into fiction. “I didn’t see anything but if I would have seen something here is what I would have seen...”. If there were an alien injuction I wish it to be possible to detect. But in the same vein people do process very low odds bad enough that “stay out of low probablity considerations” is a prime candidate to be the best advice about it.
Thanks, I made minor edits to clarify the post.
I think the case for why dath ilan is relevant to the real world basically rests on two pieces of context which most people don’t have:
Yudkowsky mostly writes rationalfic, so dath ilan is his actual expectations of what would happen if he were the median person, not just some worldbuilding meant to support a compelling narrative.
Yudkowsky tries pretty hard to convey useful thoughts about the world through his fiction. HPMOR was intended as a complement to the Sequences. Glowfic is an even weirder format, but I’ve heard Yudkowsky say that he can’t write anything else in large volume anymore, and glowfic is an inferior substitute still meant to edify. Overall, I’d guess that these quotes are roughly 30% random irrelevant worldbuilding, and 70% carefully written vignette to convey what good coordination is actually capable of.