Among people in Less Wrong, several ideas are taken for granted, that would be unfamiliar and even shocking and distasteful to the general public. So much, that special care needs to be taken when introducing them in stories, lest they derail the public's attention from what the story actually intends to be about. Among these ideas I would include

* Transhumanism: the idea that ponies would improve themselves with whatever technomagical means are available to them.
* Anti-Deathism: the notion that death is bad and that eradicating it is a good thing, especially on a mass scale.
* Ethical Pragmatism and other Meta-Ethics, as well as unconventional ideas such as Effective Altruism and Enlightened Self-Interest.
* GFAI and related concerns. Though I hope the Optimalverse made a dent in this particular demographic.
* and so on...

When I wrote my Celespike shipping fic, it was purely intended to be a fluff piece where Celestia and Spike get intimate together. The idea that they would find a way to extend immortality (or rather, extremely long lifespans) to all sentient beings seemed to emerge naturally enough from the characteristics of the setting, its apparent speed of technomagical development, and my own Transhumanist assumptions, and I thought nothing of employing it.

Apparently I need to revise my expectations vis-a-vis the general public, because to them it was a pretty big deal, and the FAQ about widespread immortality being stupid came up in the comments section. I think I did a decent job of explaining things, but I'm afraid that the transhumanist themes might overtake the story just by virtue of me having to explain them to the audience.

How do you guys deal with this concern?

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Anti-deathism is something that I get the impression the overwhelming majority of people on this site are against. I largely blame this popular way of thinking on religious types who have convinced themselves that death isn't death.

I can easily see this being the way they think due to the intense popularity of "immortality is a curse" type of stories that seem to crop up, usually some variant of Twilight outliving her friends and being depressed for eons.

3660397 To be fair, the fic in question is exactly about that; the mass-immortality procedure is built upon Twilight's research, but she doesn't live to see it bear its fruits, nor do any of the Mane Six. The slim chance of cryogeny has proven to be a dud. They are all irrecoverably and irretrievably dead. Spike and Celestia are among the very few very-long-lived beings who get to see their perpetual problem of constantly outliving everyone around them solved. But this causes exacerbated feelings of guilt and loss regarding the people who died not long before the cure for death was perfected, and those who died while it still wasn't scaled to mass-implementation. "If only we'd listened to her earlier," "If only wed spent more resources," "I miss our friends", and so on and so forth. The pain and dissonance of the death-becoming-avoidable transition.

...

...

I can't believe that I came up with all this just because I needed an excuse for Celestia and Spike to cuddle without making Celestia a paedo. How is this not going to be perceived as a pamphlet?

I think I might need some help pulling this off properly. Is anyone here familiar with such transition scenarios and interested in proofreading future chapters?

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an excuse for Celestia and Spike to cuddle

Well, that was why I downvoted and nope'd right out of it. It was pretty obvious to me that was what was going on. The fact that while trying to advocate anti-deathism it still ended up looking just like every other tired "long life/immortality sucks" fic in execution just adds to my personal dislike of it. But those things are neither here nor there.

3660481 I'm not trying to advocate anything, I take "immortality for all is a good thing" for granted.

I think the drama proposed here is a legitimate concern even for a transhumanist. I'd hate to be left behind, and I'd certainly hate for my loved ones to be left behind. That won't stop me, or the characters, from looking forward to a world without death and being overall happy and enthusiastic about the development. Long-life immortality doesn't suck, it's awesome.

To use a modern-day metaphor, there are still large populations where children commonly die from easily preventable diseases. When governments and NGO's get off their asses and easily save thousands of lives, there will probably be some regret and misery about the kids who died within a year before antibiotics or clean water or whatever was introduced, and there will have to be a transition and adjustment to all the new kids actually staying alive, and there's a legitimate story there.

On an off-topic tangent, Cryosite, do you dislike shipping on principle?

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On an off-topic tangent, Cryosite, do you dislike shipping on principle?

Nope, I'm a fairly avid shipper actually.

But take this scenario if you will. Imagine some real person you know who happens to be pre-adolescent. Some little boy or some little girl, maybe 10 years old or younger. Now try to imagine them romantically involved with someone. Rather than letting them be a child and do childhood things and grow at their own pace, fast forward your imagination to them being an adult and get really detailed with your speculation about their love life.

Rather creepy.

Shipping Spike pretty much requires you age him up, as you say, to avoid being a pedo. That is a sign that you probably ought not do that. You're no longer shipping Spike, you're instead shipping this character you imagine Spike may become. What is the point of even naming this original creation "Spike" then? You're not celebrating or expanding on the character for what he is and what role he plays in the show. Instead you're trying to invalidate him and rush on to the uncertain future to where it stops being squicky to ship him.

That real pre-adolescent person you know is a real person with real goals, feelings, and thoughts. They're a real person now, and they have plenty of interesting stories to tell if you listen, I can gaurantee it. A good story involving Spike would treat him the same way. Let him be a little boy, because that is what he is. Tell the stories that he, as a little boy, would have. Tell about his dreams, goals, thoughts, and feelings but don't rush off to create an OC based on what you think he might be like in the future.

Just step back and look at what you've said you did. Rather than do justice to Spike as an interesting person, you went and formulated an entire future Equestria, just to try and justify having him cuddle with Celestia. Just to justify it. You didn't write with the intention of exploring this idea you had that was itself well-fleshed out, planned, and decided that Spike and Celestia would be a good fit to that story.

That is why it got the downvote from me. Not because it is shipping, but because it was a bad story, built on shaky premise, and executed terribly on top of that. It was shipping first, story... if you can manage it. It is porn.

3660598 ... Well that was scathing. Ouch. Also the final paragraph seems a bit unfair. A story that isn't plot-driven isn't necessarily on the same level as a crotch-grinder, and a sketch of an interesting moment in time for its own sake and with minimal context is widely accepted as artistically legitimate. Some art forms consist of nothing but such instants.

The sort of concerns you expressed about using the characters as-they-are as opposed to playing with their potentiality... they're interesting, and I like how impassioned your defence of them was, but, after giving it a moment of thought and letting the emotion pass, I can't honestly say that I share them.

As far as I'm concerned, characters are puppets, to be moulded and shaped and above all used to the writer's ends, whichever they may be. The challenge is to do it in such a way that you preserve the illusion of portraying living sentient beings, and to maintain the reader's interest in reading the peace, and yours in writing it, as well as leaving both of you feeling enriched, in one way or another, from your respective experiences.

Just step back and look at what you've said you did. Rather than do justice to Spike as an interesting person, you went and formulated an entire future Equestria, just to try and justify having him cuddle with Celestia. Just to justify it. You didn't write with the intention of exploring this idea you had that was itself well-fleshed out, planned, and decided that Spike and Celestia would be a good fit to that story.

Step back a bit further. On a dare ("Ship Spike and Celestia!"), a tale of loss and sorrow, contextualized with a thought-provoking setting, was developed; as the story was weaved, it grew in the making, well beyond the author's intent, which was merely to overcome what seemed like a difficult challenge.

There are worse foundations to build a good story on.

a bad story, built on shaky premise, and executed terribly on top of that.

You're in no obligation to give me useful feedback, but I'd appreciate it if you could flesh out your concept of what a "good execution" would look like, I'm also, to a lesser degree, curious about what constitutes your idea of a "good story" and a "robust premise". You're talking from a very high-handed, condescending, didactic, authoritative position; I usually don't mind that kind of criticism (otherwise I'd have never been able to go through the Sequences, and that would have been my loss), but only insofar as it is constructive, that is to say, I can use it to improve my performance.

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Everything I say is assumed to be opinion unless I can and/or do back it up with sources/facts. I speak from an authoritarian stance because I am an authority on my own opinions. If it helps any, reread what I've said and input your own "I feel, I think, I like, I dislike, etc" as appropriate. I feel they're redundant.

Stories are meant to evoke an emotion, with arousal being fair game among more traditionally accepted things like laughter and sadness. A cute fluffy story with no plot is just as mindless and brainless as your standard "clopfic" and there have been plenty of essays written on certain stories being "sadness porn" or "torture porn" (for Dark genres). I'll stick by that monicker.

Given your "challenge" to write Spike and Celestia together, I'd simply look into who and what those characters are, and the kinds of interactions and relationship they have in canon. Spike is, at his core, a child. He's a young boy, stuck in a somewhat unusual circumstance, with some obvious identity issues. Celestia is a wise ruler, mentor, and giver of quests. In canon they interact often though fairly abstractly as Spike is used as a fax machine to send letters to Celestia and/or receive them. He occasionally corresponds with her himself, and there have been a few on-screen face to face interactions between them as well that could be viewed. A lot of their supposed backstory has been explored in the semi-canon comic book series, and those should be a wealth of information and ideas. Ultimately it seems that the most obvious relationship would be a mother/son one, with the comics supporting the logistics in that Celestia raised Spike literally as a surrogate mother until Twilight was old enough.

At this point you have really two main options. Go with the expanded "shipping" concept that allows for relationships other than purely romantic ones, such as "friendshipping" and telling stories about touching familial bonds that, while not romance, are certainly built on strong sense of love. The other is to embrace the creepypasta and not only go with a pedo story, but also a semi-incest one, twisting a mother/son relationship into one that is romantic/eros. I'll note that even with your "aging up" process, you didn't really completely get rid of the creepypasta, as I outlined in my last post so you essentially went down this route, but did so half-heartedly.

As for what would constitute a "good story" within the context of being fanfiction for MLP characters, it would have to have a lot of nebulous things that really are quite subjective. As stated, this is all my opinion and in order to make this setup good, to me, you would have to spark my interest in Spike which is a pretty hard task in and of itself. Rather than go the tired and often tread path of aging him up to try and make it acceptible for him to get kissy-face with a pony, you'd have to actually make him interesting and likeable, more or less the way he is on the show some of the time. You'd have to give me a story that makes sense for Spike to be involved in, rather than just toss him in because "I like Spike!"

While doing that, you would have to present a more fleshed out version of Celestia than we get to see on the show, fleshed out in a way that makes sense for her to be in the same story as the above Spike, and do so in a way that feels like it would be fitting to the character that we get such tiny glimpses of on the show. And all without making it feel like she's some creepy mother figure trying to get her "son's" penis. Ew.

As you said, a difficult challenge, and I simply feel you failed to meet it.

A "robust premise" would be one that actually stood a chance of the above. "OC loosely based on Spike" paired with "OC loosely based on Celestia" isn't really interesting. Rather than rely on the pairing to sell the story, you'd need to come up with some kind of interesting story that sells itself, and while I'm along for the ride you could slide in Spike x Celestia, and as long as you were gentle with it, really sold it, and executed delicately, you might be able to pull it off.

GhostOfHeraclitusHas a story that consists entirely of OC's. You may notice he doesn't present the story as "Here are my OC's, they do some interesting things, please read, thank you and come again." His premise is really simple: "Twilight Sparkle comes to visit Celestia in Canterlot. The bureaucracy scrambles to do it's job, and hilarity ensues." The premise is robust because it is entirely believable. There is absolutely no dissonance with that premise. There is no doubt in my mind that Twilight Sparkle occasionally visits Celestia. There is no doubt in my mind that Celestia has ponies working for her. There is no doubt in my mind that ponies often go to silly extremes to try and make everything perfect for her, as we saw in "Bird in the Hoof."

Now, he could have written a very dry and boring story, which would have been poor execution, but it just so happens he executed it beautifully. That combination of premise and execution resulted in a good story. He managed that with OCs, and made them relatable, and makes me give a damn about them, their plight, and how they handle the situation.

3660976 That's actually very helpful, thanks. I'll be the first to admit that I wasn't at the top of my game when first writing, many months ago. I'll also admit that your past earlier made me feel more upset than it should have; frankly, I bristled.

A cute fluffy story with no plot is just as mindless and brainless as your standard "clopfic"

Not necessarily. Not having a point/meaning/aesop or a complication/resolution plot is not the same as not having a brain, and vice-versa. I remember a very compelling argument being made for Ender's Game being porn for nerds... here.

Your point on the "extended shipping vs. twisted romance" is actually fair, and I'm glad you pointed it out. I was going with something different, though... remember Will Smith shamelessly flirting with Uncle Phil's mom in Fresh Prince, especially when it exasperated Uncle Phil? That was the kind of vibe I'm going for. Celesita isn't Spike's honorary mom, she's his "grandma". Twilight's his "mom". And they're both playing off each other to exasperate Twilight by acting inappropriate, but it's all a big joke. Spike's just being more overt and active. I really extrapolate an adolescent Spike to be very Will-like from the tastes and values he's currently expressing. Note that I'm only noticing all this in hindsight, so my opinion might not be the most reliable. Next chapter will incorporate the improvements you suggested; I have a pretty good idea of how the scene will play out.

Anyway, it was great having this talk, and if you're interested in helping me improve the story's future I'd love to continue it in PM's. Your insight was, well, insightful and revealing, and genuinely useful, and I could really use more of that.

But the relationship angle is not the focus of this thread. Rather it's the matter of presenting ideas that one takes for granted/obvious, that the audience doesn't, in such a way that one doesn't affect a didactic approach that preaches to the reader, but still assuages their concerns and makes them comfortable with it, but doesn't stop the plot to a grinding halt with excessive exposition and info-dumping.

In short, how to integrate ideas unfamiliar to the layman into the narrative in a subtle, unobtrusive way?

It's a bit irritating that the ideal subtitle to this thread came to me so late into it...

EDIT: I'd like to cordially thank you for recommending me "Whom the Princesses would destroy". It is simply divine.

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"Hindsight is always 20-20." It isn't healthy to live in regret of roads not taken, especially when you didn't know about them being there.

And well, you could call pedophilia any shipping between Celestia, Luna, Discord or Tirek with a mortal. After all, they are ancient immortals, so when will they find somebody their age?
If you are aging up Spike, and aren't recreating the character from scratch, go for it. I would be a lot more concerned with aging up the Cutie Mark Crusaders for this purpose.

3662694 Certainly god/mortal pairings are ethically, logistically and emotionally problematic at the best of times, never mind at the worst. Hence why I'd expect someone like Celestia to have a vested interest in uplifting everyone around her. Despite all the cool perks of power and specialness. it's so much more relaxing, to a mindful and kind and responsible soul. to live in a world not made out of cardboard.

3662731

This fic here deals with a tonne of those:
"Our Last Goodbye" by Raging Semi.

As I expected, I wasn't entirely comfortable reading a sexually-charged story about characters I know and care about. Heck, I'm watching Twin Peaks right now, and the constant long, lingering kisses make me sort of uncomfortable.

Still, I can't help but be fascinated with the topic. I've just brought in another story about equine/human predictable fallibility, and how an intelligent pony might try to anticipate their own irrationality and set themselves up as well as possible for their complexes.

Emotions around romance and sex terrify and compel me. I think they're an extremely important part of human life, but I also find them incredibly messy and difficult to express, understand, predict, and manage. When one is infatuated, one finds oneself acting irrationally despite one's own will.

Personally, I've never felt so weak and helpless as when I was in love. Life-threatening injury is a joke compared to the terror of rejection. A drug habit is easy to manage compared to the desperate need for another person. And so on.

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* Transhumanism: the idea that ponies would improve themselves with whatever technomagical means are available to them.

Humans enhance themselves with technology, to be sure, but there are limitations on this sort of thing - and generally speaking, we adhere to "if it ain't broke, don't fix it", because fixes tend to be, well, risky.

That's not to say it will always be the case, but we haven't run into any enhanced aliens yet. We do enhance ourselves, but not necessarily by stapling stuff onto our bodies; computers, vehicles, and other devices improve our capabilities but are not actually physically attached to us.

* Anti-Deathism: the notion that death is bad and that eradicating it is a good thing, especially on a mass scale.

There's no particular reason to believe this is actually a good thing; the main argument for death being good is that it frees up resources for new, better life. Given that for a long time, every new generation has been superior to the previous one, elimination of death would be bad from a pragmatic point of view.

If people have to earn their immortality, it is likely to end up with much better results.

* Ethical Pragmatism and other Meta-Ethics, as well as unconventional ideas such as Effective Altruism and Enlightened Self-Interest.

None of those are particularly controversial (other than ethical pragmatism, perhaps, but even then, most people think of themselves as pragmatic), they're just hard to implement properly. Effective altruism is very difficult to implement properly, and it is hard for people to determine their enlightened self-interest.

* GFAI and related concerns. Though I hope the Optimalverse made a dent in this particular demographic.

Well, the first way to check if someone is a rationalist is if they believe in stuff like that.

If they say that they do, you know they're not. Obviously anyone who is religious isn't a rationalist.

"Our AI, who art in the future, HAL-LOW be thy name; thy kingdom come, thy will be done, in Perth as it is in Devon."

The robo-utopian singularity is never going to happen. In real life, what you actually see are diminishing rather than accelerating returns, which is a well-known phenomenon. Every iterative improvement is successively more difficult and expensive than the previous one in any highly optimized system.

As it turns out, we have already observed this; the rate of increase in transistor density is declining, not accelerating, and the limit is the same as it has ever been - the laws of physics, as it turns out, don't really change. Inventions per-capita have been in decline for quite some time, and it is increasingly more difficult to make major improvements. All technologies have exhibited this same trend over time, and computers are no different in this way.

The reality is that according to present calculations, a future supercomputer with future 1 nm gate transistors will be just about fast enough to simulate the function of a human brain in real time, assuming additional complications don't crop up, at an enormously high cost.

Making something twice as smart as a human being (assuming that is even a meaningful thing to say, which isn't even entirely clear, because we don't really have any way of measuring intelligence in the first place in absolute terms) is going to be more difficult than making something as smart as a human being. Making something four times as smart is almost certainly going to be even more difficult than the previous advancement - likely exponentially so. And you have to recognize that humans working in groups are effectively smarter than individual humans in some way, so you have to overcome that barrier as well. We don't even know how variable human intelligence is; is the smartest human 20% smarter than an average one? 200%? 2000%? No one really knows.

And that's ignoring the fact that a human brain can run off of a couple thousand calories worth of energy per day, whereas said supercomputer would likely require a pretty immense amount of electricity to run for something as smart as one human is, let alone making something which is vastly more intelligent.

Moreover, it is very, very unlikely that intelligence can be linearly scaled. When we increase the clock speed of a computer, we're doing more calculations per second, but that just means you're doing calculations faster. Even if you had a 10:1 or 100:1 speed advantage, it wouldn't make you 10 or 100 times smarter, it would merely give you 10-100x as much time to think, which isn't even remotely the same thing as having 10x or 100x the intelligence. And that's assuming the computer even could be that much faster at any sort of reasonable energy cost.

Actually increasing absolute intelligence would very likely require you to redesign the machinery of intelligence, and that would almost certainly be extremely arduous; the problem very likely increases in difficulty exponentially, while likely not even managing linear returns, especially after a few iterations. That's a recipe for diminishing returns, not accelerating returns.

We also have no idea how close to peak intelligence humans are; there are limits on heat dissipation and allowable energy consumption, and for all we know we may well not be all that terribly far off from it in the first place. If a hundred individual intelligences are as valuable as one "maximized" intelligence, and those 100 intelligences are cheaper to maintain, then they're a superior solution to the problem.

Chances are synthetic intelligences probably aren't even worthwhile anyways; we don't allow slavery, so there's no profit in it, and what is the point of building a artificial person? The most likely route is what we already do, namely utilizing technology to boost human capabilities. My computer makes me effectively much faster at research and calculation, among other things, which makes me effectively smarter, but my computer is not smart in any way, nor does it have to be connected to my body to serve this function.

We might create synthetic intelligences for various reasons (probably experimental ones, primarily, though possibly for other reasons), but there's no reason to believe that they will be of godlike intelligence.

Singularitianism is not really very different from millenialism in the end; making Jesus into an AI doesn't really change anything, it is just reskinning Paradise so it has a sci-fi aesthetic to it. It is no more realistic.

That's not to say that the world doesn't change over time, but it isn't going to become Paradise. It is just going to be different. The world has changed vastly several times in the last few centuries, and it may well change again, but the world is not Paradise because it changed. We are all vastly better off than we once were, but that doesn't mean we're drinking ambrosia all day.

3749872 You should post that on Less Wrong proper. I'd love to read the resulting discussions.

3660397

Anti-deathism is something that I get the impression the overwhelming majority of people on this site are against

Parsing... parsing...
... equals "Deathism is something that I get the impression the overwhelming majority of people on this site are in favor of"?

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Necroposting from almost a year ago. Woo.

After rereading/skimming a bit to get the topic... um, yes? I believe that would still remain an accurate parse.

"Deathism" in this case being the belief that death is preferable to immortality. Because, apparently, everlasting life contains more funeral attendances, and that is worse than all the weddings, baby showers, birthdays, and so on they would also get to attend.

4623455
The devil you know, etc.

And let's be honest, projects for immortality have a pretty weak track record—If you haven't done your homework it's very, very easy to roll your eyes at the whole idea like "heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere we go again!" and then cling to the status quo as a sign of clear-eyed maturity.

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Well back in 200BC the emperor of China's immortality program was to eat mercury until he became immortal... so we've made some progress there.

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Hahaha, I almost mentioned the mercury thing. It was either that or a Gilgamesh reference. But knowing that we've made progress since deciding mercury must do something cool because it's shiny and fluid is exactly the kind of homework most people don't realize is there to be done, especially when there are adult kickball leagues, children's ear infections, and arguments to be had over whether season 2 of True Detective is a disaster or just disappointing.