“glowfic” apparently. written in a roleplay forum format.
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.
start here. or don’t, of course.
yeah i tried but i don’t think this was meant to be read by anyone.
I should have listened to the content warning because literally everything the main character (I shall call him Math Elk) says or thinks is completely insufferable rationalist buzzword babbling. Couldn’t make it past two pages.
It wasn’t an auspicious start when he gets on the plane and immediately treats a social interaction with a woman like a dang financial transaction. OK kept reading, maybe the main character comes from the planet of weird insufferable nerds on purpose.
It got unbearable when Math Elk did nothing but spew nonsense at Carissa and she seemed weirdly OK with it despite not being a weird nerd. Couldn’t maintain suspension of disbelief.
Wait math pets?? Tell me more. Are they cute? How can I get one? Will a math pet sit on my desk solving all my everyday algebra problems for me? How cute are they when trying to figure out excel formulas?
Update: I looked up math pet and it was not at all what I had envisioned.
Ok, I tried giving it a fair shake, and I guess it’s got the same problem as every other forum roleplay: it’s fun to roleplay, not fun to read someone else’s roleplay.
Interesting commentary on LessWrong
I don’t think this would fit into the 2022 review. Project Lawful has been quite influential, but I find it hard to imagine a way its impact could be included in a best-of.
Including this post in particular strikes me as misguided, as it contains none of the interesting ideas and lessons from Project Lawful, and thus doesn’t make any intellectual progress.
One could try to do the distillation of finding particularly interesting or enlightening passages from the text, but that would be
• A huge amount of work[1], but maybe David Udell’s sequence could be used for that.
• Quite difficult for the more subtle lessons, which are interwoven in the text.
I have nothing against Project Lawful in particular[2], but I think that including this post would be misguided, and including passages from Project Lawful would be quite difficult.
For that reason, I’m giving this a -1.
also, thanks for the intro to “glowfic” - for a good chunk of my 20s I was obsessed with my side project which I called “plotplant” (dorky?) which was an infinitely forkable collaborative writing app. I never got it past a few different build attempts because I would always get caught in the weeds of how, if it were successful, the complexity of a story that had loads of branches would be navigated. My own personal xanadu. Anyway, this glowfic looks like a nightmare scenario that would keep me in them weeds, ruminating, “there has to be a better way!”
It’s so hard to read when every bit has all that meta info next to it! Written by Eliezer or not
