Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Author Notes, Chp. 81 This makes me worry that the actual chapter might’ve come as an anticlimax, especially with so many creative >suggestions that didn’t get used. I shall poll the Less Wrong discussants and see how they felt before I decide whether >to do this again. This was actually intended as a dry run for a later, serious “Solve this or the story ends sadly” puzzle – >like I used in Part 5 of my earlier story Three Worlds Collide—but I’ll have to take the current outcome into account when >deciding whether to go through with that.
Let me argue that this chapter was in no way an anticlimax:
We had no way to know which solution Harry might have come up with or picked (I like the hat trick still even though I figured that was not likely the solution of choice).
Neither Harry nor Eliezer are omniscient
Harry was under a lot of time pressure and had less information to work with than the readers
There is a lot of ‘motivation’ to keep the story interesting which limits the available solution space (i.e., any solution that results in a terrible story is not really an option)
A lot of entertainment is derived from ‘watching’ HOW things play out. History, movies, fiction, etc. are interesting to me for this reason and not because the main character did everything flawlessly.
If Eliezer does want to do a puzzle plot piece I strongly recommend accounting for fact that many of us read this story to relax and do NOT exercise our full investigative powers on solving story problems as that involves a lot of boring (for me at least) mundane work when done properly.
Let me argue that this chapter was in no way an anticlimax:
We had no way to know which solution Harry might have come up with or picked (I like the hat trick still even though I figured that was not likely the solution of choice).
Neither Harry nor Eliezer are omniscient
Harry was under a lot of time pressure and had less information to work with than the readers
There is a lot of ‘motivation’ to keep the story interesting which limits the available solution space (i.e., any solution that results in a terrible story is not really an option)
A lot of entertainment is derived from ‘watching’ HOW things play out. History, movies, fiction, etc. are interesting to me for this reason and not because the main character did everything flawlessly.
If Eliezer does want to do a puzzle plot piece I strongly recommend accounting for fact that many of us read this story to relax and do NOT exercise our full investigative powers on solving story problems as that involves a lot of boring (for me at least) mundane work when done properly.