Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

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Proteus Jones: Feb 28, 2013

blastron posted:

There's a rather interesting technology called Spritz that purports to be able to massively improve your reading speed by dramatically changing how words are presented to you. Rather than dragging your eyes back and forth across the page, you keep your eye fixed on a single point and it blasts words directly at you. They claim that the words are positioned within the box so that your eye falls on the "optimal reading position" of the word, which is where your eyes apparently come to rest when you're reading traditionally. The sample on their front page goes up to 700 WPM, which I found to be still comprehensible, if only barely, and you better not blink. That's definitely faster than I can read normally, and I think of myself as a pretty quick reader.

Not that I'm saying Yud actually uses this technology, but it does exist.

drat. That is freaky. And kinda cool, but I'd like to see some legitimate studies on comprehension and retention. I couldn't find anything on their site linking to anything like that.

# ? Sep 19, 2015 05:26

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# ? May 15, 2024 05:20

Pavlov: Oct 21, 2012; I've long been fascinated with how the alt-right develops elaborate and obscure dog whistles to try to communicate their meaning without having to say it out loud
Stepan Andreyevich Bandera being the most prominent example of that

Spritz seems ok if you're scanning familiar material, but I'm not sure I'd like to read a novel that way. I go back and reread sentences pretty often when I'm reading something interesting, and with spritz it looks like you'd have to fiddle with the interface to do that, as apposed to just moving your eyeballs. It might be good for dealing with eye strain from reading too much though.

# ? Sep 19, 2015 18:56

VictualSquid: Feb 29, 2012; Gently enveloping the target with indiscriminate love.

When I am skimming a book, I know that I have low reading comprehension. I expect a good novel, like the original Harry Potter, to grab my interest enough to slow me down until I understand it.

But stuff like Methods of Rationality is different. If I miss some part of the story, my brain fills it with elements of the original or from my own imagination. Because those are clear improvements over Yud's writings, MoR seems better if you read it faster.

I really can't imagine someone reading through all of MoR without skimming at a low comprehension level.

# ? Sep 19, 2015 19:55

Cingulate: Oct 23, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

Furia posted:

If I understand what you are saying correctly, that would tie in perfectly to what Yud believes

I'm saying: we probably don't know everything about this topic, both "we" as humanity, and, especially, "we" in this thread.
If that's Yud's position, it's probably one of his more sensible positions.

Old Kentucky Shark posted:

Fairly confident.

The tl;dr version is that our ability to read is linked within our mind to verbal communication, to the point where all of us, even without realizing it, are engaged in subvocalization when we read; essentially, we sound the words out, whether we know it or not. Many people think subvocalization used to be more pronounced since there are passages in ancient and medieval texts noting the ability to read without whispering or moving one's lips in a way that suggests that this was considered noteworthy and uncommon, but modern teaching methods and increasingly earlier reading ages combined to push subvocalization down to the level where most people don't even know they are doing it. Scientists can still detect subvocalization, however, in the electrical impulses sent to the lips, tongue, and larynx. This turns out to form a sort of hard-cap on your ability to read quickly; if you attempt to read faster than your brain's ability to send the proper electrical impulses to the vocal chords, it, to use a technical term, totally fucks up your reading comprehension. Many speedreading courses claim to be able to eliminate subvocalization, but so far as anyone has ever been able to tell, you simply can't. It's hardwired at the most basic level.

One of the only methods to reduce subvocalization time, it turns out, lies through vocabulary; most people linger over words they are less familiar with -- unconsciously "sounding them out" in their heads and mouth -- and so the simplest functional method to increase reading speed without lowering comprehension is to make yourself familiar with more words. But that only takes you so far, and nowhere near the point most speedreaders claim. The gains are fairly modest; a very fast college-level reader is at best twice as fast as a very slow college-level reader of the same approximate reading comprehension.

The short version is that Yudkowski is an idiot; it isn't intelligence that makes you a faster reader, it's just practice and familiarity.

This sounds like the sales pitch to a speed reading software.
It also sounds obviously false.
To clarify - to the extent that you're saying: we can assume simple practice - reading more - to improve reading speed, to some extent; and any other technique we should be skeptical about; I am with you. But when you try to justify such an intuition by referring to more or less random subcomponents of reading, subvocalisation and word familiarity, I no longer am, nor when you try to give practical advice build on these pseudo-scientific explanations.

Here's the first things coming to my mind why I'm skeptical.
A lot of phenomenons in linguistics, including word frequency, fall under Zipf's law. That means they follow a Zipfian distribution - a kind of power-law distribution; so common words are a lot more common than rare words. Similarly, the influence of word frequency on reading times is logarithmic. With these two combined, you see a lot of our reading time should come from the more familiar parts of the vocabulary. There is of course still a lot of options to be stumped by high-frequency words. For example, we know complex structures (e.g. long-distance dependencies, or elements disambiguating ambiguous structures towards the less preferred reading) cause both increased reading times (the technical term being first fixation time), and "looking backwards" (regressive saccades).
Familiarity with certain words helps (logarithmically!) with reading these words, but a lot of reading is about supra-lexical elements, such as phrases. Familiarity won't help you much* if the syntax is complex.

Next, I am rather skeptical regarding the extent to which increasing one's vocabulary helps improving reading times because I am doubtful how well we can benefit from generalizing from the auditory to the visual domain. I simply don't believe the bottleneck during reading is mapping from phonology to semantics (which would be where you'd get a familiarity boost via exposure to spoken words), especially not in languages with opaque writing systems such as English.

I'm also really skeptical of what you said about the impact of subvocalisation but this is already way too much words.

Lastly, IQ has a verbal component and this verbal IQ, including vocabulary size, is of course strongly correlated with g; also, being able to practice potentially boring stuff is correlated with IQ; so if practice and familiarity make you a better reader, intelligence most likely makes you a better reader.

My main point is, there is no need, and no benefit, from arguing against Yud ideas with Yudian methods - applying half-remembered and isolated scientific concepts from a different field with logic and common sense - when a good skeptical intuition is totally sufficient, and, alternatively, actual science on the specific question at hand.

* There's an ongoing debate within linguistics if this should be "not at all" instead. I'm on the "much" side.

I'm admittedly more of an auditory cognition guy, but I also have a lot of experience with RSVP (the Spritz thing). I use it for experiments all the time (in fact, I've programmed a new RSVP experiment last week).
To make a long story short, it most likely won't help you at all. There are a few old studies according to which retention is better for free reading compared to RSVP when holding total reading times constant. This is not unsurprising. RSVP is a really unnatural and uneconomic way to read. During free reading, we can fixate more complex words or phrases for longer. During RSVP, this is not an option - everything runs past you at the same pace. You can't make regressive saccades either. Thus, you're either spending too much time with stuff that's easy for you, and/or not enough with stuff that's hard.

Cingulate fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Sep 19, 2015

# ? Sep 19, 2015 20:14

Cingulate: Oct 23, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

Pavlov posted:

Spritz seems ok if you're scanning familiar material

I'd argue it's terrible - when I skim, I focus on the content-rich passages (e.g. if I'm trying to find a specific statistic, I'm going for the numbers). With most scientific literature, you have a bunch of techniques available to make the most important stuff easier to find - e.g. bolding the take-home message, or chapter headings containing words that are then later repeated.

I agree with the rest of what you said though.

# ? Sep 19, 2015 20:16

Cingulate: Oct 23, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

After checking their website - this Spritz thing is pseudoscience.
And it's pseudoscience about something I've actually done research on myself, so I'm doubly angry. Instead of annoying everybody with neuroscience nerd-out, I'll just link to a good paper by Keith Rayner (RIP - one of the, if not the, most important reading researchers) on this I found:
https://pages.wustl.edu/files/pages...eading_help.pdf

And a Language Log entry:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=12234

# ? Sep 19, 2015 20:31

JosephWongKS: Apr 4, 2009; by Nyc_Tattoo

Chapter 16: Lateral Thinking
Part One

quote:

The enemy's gate is Rowling.

This constant shoehorning of �Rowling� into random quotes at the beginning of each chapter is getting tiresome.

quote:

_____________________________________________

I'm not a psychopath, I'm just very creative.

______________________________________________

As soon as he walked into the Defence classroom on Wednesday, Harry knew that this subject was going to be different.

It was, for a start, the largest classroom he had yet seen at Hogwarts, akin to a major university classroom, with layered tiers of desks facing a gigantic flat stage of white marble. The classroom was high up in the castle - on the fifth floor - and Harry knew that was as much explanation as he'd get for where a room like this was supposed to fit. It was becoming clear that Hogwarts simply did not have a geometry, Euclidean or otherwise; it had connections, not directions.

Unlike a university hall, there weren't rows of folding seats; instead there were quite ordinary Hogwarts wooden desks and wooden chairs, lined up in a curve across each level of the classroom. Except that each desk had a flat, white, rectangular, mysterious object propped up on it.

In the center of the gigantic platform, on a small raised dais of darker marble, was a lone teacher's desk. At which Quirrell sat slumped over in his chair, head lolled back, drooling slightly over his robes.

Now what does that remind me of...?

Is this supposed to remind us of something or someone in particular? This �Now what does that remind me of� is clearly intended to be ominous, but I honestly can�t figure out what it refers to.

quote:

Harry had arrived at the lesson so early that no other students were there yet. (The English language was defective when it came to describing time travel; in particular, English lacked any words capable of expressing how convenient it was.) Quirrell didn't seem to be... functional... at the moment, and Harry didn't particularly feel like approaching Quirrell anyway.

Harry selected a desk, climbed up to it, sat down, and retrieved the Defence textbook. He was around seven-eighths of the way through - he'd planned on finishing the book before this lesson, actually, but he was running behind schedule and had already used the Time-Turner twice today.

Soon there were sounds as the classroom began to fill up. Harry ignored them.

So much for his goal of becoming personable and making friends.

# ? Sep 21, 2015 06:22

Tiggum: Oct 24, 2007; Your life and your quest end here.

How exactly is the English language lacking in ways to describe the convenience of time travel? It allows you to get places early even if you're running late. There, I just succinctly explained the convenience.

# ? Sep 21, 2015 06:31

90s Cringe Rock: Nov 29, 2006

Oh, gently caress a pig, it's this class. I forgot about this one. The Ender's Game reference was a warning. Not the Battle School thing they set up later, just Harry being all I FIGHT TO UTTERLY DESTROY THE ENEMY hard-man-doing-hard-things.

# ? Sep 21, 2015 06:33

Xander77: Apr 6, 2009; Fuck it then. For another pit sandwich and some 'tater salad, I'll post a few more.

chrisoya posted:

Oh, gently caress a pig, it's this class. I forgot about this one. The Ender's Game reference was a warning. Not the Battle School thing they set up later, just Harry being all I FIGHT TO UTTERLY DESTROY THE ENEMY hard-man-doing-hard-things.

Oh hey. I'm just reading the Short and Snappy readthrough of Ender's game, and for once the psychological plausibility of both the original and the homage are equal - none. Both works take a complex that would work as a result of the events of the book - or of several books, in HP's case - and have it already in place for a well off young boy from a fairly regular middle-class background. For once, MoR is actually slightly more plausible - Harry is 11, rather than 6.

Xander77 fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Oct 12, 2015

# ? Sep 21, 2015 16:04

JosephWongKS: Apr 4, 2009; by Nyc_Tattoo

Chapter 16: Lateral Thinking
Part Three

quote:

"Potter? What are you doing here?"

That voice didn't belong here. Harry looked up. "Draco? What are you doing in oh my god you have minions."

Speaks a lot for Harry�s mentality that he immediately assumes that Draco�s companions are �minions� instead of �friends�.

quote:

One of the lads standing behind Draco seemed to have rather a lot of muscle for an eleven-year-old, and the other was poised in a suspiciously balanced-looking stance.

The white-blonde-haired boy smiled rather smugly and gestured behind him. "Potter, I introduce to you Mr. Crabbe," his hand moved from Muscles to Balance, "Mr. Goyle. Vincent, Gregory, this is Harry Potter."

Mr. Goyle tilted his head and gave Harry a look that was probably supposed to mean something but ended up just looking squinty. Mr. Crabbe said "Please to meetcha" in a tone that sounded like he was trying to lower his voice as far as it could go.

A fleeting expression of consternation crossed Draco's face, but was quickly replaced by his superior grin.

"You have minions! " Harry repeated. "Where do I get minions?"

Draco's smirk grew wider. "I'm afraid, Potter, that the first step is to be Sorted into Slytherin -"

"What? That's not fair!"

"- and then for your families to have an arrangement from before you were born."

Harry looked at Mr. Crabbe and Mr. Goyle. They both seemed to be trying very hard to loom. That is, they were leaning forwards, hunching over their shoulders, sticking their necks out and staring at him.

"Um... hold on," said Harry. "This was arranged years ago?"

"Exactly, Potter. I'm afraid you're out of luck."

Mr. Goyle produced a toothpick and began cleaning his teeth, still looming.

"And," said Harry, "Lucius insisted that you were not to grow up knowing your bodyguards, and that you were only to meet them on your first day of school."

That wiped the grin from Draco's face. "Yes, Potter, we all know you're brilliant, the whole school knows by now, you can stop showing off -"

What have Crabbe, Goyle or Malfoy actually said or done so far to support Eliezarry's assertion that they had only met on the first day of school?

# ? Sep 25, 2015 03:42

Zonekeeper: Oct 27, 2007

JosephWongKS posted:

What have Crabbe, Goyle or Malfoy actually said or done so far to support Eliezarry's assertion that they had only met on the first day of school?

Wild guess: their attempts to be intimidating (lowering their voices, trying to loom over Harry) could be interpreted as the pair trying to impress Malfoy as much as intimidate his victims.

# ? Sep 25, 2015 04:03

Fajita Queen: Jun 21, 2012

It's the type of cliche that would have turned up in the type of books Eliezarry reads, I guess?

# ? Sep 25, 2015 05:14

Nessus: Dec 22, 2003; After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!

Well this is, I believe, all three of theirs first day of school. Presumably they were tutored beforehand. One wonders why it's axiomatic somehow that they wouldn't have, like, had little lovely richie-rich play dates beforehand of course, but I guess House Elves can mind your spawn for you.

# ? Sep 25, 2015 05:26

Mikl: Nov 8, 2009; Vote shit sandwich or the shit sandwich gets it!

This just happened: Cracked did an article detailing Roko's Basilisk and putting it at the #1 spot for "worst abuse of modern technology".

I'll just quote a bit from the article:

quote:

[The Lesswrongers] conjured their own all-powerful deity to punish them for failing to live up to their true world-changing potential, just so that they could pretend they had any. They trapped themselves in a thought experiment of their own making, a prison whose only bars are how smart they think they are. And so they found them unbreakable.

This isn't just a misuse of Internet; it's a misuse of all future comms and connection technology. They reversed the polarity of all progress: Instead of learning about others and helping people, they pondered themselves to make things worse.

# ? Sep 25, 2015 18:43

divabot: Jun 17, 2015; A polite little mouse!

Mikl posted:

This just happened: Cracked did an article detailing Roko's Basilisk and putting it at the #1 spot for "worst abuse of modern technology".

That article's not very good and gets quite a bit wrong. (And doesn't link back to RationalWiki.) But, anything to torture eight singularitarians for every dollar donated, as utilitarianism requires.

# ? Sep 25, 2015 19:05

90s Cringe Rock: Nov 29, 2006

divabot posted:

That article's not very good and gets quite a bit wrong. (And doesn't link back to RationalWiki.) But, anything to torture eight singularitarians for every dollar donated, as utilitarianism requires.

Mistakes trigger the urge to correct and explain, increasing their suffering. A Good Article.

# ? Sep 25, 2015 19:07

Eighties ZomCom: Sep 10, 2008

Mikl posted:

This just happened: Cracked did an article detailing Roko's Basilisk and putting it at the #1 spot for "worst abuse of modern technology".

I like that you don't have to go too far down the comments section to find at least one LessWronger trying to defend it and saying how awesome and smart they are. :allears:

# ? Sep 26, 2015 10:44

divabot: Jun 17, 2015; A polite little mouse!

EvilTaytoMan posted:

I like that you don't have to go too far down the comments section to find at least one LessWronger trying to defend it and saying how awesome and smart they are.

Oh my sides:

Well actually posted:

I mean, there was no discussion of timeless decision theory, or utilitarianism, or even the basic definition of what Friendly AI means, and on top of that the entire story was pretty drat wrong. Luke failed to understand that Yudkowsky considers the basilisk to be ludicrous, and that LessWrong is actually pretty prestigious as far as internet forums go.

Real people are finding it and attesting to operating thetan level III:

quote:

#1 Roko's Basilisk was funny when I read the entry, then I made the mistake of doing further research and it just got depressingly sad.
...
In other words, it is a scam that crazy people are pulling on themselves to justify donating far to much money to some quack organization. It is analogous to lonely old people sending their retirement checks to tv preachers so that they can reserve a place in heaven.

and lots more. Hit "more comments" a few times, then Ctrl-F for ""basilisk" for great lulz.

# ? Sep 26, 2015 12:24

computer parts: Nov 18, 2010; PLEASE CLAP

Mikl posted:

This just happened: Cracked did an article detailing Roko's Basilisk and putting it at the #1 spot for "worst abuse of modern technology".

It took me a minute to really understand what that is, but my reactions are A) That's really dumb and B) why do I care if a simulated version of me is tortured.

# ? Sep 26, 2015 22:13

Darth Walrus: Feb 13, 2012

computer parts posted:

It took me a minute to really understand what that is, but my reactions are A) That's really dumb and B) why do I care if a simulated version of me is tortured.

Because you might be the simulation, and so there's a chance you'll fail your AI-god's scenario and get all I-Have-No-Mouth-And-I-Must-Screamed.

# ? Sep 26, 2015 22:17

Clipperton: Dec 20, 2011; Grimey Drawer

Darth Walrus posted:

Because you might be the simulation, and so there's a chance you'll fail your AI-god's scenario and get all I-Have-No-Mouth-And-I-Must-Screamed.

That and

rationalwiki posted:

LessWrong holds that the human mind is implemented entirely as patterns of information in physical matter, and that those patterns could, in principle, be run elsewhere and constitute a person that feels they are you, like running a computer program with all its data on a different PC; this is held to be both a meaningful concept and physically possible.

This is not unduly strange (the concept follows from materialism, though feasibility is another matter), but Yudkowsky further holds that you should feel that another instance of you is not a separate person very like you � an instant twin, but immediately diverging � but actually the same you, since no particular instance is distinguishable as "the original." You should behave and feel concerning this copy as you do about your very own favourite self, the thing that intuitively satisfies the concept "you". One instance is a computation, a process that executes "you", not an object that contains, and is, the only "true" "you".

which is too stupid for words, who could possibly

quote:

This conception of identity appears to have originated on the Extropians mailing list, which Yudkowsky frequented, in the 1990s

Oh.

Clipperton fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Sep 27, 2015

# ? Sep 27, 2015 19:35

Pavlov: Oct 21, 2012; I've long been fascinated with how the alt-right develops elaborate and obscure dog whistles to try to communicate their meaning without having to say it out loud
Stepan Andreyevich Bandera being the most prominent example of that

Honestly when you start trying to define what constitutes "you" in a discrete epistemological sense you're going to find most answers to be some mixture of dumb, unsatisfying, or useless.

# ? Sep 28, 2015 02:07

Clipperton: Dec 20, 2011; Grimey Drawer

Pavlov posted:

Honestly when you start trying to define what constitutes "you" in a discrete epistemological sense you're going to find most answers to be some mixture of dumb, unsatisfying, or useless.

in this case all three

# ? Sep 28, 2015 02:09

JosephWongKS: Apr 4, 2009; by Nyc_Tattoo

Chapter 16: Lateral Thinking
Part Four

quote:

"So they've been told their whole lives that they're going to be your minions and they've spent years imagining what minions are supposed to be like -"

Draco winced.

"- and what's worse, they do know each other and they've been practicing -"

"The boss told ya to shut it," rumbled Mr. Crabbe. Mr. Goyle bit down on his toothpick, holding it between his teeth, and used one hand to crack the knuckles on the other.

"I told you not to do this in front of Harry Potter!"

The two looked a bit sheepish and Mr. Goyle quickly put the toothpick back in a pocket of his robes.

But the moment Draco turned away from them to face Harry again, they went back to looming.

"I apologise," Draco said stiffly, "for the insult which these imbeciles have offered you."

Harry gave a meaningful look to Mr. Crabbe and Mr. Goyle. "I'd say you're being a little harsh on them, Draco. I think they're acting exactly the way I'd want my minions to act. I mean, if I had any minions."

Draco's jaw dropped.

"Hey, Gregory, you don' think he's tryna lure us away from the boss, do ya?"

"I'm sure Mr. Potter wouldn't be that foolish."

"Oh, I wouldn't dream of it," Harry said smoothly. "It's just something to keep in mind if your current employer seems unappreciative. Besides, it never hurts to have other offers while you're negotiating your working conditions, right?"

Is insulting Crabbe and Goyle by calling them �minions� supposed to be part of Eliezarry�s grand plan of �smoothly� recruiting them away from Draco? Is Eliezer a believer in �negging� and other pick-up artist �techniques�?

quote:

"What's he doin' in Ravenclaw?"

"I can't imagine, Mr. Crabbe."

Then again, Crabbe and Goyle are canonically sufficiently stupid and/or possessed of sufficiently low-esteem to be flattered to be called �minions�.

# ? Sep 28, 2015 06:01

inflatablefish: Oct 24, 2010

They work for the Malfoys. They're lucky not to be called "peons".

# ? Sep 29, 2015 00:15

Evrart Claire: Jan 11, 2008

Yud probably believes that being the minion of an intellectual "elite" is the highest thing the common masses can aspire to.

# ? Sep 29, 2015 00:36

Seraphic Neoman: Jul 19, 2011

IIRC the last thread did state that Yud was "monogamous" but had "submissive playmates"

so uh

yeah

# ? Sep 29, 2015 00:49

Tehan: Jan 19, 2011

Eliezarry is complimenting them on recognizing their own mental inferiority and gravitating to their 'correct' position, the minion of an upper-class intellectual. They are awed by his perceptiveness and flattered by his compliment.

Yud thinks actual people would actually act this way.

# ? Sep 29, 2015 05:11

JosephWongKS: Apr 4, 2009; by Nyc_Tattoo

Chapter 16: Lateral Thinking
Part Five

quote:

"Both of you shut up," Draco said through gritted teeth. "That's an order." With a visible effort, he transferred his attention to Harry again. "Anyway, what're you doing in the Slytherin Defence class?"

Harry frowned. "Hold on." His hand went into his pouch. "Timetable." He looked over the parchment. "Defence, 2:30pm, and right now it's..." Harry looked at his mechanical watch, which read 11:23. "2:23, unless I've lost track of time. Did I?" If he had, well, Harry knew how to get to whatever lesson he was supposed to be at. God he loved his Time-Turner and someday, when he was old enough, they would get married.

It�s not surprising that Eliezer, who seems to fetishize technology and goes into near-religious rapture over his vision of his omnipotent omni-benevolent AI ruler of the future, would have his author-avatar express a desire to marry an inanimate object.

quote:

"No, that sounds right," Draco said, looking puzzled. His gaze turned to look over the rest of the auditorium, which was filling with green-trimmed robes and...

"Gryffindorks! " spat Draco. "What're they doing here?"

"Hm," Harry said. "Professor Quirrell did say... I forget his exact words... that he would be ignoring some of the Hogwarts teaching conventions. Maybe he just combined all his classes."

Separation of Gryffindors and Slytherins during classes isn�t a Hogwarts teaching convention in canon, though. In Book 1, Snape had both Gryffindor and Slytherin students in his Potion classes. Another sign that Eliezer didn�t read the books.

quote:

"Huh," said Draco. "You're the first Ravenclaw in here."

"Yup. Got here early."

"What're you doing all the way in the back row, then?"

Harry blinked. "I dunno, seemed like a good place to sit?"

Draco made a scoffing sound. "You couldn't get any further away from the teacher if you tried." The blonde-haired boy leaned slightly closer. "Anyway, is it true about what you said to Derrick and his crew?"

"Who's Derrick?"

"You hit him with a pie?"

"Two pies, actually. What am I supposed to have said to him?"

"That he wasn't doing anything cunning or ambitious and he was a disgrace to Salazar Slytherin." Draco was staring intently at Harry.

"That... sounds about right," Harry said. "I think it was more like, 'is this some kind of incredibly clever plot that will gain you a future advantage or is it really as much of a disgrace to the memory of Salazar Slytherin as it looks like' or something like that. I don't remember the exact words."

"You're confusing everyone, you know," said the blonde-haired boy.

"Huh?" Harry said in honest confusion.

"Warrington said that spending a long time under the Sorting Hat is one of the warning signs of a major Dark Wizard. Everyone was talking about it, wondering if they should start sucking up to you just in case. Then you went and protected a bunch of Hufflepuffs, for Merlin's sake. Then you told Derrick he's a disgrace to Salazar Slytherin's memory! What's anyone supposed to think?"

"That the Sorting Hat decided to put me in the House of 'Slytherin! Just kidding! Ravenclaw!' and I've been acting accordingly."

That�s a decent comeback, I admit.

# ? Sep 29, 2015 09:37

Jazerus: May 24, 2011

Tehan posted:

Eliezarry is complimenting them on recognizing their own mental inferiority and gravitating to their 'correct' position, the minion of an upper-class intellectual. They are awed by his perceptiveness and flattered by his compliment.

Yud thinks actual people would actually act this way.

Nah, let's give him credit where it's due. Crabbe and Goyle being polite when they aren't putting on a minion act is Yud's only funny joke so far.

JosephWongKS posted:

Separation of Gryffindors and Slytherins during classes isn’t a Hogwarts teaching convention in canon, though. In Book 1, Snape had both Gryffindor and Slytherin students in his Potion classes. Another sign that Eliezer didn’t read the books.

Eliezarry means Quirrell has put all of the houses together, which indeed never happened in canon.

# ? Sep 29, 2015 13:36

MikeJF: Dec 20, 2003

Jazerus posted:

Eliezarry means Quirrell has put all of the houses together, which indeed never happened in canon.

Usually it'd be two houses together, yeah, because of class sizes. (I'm pretty sure some of the higher year electives with small classes had four houses together). Four together for a first-year compulsory subject would just be overcrowded, even for Harry's unusually small year level.

# ? Sep 29, 2015 13:41

Zonekeeper: Oct 27, 2007

MikeJF posted:

Usually it'd be two houses together, yeah, because of class sizes. (I'm pretty sure some of the higher year electives with small classes had four houses together). Four together for a first-year compulsory subject would just be overcrowded, even for Harry's unusually small year level.

If I remember correctly, there were 10 students per year per house (5 boys, 5 girls. Not a realistic number, but I think it made keeping up with characters easier for Rowling) so that would be a 40 student class. Pretty big by anyone's standard.

# ? Sep 29, 2015 14:45

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Well, remember how little formal education Yud's had. He probably has no conception of the damage huge class sizes can do to the ability to teach in an environment with younger students, and so assumes the limits were something like 'If we put the Gryffindors and the Slytherins together they'll fight!'

# ? Sep 29, 2015 16:52

divabot: Jun 17, 2015; A polite little mouse!

Zerilan posted:

Yud probably believes that being the minion of an intellectual "elite" is the highest thing the common masses can aspire to.

Pretty much. Yudkowsky on sparkly elites.

# ? Sep 29, 2015 17:40

NihilCredo: Jun 6, 2011; iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

Zonekeeper posted:

If I remember correctly, there were 10 students per year per house (5 boys, 5 girls. Not a realistic number, but I think it made keeping up with characters easier for Rowling) so that would be a 40 student class. Pretty big by anyone's standard.

If a wizard lives 150 years on average, that would mean a population of about 6000 total British wizards, given that they almost all go to Hogwarts. That seems pretty low for canon.

( :spergin:

)

# ? Sep 29, 2015 18:25

Cingulate: Oct 23, 2012; by Fluffdaddy

divabot posted:

Pretty much. Yudkowsky on sparkly elites.

Ha ha.

Two gems from the comments:

quote:

Eliezer,

In my experience, smart people have many original theories. They likely hold these theories because they know they are smarter than most people, and so don't see any reason to trust common knowledge. Also, holding original and complex theories make them seem more intelligent. Most original theories are of course incorrect, even when they come from smart people. Intelligent, charismatic people are very good at convincing themselves and others they are correct.

IMO, this is one of the main reasons those, smart, competent people in charge screw up so often. They don't do it because they aren't smart or competent, they do it because they have a bias in favor of their own ideas and theories, just like everyone else.

In this context, this goes without comment.

quote:

The smarter you are, the more likely you are to think you're the exception, and neglect the outside view.

Who's surprised these people do not know what the Dunning-Kruger-effect is?

I really get Yud's main point though. When I meet people like famous professors or media bosses, I'm usually extremely impressed by their intelligence and knowledge. The intellectual elites ARE elites.

(For comparison, Yud is correctly observing that he is not such a person.)

# ? Sep 29, 2015 19:42

Fajita Queen: Jun 21, 2012

A hell of a lot of people died during Voldemort's murder spree so the current student population being low seems reasonable. Then again if there were only 40 students per year the stadiums at quidditch events wouldn't be nearly as full as they are in the movies, even including the professors. :v:

# ? Sep 29, 2015 19:45

Fried Chicken: Jan 9, 2011; Don't fry me, I'm no chicken!

The Shortest Path posted:

A hell of a lot of people died during Voldemort's murder spree so the current student population being low seems reasonable. Then again if there were only 40 students per year the stadiums at quidditch events wouldn't be nearly as full as they are in the movies, even including the professors.

Iirc JKR has said she meant for there to be about 80 kids per house per year, with there being about 1500-2000 people at Hogwarts total, but she just never created that many characters

# ? Sep 29, 2015 20:31

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# ? May 15, 2024 05:20

NihilCredo: Jun 6, 2011; iram omni possibili modo preme:
plus una illa te diffamabit, quam multæ virtutes commendabunt

Fried Chicken posted:

Iirc JKR has said she meant for there to be about 80 kids per house per year, with there being about 1500-2000 people at Hogwarts total, but she just never created that many characters

Those seem more sensible figures for the feel you get about Hogwarts's size from the book.

The house system is based on the real-life house system in British public schools, right? Does anybody know how large those tend to be, and if kids from different houses attend class together?

# ? Sep 29, 2015 20:45

The Something Awful Forums > The Finer Arts > The Book Barn > Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

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