“✅” is “this is a viewpoint character because they are interesting and their mental state is consistent with the Authors intended sequence of Reader revelations”.
“(✅)” is “this person isn’t interesting enough, in their mental states, choices, or whatever, for the juice to be worth the squeeze of describing their minds in detail over time”.
“((✅))” is “this person’s mental state contains spoilers, that, if leaked to the Reader, would ruin the Author’s plan for what is supposed to be a mystery, and hard to understand, vs not (probably because some more interesting viewpoint character’s lack knowledge of the mental state of the villain or whoever is actually plot critical such that the plot would just be totally over if a viewpoint character was telepathic)”.
I think your comment fixed the chart, and now it shows ((Dumbledore)) and ((Quirrel)) and I feel like this is better than before :-)
Also, I think it is kinda interesting to try to map this framework farther out, to Mysteries, or to the Romance genre (especially love triangles?) because it probably needs more levels than these three (or maybe three levels, but make it a vector of them, that do “this, but in different dimensions of knowledge the viewpoint character can, themselves, understand”?) in a super critical way?
Like something about “each character’s own interiority and self understanding” can’t be breached (differently for each character?) in some genres because in many a Romance too much (mutual?) clarity about how and why each person would react to different possible world’s they might be in, or might actualize with their choices… would mess up the Story. (This is also a sort of useful frame for Planecrash, which is a Romance of a sort.)
You could still have interesting art… if you mess up the Story too much with super high levels of insight, but then the Story won’t be inside genre conventions that tend to ensure the reader gets the payoff they expected to get, from reading something implying that it is in a certain genre. (Playing with this too much gets into accusations of unethical marketing.)
At the character level, in some sense, every personality disorder is a way of being avowedly oblivious to something important about the normal human experience, and each such obliviousness would make it harder for a character with that personality disorder to really deserve a “✅” with no parentheses at all… except you totally can do that!
Like in Herbert’s Dune, a way to describe part of how weird it is might be that sociopathy is normal to the Author’s “omniscient” viewpoint, and so sociopaths who wouldn’t normally be more than a two bit villain or side character in a character story get viewpoint attention?? And the Author doesn’t comment on it or lampshade it or anything. And in Bushnell’s Trading Up, I think Bushnell was quite purposeful in making narcissism normal to the Author’s “omniscient” viewpoint, and there’s supposed to be no viewpoint in that story to deeply admire, and its a sort of “tragedy about trashy fun” on many levels. If you empathize too much it is a deep tragedy, but if you don’t, you can “hate read it”. Or whatever.
You might call books where the viewpoint characters are almost intolerably oblivious to themselves “cringe literature” similar to “cringe comedy” like the first season (but not the third and later seasons) of Parks & Recs?
In lots of Romance (or Romance adjacent) stuff I just don’t vibe with it because it is too cringe-to-me… either the writer is really The Author and its embarrassing to see into the writer like that, or else the writer is pandering to their Reader or… anyway… its not “on purpose (in a way I like)”.
But, by contrast, I thought Bushnell was probably doing something weird on purpose, that was sort of pandering to some readers, but also saying something to some of those readers that they might not even notice that they could usefully learn, and I got artistic payoffs from reading something so spiritually alien, and yet so grounded in almost-plausibly-real ways for some women in NYC to be, and also so detailed.
Anyway. I guess I’m trying to say that I think inventing ontologies for “how much insight is communicated about someone’s viewpoint” is interesting.
And such ontologies can also slightly be applied to the Narrator, and the Expected Reader, and the Author (if different from the Narrator), and a possibly distinct writer sitting in their office, with bills to pay, and limited spoons, and aspirations to be seen by many as an Author whose Art echos in artistic history in ways they would like, and so on.
Like with HP:MoR, a lot of plot lines could be ruled out by thinking “if X happened it would be a story about Y, and a story about Y would have result Z on the Singularitarian/Rationality movement, and Eliezer doesn’t want a future like Z, so X won’t happen”.
I don’t know of any fiction by anyone except Eliezer where precisely this filter will predict a lot about what happens in the story… but also… that’s a large part of why I read it <3
Why does nobody ever ask about the Project Lawful / Planecrash epilogue? I still have to finish that one too!
What I’m looking forward to there is the Light Novel or Manga version, with tightened pacing and so on, that is setting up an Anime that will get dubs/subs in Japanese and Chinese and Korean and so on. (Or something similarly insanely full of chutzpah that could also actually work.)
Also, a re-formatting and re-editing would let me actually recommend it to other people, which I can’t do now because they bounce off of the glowfic formatting.
I would prefer the editing to just offer a full on “weird kind of sequel” that is ANOTHER MUCH LATER PLAY THROUGH by the player of the game, where the player of the game has learned a lot about “corrigibility” from seeing past versions of the game, and can score a lot more points against the mere god-character of a concept as half-assed as “corrigibility” ;-)
Stuff like this (aiming for TV on purpose, fixing some of the alignment-theoretic understructure, improving the marketability) could actually resonate in History in a way that moves the needle on the Singularity… which is the standard I usually hold Eliezer’s writing to because I think he, himself, tries to hold himself to that standard ;-)
An Epilogue #3 that came out in a way, and with the right timing, to build interest in such a Sequel would be great. Then again, maybe actual real world international politics is more pressing, because of p-doom and timelines and an imminent WW3 and so on?
The way I read it:
“✅” is “this is a viewpoint character because they are interesting and their mental state is consistent with the Authors intended sequence of Reader revelations”.
“(✅)” is “this person isn’t interesting enough, in their mental states, choices, or whatever, for the juice to be worth the squeeze of describing their minds in detail over time”.
“((✅))” is “this person’s mental state contains spoilers, that, if leaked to the Reader, would ruin the Author’s plan for what is supposed to be a mystery, and hard to understand, vs not (probably because some more interesting viewpoint character’s lack knowledge of the mental state of the villain or whoever is actually plot critical such that the plot would just be totally over if a viewpoint character was telepathic)”.
I think your comment fixed the chart, and now it shows ((Dumbledore)) and ((Quirrel)) and I feel like this is better than before :-)
Also, I think it is kinda interesting to try to map this framework farther out, to Mysteries, or to the Romance genre (especially love triangles?) because it probably needs more levels than these three (or maybe three levels, but make it a vector of them, that do “this, but in different dimensions of knowledge the viewpoint character can, themselves, understand”?) in a super critical way?
Like something about “each character’s own interiority and self understanding” can’t be breached (differently for each character?) in some genres because in many a Romance too much (mutual?) clarity about how and why each person would react to different possible world’s they might be in, or might actualize with their choices… would mess up the Story. (This is also a sort of useful frame for Planecrash, which is a Romance of a sort.)
You could still have interesting art… if you mess up the Story too much with super high levels of insight, but then the Story won’t be inside genre conventions that tend to ensure the reader gets the payoff they expected to get, from reading something implying that it is in a certain genre. (Playing with this too much gets into accusations of unethical marketing.)
At the character level, in some sense, every personality disorder is a way of being avowedly oblivious to something important about the normal human experience, and each such obliviousness would make it harder for a character with that personality disorder to really deserve a “✅” with no parentheses at all… except you totally can do that!
Like in Herbert’s Dune, a way to describe part of how weird it is might be that sociopathy is normal to the Author’s “omniscient” viewpoint, and so sociopaths who wouldn’t normally be more than a two bit villain or side character in a character story get viewpoint attention?? And the Author doesn’t comment on it or lampshade it or anything. And in Bushnell’s Trading Up, I think Bushnell was quite purposeful in making narcissism normal to the Author’s “omniscient” viewpoint, and there’s supposed to be no viewpoint in that story to deeply admire, and its a sort of “tragedy about trashy fun” on many levels. If you empathize too much it is a deep tragedy, but if you don’t, you can “hate read it”. Or whatever.
You might call books where the viewpoint characters are almost intolerably oblivious to themselves “cringe literature” similar to “cringe comedy” like the first season (but not the third and later seasons) of Parks & Recs?
In lots of Romance (or Romance adjacent) stuff I just don’t vibe with it because it is too cringe-to-me… either the writer is really The Author and its embarrassing to see into the writer like that, or else the writer is pandering to their Reader or… anyway… its not “on purpose (in a way I like)”.
But, by contrast, I thought Bushnell was probably doing something weird on purpose, that was sort of pandering to some readers, but also saying something to some of those readers that they might not even notice that they could usefully learn, and I got artistic payoffs from reading something so spiritually alien, and yet so grounded in almost-plausibly-real ways for some women in NYC to be, and also so detailed.
Anyway. I guess I’m trying to say that I think inventing ontologies for “how much insight is communicated about someone’s viewpoint” is interesting.
And such ontologies can also slightly be applied to the Narrator, and the Expected Reader, and the Author (if different from the Narrator), and a possibly distinct writer sitting in their office, with bills to pay, and limited spoons, and aspirations to be seen by many as an Author whose Art echos in artistic history in ways they would like, and so on.
Like with HP:MoR, a lot of plot lines could be ruled out by thinking “if X happened it would be a story about Y, and a story about Y would have result Z on the Singularitarian/Rationality movement, and Eliezer doesn’t want a future like Z, so X won’t happen”.
I don’t know of any fiction by anyone except Eliezer where precisely this filter will predict a lot about what happens in the story… but also… that’s a large part of why I read it <3
What I’m looking forward to there is the Light Novel or Manga version, with tightened pacing and so on, that is setting up an Anime that will get dubs/subs in Japanese and Chinese and Korean and so on. (Or something similarly insanely full of chutzpah that could also actually work.)
Also, a re-formatting and re-editing would let me actually recommend it to other people, which I can’t do now because they bounce off of the glowfic formatting.
But then also… that story is about “corrigibility”… which is a research field that makes me un-utterably sad.
I would prefer the editing to just offer a full on “weird kind of sequel” that is ANOTHER MUCH LATER PLAY THROUGH by the player of the game, where the player of the game has learned a lot about “corrigibility” from seeing past versions of the game, and can score a lot more points against the mere god-character of a concept as half-assed as “corrigibility” ;-)
Stuff like this (aiming for TV on purpose, fixing some of the alignment-theoretic understructure, improving the marketability) could actually resonate in History in a way that moves the needle on the Singularity… which is the standard I usually hold Eliezer’s writing to because I think he, himself, tries to hold himself to that standard ;-)
An Epilogue #3 that came out in a way, and with the right timing, to build interest in such a Sequel would be great. Then again, maybe actual real world international politics is more pressing, because of p-doom and timelines and an imminent WW3 and so on?