Over at Overcoming Bias, the Bayesian sensation Eliezer Yudkowsky is syndicating a wonderful SF tale he wrote called Three Worlds Collide. Here’s a snippet from part one, describing just the tip of the iceberg of how alien an alien system of ethics could be:
“And anyone who tried to cheat, to hide away a child, or even go easier on their own children during the winnowing – well, the Babyeaters treated the merciful parents the same way that human tribes treat their traitors.“They developed psychological adaptations for enforcing that, their first great group norm. And those psychological adaptations, those emotions, were reused over the course of their evolution, as the Babyeaters began to adapt to their more complex societies. Honor, friendship, the good of our tribe – the Babyeaters acquired many of the same moral adaptations as humans, but their brains reused the emotional circuitry of infanticide to do it.
“The Babyeater word for good means, literally, to eat children.”
It just gets better from there. He’s halfway through releasing the eight-part story, and I am thoroughly engrossed.
