Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio.
This is: Hero Licensing, published by Eliezer Yudkowsky on the LessWrong.
I expect most readers to know me either as MIRI's co-founder and the originator of a number of the early research problems in AI alignment, or as the author of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, a popular work of Harry Potter fanfiction. I’ve described how I apply concepts in Inadequate Equilibria to various decisions in my personal life, and some readers may be wondering how I see these tying in to my AI work and my fiction-writing. And I do think these serve as useful case studies in inadequacy, exploitability, and modesty.
As a supplement to Inadequate Equilibria, then, the following is a dialogue that never took place—largely written in 2014, and revised and posted online in 2017.
i. Outperforming and the outside view
(The year is 2010. eliezer-2010 is sitting in a nonexistent park in Redwood City, California, working on his laptop. A person walks up to him.)
person: Pardon me, but are you Eliezer Yudkowsky?
eliezer-2010: I have that dubious honor.
person: My name is Pat; Pat Modesto. We haven’t met, but I know you from your writing online. What are you doing with your life these days?
eliezer-2010: I’m trying to write a nonfiction book on rationality. The blog posts I wrote on Overcoming Bias—I mean Less Wrong—aren’t very compact or edited, and while they had some impact, it seems like a book on rationality could reach a wider audience and have a greater impact.
pat: Sounds like an interesting project! Do you mind if I peek in on your screen and
eliezer: (shielding the screen) —Yes, I mind.
pat: Sorry. Um... I did catch a glimpse and that didn’t look like a nonfiction book on rationality to me.
eliezer: Yes, well, work on that book was going very slowly, so I decided to try to write something else in my off hours, just to see if my general writing speed was slowing down to molasses or if it was this particular book that was the problem.
pat: It looked, in fact, like Harry Potter fanfiction. Like, I’m pretty sure I saw the words “Harry” and “Hermione” in configurations not originally written by J. K. Rowling.
eliezer: Yes, and I currently seem to be writing it very quickly. And it doesn’t seem to use up mental energy the way my regular writing does, either.
(A mysterious masked stranger, watching this exchange, sighs wistfully.)
eliezer: Now I’ve just got to figure out why my main book-writing project is going so much slower and taking vastly more energy... There are so many books I could write, if I could just write everything as fast as I’m writing this...
pat: Excuse me if this is a silly question. I don’t mean to say that Harry Potter fanfiction is bad—in fact I’ve read quite a bit of it myself—but as I understand it, according to your basic philosophy the world is currently on fire and needs to be put out. Now given that this is true, why are you writing Harry Potter fanfiction, rather than doing something else?
eliezer: I am doing something else. I’m writing a nonfiction rationality book. This is just in my off hours.
pat: Okay, but I’m asking why you are doing this particular thing in your off hours.
eliezer: Because my life is limited by mental energy far more than by time. I can currently produce this work very cheaply, so I’m producing more of it.
pat: What I’m trying to ask is why, even given that you can write Harry Potter fanfiction very cheaply, you are writing Harry Potter fanfiction. Unless it really is true that the only reason is that you need to observe yourself writing quickly in order to understand the way of quick writing, in which case I’d ask what probability you assign to learning that successfully. I’m skeptical that this is really the best way of using your off hours.
eliezer: I’m skeptical that you have correctly understood the concept of “off hours.” There’s a ...
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