So after reading the comments, I showed this to a friend of mine to check if it would come across the way I expected to a (borderline) non-LWer. It was more or less what I expected … my interjections are in brackets.
It’s long, give me a few minutes … Hmm. My initial reaction is “this guy sounds like a colossal prick”.
[heh, I thought it might be.]
A greater work of masturbatory, self-important bullcrap I have not read in some time. Like, it’s clear he’s an intelligent guy, but not nearly as intelligent as he imagines himself.
[I mean, I’ve read his (non-technical) work, so I’m almost as impressed with him as he is...]
He has some good ideas [although I personally think the house-cables are dumb] but he wraps them up in a load of entitlement and self-importance and impracticality. Like instead of saying “you know, the medical profession would be better served by being organised like this” he says “if I’d be in charge then we would have organised the medical profession in a way better way like 50 years ago and anyone who disagrees with me is a bumbling idiot”.
Perhaps he’s slightly more polite than that
And he’s shooting himself in the foot, because after reading that, mostly I just want to take him aside and explain to him how much his writing is going to make people hate him and want to slap him.
[oh, in fairness, he doesn’t usually write like that. I assume this was his way of using some random ideas he hadn’t written about because no-one will implement them this century.]
The thought of “huh, that’s a good idea for organising diagnosis and treatment” is secondary and that’s impressive because I’m more than a little pissed off at my doctor right now.
This is even more pronounced than the reaction of many commenters, as you’d expect. Definitely still room for improvement there, Eliezer!
I liked HPMoR’s writing style. But I think it’s a matter of life experience—if I hadn’t spent my formative years surrounded by blithering idiots and utter institutional incompetence at every level and isolated as a result, I’d probably want to slap him too.
And maybe it’s a good strategy in terms of recruitment: it’s easier to attract people with less social capital, since the people with more social capital already have lives and don’t need to associate with institutions to build up social capital—and being four standard deviations to the right of just about everyone else in the immediate meatspace environment is a sure way to end up with very little social capital.
If the/a goal is to create a social-capital-building institution, that is. It may not be optimal for maximizing memetic spread.
HPMOR is slightly different in that the features of arrogance are an established part of the protagonists character, and acknowledged at least in part by the author. So there is a degree of dramatic irony where the reader knows that Harry isn’t quite as smart as he thinks he is, and notices him being over confident and making mistakes.
I can only think of one case that even feels worrisome. When Harry suggests they shouldn’t free the house elves, I don’t (or didn’t) feel sure the author knows that people saying slaves want masters is not evidence against the same old story; that in canon Dobby wants freedom; and that being Dumbledore’s slave is a poor career move if Dobby’s master almost has the votes to replace Dumbledore. (In principle Albus could also die, and deliberately put a Death Eater in charge. But that’s silly. There’s such a thing as too much pessimism.)
But Harry eventually starts thinking of the goblins as people. Here he at least starts to remember that, given human-like behavior and appearance, he should give a high prior to human-like minds. So we can still see slavery-apologist Harry as (meant to be) jumping to conclusions based on knowably poor evidence.
I don’t know what you just said. “Pretentiousness” suggests to me, ‘acting like you know something when you don’t.’ And insofar as the term “Mary Sue” means anything to me, it suggests ‘the author treating some character as correct or justified when by normal standards they seem wrong.’ Like if Harry was right about elf slavery.
As a fandom term, “Mary Sue” has no official definition, but it generally seems to be when a character is used for wish-fulfillment in a way which overrides good storytelling. The wish fulfillment can be either direct (the author wants to date Harry and go on adventures like he does, and writes such a character) or indirectly (the author wants to correct things that are wrong with the world and so writes a character who does so).
If Harry is being used as a mouthpiece to say things that the author would like to say, whether or not it makes sense for the character to say them or get away with saying them, then the character would be a Mary Sue.
I’ve seen “Mary Sue” used to describe a lot of things, but I’ve never seen it used to describe a character created to patch what the author sees as flaws in the world or the storytelling. I have heard the term “fix fic”, which seems to cover much of that ground, but it’s not automatically pejorative.
That said, defining Mary Sue is fraught with the same difficulties as talking about D&D’s alignment system or comparing Kirk to Picard.
A “fix fic” is a type of fanfic, not a type of character, and doesn’t necessarily include a character that goes around doing the fixing. If a character fixes things by doing contrived things, especially if those things wouldn’t happen or the character wouldn’t be able to get away with them, then the character would be a Mary Sue.
Yeah, I still don’t buy it. You’re describing a bad plot structure, not a bad character type, and so’s the article you linked to.
I did my time on TV Tropes and don’t particularly want to get back into the game, but that read to me like someone extending a family of tropes with poor associations in an attempt to tar a story or stories they happened not to like—which is officially against policy over there, but happens all the time anyway. Long story short, the existence of a trope page doesn’t mean it’s reliable as analysis, nor as regards jargon that isn’t its own.
I can’t speak to Pilgrim’s Progress for the simple reason that I couldn’t get past 20 pages of it before giving up, but Odysseus? That’s easy: absolutely not.
In fan fiction, a Mary Sue is an idealized character, often but not necessarily an author insert.
...Mary Sue stories—the adventures of the youngest and smartest ever person to graduate from the academy and ever get a commission at such a tender age. Usually characterized by unprecedented skill in everything from art to zoology, including karate and arm-wrestling. This character can also be found burrowing her way into the good graces/heart/mind of one of the Big Three [Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, if not all three at once. She saves the day by her wit and ability, and, if we are lucky, has the good grace to die at the end, being grieved by the entire ship.
… the “Mary Sue” is judged as a poorly developed character, too perfect and lacking in realism to be interesting.
...These traits usually reference the character’s perceived importance in the story, their physical design and an irrelevantly over-skilled or over-idealized nature.
...The prototypical Mary Sue is an original female character in a fanfic who obviously serves as an idealized version of the author mainly for the purpose of Wish Fulfillment. She’s exotically beautiful, often having an unusual hair or eye color, and has a similarly cool and exotic name. She’s exceptionally talented in an implausibly wide variety of areas, and may possess skills that are rare or nonexistent in the canon setting. She also lacks any realistic, or at least story-relevant, character flaws — either that or her “flaws” are obviously meant to be endearing.
...A Mary Sue character is usually written by a beginning author. Often, the Mary Sue is a self-insert with a few “improvements” (ex. better body, more popular, etc). The Mary Sue character is almost always beautiful, smart, etc… In short, she is the “perfect” girl.
In and out of the Odyssey, his defining characteristic is self-interested cleverness with a flaw of pride. He is far from perfect: he is quickly angered, selfish, and self-destructively arrogant. The whole story of the Odyssey is how his pride led to being cursed by the son of Poseidon, and all his sufferings and travails after that (not to mention all his men dying). Besides his character flaws, his personal traits are far from special: he has no supernatural abilities, he is not a demi-god or of unusual parentage like what seems like half the characters in the Illiad, he relies on personal charm or divine aid whenever he does run into supernatural entities, and his athleticism is inferior to Hector, Ajax, Heracles, etc. He is not a Mary Sue unless every trickster character like Coyote or Loki can also be considered Mary Sues as well. The Wikipedia article includes all sorts of good bits that is starkly incompatible with considering Odysseus a Mary Sue. For example, the Romans didn’t regard him as perfect:
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey portrayed Odysseus as a culture hero, but the Romans, who believed themselves the heirs of Prince Aeneas of Troy, considered him a villainous falsifier. In Virgil’s Aeneid, written between 29 and 19 BC, he is constantly referred to as “cruel Odysseus” (Latin “dirus Ulixes”) or “deceitful Odysseus” (“pellacis”, “fandi fictor”). Turnus, in Aeneid ix, reproaches the Trojan Ascanius with images of rugged, forthright Latin virtues, declaring (in John Dryden’s translation), “You shall not find the sons of Atreus here, nor need the frauds of sly Ulysses fear.” While the Greeks admired his cunning and deceit, these qualities did not recommend themselves to the Romans who possessed a rigid sense of honour. In Euripides’s tragedy Iphigenia at Aulis, having convinced Agamemnon to consent to the sacrifice of his daughter, Iphigenia, to appease the goddess Artemis, Odysseus facilitates the immolation by telling her mother, Clytemnestra, that the girl is to be wed to Achilles. His attempts to avoid his sacred oath to defend Menelaus and Helen offended Roman notions of duty; the many stratagems and tricks that he employed to get his way offended Roman notions of honour.
And maybe not Christians either:
Dante, in Canto 26 of the Inferno of his Divine Comedy, encounters Odysseus (“Ulisse” in the original Italian) near the very bottom of Hell: with Diomedes, he walks wrapped in flame in the eighth ring (Counselors of Fraud) of the Eighth Circle (Sins of Malice), as punishment for his schemes and conspiracies that won the Trojan War.
(As opposed to putting Odysseus up with the noble pagans in the first ring.) Or:
When the Achaean ships reached the beach of Troy, no one would jump ashore, since there was an oracle that the first Achaean to jump on Trojan soil would die. Odysseus tossed his shield on the shore and jumped on his shield.[citation needed] He was followed by Protesilaus, who jumped on Trojan soil and later became the first to die, after he was slain by Hector.
The story of the death of Palamedes has many versions. According to some, Odysseus never forgave Palamedes for unmasking his feigned madness, and played a part in his downfall. One tradition says Odysseus convinced a Trojan captive to write a letter pretending to be from Palamedes. A sum of gold was mentioned to have been sent as a reward for Palamedes’s treachery. Odysseus then killed the prisoner and hid the gold in Palamedes’s tent. He ensured that the letter was found and acquired by Agamemnon, and also gave hints directing the Argives to the gold. This was evidence enough for the Greeks and they had Palamedes stoned to death. Other sources say that Odysseus and Diomedes goaded Palamedes into descending a well with the prospect of treasure being at the bottom. When Palamedes reached the bottom, the two proceeded to bury him with stones, killing him.[24]
Or
When the contest of the bow begins, none of the suitors is able to string the bow, but Odysseus does, and wins the contest. Having done so, he proceeds to slaughter the suitors—beginning with Antinous whom he finds drinking from Odysseus’ cup—with help from Telemachus, Athena and two servants, Eumaeus the swineherd and Philoetius the cowherd. Odysseus tells the serving women who slept with the suitors to clean up the mess of corpses and then has those women hanged in terror. He tells Telemachus that he will replenish his stocks by raiding nearby islands.
My rhetorical questions were intended to imply that my answer to both is “no”, but I don’t think the reception of Odysseus by the Romans and Christians is to the point. What I understand by a Mary Sue is a character standing in a certain relationship to the author: a narcissistic, self-indulgent, wish-fulfillment fantasy. (The TV Tropes page includes that, but it gets rather buried amongst all the detail. The Urban Dictionary page leaves this out—it is wrong. Wikipedia is accurate. Jiro’s definition above, in his first paragraph, leaves out the narcissism, and his second paragraph over-extends the concept.)
It is a charge so easy to level against any work of fiction, including the two I mentioned, and so impossible to argue about (since it depends on the inner thoughts of the author, for which the only witness is the accused) that it contributes nothing to any serious discussion. Its purpose is summary dismissal without trial.
A few more examples in the “Mary Sue or not?” game:
Menelaus Montrose in John C. Wright’s “Count to a Trillion” series.
I haven’t read a lot of the examples you ask about. God is excluded because he is not being presented as a fictional character. A fictional character who has unlimited power, torments an innocent person and gets away with it, lectures the audience, and is presented positively probably is a Mary Sue.
Conan is borderline because the criteria for good storytelling in the sword and sorcery genre are looser than in other genres, so he can do heroic deeds and get treasure and women without this necessarily being poor storytelling, I don’t think you can seriously claim that good storytelling is sacrificed in order to have Frodo go on an adventure.
Unlike my previous examples, that list of five was not intended to suggest any particular answer to the question, “Is this a Mary Sue?”, but to indicate the problem about crying Mary Sue. One could stridently say that any of them are (Christians generally take Job to be a parable, i.e.fiction—Job no more existed than did the Prodigal Son), and where can a discussion go after that?
ETA:
As for John Galt, Google him and “Mary Sue”.
I predict that of those who have troubled to have a view on the Sueness of Galt, their view is highly correlated with their attitude to Ayn Rand’s ideas.
One could stridently say that any of them are… and where can a discussion go after that?
Well, I defined it in a way that depends on good storytelling. “Good storytelling” is subjective, yet people have conversations all the time about whether something is good storytelling.
I don’t think the fact that a sufficiently determined person could call almost anything a Mary Sue means that the concept is completely devoid of meaning, that we can’t have constructive discussions about whether a character is one, or that there can’t be more borderline and less borderline examples and most of us can agree on the less borderline ones.
But surely you don’t think people will generally read all your work in the order you’d prefer, right? So now that you’ve realized some things about how status works, wouldn’t it be better to write in some way that doesn’t lead a sizable fraction of the people you wish were helping your cause to conclude that you’re a “colossal prick”?
Because when I talk to academics who might be good collaborators with MIRI, and they’ve read Eliezer’s stuff, they pretty often have had negative reactions to Eliezer’s writing. I try to re-explain MIRI’s work in less off-putting ways, but it’s hard to overcome initial impressions.
What percentage, would you say, of technical academics (who’ve read Eliezer’s writtings and conversed with you on the subject) have been turned off by it?
Wow. This really is a bubble. And here I was thinking the 3 sigma crowd might be less likely to be turned off by Eliezer. Do they state their reasons; if they do, could you list the compelling ones?
Probably all sorts of subtle things in the writing voice that people who trained to be scientists in academia learn by the time they get to PhD, and they can tell if those are missing and get the subconscious crackpot signal. Same as what happens every time when an outsider tries to influence people in a subculture and keeps getting the subtle subculture communication patterns wrong.
Might be easier if EY went in saying “here’s some science I did, take a look” rather than “you’re doing it all wrong, you should be working on this stuff like this instead”.
I have emailed roughly a dozen phds I know from grad school and work. I’ve asked if they remember what pushed them away, and if they don’t to take a second look. Hopefully some of them will register to give their own responses (and so you can converse with them), but for the ones who don’t register but email me, I’ll add them here myself.
My own response- I’m a physics phd, and for the first example that springs to mind, I find the quantum physics sequence very off putting. It opens by saying quantum physics isn’t mysterious and by the time it gets to the born probabilities, it admits that quantum physics is very much mysterious. I’m sure you can find previous posts where I’ve argued against many worlds as the one true interpretation.
First outsider response back;
James R. physics phd- “I’m pretty familiar with LessWrong, and have previously tried to read the first sequence. It seemed a lot like what you’d find on any atheist blog (a bit on evidence and sagan’s dragon, etc). I stopped when I got to a discussion of emergence that was appallingly ignorant. It was especially vexing given that the author, while deriding the idea, clearly believes intelligence is an emergent phenomenon, not dependent on the underlying neurons, or else he wouldn’t advocate you can reproduce it in silicon. Especially ironic given that a the whole next sequence (I didn’t read it) seems to be about the fact that words mean things. I won’t bother reading an author who won’t do the bare minimum of due diligence to investigate a term before writing a whole blog post about it.”
It seems a bit sad to entirely stop posting things to LessWrong, but I suppose that if only Facebook routes things to people who will want to read it, I should post any possibly-offensive or controversial material to only Facebook.
I was thinking more that you could try your hand at a writing style that communicates the same stuff but doesn’t annoy so many people. E.g. Bostrom writes about the same topics but seems to annoy people less often.
The primary failure mode of writing is that nobody reads it. I don’t know how to write like Bostrom in a way that people will read. I’m already worried about things like the tiling agents paper dropping off the radar.
Lots of people read Bostrom. And he gets listed in the FP 100 Global Thinkers list. And his works are widely translated. And he’s done hundreds of interviews in popular media. Lots of people read Robin Hanson, too.
I’m not saying you should drop all current projects to learn this additional writing skill of being fun to read while also not pissing people off, I’m just saying that I think the lesson to be drawn from lots of smart people being annoyed by your tone is a bit deeper than “Just don’t use this article as an introduction to LW.”
The steps you could take to avoid the nobody-reads-it failure mode seem to me to be orthogonal to the steps you could take to avoid the author-is-a-colossal-prick failure mode. Given that you started this whole damn web site and community as insurance against the possibility that there might be someone out there with more innate talent for FAI, lukeprog’s suggestion that you take steps to mitigate the author-is-a-colossal-prick failure mode in furtherance of that mission seems like a pretty small ask to me. And I say this as one who has always enjoyed your writing.
I’ve had the experience of finding your writing very annoying, but then coming around. On the basis of this, I have a suggestion: I don’t think you’re going to get the signaling thing right. Bostrom is good at that because he’s an academic and that involves years and years of signal training, and heavy selection on that basis.
I ceased to be annoyed by your writing when it occurred to me that no one in the world, nor all of us together, could subject you to a greater hell of ridicule than you will if you don’t make some significant progress on this FAI thing in your lifetime. My urge to adjust your sense of status evaporated when I realized I don’t need to put a sword over your head, because the sword you put there is bigger than any I could come up with.
Your rhetorical and personal assets are sincerity and passion. These are undermined by glibness and irony, and appeals to status. So I suggest avoiding these things, rather than working on a more professional style.
It’s interesting to note that all this would be largely mediated if Eliezer hadn’t made himself a character in the story. A case for land value tax, easily moveable housing, the value of rationality, his belief in the incompetence of this dimension– all this could have done in a story that doesn’t star Eliezer– and the reader wouldn’t, then, have to deal with the dissonance between the status it looks like Eliezer assigns himself (that of a player from a higher league slumming here) and that which the naive reader of the piece assigns him; so long as the character is not an obvious stand in.
As of now the story is a super stimulus for the improper-status-assignment emotion he recently discovered—which I suppose could be the true prank.
There’s something to learn in Feynman’s writings. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! is a book about how a highly-intelligent man gets by in a world full of fools. And yet the readers never feel like the author thinks they are fools, even though from Feynman’s perspective they almost certainly are.
You’re right, of course, it’s worse when the person is new (although my friend is vaguely familiar with LW—he reads Yvain’s blog, for example.) Indeed, that’s precisely why I showed it to him—to test that prediction.
I noticed a lot of similar (if less overt) reactions in the comments, which is what suggested to me this effect might be in effect in the first place (I loved both HPMOR and this post, so I must be similarly status-blind.)
This was my own attempt to confirm the hypothesis for myself, informally, and I found his response fairly persuasive. Well, it’s another data point for you, and I hope it helps your work even if it’s only as confirmation of something you already knew.
So after reading the comments, I showed this to a friend of mine to check if it would come across the way I expected to a (borderline) non-LWer. It was more or less what I expected … my interjections are in brackets.
This is even more pronounced than the reaction of many commenters, as you’d expect. Definitely still room for improvement there, Eliezer!
He writes like this in HPMoR, and to be honest I want to slap him even though I agree with him.
I liked HPMoR’s writing style. But I think it’s a matter of life experience—if I hadn’t spent my formative years surrounded by blithering idiots and utter institutional incompetence at every level and isolated as a result, I’d probably want to slap him too.
And maybe it’s a good strategy in terms of recruitment: it’s easier to attract people with less social capital, since the people with more social capital already have lives and don’t need to associate with institutions to build up social capital—and being four standard deviations to the right of just about everyone else in the immediate meatspace environment is a sure way to end up with very little social capital.
If the/a goal is to create a social-capital-building institution, that is. It may not be optimal for maximizing memetic spread.
HPMOR is slightly different in that the features of arrogance are an established part of the protagonists character, and acknowledged at least in part by the author. So there is a degree of dramatic irony where the reader knows that Harry isn’t quite as smart as he thinks he is, and notices him being over confident and making mistakes.
I can only think of one case that even feels worrisome. When Harry suggests they shouldn’t free the house elves, I don’t (or didn’t) feel sure the author knows that people saying slaves want masters is not evidence against the same old story; that in canon Dobby wants freedom; and that being Dumbledore’s slave is a poor career move if Dobby’s master almost has the votes to replace Dumbledore. (In principle Albus could also die, and deliberately put a Death Eater in charge. But that’s silly. There’s such a thing as too much pessimism.)
But Harry eventually starts thinking of the goblins as people. Here he at least starts to remember that, given human-like behavior and appearance, he should give a high prior to human-like minds. So we can still see slavery-apologist Harry as (meant to be) jumping to conclusions based on knowably poor evidence.
I wasn’t talking about the apologism for various unpopular opinions, I was talking about the pretentiousness and Mary Sueness.
I don’t know what you just said. “Pretentiousness” suggests to me, ‘acting like you know something when you don’t.’ And insofar as the term “Mary Sue” means anything to me, it suggests ‘the author treating some character as correct or justified when by normal standards they seem wrong.’ Like if Harry was right about elf slavery.
As a fandom term, “Mary Sue” has no official definition, but it generally seems to be when a character is used for wish-fulfillment in a way which overrides good storytelling. The wish fulfillment can be either direct (the author wants to date Harry and go on adventures like he does, and writes such a character) or indirectly (the author wants to correct things that are wrong with the world and so writes a character who does so).
If Harry is being used as a mouthpiece to say things that the author would like to say, whether or not it makes sense for the character to say them or get away with saying them, then the character would be a Mary Sue.
I’ve seen “Mary Sue” used to describe a lot of things, but I’ve never seen it used to describe a character created to patch what the author sees as flaws in the world or the storytelling. I have heard the term “fix fic”, which seems to cover much of that ground, but it’s not automatically pejorative.
That said, defining Mary Sue is fraught with the same difficulties as talking about D&D’s alignment system or comparing Kirk to Picard.
A “fix fic” is a type of fanfic, not a type of character, and doesn’t necessarily include a character that goes around doing the fixing. If a character fixes things by doing contrived things, especially if those things wouldn’t happen or the character wouldn’t be able to get away with them, then the character would be a Mary Sue.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FixerSue
Yeah, I still don’t buy it. You’re describing a bad plot structure, not a bad character type, and so’s the article you linked to.
I did my time on TV Tropes and don’t particularly want to get back into the game, but that read to me like someone extending a family of tropes with poor associations in an attempt to tar a story or stories they happened not to like—which is officially against policy over there, but happens all the time anyway. Long story short, the existence of a trope page doesn’t mean it’s reliable as analysis, nor as regards jargon that isn’t its own.
There are Mary Sues, and there is didactic fiction. Is Christian a Mary Sue in The Pilgrim’s Progress?
There are Mary Sues, and there is heroic fiction. Is Odysseus a Mary Sue in the Odyssey?
I can’t speak to Pilgrim’s Progress for the simple reason that I couldn’t get past 20 pages of it before giving up, but Odysseus? That’s easy: absolutely not.
Let’s look at the definition of Mary Sue from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue , http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MarySue , and http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Mary-Sue which collectively are a good representation of the common understanding of the term and define what it means.
In and out of the Odyssey, his defining characteristic is self-interested cleverness with a flaw of pride. He is far from perfect: he is quickly angered, selfish, and self-destructively arrogant. The whole story of the Odyssey is how his pride led to being cursed by the son of Poseidon, and all his sufferings and travails after that (not to mention all his men dying). Besides his character flaws, his personal traits are far from special: he has no supernatural abilities, he is not a demi-god or of unusual parentage like what seems like half the characters in the Illiad, he relies on personal charm or divine aid whenever he does run into supernatural entities, and his athleticism is inferior to Hector, Ajax, Heracles, etc. He is not a Mary Sue unless every trickster character like Coyote or Loki can also be considered Mary Sues as well. The Wikipedia article includes all sorts of good bits that is starkly incompatible with considering Odysseus a Mary Sue. For example, the Romans didn’t regard him as perfect:
And maybe not Christians either:
(As opposed to putting Odysseus up with the noble pagans in the first ring.) Or:
Or
My rhetorical questions were intended to imply that my answer to both is “no”, but I don’t think the reception of Odysseus by the Romans and Christians is to the point. What I understand by a Mary Sue is a character standing in a certain relationship to the author: a narcissistic, self-indulgent, wish-fulfillment fantasy. (The TV Tropes page includes that, but it gets rather buried amongst all the detail. The Urban Dictionary page leaves this out—it is wrong. Wikipedia is accurate. Jiro’s definition above, in his first paragraph, leaves out the narcissism, and his second paragraph over-extends the concept.)
It is a charge so easy to level against any work of fiction, including the two I mentioned, and so impossible to argue about (since it depends on the inner thoughts of the author, for which the only witness is the accused) that it contributes nothing to any serious discussion. Its purpose is summary dismissal without trial.
A few more examples in the “Mary Sue or not?” game:
Menelaus Montrose in John C. Wright’s “Count to a Trillion” series.
Frodo Baggins.
Conan.
John Galt.
God, in the Book of Job.
I haven’t read a lot of the examples you ask about. God is excluded because he is not being presented as a fictional character. A fictional character who has unlimited power, torments an innocent person and gets away with it, lectures the audience, and is presented positively probably is a Mary Sue.
Conan is borderline because the criteria for good storytelling in the sword and sorcery genre are looser than in other genres, so he can do heroic deeds and get treasure and women without this necessarily being poor storytelling, I don’t think you can seriously claim that good storytelling is sacrificed in order to have Frodo go on an adventure.
As for John Galt, Google him and “Mary Sue”.
Unlike my previous examples, that list of five was not intended to suggest any particular answer to the question, “Is this a Mary Sue?”, but to indicate the problem about crying Mary Sue. One could stridently say that any of them are (Christians generally take Job to be a parable, i.e.fiction—Job no more existed than did the Prodigal Son), and where can a discussion go after that?
ETA:
I predict that of those who have troubled to have a view on the Sueness of Galt, their view is highly correlated with their attitude to Ayn Rand’s ideas.
Well, I defined it in a way that depends on good storytelling. “Good storytelling” is subjective, yet people have conversations all the time about whether something is good storytelling.
I don’t think the fact that a sufficiently determined person could call almost anything a Mary Sue means that the concept is completely devoid of meaning, that we can’t have constructive discussions about whether a character is one, or that there can’t be more borderline and less borderline examples and most of us can agree on the less borderline ones.
Trying to use this as an introduction to LW would be stupid, yes.
But surely you don’t think people will generally read all your work in the order you’d prefer, right? So now that you’ve realized some things about how status works, wouldn’t it be better to write in some way that doesn’t lead a sizable fraction of the people you wish were helping your cause to conclude that you’re a “colossal prick”?
Why do you believe there is “a sizable fraction” of such people? The above mentioned anecdote is really the only instance that comes to (my) mind.
Because when I talk to academics who might be good collaborators with MIRI, and they’ve read Eliezer’s stuff, they pretty often have had negative reactions to Eliezer’s writing. I try to re-explain MIRI’s work in less off-putting ways, but it’s hard to overcome initial impressions.
What percentage, would you say, of technical academics (who’ve read Eliezer’s writtings and conversed with you on the subject) have been turned off by it?
So in my limited experience with physics and statistics phds I’ve sent here, its north of 80%.
Wow. This really is a bubble. And here I was thinking the 3 sigma crowd might be less likely to be turned off by Eliezer. Do they state their reasons; if they do, could you list the compelling ones?
Probably all sorts of subtle things in the writing voice that people who trained to be scientists in academia learn by the time they get to PhD, and they can tell if those are missing and get the subconscious crackpot signal. Same as what happens every time when an outsider tries to influence people in a subculture and keeps getting the subtle subculture communication patterns wrong.
Might be easier if EY went in saying “here’s some science I did, take a look” rather than “you’re doing it all wrong, you should be working on this stuff like this instead”.
I have emailed roughly a dozen phds I know from grad school and work. I’ve asked if they remember what pushed them away, and if they don’t to take a second look. Hopefully some of them will register to give their own responses (and so you can converse with them), but for the ones who don’t register but email me, I’ll add them here myself.
My own response- I’m a physics phd, and for the first example that springs to mind, I find the quantum physics sequence very off putting. It opens by saying quantum physics isn’t mysterious and by the time it gets to the born probabilities, it admits that quantum physics is very much mysterious. I’m sure you can find previous posts where I’ve argued against many worlds as the one true interpretation.
First outsider response back; James R. physics phd- “I’m pretty familiar with LessWrong, and have previously tried to read the first sequence. It seemed a lot like what you’d find on any atheist blog (a bit on evidence and sagan’s dragon, etc). I stopped when I got to a discussion of emergence that was appallingly ignorant. It was especially vexing given that the author, while deriding the idea, clearly believes intelligence is an emergent phenomenon, not dependent on the underlying neurons, or else he wouldn’t advocate you can reproduce it in silicon. Especially ironic given that a the whole next sequence (I didn’t read it) seems to be about the fact that words mean things. I won’t bother reading an author who won’t do the bare minimum of due diligence to investigate a term before writing a whole blog post about it.”
Ouch. (The statistics PhD thing is saddening to me but not surprising, alas.)
It seems a bit sad to entirely stop posting things to LessWrong, but I suppose that if only Facebook routes things to people who will want to read it, I should post any possibly-offensive or controversial material to only Facebook.
I was thinking more that you could try your hand at a writing style that communicates the same stuff but doesn’t annoy so many people. E.g. Bostrom writes about the same topics but seems to annoy people less often.
The primary failure mode of writing is that nobody reads it. I don’t know how to write like Bostrom in a way that people will read. I’m already worried about things like the tiling agents paper dropping off the radar.
Lots of people read Bostrom. And he gets listed in the FP 100 Global Thinkers list. And his works are widely translated. And he’s done hundreds of interviews in popular media. Lots of people read Robin Hanson, too.
I’m not saying you should drop all current projects to learn this additional writing skill of being fun to read while also not pissing people off, I’m just saying that I think the lesson to be drawn from lots of smart people being annoyed by your tone is a bit deeper than “Just don’t use this article as an introduction to LW.”
I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know how to learn to do it either.
The steps you could take to avoid the nobody-reads-it failure mode seem to me to be orthogonal to the steps you could take to avoid the author-is-a-colossal-prick failure mode. Given that you started this whole damn web site and community as insurance against the possibility that there might be someone out there with more innate talent for FAI, lukeprog’s suggestion that you take steps to mitigate the author-is-a-colossal-prick failure mode in furtherance of that mission seems like a pretty small ask to me. And I say this as one who has always enjoyed your writing.
Do you know how to learn to do this?
I would miss his current writing style.
If you’ll forgive unasked for advice:
I’ve had the experience of finding your writing very annoying, but then coming around. On the basis of this, I have a suggestion: I don’t think you’re going to get the signaling thing right. Bostrom is good at that because he’s an academic and that involves years and years of signal training, and heavy selection on that basis.
I ceased to be annoyed by your writing when it occurred to me that no one in the world, nor all of us together, could subject you to a greater hell of ridicule than you will if you don’t make some significant progress on this FAI thing in your lifetime. My urge to adjust your sense of status evaporated when I realized I don’t need to put a sword over your head, because the sword you put there is bigger than any I could come up with.
Your rhetorical and personal assets are sincerity and passion. These are undermined by glibness and irony, and appeals to status. So I suggest avoiding these things, rather than working on a more professional style.
It’s interesting to note that all this would be largely mediated if Eliezer hadn’t made himself a character in the story. A case for land value tax, easily moveable housing, the value of rationality, his belief in the incompetence of this dimension– all this could have done in a story that doesn’t star Eliezer– and the reader wouldn’t, then, have to deal with the dissonance between the status it looks like Eliezer assigns himself (that of a player from a higher league slumming here) and that which the naive reader of the piece assigns him; so long as the character is not an obvious stand in.
As of now the story is a super stimulus for the improper-status-assignment emotion he recently discovered—which I suppose could be the true prank.
There’s something to learn in Feynman’s writings. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! is a book about how a highly-intelligent man gets by in a world full of fools. And yet the readers never feel like the author thinks they are fools, even though from Feynman’s perspective they almost certainly are.
You’re right, of course, it’s worse when the person is new (although my friend is vaguely familiar with LW—he reads Yvain’s blog, for example.) Indeed, that’s precisely why I showed it to him—to test that prediction.
I noticed a lot of similar (if less overt) reactions in the comments, which is what suggested to me this effect might be in effect in the first place (I loved both HPMOR and this post, so I must be similarly status-blind.)
This was my own attempt to confirm the hypothesis for myself, informally, and I found his response fairly persuasive. Well, it’s another data point for you, and I hope it helps your work even if it’s only as confirmation of something you already knew.
It could be worse: imagine he had published that on a different day of the year.