big scary monsters posted:

It's sort of interesting to consider what might be needed in a language/architecture to be robust not only to bad variables and inputs but also on the fly random changes to the code in memory, where behaviour that would usually result in segmentation faults and buffer overflows is allowed by design.

Night10194 posted:

I'm really tempted to talk to one of my professors about writing a religious studies paper on this particular cult and if he thinks it'd be viable/publishable. It's just fascinating to me, to see the denial of any religious thought in a faith community and yet see their eschaton is so close to the classic one formed by the dominant religion in their home region. Religious thinking arising from a professed complete lack of religion.

Antivehicular posted:

Never mind that it's explicitly stated that you have no privacy even in your own digitized head, since the AI will constantly monitor your thoughts and feelings to ensure "optimization." I'm reasonably open to techno-immortality, but I'm pretty sure if it came with the rider "and also the God AI will be constantly reading your mind," I would resign myself to living out my threescore and ten.

Djeser posted:

Many nerds have thought, "man, if only I made a new language, then no one would lie/everything would be unambiguous/everyone could communicate with each other." How many of these languages have caught on and become useful?

Night10194 posted:

It's just fascinating to me, to see the denial of any religious thought in a faith community and yet see their eschaton is so close to the classic one formed by the dominant religion in their home region. Religious thinking arising from a professed complete lack of religion.

Joshlemagne posted:

It's a bit like if I said I was going to revolutionize the field of architecture and allow buildings to be constructed using non-euclidean geometries. And I was going to do this by inventing a new kind of screwdriver.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/12/what-the-hell-hegel/ posted:

I know pretty much nothing about Hegel and am not nearly qualified to have an opinion on the debate about whether his inscrutability conceals deep wisdom or total nonsense. But there are a few points I draw from his rise and fall without being able to judge it philosophically.

quote:

Part of this is because on the rare occasions I do understand something difficult, I am acutely aware of all the people accusing it of being a confusing mass of jargon disguising a lack of real insight – and of how wrong these people are. “Ha ha, look at all these smart erudite domain experts who believe a stupid thing, that just proves smart domain experts lack common sense” now seems like a huge failure mode to me. There’s also a certain intellectual version of Chesterton’s Fence which looks kind of like “Don’t dismiss an idea until you can see why it would be so tempting for other people to believe”. Right now I don’t see the temptation in Hegel or for that matter any of Continental philosophy. That half of the philosophical universe, including many people who display objective signs of brilliance – has decided to just wallow in pointless obscurantism seems to beggar belief.

Spoilers Below posted:

I usually find Slatestar Codex to be not too bad, but his latest is really a piece of work.


We have a very long article in which the author tells us he has not read the works of a difficult philosopher, does not understand him, cites a number of more prominent philosophers who dismiss him, but is still going to write an article anyways. The circle jerk continues in the comments over whether or not something which is difficult if it can't be understood completely by reading a basic introduction to the subject. Complicated ideas like "Progress is made by confronting the problems in your existing ideas and revising the theory to accommodate the new data" and "history is teleological" are apparently outside their wheelhouse.

Points for this, at least:

BlueDude posted:

** Unfortunately, you can only maintain a stable, social relationship with around 150 of them at a given time. This is known as Dunbar's Number.
*** This fact, however, doesn't stop some people having a Facebook "friends list" several times that number, however; a source of minor contention for skeptics of social media.

quote:

Rational _Atlas Shrugged_ plot outline:

Dagny Taggart as an alternate Google cofounder, who's been pushing hard on robotic cars in order to reduce traffic accidents.

Hank Rearden is an alternate Tesla cofounder, trying to produce electric cars to reduce carbon footprints (he's not building rockets because Elon Musk is too powerful a character for this story).

Both of them were raised by different kinds of horrible parents who kept pushing altruism at them, and swore early on to live their lives for their own sake, nor ask any other to live their life for the sake of theirs. They studied game theory when they got to college and decided that the ideal of cooperating in iterated Prisoner's Dilemmas with other selfish people seemed very beautiful. They are aware that the part where they advise other people to be selfish is not what a Bayesian selfishness maximizer would do, but they see no point to some kind of crazy idealistic purity in their utility function.

Dagny and Hank are sick and tired of San Francisco's controls on new apartments making rents around them skyrocket and causing their employees to be hated, and they go around screaming "IF WE MUST HAVE TAXES CAN'T WE HAVE LAND VALUE TAXES?" and plotting a move to a charter city where they can have their all-electric all-robotic car grid and reasonable rents for their employees. They try to get together with alternate Amazon cofounder Ellis Wyatt to build the logistic systems they need, and Wyatt brings on board the notion of movable housing.

...and that's when things start to go wrong. The key people they need for the project keep... disappearing.

Francisco d'Anconia is the alternate Skype cofounder who was previously trying to build a cryptoequity system and find a country to support it---Dagny remembers Francisco being so enthusiastic about what correct equity and correct finance could accomplish---and then Francisco mysteriously dropped that project and now seems to be actively opposing projects like theirs.

Promising rationality theorist Hugh Akston now seems to mainly be writing fanfiction, though nobody knows where he's uploading the stories from.

John Galt is a sad, conflicted figure played by Michael Vassar (obvious). Galt convinced Scott Sumner to drop out of pushing NGDP level targeting, after Galt realized that faster world economic growth was just pushing along the timeline to unFriendly AI. Galt doesn't _like_ everything he does to keep the Great Stagnation in place, he certainly doesn't gloat about it, he just doesn't see anything else he can do.

Galt's Gulch was funded by Midas Thiel and has all the things done correctly, as best they can at their relatively low tech level and with such poor economies of scale. They have robotic electric cars, because those can be made relatively cheaply, but no underground roads or movable housing. A lot of people working near Galt's Gulch are just farmers---very-well-educated farmers who couldn't make it in the insane System elsewhere. Others are retired founders or angel investors who don't want the police randomly kicking in their door one night because they use marijuara.

Mathematicians who can't make it through the insane funding situations of academia have been coming to Galt's Gulch's math monasteries, led by Hugh Akston. Other monasteries have the real social scientists who use Bayesian statistics, except for their plants in academia that publish frequentist articles to slow down the field. They have the real schools that rapid-test teaching units, which is how they produce their operatives that keep the Great Stagnation in place. They don't have any political power in the mainstream, all they have is a conspiracy. Their goal is not to cause a collapse but to just cause things to keep ticking along with slower economic growth, and to sabotage academic science that produces x-risks, though they've had more success sabotaging biology and medicine than computer science.

The existence of Galt's Gulch is well-known and not secret; only the conspiracy parts of it are nonpublic. As a whole, the town is very ideologically nonuniform but higher-IQ than average; in most ways it resembles a college town.

Overarching the entire story are newspapers and TV interviews with Tyler Cowen talking about the Great Stagnation, and the wild-haired conspiracy theorists screaming about how it's all a plot by John Galt and the Illuminati in Galt's Gulch. Naturally Galt planted the conspiracy theorists to make sure the idea was disreputable and never got any public attention from people trying to look Serious.

The real trick would be to have the story constantly exhibit the Objectivist!heroic virtues of self-reliance, non-appeal to altruism, cooperative selfish people, defiance of the System, etcetera, while normatively repairing all the parts that talk about rationality and economics.

MinistryofLard posted:

Eliezer Yudkowsky, on reparing Atlas Shrugged.

Courtesy of his facebook page, coz I know too many Yudkowskites.

MinistryofLard posted:

Eliezer Yudkowsky, on reparing Atlas Shrugged.

Courtesy of his facebook page, coz I know too many Yudkowskites.

quote:

Promising rationality theorist Hugh Akston now seems to mainly be writing fanfiction, though nobody knows where he's uploading the stories from. 

The Time Dissolver posted:

What's that exclamation mark in the last paragraph supposed to indicate? Where does it come from and how's it used?

The Time Dissolver posted:

What's that exclamation mark in the last paragraph supposed to indicate? Where does it come from and how's it used?

The Time Dissolver posted:

What's that exclamation mark in the last paragraph supposed to indicate? Where does it come from and how's it used?

Lottery of Babylon posted:

Why are the "heroes" deliberately sabotaging medicine?

Besesoth posted:

It ultimately comes from UUCP mail routing. UUCP mail addresses were broad-first - basically the inverse of current email addresses. A user at foo@bar.baz.bim.com might have been bim.com!baz!bar!foo under UUCP bang-path notation. Shorthand was box!user, so bar!foo.

Ultimately, that evolved into fandom's use of the bang: media!character, such as Sherlock!Watson (the portrayal of John Watson in the TV show Sherlock, as opposed to, for example, Doyle!Watson, AC Doyle's original portrayal). In this case Yud's broadening the use a bit; "Objectivist!heroic" means "heroic as seen by objectivists", as opposed to, say, GreekMyth!heroic or Arthurian!heroic.

Lottery of Babylon posted:

Why are the "heroes" deliberately sabotaging medicine?

MinistryofLard posted:

Eliezer Yudkowsky, on reparing Atlas Shrugged.

Courtesy of his facebook page, coz I know too many Yudkowskites.

Lottery of Babylon posted:

Why are the "heroes" deliberately sabotaging medicine?

Don Gato posted:

So we might become the eldar and create a new chaos god, got it.

Cardiovorax posted:

The idea of "math monasteries" is just so funny to me. I mean, I love math, but knowing mathematicians the way I do, the idea of them dressing up in frocks and being all comtemplative is just funny. I can't imagine a bunch of people who are less monk-y.

And oh hey, there's that IQ obsession again.

Cardiovorax posted:

It's my favourite Lovecraft quote, straight out of The Call of Cthulhu. It's an oddly beautiful and almost hopeful vision, in a bit of a twisted way. It's pretty much unique in his work. Lovecraft is all about helpless nihilism, humanity being buffeted about in an uncaring cosmos by forces too great to even notice our presence. Humanity rising up to become like the Great Old Ones, learning and sharing in their knowledge as equals is very... unlike that. It probably wasn't really a pleasant thought to him.

I suppose you'd have to be a little bit twisted too to appreciate it.

Nessus posted:

You could debate whether or not humanity would really be 'humanity' at that point. Also, shouting and revelling and killing all sound like dreadfully jock pursuits, don't you know.

MinistryofLard posted:

Mathematicians who can't make it through the insane funding situations of academia have been coming to Galt's Gulch's math monasteries, led by Hugh Akston. Other monasteries have the real social scientists who use Bayesian statistics, except for their plants in academia that publish frequentist articles to slow down the field. They have the real schools that rapid-test teaching units, which is how they produce their operatives that keep the Great Stagnation in place. They don't have any political power in the mainstream, all they have is a conspiracy. Their goal is not to cause a collapse but to just cause things to keep ticking along with slower economic growth, and to sabotage academic science that produces x-risks, though they've had more success sabotaging biology and medicine than computer science.

The Unholy Ghost posted:

Okay, so I posted earlier in here about how I didn't understand the hate for this guy, and now I understand even less. Everyone here told me that HPMOR goes completely bonkers or whatever and that Harry summons Carl Sagan as a patronus, but...

Well, I'm at Chapter 46, and Harry's patronus is a human in general, not Carl Sagan. I still haven't seen anything offensive yet, and I'm just overall feeling kind of disappointed that this thread is working so hard to hate a perfectly fine, somewhat eye-opening story. Call me an idiot if you want, but some of the concepts that are discussed in the story were mindblowing to me, and my basic research afterwards essentially confirmed the ideas I was most interested in.

I mean, I guess my point is that you guys are picking at the stupidest crap which then turns out to not even be true. I was telling myself that I'd stop reading once Carl Sagan popped up, because that really would be idiotic, but instead the patronus was an awesome metaphor that essentially summed up Harry's ideals in the story.

So I have to wonder how much of the stuff you people are complaining about is not even something he wrote.

Now, maybe his forums are crazy (although with the track record of this thread I'd be less inclined to believe it than before) but I really don't see any problems with his work other than that it's a fanfiction, in which case I can kind of see that he may have been looking for a friendlier medium to communicate his basic ideas. ...Or, maybe he just wants to have fun.

quote:

Draco snarled. "She has some sort of perverse obsession about the Malfoys, too, and her father is politically opposed to us so he prints every word. As soon as I'm old enough I'm going to rape her."

Nessus posted:

Morkyz posted:

that was edited out

quote:

"You're telling the truth," Draco said slowly. "You wouldn't fake a whole book just for this - and I can hear it in your voice. But... but..."

"How, without wands or magic? It's a long story, Draco. Science doesn't work by waving wands and chanting spells, it works by knowing how the universe works on such a deep level that you know exactly what to do in order to make the universe do what you want. If magic is like casting Imperio on someone to make them do what you want, then science is like knowing them so well that you can convince them it was their own idea all along. It's a lot more difficult than waving a wand, but it works when wands fail, just like if the Imperius failed you could still try persuading a person. And Science builds from generation to generation. You have to really know what you're doing to do science - and when you really understand something, you can explain it to someone else. The greatest scientists of one century ago, the brightest names that are still spoken with reverence, their powers are as nothing to the greatest scientists of today. There is no equivalent in science of your lost arts that raised Hogwarts. In science our powers wax by the year. And we are beginning to understand and unravel the secrets of life and inheritance. We'll be able to look at the very blood of which you spoke, and see what makes you a wizard, and in one or two more generations, we'll be able to persuade that blood to make all your children powerful wizards too. So you see, your problem isn't nearly as bad as it looks, because in a few more decades, science will be able to solve it for you."

"But..." Draco said. His voice was trembling. "If Muggles have that kind of power... then... what are we? "

"No, Draco, that's not it, don't you see? Science taps the power of human understanding to look at the world and figure out how it works. It can't fail without humanity itself failing. Your magic could turn off, and you would hate that, but you would still be you. You would still be alive to regret it. But because science rests upon my human intelligence, it is the power that cannot be removed from me without removing me. Even if the laws of the universe change on me, so that all my knowledge is void, I'll just figure out the new laws, as has been done before. It's not a Muggle thing, it's a human thing, it just refines and trains the power you use every time you look at something you don't understand and ask 'Why?' You're of Slytherin, Draco, don't you see the implication?"

Draco looked up from the book to Harry. His face showed dawning understanding. "Wizards can learn to use this power."

Very carefully, now... the bait is set, now the hook... "If you can learn to think of yourself as a human instead of a wizard then you can train and refine your powers as a human."

And if that instruction wasn't in every science curriculum, Draco didn't need to know it, did he?

Draco's eyes were now thoughtful. "You've... already done this?"

"To some extent," Harry allowed. "My training isn't complete. Not at eleven. But - my father also bought me tutors, you see." Sure, they'd been starving grad students, and it had only been because Harry slept on a 26-hour cycle, but leave all that aside for now...

Slowly, Draco nodded. "You think you can master both arts, add the powers together, and..." Draco stared at Harry. "Make yourself Lord of the two worlds?"

Harry gave an evil laugh, it just seemed to come naturally at that point. "You have to realise, Draco, that the whole world you know, all of magical Britain, is just one square on a much larger gameboard. The gameboard that includes places like the Moon, and the stars in the night sky, which are lights just like the Sun only unimaginably far away, and things like galaxies that are vastly huger than the Earth and Sun, things so large that only scientists can see them and you don't even know they exist. But I really am Ravenclaw, you know, not Slytherin. I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised."

There was awe on Draco's face. "Why are you telling me this?"

"Oh... there aren't many people who know how to do true science - understanding something for the very first time, even if it confuses the hell out of you. Help would be helpful."

Draco stared at Harry with his mouth open.

"But make no mistake, Draco, true science really isn't like magic, you can't just do it and walk away unchanged like learning how to say the words of a new spell. The power comes with a cost, a cost so high that most people refuse to pay it."

Draco nodded at this as though, finally, he'd heard something he could understand. "And that cost?"

"Learning to admit you're wrong."

"Um," Draco said after the dramatic pause had stretched on for a while. "You going to explain that?"

"Trying to figure out how something works on that deep level, the first ninety-nine explanations you come up with are wrong. The hundredth is right. So you have to learn how to admit you're wrong, over and over and over again. It doesn't sound like much, but it's so hard that most people can't do science. Always questioning yourself, always taking another look at things you've always taken for granted," like having a Snitch in Quidditch, "and every time you change your mind, you change yourself. But I'm getting way ahead of myself here. Way ahead of myself. I just want you to know... I'm offering to share some of my knowledge. If you want. There's just one condition."

"Uh huh," Draco said. "You know, Father says that when someone says that to you, it is never a good sign, ever."

Harry nodded. "Now, don't mistake me and think that I'm trying to drive a wedge between you and your father. It's not about that. It's just about me wanting to deal with someone my own age, rather than having this be between me and Lucius. I think your father would be okay with that too, he knows you have to grow up sometime. But your moves in our game have to be your own. That's my condition - that I'm dealing with you, Draco, not your father."

"I've got to go," Draco said. He stood up. "I've got to go off and think about this."

"Take your time," Harry said.

chrisoya posted:

It's an easy mistake to make. What actually got toned down in that section was Harry's "how barbaric, wizards are basically magic Arabs" response.

The Unholy Ghost posted:

So I have to wonder how much of the stuff you people are complaining about is not even something he wrote.

The Unholy Ghost posted:

I mean, I guess my point is that you guys are picking at the stupidest crap which then turns out to not even be true. I was telling myself that I'd stop reading once Carl Sagan popped up, because that really would be idiotic, but instead the patronus was an awesome metaphor that essentially summed up Harry's ideals in the story.

Tiggum posted:

It kind of works if you accept Yudkowsky's explanation that the dementors represent death, but they clearly don't. They don't even kill people. But Yudkowsky wants the concept of death to be the ultimate bad guy, so he just says "dementors = death" and that's it. Then you've got his explanation for why patronuses are animals — because animals don't understand death. But that doesn't make sense. Why would not understanding death make it go away? Animals die. And it's all forced into this mould so that he can have his ultimate patronus be a human so he can have humans defeat death.