Bribe an astronaut on the next manned moon mission to bring it with them
Bribe an engineer on the next robotic moon mission to send it with the rover
Get on a manned mars mission, and throw it out the airlock at just the right speed
Massive evacuated sphere (like a balloon but arbitrarily light), aimed very carefully
Catapult
Send instructions on how to build a copy of the thing, and where to put it, such that an alien race will do it as a gesture of goodwill
Same, but with an incentive of some kind
Same, but do it acausally
Make a miniature moon and put the thing on that
Build an AGI with the goal of putting the thing on the moon with 99% confidence, with minimum impact to other things
Carve the thing out of the moon’s surface, using lasers from satellites around Earth
Build a reverse space elevator: the earth is in a luno-stationary orbit due to tidal locking, so you could in principle build an extremely tall tower on the moon’s surface that came relatively close to earth. Then, you could lower objects down that tower after launching them a relatively short distance, exchanging them for moonrock ballast.
Quantum-bogo-send it: check to see if the thing has materialized on the moon. If it hasn’t, destroy this everett branch.
Tegmark-1-bogo-send it: check to see if the thing has materialized on the moon. If it hasn’t, destroy a large local region of space.
Tegmark-4-bogo-send it: check to see if the thing has materialized on the moon. If it hasn’t, derive a logical contradiction
Pray for God to send the thing to the moon
Offer to sell your soul to the devil in exchange for the thing being sent to the moon
Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, and do the best one
Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, and do the worst one
Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, and do all of them
Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, put all the letters from all the answers into a big bag, and shake it and draw from it repeatedly until you draw a sentence that describes a strategy for sending a thing to the moon, and then do that
Somehow annihilate the earth (except for the thing). The thing will then probably fall to the moon? Probably, figure out whether that’s right before annihilating the earth
Pull a Raymond-Smullyan-style “will you answer my next question honestly?” scam on the director of NASA, forcing him to kiss you… er… I mean, send the thing to the moon
Wait until moon tourism is cheap
Start a religion whose central tenets include the belief that this thing being on the moon is a prerequisite for the creation of a universal utopia
Non-reverse-space-elevator: build a space elevator, and then throw the thing off the top when the moon is nearby
Big ol’ rocket
Nuclear explosion based craft
Wormhole
Unrealistically-good weather control, allowing you to harness the motion of the molecules in the atmosphere to propel objects however you want via extremely careful placement.
Redefine or reconceptualize “the moon” to mean wherever the thing is already
Redefine or reconceptualize “thing” to mean a thing that’s already on the moon
Redefine or reconceptualize “send” to mean keeping the sent thing away from the target
Build an extremely detailed simulation of the moon with the thing on it
Wait for the sun to engulf the earth-moon system, mixing what’s-left-of-the-thing up with what’s-left-of-the-moon
Propel the earth, “wandering earth”-style, to become a moon of Jupiter. Now at least the thing is on a moon.
Propel the earth, “wandering earth”-style, to collide with the moon, and be sure the thing is located at the point of collision
Throw it really hard
Gun
Put your face between a really big grapefruit and the moon, put the thing in the grapefruit, and then insert a spoon into the grapefruit. When the grapefruit squirts at your face, pull away quickly
Make a popular movie that involves the thing being sent to the moon, in a very memeable way, and hope Elon takes the bait
Name the thing “420 69 Doge To The Moon” and hope Elon takes the bait
So, y’know how you can levitate things in ultrasonic standing waves? Can you do that with light waves on a super small scale? I think you can, and I think I’ve seen some IBM animation that was made this way? “optical tweezers”, was it called? So, do that, with the standing waves slowly drifting up toward the moon
Eh; things seeming to retain a particular identity over time is just a useful fiction—“the thing” next year is just a subset of the causal results of the thing as it is now, not really any more special than any other causal results of the thing as it is now. So since the moon is in the thing’s future light cone already, the job is more-or-less already accomplished.
Turn back time to the moment when the parts of the thing were most recently intermixed with the parts of the moon. Maybe the big bang? or maybe some more recent time.
Starting somewhere on the equator, move the thing upward by one foot. Tomorrow, move it up by another foot. Continue until you reach the moon. Surely it’s never all that hard to just move the thing one more foot, right?
I did the exercise because I couldn’t sleep; I didn’t keep careful count of the time, and I didn’t do it all in one sitting. I’d guess I spent about an hour on it total, but I think there’s a case to be made that this was cheating. However, “fresh eyes” is actually a really killer trick when doing this kind of exercise, in my experience, and it’s usually available in practice. So I don’t feel too bad about it.
I really really dislike the experience of saying things I think are totally stupid, and I currently don’t buy that I should start trying to say stupider things. My favorite things in the above list came from refusing to just say another totally stupid thing. Nearly everything in my list is stupid in some way, but the things that are so stupid they don’t even feel interesting basically make me feel sad. I trust my first-round aesthetic pruner to actually be helping to train my babbler in constructive directions.
The following don’t really feel worth having said, to me:
Throw it really hard
Catapult
Kick it really hard
Wormhole
Nuclear explosion based craft
My favorites didn’t come after spewing this stuff; instead they came when I refused to be okay with just saying more of that kind of junk:
Move the thing upward by one foot per day
Name the thing “420 69 Doge To The Moon” and hope Elon takes the bait
The various bogo-send options
Optical tweezers
The difference isn’t really that these are less stupid; in fact they’re kind of more stupid, practically speaking. But I actually viscerally like them, unlike the first group. Forcing myself to produce things I hate feels like a bad strategy on lots of levels.
First: people are different, so, like, definitely do the version of this you think actually helps you. (I’ve updated that “reflect afterward about what worked and didn’t work for you” is a generally important part of cognitive exercises, and should be a part of the Babble exercises)
But I want to flag the reasons I personally think it’s important to have access to the dumb thoughts, and why it at least works for me.
I personally frequently have the experience of feeling totally stuck, writing down “list of strategies for X?”, still feeling totally stuck, and then writing down “bad reasons for X”, and this just totally unsticks me. I typically generate 1-2 bad ideas and then start generating good ideas again.
They’re… free? Nothing bad happens when I generate them. I ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later.
The goal here is train myself to have an easier time generating ideas on the fly. In real life, I don’t generate 50 ideas when babbling, I typically generate like 10. The point of the practice IMO is to sort of overtrain such that the 10 good ideas come easily when you need them and you never feel stuck.
You might not share the experience in #1, in which case, for sure, do what seems good. (To be clear, if you found “actually generate good ideas tho” a prompt that generated useful stuff, seems good to notice and have that prompt in your toolkit)
But FYI my crux for “whether I personally think BenWr benefits from generating bad ideas” is whether you ended up generating more good ideas faster-than-otherwise (which might or might not be true, but you didn’t really address). ((though note: “whether it’s useful to generate bad ideas” is a different question from “whether it’s useful to use the prompt ‘only generate good ideas’. It’s possible for them both to be useful))
I agree that “stop and come back to it later” is often an important aspect of this sort of skill, but in general if I can generate the good ideas in the first place in one sitting that’s better, because then I can just actually finish whatever goal the babbling was in service of.
>They’re… free? Nothing bad happens when you generate them. You ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later.
I understood BenWr to be suggesting this was false. His pruner is rejecting “bad ideas” for a reason, and perhaps it is a good reason; perhaps bad things do happen if he deliberately lets in more “bad ideas”.
If that were true for people in general, or for a significant minority of people, I’d definitely want to understand what the bad thing is, how it works, whether “having bad ideas” tends to be good on net anyway, and how to mitigate the bad thing if so.
I do think that lots of people—at least 85% of people, in my experiences running this kind of exercise with others—experience some kind of pain or suffering when “trying to have bad ideas”, at least at first. (I did a series of mnemonics workshops before I even started using this kind of thing in rationality training, so n is somewhere around… 350?)
It has always appeared to me that the painful parts of the experience are coming from a combination of “doing new things is hard”, “doing things I’ve trained myself not to do is uncomfortable”, and “social image-based stuff like ‘what if people see this and think I’m bad’ or ’what if I see this and think I’m bad”. All of these concerns are important to address in some way, I claim, for a person to get really good at this. I haven’t actually seen anybody investigate what’s going on for them and then decide that they do not want to gain the skillset. (There certainly are people who decide not to use negatively-valenced emotions when committing things to memory, and who decide to keep their “thinking like a villain” knob turned down pretty low, and these decisions seem similar to “try not to have bad ideas”; but I think they’re not dealbreakers for the central skill, and I think “try not to have bad ideas” probably is.)
However, I think I was much, much worse ten years ago at making space for the people I’m teaching to find their own way of doing things. So maybe if I ran mnemonics workshops today, many more people would pipe up to be like “You know what? This is bad for me. No thank you.”
fyi I updated the section to say “I” instead of “you” (I’d set myself the goal of talking about my own experience since this seemed like the sort of thing it was important not to assume too much of others, but then slipped up out of habit. I meant it more in a form “hey, here’s how it is for me, consider whether this is also true of you?’”)
(in general I’ve gotten feedback or picked up vibes that I’m kinda pushy with my frame in a way that’s tramply to people trying to articulate or figure out their own way of doing things, which I’m still trying to figure out)
A line I edited in towards the end, which I think was maybe the most important one, was to distinguish the difference between “explicitly trying to generate good ideas and not accept bad ideas” in a particular way, vs “allowing yourself to generate bad ideas” (which I still don’t know enough to know if it resonates with benwr, but, seemed like the sort of thing that’d be easy to conflate, since the difference is subtle)
Hire SpaceX to send it
Bribe an astronaut on the next manned moon mission to bring it with them
Bribe an engineer on the next robotic moon mission to send it with the rover
Get on a manned mars mission, and throw it out the airlock at just the right speed
Massive evacuated sphere (like a balloon but arbitrarily light), aimed very carefully
Catapult
Send instructions on how to build a copy of the thing, and where to put it, such that an alien race will do it as a gesture of goodwill
Same, but with an incentive of some kind
Same, but do it acausally
Make a miniature moon and put the thing on that
Build an AGI with the goal of putting the thing on the moon with 99% confidence, with minimum impact to other things
Carve the thing out of the moon’s surface, using lasers from satellites around Earth
Build a reverse space elevator: the earth is in a luno-stationary orbit due to tidal locking, so you could in principle build an extremely tall tower on the moon’s surface that came relatively close to earth. Then, you could lower objects down that tower after launching them a relatively short distance, exchanging them for moonrock ballast.
Quantum-bogo-send it: check to see if the thing has materialized on the moon. If it hasn’t, destroy this everett branch.
Tegmark-1-bogo-send it: check to see if the thing has materialized on the moon. If it hasn’t, destroy a large local region of space.
Tegmark-4-bogo-send it: check to see if the thing has materialized on the moon. If it hasn’t, derive a logical contradiction
Pray for God to send the thing to the moon
Offer to sell your soul to the devil in exchange for the thing being sent to the moon
Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, and do the best one
Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, and do the worst one
Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, and do all of them
Ask everyone on LessWrong to generate 50 ideas each on how to send a thing to the moon, put all the letters from all the answers into a big bag, and shake it and draw from it repeatedly until you draw a sentence that describes a strategy for sending a thing to the moon, and then do that
Somehow annihilate the earth (except for the thing). The thing will then probably fall to the moon? Probably, figure out whether that’s right before annihilating the earth
Pull a Raymond-Smullyan-style “will you answer my next question honestly?” scam on the director of NASA, forcing him to kiss you… er… I mean, send the thing to the moon
Wait until moon tourism is cheap
Start a religion whose central tenets include the belief that this thing being on the moon is a prerequisite for the creation of a universal utopia
Non-reverse-space-elevator: build a space elevator, and then throw the thing off the top when the moon is nearby
Big ol’ rocket
Nuclear explosion based craft
Wormhole
Unrealistically-good weather control, allowing you to harness the motion of the molecules in the atmosphere to propel objects however you want via extremely careful placement.
Redefine or reconceptualize “the moon” to mean wherever the thing is already
Redefine or reconceptualize “thing” to mean a thing that’s already on the moon
Redefine or reconceptualize “send” to mean keeping the sent thing away from the target
Build an extremely detailed simulation of the moon with the thing on it
Wait for the sun to engulf the earth-moon system, mixing what’s-left-of-the-thing up with what’s-left-of-the-moon
Propel the earth, “wandering earth”-style, to become a moon of Jupiter. Now at least the thing is on a moon.
Propel the earth, “wandering earth”-style, to collide with the moon, and be sure the thing is located at the point of collision
Throw it really hard
Gun
Put your face between a really big grapefruit and the moon, put the thing in the grapefruit, and then insert a spoon into the grapefruit. When the grapefruit squirts at your face, pull away quickly
Make a popular movie that involves the thing being sent to the moon, in a very memeable way, and hope Elon takes the bait
Name the thing “420 69 Doge To The Moon” and hope Elon takes the bait
So, y’know how you can levitate things in ultrasonic standing waves? Can you do that with light waves on a super small scale? I think you can, and I think I’ve seen some IBM animation that was made this way? “optical tweezers”, was it called? So, do that, with the standing waves slowly drifting up toward the moon
Eh; things seeming to retain a particular identity over time is just a useful fiction—“the thing” next year is just a subset of the causal results of the thing as it is now, not really any more special than any other causal results of the thing as it is now. So since the moon is in the thing’s future light cone already, the job is more-or-less already accomplished.
Turn back time to the moment when the parts of the thing were most recently intermixed with the parts of the moon. Maybe the big bang? or maybe some more recent time.
Starting somewhere on the equator, move the thing upward by one foot. Tomorrow, move it up by another foot. Continue until you reach the moon. Surely it’s never all that hard to just move the thing one more foot, right?
Kick it really hard
Nanobot swarm
Adult-sized stomp rocket
Some thoughts after doing this exercise:
I did the exercise because I couldn’t sleep; I didn’t keep careful count of the time, and I didn’t do it all in one sitting. I’d guess I spent about an hour on it total, but I think there’s a case to be made that this was cheating. However, “fresh eyes” is actually a really killer trick when doing this kind of exercise, in my experience, and it’s usually available in practice. So I don’t feel too bad about it.
I really really dislike the experience of saying things I think are totally stupid, and I currently don’t buy that I should start trying to say stupider things. My favorite things in the above list came from refusing to just say another totally stupid thing. Nearly everything in my list is stupid in some way, but the things that are so stupid they don’t even feel interesting basically make me feel sad. I trust my first-round aesthetic pruner to actually be helping to train my babbler in constructive directions.
The following don’t really feel worth having said, to me:
Throw it really hard
Catapult
Kick it really hard
Wormhole
Nuclear explosion based craft
My favorites didn’t come after spewing this stuff; instead they came when I refused to be okay with just saying more of that kind of junk:
Move the thing upward by one foot per day
Name the thing “420 69 Doge To The Moon” and hope Elon takes the bait
The various bogo-send options
Optical tweezers
The difference isn’t really that these are less stupid; in fact they’re kind of more stupid, practically speaking. But I actually viscerally like them, unlike the first group. Forcing myself to produce things I hate feels like a bad strategy on lots of levels.
First: people are different, so, like, definitely do the version of this you think actually helps you. (I’ve updated that “reflect afterward about what worked and didn’t work for you” is a generally important part of cognitive exercises, and should be a part of the Babble exercises)
But I want to flag the reasons I personally think it’s important to have access to the dumb thoughts, and why it at least works for me.
I personally frequently have the experience of feeling totally stuck, writing down “list of strategies for X?”, still feeling totally stuck, and then writing down “bad reasons for X”, and this just totally unsticks me. I typically generate 1-2 bad ideas and then start generating good ideas again.
They’re… free? Nothing bad happens when I generate them. I ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later.
The goal here is train myself to have an easier time generating ideas on the fly. In real life, I don’t generate 50 ideas when babbling, I typically generate like 10. The point of the practice IMO is to sort of overtrain such that the 10 good ideas come easily when you need them and you never feel stuck.
You might not share the experience in #1, in which case, for sure, do what seems good. (To be clear, if you found “actually generate good ideas tho” a prompt that generated useful stuff, seems good to notice and have that prompt in your toolkit)
But FYI my crux for “whether I personally think BenWr benefits from generating bad ideas” is whether you ended up generating more good ideas faster-than-otherwise (which might or might not be true, but you didn’t really address). ((though note: “whether it’s useful to generate bad ideas” is a different question from “whether it’s useful to use the prompt ‘only generate good ideas’. It’s possible for them both to be useful))
I agree that “stop and come back to it later” is often an important aspect of this sort of skill, but in general if I can generate the good ideas in the first place in one sitting that’s better, because then I can just actually finish whatever goal the babbling was in service of.
>They’re… free? Nothing bad happens when you generate them. You ignore them and move on and consolidate the good ideas later.
I understood BenWr to be suggesting this was false. His pruner is rejecting “bad ideas” for a reason, and perhaps it is a good reason; perhaps bad things do happen if he deliberately lets in more “bad ideas”.
If that were true for people in general, or for a significant minority of people, I’d definitely want to understand what the bad thing is, how it works, whether “having bad ideas” tends to be good on net anyway, and how to mitigate the bad thing if so.
I do think that lots of people—at least 85% of people, in my experiences running this kind of exercise with others—experience some kind of pain or suffering when “trying to have bad ideas”, at least at first. (I did a series of mnemonics workshops before I even started using this kind of thing in rationality training, so n is somewhere around… 350?)
It has always appeared to me that the painful parts of the experience are coming from a combination of “doing new things is hard”, “doing things I’ve trained myself not to do is uncomfortable”, and “social image-based stuff like ‘what if people see this and think I’m bad’ or ’what if I see this and think I’m bad”. All of these concerns are important to address in some way, I claim, for a person to get really good at this. I haven’t actually seen anybody investigate what’s going on for them and then decide that they do not want to gain the skillset. (There certainly are people who decide not to use negatively-valenced emotions when committing things to memory, and who decide to keep their “thinking like a villain” knob turned down pretty low, and these decisions seem similar to “try not to have bad ideas”; but I think they’re not dealbreakers for the central skill, and I think “try not to have bad ideas” probably is.)
However, I think I was much, much worse ten years ago at making space for the people I’m teaching to find their own way of doing things. So maybe if I ran mnemonics workshops today, many more people would pipe up to be like “You know what? This is bad for me. No thank you.”
fyi I updated the section to say “I” instead of “you” (I’d set myself the goal of talking about my own experience since this seemed like the sort of thing it was important not to assume too much of others, but then slipped up out of habit. I meant it more in a form “hey, here’s how it is for me, consider whether this is also true of you?’”)
(in general I’ve gotten feedback or picked up vibes that I’m kinda pushy with my frame in a way that’s tramply to people trying to articulate or figure out their own way of doing things, which I’m still trying to figure out)
A line I edited in towards the end, which I think was maybe the most important one, was to distinguish the difference between “explicitly trying to generate good ideas and not accept bad ideas” in a particular way, vs “allowing yourself to generate bad ideas” (which I still don’t know enough to know if it resonates with benwr, but, seemed like the sort of thing that’d be easy to conflate, since the difference is subtle)
A thing that was going through my head but I wasn’t sure how to turn into a real idea (vulgar language from a movie):
Perhaps you would like me to stop the car and you two can fuck yourselves to Lutsk!