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.
In his dialogue Deconfusing Some Core X-risk Problems, Max H writes:
Yeah, coordination failures rule everything around me. =/
I don't have good ideas here, but something that results in increasing the average Lawfulness among humans seems like a good start. Maybe step 0 of this is writing some kind of Law textbook or Sequences 2.0 or CFAR 2.0 curriculum, so people can pick up the concepts explicitly from more than just, like, reading glowfic and absorbing it by osmosis. (In planecrash terms, Coordination is a fragment of Law that follows from Validity, Utility, and Decision.)
This is the "glowfic" he was referring to.
I'm very sympathetic to Niplav and Max H's concerns that it's just way too long. However, I disagree with their thinking. The burden of the length has actually fallen much harder on me than most readers, and in spite of that, I still think that projectlawful is worth the read.
The lessons from projectlawful are a package deal; if you want some, you have to read the rest, and you have to watch examples characters trying the lessons and sometimes failing and sometimes succeeding, and you have to care. The use of examples to approach each problem from multiple angles is a key element of what made Yud's original sequences great and what made the CFAR handbook effective.
Yudkowsky seems to have noticed that humans spend many hours a week reading fiction and zero hours a week becoming more rational, and that people weren't reading the sequences so much because it was "work". I currently think that both projectlawful and HPMOR were the correct moves to fix these problems.
Thanks for the sort-of-response. My main point was that it's tricky to include Project Lawful in the review, since the past three times those were fairly short (and small!) books. Long things are fine, but I was critical about the value of including all of Project Lawful in the review.
whoops, corrected from habryka to Max H. That section was a bit unusual, this is not a normal mistake that I'm predisposed to making (this is an example of a mistake that I'm very predisposed to making).
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.