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@RemiLeopard Eliezer asked market owners to suspend markets related to this thread at 8pm last night so that the market could reward those who had reasoned with most of the info, rather than rewarding those who read the end of the story/clicked the fastest.
Well, while the story has paused and the markets are closed and my positions are looking profitable...
My basic thesis is that isekai stuff is mostly ruled out on a literary level. We've had the isekai version of this story, another one is boring. The what-would-dath-ilan-do lesson doesn't actually care that much whether it's isekai or something slightly more normal. So the literary challenge for the author is to write a story that isn't an isekai, doesn't feel otherwise weirdly deus ex machina, and accomplishes... something. Obvious candidates for "something" include AGI/ASI stuff, showing off, and somewhat more mundane rationality / how would dath ilan handle this options.
This seems like the biggest thing that doesn't fit: "The central pillar of the story is the novel behaviors that emerge in a world where prediction markets are common." To which my best response is, this is about how prediction markets work in worlds where they're the normal thing, and here are mostly a literary device to show what people are thinking, rather than direct influences on the plot.
Most of my explicit probability is currently on something like "this is a test run by Exception Handling, everyone with a shortwave is in on it". Exception Handling wanted to see how people handled something weird, so they ran an experiment. Somewhere in the background is a pile of prediction markets agreeing that this was a particularly low-risk scenario to run the test in. Prank and test overlap a lot here. But mostly I'm leaning toward "mundane, NOS".
@EvanDaniel exception handling test could be either mundane, or other. Would be a good explicit option.
@MartinRandall could also have basement involvement. It would have been neat (but overly specific?) originally, but I don't think splitting it off "other" now would be a good idea.
I think I'm currently mostly on "mundane, NOS". My bets are on yes on mundane, no on isekai, slight yes on basement.
Okay, the mundane explanation with most of my probability mass is supercriminal/trolling+sabotage from the Captain.
Evidence which supports this hypothesis:
1. I think the Captain could've done it, although my technical knowledge might be failing me.
1a. Per GPT, the Captain might be able to use circuit breakers to achieve the high frequency failures. This looks like "disabling three antennae at once", so you could maybe have some timed fuse to do that as well, but thats complexity.
1b. Jamming the ticks on shortwave should be trivial iiuc, you know what signals are expected and when, antiphasing an expected signal should be easy.
2. The Captain blocked the experiment to drop below cloud coverage, and the experiment to drill to the fuselage.
3. The Captain has had almost no internal thoughts visible to us, especially relative to the First Office.
The zeroth most damning thing is that the story keeps telling us it isn't super criminals.
The first most damning textual thing for this hypothesis is that the only inner thoughts we've seen from the Captain:
> She was kind of hoping that someone on board would have some clue about what was going on, would confess to having some kind of mad-experimental anti-radio equipment buried in their checked luggage... not exactly that, of course, but something.
Which seems hard to be a conspirator's thoughts. The best explanation for that thought is making money on the internal prediction market when an innocuous prediction was bid upwards and looking to make money when the actual answer was "the Captain did it", but I gotta say it's not great. I mean, maybe that would count as trolling if the Captain is doing this as a stunt, but that's complexity.
The second most damning thing is the failure to receive shortwave from anyone outside the aircraft.
The third most damning thing is the lack of EH showing up.
@RobertKennedy Interesting !
My mundane explanation with the most with the most probability mass, is that they aren’t actually in a plane. It could explain why the communications doesn’t work (and what they see "outside" could be high quality videos).
And the "why", could be some kind of scenario, either for fun, or/and to see how people react in these kinds of conditions.
@EliezerYudkowsky If you already know what you want to do with this story, could you share a hash (with some salt), of the answer ?
Can we get a new option for "AGI/ASI (or something involving the Basement)", please? That's what most of my "Other" is about on right now.
Everyone's saying "it's never a criminal mastermind". And there seems to be a lot of subtext (and text) about how much time different parties have had to think. (e.g. "I'm not seeing how that logic gets evaded by somebody smarter than I am, at least after my first 5 seconds of thinking about it.") Metagaming a bit here: That rhymes with a lot of recent arguments about AGI/ASI.
@josh I like this reasoning. Some things that don't quite fit with it: I don't think this airplane or its passengers are supposed to be all that unique, or that airplane flights are supposed to be rare. So why is there one special flight that is still alive with radios active, but only one? Or only one in the general vicinity, since they can't raise any other flights on the shortwave?
@josh I think the "it's never a criminal mastermind", work because it is also "always mundane".
But given it isn’t mundane, I think a criminal mastermind is more probable than Basement doing something this weird : It is weird for Basement because they should be very serious and very secret, and it is hard to see their goal here. While for a criminal mastermind, having fun could be a big part of why they do whatever they do.
Still, I like the idea, even if I think it doesn’t work well.
@dionisos For clarity, the reason I mentioned the many references to "it's never a criminal mastermind" was that 1) at a meta-level it seems unlikely that this story is about a mundane event, because we know this is a story, and 2) the various things said about a criminal mastermind (that they could have thought it through longer and taken ever more elaborate steps) are going to make criminal mastermind seem increasingly farfetched, but will still be well within the capabilities of AGI.
@dionisos I definitely think it unlikely that this is an intentional action by the Basement researchers, yes.
@EvanDaniel That's a great point. We haven't heard anything about their knowledge of the flight plans of other planes. If we get in-story confirmation that there should be other planes in range that would be some evidence against.
@josh
This is how I understood what you said, except :
> are going to make criminal mastermind seem increasingly farfetched, whereas the capabilities of AGI could.
I don’t think it makes the criminal mastermind that farfetched at all.
In default the average intelligence is way higher than on earth, and they learn some very advanced reasoning techniques. Also there are the keeper who are able to do quite farfetched stuffs (like making someone do very irrational stuffs with some minutes of dialogue)
Also, that : https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5wMcKNAwB6X4mp9og/that-alien-message
The message could very well be that you don’t need super intelligence at all to do crazy stuffs, when you are smart enough, rational enough, and you have time.
1) at a meta-level it seems unlikely that this story is about a mundane event, because we know this is a story
Sure, the most probable is that it is an isekai given the fact it is always that on glowfic.
But it is less probable it is a isekai, given we are asked to bet, and it would be less fun that it is just another isekai (otherwise I would be at +90% for this option).
Given it isn’t a isekai, I think it being a mundane event isn’t that improbable, because it would be mundane for dath ilan (which is, probably not mundane for us), and could still be an interesting and surprising mundane event (in fact, it has to be, given what we already know).
Maybe it is something like : They took some unadvised drugs to mess a little with their short term memories before some sort of scenario, to live some adventures, and see how they would do in some weird circumstances (or whatever else, it is really just a poor example).
(The idea being that they are not in a plane at all)
@josh They're using the 20m band, which is great for long-distance propagation. We've got confirmation both in story and in other Dath Ilan universes that the physics is the same, and meta-level confirmation that Eliezer is aware of how skip propagation works. Daytime range should be over 500km.
There should be planes in range if this is anything like a crowded aviation corridor on Earth. There should be many planes in range.
@EvanDaniel Agreed, if there were any other planes around they should have reached those planes. However, one AGI-adjacent possibility that would explain why it's just this plane would be "this plane crashed, and an AGI is attempting a rescue sim or similar".