Another thought about the sidekick status. I recall this comment by Eliezer, where he says, in part:
If you know yourself for an NPC and that you cannot start such a project yourself, you ought to throw money at anyone launching a new project whose probability of saving the world is not known to be this small.
I could be misreading it, but if you replace “money” with “effort”, he basically describes the sideckick role as “NPC”. Which rubbed me the wrong way even then. I certainly would not describe you or Brienne as NPCs, no way. I wonder if it’s just an unfortunate choice of words.
I think that, if Eliezer felt that way in the past, he no longer feels that way; he has told me that he thinks the sidekick role is valuable and regrets possibly having made sidekick-identified people feel otherwise.
I wonder if it’s just an unfortunate choice of words.
It strikes me as consistent with a “there are the real, heroic, important people who make decisions and do stuff and change the world and do the impossible and are thousand-year-old vampires and wish to become stronger and etc., and then there’s everyone else” vibe that pervades the Sequences.
(ETA: …but which apparently is either unintentional or subsequently updated away from.)
Being charitable, it seems to me that this is more a case of the word (phrase? acronym?) “NPC” having somewhat unfortunate connotations than of any direct malice being intended. For instance, if we take Eliezer’s quote and replace “know yourself for an NPC” with “are aware that you have little chance of contributing directly to [our agenda]”, we get something that’s far less objectionable. Since replacing the word with the meaning shouldn’t change anything if you’re doing it right, I don’t “NPC” was intended as anything more than a simple turn of phrase. The use of “NPC” simply strikes me as Eliezer’s typical flair for drama, rather than some sort of deliberate snipe.
I think that, in a video game sense (which is really the only context where the distinction of “player characters” makes real narrative sense,) “sidekick” type characters probably do tend to be NPCs. But I think this is a major weakness of using a video game framing for the concepts under discussion. Problems are rarely solved in real life the way they’re solved in books, but they’re pretty much never solved in real life the way they are in video games.
It is a wholly inadequate analogy. Player Characters are supposed to be the ones with the agency, right? But most Player Characters are confined to a low-level domain of expertise(not metaethics, communication, social organization or economics, but scavenging and combat), and thus to do any good in the world must defer to someone with more high-level worldview(someone they should rightly trust well enough to tell them where humanity needs them), either that, or they tend to undergo their campaigns in some twisted amusement ride under the thumb of a perverse god(moloch, most likely), where straying from their specialization is simply not on offer.
In short; those who live life like a game, fulfilled and decisive, either must or at least should follow(or advise for) some higher authority who knows how to fit their domain into the broader needs of the species.
The rest of us, those of us more inclined to insatiable curiosity and pensivity, we are not player characters. We are the DMs who designed the game to keep its Player Characters happy in doing good.
Another thought about the sidekick status. I recall this comment by Eliezer, where he says, in part:
I could be misreading it, but if you replace “money” with “effort”, he basically describes the sideckick role as “NPC”. Which rubbed me the wrong way even then. I certainly would not describe you or Brienne as NPCs, no way. I wonder if it’s just an unfortunate choice of words.
I think that, if Eliezer felt that way in the past, he no longer feels that way; he has told me that he thinks the sidekick role is valuable and regrets possibly having made sidekick-identified people feel otherwise.
It strikes me as consistent with a “there are the real, heroic, important people who make decisions and do stuff and change the world and do the impossible and are thousand-year-old vampires and wish to become stronger and etc., and then there’s everyone else” vibe that pervades the Sequences.
(ETA: …but which apparently is either unintentional or subsequently updated away from.)
According to OP’s reply, Eliezer_2015 likely disagrees with Eliezer_<=2013 on this issue… and we have Brienne to thank for it.
Cool. Updated (both the comment and my beliefs).
Being charitable, it seems to me that this is more a case of the word (phrase? acronym?) “NPC” having somewhat unfortunate connotations than of any direct malice being intended. For instance, if we take Eliezer’s quote and replace “know yourself for an NPC” with “are aware that you have little chance of contributing directly to [our agenda]”, we get something that’s far less objectionable. Since replacing the word with the meaning shouldn’t change anything if you’re doing it right, I don’t “NPC” was intended as anything more than a simple turn of phrase. The use of “NPC” simply strikes me as Eliezer’s typical flair for drama, rather than some sort of deliberate snipe.
I think that, in a video game sense (which is really the only context where the distinction of “player characters” makes real narrative sense,) “sidekick” type characters probably do tend to be NPCs. But I think this is a major weakness of using a video game framing for the concepts under discussion. Problems are rarely solved in real life the way they’re solved in books, but they’re pretty much never solved in real life the way they are in video games.
It is a wholly inadequate analogy. Player Characters are supposed to be the ones with the agency, right? But most Player Characters are confined to a low-level domain of expertise(not metaethics, communication, social organization or economics, but scavenging and combat), and thus to do any good in the world must defer to someone with more high-level worldview(someone they should rightly trust well enough to tell them where humanity needs them), either that, or they tend to undergo their campaigns in some twisted amusement ride under the thumb of a perverse god(moloch, most likely), where straying from their specialization is simply not on offer.
In short; those who live life like a game, fulfilled and decisive, either must or at least should follow(or advise for) some higher authority who knows how to fit their domain into the broader needs of the species.
The rest of us, those of us more inclined to insatiable curiosity and pensivity, we are not player characters. We are the DMs who designed the game to keep its Player Characters happy in doing good.