I gave it the premise and asked for interesting directions to take it in. Then I told it which ones I liked the most. After a couple of iterations of ideation, I asked it to review, filter which of the scenes are the best ones, and come up with some options for the overall flow. Then I again selected the best variant. Once everything was clarified, I asked it to write the whole thing. Then I looked it over and made minor suggestions for improvement. All the final writing was by Claude. It’s like being the manager of a writer, instead of writing yourself, except that some of the jokes were things I provided verbatim.
Could you elaborate on the jokes provided by you and on the philosophical level of your contributions (e.g. by providing the entire dialogue)? For comparison, my dialogue with Claude Opus 4.5 about the story looked like this Google doc. [EDIT: forgot to share the doc, this is fixed now] Additionally, it spoils a weak point in the story’s philosophy.
My opinion filled with deeper spoilers on the weak point
The simulation required the hosts to create and sustain the birds by doing a fairly simple magical alteration of the birds’ allegedly weak bodies. Additionally, the story had the hosts flip the sign of the karma function so that the worst behaviors somehow ended up being rewarded by power. I expect that this would require a far more computationally complex process; for example, were satanists to conduct their rituals, their effect would have a materialistic explanation of satanists becoming more united and a non-materialistic explanation of Satan (or whoever plays its role) magically disrupting the humans’ efforts to coordinate against the satanists. However, such disruption would require Satan to intervene in the humans’ brains in hard-to-notice ways, which in turn would require far more complex programmes put in place and/or OOMs more compute spent.
I just read your Googledoc: I think your Claude instance missed the point. Yes, creating inverse karma would absolutely be a different, much more complex type of process. The joke is that this only appears true to us because we lack [Untranslatable] and somehow in the real world, using [Untranslatable] actually makes this fairly straightforward. This is impossible to prove or disprove by design. How can you argue about anything, when the premise is that your entire process for epistemic reasoning has been adversarially manipulated to be fundamentally flawed?
Thank you!
I gave it the premise and asked for interesting directions to take it in. Then I told it which ones I liked the most. After a couple of iterations of ideation, I asked it to review, filter which of the scenes are the best ones, and come up with some options for the overall flow. Then I again selected the best variant. Once everything was clarified, I asked it to write the whole thing. Then I looked it over and made minor suggestions for improvement. All the final writing was by Claude. It’s like being the manager of a writer, instead of writing yourself, except that some of the jokes were things I provided verbatim.
Could you elaborate on the jokes provided by you and on the philosophical level of your contributions (e.g. by providing the entire dialogue)? For comparison, my dialogue with Claude Opus 4.5 about the story looked like this Google doc. [EDIT: forgot to share the doc, this is fixed now] Additionally, it spoils a weak point in the story’s philosophy.
My opinion filled with deeper spoilers on the weak point
The simulation required the hosts to create and sustain the birds by doing a fairly simple magical alteration of the birds’ allegedly weak bodies. Additionally, the story had the hosts flip the sign of the karma function so that the worst behaviors somehow ended up being rewarded by power. I expect that this would require a far more computationally complex process; for example, were satanists to conduct their rituals, their effect would have a materialistic explanation of satanists becoming more united and a non-materialistic explanation of Satan (or whoever plays its role) magically disrupting the humans’ efforts to coordinate against the satanists. However, such disruption would require Satan to intervene in the humans’ brains in hard-to-notice ways, which in turn would require far more complex programmes put in place and/or OOMs more compute spent.
UPD: I found this piece by Yudkowsky with a potentially similar thought experiment.
I just read your Googledoc: I think your Claude instance missed the point. Yes, creating inverse karma would absolutely be a different, much more complex type of process. The joke is that this only appears true to us because we lack [Untranslatable] and somehow in the real world, using [Untranslatable] actually makes this fairly straightforward. This is impossible to prove or disprove by design. How can you argue about anything, when the premise is that your entire process for epistemic reasoning has been adversarially manipulated to be fundamentally flawed?
Sure, here is the conversation I had with Claude: https://claude.ai/share/d501d694-8764-4fb2-a1d7-b57c2cd40748
I would say that most of the philosophy and around half the jokes came from me. Claude filled in the details.