{"id":266,"date":"2009-02-01T21:05:36","date_gmt":"2009-02-02T05:05:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=266"},"modified":"2009-02-01T21:05:36","modified_gmt":"2009-02-02T05:05:36","slug":"in-praise-of-baby-eating","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=266","title":{"rendered":"In Praise of Baby-Eating"},"content":{"rendered":"

Overcoming Bias<\/em><\/a> is an erudite blog out out Oxford which focuses on the general theme of self-deception.\u00a0 It plays around with everything from God to zombies, from neuroeconomics to applied statistics.\u00a0 It is sometimes dry, but always substantive \u2014 and now, for a limited time only, it is also fucking hilarious.<\/p>\n

Blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky is serving up the kind of classic fifties-era first-contact story that Jonathan Swift might have written, if Jonathan Swift had had a background in game theory.\u00a0 In the first installment we encounter an alien race whose peaceful, scientific, and undeniably moral civilization is predicated upon the eating of babies. Our earnest crew wrestles with the intuitive proposition that baby-eating is wrong, but has a much more\u00a0 difficult time than you might think expressing just why<\/em> that might be.\u00a0 Then we get into the use of tentacle porn as a handshaking protocol.\u00a0 It goes from there.<\/p>\n

The remarkable thing about this series (so far, anyway) is that while an almost Douglas-Adamsesque sense of absurdity hangs over the proceedings, the author wrote the story “to illustrate some points on naturalistic metaethics and diverse other issues of rational conduct.”\u00a0 The Prisoner’s dilemma shows up almost at the first paragraph; Bayes’ Theorem is not far behind.\u00a0 And the fact that Yudkowsky’s aliens, biologically, are radically cool in their own right\u2014 no wrinkly-headed sock puppets here (and trust me, I know cool aliens when I see them)\u00a0 \u2014 is pure bonus.<\/p>\n

Nothing has blown up yet.\u00a0 It’s not a Jerry Bruckheimer kind of story; so far the action consists of a bunch of people sitting around the conference table in their starship, tearing out their hair.\u00a0 The most explicit act of violence to date consists of the captain banging his face on the table to try and knock the cognitive dissonance out of his head.<\/p>\n

Still, each new development seems to be upping the odds of imminent catastrophic battle in the near future.\u00a0 New installments are being posted daily:\u00a0 if you run over there now, you can get caught up before the genocide starts.\u00a0 Here’s<\/a> the introduction to the exercise.\u00a0 The story itself begins here<\/a>.\u00a0 Each installment links to the next.<\/p>\n

See you there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Overcoming Bias is an erudite blog out out Oxford which focuses on the general theme of self-deception.\u00a0 It plays around with everything from God to zombies, from neuroeconomics to applied statistics.\u00a0 It is sometimes dry, but always substantive \u2014 and now, for a limited time only, it is also fucking hilarious. Blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fellow-liars","category-ink-on-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":267,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions\/267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}