How about an expanded version: if we could be a timeless spaceless perfect observer of the universe(s), what evidence would we expect to see?
almkglor
Karma: 118
Although it might be good to be aware that you shouldn’t remove a weapon from your mental arsenal just because it’s labeled “dark arts”. Sure, you should be one heck of a lot more reluctant to use them, but if you need to shut up and do the impossible really really badly, do so—just be aware that the consequences tend to be worse if you use them.
After all, the label “dark art” is itself an application of a Dark Art to persuade, deceive, or otherwise manipulate you against using those techniques. But of course this was not done lightly.
I’m not sure about others, but while I initially felt that way (“Thank …. who?”) whenever something like that happened, careful thought-screening and imagining situations (i.e. simulation) helped weed it out. I’d be surprised if I slip something like that these days, unless it’s really really nasty.
“It’s frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what is going on.”—Amos Tversky
“Speed is what distinguishes intelligence. No bird discovers how to fly: evolution used a trillion bird-years to ‘discover’ that—where merely hundreds of person-years sufficed.”—Marvin Minsky
I just finished my NaNoWriMo novel, Judge on a Boat (latest revision kept here), last month in November, and this month I’m going through the process of fixing it up and improving it. I described it on LessWrong yesterday.
Why this project? Well, I’ve been lurking on Less Wrong (and before that, Overcoming Bias) for years, and yet I recently realized that I’ve not been very rational in actual practice. So I decided to write a novel about rationality and moral philosophy, just to make sure that I managed to actually understand the topics well enough to put them in my own words. Hopefully the attempt to explain them to a lay audience will help my own understanding.
I’d like to get some help from others in the LW community, since I suspect the novel is not very well-written, and I need some ideas on how to improve it. Why should anyone help me? Well: two of the best recent rationalist fiction that I know of are Alicorn’s Luminosity and EY’s HPMoR. I am nowhere near those levels (for one, their characters are not flat). The only advantage I have is that my novel has (in current law, anyway) a slightly higher chance of being published, unless J.K.Rowling suddenly has an aneurysm and gives the copyright to the public domain, or if suddenly everyone listens to rms and start repealing copyright laws internationally: the novel is original and won’t get sued into oblivion if published.
My goals are… a bit iffy. I imagine publishing this in actual real-world physical book form, because those things are easier to give as gifts and might help raise the sanity waterline (badly needed in my family, and least they read books). But with the current level of quality I suspect I have about a snowball’s chance of passing unscathed through the sun.
Alternatively: how about an open-source novel? I could put it up into a CC-BY-SA and try to actively recruit people to help improve it, try to leverage the community, but that probably will make it difficult to publish physically, as legally speaking (IANAL) that would require contacting all the copyright owners. Maybe a fiduciary agreement a la FSF-Europe, but I know of no big, trustable entity that would act as a fiduciary for fiction.
What do you think about David Brin’s “disputation arenas?”
Maybe we could get a group of scientists to try out some form of disputation arena (Delphi Method for example) and see if they can be more effectively managed that way?
Hello Less Wrong,
My first comment ever. I have been lurking on Less Wrong for several years already (and on Overcoming Bias before there was even a Less Wrong site), and have been mostly cyber-stalking EY ever since I caught wind of his AI-Box exploits.
This year 2012, on a whim, I joined the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) last November, and started writing a novel I had been randomly thinking of making, “Judge on a Boat”. The world is that humanity manages to grow up a little without blowing itself up, rationality techniques are taught regularly (a certain minimum level of knowledge in these techniques is required for all citizens), practical mind simulations and artificial intelligence are still far-off (but being actively worked on, somewhere way, way off in the background of the novel), and experts in morality and ethical systems, called “Judges”, are given the proper respect they deserve.
The premise is that a trainee Judge, Nicole Angel, visiting Earth for her final examinations (she’s from Mars Lagrange Point 1), gets marooned on a lifeboat with a small group of people. She is then forced to act as a full Judge (despite not actually passing the exams yet) for the people in the boat.
The other premise is that a new Judge, Emmanuel Verrens, is reading about Nicole Angel’s adventures in novel form, under the guidance of high-ranking Judge David Adams. Emmanuel’s thinking is remarkably similar to hers, despite her being a fictional character -
The novel was intended to be more about moral philosophy than strictly rationality, but as I was using Less Wrong as an ideas pump, it ended up being more about rationality, really. (^^)v
Anyway, if anyone is interested in the early draft text, see this.
I proffer the following quotes rather than an entire article (I think the major problem with post-modernism isn’t irrationality, but verbosity. JUST LOOK AT YOURSELF):