Most fictional characters are optimised to make for entertaining stories, hence why “generalizing from fictional evidence” is usually a failure-mode. The HPMOR Harry and the Comet King were optimized by two rationalists as examples of rationalist heroes — and are active in allegorical situations engineered to say something that rationalists would find to be “of worth” about real world problems.
They are appealing precisely because they encode assumptions about what a real-world, rationalist “hero” ought to be like. Or at least, that’s the hope. So, they can be pointed to as “theses” about the real world by Yudkowsky and Alexander, no different from blog posts that happen to be written as allegorical stories, and if people found the ideas encoded in those characters more convincing than the ideas encoded in the present April Fools’ Day post, that’s fair enough.
Not necessarily correct on the object-level, but, if it’s wrong, it’s a different kind of error from garden-variety “generalizing from fictional evidence”.
As fictional characters popular among humans, what attitude is present in them is evidence for what sort of attitude humans like to see or inhabit. As author of those characters, Yudkowsky should be aware of this mechanism. And empirically, people with accurate beliefs and positive attitudes outperform people with accurate beliefs and negative attitudes. It seems plausible Yudkowsky is aware of this as well.
“Death with dignity” reads as an unnecessarily negative attitude to accompany the near-certainty of doom. Heroism, maximum probability of catgirls, or even just raw log-odds-of-survival seem like they would be more motivating than dignity without sacrificing accuracy.
Like, just substitute all instances of ‘dignity’ in the OP with ‘heroism’ and naively I would expect this post to have a better impact(/be more dignified/be more heroic), except insofar it might give a less accurate impression of Yudkowsky’s mood. But few people have actually engaged with him on that front.
Harry Potter and the Comet King have access to magic; we don’t.
… is the obvious response, but the correct response is actually:
Harry Potter and the Comet King don’t exist, so what attitude is present in those characters is irrelevant to the question of what attitude we, in reality, ought to have.
Most fictional characters are optimised to make for entertaining stories, hence why “generalizing from fictional evidence” is usually a failure-mode. The HPMOR Harry and the Comet King were optimized by two rationalists as examples of rationalist heroes — and are active in allegorical situations engineered to say something that rationalists would find to be “of worth” about real world problems.
They are appealing precisely because they encode assumptions about what a real-world, rationalist “hero” ought to be like. Or at least, that’s the hope. So, they can be pointed to as “theses” about the real world by Yudkowsky and Alexander, no different from blog posts that happen to be written as allegorical stories, and if people found the ideas encoded in those characters more convincing than the ideas encoded in the present April Fools’ Day post, that’s fair enough.
Not necessarily correct on the object-level, but, if it’s wrong, it’s a different kind of error from garden-variety “generalizing from fictional evidence”.
+1
As fictional characters popular among humans, what attitude is present in them is evidence for what sort of attitude humans like to see or inhabit. As author of those characters, Yudkowsky should be aware of this mechanism. And empirically, people with accurate beliefs and positive attitudes outperform people with accurate beliefs and negative attitudes. It seems plausible Yudkowsky is aware of this as well.
“Death with dignity” reads as an unnecessarily negative attitude to accompany the near-certainty of doom. Heroism, maximum probability of catgirls, or even just raw log-odds-of-survival seem like they would be more motivating than dignity without sacrificing accuracy.
Like, just substitute all instances of ‘dignity’ in the OP with ‘heroism’ and naively I would expect this post to have a better impact(/be more dignified/be more heroic), except insofar it might give a less accurate impression of Yudkowsky’s mood. But few people have actually engaged with him on that front.