So if you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and thought...
"You know, HPMOR is pretty good so far as it goes; but Harry is much too cautious and doesn't have nearly enough manic momentum, his rationality lectures aren't long enough, and all of his personal relationships are way way way too healthy."
It's the story of Keltham, from the world of dath ilan; a place of high scientific achievement but rather innocent in some ways. For mysterious reasons they've screened off their own past, and very few now know what their prescientific history was like.
Keltham dies in a plane crash and ends up in the country of Cheliax, whose god is "Asmodeus", whose alignment is "Lawful Evil" and whose people usually go to the afterlife of "Hell".
And so, like most dath ilani would, in that position, Keltham sets out to bring the industrial and scientific revolutions to his new planet! Starting with Cheliax!
(Keltham's new friends may not have been entirely frank with him about exactly what Asmodeus wants, what Evil really is, or what sort of place Hell is.)
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.
The starting point is Book 1, Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus. I suggest logging into ProjectLawful.com with Google, or creating an email login, in order to track where you are inside the story.
Please avoid story spoilers in the comments, especially ones without spoiler protection; this is not meant as an "ask Eliezer things about MICWOA" thread.
Reading Project Lawful (so far, which is the majority of Book 1) has given me a strong mental pointer to the question of "how to model a civilization that you find yourself in" and "what questions to ask when trying to improve it and fix it", from a baseline of not really having a pointer to this at all (I have only lived in one civilization and I've not been dropped into a new one before). I would do many things differently to Keltham (I suspect I'd build prediction markets before trying to scale up building roads) but it's nonetheless extremely valuable to read someone's attempt at this.
The thing I dislike most about it is that every interaction is suffused with highly adversarial deceptive analysis. I find this pretty hard to do in real life and kind of distasteful and is not a skill I aspire to have. I understand Keltham finds himself in a highly adversarial environment, but I still don't like it.
I really wish it had chapters or similar units of chunking. I bounced off like 4 times before being able to read this book, having to learn the practice of "this is about enough reading for now / this is probably a good place to stop" which most books help me with themselves.
Overall +9 as an assessment of the quality of the contribution, though I agree that I'm not quite sure how this would fit in the review. Perhaps we could just include a select few pages of it for flavor then link to the website.
So if you read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, and thought...
"You know, HPMOR is pretty good so far as it goes; but Harry is much too cautious and doesn't have nearly enough manic momentum, his rationality lectures aren't long enough, and all of his personal relationships are way way way too healthy."
...then have I got the story for you! Planecrash aka Project Lawful aka Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus, is a story in roleplay-format that I as "Iarwain" am cowriting with Lintamande, now past 1,000,000 words.
It's the story of Keltham, from the world of dath ilan; a place of high scientific achievement but rather innocent in some ways. For mysterious reasons they've screened off their own past, and very few now know what their prescientific history was like.
Keltham dies in a plane crash and ends up in the country of Cheliax, whose god is "Asmodeus", whose alignment is "Lawful Evil" and whose people usually go to the afterlife of "Hell".
And so, like most dath ilani would, in that position, Keltham sets out to bring the industrial and scientific revolutions to his new planet! Starting with Cheliax!
(Keltham's new friends may not have been entirely frank with him about exactly what Asmodeus wants, what Evil really is, or what sort of place Hell is.)
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.
The starting point is Book 1, Mad Investor Chaos and the Woman of Asmodeus. I suggest logging into ProjectLawful.com with Google, or creating an email login, in order to track where you are inside the story.
Please avoid story spoilers in the comments, especially ones without spoiler protection; this is not meant as an "ask Eliezer things about MICWOA" thread.