Yeah, I was thinking maybe the “world level” issue could be defense: perhaps witches spend 90% of their time on self defense in a state of nature and so a government that only uses 60% of the economy is a net good deal? It seems like this would necessitate magical mechanisms that make it easy to spread “generic safety” but hard to limit coverage to free riders. If such dynamics don’t “fall out” of magical physics, it should raise an additional flag.
I hadn’t thought of the Labour affiliation on the “author level”. I’d been thinking maybe it was just easy to ignore incompatibilities of this sort because of near/far dichotomies—its easy to pretend “famous people” are inhuman beings whose exalted struggles can not be truly influenced by “we mortals”.
I think the Labour insight is a better theory because it makes more concrete predictions about the symbolic level. If Rowling wants a story that teaches her kids to favor political wealth redistribution it predicts lots of specific details about what to expect in the “political realm” (many of which seem true of her story), rather than just to predict that the politics will be inconsistent with the near mode.
Ooh! Idea! Applying this insight to Eliezer himself (because it was his characters acting funny that got me on the track of the population size in the first place) …
Earlier, I didn’t think time travel prime factorization would work because Eliezer is writing about rationality rather than time travel. If time travel was too easy the rationality would lose center stage. But since then I haven’t been using the supported theory to predict other things…
The didactic function of MoR means that Eli has to tie up the lose end of Voldemort at some point, and it should be really dramatic and cool ending because otherwise the story loses its aura of awesome and the rationality lessons suffer by proximity. In the meantime, it seems like awareness that one is living in a story explains magical physics and other discrepancies like those related to the population size...
So my over-specific prediction is that evidence is going to build up for a while until Eliezer has room to impart all the lessons to the readers that he thinks are sufficient to make his political case (utilitarian ethics, scope insensitivity, simplified humanism, politics is the mindkiller, maybe “insight cascades” since they are critical to his theory about the singularity?). Then Harry figures out that he’s in a story, necessarily immediately , but the end means “no more lessons” so the end and the amount of teaching have to be synced and genre-awareness could help the ending be awesome.
The “I’m in a story” insight and a super amazing trick or two that grow out of it (unknown at this point, but Eliezer is clever), are being saved up for the fight against Voldemort at the end, with the insight coming after Harry and Voldemort have a falling out (unless Harry’s true task is to redeem Voldemort, rather than defeat him).
Its quite possible that the falling out could actually precipitate the insight, because in point of fact, Voldemort’s Deathstar almost certainly exists to make the story interesting, rather than because it’s necessary to conquer Magical Britain. When Harry finds out his enemy is also his favorite teacher who has even more super powers than he thought, this is more evidence that Harry is in a story.
So it would be good timing all around to have Voldemort be revealed and reality fall apart when all the lessons are done or in sight of being done.
The “I’m in a story” insight and a super amazing trick or two that grow out of it (unknown at this point, but Eliezer is clever)
I was hoping Eliezer wouldn’t go there since it would seem rather trite. But thinking about how it would relate to the subject matter it does have some potential. A suitable lesson would come if it was actually Voldemort who figured out where he was. He would then solve the “Dark Lord in a Box” problem, break out by hacking a reader, leveraging the intellectual capacity of the author to give the hacked reader the ability to create an AI capable of extracting Voldemort’s volition. By that mechanism Voldemort would then take control of the cosmic commons of the “1 level up” reality.
Obviously the “1 level up” reality couldn’t be this one. Because that requires that Eliezer (or a combination of Eliezer and the hacked reader) solve both the Friendliness and General Artificial Intelligence problems. (Where ‘Friendly’ is ′ to Voldemort’.)
, are being saved up for the fight against Voldemort at the end, with the insight coming after Harry and Voldemort have a falling out (unless Harry’s true task is to redeem Voldemort, rather than defeat him).
Better yet would be if Harry continues to defy the usual form of fiction and not define himself in terms of an enemy. He has his own goal of universe optimisation and Voldemort doesn’t actually need to be a big part in that for good or ill.
Oh man, I hadn’t thought of Quirellmort as a sentient being running under a layer of emulation with a goal to escapes from its emulation layer. I’m imagining some kind of crazy moral principle here like “Though shalt not emulate sentient beings capable of becoming metaphysically meta-aware.”
If Quirellmort found out that we were all muggles, would he even want to escape if he couldn’t be a dark wizard up here? Maybe he wouldn’t see us as muggles if he remained focused on the way we have “god level access” to his “plot physics” by virtue of our ability to communicate with Eliezer?
I don’t know if it would be horrifying or amusing if he managed to escaped into our world… and then turned around and started writing novels about civilizations with 10^50 slaves in thrall to an obvious author insert :-P
Yeah, I was thinking maybe the “world level” issue could be defense: perhaps witches spend 90% of their time on self defense in a state of nature and so a government that only uses 60% of the economy is a net good deal? It seems like this would necessitate magical mechanisms that make it easy to spread “generic safety” but hard to limit coverage to free riders. If such dynamics don’t “fall out” of magical physics, it should raise an additional flag.
I hadn’t thought of the Labour affiliation on the “author level”. I’d been thinking maybe it was just easy to ignore incompatibilities of this sort because of near/far dichotomies—its easy to pretend “famous people” are inhuman beings whose exalted struggles can not be truly influenced by “we mortals”.
I think the Labour insight is a better theory because it makes more concrete predictions about the symbolic level. If Rowling wants a story that teaches her kids to favor political wealth redistribution it predicts lots of specific details about what to expect in the “political realm” (many of which seem true of her story), rather than just to predict that the politics will be inconsistent with the near mode.
Ooh! Idea! Applying this insight to Eliezer himself (because it was his characters acting funny that got me on the track of the population size in the first place) …
Earlier, I didn’t think time travel prime factorization would work because Eliezer is writing about rationality rather than time travel. If time travel was too easy the rationality would lose center stage. But since then I haven’t been using the supported theory to predict other things…
The didactic function of MoR means that Eli has to tie up the lose end of Voldemort at some point, and it should be really dramatic and cool ending because otherwise the story loses its aura of awesome and the rationality lessons suffer by proximity. In the meantime, it seems like awareness that one is living in a story explains magical physics and other discrepancies like those related to the population size...
So my over-specific prediction is that evidence is going to build up for a while until Eliezer has room to impart all the lessons to the readers that he thinks are sufficient to make his political case (utilitarian ethics, scope insensitivity, simplified humanism, politics is the mindkiller, maybe “insight cascades” since they are critical to his theory about the singularity?). Then Harry figures out that he’s in a story, necessarily immediately , but the end means “no more lessons” so the end and the amount of teaching have to be synced and genre-awareness could help the ending be awesome.
The “I’m in a story” insight and a super amazing trick or two that grow out of it (unknown at this point, but Eliezer is clever), are being saved up for the fight against Voldemort at the end, with the insight coming after Harry and Voldemort have a falling out (unless Harry’s true task is to redeem Voldemort, rather than defeat him).
Its quite possible that the falling out could actually precipitate the insight, because in point of fact, Voldemort’s Deathstar almost certainly exists to make the story interesting, rather than because it’s necessary to conquer Magical Britain. When Harry finds out his enemy is also his favorite teacher who has even more super powers than he thought, this is more evidence that Harry is in a story.
So it would be good timing all around to have Voldemort be revealed and reality fall apart when all the lessons are done or in sight of being done.
I was hoping Eliezer wouldn’t go there since it would seem rather trite. But thinking about how it would relate to the subject matter it does have some potential. A suitable lesson would come if it was actually Voldemort who figured out where he was. He would then solve the “Dark Lord in a Box” problem, break out by hacking a reader, leveraging the intellectual capacity of the author to give the hacked reader the ability to create an AI capable of extracting Voldemort’s volition. By that mechanism Voldemort would then take control of the cosmic commons of the “1 level up” reality.
Obviously the “1 level up” reality couldn’t be this one. Because that requires that Eliezer (or a combination of Eliezer and the hacked reader) solve both the Friendliness and General Artificial Intelligence problems. (Where ‘Friendly’ is ′ to Voldemort’.)
Better yet would be if Harry continues to defy the usual form of fiction and not define himself in terms of an enemy. He has his own goal of universe optimisation and Voldemort doesn’t actually need to be a big part in that for good or ill.
Oh man, I hadn’t thought of Quirellmort as a sentient being running under a layer of emulation with a goal to escapes from its emulation layer. I’m imagining some kind of crazy moral principle here like “Though shalt not emulate sentient beings capable of becoming metaphysically meta-aware.”
If Quirellmort found out that we were all muggles, would he even want to escape if he couldn’t be a dark wizard up here? Maybe he wouldn’t see us as muggles if he remained focused on the way we have “god level access” to his “plot physics” by virtue of our ability to communicate with Eliezer?
I don’t know if it would be horrifying or amusing if he managed to escaped into our world… and then turned around and started writing novels about civilizations with 10^50 slaves in thrall to an obvious author insert :-P