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Mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus
- GenresFantasy
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About the author
Eliezer Yudkowsky
51 books1,964 followersEliezer Yudkowsky is a founding researcher of the field of AI alignment and played a major role in shaping the public conversation about smarter-than-human AI. He appeared on Time magazine's 2023 list of the 100 Most Influential People In AI, was one of the twelve public figures featured in The New York Times's "Who's Who Behind the Dawn of the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement," and has been discussed or interviewed in The New Yorker, Newsweek, Forbes, Wired, Bloomberg, The Atlantic, The Economist, The Washington Post, and many other venues.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 31, 2022
Ambivalence gets a bum rap. Who would ever want to read a book that simultaneously delights and frustrates a reader to no end? When the text continually drops the ball on a simple matter and the mistake is repeated over and over again throughout the text, to the extent that this core mistake permeates the text in a way that can never be corrected by an editor, how could it ever be that the other content could delight enough to make up for this seemingly fatal deficiency?
I’m ambivalent about mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. The characters all just care about sex too much. It's distracting. It's annoying. It makes it very difficult for me to place myself in the story seamlessly. But, unbelievably, the core conceit of a subpar dath ilani being isekaied into the Pathfinder universe where the citizenry literally are lawful evil supporters of hell itself and the dath ilani has yet to realize that evil is evil has got to be the most fascinating and exciting story hook I've come across since I was a teenager and wasn't already jaded to the classical canon.
Let me take a step back to explain, because if you're new to all of this, then the aim of this essay is to get you to read this story. Some very light spoilers follow, but honestly they are so light that I expect no one reading them to be bothered by them (the few who would be bothered by the most minimal of spoilers will stop reading here of their own accord).
First: Pathfinder is a role playing game universe with its own unique set of rules for magic, character alignment, governments, and gods. You usually see people playing an RPG in this setting; it's an alternative to the much better known Dungeons & Dragons universe. You don't need to be familiar with Pathfinder to get into this story, even though it's set in the Pathfinder universe. It's sufficient to be aware of general tropes regarding devils that contract for your soul and to realize that in Pathfinder, some governments are themselves lawful evil and enforce all their citizens to contract with devils for their souls. If you don't know Pathfinder, another basic fact you'll need is that demons are distinct from devils. Demons are chaotic evil fiends from the Abyss that exhibit raw fighting strength, while devils are non-chaotic evil contract-lovers who delight in taking unfair advantage of those who dare to sell their soul.
Second, dath ilan is an invention of Elizer Yudkowsky, one of the authors of mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. Yudkowsky is significant in the rationality movement and has spent a lot of time writing tracts that help to make people think better about various things. dath ilan started out as an April Fools joke, when Yudkowsky started pretending that he was himself a citizen of dath ilan that was isekaied into our world and has been trying ever since to teach us Earthlings the ways of dath ilan. In dath ilan, the sanity waterline is much higher than on Earth. People cooperate there in ways that people here cannot, merely because everyone is much more rational along the dimensions that Yudkowsky cares about. It's a fascinating world, even if I don't personally agree that such a world would look the way that Yudkowsky portrays it. Their tech level is approximately a little beneath our own, mostly because the responsible adults of dath ilan deliberately slowed down (or stopped?) all technological progress along a dimension that will be obvious if you know any of Yudkowsky's other works, but which I won't name here as I expect it to be a further plot point in the text. If you know nothing of Yudkowsky and are going into this blind, the most important thing to know about dath ilan is that they're supposed to be the best that humans can be. Stuff just works there. Schools teach learning, businesses exist to better organize making goods available, politicians do the right thing, etc. It's not heaven — they're all still baseline humans — but they are much smarter than us and they work together to do society correctly.
Third, isekai is a genre where someone from world A suddenly finds themselves in world B. The genre started as a way to take someone from our world and put them in a fantasy world so that we can identify with the straight man and it is justified in-story why we stop to pay attention to details that people from world B wouldn't find interesting. But in mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus, this is turned on its head because we are unfamiliar with both world A and world B: Keltham (the dath ilani) is transported into the Pathfinder universe, where the lawful evil residents of Cheliax immediately start deceiving Keltham for reasons that I won't spoil here. Keltham is a teenager; he's smart, as all dath ilani are, but he's not the shining standard example you might expect from a place like dath ilan; Keltham is a bit weird by his culture's standards.
The resulting story is amazing. So many stories out there fail in my eyes because they insist on having characters hold the idiot ball, or because the characters make dumb decisions that the audience would never make. (It's the trope of a group in a scary mansion at night deciding to split up, but writ large: charatcers overlook obvious clues or make other choices that they definitely would not take if they were sufficiently rational.) mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus doesn't make this mistake. Keltham acts rationally. The adults of Cheliax act as they should, given their knowledge and desires. The story makes sense, and that's a rare treat among most stories told on Earth. mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus is a prime example of rational fiction, a genre that first started being considered a genre of its own in part due to Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, one of the best fanfictions ever written. If you end up liking mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus, you'll likely enjoy other rational fiction works; alternatively, if you find yourselves liking shorter ratfics, you'll also likely find this text worth the read.
But, as the opening of this review points out, I don't have nothing but praise for this book. Several parts make me feel strongly ambivalent.
mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus is a glowfic. It's written by two authors, each of whom writes dialogue and setting for the portion that they're responsible for. The text itself is a series of forum posts, where each post is written by one of the authors. It's not clear if they played it straight, but hypothetically, each other doesn't always know in advance what the other author is necessarily going for. In some glowfics, this means you get to see a succession of "yes and" situations, but in this specific glowfic style, you're more likely to see one author putting forth a general idea and the other one pushing back and finding edge cases that may trip them up. Does this make for good writing? Maybe, but not here. That's why I suspect that these two glowfic writers are more in concert than they may at first appear, since it's resulting in writing that more closely corresponds to what a single author may have written on their own. Parts of this feel stumbly where it needn't if this hadn't been a glowfic. I'm especially unhappy with the forum post format, which artificially creates issues not only with mathematical notation but also doesn't allow for graceful chapter headings or appropriate white space.
The strongest thing that puts me off the story, however, is the continued focus on sex. Yes, I get that Keltham is a teenager, and that a lawful evil society like Cheliax would use sex to nefarious ends. But the BDSM stuff is really pushed as a major part of the storyline in what feels like the cringiest thing I've ever started and then continued to read. The Erogamer, which is famously full of sex and yet nevertheless tells a deep story you won't expect (even having given this disclaimer, it will still be unexpected), does a legit better job of making the sex feel important-to-the-story than mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus does. Despite being asexual myself, I really enjoyed The Erogamer, and, in a similar way, I'm really enjoying mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. But the former feels like the sex stuff is earned, while the latter feels like the authors just really wanted their rational story about math and rationality to also have a bunch of sex in it. I cannot tell you how much this turns me off. When I say I'm ambivalent about this, I don't mean that the sex part is bad but I recommend the story anyway because of its good qualities. No, what I mean is that the sex thing is so bad that I actively want to warn people away from reading this trash. Yet, at the same time, the rest of it is so good that I need others to experience this treasure. That's what I mean by my being ambivalent.
But, as I mentioned, I am asexual. Maybe other people just won't mind this level of BDSM in their stories. I tend to cringe when I see the two leads in a movie kiss (I keep hoping they're just friends!), and yet movie-makers keep using this trope over and over again, so maybe the rest of society just tolerates this kind of thing without cringing in the way I do. Maybe you'll enjoy it. But I remain ambivalent.
Sex isn't the only issue, however. The math is somewhat jumbled; the reader, if they are math literate, will be able to follow only with difficulty because dath ilan uses a different way of teaching and talking about math; the math illiterate will do no better than to skim over these parts. Worse, the format lends itself poorly to mathematical notation: at some points, the authors literally use a series of dashes to create a vinculum (dividing line in a fraction). The html doesn't wrap correctly in some browsers, so this makes the math appear amateurish. Given that I think at least one author really does intend for readers to learn this stuff, I'm guessing this doesn't have any aspect of authorial intent, and if the authors knew how to allow LaTeX to appear, they might use that instead. (I'm only partially sure because the authors insist upon making dath ilan math use different notation and go about describing mathematical relationships in an entirely different way.)
Worse, the author seems to want to teach the reader, even if the reader just wants to enjoy the story. This creates a tension where the author spends way more time on explaining a concept than any other author realistically would, and it may cause some readers to lose interest for a dozen forum posts at a time. I get that the point of the story is to semi-secretly increase the sanity waterline. But it feels like playing an edutainment game at times. Maybe if the teaching sections were shorter, or less dense, then you could stealthily teach while the reader is focused on enjoying the story. But, as written, it's like a story that occasionally takes breaks in order to go in depth and teach a lesson on rationality. Unfortunately, this isn't fixable by editing out the teaching parts, because the teaching parts are integral to the story itself. Fascinatingly, as you learn each lesson, you are supposed to be able to better understand what Keltham was doing in previous parts of the story. In a way, this is like an M. Night Shyamalan twist where when you see the twist at the end, you look back at the beginning and see it in a new light — except the twist is continuous: as you learn more ratonality, you're better able to appreciate how Keltham has been experiencing the situation the entire time, since he's looking at everything with a rational eye.
So even though the teaching parts feel stilted and break up the cadence of the story in unflattering ways, they're nevertheless part of what makes this text great. (Meanwhile, the sex stuff could be removed almost entirely and I suspect the story would be better for it.)
The story itself is ongoing, but I'm a writing a review now anyway because I'm already certain of the five star rating I'm going to give it. You may wonder why a book I'm ambivalent about is getting a perfect rating, but, at the meta level, I think that this is entirely appropriate. I genuinely cringe at sex stuff in this book even when I didn't cringe at more extreme sex stuff in The Erogamer. I actively dislike the sex parts so much that I want to warn people away from reading. I also actively like the other parts so much that I need others to read this. On the meta level I want others to experience this fascinating dissonance, which, when combined with the good object level parts, results in my five star rating.
You can read mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus on glowfic.com. You can learn more about dath ilan on LessWrong, including links to previous stories about dath ilan people isekaied into various locales. If you decide to read this despite never having heard of Yudkowsky or rational fiction before, and you like it, be sure to look up other rational fiction works. Oh, and Eliezer, if you're reading this: good god, man, please stop weaving this much unnecessary sex into your plotlines. It's one thing to write sex into a story about being corrupted by the internet. But when you take what may be the best plot hook of all time (dath ilani isekaied to nation of lawful evil people intent on corrupting them) and then stuff your sex fantasies in there, it ruins what could have been so much better. I'll take it anyway, because it's damn good, and maybe there's no incentive to do otherwise since most of your intended readers won't be asexual like me, but good god that's a lot of sex and masochism for a story supposedly about rationality. Granted, the lawful evil stuff justifies the inclusion of masochism, but not the sex in the first place, no matter how horny a teenage dath ilani might be.
I’m ambivalent about mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. The characters all just care about sex too much. It's distracting. It's annoying. It makes it very difficult for me to place myself in the story seamlessly. But, unbelievably, the core conceit of a subpar dath ilani being isekaied into the Pathfinder universe where the citizenry literally are lawful evil supporters of hell itself and the dath ilani has yet to realize that evil is evil has got to be the most fascinating and exciting story hook I've come across since I was a teenager and wasn't already jaded to the classical canon.
Let me take a step back to explain, because if you're new to all of this, then the aim of this essay is to get you to read this story. Some very light spoilers follow, but honestly they are so light that I expect no one reading them to be bothered by them (the few who would be bothered by the most minimal of spoilers will stop reading here of their own accord).
First: Pathfinder is a role playing game universe with its own unique set of rules for magic, character alignment, governments, and gods. You usually see people playing an RPG in this setting; it's an alternative to the much better known Dungeons & Dragons universe. You don't need to be familiar with Pathfinder to get into this story, even though it's set in the Pathfinder universe. It's sufficient to be aware of general tropes regarding devils that contract for your soul and to realize that in Pathfinder, some governments are themselves lawful evil and enforce all their citizens to contract with devils for their souls. If you don't know Pathfinder, another basic fact you'll need is that demons are distinct from devils. Demons are chaotic evil fiends from the Abyss that exhibit raw fighting strength, while devils are non-chaotic evil contract-lovers who delight in taking unfair advantage of those who dare to sell their soul.
Second, dath ilan is an invention of Elizer Yudkowsky, one of the authors of mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. Yudkowsky is significant in the rationality movement and has spent a lot of time writing tracts that help to make people think better about various things. dath ilan started out as an April Fools joke, when Yudkowsky started pretending that he was himself a citizen of dath ilan that was isekaied into our world and has been trying ever since to teach us Earthlings the ways of dath ilan. In dath ilan, the sanity waterline is much higher than on Earth. People cooperate there in ways that people here cannot, merely because everyone is much more rational along the dimensions that Yudkowsky cares about. It's a fascinating world, even if I don't personally agree that such a world would look the way that Yudkowsky portrays it. Their tech level is approximately a little beneath our own, mostly because the responsible adults of dath ilan deliberately slowed down (or stopped?) all technological progress along a dimension that will be obvious if you know any of Yudkowsky's other works, but which I won't name here as I expect it to be a further plot point in the text. If you know nothing of Yudkowsky and are going into this blind, the most important thing to know about dath ilan is that they're supposed to be the best that humans can be. Stuff just works there. Schools teach learning, businesses exist to better organize making goods available, politicians do the right thing, etc. It's not heaven — they're all still baseline humans — but they are much smarter than us and they work together to do society correctly.
Third, isekai is a genre where someone from world A suddenly finds themselves in world B. The genre started as a way to take someone from our world and put them in a fantasy world so that we can identify with the straight man and it is justified in-story why we stop to pay attention to details that people from world B wouldn't find interesting. But in mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus, this is turned on its head because we are unfamiliar with both world A and world B: Keltham (the dath ilani) is transported into the Pathfinder universe, where the lawful evil residents of Cheliax immediately start deceiving Keltham for reasons that I won't spoil here. Keltham is a teenager; he's smart, as all dath ilani are, but he's not the shining standard example you might expect from a place like dath ilan; Keltham is a bit weird by his culture's standards.
The resulting story is amazing. So many stories out there fail in my eyes because they insist on having characters hold the idiot ball, or because the characters make dumb decisions that the audience would never make. (It's the trope of a group in a scary mansion at night deciding to split up, but writ large: charatcers overlook obvious clues or make other choices that they definitely would not take if they were sufficiently rational.) mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus doesn't make this mistake. Keltham acts rationally. The adults of Cheliax act as they should, given their knowledge and desires. The story makes sense, and that's a rare treat among most stories told on Earth. mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus is a prime example of rational fiction, a genre that first started being considered a genre of its own in part due to Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, one of the best fanfictions ever written. If you end up liking mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus, you'll likely enjoy other rational fiction works; alternatively, if you find yourselves liking shorter ratfics, you'll also likely find this text worth the read.
But, as the opening of this review points out, I don't have nothing but praise for this book. Several parts make me feel strongly ambivalent.
mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus is a glowfic. It's written by two authors, each of whom writes dialogue and setting for the portion that they're responsible for. The text itself is a series of forum posts, where each post is written by one of the authors. It's not clear if they played it straight, but hypothetically, each other doesn't always know in advance what the other author is necessarily going for. In some glowfics, this means you get to see a succession of "yes and" situations, but in this specific glowfic style, you're more likely to see one author putting forth a general idea and the other one pushing back and finding edge cases that may trip them up. Does this make for good writing? Maybe, but not here. That's why I suspect that these two glowfic writers are more in concert than they may at first appear, since it's resulting in writing that more closely corresponds to what a single author may have written on their own. Parts of this feel stumbly where it needn't if this hadn't been a glowfic. I'm especially unhappy with the forum post format, which artificially creates issues not only with mathematical notation but also doesn't allow for graceful chapter headings or appropriate white space.
The strongest thing that puts me off the story, however, is the continued focus on sex. Yes, I get that Keltham is a teenager, and that a lawful evil society like Cheliax would use sex to nefarious ends. But the BDSM stuff is really pushed as a major part of the storyline in what feels like the cringiest thing I've ever started and then continued to read. The Erogamer, which is famously full of sex and yet nevertheless tells a deep story you won't expect (even having given this disclaimer, it will still be unexpected), does a legit better job of making the sex feel important-to-the-story than mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus does. Despite being asexual myself, I really enjoyed The Erogamer, and, in a similar way, I'm really enjoying mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus. But the former feels like the sex stuff is earned, while the latter feels like the authors just really wanted their rational story about math and rationality to also have a bunch of sex in it. I cannot tell you how much this turns me off. When I say I'm ambivalent about this, I don't mean that the sex part is bad but I recommend the story anyway because of its good qualities. No, what I mean is that the sex thing is so bad that I actively want to warn people away from reading this trash. Yet, at the same time, the rest of it is so good that I need others to experience this treasure. That's what I mean by my being ambivalent.
But, as I mentioned, I am asexual. Maybe other people just won't mind this level of BDSM in their stories. I tend to cringe when I see the two leads in a movie kiss (I keep hoping they're just friends!), and yet movie-makers keep using this trope over and over again, so maybe the rest of society just tolerates this kind of thing without cringing in the way I do. Maybe you'll enjoy it. But I remain ambivalent.
Sex isn't the only issue, however. The math is somewhat jumbled; the reader, if they are math literate, will be able to follow only with difficulty because dath ilan uses a different way of teaching and talking about math; the math illiterate will do no better than to skim over these parts. Worse, the format lends itself poorly to mathematical notation: at some points, the authors literally use a series of dashes to create a vinculum (dividing line in a fraction). The html doesn't wrap correctly in some browsers, so this makes the math appear amateurish. Given that I think at least one author really does intend for readers to learn this stuff, I'm guessing this doesn't have any aspect of authorial intent, and if the authors knew how to allow LaTeX to appear, they might use that instead. (I'm only partially sure because the authors insist upon making dath ilan math use different notation and go about describing mathematical relationships in an entirely different way.)
Worse, the author seems to want to teach the reader, even if the reader just wants to enjoy the story. This creates a tension where the author spends way more time on explaining a concept than any other author realistically would, and it may cause some readers to lose interest for a dozen forum posts at a time. I get that the point of the story is to semi-secretly increase the sanity waterline. But it feels like playing an edutainment game at times. Maybe if the teaching sections were shorter, or less dense, then you could stealthily teach while the reader is focused on enjoying the story. But, as written, it's like a story that occasionally takes breaks in order to go in depth and teach a lesson on rationality. Unfortunately, this isn't fixable by editing out the teaching parts, because the teaching parts are integral to the story itself. Fascinatingly, as you learn each lesson, you are supposed to be able to better understand what Keltham was doing in previous parts of the story. In a way, this is like an M. Night Shyamalan twist where when you see the twist at the end, you look back at the beginning and see it in a new light — except the twist is continuous: as you learn more ratonality, you're better able to appreciate how Keltham has been experiencing the situation the entire time, since he's looking at everything with a rational eye.
So even though the teaching parts feel stilted and break up the cadence of the story in unflattering ways, they're nevertheless part of what makes this text great. (Meanwhile, the sex stuff could be removed almost entirely and I suspect the story would be better for it.)
The story itself is ongoing, but I'm a writing a review now anyway because I'm already certain of the five star rating I'm going to give it. You may wonder why a book I'm ambivalent about is getting a perfect rating, but, at the meta level, I think that this is entirely appropriate. I genuinely cringe at sex stuff in this book even when I didn't cringe at more extreme sex stuff in The Erogamer. I actively dislike the sex parts so much that I want to warn people away from reading. I also actively like the other parts so much that I need others to read this. On the meta level I want others to experience this fascinating dissonance, which, when combined with the good object level parts, results in my five star rating.
You can read mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus on glowfic.com. You can learn more about dath ilan on LessWrong, including links to previous stories about dath ilan people isekaied into various locales. If you decide to read this despite never having heard of Yudkowsky or rational fiction before, and you like it, be sure to look up other rational fiction works. Oh, and Eliezer, if you're reading this: good god, man, please stop weaving this much unnecessary sex into your plotlines. It's one thing to write sex into a story about being corrupted by the internet. But when you take what may be the best plot hook of all time (dath ilani isekaied to nation of lawful evil people intent on corrupting them) and then stuff your sex fantasies in there, it ruins what could have been so much better. I'll take it anyway, because it's damn good, and maybe there's no incentive to do otherwise since most of your intended readers won't be asexual like me, but good god that's a lot of sex and masochism for a story supposedly about rationality. Granted, the lawful evil stuff justifies the inclusion of masochism, but not the sex in the first place, no matter how horny a teenage dath ilani might be.
May 17, 2022
I love Eliezer's books so much. Sure there are parts that are hard to grasp, I need to read it a few times and wonder if he is being obscure on purpose.
But overall I can just relate to him so much. It feels like I am finding a part of me that I never really fed. I don't feel like an alien in this world, I'm normal enough but I'm also smart enough to see where he is coming from.
There is a certain way that music touches your soul. It exposes certain patterns that are inarguably resonant with your soul. Great art makes you feel that way. Sometimes when you grok concepts you get a taste of this. At many parts of this book I felt a similar pleasure that was me marvalling at the structure. But this needs you to take every word seriously..
When you get to see how multi agent coordination can be so much more efficient it brings me to tears. Humans are doing a poor job of cooperating. His picture of the gods is a window into what we might one day create.
I don't think I'd be able to create such ideas but I am able to appreciate the value.
Considering how AGI seems to be around the corner. How we have still not made significant progress in the alignment problem. Maybe in his world we might have started early.
I could feel his pain at being a rare creature in this world. In this book Keltham wonders about a world where he would be the average guy and he feels sad because that's not his reality.
I might have thought it would be nice to be special, "better than others" in this cool way. But after a point you feel really lonely and feel helpless since it's hard to organize people when they can't see what you see.
There is also the unabashed way in which he proclaims his goal to bed many pretty girls as possible 😂 like that was just so direct.
> Dath Ilan is not going to fling it's children out into the world with no concept of how to find, explore, build or maintain a romantic relationship.
😭😭💔💔💔 Why is our reality so cruel? So suboptimal.
So fantasy is the genre where you see humans voice their desires for a world with magic, with tangible villains to defeat. But they don’t rethink organisational structures this way. For example, children are the lynchpin of society. Are we really being careful about how everyone is raising them? Are we getting better at it? Nope just more individual freedom.
It is embarrassing to see how many obvious mistakes we have made. The book talks about hereditary optimisation, how we need to be careful that the humans with the best genes are properly incentivised to have kids. Right now have access to contraceptives, career opportunities, they have a high bar for partner quality. So 2 great parents usually have 1 child, a small representation in the gene pool.
In pedagogy we find what an obvious conflict of interest would arise if the person teaching also was responsible for grading how well the students learned.
How we should be more ok with being wrong loudly. Why we only ask questions to which the student already knows the answer.
The protagonist of this story Keltham reminded me of Black Jack in the anime. He is clear about demanding payment for any value rendered. But the value he provides is so much that we overlook his selfishness.
But overall I can just relate to him so much. It feels like I am finding a part of me that I never really fed. I don't feel like an alien in this world, I'm normal enough but I'm also smart enough to see where he is coming from.
There is a certain way that music touches your soul. It exposes certain patterns that are inarguably resonant with your soul. Great art makes you feel that way. Sometimes when you grok concepts you get a taste of this. At many parts of this book I felt a similar pleasure that was me marvalling at the structure. But this needs you to take every word seriously..
When you get to see how multi agent coordination can be so much more efficient it brings me to tears. Humans are doing a poor job of cooperating. His picture of the gods is a window into what we might one day create.
I don't think I'd be able to create such ideas but I am able to appreciate the value.
Considering how AGI seems to be around the corner. How we have still not made significant progress in the alignment problem. Maybe in his world we might have started early.
I could feel his pain at being a rare creature in this world. In this book Keltham wonders about a world where he would be the average guy and he feels sad because that's not his reality.
I might have thought it would be nice to be special, "better than others" in this cool way. But after a point you feel really lonely and feel helpless since it's hard to organize people when they can't see what you see.
There is also the unabashed way in which he proclaims his goal to bed many pretty girls as possible 😂 like that was just so direct.
> Dath Ilan is not going to fling it's children out into the world with no concept of how to find, explore, build or maintain a romantic relationship.
😭😭💔💔💔 Why is our reality so cruel? So suboptimal.
So fantasy is the genre where you see humans voice their desires for a world with magic, with tangible villains to defeat. But they don’t rethink organisational structures this way. For example, children are the lynchpin of society. Are we really being careful about how everyone is raising them? Are we getting better at it? Nope just more individual freedom.
It is embarrassing to see how many obvious mistakes we have made. The book talks about hereditary optimisation, how we need to be careful that the humans with the best genes are properly incentivised to have kids. Right now have access to contraceptives, career opportunities, they have a high bar for partner quality. So 2 great parents usually have 1 child, a small representation in the gene pool.
In pedagogy we find what an obvious conflict of interest would arise if the person teaching also was responsible for grading how well the students learned.
How we should be more ok with being wrong loudly. Why we only ask questions to which the student already knows the answer.
The protagonist of this story Keltham reminded me of Black Jack in the anime. He is clear about demanding payment for any value rendered. But the value he provides is so much that we overlook his selfishness.
September 13, 2024
Review of all of planecrash:
I read this 1M+ word monstrosity while in a reading rut, so it clearly has a lot going for it, despite the gratuitous sex & math scenes (which I mostly skipped) and the many dissatisfactions I have with it, foremost among which is its constant fourth wall breaking. I don't want the characters strategizing around the fact that they're in a story or speculating that most of the people in their world aren't fully conscious! It ruins both immersion & the sense of stakes! This is more of an issue in the second half of the story. Smaller criticisms: the TDT doesn't reaallly work imo & is plot-critical, the quantum immortality reasoning for ending up in other worlds post-death isn't explained well / also probably doesn't work
But despite the broken immersion, the worldbuilding is actually great; detailed & you can really sink your teeth into it. I love the ensemble cast, which has many delightful characters (my favorites include Carissa, Abrogail, Asmodia, Fe-Anar, Cayden Cailean, Iomedae... Keltham is just ok lol); Eliezer is getting better at writing women, but the best female character (Carissa) is written by his cowriter lintamande. This book actually shook loose some of my fear of suffering & belief in the moral primacy of reducing suffering, that's how convincing Carissa was.
I'm left wanting more stories set in this world + more stories about Carissa especially, which unfortunately don't seem to exist atm outside of a few tiny AUs. And even though it was appropriate, the ending still made me sad... I wish there was more Carissa POV near the end so that it would feel triumphant instead of bittersweet.
I read this 1M+ word monstrosity while in a reading rut, so it clearly has a lot going for it, despite the gratuitous sex & math scenes (which I mostly skipped) and the many dissatisfactions I have with it, foremost among which is its constant fourth wall breaking. I don't want the characters strategizing around the fact that they're in a story or speculating that most of the people in their world aren't fully conscious! It ruins both immersion & the sense of stakes! This is more of an issue in the second half of the story. Smaller criticisms: the TDT doesn't reaallly work imo & is plot-critical, the quantum immortality reasoning for ending up in other worlds post-death isn't explained well / also probably doesn't work
But despite the broken immersion, the worldbuilding is actually great; detailed & you can really sink your teeth into it. I love the ensemble cast, which has many delightful characters (my favorites include Carissa, Abrogail, Asmodia, Fe-Anar, Cayden Cailean, Iomedae... Keltham is just ok lol); Eliezer is getting better at writing women, but the best female character (Carissa) is written by his cowriter lintamande. This book actually shook loose some of my fear of suffering & belief in the moral primacy of reducing suffering, that's how convincing Carissa was.
I'm left wanting more stories set in this world + more stories about Carissa especially, which unfortunately don't seem to exist atm outside of a few tiny AUs. And even though it was appropriate, the ending still made me sad... I wish there was more Carissa POV near the end so that it would feel triumphant instead of bittersweet.
January 28, 2025
Charming, smart, meta, maybe-useful
I think depictions of Dath Ilan (~a society where things are managed really competently) were helpful for getting concrete ideas on what to strive for as a society, and suspect someone with similar interests to me could get a lot of the value (apart from reading enjoyment) from the book by only looking up parts spoken from the perspective of Dath Ilan (control+F "dath ilan:")
- I liked: mind games, smart characters (and intentionally less smart ones), the story being delightfully meta, depictions of Dath Ilan. I was interested in most characters' stories which helped with staying engaged.
- I didn't like: DND elements like stats (Wisdom 12, Strength 15) and mentions about dice rolls and how many rounds things might take, details of how magic works in Golarion, in general lack of polish (which is to be expected from the format and part of the charm, though I think a more polished version would still be more enjoyable)
I read the version with lectures included, though I mostly skimmed the lecture parts. I'll want to revisit at least some of it. I at least want to get better intuition for conceptualizing bayesian evidence in the real world by thinking in log2 probabilities, it's still unclear to me. Also want to revisit some dicussions on anthropics and decision theory.
I think depictions of Dath Ilan (~a society where things are managed really competently) were helpful for getting concrete ideas on what to strive for as a society, and suspect someone with similar interests to me could get a lot of the value (apart from reading enjoyment) from the book by only looking up parts spoken from the perspective of Dath Ilan (control+F "dath ilan:")
- I liked: mind games, smart characters (and intentionally less smart ones), the story being delightfully meta, depictions of Dath Ilan. I was interested in most characters' stories which helped with staying engaged.
- I didn't like: DND elements like stats (Wisdom 12, Strength 15) and mentions about dice rolls and how many rounds things might take, details of how magic works in Golarion, in general lack of polish (which is to be expected from the format and part of the charm, though I think a more polished version would still be more enjoyable)
I read the version with lectures included, though I mostly skimmed the lecture parts. I'll want to revisit at least some of it. I at least want to get better intuition for conceptualizing bayesian evidence in the real world by thinking in log2 probabilities, it's still unclear to me. Also want to revisit some dicussions on anthropics and decision theory.
December 21, 2025
Really great. Gets better in the second half.
From around page 3000 to page 5200 in the pdf with images, it drags a little imo, but its worth it to pull thru.
Pros:
- Very thought thru characters, all of them have mostly coherent motivations
- Very cool setting. Its pathfinder, but its an interpretation of pathfinder, and its a really cool interpretation!
- Hard to explain without spoiling, but it has applied bayesianism on full display to a degree I've never seen in any book. It's really cool
- I do get emotionally attached to the characters
- Just the themes and concepts it deals with are really cool
Cons:
- Too long
- Its well written on a story and character level, but poorly written on a sentence to sentence level. You can kind of tell Eliezer just sat down and wrote stuff that appeared in his head. He probably spent time thinking about the long arcs, but the paragraphs not so much
- I don't like the BDSM scenes. And they do have some relevance to the plot. I would encourage people read the first three, then just skip the rest.
- Some of the rationality lectures are kind of predictable and repetitive if you've already read eg. the sequences.
From around page 3000 to page 5200 in the pdf with images, it drags a little imo, but its worth it to pull thru.
Pros:
- Very thought thru characters, all of them have mostly coherent motivations
- Very cool setting. Its pathfinder, but its an interpretation of pathfinder, and its a really cool interpretation!
- Hard to explain without spoiling, but it has applied bayesianism on full display to a degree I've never seen in any book. It's really cool
- I do get emotionally attached to the characters
- Just the themes and concepts it deals with are really cool
Cons:
- Too long
- Its well written on a story and character level, but poorly written on a sentence to sentence level. You can kind of tell Eliezer just sat down and wrote stuff that appeared in his head. He probably spent time thinking about the long arcs, but the paragraphs not so much
- I don't like the BDSM scenes. And they do have some relevance to the plot. I would encourage people read the first three, then just skip the rest.
- Some of the rationality lectures are kind of predictable and repetitive if you've already read eg. the sequences.
Currently reading
March 21, 2025Lawful is uncomfortable to read half the time. Consuming other pieces of (irrational) fiction becomes jarring if read after this.
Dath Ilan seems like a great civilization, I wonder if prediction markets similar to described could actually work in a high intelligence society.
“Make up a prior and likelihood ratio, multiply them together to get a posterior, and then throw that number out and go with your intuitive feeling once you’ve forced your brain to actually ask all of the correct questions.”
The most impressive piece of fiction I’ve read.
Dath Ilan seems like a great civilization, I wonder if prediction markets similar to described could actually work in a high intelligence society.
“Make up a prior and likelihood ratio, multiply them together to get a posterior, and then throw that number out and go with your intuitive feeling once you’ve forced your brain to actually ask all of the correct questions.”
The most impressive piece of fiction I’ve read.
June 13, 2022
Have you ever read a book that you felt was written for you personally. And that you can't find anything to fault? That's exactly what this book has done for me so far.
Maybe I'll change the rating when my emotions subside and I'm able to critically evaluate it, but for now, 10/10.
Maybe I'll change the rating when my emotions subside and I'm able to critically evaluate it, but for now, 10/10.
July 2, 2024
the story is a big enticing puzzle the authors are asking you to solve
the mad investor's laws are interesting and stay with me even now
I strongly recommend reading some other work from Yudkowsky before this.
the mad investor's laws are interesting and stay with me even now
I strongly recommend reading some other work from Yudkowsky before this.
February 9, 2022
Did not finish. Very interesting premise but the farther it goes, the less I'm enjoying it, and the more I'm skipping things.
September 7, 2024
quite plausibly the best book ever written along some relevant dimensions ("frequency of gratuitous sex scenes" and "frequency of tangential math lectures" are not among them)
March 17, 2025
I've read HPMOR. I've read Worth the Candle. I've read every word of every Wildbow story. I love a slow burn. But this burn was too slow even for me, despite how much I enjoy the individual authors.
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