“Review: Planecrash” by L Rudolf L

Take a stereotypical fantasy novel, a textbook on mathematical logic, and Fifty Shades of Grey. Mix them all together and add extra weirdness for spice. The result might look a lot like Planecrash (AKA: Project Lawful), a work of fiction co-written by "Iarwain" (a pen-name of Eliezer Yudkowsky) and "lintamande".

(image from Planecrash)

Yudkowsky is not afraid to be verbose and self-indulgent in his writing. He previously wrote a Harry Potter fanfic that includes what's essentially an extended Ender's Game fanfic in the middle of it, because why not. In Planecrash, it starts with the very format: it's written as a series of forum posts (though there are ways to get an ebook). It continues with maths lectures embedded into the main arc, totally plot-irrelevant tangents that are just Yudkowsky ranting about frequentist statistics, and one instance of Yudkowsky hijacking the plot for a few pages to soapbox about [...]

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Outline:

(02:05) The setup

(04:03) The characters

(05:49) The competence

(09:58) The philosophy

(12:07) Validity, Probability, Utility

(15:20) Coordination

(18:00) Decision theory

(23:12) The political philosophy of dath ilan

(34:34) A system of the world

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First published:
December 27th, 2024

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/zRHGQ9f6deKbxJSji/review-planecrash

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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