Reading Notes
- Setup
- No nanotech, biotech barely works, no AI
- Humans have developed faster than light travel by using Alderson drives
- Each star has billions of Alderson starlines
- Humanity has been expanding out from Sol - all current colony planets are 1 hop away from Sol
- Nova causes flare in Alderson starline around colony planet Huygens - ship Impossible Possible World sent to investigate
- Main characters
- Lord Administrator Akon - “conference chair” - ship’s leader
- Lady Sensory
- Lord Programmer
- Lord Pilot
- Lady Psychologist
- Ship’s confessor
- Master of Fandom
- Ship encounters aliens
- Receives massive data dump from them
- First decision: should humans put up shields or not?
- Aliens have not put up their own shields
- Game-theory - humans should not put up their own shields until aliens make a move that means hostile intent
- Aliens’ technology level is less than humans’ - weaker starship drive, inferior shielding
- Humans discover (after analyzing the aliens’ data) that they eat their own children
- Children are sentient at the time of eating
- Children have to be killed, otherwise they’d just die of starvation
- Babyeaters, as the aliens are called, evolved from r-strategy ancestors
- However, after they discovered their equivalent of agriculture, r-strategy reproduction became inefficient
- Instead of switching over to k-strategy reproduction, they evolved cannibalism
- Infanticide and cannibalism are so ingrained that their moral language is structured around distance from willing infanticide
- Good: to eat children
- Evil/Wrong: to show mercy
- Babyeaters have a much stronger group cooperative instinct than humans - no wars after their scientific revolution
- However, they also punish defectors much more harshly - no notion of leniency - the only acceptable punishment is death
- Babyeaters see any species that doesn’t commit infanticide and cannibalism as defective and disgusting - anathema to culture and civilization
- Humans have sent enough data to let Babyeaters know that they don’t kill and eat their own children
- Lord Pilot - human ship should put up shields immediately
- Akon & Master of Fandom disagree - even knowing that the humans don’t eat children, Babyeaters have not moved with hostile intent
- Moreover, it’s not likely that Babyeaters would be able to conquer humans - they simply don’t have the technology to do so - humanity would win a war for survival
- Lord Pilot and Lady Sensory suggest that they go back and return with an army to rescue the Babyeater children
- First question: How? They Babyeaters were the first ones at the nova; they know from where humans came, by observing which starline they entered on, but how do we know which starline they used?
- Master of Fandom: we cannot apply our morality to them
- Confessor: it’s easy to say that you’d conquer the Babyeaters and stop them from eating their own children, but it’s much harder to say what you’d turn them into to preven that from happening
- Do not launch a crusade unless you can say what you’re fighting for
- Babyeaters attempt to persuade humans to eat babies
- Appeal to logic - babyeating = faster evolution
- Don’t seem to understand gamete selection
- Appeal to authority - humans have advocated sacrifice and purity
- Don’t seem to understand that Hitler is not exactly well regarded
- Humans are unsurprisingly unconvinced by Babyeater arguments
- New alien ship jumps into system - neither Babyeater or Human
- Sends a friendly greeting along with… porn?
- Overoptimized appearance masks disgusting reality
- Use same mechanism for memory and genetic storage
- Share each others’ thoughts when they have sex
- First crew of other alien ship overwhelmed with empathetic pain after learning of Babyeaters
- Ship functions taken over by kiritsugu
- Kiritsugu dialogue with Confessor
- Kiritsugu are like the mirror image of a Confessor
- Both are experts in rationality and Bayesian reasoning
- However, a kiritsugu is the ultimate sin for a Confessor - exercise of command
- And a Confessor is the ultimate sin for a kiritsugu - the failure to take command when taking command would be helpful
- Kiritsugu asks what alternatives humans have come up with regarding babyeaters
- Leave Babyeaters be: unacceptable
- Exterminate Babyeaters: unacceptable
- Humans desire to keep Babyeater children alive, but do not want to fundamentally alter the moral values of babyeaters
- Kiritsugu says that humanity’s treatment of its children causes the Super-Happys as much pain as the Babyeaters treatment of their children causes pain for humans
- Akon asks Confessor if humanity went down the wrong path
- Confessor’s reply
- Neither the existence of Super-Happys or Babyeaters is evidence that humanity went down the wrong path
- Super-Happys try to do the Super-Happy thing
- Babyeaters try to do the Babyeater thing
- Neither of those is necessarily the right thing
- Confessor reveals his true nature: relic of pre-Utopia humanity
- Says that he was a violent criminal before he was “rescued”
- Akon regrets meeting the Babyeaters and Superhappies
- Confessor reminds him that if humanity hadn’t met the Babyeaters, Babyeater children would continue dying
- Optimize for results, not responsibility
- Debate on how humanity would react to news of Babyeaters
- Akon - humanity would immediately mobilize and do whatever it needed to do to save the Babyeater children
- Confessor - Akon is massively underestimating humanity’s ability to let horrible things happen, so long as those horrible things are far away
- The rest of the ship’s crew doesn’t have any useful suggestions
- Superhappys seem to think and develop technology much faster than humans
- For Superhappys, thinking is evolution and evolution is thinking
- Humans ask Superhappys what their intentions and capabilities are w.r.t to themeselves and the babyeaters
- First proposal
- Babyeaters eat their children at a stage when they’re not sentient
- Babyeaters life cycle could be changed to accomodate this
- In response, humans and Superhappys update to have more children and consume them when they’re not sentient
- Superhappys acknowledge that this proposal is unlikely to be accepted
- Second proposal
- Compromise deal between Superhappys and humans
- Superhappys will evolve to value happiness obtained with more complex means as long as the total amount of happiness does not decrease
- Humans have to give up pain and misery in all its forms
- Superhappys don’t exactly give humanity a choice - after all, all pain is empathetically felt by Superhappys and they’d rather modify us than modify themselves
- At this point the ship’s Engineer intervenes - says that he’s derived a means from the Babyeaters’ data to blow up stars with an Alderson drive
- Humans can blow up the star they’re at but this will prevent either humans or Superhappys from rescuing the Babyeater children
- At this point the Superhappys message and ask for a reply from the humans
- Akon replies that he personally, at least, accepts the Superhappy’s offer
- The Superhappys say that since Akon is a pretty typical human, the fact that Akon accepted their offer means that most humans will accept as well
- At this point, the Lord Pilot moves to attack Akon
- Confessor stuns the Lord Pilot
- Impossible Possible World returns to human space with the news
- Humanity, for one reason or another decides to go along with the Superhappy plan
- Superhappy ships show up above human inhabited worlds
- Dissenters have been quietly committing suicide and infanticide in order to not become whatever the Superhappys are going to make humanity – this fact has been concealed from the Superhappys
- Everyone gets a door, a capsule up to the Superhappy ship and presumably a happy ending?
- Confessor stuns Akon and assumes command
- Impossible Possible World returns to Huygens, broadcasts a warning and sets into motion the plan to blow up the star with the Alderson drive
- By blowing up Huygens, the crew can simultaneously allow the Superhappys to go after the Babyeaters while simultaneously cutting off contact with Superhappys
- Babyeater children get saved, humanity is unaltered
- Cost: 15 billion lives minus those who managed to make it off in the 3:30 on starships
- Crew reflects on the meaning of what they’ve done
Discussion Notes
Lightning Talks
Joe: 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics
- 2016 Nobel Prize in Physics was won by Thouless, Haldane and Kosterlitz
- Thouless is from the University of Washington (!)
- Prior theories of phase transitions relied on changes in the group symmetry of materials
- Solid to liquid, liquid to gas, etc.
- Thouless, Haldane and Kosterlitz identified a form of phase transition that doesn’t alter symmetry - topological phase transition
- Example: vortices and anti-vortices
- Neither can exist in isolation, but vortices and anti-vortices can exist in pairs
- Rearranging the configuration of vortices and anti-vortices doesn’t alter the symmetry of the material, but resembles a phase transition in every other way
- Thus this is a new type of phase transition
Reading Discussion
- How would the Superhappys have known where humans and babyeaters came from?
- Babyeaters observed where humans came from
- Babyeaters cooperated with Superhappys by transmitting their own origin and the humans’ origin to the Superhappys
- If the Superhappys were AI, would they be a friendly AI or an unfriendly AI?
- Maybe the Superhappys are giving us the best possible deal
- But how can we know that? The Superhappys have enough of a technological edge on us to impose any deal they want, whether we like it or not
- Superhappys are Borg, or rather the Borg would be Superhappys if only they smiled
- Superhappys have Lysenkoist genetics, which is why they evolve so fast
- The final outcome of this story depends the cosmological nature of the universe
- Humans have blown up the starline between Hyugens and Earth
- If the universe is infinite, then this means that the Superhappys will have to be extraordinarily lucky in order to find another starline that connects back to human space
- If the universe is finite, then the Superhappys will inevitably recontact humans as their rate of increase is much faster than humans’
- Babyeaters have naturalistic metaethics - what’s natural is right and what’s right is natural
- Eliezer does dialogue well
- One of the things that Eliezer did in this story is to make even the humans of the future seem a little bit alien
- Men adjusting lipstick
- References to legalization of nonconsensual sex
- What would we find most alien or disgusting in a plausible future?
- Forced mental modifications: “fixing” addicts, criminals, etc. through nootropic cocktails
- Genetics arms race - iterated embryo selection, CRISPR, etc.