“glowfic” apparently. written in a roleplay forum format.
This is not a story for kids, even less so than HPMOR. There is romance, there is sex, there are deliberately bad kink practices whose explicit purpose is to get people to actually hurt somebody else so that they’ll end up damned to Hell, and also there’s math.
start here. or don’t, of course.
I should have listened to the content warning because literally everything the main character (I shall call him Math Elk) says or thinks is completely insufferable rationalist buzzword babbling. Couldn’t make it past two pages.
It wasn’t an auspicious start when he gets on the plane and immediately treats a social interaction with a woman like a dang financial transaction. OK kept reading, maybe the main character comes from the planet of weird insufferable nerds on purpose.
It got unbearable when Math Elk did nothing but spew nonsense at Carissa and she seemed weirdly OK with it despite not being a weird nerd. Couldn’t maintain suspension of disbelief.
Wait math pets?? Tell me more. Are they cute? How can I get one? Will a math pet sit on my desk solving all my everyday algebra problems for me? How cute are they when trying to figure out excel formulas?
Update: I looked up math pet and it was not at all what I had envisioned.
also, thanks for the intro to “glowfic” - for a good chunk of my 20s I was obsessed with my side project which I called “plotplant” (dorky?) which was an infinitely forkable collaborative writing app. I never got it past a few different build attempts because I would always get caught in the weeds of how, if it were successful, the complexity of a story that had loads of branches would be navigated. My own personal xanadu. Anyway, this glowfic looks like a nightmare scenario that would keep me in them weeds, ruminating, “there has to be a better way!”
It’s so hard to read when every bit has all that meta info next to it! Written by Eliezer or not
actually I found this ancient text online that helps explain everything:
Eliezer Monogatari, chapter 69:
On his mighty steed Oververbosity, Eliezer is fast approaching the cliff edge overlooking the dreaded Chasm of Unreadability. His desire to cram more words and IQfulness into his text has deafened him to the wails of the Ghost of Editors Past, begging him to at least paste into Google Docs and fix a few squigglies.
In a moment of rational brilliance, he casts Bayesian Reasoning and epiphanisationalises that he can Just Add Metainfo to every line, exponentially increasing his QLAWPW (quality of life adjusted words per word), making him The Greatest Author. His loyal mount leaps into the air over the abyss, buoyed by clouds of self-delusion.
Of course, he crashes and falls into the chasm. But what’s this? The miasma of unreadability… it’s more clouds of self-delusion generated by the cult of TREACLES! He rises, unscathed, head three sizes bigger than before.1
1: Scholars are divided on whether this is because the toxic miasma mutated his sense of self-worth or if he hit his head on the chasm floor and it swelled. We will never know.
There is romance, there is sex, there are deliberately bad kink practices whose explicit purpose is to get people to actually hurt somebody else
The fact that this isn’t just a ratfic of My Immortal is cowardice to the highest degree
Also, I will mention it every time it comes up: “dath ilan” is an anagram of thailand and there just has to be a reason, dammit.
Hi my name is Eliezer Rationa’lity Sanity Raven Jaynes and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with libertarian streaks and helpful tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Robin Hanson (AN: if u don’t know who he is get da hell out of here!). I’m not related to E. T. Jaynes but I wish I was because he’s a major fucking hottie.
Why do both Scotts and Eliezers pseudonyms end with ‘ain’? Yvain and Iarwain.
Edit: and small frustration what is up with the lack of timestamps? I know the internet is getting worse and worse with those replacing the ‘posted at 22 feb 2022’ with ‘posted 1 year ago’ things (as predicted in the transmetropolitan), or just having sites autoupdate the timestamps to seem current for the google ranking (saw a ‘2024’ guide which in the text still talked about 2023 and had a mid 2023 timestamp, so somebody messed up a script there). But no timestamps at all is a bit odd, the only timestamp I saw was ‘Jan 19, 2024, 3:29 PM’ and that looks suspiciously like ‘now’.
Fake answer: at some point in rat history they thought that Armenian people were genetically superior and decided to take traditional Armenian surnames as their handles, but they both simultaneously and serendipitously bungled the spelling. The names should actually be “Yvian” (pronounced yiv-yahn) and “Iarwian” (pronounced ee-arh-wee-yahn)
Real answer: probably a tolkien elvish name idk
elvish name
https://www.glyphweb.com/arda/i/iarwainbenadar.php the elvish name of Tom Bombadil.
Could it be that Yud read about Bombadil, thought, “man it’s a good thing this dude is with the good guys, or middle earth would be screwed” and then decided to spin that into a technocult about AI?
what is up with the lack of timestamps?
For mysterious reasons they’ve screened off their own past.
There are hidden timestamps, remove the “.post-footer { display: none; }” CSS from the page and they should appear, but yeah keeping timestamps from us is the worst I want to know when stuff went down.
I don’t even really care that much, it is just a small but ongoing frustration with enshittification of everything digital. (and the Rationalists do nothing! You live in SV damnit, do some effective angry protesting or something ;) )
Why protest when you could spend far less energy and just “not be wrong” and “have no stake” by over-fitting your statistical model to the past?
Interesting commentary on LessWrong
I don’t think this would fit into the 2022 review. Project Lawful has been quite influential, but I find it hard to imagine a way its impact could be included in a best-of.
Including this post in particular strikes me as misguided, as it contains none of the interesting ideas and lessons from Project Lawful, and thus doesn’t make any intellectual progress.
One could try to do the distillation of finding particularly interesting or enlightening passages from the text, but that would be
• A huge amount of work[1], but maybe David Udell’s sequence could be used for that.
• Quite difficult for the more subtle lessons, which are interwoven in the text.
I have nothing against Project Lawful in particular[2], but I think that including this post would be misguided, and including passages from Project Lawful would be quite difficult.
For that reason, I’m giving this a -1.
