By far the most enjoyable writing of yours I've read. I'd pay to read the rest but since you're giving it up for free I'll make a donation to SIAI instead.

Stellar, quite literally. Cannot wait for the next installments. You must eat your babies.

It's good. Not baby-eatin' good, but good enough ;).

Amazing.

I wonder if they discovered libertarianism, and if they are able to think in alternative ethic systems.

Similar: how do they treat abortion, freezing of embryos and such.

Anyone see similarities to the mooties from 'The Mote in God's Eye'?

Martin

I was going to say that this (although very good) wasn't quite Weird enough for your purposes; the principal value of the Baby-Eaters seems to be "individual sacrifice on behalf of the group", which we're all too familiar with. I can grok their situation well enough to empathize quickly with the Baby-Eaters. I'd have hoped for something even more foreign at first sight.

Then I checked out the story title again.

Eagerly awaiting the next installments!

Martin, the Baby-eaters don't remind me of the Moties. I think it's Eli's use of the Alderson Drive that reminded you of The Mote in God's Eye.

1. Akon's first line is objectively the right thing to say in that situation. One might append "holy."

2. Akon's first line at the Command Conference is also pure gold.

I expect it would make writing the series vastly more difficult, but I so much wanted to see a group of choose-your-own-adventure options at the bottom, for what the crew should do.

Why didn't the Babyeaters develop the practice of separate pens for each family, with tribes redistributing common resources (e.g. erratic, potentially rotting, meat from hunts) among parents, and parents feeding children out of their share? Maybe their brains lacked the capacity to recognize so many distinct off-spring, but why not spray them with a pheromone? Producing vast numbers of offspring with big expensive full-size brains (which is itself implausible) makes the large numb to be destroyed immediately would impose huge metabolic costs relative to privatizing the commons and distinguishing between offspring, then adjusting clutch-size based on parental resources.

Martin, the Baby-eaters don't remind me of the Moties. I think it's Eli's use of the Alderson Drive that reminded you of The Mote in God's Eye. @Peter

Nope :-). I thought about the vast reproduction rate both species share. And since the german title of the book and name for the Moties is different i had to look it up.

Martin

"makes the large numb" Is obviously a result of an incomplete edit.

I wonder why the babies don't eat each other. There must be a huge selective pressure to winnow down your fellows to the point where you don't need to be winnowed. This would in turn select for small brained, large and quick growing at the least. There might also be selective pressure to be partially distrusting of your fellows (assuming there was some cooperation), which might follow over into adulthood.

I also agree with the points Carl raised. It doesn't seem very evolutionarily plausible.

Good stuff, Eliezer. You have no idea how happy I am that this is part 1 of 8. Eight!!

Patrick, the way I understand the aliens' psychology, it's not that they eat babies because their terminal value is "the group comes before the individual", it's that their terminal value is "it's good to eat babies". That this was good for their group(s) in the early history of their species is the explanation for why they have this terminal value, but it doesn't factor in their moral reasoning.

Is this a different story from the one that was supposed to make us go insane?

If the aliens' wetware (er, crystalware) is so efficient that their children are already sentient when they are still tiny relative to adults, why don't the adults have bigger brains and be much more intelligent than humans? Given that they also place high values on science and rationality, had invented agriculture long before humans did, and haven't fought any destructive wars recently, it makes no sense that they have a lower level of technology than humans at this point.

Other than that, I think the story is not implausible. The basic lesson here is the ... (read more)

Kevin, yes, a different story.

Why didn't the Babyeaters develop the practice of separate pens for each family, with tribes redistributing common resources (e.g. erratic, potentially rotting, meat from hunts) among parents, and parents feeding children out of their share?

Why doesn't modern society securitize hard assets into money of zero maturity, instead of using a purely abstract debt-based currency to denominate debts? Because it would be slightly more complicated, that's why.

Evolution doesn't do a lot of stuff that you think is a good idea. Even s... (read more)

How is it that these aliens' anatomy is so radically different from humans', yet they have a word for "kick"?

WE WISH TO SUBSCRIBE TO YOUR NEWSLETTER

Laughed at loud at this point.

Great stuff, I was disappointed when I reached the end and realized I have to wait for the next day.

My only complaint is that this is apparently going to be only eight parts and not a full-length novel, but maybe you can be forgiven for that.

Wait, how did they manage to avoid developing a notion of forgiveness in some form? I mean, isn't that more or less required to stabilize out of sync tit-for-tat oscillations? Or am I completely wrong on this? @Psy-Kosh

They didn't stabilize tit-for-tat, they completely eliminated the other side in any dispute. I guess they could quickly repopulate even after the most devastating wars by just not eating so many babies. This kept happening until the scientist Babyeaters killed off all non-scientist tribes. The scientists aren't forgiving, they just unders... (read more)

Does the Babyeater morality emphasize the consumption and digestion of babies or is it simply the winnowing that they value? If it's the latter our biologies are probably different enough that one could fudge the translation of some texts about contraception and abortion to make it look like we winnow. It just turns out that we destroy our young even earlier and do so by prohibiting them from combining another sort of baby- which they need to survive. Sometimes when they do combine we destroy them anyway.

Not to be crude, but maybe the aliens would enjoy so... (read more)

Re: "MST3K Mantra"

Illustrative fiction is a tricky business, if this is to be part of your message to the world it should be as coherent as possible, so you aren't accidentally lying to make a better story.

If it is just a bit of fun, I'll relax.

"Why doesn't modern society securitize hard assets into money of zero maturity, instead of using a purely abstract debt-based currency to denominate debts? Because it would be slightly more complicated, that's why." Eliezer,

I think you're mistaken about the relative complexity of parents selectively provisioning their own offspring, versus the baroque and complex adaptations for social intelligence and coordination required for this system to be stable.

"And anyone who tried to cheat, to hide away a child, or even go easier on their own child... (read more)

How can I put it? If I were to describe anything that couldn't happen from an evolutionary perspective, that would be cheating. At the same time, I needed baby-eating aliens for my story, so I wrote the bottom line first and then put the 'explanation' on the lines above. Though it's worth noting that cannibalism was the result of group selection in a laboratory environment; see The Tragedy of Group Selectionism. And it's also worth noting that the point I'm using the Babyeaters to make, is one that I happen to actually believe to be true.

There's a poin... (read more)

Re: "MST3K Mantra"

Very improbable evolved beings don't make for good warnings about the precious moral miracle of human values. It would be better to use an example of a plausible 'near-miss,' e.g. by extrapolating from something common in Earth species.

Carl, the essential premise of the Babyeaters is "among chimp-level creatures who've previously developed strong social recognition and reputation tracking, group selection can actually take hold via punishment of nonpunishers and extermination warfare between tribes".

Then you ask what kind of aliens you might run into as a result.

If you told me that this actually happened, I would not see it as contradicting any particular evolutionary biology that I know of. No, group selection doesn't usually happen in Nature, but you don't usually have stron... (read more)

Even relatively strong social recognition and coordination systems, as in primates, leave plenty of opportunities to shirk and betray. Behaviors of selective provisioning and parental investment (the cheating that already sometimes occurs and is punished among Babyeaters) serves both group and individual fitness, reducing the strength of group selection needed to maintain the altruistic punishment of shirkers. It would thus be easier for it to evolve, and groups of selective-provisioners would on average have a competitive advantage (since the group-benefi... (read more)

Great bouncing Bayesian Babyeater babies Batman!

This is the point at which you invoke the MST3K Mantra.

Eliezer I sincerely hope we dont chop up your story before its even completely posted. A certain amount of Suspension of disbelieve is needed anyway.

And i sense a new inside joke coming up.

I can say thats: double-plus-baby-eating?

Martin

PS: there is no evidence for any kind of FTL actually working, scnc, argh, stop beating be with your narn bat squats aaaaaaa.-

This is the point at which you invoke the MST3K Mantra.

Eliezer I sincerely hope we dont chop up your story before its even completely posted. A certain amount of Suspension of disbelieve is needed anyway.

And i sense a new inside joke coming up.

I can say thats: double-plus-baby-eating?

Martin

PS: there is no evidence for any kind of FTL actually working, scnc, argh, stop beating be with your narn bat squats aaaaaaa.-

This is the point at which you invoke the MST3K Mantra.

Eliezer I sincerely hope we dont chop up your story before its even completely posted. A certain amount of Suspension of disbelieve is needed anyway.

And i sense a new inside joke coming up.

I can say thats: double-plus-baby-eating?

Martin

PS: there is no evidence for any kind of FTL actually working, scnc, argh, stop beating be with your narn bat squats aaaaaaa.-

Carl, why doesn't your logic rule out ant colonies of only 3/4 related individuals?

Given ant chromosomal structure, an ant is more related to her sisters than her offspring, and a single female can convert food/resources to offspring roughly as well as two females each with half the resources.

I think I remember reading once that ant colonies do, in fact, produce worker ants that "cheat" and attempt to reproduce, while other ants enforce the "cooperative" status quo.

I.e. sister ants with their parents alive don't need complex social recognition and punishment mechanisms to deal with conflicting individual and group interests, since their best outcomes coincide. That coincidence of interests can be almost as complete as for a group of clones.

Eliezer: with regards to the MST3K mantra, all I have to say is "But this way is more fun!" :)

As Doug observes, worker ants may indeed cheat and try to reproduce male offspring, to whom they are apparently more closely "related" for such purposes than they are related to the queen. Googling around on ant genetic conflicts also produced this paper on how even a group of clones apparently needed to police reproduction. That part I don't quite get, but the summary of standard relationships says:

In a society with a single, once-mated queen (monogyny and monandry), workers are more closely related (life-for-life relatedness) to their own so

Actually, babyeating in the common pen isn't even internally stable. Let's take the assumptions of the situation as given:

1. There is intertribal extermination warfare. Larger tribes tend to win and grow. Even division of food among excessive numbers of offspring results in fewer surviving adults, and thus slower tribal population growth and more likely extermination.
2. All offspring are placed in a common pen.
3. Food placed in the common pen is automatically equally divided among those in the pen and adults cannot selectively provision.
4. Group selection has res

"I don't understand why you think that provisioning your own offspring is a group advantage." If parents could selectively provision their own offspring in the common pen, then the group would not be wracked by intense commons-problem selective pressures driving provisioning towards zero and reproduction towards the maximum (thus resulting in extermination by more numerous tribes).

Carl, it seems to me that a lot of what we're discussing here has analogues in human food-sharing. Babyeaters who contribute more food to the pen might have higher tribal status. Punishing low contributors to the pen doesn't force a homogenous level of reproductive effort, either. Suppose that all Babyeaters make equal contributions to the food pen; their leftover (variance in) food resources could be used to grow their own bodies, bribe desirable mates (those of good genetic material as witnessed by their large food contributions), or create larger num... (read more)

Given that it's Carl, and that the nits sound pretty plausible, I'm guessing the latter. Personally though, given the LARGE number of fantasy assumptions in this story, most importantly FTL and synchronized ascent sentience so perfectly timed that neither humans nor baby-eaters expanded to fill one-another's space first even given FTL, I think we have to assume the MST3K mantra is in fairly full effect.

Eliezer, you're right that the coordination mechanisms would be imperfect, so it's an overstatement to say NO babyeating would occur, I meant that you wouldn't have the 'winnowing' sort of babyeating with consistent orders-of-magnitude disproportions between pre- and post-babyeating offspring populations.

Nits. I'd say there are probably lots of at-least-Babyeater-level-abhorrent evolutionary paths (not that Babyeaters are that bad, I'd rather have a Babyeater world than paperclips) making up a big share of evolved civilizations (it looks like the great maj... (read more)

Michael,

I guess it depends on whether the fantastic element can adequately stand in for whatever it is supposed to represent. Magic starship physics can be used to create a Prisoner's Dilemma without trouble, since PDs are well understood, and it's fairly obvious that we will face them in the future. No-Singularity and FTL, so that we can have human characters, are also understandable as translation tools. If Babyeaters are a stand-in for 'abhorrent alien evolved morality' to an audience that already grasps the topic, then the details of their evolution do... (read more)

Michael, don't forget the "machine translation" algorithm.

I meant that you wouldn't have the 'winnowing' sort of babyeating with consistent orders-of-magnitude disproportions between pre- and post-babyeating offspring populations.

I fear that you have not managed to convince me of this. If the general idiom of children in pens is stable, then the adults contributing lots and lots of children (as many as possible) is also evolutionarily stable.

I'd rather have a Babyeater world than paperclips

You say this even after reading Part 2, about the ... (read more)

I'd take the paperclips, so long as it wasn't running any sentient simulations.

A vast region of paperclips could conceivably after billions of years evolve into something interesting, so let us stipulate that the paperclipper wants the vast region to remain paperclips, so it remains to watch over its paperclips. Better yet, replace the paperclipper with a superintelligence that wants to pile all the matter it can reach into supermassive black holes; supermassive black holes with no ordinary matter nearby cannot evolved or be turned into anything interes... (read more)

"I fear that you have not managed to convince me of this. If the general idiom of children in pens is stable, then the adults contributing lots and lots of children (as many as possible) is also evolutionarily stable."

I have a tribe of Babyeaters that each put 90% of their effort into reproducing, and 10% into contributing to the common food supply of the pen. This winds up producing 5000 offspring, 30 of which are not eaten, and are just adequately fed by the 10% of total resources allocated to the food supply. Now consider an allele, X, that di... (read more)

Richard, I'd take the black holes of course.

Carl, one of the root assumptions here is that infants are much cheaper to produce than preteens are to feed. The Babyeater children are eliminated at just the stage before they begin quickly growing and consuming lots of food (but not, alas, before the stage before they become sentient). If most of the total cost of growing a child lies in feeding it past the rapid growth stage, rather than birthing 50 infants and feeding them up to that point, then tribes that birth fewer infants will not have much of an adva... (read more)

"If most of the total cost of growing a child lies in feeding it past the rapid growth stage, rather than birthing 50 infants and feeding them up to that point,"

From their visibility in the transmitted images it seems the disproportion isn't absurdly great. Also, if the scaling issues with their brains were so extreme, why didn't they become dwarfs? One big tool-using crystal being versus 500 tool-using dwarfs of equal intelligence seems like bad news for the giant.

"You're also postulating that a whole group gets this mutation in one shot - ... (read more)

And again, babyeating norms need to invade in a similar fashion, and without norms other than baby-eating, the communal feeding pen selects for zero provisioning effort.

Richard, I'd take the black holes of course.

As I expected. Much you (Eliezer) have written entails it, but it still gives me a shock because piling as much ordinary matter as possible into supermassive black holes is the most evil end I have been able to imagine. In contrast, suffering is merely subjective experience and consequently, according to my way of assigning value, unimportant.

Transforming ordinary matter into mass inside a black hole is a very potent means to create free energy, and I can imagine applying that free energy to ends that justify... (read more)

Hollerith, you are now officially as weird as a Yudkowskian alien. If I ever write this species I'll name it after you.

Carl, I realize that I am postulating a sort of complicated and difficult adaptation, and then supposing that a comparatively simpler adaptation did not follow it.

And if I were writing my own story that way, and then criticizing you for writing your own story the other way, that would be unfair.

But Carl, this sort of thing does happen in real-world biology; there are adaptations that seem complicated to us, which fail to improve in ways... (read more)

Hollerith, you are now officially as weird as a Yudkowskian alien. If I ever write this species I'll name it after you.

Eliezer, to which of the following possibilities would you accord significant probability mass? (1) Richard Hollerith would change his stated preferences if he knew more and thought faster, for all reasonable meanings of "knew more and thought faster"; (2) There's a reasonable notion of extrapolation under which all normal humans would agree with a goal in the vicinity of Richard Hollerith's stated goal; (3) There exist relat... (read more)

Anna, talking about all reasonable meanings of "knew more and thought faster" is a very strong condition.

I would guess... call it 95% probability that a substantial fraction of reasonable construals of "knew more, thought faster" would deconvert the extrapolated Hollerith, and maybe 80% probability that most reasonable construals would so deconvert him. (2) gets negligible probability mass (if Hollerith got to a consistent place, he got there by an unusual sequence of adopted propositional moral beliefs with many degrees of freedom) and so (3) by subtraction.

I would greatly prefer that there be Babyeaters, or even to be a Babyeater myself, than the black hole scenario, or a paperclipper scenario. This strongly suggests that human morality is not as unified as Eliezer believes it is... like I've said before, he will horrified by the results of CEV.

Or the other possibility is just that I'm not human.

Let me clarify that what horrifies me is the loss of potential. Once our space-time continuum becomes a bunch of supermassive black holes, it remains that way till the end of time. It is the condition of maximum physical entropy (according to Penrose). Suffering on the other hand is impermanent. Ever had a really bad cold or flu? One day you wake up and it is gone and the future is just as bright as it would have been if the cold had never been.

And pulling numbers (80%, 95%) out of the air on this question is absurd.

Unknown, how certain are you that you would retain that preference if you "knew more, thought faster"? How certain are you that Eliezer would retain the opposite preference and that we are looking at real divergence? I have little faith in my initial impressions concerning Babyeaters vs. black holes; it's hard for me to understand the Babyeater suffering, or the richness of their lives vs. of black holes, as more than a statistic.

Eliezer, regarding (2), it seems plausible to me (I'd assign perhaps 10% probability mass) that if there is a well... (read more)

I would greatly prefer that there be Babyeaters, or even to be a Babyeater myself, than the black hole scenario, or a paperclipper scenario.

Seems to me it depends on the parameter values.

Can a preference against arbitrariness ever be stable? Non-arbitrariness seems like a pretty arbitrary thing to care about.

Instead of describing my normative reasoning as guided by the criterion of non-arbitrariness, I prefer to describe it as guided by the criterion of minimizing or pessimizing algorithmic complexity. And that is a reply to steven's question right above: there is nothing unstable or logically inconsistent about my criterion for the same reason that there is nothing unstable about Occam's Razor.

Roko BTW had a conversion experience and now praises CEV and the Fun Theory sequence.

Anna, it takes very little effort to rattle off a numerical probability -- and then most readers take away an impression (usually false) of precision of thought.

At the start of Causality Judea Pearl explains why humans (should and usually do) use "causal" concepts rather than "statistical" ones. Although I do not recall whether he comes right out and says it, I definitely took away from Pearl the heuristic that stating your probability about some question is basically useless unless you also state the calculation that led to the number... (read more)

Eliezer, if I understand you correctly, you would prefer a universe tiled with paperclips to one containing both a human civilization and a babyeating one. Let us say the babyeating captain shares your preference, and you and he have common knowledge of both these preferences.

Would you now press a button exterminating humanity?

I've not read this all the way through yet, but I want to add that space travel would seem a great deal more appealing were there Mistress of Fandom positions available.

I should think it obvious that if there are Masters of Fandom, there are Mistresses of Fandom.

Though Google turns up only 4 hits for "Secret Mistress of Fandom", which may imply that "Secret Master of Fandom" is considered a gender-free term.

The anthropological theory of Rene Girard suggests that our culture (and religion or rather religion and culture) has roots in organizing human groups for a proper lynch of a chosen individual. This shocking revelation is not that far from the fiction you created here - I wonder if it was the inspiration (but then it would be in conflict with your usual anti-Christianity stance).

You lost me

Greg Gurevich

Eleizer wasn't the first to think of this sort of thing:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal

The ship employs a Master of Fandom? (Not a Secret Master, obviously; they're too hard to recruit.)

I once had a chat with Dan Alderson (1941–89) about his "tramlines" (as he called them). They follow gradients of the "fifth force" field; traversible tramlines pass through saddle-points (because potential energy must be conserved). The fifth force is generated by stars in proportion to some power of their luminosity. So, to a rough approximation and with some simplifying assumptions, a traversible tramline exists between two stars if ... (read more)