More generally, every single piece of fiction written by EY that I’ve read so far involves very rational characters doing very rational things, and that’s kind of the point. No one is saying that you shouldn’t write fiction in general, but I do say that you shouldn’t stop being rational while writing fiction.
This feels to me like a goalpost being moved.
Yes, Eliezer’s characters do smart things, but the likely reason is that he likes writing them that way, the audience enjoys reading that, and he has a comparative advantage doing that. (Kinda like Dick Francis writes about horse racing all the time.)
And I guess HPMOR really is “the Sequences for people who wouldn’t read the Sequences otherwise”. But was is also strategically necessary to write this or this? New audience, perhaps, but strongly diminishing returns.
The original objection was that rationalists and effective altruists feel like they are not allowed to do things that are not optimal (fully rational, or fully altruistic). Writing HPMOR could have been an optimal move for Eliezer, but the following stories probably were not. They are better explained by a hypothesis that Eliezer enjoys writing.
This feels to me like a goalpost being moved.
Yes, Eliezer’s characters do smart things, but the likely reason is that he likes writing them that way, the audience enjoys reading that, and he has a comparative advantage doing that. (Kinda like Dick Francis writes about horse racing all the time.)
And I guess HPMOR really is “the Sequences for people who wouldn’t read the Sequences otherwise”. But was is also strategically necessary to write this or this? New audience, perhaps, but strongly diminishing returns.
The original objection was that rationalists and effective altruists feel like they are not allowed to do things that are not optimal (fully rational, or fully altruistic). Writing HPMOR could have been an optimal move for Eliezer, but the following stories probably were not. They are better explained by a hypothesis that Eliezer enjoys writing.