The author of the story in question takes a fairly similar attitude, specifically noting that, without feedback or external contact, often the 10,000-day monks produce only useless things or their monastery opens up on schedule and everyone is dead (I think sometimes of mass suicide but it’s been a while). On the other hand, you also at least once get monks who have spooky multiverse-walking quantum-immortality abilities and can defeat aliens. I get the impression that it’s intended a bit analogous to an even more extreme ‘intellectual venture capital’; the idea being that the long-term monasteries are long-shots which usually fail but just once is enough to pay for them all. The abilities of the quantum-immortal monks are self-verifying in the sense that if you hit the tail of the power law, the incidental spin-off capabilities are so impressive that asking is otiose—similar to a VC investing in Facebook or Airbnb or Bitcoin or Stripe; if you did, you don’t really need to do a detailed audit to figure out if you turned a profit! (You did!)
So the real point of disagreement, perhaps, is whether even 1 such success is plausible.
Small correction, the level which goes insane or dies is the second level down, out of four total; 100 years rather than 1000. Though it is roughly 3x the 10,000 day mark would equal, though. The weaponized use of Penrose Quantum Mind is devised by the top level, who are seen only once per 1000 years. (As it is written: SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale. Even the particularly clever ones who play around with big ideas and write extremely ingroup-y doorstoppers.)
The author of the story in question takes a fairly similar attitude, specifically noting that, without feedback or external contact, often the 10,000-day monks produce only useless things or their monastery opens up on schedule and everyone is dead (I think sometimes of mass suicide but it’s been a while). On the other hand, you also at least once get monks who have spooky multiverse-walking quantum-immortality abilities and can defeat aliens. I get the impression that it’s intended a bit analogous to an even more extreme ‘intellectual venture capital’; the idea being that the long-term monasteries are long-shots which usually fail but just once is enough to pay for them all. The abilities of the quantum-immortal monks are self-verifying in the sense that if you hit the tail of the power law, the incidental spin-off capabilities are so impressive that asking is otiose—similar to a VC investing in Facebook or Airbnb or Bitcoin or Stripe; if you did, you don’t really need to do a detailed audit to figure out if you turned a profit! (You did!)
So the real point of disagreement, perhaps, is whether even 1 such success is plausible.
Small correction, the level which goes insane or dies is the second level down, out of four total; 100 years rather than 1000. Though it is roughly 3x the 10,000 day mark would equal, though. The weaponized use of Penrose Quantum Mind is devised by the top level, who are seen only once per 1000 years. (As it is written: SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale. Even the particularly clever ones who play around with big ideas and write extremely ingroup-y doorstoppers.)