LessWrong/ideas/Three Worlds Collide

About

"The Baby Eating Aliens", more commonly referred to as "the babyeaters", is a sequence of LessWrong blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowski.

Posts

• 2009-01-30 The Baby-Eating Aliens (1/8)

  Future humanity encounters a race of aliens whose ethics include a perceived social need to eat most of their young, due to their high reproductive volume. The act of eating one's young is perceived as such a necessity that the act of doing so has become equivalent, in their thinking, to the general idea of "good". The young are sentient, and protest being eaten.

• 2009-01-30 War and/or Peace (2/8)

  As soon as they have interpreted the alien transmissions and understand the baby-eating nature of the aliens, they at first panic and assume the aliens are essentially hostile -- even though the aliens praised the humans' earlier actions and appear friendly.

  After recovering from this panic, the humans debate about (a) whether the aliens are evil, (b) whether to go to war on the aliens in order to save their children.

  One human suggests that the aliens could be biologically modified so as to make baby-eating no longer necessary; this very sensible idea is rejected with an emotional argument -- "They would grow up loathing themselves for being unable to eat babies. Horrors in their own eyes. It would be kinder just to kill them." Apparently nobody objects to this counterargument.

  On further analysis, a new wrinkle is discovered: there is evidence that those being eaten experience extreme pain over a quite long period, before the digestion process is complete.

  The aliens then begin trying to persuade the humans to eat their own babies, arguing that this would more rapidly increase the humans' evolutionary fitness. The humans apparently agree with the rather fuzzy statement that "Evolution and survival are universals." The aliens also argue on the basis of "sacrifice and loyalty to the tribe", and reveal that they apparently see Adolf Hitler as a "good guy" who made some honest mistakes.

  At the end of this episode, a third party enters the arena (not babyeater and not human).

• 2009-02-01 The Super Happy People (3/8)

  The third ship contains a benevolent race, the Maximum Fun-Fun Ultra Super Happy People (SHP), which uses the same biological medium for encoding genetic material and thoughts. (Put another way, they communicate through sex.)

  The SHP have technologically modified themselves so they do not experience pain. To the SHP, experiencing pain is much the same as killing children is to humans. The SHP representative asks if the humans will work with the SHP to fix this problem in humanity.

  The lead human argues that the ability to feel pain is necessary for empathy; the lead SHP argues that pain is not a necessary element of empathy.

  The lead human argues that the ability to feel pain was chosen by humanity (but does not explain why he believes this). The lead SHP argues that human children do not agree with that choice.

  The lead SHP states an intention to fix the problem by force if necessary, due to the pain being experienced by human children.