Eliezer Yudkowsky: belief

Transcript context

…I know about it. I have not read it yet. Most of my fiction is not about somebody arriving on another planet who has to deliver lectures. There I was being a bit deliberately like, — “Yeah, I’m going to just do it with Project Lawful. I’m going to just do it. They say nobody should ever do it, and I don’t care. I’m doing it ever ways. I’m going to have my character actually launch into the lectures. ” The lectures aren’t really the parts I’m proud about. It’s like where you have the life or death, deathnote style battle of wits that is centering around a series of Bayesian updates and making that actually work because it’s where I’m like — “Yeah, I think I actually pulled that off. And I’m not sure a single other writer on the face of this planet could have made that work as a plot device.” But that said, the nonfiction is like, I’m explaining this thing, I’m explaining the prerequisite, I’m explaining the prerequisites to the prerequisites. And then in fiction, it’s more just, well, this character happens to think of this thing and the character happens to think of that thing, but you got to actually see the character using it. So it’s less organized. It’s less organized as knowledge. And that’s why it’s easier to write. Yeah. One of my favorite pieces of fiction that explains something is the Dark Lord’s Answer. And I honestly can’t say anything about it without spoiling it. But I just want to say it was such a great explanation of the thing it is explaining. I don’t know what else I can say about it without spoiling it.…

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