Popularizing rationality is harder than most rationalists realize. As a very high lower bound, I don’t think Eliezer is succeeding at it with MoR. I strongly encourage you to practice it with a project you can finish as soon as possible, like a blog-post-sized short story.
In general, people who want to succeed in creative endeavors tend to underestimate the importance of practicing through many cycles of making something and learning from it. It’s far too common to try to take on a large, long-term project right off the bat.
(The sequences generally succeed at communicating their ideas, but they’re aimed at an audience that’s already more intelligent, intellectual, thoughtful, and rational coming in, which is a different and easier task than popularizing difficult, complicated ideas.)
Thanks, this is a good precaution to take. My goal isn’t to popularize rationality per-se (I can’t speak for Eliezer, I don’t know what his goal is with MoR), it’s more to show various topics/principles/ideas introduced here in different light, not necessarily to defends them or to explain them. I think people playing a fantasy game are a lot more receptive to crazy/unusual ideas, so it will be easy to sneak those ideas past their radar.
If I don’t succeed at it with the first game, at least I’ll still have a pretty good and fun game. Thanks for the word of caution.
Popularizing rationality is harder than most rationalists realize. As a very high lower bound, I don’t think Eliezer is succeeding at it with MoR. I strongly encourage you to practice it with a project you can finish as soon as possible, like a blog-post-sized short story.
In general, people who want to succeed in creative endeavors tend to underestimate the importance of practicing through many cycles of making something and learning from it. It’s far too common to try to take on a large, long-term project right off the bat.
(The sequences generally succeed at communicating their ideas, but they’re aimed at an audience that’s already more intelligent, intellectual, thoughtful, and rational coming in, which is a different and easier task than popularizing difficult, complicated ideas.)
Thanks, this is a good precaution to take. My goal isn’t to popularize rationality per-se (I can’t speak for Eliezer, I don’t know what his goal is with MoR), it’s more to show various topics/principles/ideas introduced here in different light, not necessarily to defends them or to explain them. I think people playing a fantasy game are a lot more receptive to crazy/unusual ideas, so it will be easy to sneak those ideas past their radar. If I don’t succeed at it with the first game, at least I’ll still have a pretty good and fun game. Thanks for the word of caution.
By the way, as examples of very fast game development, you might want to look at Increpare, Klik of the Month, and Speed-IF.