But, everything he has the characters do is something he knows, and it must be that way.
No, no… that’s true in a limited way, I mean the characters don’t know about any real-world experiments that he doesn’t, for example.
However, they can have novel insights. This is a good reason to write fiction, in fact. I write dialogues between characters in comics that I read when I’m stuck on math or programming problems. When I do this, it’s still me that’s thinking of it, of course. But it comes to me in a character’s voice.
So that might happen with HPMOR, too. There might be things in HPMOR that Eliezer only figured out when he heard, internally, one of his characters say them.
No, no… that’s true in a limited way, I mean the characters don’t know about any real-world experiments that he doesn’t, for example.
However, they can have novel insights. This is a good reason to write fiction, in fact. I write dialogues between characters in comics that I read when I’m stuck on math or programming problems. When I do this, it’s still me that’s thinking of it, of course. But it comes to me in a character’s voice.
So that might happen with HPMOR, too. There might be things in HPMOR that Eliezer only figured out when he heard, internally, one of his characters say them.