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NeoAnjou posted:Don't assume that anything spelt with an 's' is British English, and a 'z' American. What do you mean? Every red-blooded American knows all about conzequentialism 
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Apr 1, 2015 20:51
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Nessus posted:Hilari-tea. Where's my scam sauce fanfic money, internet? 
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May 3, 2015 20:49
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SolTerrasa posted:Oh, it's worse than that, it's a misappropriated term from psychology. Man I wish we still had a LessWrong mock thread, I would be all over writing an effortpost about Big Yud's opinions on loving hedonics. Ahem, the proper term is "Utilitarian-American Vernacular English" you disgusting racists
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Jun 27, 2015 10:19
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divabot posted:slatestarscratchpad: Wait, are rationalists really that big a bloc that they can make sure people they like win Hugo Awards? Asking for, um, a friend. SSC is a much better blogger than Big Yud, and not surprisingly he also writes much better (and shorter) wacky fiction, so I dearly hope someone tells him "yes dear, we can totally mastermind you a Hugo win" 
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Aug 3, 2015 20:53
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Mikl posted:Interesting fact: besides the "for kids" edition, some publishers also put out an edition of the Harry Potter books "for adults", which had a single solid colour and discreet lettering on the cover as opposed to a colourful drawing. This was purportedly so grown ups could read the books in public (commuting on public transit, for example) without giving away the fact that they were reading a children's book.  
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Sep 5, 2015 13:38
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Newcomb's Paradox is interesting because it's a real thing that you could set up at any time. While its presentation usually involves an idealised, perfectly-prescient Oracle/alien/computer, that is merely for the sake of convenience: the exact same paradox still happens with a minimally-talented cold reader who has a track record of guessing correctly 50.00001% of the time. (You just have to raise the stakes to compensate.) By contrast, Roko's Basilisk - much like Pascal's Wager - isn't really interesting as much as it is interestingly broken. It's straightforward to challenge any of its numerous assumptions, or to come up with a nonconstructive counterargument ("If you accept Roko's Basilisk from a benevolent AI, then you could imagine a malevolent AI playing the opposite trick", which also mirrors Pascal's Wager). But properly formulating a constructive counterargument can hinge on some fun logic games. For example, this: Karia posted:This thing is stupid. What I don't understand is why the AI would actually torture anyone. Even if we accept everything as a given, the AI's actions are totally irrelevant to anyone's actions in the past. The only thing that matters is whether people believe that the AI will hurt them/their mind-clones. The AI has nothing to gain by actually hurting people. It gains influence by people in the past believing it will, which it has no control over. Optimal play for the AI is to have LW or other nutjobs running around convincing everyone that the basilisk is true (which the AI can't encourage unless LW believes it will hurt them) and then not hurt anyone since it gains the AI nothing. is a counterargument that doesn't quite work (if you grant all the assumptions). If you figured out that "the optimal play for the AI is to bluff", and on that basis decide to call the bluff and not support the AI's construction, then that is no longer the optimal play for the AI. The moment you figure out a reason why the AI shouldn't torture you, whatever it is, that is reason enough for the AI to torture you even though there's no (direct) gain in it. Somebody brought up the poisoned wine scene from The Princess Bridge and that's kind of what's going on here - I know that the AI knows that I know that the AI knows... - except that in this case, you are betting a few decades of personal effort against eternal torture, while the AI is betting a slight delay in its creation (which is a tremendous amount of human suffering over billions of people) vs. the suffering of one post-Singularity simulated human. Playing a coin flip game against the AI's bluff is not in your best interests.
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Sep 7, 2015 19:42
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Clipperton posted:One of those assumptions, if I read that rationalwiki article right, is that you should treat whatever happens to a simulation of you as just as bad as the same thing happening to the real you, which is, to put it charitably, retarded. It's not because simulations = real people. It's because you care about yourself even if you were a simulation, and how do you know that you are not a simulation? Bonus! There's a non-essential addition to the Basilisk where you consider that: (a) the AI might create one copy of you, but it might just as easily create multiples of them, and (b) if you have no way to determine that you are the real you (as opposed to a simulated copy), then your chances of being real are totally random, and therefore your best guess can only be 1/(N+1), where N is the number of copies the AI made. Therefore, you should go ahead and assume that you're a simulation, since N will average out at a number higher than 1, making the simulation scenario have a >50% chance of being the correct one. (Unless you can prevent the AI from simulating you, thus increasing the chances of N = 0. Which, as has been mentioned, can be achieved by deleting Facebook If that sounds vaguely familiar to you, it's a slight reframing of the Doomsday argument, which is another "wait how could that possibly be correct?" argument that's a ton of fun to
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Sep 7, 2015 20:31
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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. (  )
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Sep 29, 2015 18:25
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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?
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Sep 29, 2015 20:45
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Qwertycoatl posted:Classes were all mixed and it was really just about scoring points on sports day. MrFlibble posted:They had houses at the school I went to - but it was a sports day kind of thing. That is disappointingly uncool for a country that has Shadow Lords in its government system.
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Sep 29, 2015 21:40
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Furia posted:Of course not, but can you just imagine the blogpost he would have to write after that fiasco? It'd be the cherry at the top of the ice cream of all we have seen. Sure, just like all those posts he wrote after he started losing at the AI box game. Wait, no, actually he never mentioned it again and just hoped everybody would forget about it.
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Oct 6, 2015 19:36
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Palisader posted:I know this is from several pages back, but during that whole transmogrification lesson, did Harry never think to question how his motheraunt was permanently transformed into a hot woman? Does that ever come up again? Sorta. Harry will eventually have the realisation that "poo poo, my mum should be getting super-cancer any year now", but it's about eighty chapters ahead. The real answer to that question will come from the key plot point of the ending arc, which I'm not gonna spoil here yet.
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Oct 16, 2015 08:20
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It's hard to draw the line between Eliezer's ideas of "so weird it's funny" and "so weird it's creepy", but I'm pretty sure this is one of the parts where you're actually *supposed* to cringe at Harry's creepiness. IIRC, at some point later on he wonders "am I ever going to live that one down?".
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Oct 25, 2015 16:00
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:My relatively compact mathematics reference book from back in college lists 400 primes... it takes only about 60% of the space of a page to do so. You wouldn't need a lot of pages to get to ten thousand. Before the invention of electronic calculators they used to publish books that were nothing but tables of hundreds of thousands of logarithms. What I'm saying is, books like this with just a shitload of "useful" numbers have not been at all uncommon historically, or even today. Hogwarts is an old place, where computers aren't a thing, so it doesn't surprise me at all to see that. More like "where computers CAN'T BE a thing". Electronic devices don't work at Hogwarts; I don't remember if either the novels or HPMOR ever gave an in-universe justification. (The narrative rationale is pretty clear, though.) blastron posted:Hmm, I think breaking down these chapters into such small pieces is causing us to jump on any little thing to nitpick. Quite frankly, nothing unusual at all happened in this sub-chapter, so instead of rolling our eyes at the experiment itself we're splitting hairs about prime number tables. 
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Oct 27, 2015 20:59
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Tunicate posted:Since canon harry doesn't have it, we can safely say this 'disorder' isn't genetic in origin. Eliezer stated that he had that exact disorder as a kid IRL, so I expect your diagnosis to be completely correct.
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Nov 21, 2015 15:27
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for him to sleep a normal eight hours.
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Even when Dumbledore is reciting random nonsense words Rowling does it better than Yudkowsky. Well, Rowling being a much more competent writer is something with which I think Yudkowsky will readily agree... at least in public  .
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Dec 31, 2015 00:05
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anilEhilated posted:That's not random, though: he outright stated he's gonna say a couple of words. He stated the exact same thing in HPMor, as well, just following it with different words ("Happy happy boom boom swamp swamp swamp", which I assumed must have been another lame pop culture reference - they weren't, but they are now.) But! Actually, you ignorant simpleton, Dumbledore was making an important point about the divisions that have just been made and the identities these students are about to take on. Shame on Eliezer for failing to capture such basic subtext, tsk tsk tsk. Tsk.
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Jan 5, 2016 22:39
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SSNeoman posted:For how quick LW is to shout "SHUT UP AND MULTIPLY", Harry's fallacy seems to fly completely against it. Also just take the drat rock. You have a trunk don't you? Keep it there. Dumbledore insisted that even the pouch wasn't close enough and that Harry should have carried the rock at all times.
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Jan 6, 2016 14:00
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reignonyourparade posted:The fact that he worded it as "opinion of god" rather than "word of god" is way more consistent with an author that ascribes to death of the author describing their own interpretation of their work while recognizing it's not the only one. That reminds me, he said he'd wait a year between finishing the series and writing the "X-Years-After" Epilogue, in order to let people write their own continuation fanfictions. We're pretty close to a year since HPMOR finished, aren't we?
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Jan 10, 2016 13:49
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i81icu812 posted:Oh god. Have people actually been producing hpmor continuation fanfics? What do you think?
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Jan 10, 2016 16:35
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Fenrisulfr posted:On first reading I assumed the friend Dumbledore mentions was Snape, and that Dumbledore was admitting to purposefully sabotaging their relationship, but that was back before I knew anything about Yud so I assumed it had to have some kind of narrative purpose. Now that I know better I'm pretty sure the whole thing was just to set up a really lame pun in the next few lines and that's it. Red Mike posted:It's this. Dumbledore's the one going 'What would happen if X', and she's the one drinking an experimental potion that nearly killed her. If anyone thinks this might be some sort of Chekov's gun or something, this entire bit is never mentioned again as far as I know. You've already seen this Chekov's gun fire. This chapter posted:Harry squinted slightly. The yellowing pages seemed to be describing something called a potion of eagle's splendor, many of the ingredients being items that Harry didn't recognise at all and whose names didn't appear to derive from English. Scrawled in the margin was a handwritten annotation saying, I wonder what would happen if you used Thestral blood here instead of blueberries? and immediately beneath was a reply in different handwriting, You'd get sick for weeks and maybe die. Much earlier... posted:"Anyway," Petunia said, her voice small, "she gave in. She told me it was dangerous, and I said I didn't care any more, and I drank this potion and I was sick for weeks, but when I got better my skin cleared up and I finally filled out and... I was beautiful, people were nice to me," anilEhilated posted:Oh, and IIRC Eagle's Splendor is indeed a DnD charisma-boosting spell.
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Jan 12, 2016 01:38
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Yeah, there have been edits to fix small errors or inconsistencies with canon (eg. Petunia's potion had originally helper her lose weight, until someone pointed out that in canon she wasn't fat), but I can't remember any foreshadowing being added after the fact, nor events being obviously chosen to retroactively create foreshadowing. I actually once called out a foreshadowing in Ch.1 that I was absolutely sure had been added in later since it paid off around chapter ninety or so - the centaur telling Lily not to help her sister - but it turned out I was wrong and it had actually been there from the start. Welp.
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Jan 17, 2016 21:02
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Moddington posted:There's no way the italicized introduction was there from the start, but archive.org doesn't cache fanfiction.net, and the cache of hpmor.com only goes back to early 2012, with 70+ chapters. The story was started on the 28th of February 2010, according to FF.net. The italicized introduction was there, at the very latest, in June of the same year: ctrl-F "blood". (Also, please take a moment to appreciate the irony of the first HPMoR hate blog ending up being used, almost six years later, in defence of it.  )
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Jan 17, 2016 23:28
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Hey, did anyone ask for more Yud-fiction? Maybe of the shamelessly weeaboo kind?
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Jan 30, 2016 11:26
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LowellDND posted:I mean, if you just feed it data, it seems to do okay. Man did you choose the wrong week to make this post.   
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Mar 28, 2016 15:49
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Furia posted:So are we really going with the "you can't arrest me, my dad's a lawyer!" attitude here? Is that really what Imm supposed to sympathise with here? Well Snape just literally said "I can't be fired, my best friend is a Vice-Dark Lord" sooo...
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Apr 13, 2016 08:13
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Poe. Poe never changes.
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Jun 3, 2016 20:08
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Jazerus posted:See, the worst thing about MoR (and I don't say this lightly) is that if you take it seriously it totally, albeit unintentionally, validates the actions of Vernon Dursley and Dumbledore in the books. Who's the better person? Harry or Eliezarry? The only difference is their upbringing. Eliezarry is the embodiment of everything Dumbledore was hoping to avoid in Harry's personality; eager to abuse his celebrity, convinced of his own superiority, willing to stride into wizarding politics without a loving clue what he is doing on a spiteful childish whim. He had essentially a normal, if slightly eccentric, Muggle childhood. The only difference is the abuse. Rowling obviously went with the wicked stepparents because it's a trope, but in the last book (IIRC) she pretty clearly argues that Harry became a heroic man despite the Dursleys' abuse, and not at all because of it. That's where Harry confronts Ghost-Dumbledore over it, and GD's - fairly lame - response is that deep down Petunia must have loved him a little bit as her sister's son, or she would not have taken him at all. Dumbledore didn't give a poo poo about Harry's upbringing, his only concern in the books was that he stayed with blood-kin to keep Lily's super-duper-abjuration active. Then, to reinforce the point, Rowling has every other good character come from loving (if not always lucky) families, while Voldemort comes from neglect and abuse and turns out exactly like you'd expect a neglected/abused child with superpowers to turn out. Big Yud reads this (on the wiki), nods sagely, and rolls with it. So Eliezarry is every bit as "heroic" as Harry (he wants to save EVERYONE!), but thanks to his loving upbringing he is not hampered by such crippling weaknesses as "accepting the wizarding world as not full of total morons" or "trusting Dumbledore to maybe know a thing or two". Which, in this universe, would actually be crippling, as it not-at-all-coincidentally happens.
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Jun 15, 2016 19:42
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divabot posted:VioletCorsica, is this yours or are geniuses thinking alike? Big Yud had a very Yud comment on it: Eliezer Yudkowky posted:You know, technically, the original was also written by a recurrent neural network...
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Jul 16, 2016 09:48
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Tiggum posted:It's interesting that Harry doesn't seem to consider what seems to me the most obvious solution to all his problems with accepting the existence of magic. He can't believe it works in the way it apparently does because he's assuming it's a product of the natural world. What if it's alien nanobots or something? If it's designed then it can work however the designer wanted it to. "The universe" doesn't care how you say "wingardium leviosa", but for some reason this ancient meddling alien really did/does. He comes to exactly that conclusion after a while. When he did, readers feared the fic would turn out to be a parable for Eliezer's Skynet obsession ("Atlantis fell because they made an Unfriendly AI!"), but thankfully that wasn't the case. Added Space, could you please paste a link to the chapter being reviewed at the start of the post? This way those who want to check out the abridged parts can do it quickly.
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Jan 2, 2017 12:33
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Xander77 posted:I get that Yud has really weird ideas about what science is, but how and why would Harriezer - the son of an actual scientist - would grow up thinking that science "started" during the Enlightenment? Harriezer said that 1904 was "more than two centuries after science had gotten started". The Scientific Revolution is generally considered to encompass the developments between Galileo (early-mid 17th century) and Newton (late 17th century). Looks fine to me.
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Jan 4, 2017 01:52
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Dienes posted:Its literally controlling bugs in a 6-block radius for 90% of the novel. Almost. The frequently-used ability of her spiders to near-instantly produce metres and metres of impossibly strong webbing was a total rear end-pull. (Pun very intended.)
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Jan 6, 2017 03:49
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21 Muns posted:I genuinely recommend that if this thread ever finishes Methods Of Rationality, it moves onto "Ginny Weasley And The Sealed Intelligence". It appears to be sucking Methods' cock at first but gradually reveals itself as a Christian tract wherein Wait wait wait, you're telling me that somebody wrote an unauthorised Christian spin-off of a Jewish story, in which the protagonists from the original turn into the bad guys at the end ?
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Jan 24, 2017 22:52
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Cyrai posted:There really isn't any use for it unless your situation involves absolutely, 100% omnipotent beings. Which, you know, aren't things that exist, and almost certainly cannot possibly exist. As I recall, neither actual- nor near-omnipotence / omniscience is necessary for the various Newcomblike problems to work, it's merely an idealized scenario (that the AI fans latched on). All you need is to have reason to believe that the guy offering you the deal has a better-than-even odds of predicting your behaviour. You can replace the infallible machine oracle with a mildly talented cold reader and the paradoxes still stand, you just have to multiply every payout by 51% / 49% instead of 100% / 0%.
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Mar 5, 2017 09:15
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Tiggum posted:And in terms of the plot, it's obviously just there to reduce a team conflict to an individual conflict so that Harry can be the winner [..] Yudkowsky hating Quidditch and wanting to "fix" it is just another example of him not understanding why Rowling made the decisions she did and thinking he knows better. Doctor Spaceman posted:So Yud missed the practical purpose (to give the hero something to do in a match) and the point of the joke. Nah, Yud's well aware of the Snitch's narrative purpose: Chapter 7 posted:And then whichever Seeker gets lucky swoops in and grabs the Snitch and makes everyone else's work moot. It's like someone took a real game and grafted on this pointless extra position so that you could be the Most Important Player without needing to really get involved or learn the rest of it.
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Mar 12, 2017 18:12
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Added Space posted:Earlier Harriezer was wondering if his grandparents would be alive if Lily had used potions on them. That made me realize, canon Harry's not only a war orphan, he's also improbably unlucky in being the child of twenty-year-old parents yet still having no living grandparents - especially with two of those grandparents being magical. Yes, I realize it's narrative convenience, and the fact that I never thought about it before shows it's an entirely forgivable one. Still, it would have been really easy to just make them into four more of Voldemort's victims.
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Mar 17, 2017 20:36
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Parents, talk to your kids about astronomy before someone else does.
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Mar 19, 2017 13:54
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Xander77 posted:This is a relatively interesting point of view I have not encountered in the past. I'm sure quite a few philosophers over the centuries have had similar ideas, but its modern-day form is probably best summed up in Nick Bostrom's ethics paper / pamphlet, appropriately called "The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant": http://jme.bmj.com/content/31/5/273
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Apr 8, 2017 16:44
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Xander77 posted:"Dying horrifically from preventable causes before your time" is a decent enough analogy to "dying horrifically from preventable causes before your time". Maybe not so much for "dying, ever, at all". You're begging the question. The idea that there is such a thing as "your time" to begin with is the point of contention.
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Apr 9, 2017 17:31
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Death Bot posted:This is a weird convo to have in a series where the first book ends with a guy taking the secret to guilt free immortality to the grave and Dumbledore just kinda says "living forever is a silly human wish" Perplexing indeed, this deviation from the original. Why, at this rate I'm beginning to suspect that in HPMOR Voldemort isn't defeated by the power of love either!
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Apr 10, 2017 18:29
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