Author’s Note 119: Shameless Blegging
hpmor.com
hpmor.com
- 'My publicly writing is a problem because "seething pools of corruption" in journalism will sneer at me.'
- 'To continue writing, I need to improve the global social condition.'
- 'I've designed and had someone program a Wikipedia replacement which has a one third probability of succeeding.'
- 'I think I can predict startup success in a way almost nobody else can.'
- 'Please involve me in <large list of futuristic projects>'.
That's... a bit amazing as a coda to a piece of fanfiction. Yes, I know HPMOR is not your average fanfic (I've read at least two thirds of it), but just... take a moment to step back and admire the post, and the level of self-confidence required to write it. All I can say.
FWIW I'm super excited about EY doing angel investing, I'd view an investment from him as more signal baring (and more of a trophy) than a YC investment... though I'm not sure how common a feeling this is.
It's unfortunate that his tone / style of writing generally annoys exceptionally smart people. It took me several years to get over it personally.
Consider that Harry in HPMOR is essentially a stand-in for a younger version of the author, and it becomes less surprising. He literally believes that he is an exceptional genius and that he is one of the only rational people in the world.
You can read his "autobiography" here: http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Yudkowsky%27s_coming_of_age
Additionally, he regards his work on AI as literally the most important thing in the world because he sincerely believes that it is the only possible way to save mankind.
I have some measure of respect for EY and he clearly is very intelligent but I think most people outside of his community would regard him as having a somewhat inflated ego.
You can not write all the POVs in HPMOR and still have 'giant ego' problems. He specifically addresses these issues (scene where harry learns to 'lose').
I think most peoples problem with him is that they hate how brazen he is in taking chances, they might think 'who is this arrogant asshole who thinks he DESERVES to talk to JKR' but the thing is he doesn't BELIEVE he deserves anything. He knows the only price for asking is hate by this group of people and the reward is far greater so why NOT ask?
What are some examples of substantial accomplishments that we can look to so as to justify this faith in his ability to get things done, and done well?
I think you're taking my criticism as much more severe than it actually is. I don't doubt there is a lot of optimization that can be done in the realm of (for example) startup investing - I've seen enough of how the business world works - and I expect that EY may indeed be able to make a difference there.
But to have more trust in EY than professionals and subject-matter experts in general seems rather absurd, and is what opens up EY to criticisms of supporting a minor personality cult.
> He specifically addresses these issues (scene where harry learns to 'lose').
In which he is intended to learn delayed gratification, not humility.
> He knows the only price for asking is hate by this group of people and the reward is far greater so why NOT ask?
I'm not saying there is anything wrong with asking. I hope that he does succeed, particularly in contacting JKR, maybe even winning a Hugo awawrd (I enjoy HPMOR but I think that it is overrated). I have no problem with him seeking contacts to become an investor, talk to people about city optimization, etc. I have a lot of sympathy for what he's saying about the attitude he gets, and that is reflected on the rest of his work, because he's famous for writing fanfiction.
But simply reading his writings provides ample evidence that EY, while genuine and sincere in his beliefs, and intelligent, has a rather overly high estimation of himself and his work, and knowing that puts OP's comment into more context.
But I too wonder what on Earth he's actually accomplished other than just words about existential risks.
I like his writings, both fiction and not. At one point, I was I guess, kinda of a fan, and I wanted to look up what progress he'd made to his self-assigned goal of Friendly AI, and I couldn't find anything besides a few cute papers.
I was unimpressed. No doubt Eliezer is smart, but contrary to what he seems to think, there are hundreds of thousands of people in the world just as smart, though maybe in different ways. In the scheme of things, he's not that unique. I think Eliezer's ego would be appropriate for someone who had made some progress in those goals. Presently it's a little cringy ..... but I still hope he surprises us.
Hardly. Even EY points to science fiction as what inspired him in a lot of ways. Probably the biggest mainstream popularizer of the idea of existential risk these days is the History/Discovery Channel with the nonsense it puts out. Actually, you could probably just go with the movie/tv industry in general.
Even more scientifically, you've had worries about asteroid impacts, supernova radiation, grey goo, etc. longer than EY has been alive, and these ideas were "popular" and in the mainstream consciousness in a way that EY and his ideas are not and probably will never be. EY and MIRI are unknowns outside of a very narrow field.
> founder of the Field of Friendly AI research,
I am not really sure how much to credit him with this, but I suppose it is true that most AI research pre-EY consisted of trying to develop AI with discussions of "friendliness" being more informal.
> founder of MIRI, an organisation dedicated to its research,
An unknown.
> author of a number of published articles on same.
Articles with virtually nonexistent circulation outside MIRI and LessWrong. How many citations of EY's published articles exist outside of those communities? Being self-published is not exactly extraordinary.
Again, I don't have anything against EY. He's just simply not that significant of a figure. Maybe he will be in the future - he certainly thinks MIRI is the only organization worth donating money to because it is the only way to save mankind - but he isn't now. I would not be surprised if most AI people regarded him mostly as a crank. (I don't think that's so, but I think EY's circumstances make him somewhat antithetical to the mainstream scientific community.) To be sure, I haven't founded anything as successful as LessWrong, even, and I certainly haven't convinced anyone to pay me to think and formalize my ideas. By most measures EY is more successful than I am.
Sidenote: Don't google MIRI at work. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute is not the first result.
I just did, and the entire front page is safe for work. Maybe Google knows something about your search patterns?
Why is that? This is equivalent to saying "He is rubber, you are glue, whatever you say bounces off him and sticks to you". His perceived public overconfidence is only harming him. He doesn't have to start self-deprecating, but toning it down a bit would reduce the amount of people claiming he leads a cult or has delusions of grandeur. I don't believe that the fate of the world rests on his or his organization's shoulders, and I doubt that very many LessWrong users do either. So what does he gain by asserting it does?
I am fine with him taking risks and I value his work, but that doesn't mean I have to value his level of confidence.
Whether or not you agree with the premise of Roko's Basilisk, the fact that so much thought has been put into this is interesting in its own right.
Also what actually is the wikipedia replacement he's talking about?
Reading just a bit, the constant "science!" is really off putting and I'm only half the chapter in. Just reading this [0] makes me want to close the tab. Is it this obvious and in the face throughout the whole 'book'?
[0]
> "Mum," Harry said. "If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um... off the top of my head I can't think of where to find something about how it's an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments -"
If you're into audiobooks, don't miss the podcast: http://www.hpmorpodcast.com -- It is excellently read by multiple voices.
You can find editors for hire online. Some of them are very good.
Of course, they won't be JKR or JKR's editors. They'll be ordinary professionals with a professional opinion.
I suspect that may be enough to put the author off.
I also suspect that JKR has glanced at this already. But since she's known for taking political positions rather different to the author's, I doubt first contact would be a happy experience.
You need to contact JKR to know what to tell the editor (is she offended by the many criticisms of canon? the occasional political comments eg on immigration? the notorious Draco rape bit? and so on); bonus points if the editor is trusted and can help make the deal work.
You're not editing at this point, you're asking for official approval, which is a whole other thing.
You're not going to get that from JKR, or from any other high-profile author who has a professional interest in keeping their own work separate from the vast flood of fanfic that surrounds it.
But also - it's simply stupid (and irrational) to think that JKR is going to approve of political comments about immigration, or a rape scene.
She's made her political position very obvious in interviews. Why would she change it for some fanfic?
It's like trying to tell Steve Jobs that he should have made Macs run Windows, because OS X was a dumb mistake.
> You're not editing at this point, you're asking for official approval, which is a whole other thing.
Official approval would almost certainly require changes, hence the need for an editor after starting any sort of negotiation. The editor is part of any deal going through. No one expects that there's even the slightest chance that MoR would be approved with no changes; there is a tiny iota of a chance that after appropriate changes are made. What is 'appropriate'? No idea. So hiring an editor before is not nearly as useful as hiring after.
> But also - it's simply stupid (and irrational) to think that JKR is going to approve of political comments about immigration, or a rape scene.
You're very opinionated for an ignorant fool. I never said it was a rape scene, and I doubt Rowling would object to the immigration part.
It's quite common for authors that achieve critical success. Stephan King even went back and published one of his older books with the material the big bad editors and publishers made him take out. Let's not even talk about Robert Jordan.
Even his detractors [0] call HPMOR a "cracking good read".
The projects he's mentioned are all full time undertakings by someone qualified in their respective areas, so it seems excessive and naive to think they can all be addressed simultaneously by one person who's record of accomplishment to date is meager.
And even if the chance of any of the things he mentions happening are very small any one of them would be awesome. Seriously, half of them could be the life's work of a very talented, intelligent person. If he gets more than one of the very ambitious ones up and running and then either does the Musk superhuman thing or hands it off to someone else I'll be very impressed.
In the same way that a clever computer science can be useful to many industries purely through the application of computing, he is hoping that his thought processes can be useful to many different industries, quite separate from actual in-depth knowledge of that particular industry.
I don't think this is a far-fetched idea.
Whether Eliezer is actually good enough to do it is another question, to which I don't know the answer.
They'd fought in the forest, and he hadn't gotten a chance to say it.
They'd fought in the corridors of Hogwarts, and he hadn't gotten a chance to say it.
They'd fought in the air, broomsticks issued to every soldier, and it still hadn't made sense to say it.
Harry had thought he wouldn't ever get to say those words, not while he was still young enough for them to be real...
The Chaos Legionnaires were looking at Harry in puzzlement, as their general swam with his feet pointing up toward the distant light of the surface,and his head pointed down toward the murky depths.
"Why are you upside down?", the young commander shouted at his army, and began to explain how to fight after you abandoned the privileged orientation of gravity.
---------
That scene is enough, for me, for the book to be Great Literature. No need to overthink the term. I don't think the author could avoid having some people call his writing Great Literature if he tried.
>In a publishing world where popular success often equates to ill-written or hackneyed work, Pratchett’s novels, although in a racy, readable style, were constantly witty, with many cultural, vernacular and literary references. You never quite knew where the next association was coming from: you would find sideways references to HP Lovecraft, William Shakespeare, Beachcomber, Sellar and Yeatman, Thomas Hughes, Peter Shaffer (a good joke about Salieri), JRR Tolkien, Egyptology, vampirism, dragons.
On a different note, here's an example of a shout-out (actually, two) in HPMOR:
> "Since you became Headmaster forty years ago, there've been eleven students to graduate Hogwarts who became heroes, I mean people like Lupe Cazaril and so on, and ten of those were boys. Cimorene Linderwall was the only witch."
Those names, Lupe Cazaril and Cimorene Linderwall, add nothing to the story and don't appear again. They're an out-of-universe signal from the author to the reader that you're both familiar with the work of Lois McMaster Bujold and Patricia C. Wrede.
The passage I quoted is in-universe characterization. (Characterization that I particularly like.) It can't be understood unless the reader is familiar with Ender's Game, but it's clear, for example, that Harry, not Eliezer Yudkowsky, is also familiar with that book. Compare the other example, where it's clear that not only is everyone unfamiliar with Dealing with Dragons, it doesn't exist at all.
It's fine if you see nothing of value in a moving scene of a little boy getting to recapitulate, in real life, one of his idol's greatest moments. I do see value in that.
I have no doubt that he would also rather invest his advanced literary skills in new fiction more than spend time with an editor on something that has already went splat.
Think safe thoughts!
Why? Some smarter folks I trust for their opinions believe otherwise. It's also because I haven't read the damn novel and they have, or so I assume.