SneerClub

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.

From a downvoted comment:

Because players aren't sure where a story is going and can't edit previous sections, the stories tend to be plagued by pacing problems- scenes that could be a paragraph are dragged out over pages, important plot beats are glossed over, and so on. It's also very rare that players are able to pull off the kind of coordination necessary for satisfying narrative buildup and payoff, and the focus on player character interaction tends to leave a lot of necessary story scaffolding like scene setting and NPC interaction badly lacking.

If your goal in writing this was in part to promote or socially explore these utopian ideas rather than just to enjoy a forum game, it may be worth considering ways to mitigate these issues- to modify the Glowfic formula to better accommodate an audience.

Yud's response:

We are both experienced authors not in need of this advice at this level.

<no words, no words, they should have sent a poet.gif>

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

this story takes place in a totalitarian state ruled by the literal forces of literal Hell

Look, I'm giving it a go but the very first line of the content warnings is a case of "is this written by a grown man or a 14 year old emo kid"

Past 1M words

That's gonna be 4.000 pages of extremely dubious porn and rationalist navel gazing, if anyone's keeping count.

Why do both Scotts and Eliezers pseudonyms end with 'ain'? Yvain and Iarwain.

Edit: and small frustration what is up with the lack of timestamps? I know the internet is getting worse and worse with those replacing the 'posted at 22 feb 2022' with 'posted 1 year ago' things (as predicted in the transmetropolitan), or just having sites autoupdate the timestamps to seem current for the google ranking (saw a '2024' guide which in the text still talked about 2023 and had a mid 2023 timestamp, so somebody messed up a script there). But no timestamps at all is a bit odd, the only timestamp I saw was 'Jan 19, 2024, 3:29 PM' and that looks suspiciously like 'now'.

It's actually kind of an achievement that in the ultra-saturated Isakai genre they've managed to set a new standard in repulsive premises.

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.

yeah i tried but i don't think this was meant to be read by anyone.

thankful that you need to sign up using a google account or email to read, this will shield more people from the radioactive glowfic

Edit TOO LATE there's a Tvtropes page: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Roleplay/ProjectLawful