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A free full-cast Audiobook of Planecrash is currently in production at https://shows.acast.com/project-lawful-aka-planecrash, using AI-generated voices. It is quite excellent, albeit missing a few of the glowfic-specific elements such as character portraits and reaction tags (posts with no text, only character portraits). I highly recommend it for anyone.
There is a parallel analysis podcast and book club hosted by myself and members of The Bayesian Conspiracy's discord channel, formerly It Makes Sense If You Understand Decision Theory, now We Want Headbands (in homage to We've Got Worm). As we go, I'm sectioning it into shorter Books and Chapters, with somewhat-descriptive titles. The podcast-aligned table of contents and links to the podcasts are available at http://www.imsiyudt.com/
I dunno about yours, but my lampshades don't usually spin, particularly not with a "vroop".
On second thought, I have an alternative solution to what it is lampshading, that is the broken suspension of disbelief that after stating that the terms of Quirrell's contract prevented him and others from investigating Quirrell's identity, Albus would leave the room, allowing his conspirators to investigate Quirrell's identity.
This theory sounds incredibly plausible from the perspective of the author wanting to use the lampshade trope, but from the perspective of the reader, that action was completely in-character for Dumbledore and doesn't actually break suspension of disbelief.
You can't say it's obvious unless you can point to something it is specifically lampshading. The best answers I've seen so far in this thread are that it's lampshading itself, in which case there's no reason for it to have been in the story. Traditionally when you hang a lampshade on something, it's something that the author needs as a plot device but actually wouldn't make very much sense if the story were playing out realistically, that is, it threatens suspension of disbelief. I don't think any of us would disbelieve that Dumbledore would have a strange vroopy thingy in his office, so lampshading itself doesn't make any sense (which I suppose would make it a meta-lampshade, which breaks the suspension of disbelief I have that the author is trying to use a trope in its proper context, and such abstractions could recurse infinitely).
The vrooping thing sounds like a centrifuge to me, though the pulsing light isn't something I'm familiar with in such apparatus.
If it is indeed a centrifuge, it would make sense that it was only mentioned -after- Dumbledore left the room. If they had somehow obtained a sample of Quirrell's blood, they might be separating it to do a DNA comparison against any candidates for his identity, which if I were HJPEV would have been one of my first (dozen) solutions to the problem of identification.
It's a reference to an episode of The Simpsons, wherein Lisa's boyfriend states: "I'm a level 5 vegan. I won't eat anything that casts a shadow."
Edit2: Primary source found.
Fair point, though that also removes the point of evidence that casting requirements are removed with practice.
"It takes a cracked soul to cast." and "Murder tears the soul." just says that if you've gotten to the point where you could cast it once, that particular pre-requisite is already accomplished, so the work to crack your soul is already put in. It doesn't say anything about removing the requirement of wanting someone dead.
Though, so long as we're looking at evidence, if we take Quirrell at his word, then his ability to cast the spell despite not wanting his opponent dead is pretty strong evidence that the requirement is in fact removed. In fact, we already know that some "requirements" to cast spells are not set in stone: from that same scene, Harry cast the true patronus without the carefully practiced stance and wand twitches, instead merely "one desperate wish that an innocent man should not die -"—but the constant requirement in this case seems to be the thought that accompanies the casting of the spell, which is why I'm hesitant to believe the wish of death is removed from AK's casting requirement.
In canon, Moody used the unforgivables on a spider, and given the prevalence of ostensibly non-sentient things-to-fear in the magical world (e.g. boggarts), it's conceivable that they could have found a particular magical creature that even the most PETA-supporting student would have no trouble excising from the world. Also, as far as I can tell, there's nothing in canon to contradict that curses' targets are limited to Kingdom Animalia (see also: Harry's existential crisis about sentient plants), and I seriously doubt there are any 7th level vegans at Hogwarts.
I interpreted the ease of casting the spell as a specific application of scope insensitivity rather than a change in the requirement to cast it. That is, while casting it the second time might be just as difficult (i.e. take as much mental/magical/spiritual energy) as the first, the third and fourth time would together be only as strenuous as the first, as would the collective fifth through eighth time, etc. It is already established in-universe that some form of personal mana depletion exists, and my idea of this difficulty reduction is an extension of that form of energy to the spiritual energy (established in canon w.r.t. horcruxes, dementors, etc.).
I'm a little surprised that HJPEV didn't immediately update his probabilities regarding Quirrell's motives in Azkaban with the new knowledge from Moody that "You've got to mean it. You've got to want someone dead, and not for the greater good, either.", which would seem to discredit the Defense Professor's excuse that "a curse which cannot be blocked and must be dodged is an indispensable tactic."
Either way, should we or shouldn't we have trusted the rest of their answers to be statistically reliable?
What, the myriad prophets of revealed religions and cults aren't enough of a hint for you?
If this were anywhere but a site dedicated to rationality, I would expect trolls to self-report their karma scores much higher on a survey than they actually are, but that data is pretty staggering. I accept the rejection of the hypothesis, and withdraw my opinion insofar as it applies to this site.
Hell, if the mathematical universe hypothesis is correct, then somewhere out there in the universe there is, with no intelligent priors, a collection of particles in the form of a computer, simulating a universe containing intelligent entities.
Would someone who created a computer that created the universe count as a god? I can easily write computer games with more complex behavior than I feel capable of fully comprehending, but I would not consider that computer program an intelligent entity. I can imagine that someone more educated and with a higher mental capacity than I could similarly write a computer program that is capable of creating and maintaining in simulation a universe with the global constants and initial conditions necessary to produce intelligent life without the program actually qualifying as intelligent itself.
My personal belief is that if there is a "god", he is quite probably much like a video game programmer, who can set up a universe like an MMO and let it run "infinitely" in "real-time", but, being constrained to a similar time-scale as the "players", is unable to make a large number of fine-grained adjustments to local variables at the immediate behest of said players (i.e. "answering prayers"). Someday we may get a version 2.0 release which allows third-party plugins so players can hack the universe to answer their own prayers, but I don't place a high conditional probability on that happening within my projected lifetime.
TROLL TOLL POLICY: Disapprove: 194, 16.4% Approve: 178, 15%
So more people are against than for. Not exactly a mandate for its use.
Hypothesis: those directly affected by the troll policy (trolls) are more likely to have strong disapproval than those unaffected by the troll policy are to have strong approval.
In my opinion, a strong moderation policy should require a plurality vote in the negative (over approval and abstention) to fail a motion to increase security, rather than a direct comparison to the approval. (withdrawn as it applies to LW, whose trolls are apparently less trolly than other sites I'm used to)
I don't agree that the first doesn't count. The Relationship Style question was about preferred style, not current active situation. It could be that 2/3 of the polyamorous people just can't get a date (lord knows I've been there). (ETA:) Or, in the case of not looking, don't want a date right now (somewhere I've also been).
It was stated that they should give the obvious answer and that surveys that didn't follow the rules would be thrown out... but maybe 50% isn't as obvious as 99.99% of the population thinks it is.
Is there any reason the prompt for the question shouldn't have explicitly stated "(The obvious answer is the correctly formatted value equivalent to p=0.5 or 50%)"?
Any results for the calibration IQ?
This question was biased against people who don't believe in history.
For my answer, which was wildly wrong, I guesstimated by interpolating backward using the rate of technological and cultural advance in various cultures throughout my lifetime, the dependency of such advances on Bayesian and related logics, with an adjustment for known wars and persecution of scientists and an assumption that Bayes lived in the western world. I should have realized that my confidence on estimates of each of these (except the last) was not very good and that I really shouldn't have had any more than marginal confidence in my answer, but I was hoping that the sheer number of assumptions I made would approach statistical mean of my confidences and that the overestimates would counterbalance the underestimates.
The real lesson I learned from this exercise is that I shouldn't have such high confidence in my ability to produce and compound a statistically significant number of assumptions with associated confidence levels.
I want to say that my own origin lies in having been raised Unitarian Universalist with the most amazing minister who never invoked "God" as anything more than the common good or interpersonal kindness. I want to believe that UU Sunday school attendance, or, more interesting to me even at that young age, ditching class and sticking through the "adult" section of the worship, where she would give the most awe-inspiringly inspirational sermons, would be enough to awaken any child as a rationalist. Alas, I am fairly certain I was prepared for rationalism even before my family moved to the church while I was in elementary school, and alas, that minister retired all too soon.
Another possibility is the fact that I was raised in a neighborhood co-op, where each afternoon I would spend at the home of a different friend, experiencing their family culture, and the diversity among those households—race, religion, nationality, economic status, orientation, language, profession—instilled an early understanding that any adherence to convention was a matter of choice.
There is one more influence, less grand, perhaps, than the others, but I think perhaps most concrete as an awakening "event". My grandfather used to visit often when I was young. He liked to play a game with my siblings and me where he would point at an aeroplane flying overhead and declare "there goes a bird!" and my sisters and I would reply "grandpa, that's a plane!", and he would point to a squirrel and say "look at that groundhog climbing the tree over there!" and my sisters and I would reply "grampa, that's a squirrel!", and so on for all manner of things.
My grandfather also smoked, and from everything I'd learned even at that early age, smoking was bad. One day, I decided to ask my grandfather to quit, because that was what you were supposed to do with bad habits. He told me that he would quit smoking if I would stop being silly and call those little feathery animals that flapped around in the air by their proper name: 'aeroplane', and those furry little critters that dug up the garden and left burrow holes all over the park 'squirrels'.
And I did.
It was a while before I saw my grandfather again, and eventually he came to stay with my family for his final years, but after I resolved to speak his language around him (even if I kept to the "real" terminology elsewhere), I never saw him light another cigarette. I don't know if he actually quit, and for the sake of the fable, it doesn't really matter. What I carried from then on was an understanding that there was a clear distinction between fact and fiction and that each has value, but as much as I might enjoy my conversations with my grandfather, and the benefit of humouring his fiction, I needed to place a filter between that and my true model of the world. That is, my curiousity in one (fact or fiction) wouldn't always suffice for an understanding of the other, but even the existence of a fiction had the potential to influence reality.
As an educator, I recognize this sort of potential in all young children, who create entire worlds of make-believe, complete with their own characters, societies, codes-of-conduct, and even laws of physics, each of which world is kept quite distinct from the others. The point where imagination becomes rationality is the point where the child can recognize, consciously, for any rule in their imagined world, "how is that different from the world we live in?", and "what else would be different if that were the rule?", and establish a curiousity about those sorts of inferences. That is, when the child's fiction genre of choice shifts from Adventure to Speculative.
Two relatively simple rebuttals to your premise:
(1) One can easily create a number with a non-terminating decimal expansion which makes use of a finite quantity of the digit "5". Therefore it is conceivable that one could also exist in an infinite universe which makes use of only a finite quantity of atomic structures identical to "you".
Similarly, and working in the opposite direction (complex-to-simple as opposed to the former simple-to-complex extrapolation), it is strongly believed that we exist in a universe with fixed universal constants, whose values are just-so, such that no universe similar to ours could be produced with any variation on those constants. If we may accept that as an argument that no such "universe" exists that we can perceive, then it should be just as easy to accept that no such arrangement of particles exists in our current perceivable universe which is similar in form and history to "you".
(2) Even if there exists an infinite number of yous in this universe comprising the entire scope of conceivable future selves (or, more succinctly, if the Mathematical Universe Hypothesis is correct), this argument still does not answer the question: "How do you know that we exist in that 1% of the galaxies where you're correct about surviving the operation?"
A potential error for the second conclusion is that we have incorrectly predicted the nature of consciousness, and the true solution is that one is somehow able to perceive without a physical avatar functioning in the way we expect of a human capable of perception. Thus, "you" are able to experience the branches of the MWI where everyone else perceives you to be dead.
Interesting you don't consider what I thought would be the obvious interpretation of counting Y(+Z) alone, even after you considered adding adopted and foster children, which would, over the population, double-count any choice with the inclusion of X.
If I, given a universal interface to a class of sentient beings, but without access to that being's language or internal mind-state, could create an environment for each possible truth value of the statement, where any experiment conducted by a being of that class upon the environment would reflect the environment's programmed truth value of the statement, and that being could form a confidence of belief regarding the statement which would be roughly uniform among beings of that class and generally leaning in the direction of the programmed truth value, then the statement has meaning.
In other words, I put on my robe and wizard's cap, and you put on your haptic feedback vest and virtual reality helmet, and you tell me whether Elaine is a Post-Utopian.
This should cover propositions whose truth-value might not be knowable by us within our present universe if we can craft the environment such that it is knowable via the interface to the observer. e.g. hyperluminal messaging / teleportation / "pause" mode / "ghost" mode, debug HUDs, etc.
Nu, lrf, V sbetbg nobhg jrrxraqf. Ubjrire, zbfg bs gur ybj-vapbzr crbcyr V xabj ner npghnyyl jbexvat zhygvcyr cneg-gvzr wbof, be n cneg-gvzr wbo naq fpubby (juvpu, va vairfgzrag inyhr, qrcraqvat ba gur ntr bs gur vaqvivqhny, vf ubhe-sbe-ubhe pbzcnenoyr gb n ybj-jntr wbo), bsgra nzbhagvat gb zber guna sbegl ubhef n jrrx. V guvax (ntnva, nffhzvat gur urnqnpurf qba'g nssrpg fyrrc) n svsgl creprag punapr vf fgvyy n ernfbanoyr nffhzcgvba, rfcrpvnyyl fvapr fgerff, fhpu nf jbex, vf n cevznel pngnylfg sbe urnqnpurf.
Thanks for the idea. I know he referenced OvercomingBias for a while before LessWrong, and I read a handful of articles there, but I think my sparse interest in following anything, aside from what was crossposted or linked at Yvain's blog, makes any claim of seniority a potential false representation of my expertise.
This is sort of the inverse problem of the way I counted the start of my last relationship more than a year earlier than my then-partner would. One good thing I can say for weddings (aside from marriage) is that at least they solidify a date to count as anniversary. So, I suppose now that I've finally registered an account, I can count today for future anniversaries between myself and LessWrong.
V rfgvzngrq ol nffhzvat gur gerr jnf nobhg gjragl srrg va qvnzrgre (fbzrguvat V erzrzore sebz zl Ylprhz qnlf jvgu pvepn avargl creprag pbasvqrapr), naq unq nobhg na rvtugl-avar qrterr vapyvar (bar qrterr gncre), juvpu V pbhyq rfgvzngr ol bofreivat n inevrgl bs rireterraf va zl ivpvavgl. Sebz gurer, vg jnf fvzcyr gevtbabzrgel.
I spent a lot of time analyzing that question and came up with the following solution, which, granted, assumes at least three things, and "only a fool would attempt a plot that was as complicated as possible", but...
Vs jr nffhzr gung svsgl creprag bs gur urnqnpurf qverpgyl nssrpg jbexvat ubhef, gura gur pbfg bs nal bs gur guerr qehtf vf fvtavsvpnagyl ybjre guna gur bccbeghavgl pbfg bs ybfvat gubfr jbex-ubhef ng zvavzhz jntr. Qeht N, juvyr abg gur zbfg pbfg-rssrpgvir jura pbzcnerq qverpgyl gb Qeht O (be rira P), unf gur terngrfg rssrpg naq fgvyy pbfgf yrff guna gur zna jbhyq znxr va jbex-ubhef tnvarq. Gur pbzcnengvir pbfg bs guvegl-gjb qbyynef naq svsgl pragf sbe gur zber rssrpgvir qeht vf n yvggyr zber guna bar qbyyne cre yrvfher ubhe tnvarq, naq rira fbzrbar fgenccrq sbe pnfu jbhyq nyzbfg pregnvayl cnl n qbyyne gb erzbir na ubhe bs rkpehpvngvat cnva (V'z nffhzvat gur pheerag znexrg sbe cnva cvyyf vf qevira zber ol uvtu fhccyl guna ybj qrznaq).
Edit: xrrc va zvaq gung gur dhrfgvba fnvq "n ybj vapbzr", abg "harzcyblrq".
That Myers-Briggs test was a lot less thorough than what I remember from a lot of the ones I took online back in TheSpark era. Though, part of me is kind of glad that each of the extra credit questions could be completed in under an hour.
I probably never would have heard of the idea if someone hadn't pointed out its conspicuous omission on the census. I read completely through the original test census and it didn't even register as something so noteworthy on first pass... just another thing that I would probably understand better if I actually read more LessWrong, but since I hadn't, I'd leave my answer blank. Now I know a lot more about it and could probably (p=70%) actually put an answer down with some confidence.
Since it appears the final version of the census has been backedited onto the draft version, can anyone mention (rot13, probably, if it's that controversial) what the question was which was removed?
As I mention elsewhere, ... gur grfg vf vaperqvoyl rnfl gb tnzr. Vg qbrfa'g punatr gur cbfvgvba bs cbgragvny nafjref orgjrra gnxvatf, fb trggvat n cresrpg fpber ba lbhe frpbaq gel vf cerggl rnfl.
Unless there are significant numbers of people, myself for example, who take the test multiple times with varied random algorithms just to see how it affects the outcome. I'd only put a (p=0.55) at the test underestimating your score, conditional that it doesn't correct for self-selection bias.
Though, given that the lowest score appears to be "less than 79", rather than an exact number, they may simply drop any scores under 79 from their pool, or at the very least weight them differently. Has anybody identified a similar maximum score which would support this hypothesis of discarding outliers?
Also, just spent an hour I should have spent sleeping upvoting all the comments that explicitly mentioned taking the test, and a few that were just insightful.
(yelling) Curse you squid-god of time, for reawakening the sleeping demon that is my love for census, long forgotten in the archives of naturalization! (/yelling)
I too had to estimate my time in the community (even though this is my first day posting anything)—I started lurking shortly after Yvain mentioned it in his blog, but he is a prolific enough writer that digging through those archives would be a mind-numbing task. Perhaps there's someone else who's done the dirty work for me? (hoping)
At first I wondered whether the test adjusts either direction for lack-of-patience; and then I realized I could run an experiment.
There don't appear to be any points granted for finishing early; I just took the test three times, guessing randomly as fast as possible, and scored 93 first then <79 (what appears to be the lowest score possible) twice and 93 the third time, and then took the test a fourth time, guessing randomly at a rate of 1 question/minute (finishing with 1 minute to spare), and got 83. This appears to reject the hypothesis that finishing early boosts your score (or, inversely, taking more time lowers your score).
Though... V whfg ernyvmrq vg qbrfa'g nccrne gb inel gur cbfvgvba bs gur nafjref ba frcnengr nggrzcgf, fb n zber gubebhtu grfg jbhyq hfr n cerqrgrezvarq frdhrapr bs nafjref gung fbzrgvzrf erfhyg va na VD nobir 79, naq inel gur gvzr gb pbzcyrgr gur grfg hfvat gung frdhrapr. ... but I have to get to bed soon so I'm not going to spend another 40 minutes to run that test.
I strongly suspect that a lot of the members of LessWrong have had a non-internet IQ test and will have entered their scores on the census. Those who also took the extra credit internet test and entered their scores to that as well could serve as a sample group for us to make just such an analysis.
Granted, we are likely a biased sample of the population (I suspect a median of somewhere around 125 for both tests), but data is data.
Survey taken: check! Account finally registered: check, please!
I was off by 50%ish on the two estimation questions, but I forgive myself Bayes' age since I really know nothing about history in "space-of-time" context. The redwood tree on the other hand was a geometry problem for me, more than anything else, and I misjudged its incline by half a degree.