My grandfather is 92, one of the happiest people i know. He's also immensely financially successful, a philantrohpist who keeps saying, over and over, that we are called to love and serve. He has something like 100 living descendants:
Moral realism means thinking that his live following the path dictated by all three idols isn't a coincidence, it's a result of a life well lived. That happiness the woman got from knowing there is a meaning - it's a prediction of the moral realism hypothesis. A sense of peace is exactly the outcome that the moral realism hypothesis predicts: https://apxhard.com/2022/02/20/making-moral-realism-pay-rent/
I lean towards moral realism, and your post here is interesting to me from a quick skim. I don't really get, though, the assumption that moral facts will be available to humans, especially if we rely primarily on experiential data. Couldn't it be the case that there are moral facts, including moral facts that are binding on us, which are outside of our natural sphere of knowledge? At the very least, it seems to me like there are many moral claims that are a net negative for me to acknowledge, even if I think they're the right thing to do.
> Couldn't it be the case that there are moral facts, including moral facts that are binding on us, which are outside of our natural sphere of knowledge
Could the same be true of physical facts? Are there facts about material reality which are outside our natural sphere of knowledge?
What is the moral equivalent of a telescope or a particle accelerator? Are those part of our natural domain of physical knowledge?
This is a good response, although I'm not sure it makes me feel better, lol. If you think of our moral knowledge as paralleling our scientific knowledge, then it's clear that as our morals have been growing and changing over the past 400 years, to say nothing as longer timespans, they've gradually gotten closer to present consensus American morals (not to imply a teleology or purposefulness to that movement). If we think the science metaphor is correct, then people in the past could not have known present morals were correct, or if so it would be essentially accidental (like Democritus discovering atoms). Not only does this mean that past people are condemned without much chance of escape, but also that we in the present are likely wrong about important moral facts and thus similarly condemned.
(I think a lot of this is solvable via divine revalation and Christian forgiveness).
There are plenty of physical facts we don't know. We don't know the names of all the people who lived in Sumer at any given time. We don't know what star formed first. We don't know which star will be the last to die. We don't know who the last person to live will be. We don't know what the biggest rocket we can build is. We don't know what direction the whisp of a dandelion's head will go if you blow on it. Our science is so small compared to the vast number of physical motions that have, do, and will happen.
I think widespread literacy and the printing press helped accelerate moral progress. Certain socio-political forms like modern democracy the same. Not sure what else.
You can make the same claim about science, just replacing prophets with leading scientists. How much of our knowledge of physics came from newton?
Buddha explicitly said things like ' don't just take my word for it, do the experiment and see it yourself
or, check out this quote from deuteronomy 18:22, which is basically the rationalist creed:
"when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him."
If happiness is the primary measuring stick here, wouldn't a heroin user with enough funds to supply and manage it be the happiest person in the world? I haven't tried it but I imagine a heroin injection brings you more happiness than 100+ living descendants could ever do.
And no, I wouldn’t say it’s the primary measuring stick. When asked the meaning of life, the idols gave three: find happiness, love others, and propagate the species. But what if these are all instrumental strategies of the one true terminal goal?
I had a similar thought a few months ago and tried it.
Do not recommend. (I am currently on methadone slowly recovering from the resulting opioid dependency).
The problem is the way tolerance works. Specifically, that tolerance to different effects of heroin builds up at different rates. Tolerance to euphoria builds the fastest, while tolerance to other effects like sedation builds more slowly.
The process goes something like this:
- Initially, a "small" dose produces euphoria without sedation and a "medium" dose produces heavy sedation.
- Later, as you build tolerance, you might need a "large" dose to get the same heavy sedation, and a "medium" dose to get the same euphoria, BUT the "middle" dose is also still slightly sedating.
- Eventually, a dose that produces euphoria is also very sedating, and finally you get to a point where you would lose consciousness before you get any euphoria at all.
This is not my experience at all. Opioids have never stopped feeling amazing to me. I have been using them for fifteen years, at this point, with maybe two tolerance breaks in all that time.
From what I understand, some people's tolerance builds up much slower (if at all) and they can use small doses of opioids for decades. @Himaldr below confirms this.
So assuming a given person is "lucky" to be able to consume heroin daily for 40 years, would they be better off that OPs grandfather with 100+ living descendants?
Opiates bring you physical comfort, not happiness. Happiness cannot ever be successfully pursued. It only comes as a byproduct of pursuing something else.
It seems like our language could be more precise, I don't know how it is in other languages. Passing euphoric sensations seem pretty different from other experiences we associate with happiness -- satisfaction, joy, sense of purpose/meaning, appreciation, gratitude, exhilaration, peacefulness, loving and being loved, and so on.
The Columbia University professor Carl Hart is a heroin user with massive (enough) funds. He's also a neuropsychopharmacologist, FWIW. Email him at clh42@columbia.edu . But beware: he might just tell you to buy his most recent book.
I was that heroin user for many years. Those were glorious years, but the hedonic treadmill comes for us all eventually. Opiates bring you physical comfort, not necessarily happiness. The best thing my privilege ever did for me was give me the ability to end my heroin use before it harmed me, my ability to continue living an amazing life, or anybody else.
So if I'm following your argument correctly you claim that if moral realism is true, we will have a tendency to converge on real moral laws when we create a model of morality and then iteratively change it based on evidence.
Why do you assume that moral truths will result in a feeling of peace or happiness? My understanding of moral realism is that it promises *an* answer to our moral questions, not one that we enjoy or even one that's human-legible.
In fact, it kinda seems like you've started out with a moral assumption that 'peaceful' is a good/desirable state that gives meaningful information about morality. I'm not sure that's true. (In fact, all of the moral ideas I find most plausible make me uncomfortable to some degree—in an immoral world, making moral choices can be much harder than making immoral ones.)
Peace isn’t an assumption, it’s a consequence of a predictive processing view of morality. If peace is the absence of surprise and purturbation in your value-predicting map, and your map is converged with reality, then it should be genera stable.
Peace is the moral equivalent of “not being surprised” in the empirical realm. Someone who is continually surprised doesn’t have a converged map of external reality. Likewise, someone who is continuously disturbed doesn’t have a the valence dimension of their map converged to the territory.
It is not such a consequence. If one is certain that one is going to be executed the next day, peace is rarely the result, notwithstanding certainty. Uncertainty can't be the *only* source of lack of peace, even on predictive processing (or else PP is falsified).
One might feel horror at moral truths, for example, because of how unattainable they felt.
This is a great example, but writing from religious practitioners in multiple faiths says that the opposite is true, in a way that lines up with predictive processing!
You're raising the question scott raised: if predictive processing is true, shouldn't "sitting in an empty room with the lights turned off" feel infinitely pleasurable because it's easy to predict?" And the answer is, "yes, actually, it really _is_, but it takes a long time to get your predictive map to converge on that reality, because your priors don't just change immediately, and you have these baseline priors that except certain levels of stimulation."
Here's a Buddhist monk writing about how accepting the reality of your death leads to a kind of peace because you fully embrace the present:
It's told that Buddha originally tried to teach his disciplines by having them sit around and meditate in a graveyard.
> . Uncertainty can't be the *only* source of lack of peace, even on predictive processing
What is the difference between having your mental map of the world be stable, in the moment - including the valence dimensions - and being at peace? Perturbations in the valence dimension of the map of your immediate surroundings would lead you to 'grasp' at possibilities that seem close by. If your mental map is fixed, the gradient of maximal valence becomes easier to compute, so your brain stops trying to 'find a different way' and instead just accepts wherever you are right now, even if it's painful.
Respectfully, I disagree. To say that "knowing about your imminent death brings peace" and to say "knowing about your imminent death brings peace if you foster a very particular mindset known to some religions" are very different claims, and the former is the one that would need to be true for your claim to work.
> What is the difference between having your mental map of the world be stable, in the moment -- including the valence dimensions -- and being at peace?
Ask somebody who feels despair. Despair can result from (or in) an exceptionally stable map, and it is very far from peace.
"They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged." - Terry Pratchett
I'm confused by the terminology you are using here. Moral realism is the position that moral statements are propositional and at least some of them are true. e.g. Saying that torturing babies for fun is wrong is a fact is an expression of moral realism. It doesn't commit you to the position that being moral in any meaningful sense makes you happy or peaceful.
I like how the docent was so bad at his job that he assumed an untrue answer could only come from Liar. Or maybe he just assumed the idols would be nice enough to be obvious.
I don't think it was an option in the survey a while back, but this is the kind of post I like most from this blog. Just a collection of vignettes, all variations on an interesting theme.
I wondered if the tacos were made out of mixed penguin and monkey meat, but what if the monkeys are cooking and the penguins are serving the tacos? Maybe the monkeys are just really bad cooks, or it takes the penguins so long to waddle to the table with the food it's gone cold by the time you get it!
Chunky Monkey ice cream does not have any monkeys in it, chunky or otherwise. A penguin monkey taco is probably just chunks of frozen banana wrapped in a tortilla.
Many countries prohibit consuming penguin meat, as they are considered a product of Antarctica under the 1959 treaty. As for monkey, there are countries that eat them, but importation and sale of their meat in the US at least is illegal, as is all bushmeat. Also consuming monkey neural tissue is a very bad idea, so I would want to know how the sausage was made in this case.
I don't know if its because *I'm* still in the middle of Sadly, Porn, or if it really got deeper in your head than you acknowledged in your review, but between this and "the gods only have power because we believe in them" you seem to be treading a lot of the same ground in your own way.
…that was supposed to be kind of meekly understated, but now that I look it just seems sarcastic. But you’re unironically extremely good at this and should publish books of short stories
Yes, strongly agree. I would love a book of short stories from you. Your collection would go perfectly on the shelf next to Ted Chiang's *Stories of Your Life and Others*.
Wow yeah, I like the comparison. Chiang has a different style, but both he and Scott can pack interesting philosophy into short stories the way few other writers can.
Substack has something called "sections", but it seems like overkill for tagging posts. It is like splitting your blog into multiple blogs, and then your readers can subscribe to a selection of them, and you can charge them for reading each section separately.
(There is also something called "tags" but that applies to entire blogs, not posts. Like, ACX could be tagged "Rationality" and that could maybe somehow help some readers discover it.)
The best solution I can imagine with current tools is someone creating and maintaining a "Fiction" post manually, with links to all fictions.
Perhaps this could be automated, by choosing an arbitrary but uniform syntax for tags at the bottom of ACX articles, and then a web scraper would find all posts with this tag, and update the tag-articles accordingly. For example, if an article had "#fiction" at the bottom, the keyword would be automatically linked to page "acx/p/tag-fiction" if such page exists, and a link to the article would be appended to the "Tag: Fiction" page. The advantage would be that this could also automatically link the articles from SSC.
Seconded. This was one of the best short stories I've read, and all your fiction seems to occupy a fairly unique niche that I'd love to see more of. Please write more!
Clearly the business man should buy the lotto tickets. If the last idol was truthteller, then he (probably) won't win, and thus he won't have used the idols for sordid financial gain - in fact he'll have used them for financial loss. If the last idol wasn't truthteller, then he'll win with one of the first two's numbers, and the warning was (probably) false.
That is, unless the idol meant "ATTEMPTED sordid financial gain", but given that they're omniscient, one would assume they choose their words carefully.
If the business man was the kind of person that would come to this conclusion and still buy lottery tickets after getting the warning, he would have gotten a different answer.
What if the last idol was Random, telling the truth? Or if the last idol was Truth-Teller, and one of the first two idols was Random, telling the truth?
Depends on what definition of "random" they're working from, I guess. If it's "select a random answer from the set of all possible answers" then it's pretty safe, as the set of all possible answers is very large, and the chances of randomly selecting one that sounds like a dire warning are low. But if it's more like "Random just gets to say whatever it wants", then it's more risky.
I think it's the latter interpretation. Random has extended periods where it gives the exact same answer to all questions, which implies it's probably not just a random word generator.
The last one could also be Liar. Though in either case one shouldn't feel compelled to buy a lottery ticket. The statement p => q (where p is 'using the idols for sordid financial gain' and q is 'will go to hell') isn't a falsification of !p => q ('not using the idols for gain will send you to hell') It's a falsification of p !=> q ('using the idols for gain will not send you to hell').
Without asking the idols anything, it could already (unrelatedly) have been the case that !(using for gain) => hell, in which case everyone is in trouble. But that way Pascal's Wager lies.
I don't think we've gained enough additional evidence from talking to the idols that *not* using them for sordid financial gain has any Hell-related outcomes. (Of course, the possibility becomes somewhat more likely just because an omniscient idol said a sentence that contained "idols", "financial gain", and "Hell" in it, so these are less likely to be completely unrelated.) So we should stick with our prior beliefs about Hell and sordid financial gain.
Depends on what exactly "random" means. For most definitions of "random" it seems colossally unlikely that it would happen to answer with the winning lottery tickets (actually pretty unlikely that it would answer with lottery ticket numbers at all).
Also, if you're gonna be worried that an idol answers randomly telling the truth by saying something about what actions bring eternal damnation, you can end up in some weird situations. What if an idol answers your unrelated question by saying that if you DON'T go to Russia and ask Putin to have sex with you then you'll be eternally damned? It could be the random idol telling the truth!
I think the narrator, but not the petitioner, can conclude that the last idol wasn't the Truth-Teller, because it is forbidden by an ancient oath from giving knowledge directly.
If the last idol was truthteller then there is a chance random gave him the right ticket and he's on the road to hell. What are the odds of such a thing happening randomly? Well they say that one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten.
This could be Scott's meta level way of telling us without telling us in a story wrapped in a mystery which was wrapped in a penguin monkey taco that.....these idols are real and he met them one time, he can't talk about them openly without also instilling doubt in his story, and this is how he actually met his wife.
If they tried, they could probably figure it out. (I did, using some Google-fu, but since Scott's wife's identity hasn't been publicly identified here I assume that they would prefer that I not say more about her.)
I love a large number of Astral Codex Ten/Slate Star Codex posts, but I think that Scott's fiction is my favorite type. Like a poster above, I would love to see him publish a book of short stories. (And/or Unsong. (And/or a different novel.))
It had never occurred to me before that there have to be gods for "people who like solving logic puzzles" 😁
The other petitioners really need to be steered elsewhere, since they're asking genuine questions. This temple is for "so you think you're *so* smart" devotees only!
I don't think that's the case. It seems like the nonlogicky participants ended up with more positive outcomes on average, actually gaining something from the experience. While the logicky ones mostly ended up with discounted T-shirts.
There are always people who like playing theology games. They're not interested in "what is the meaning of life?" getting a real answer, they much prefer "If God is omnipotent, does that mean He can create a rock too heavy for Him to lift?" (ha ha gotcha there!)
So a discounted t-shirt is way more than they deserve, honestly. Just be glad you didn't get smote for being a smartarse!
Scott, I’ve read your blogs for years and never felt like I had anything insightful enough to say in the comments, but your short stories are some of my favorite parts of what you write. Thank you for bringing your weird, thought-provoking vignettes into the world.
- It’s the idol the answers randomly -> that answer randomly
- She was about my age, tall, oddly cute in a sort of ethereal, distracted way. -> [this sentence reads a bit weirdly because it uses commas for different purposes.]
“My question is: what’s going on? Why are there three idols, one of which always tells the truth, one of which always lies, and one of which answers randomly?” -> [Shouldn't that count as two questions?]
- [Finally, the post uses both the "…" ellipsis and the ". . ." ellipsis. This is slightly inconsistent, plus the latter ellipses are sometimes interrupted by line breaks.]
What ended up being the punchline of the frowning woman's vignette, I had expected to be the real twist of the story. Probably means my own visit would end in a t-shirt discount.
On the other hand, what should we believe about a world where Keeper of the Idols is a low-status summer intership?
MIRI should relocate to the vicinity of the temple, and use most of their funding to hire LOTS of day laborers.
... Oh, what am I saying. If this temple existed, it'd be a more inflammatory holy site than Temple Mount. The nuclear superpowers would threaten to nuke it if either tried to access it.
Nice one. However i thought that we don't have nerves inside the body and hence wouldn't feel a thing when getting organs eaten by worms? Assuming we won't be feeling secondary effects of course.
One of my favorites you've ever written. Be proud of this one - and especially of how many "in a voice that sounded like ____" you were able to imagine!
I don't understand what happened with the second-to-last petitioner. Is there some interpretation of these answers where they're NOT in violation of the given constraints? Or are we supposed to conclude that they were forced to act against their stated natures by the God of Knowledge warping probability around them?
One interpretation: The idols were Liar, then Truth-Teller, then Random. The petitioner asked her second question in the hypothetical, so Truth-Teller was free to "yes, and" the lore of Liar's invented universe.
Another interpretation: One of the first two was Liar, lying in some way that didn't negate the basic premise.
Sorry, I meant second-to-last not including the Keeper. The one with the tweed and the smirk, who thought she trapped them and was upset when the final answer was "Penguin monkey taco."
We established that the idols don't only speak in response to questions. Therefore the final answer consisted of truthteller remaining dead silent as the only way to satisfy its "always tells the truth" constraint in the face of a paradox, then remarking "penguin monkey taco" apropos of nothing in particular.
"Penguin monkey taco" *is* a true answer, since the temple has a penguin monkey taco stand.
The rules just say one of the idols always gives a true answer. That answer needn't be the answer to the question you asked. If the truth-telling idol said "Paris is the capital of France" if you asked it "Whom should I marry, Jake or Jeff?", that's a true answer.
Whenever you write something in this repetitive format -- although in this case there's a single contiguous timeline to the events -- it always reminds me of Kierkegaard's stories of Abraham and Isaac. Is there something to that or am I imagining the influence?
“The God of Knowledge thought about this oath for many eons, and decided to create us. He bent probability around this spot, so that no matter what people asked, we would never directly communicate useful advice.”
Clearly the visor lady at the very beginning was the truly dangerous one, because fate had no better option than to have the Keeper be away when she arrived
This is really good! I get a kind of existential frustration at how all the questioners either naively ask their biggest question straight off, or waste all their questions on logical cleverness. It would be possible to use the first two questions to determine which one is Truth-Teller, and *then* ask what you most desperately want to know. But no one can synthesize those two distinct ways of dealing with oracles - until the end, perhaps, when the narrator kind of does that. His questions weren't framed very cleverly, but it seems to have worked out.
I don't think I saw elsewhere in the comments the most obvious takeaway: the story is autobiographical with Scott as the comp religion attendant, his blog as the Oracle, and the smarty petitioners as us looking for predictions by deductive reasoning while simpler petitioners find the only real meaning to be found. Oh, and the girl at the end. The only real meaning to be found ;-)
This story took me right back to the days of the Internet Oracle - just the right mix of puzzle, irreverence, and denial of real knowledge. I loved the ending too.
And thus, others were helped, happiness was found and the species was carried on... and the meaningless circle of life continued for the amusement of blind, idiotic, syphilitic deities cram jammed in impossibly non Euclidian plans of existence...
> “Oh, I thought ‘answers randomly’ meant he was supposed to choose randomly between true and false answers.”
Huh, "penguin monkey taco" does sound like a false answer to the question "what must I do to succeed in business", unless you work in a Chinese wet market or something. And indeed...
> “Because ever since he started saying that, we tried opening up a penguin monkey taco stand next to the gift shop, and it’s been horrendously unpopular. Do you have a third question for the idols?”
...guessed so. Then, how do you know it wasn't Liar who answered that?
You have a chance to ask three questions to three omniscient idols, one always telling the truth, one always lying, and a third one being the C... (sorry, spoiler, I guess) a perfectly malicious entity capable of seeing all possible futures and optimizing its words for maximally disastrous results, would you go for it?
Hmmm a God of Knowledge and a God of Power. All we need now is a God of Courage and we're working under Legend of Zelda religious rules! Nice!
Good story too! Kind of reminds me of the "transcendent joy" cactus story you wrote whose name is impossible for me to remember. As someone else mentioned, you're starting to favor a certain type of story, but honestly I don't hate it.
The God of Knowledge and God of Power here seem to care a bit about humanity; based on how they handled the Triforce, Nayru and Din pretty clearly don't (nor does Farore; only Hylia does).
The worst part of Breath of the Wild is that Zelda doesn't awaken the power of the Triforce by conquering its possessor or uniting the three Triforces or exemplifying a balance of the three virtues, but by *needing to protect her boyfriend*.
“Just because I always lie necessarily means I’m a monster.” Eek! I don’t know what this says about me but after this one line i think I’m kind of crushing on the Lying Idol? Please check my temperature doctor. You simply don’t get this level of boolean characterization anywhere else! Lmao
The petitioner faced the three omniscient idols. "This is a question for all three idols, 'When will human civilization end?'."
"June 14, 2044." said the left idol in a voice like gravel in a blender.
"June 14, 2044, at precisely 6 am." said the middle idol in a voice that portended transcendental joy.
"No, no, no, that's just what they want you to think. Civilization probably won't end until the following day." said the right idol in a voice that thrummed like a underinflated tire.
"But... you all agree that the civilization will end June 14 2044 or the day after?"
"Seek to know no more!" chanted the three idols remorselessly.
"But... but..." the petitioner turned to me in alarm. "You saw right? You heard them right?"
"Yes, that was quite something. But I'm going to have to ask you to leave now so the next petitioner can have their turn."
"But you heard they all agree the the world is going to end in a little over twenty years!"
"Yes, yes, tell you what, tell the guy at the gift shop and he'll give you 50% of an 'I got all three idols to agree' t-shirt."
My personal headcanon is that the final exchange is in front of the penguin monkey taco shop and one of her next sentences will be "By the way, your shoelace is untied."
So obviously you should just buy the two lottery tickets and donate them to a good charity to which you have no financial or personal ties except as a donor.
Do the idols really switch positions for each new petitioner? I can't find anything in the story that would be inconsistent with:
- The left idol is always Liar,
- the center idol is always Random,
- the right idol is always Truth-Teller.
Truth-Teller is allowed to answer "Penguin monkey taco" in some situations like paradoexes.
If that's true then it gives a completely different view of the ambiguous statements, at least in the story's universe.
The right idol even tends to say possibly technically correct answers with somewhat minimum amount of info. "To carry on the species" is the answer to the literal interpretation of "the meaning of life" (as in "what does life do").
Another remark is that we don't know which idol says each of the three lines
- "You’re welcome."
- "The fact that I always lie necessarily implies that I’m a monster."
- "Penguin monkey taco."
so the knowledge above doesn't help us. However, I think the middle sentence *can't* be said by Liar unless the statement is false. It could be false in one of many ways but the narrative of the story suggests we should take it as a surprising but true fact. It could always be said by Random though the third statement might imply they are not Random even though the other idols are allow to say "Penguin monkey taco", the story seems to suggest we should take the more humorous interpretation (or the joke is partly ruined). It could potentially be said by Truth-Teller because the implication is true but the premise is not.
The next petitioner was young, with somewhat unkempt hair, sneakers and ill-fitting clothes. "All right, so how does this work anyway?"
After I explained the three idols, Tom stood in front of them and asked his question. "Sooo, how would I recognize the prettiest girl who'd go out with me, like, long-term?"
In a voice reverberating across the valley, the first idol answered: "Penguin monkey taco!"
"Huh, that's pretty random..."
Tom was immediately interrupted by the thunderous voice of the second idol: "Penguin monkey taco!"
Tom quickly turned to the third idol, whom he figured would be the truth-teller, and waited. Yet nothing happened for thirty long seconds. Eventually, a high fairy-like voice resonated in his ears:
"Hey! Listen! There is a cute brunette in your employer's marketing department who has a secret crush on you, and would eventually marry you if you played your cards right. If you organize a mindfulness seminar next month, she will stay behind to talk to you. Also, her name begins with a J. That is how you will recognize her."
"Oh, that's got to be Jeannine! She's super hot! Yo, thanks guys! I owe you one!", shouted Tom, all smiles.
"Seek to know no more! Begone!", they replied in unison, before I pointed Tom towards the gift shop and penguin monkey taco stand.
"Nah mate, I'm going straight back to work!", Tom said premeditately, before running past the penguin monkey taco shop where a beautiful blonde woman sat alone, waiting.
This was my second-favorite story of yours, Scott, back when I first read this almost a year ago. It still is. As someone who is struggling to find the time to write well and manage everything else that life offers before it, it's inspiring and humbling to see you keep at this and do it so well. Thanks.
Sounds like you have more getting over it to do.
What happened here?
A commenter unhappy about Scott expressing his happiness about finding someone.
R.e. meaning of life:
My grandfather is 92, one of the happiest people i know. He's also immensely financially successful, a philantrohpist who keeps saying, over and over, that we are called to love and serve. He has something like 100 living descendants:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mStSU9wLJyk
Moral realism means thinking that his live following the path dictated by all three idols isn't a coincidence, it's a result of a life well lived. That happiness the woman got from knowing there is a meaning - it's a prediction of the moral realism hypothesis. A sense of peace is exactly the outcome that the moral realism hypothesis predicts: https://apxhard.com/2022/02/20/making-moral-realism-pay-rent/
Thanks for the links.
I'm sorry to hear about your grandmother; my mother passed that way too.
I lean towards moral realism, and your post here is interesting to me from a quick skim. I don't really get, though, the assumption that moral facts will be available to humans, especially if we rely primarily on experiential data. Couldn't it be the case that there are moral facts, including moral facts that are binding on us, which are outside of our natural sphere of knowledge? At the very least, it seems to me like there are many moral claims that are a net negative for me to acknowledge, even if I think they're the right thing to do.
> Couldn't it be the case that there are moral facts, including moral facts that are binding on us, which are outside of our natural sphere of knowledge
Could the same be true of physical facts? Are there facts about material reality which are outside our natural sphere of knowledge?
What is the moral equivalent of a telescope or a particle accelerator? Are those part of our natural domain of physical knowledge?
This is a good response, although I'm not sure it makes me feel better, lol. If you think of our moral knowledge as paralleling our scientific knowledge, then it's clear that as our morals have been growing and changing over the past 400 years, to say nothing as longer timespans, they've gradually gotten closer to present consensus American morals (not to imply a teleology or purposefulness to that movement). If we think the science metaphor is correct, then people in the past could not have known present morals were correct, or if so it would be essentially accidental (like Democritus discovering atoms). Not only does this mean that past people are condemned without much chance of escape, but also that we in the present are likely wrong about important moral facts and thus similarly condemned.
(I think a lot of this is solvable via divine revalation and Christian forgiveness).
There are plenty of physical facts we don't know. We don't know the names of all the people who lived in Sumer at any given time. We don't know what star formed first. We don't know which star will be the last to die. We don't know who the last person to live will be. We don't know what the biggest rocket we can build is. We don't know what direction the whisp of a dandelion's head will go if you blow on it. Our science is so small compared to the vast number of physical motions that have, do, and will happen.
I think widespread literacy and the printing press helped accelerate moral progress. Certain socio-political forms like modern democracy the same. Not sure what else.
The Prophets of the major world religions are the primary source of moral knowledge.
You can make the same claim about science, just replacing prophets with leading scientists. How much of our knowledge of physics came from newton?
Buddha explicitly said things like ' don't just take my word for it, do the experiment and see it yourself
or, check out this quote from deuteronomy 18:22, which is basically the rationalist creed:
"when a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken; the prophet has spoken it presumptuously. You need not be afraid of him."
If happiness is the primary measuring stick here, wouldn't a heroin user with enough funds to supply and manage it be the happiest person in the world? I haven't tried it but I imagine a heroin injection brings you more happiness than 100+ living descendants could ever do.
Try reading the story of a heroin user with massive funds:
https://www.loudersound.com/features/drugs-ghosts-and-the-radical-re-birth-of-john-frusciante
And no, I wouldn’t say it’s the primary measuring stick. When asked the meaning of life, the idols gave three: find happiness, love others, and propagate the species. But what if these are all instrumental strategies of the one true terminal goal?
I had a similar thought a few months ago and tried it.
Do not recommend. (I am currently on methadone slowly recovering from the resulting opioid dependency).
The problem is the way tolerance works. Specifically, that tolerance to different effects of heroin builds up at different rates. Tolerance to euphoria builds the fastest, while tolerance to other effects like sedation builds more slowly.
The process goes something like this:
- Initially, a "small" dose produces euphoria without sedation and a "medium" dose produces heavy sedation.
- Later, as you build tolerance, you might need a "large" dose to get the same heavy sedation, and a "medium" dose to get the same euphoria, BUT the "middle" dose is also still slightly sedating.
- Eventually, a dose that produces euphoria is also very sedating, and finally you get to a point where you would lose consciousness before you get any euphoria at all.
This is not my experience at all. Opioids have never stopped feeling amazing to me. I have been using them for fifteen years, at this point, with maybe two tolerance breaks in all that time.
...not that I recommend them, either.
Wow! Using with what frequency?
From what I understand, some people's tolerance builds up much slower (if at all) and they can use small doses of opioids for decades. @Himaldr below confirms this.
So assuming a given person is "lucky" to be able to consume heroin daily for 40 years, would they be better off that OPs grandfather with 100+ living descendants?
Opiates bring you physical comfort, not happiness. Happiness cannot ever be successfully pursued. It only comes as a byproduct of pursuing something else.
It seems like our language could be more precise, I don't know how it is in other languages. Passing euphoric sensations seem pretty different from other experiences we associate with happiness -- satisfaction, joy, sense of purpose/meaning, appreciation, gratitude, exhilaration, peacefulness, loving and being loved, and so on.
The Columbia University professor Carl Hart is a heroin user with massive (enough) funds. He's also a neuropsychopharmacologist, FWIW. Email him at clh42@columbia.edu . But beware: he might just tell you to buy his most recent book.
This guy is incredible. I can’t imagine the guts it takes to do what he’s doing.
I was that heroin user for many years. Those were glorious years, but the hedonic treadmill comes for us all eventually. Opiates bring you physical comfort, not necessarily happiness. The best thing my privilege ever did for me was give me the ability to end my heroin use before it harmed me, my ability to continue living an amazing life, or anybody else.
So if I'm following your argument correctly you claim that if moral realism is true, we will have a tendency to converge on real moral laws when we create a model of morality and then iteratively change it based on evidence.
Why do you assume that moral truths will result in a feeling of peace or happiness? My understanding of moral realism is that it promises *an* answer to our moral questions, not one that we enjoy or even one that's human-legible.
In fact, it kinda seems like you've started out with a moral assumption that 'peaceful' is a good/desirable state that gives meaningful information about morality. I'm not sure that's true. (In fact, all of the moral ideas I find most plausible make me uncomfortable to some degree—in an immoral world, making moral choices can be much harder than making immoral ones.)
Peace isn’t an assumption, it’s a consequence of a predictive processing view of morality. If peace is the absence of surprise and purturbation in your value-predicting map, and your map is converged with reality, then it should be genera stable.
Peace is the moral equivalent of “not being surprised” in the empirical realm. Someone who is continually surprised doesn’t have a converged map of external reality. Likewise, someone who is continuously disturbed doesn’t have a the valence dimension of their map converged to the territory.
It is not such a consequence. If one is certain that one is going to be executed the next day, peace is rarely the result, notwithstanding certainty. Uncertainty can't be the *only* source of lack of peace, even on predictive processing (or else PP is falsified).
One might feel horror at moral truths, for example, because of how unattainable they felt.
This is a great example, but writing from religious practitioners in multiple faiths says that the opposite is true, in a way that lines up with predictive processing!
You're raising the question scott raised: if predictive processing is true, shouldn't "sitting in an empty room with the lights turned off" feel infinitely pleasurable because it's easy to predict?" And the answer is, "yes, actually, it really _is_, but it takes a long time to get your predictive map to converge on that reality, because your priors don't just change immediately, and you have these baseline priors that except certain levels of stimulation."
Here's a Buddhist monk writing about how accepting the reality of your death leads to a kind of peace because you fully embrace the present:
https://www.shambhala.com/thich-nhat-hanh-on-dying/
It's told that Buddha originally tried to teach his disciplines by having them sit around and meditate in a graveyard.
> . Uncertainty can't be the *only* source of lack of peace, even on predictive processing
What is the difference between having your mental map of the world be stable, in the moment - including the valence dimensions - and being at peace? Perturbations in the valence dimension of the map of your immediate surroundings would lead you to 'grasp' at possibilities that seem close by. If your mental map is fixed, the gradient of maximal valence becomes easier to compute, so your brain stops trying to 'find a different way' and instead just accepts wherever you are right now, even if it's painful.
Respectfully, I disagree. To say that "knowing about your imminent death brings peace" and to say "knowing about your imminent death brings peace if you foster a very particular mindset known to some religions" are very different claims, and the former is the one that would need to be true for your claim to work.
> What is the difference between having your mental map of the world be stable, in the moment -- including the valence dimensions -- and being at peace?
Ask somebody who feels despair. Despair can result from (or in) an exceptionally stable map, and it is very far from peace.
"They say that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates a man's mind wonderfully; unfortunately, what the mind inevitably concentrates on is that, in the morning, it will be in a body that is going to be hanged." - Terry Pratchett
I'm confused by the terminology you are using here. Moral realism is the position that moral statements are propositional and at least some of them are true. e.g. Saying that torturing babies for fun is wrong is a fact is an expression of moral realism. It doesn't commit you to the position that being moral in any meaningful sense makes you happy or peaceful.
I like how the docent was so bad at his job that he assumed an untrue answer could only come from Liar. Or maybe he just assumed the idols would be nice enough to be obvious.
Also, what kind of person would not ask the questions on their first day on the job?
someone patient enough to watch all the failings of others, secure in the knowledge that they can ask later.
Or apathetic enough!
The docent believed himself unworthy
They seemed to want to tell him something, so I'd assume they're being nice.
That was so sweet. Big Unsong mood, love it. And nice opposition with "Taboo Words" :)
Of the left idol, I ask: what will the center idol say is the correct font to use to actually make that "I SOLVED THE RIDDLE OF THE IDOLS" t-shirt?
Penguin monkey sans
Thank you both for this exchange! :)
I don't think it was an option in the survey a while back, but this is the kind of post I like most from this blog. Just a collection of vignettes, all variations on an interesting theme.
+1
+1
+1
+2?
yeah these ones area really good. the infinite love cactus thing really stuck with me.
Fully agreed. And yes, I also thought about the cactus.
I wonder if anyone's ever eaten a penguin monkey taco. If they did, it was probably either in Peru or South Africa.
I wondered if the tacos were made out of mixed penguin and monkey meat, but what if the monkeys are cooking and the penguins are serving the tacos? Maybe the monkeys are just really bad cooks, or it takes the penguins so long to waddle to the table with the food it's gone cold by the time you get it!
Chunky Monkey ice cream does not have any monkeys in it, chunky or otherwise. A penguin monkey taco is probably just chunks of frozen banana wrapped in a tortilla.
It was actually a true answer. The hard part is correctly interpreting what penguin monkey taco means.
Many countries prohibit consuming penguin meat, as they are considered a product of Antarctica under the 1959 treaty. As for monkey, there are countries that eat them, but importation and sale of their meat in the US at least is illegal, as is all bushmeat. Also consuming monkey neural tissue is a very bad idea, so I would want to know how the sausage was made in this case.
Raymond Smullyan would probably have enjoyed this blog post immensely.
I've only read "What is the name of this book?" Any recommendations for one of his many other titles?
The Tao is Silent
Far more fun than real religion.
Wow. I don't know why this one hit the way it did, but this might actually be my favorite Scott Alexander short!
I stopped lurking to say the same. The "nice" made me laugh out loud and I walked away feeling kind of warm and fuzzy.
Thank you for writing this, Scott :)
I don't know if its because *I'm* still in the middle of Sadly, Porn, or if it really got deeper in your head than you acknowledged in your review, but between this and "the gods only have power because we believe in them" you seem to be treading a lot of the same ground in your own way.
Huh, I hadn't thought of that aspect, thanks.
Good one. But even love doesn't guarantee happiness.
you’re so good at this
…that was supposed to be kind of meekly understated, but now that I look it just seems sarcastic. But you’re unironically extremely good at this and should publish books of short stories
Thanks!
Yes, strongly agree. I would love a book of short stories from you. Your collection would go perfectly on the shelf next to Ted Chiang's *Stories of Your Life and Others*.
Wow yeah, I like the comparison. Chiang has a different style, but both he and Scott can pack interesting philosophy into short stories the way few other writers can.
I think it would be great for someone to compile the many short stories he's written on the old blog as well https://slatestarcodex.com/tag/fiction/
(unfortunately ACX doesn't support post tagging so I can't just filter for posts tagged 'fiction' here)
Substack has something called "sections", but it seems like overkill for tagging posts. It is like splitting your blog into multiple blogs, and then your readers can subscribe to a selection of them, and you can charge them for reading each section separately.
https://on.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-publication-sections
(There is also something called "tags" but that applies to entire blogs, not posts. Like, ACX could be tagged "Rationality" and that could maybe somehow help some readers discover it.)
The best solution I can imagine with current tools is someone creating and maintaining a "Fiction" post manually, with links to all fictions.
Perhaps this could be automated, by choosing an arbitrary but uniform syntax for tags at the bottom of ACX articles, and then a web scraper would find all posts with this tag, and update the tag-articles accordingly. For example, if an article had "#fiction" at the bottom, the keyword would be automatically linked to page "acx/p/tag-fiction" if such page exists, and a link to the article would be appended to the "Tag: Fiction" page. The advantage would be that this could also automatically link the articles from SSC.
yes someone please do this!
Agree!
Seconded. This was one of the best short stories I've read, and all your fiction seems to occupy a fairly unique niche that I'd love to see more of. Please write more!
yes
Squee! Stories by Scott Alexander about logic puzzles make me giddy with joy. See also https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/10/15/it-was-you-who-made-my-blue-eyes-blue/
(Anything else that belongs in this category?)
I'm commenting before reading (I plan to read it out loud to my family later) to point y'all to this puzzle which y'all are likely to like:
https://forum.beeminder.com/t/followup-to-the-stupidly-hard-dog-logic-puzzle/5590
This post reminded me of these variations on the Scorpion and the Frog
https://sadoeuphemist.tumblr.com/post/615521935528460288/a-scorpion-not-knowing-how-to-swim-asked-a-frog
One of my favorite fables.
"Squee" takes me back. I haven't seen that in ages.
Later: Love-love-loved it! A lot of literal laughing out loud.
Clearly the business man should buy the lotto tickets. If the last idol was truthteller, then he (probably) won't win, and thus he won't have used the idols for sordid financial gain - in fact he'll have used them for financial loss. If the last idol wasn't truthteller, then he'll win with one of the first two's numbers, and the warning was (probably) false.
That is, unless the idol meant "ATTEMPTED sordid financial gain", but given that they're omniscient, one would assume they choose their words carefully.
If the business man was the kind of person that would come to this conclusion and still buy lottery tickets after getting the warning, he would have gotten a different answer.
A random answer need not be false.
What if the last idol was Random, telling the truth? Or if the last idol was Truth-Teller, and one of the first two idols was Random, telling the truth?
Penguin monkey taco, obviously.
I'm filling this out on my next lotto form.
Depends on what definition of "random" they're working from, I guess. If it's "select a random answer from the set of all possible answers" then it's pretty safe, as the set of all possible answers is very large, and the chances of randomly selecting one that sounds like a dire warning are low. But if it's more like "Random just gets to say whatever it wants", then it's more risky.
My sense is very much that random gets to say whatever it wants
I think it's the latter interpretation. Random has extended periods where it gives the exact same answer to all questions, which implies it's probably not just a random word generator.
Yeah. Is "random" a 50/50 chance of True/False, or a completely random answer from an answer space (in which case a negligible probability of True)?
Given penguin monkey taco, definitely the latter.
What if the last idol was Random telling falsehood, and actually all who DON'T use the idols for financial gain will burn in hell? :P
The last one could also be Liar. Though in either case one shouldn't feel compelled to buy a lottery ticket. The statement p => q (where p is 'using the idols for sordid financial gain' and q is 'will go to hell') isn't a falsification of !p => q ('not using the idols for gain will send you to hell') It's a falsification of p !=> q ('using the idols for gain will not send you to hell').
It could be that !(using for gain => hell) and also incidentally (!(using for gain) => hell)
Without asking the idols anything, it could already (unrelatedly) have been the case that !(using for gain) => hell, in which case everyone is in trouble. But that way Pascal's Wager lies.
I don't think we've gained enough additional evidence from talking to the idols that *not* using them for sordid financial gain has any Hell-related outcomes. (Of course, the possibility becomes somewhat more likely just because an omniscient idol said a sentence that contained "idols", "financial gain", and "Hell" in it, so these are less likely to be completely unrelated.) So we should stick with our prior beliefs about Hell and sordid financial gain.
I wasn't seriously making a case, just criticizing Scott's argument to which I was responding
Depends on what exactly "random" means. For most definitions of "random" it seems colossally unlikely that it would happen to answer with the winning lottery tickets (actually pretty unlikely that it would answer with lottery ticket numbers at all).
Also, if you're gonna be worried that an idol answers randomly telling the truth by saying something about what actions bring eternal damnation, you can end up in some weird situations. What if an idol answers your unrelated question by saying that if you DON'T go to Russia and ask Putin to have sex with you then you'll be eternally damned? It could be the random idol telling the truth!
But also it doesn't exclude the possibility that you're going to be eternally damned either way.
I think the narrator, but not the petitioner, can conclude that the last idol wasn't the Truth-Teller, because it is forbidden by an ancient oath from giving knowledge directly.
If the last idol was truthteller then there is a chance random gave him the right ticket and he's on the road to hell. What are the odds of such a thing happening randomly? Well they say that one in a million chances happen nine times out of ten.
Heck, *we* should all play those numbers in the lottery!
This could be Scott's meta level way of telling us without telling us in a story wrapped in a mystery which was wrapped in a penguin monkey taco that.....these idols are real and he met them one time, he can't talk about them openly without also instilling doubt in his story, and this is how he actually met his wife.
If this is an attempt to prevent New York Times from finding out Scott's wife's surname, I have a weird feeling that it might actually not work.
If they tried, they could probably figure it out. (I did, using some Google-fu, but since Scott's wife's identity hasn't been publicly identified here I assume that they would prefer that I not say more about her.)
I love a large number of Astral Codex Ten/Slate Star Codex posts, but I think that Scott's fiction is my favorite type. Like a poster above, I would love to see him publish a book of short stories. (And/or Unsong. (And/or a different novel.))
Thanks for writing this!
It had never occurred to me before that there have to be gods for "people who like solving logic puzzles" 😁
The other petitioners really need to be steered elsewhere, since they're asking genuine questions. This temple is for "so you think you're *so* smart" devotees only!
I don't think that's the case. It seems like the nonlogicky participants ended up with more positive outcomes on average, actually gaining something from the experience. While the logicky ones mostly ended up with discounted T-shirts.
There are always people who like playing theology games. They're not interested in "what is the meaning of life?" getting a real answer, they much prefer "If God is omnipotent, does that mean He can create a rock too heavy for Him to lift?" (ha ha gotcha there!)
So a discounted t-shirt is way more than they deserve, honestly. Just be glad you didn't get smote for being a smartarse!
Pretty sure that when God creates a rock so heavy he can’t lift it, the universe gets a new black hole.
This was a delicious read, thanks for sharing it with us!
I really enjoyed this one!
This is the origin story of Penguin Monkey Taco, the NFT which will eventually become the universe’s primary store of value.
Scott, I’ve read your blogs for years and never felt like I had anything insightful enough to say in the comments, but your short stories are some of my favorite parts of what you write. Thank you for bringing your weird, thought-provoking vignettes into the world.
I truly love these fiction entries. Thanks, Scott. This one, in particular, gives me something to think about.
Just popping in to say that I love these sorts of stories from you.
so many missed opportunities to say it smh
*Cute*. I loved it, thank you for sharing!
Typos and related stuff:
- It’s the idol the answers randomly -> that answer randomly
- She was about my age, tall, oddly cute in a sort of ethereal, distracted way. -> [this sentence reads a bit weirdly because it uses commas for different purposes.]
“My question is: what’s going on? Why are there three idols, one of which always tells the truth, one of which always lies, and one of which answers randomly?” -> [Shouldn't that count as two questions?]
- [Finally, the post uses both the "…" ellipsis and the ". . ." ellipsis. This is slightly inconsistent, plus the latter ellipses are sometimes interrupted by line breaks.]
What ended up being the punchline of the frowning woman's vignette, I had expected to be the real twist of the story. Probably means my own visit would end in a t-shirt discount.
On the other hand, what should we believe about a world where Keeper of the Idols is a low-status summer intership?
The point of that one is that the idols are buddies with the narrator
I'll join the chorus. Very enjoyable. Thanks for writing.
MIRI should relocate to the vicinity of the temple, and use most of their funding to hire LOTS of day laborers.
... Oh, what am I saying. If this temple existed, it'd be a more inflammatory holy site than Temple Mount. The nuclear superpowers would threaten to nuke it if either tried to access it.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/02/26/rule-genius-in-not-out/
Nice one. However i thought that we don't have nerves inside the body and hence wouldn't feel a thing when getting organs eaten by worms? Assuming we won't be feeling secondary effects of course.
You're thinking of the brain. Damage to other organs does hurt.
Thanks, that was great and cathartic in a way.
One of my favorites you've ever written. Be proud of this one - and especially of how many "in a voice that sounded like ____" you were able to imagine!
The best part is that the horrific threat of hell gets “in a monotone” thrown in at the end
I don't understand what happened with the second-to-last petitioner. Is there some interpretation of these answers where they're NOT in violation of the given constraints? Or are we supposed to conclude that they were forced to act against their stated natures by the God of Knowledge warping probability around them?
One interpretation: The idols were Liar, then Truth-Teller, then Random. The petitioner asked her second question in the hypothetical, so Truth-Teller was free to "yes, and" the lore of Liar's invented universe.
Another interpretation: One of the first two was Liar, lying in some way that didn't negate the basic premise.
Sorry, I meant second-to-last not including the Keeper. The one with the tweed and the smirk, who thought she trapped them and was upset when the final answer was "Penguin monkey taco."
We established that the idols don't only speak in response to questions. Therefore the final answer consisted of truthteller remaining dead silent as the only way to satisfy its "always tells the truth" constraint in the face of a paradox, then remarking "penguin monkey taco" apropos of nothing in particular.
"Penguin monkey taco" *is* a true answer, since the temple has a penguin monkey taco stand.
The rules just say one of the idols always gives a true answer. That answer needn't be the answer to the question you asked. If the truth-telling idol said "Paris is the capital of France" if you asked it "Whom should I marry, Jake or Jeff?", that's a true answer.
TL;DR
I didn't see the point of every story, but overall it was absolutely hilarious
“The fact that I always lie necessarily implies that I’m a monster.”
haha nice
This story is better than anything the MFA students at my university produce. Vastly better. Thanks, Scott. This made my day.
Mmmm yes, Scott fiction....rub it all over my body
Excellent!
Whenever you write something in this repetitive format -- although in this case there's a single contiguous timeline to the events -- it always reminds me of Kierkegaard's stories of Abraham and Isaac. Is there something to that or am I imagining the influence?
There's a lot that's clever and charming about this, but I thought the humor-through-repetition was particularly well done.
After that previous discussion of genius it's nice to see a real example of it. "And they used gender neutral pronouns" made me laugh out loud.
“The God of Knowledge thought about this oath for many eons, and decided to create us. He bent probability around this spot, so that no matter what people asked, we would never directly communicate useful advice.”
Clearly the visor lady at the very beginning was the truly dangerous one, because fate had no better option than to have the Keeper be away when she arrived
This is really good! I get a kind of existential frustration at how all the questioners either naively ask their biggest question straight off, or waste all their questions on logical cleverness. It would be possible to use the first two questions to determine which one is Truth-Teller, and *then* ask what you most desperately want to know. But no one can synthesize those two distinct ways of dealing with oracles - until the end, perhaps, when the narrator kind of does that. His questions weren't framed very cleverly, but it seems to have worked out.
I don't think I saw elsewhere in the comments the most obvious takeaway: the story is autobiographical with Scott as the comp religion attendant, his blog as the Oracle, and the smarty petitioners as us looking for predictions by deductive reasoning while simpler petitioners find the only real meaning to be found. Oh, and the girl at the end. The only real meaning to be found ;-)
My only criticism is that you didn't call it "Idol Chatter".
I'm guessing that the "something interesting" he might learn was the girl's number.
I honestly thought he'd be attacked by murder hornets when going through the shop...
This story took me right back to the days of the Internet Oracle - just the right mix of puzzle, irreverence, and denial of real knowledge. I loved the ending too.
I enjoyed reading this, but I'm surprised no idol jumped at the opportunity to simply answer the "meaning of life" question with 42.
Easy A. Nice piece!
“Sure. Can I have your number?”
And thus, others were helped, happiness was found and the species was carried on... and the meaningless circle of life continued for the amusement of blind, idiotic, syphilitic deities cram jammed in impossibly non Euclidian plans of existence...
> “Oh, I thought ‘answers randomly’ meant he was supposed to choose randomly between true and false answers.”
Huh, "penguin monkey taco" does sound like a false answer to the question "what must I do to succeed in business", unless you work in a Chinese wet market or something. And indeed...
> “Because ever since he started saying that, we tried opening up a penguin monkey taco stand next to the gift shop, and it’s been horrendously unpopular. Do you have a third question for the idols?”
...guessed so. Then, how do you know it wasn't Liar who answered that?
Should have gone with that one instead of the bat.
Bats may have given us COVID but bushmeat gave us AIDS and poultry gave us the "Spanish" flu, so I'm not sure of that.
You have a chance to ask three questions to three omniscient idols, one always telling the truth, one always lying, and a third one being the C... (sorry, spoiler, I guess) a perfectly malicious entity capable of seeing all possible futures and optimizing its words for maximally disastrous results, would you go for it?
Love it!
Hmmm a God of Knowledge and a God of Power. All we need now is a God of Courage and we're working under Legend of Zelda religious rules! Nice!
Good story too! Kind of reminds me of the "transcendent joy" cactus story you wrote whose name is impossible for me to remember. As someone else mentioned, you're starting to favor a certain type of story, but honestly I don't hate it.
Looking forward to more like this!
The God of Knowledge and God of Power here seem to care a bit about humanity; based on how they handled the Triforce, Nayru and Din pretty clearly don't (nor does Farore; only Hylia does).
The worst part of Breath of the Wild is that Zelda doesn't awaken the power of the Triforce by conquering its possessor or uniting the three Triforces or exemplifying a balance of the three virtues, but by *needing to protect her boyfriend*.
I think your weird, parable-y posts are my favorite.
"I could tell you something."
I understand Penguin Monkey Tacos can only be eaten with a spork
“Just because I always lie necessarily means I’m a monster.” Eek! I don’t know what this says about me but after this one line i think I’m kind of crushing on the Lying Idol? Please check my temperature doctor. You simply don’t get this level of boolean characterization anywhere else! Lmao
The petitioner faced the three omniscient idols. "This is a question for all three idols, 'When will human civilization end?'."
"June 14, 2044." said the left idol in a voice like gravel in a blender.
"June 14, 2044, at precisely 6 am." said the middle idol in a voice that portended transcendental joy.
"No, no, no, that's just what they want you to think. Civilization probably won't end until the following day." said the right idol in a voice that thrummed like a underinflated tire.
"But... you all agree that the civilization will end June 14 2044 or the day after?"
"Seek to know no more!" chanted the three idols remorselessly.
"But... but..." the petitioner turned to me in alarm. "You saw right? You heard them right?"
"Yes, that was quite something. But I'm going to have to ask you to leave now so the next petitioner can have their turn."
"But you heard they all agree the the world is going to end in a little over twenty years!"
"Yes, yes, tell you what, tell the guy at the gift shop and he'll give you 50% of an 'I got all three idols to agree' t-shirt."
My personal headcanon is that the final exchange is in front of the penguin monkey taco shop and one of her next sentences will be "By the way, your shoelace is untied."
Darn, that would have been a great ending (though I can't quite figure out how to make it work)
Imagine being clueless enough to be envious of people envious of being slaves to Amazon. Only a student could be so deluded.
Thankfully, Protagonist shows some growth by the end.
So obviously you should just buy the two lottery tickets and donate them to a good charity to which you have no financial or personal ties except as a donor.
Your short fiction is wonderful for the same reasons the short fiction of Fredric Brown is so great. Brava!
Scott, please write more fiction.
Really enjoying the increase in fiction posts.
Do the idols really switch positions for each new petitioner? I can't find anything in the story that would be inconsistent with:
- The left idol is always Liar,
- the center idol is always Random,
- the right idol is always Truth-Teller.
Truth-Teller is allowed to answer "Penguin monkey taco" in some situations like paradoexes.
If that's true then it gives a completely different view of the ambiguous statements, at least in the story's universe.
The right idol even tends to say possibly technically correct answers with somewhat minimum amount of info. "To carry on the species" is the answer to the literal interpretation of "the meaning of life" (as in "what does life do").
Another remark is that we don't know which idol says each of the three lines
- "You’re welcome."
- "The fact that I always lie necessarily implies that I’m a monster."
- "Penguin monkey taco."
so the knowledge above doesn't help us. However, I think the middle sentence *can't* be said by Liar unless the statement is false. It could be false in one of many ways but the narrative of the story suggests we should take it as a surprising but true fact. It could always be said by Random though the third statement might imply they are not Random even though the other idols are allow to say "Penguin monkey taco", the story seems to suggest we should take the more humorous interpretation (or the joke is partly ruined). It could potentially be said by Truth-Teller because the implication is true but the premise is not.
I think you're overthinking it. That's the Liar's way of saying "The fact that I always lie doesn't necessarily mean that I'm a monster".
“Nah. I’m seeing somebody.”
The next petitioner was young, with somewhat unkempt hair, sneakers and ill-fitting clothes. "All right, so how does this work anyway?"
After I explained the three idols, Tom stood in front of them and asked his question. "Sooo, how would I recognize the prettiest girl who'd go out with me, like, long-term?"
In a voice reverberating across the valley, the first idol answered: "Penguin monkey taco!"
"Huh, that's pretty random..."
Tom was immediately interrupted by the thunderous voice of the second idol: "Penguin monkey taco!"
Tom quickly turned to the third idol, whom he figured would be the truth-teller, and waited. Yet nothing happened for thirty long seconds. Eventually, a high fairy-like voice resonated in his ears:
"Hey! Listen! There is a cute brunette in your employer's marketing department who has a secret crush on you, and would eventually marry you if you played your cards right. If you organize a mindfulness seminar next month, she will stay behind to talk to you. Also, her name begins with a J. That is how you will recognize her."
"Oh, that's got to be Jeannine! She's super hot! Yo, thanks guys! I owe you one!", shouted Tom, all smiles.
"Seek to know no more! Begone!", they replied in unison, before I pointed Tom towards the gift shop and penguin monkey taco stand.
"Nah mate, I'm going straight back to work!", Tom said premeditately, before running past the penguin monkey taco shop where a beautiful blonde woman sat alone, waiting.
Excellent 😊
Funny story.
Gonna be honest, I was fully expecting a twist where his shoelace turned out to actually be untied after all.
So in the story of the idols as they tell it themselves, which part is true/false/random?
Great work on this, Scott. I love these short stories of yours.
I kinda want a 'I TRAPPED THE IDOLS WITH A CLEVER PARADOX' t-shirt now.
> "...where venomous worms will gnaw at their organs from the inside forever, never to know rest or surcease from pain"
Man, those venomous worms need to form a union or something.
A really cute story. I'm glad you're writing fiction again, and not only for the selfish reason that I love your work
Beautiful, as always. I have translated this story into Russian. May I post the translation in my blog?
Yes, of course.
Thanks. Here it is: https://colt-browning.livejournal.com/8795.html
(and this is another translation: http://samlib.ru/editors/i/ibatullin_r_u/idol.shtml )
My headcanon is that this is Aaron Smith-Teller from an alternative universe.
I love how every time the idols speak, it's in a different over-the-top metaphor for a booming voice.
Except for one of them. Did you catch it?
Great writing as always, and pretty funny, but I can't say I really got the point
(I mean apart from "carpe diem" which is always a nice one, but I'm assuming Scott had something more specific in mind)
I guess I'm not worthy of fooling around with antimemetics yet
Big JBP vibes.
Mystery... There is something worth knowing... Stop being a loser and take yourself seriously... Meet a nice girl...
This was my second-favorite story of yours, Scott, back when I first read this almost a year ago. It still is. As someone who is struggling to find the time to write well and manage everything else that life offers before it, it's inspiring and humbling to see you keep at this and do it so well. Thanks.