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The wiki claims- unfortunately without attribution- that Dumbledore offered to be the Potters' Keeper, and was turned down.
I definitely remember this from the third book. The adults are talking about the Potters' deaths in the Three Broomsticks Inn and someone mentions that Dumbledore himself offered to become the secret keeper, but was turned down with insistences that Sirius Black would never betray them.
EDIT: Found it.
"So Black was the Potters' Secret-Keeper?" whispered Madam Rosmerta.
"Naturally," said Professor McGonagall. "James Potter told Dumbledore that Black would die rather than tell where they were, that Black was planning to go into hiding himself... and yet, Dumbledore remained worried. I remember him offering to be the Potters' Secret-Keeper himself."
Can somebody explain to me why Harry was so into House points before Azkaban recalibrated his sense of perspective? It makes sense why most people seek them; you take several dozen kids, split them up into different groups, and soon enough you hear them talking about how they can't let those Gryffindor jerkasses win the House Cup and so on. But it seems to me like you need to identify with your House to an unhealthy degree to take so much pleasure in earning points for it. Hermione obviously has that problem (cf. her speech about House Ravenclaw in ch. 34), but I would have expected Harry to avoid falling into such an obvious trap.
Note that Draco never seems interested in getting house points (as far as I can remember, anyways), so I guess his Slytherin education allowed him to see what the Ravenclaws missed: House Points are just one of those totally useless things you use to incentivize people into desired behaviors without having to give them any real, costly rewards. Like employee of the month awards, and military medals, and lesswrong kar-
...
Nevermind, I think I get it now.
(But seriously, karma at least has an individual tracking component that allows one to gain status in the community; is there anything about house points that would win Hermione or Harry more status than they would if they just kept getting good grades in class, answering questions correctly, and saving victims from bullies?)
This attempted murder was well-planned to evade detection both by the wards of Hogwarts and the Headmaster's timely eye.
Quirrell sure loves his stealth puns. Is there any reason he is not openly telling Hermione about Dumbledore's time turner?
The Defense Professor turned his head down from the sky to regard her; and she saw, in the light of the doorway, that he was smiling - or at least half his face was smiling.
Is Quirrell's half-smile a reference to Robin Hanson's picture?
It's implied in Ch. 38 and all subsequent Lucius/Harry interactions. Specially relevant is the ironic "I prefer to deal with the part of House Malfoy that's my own age", which Lucius understands in a completely different way than Harry intends.
I think he meant that in case of failure, the happy ending will simply become the "false ending" instead of the "true ending". Since we get both either way, there really isn't a difference.
But I'm still confused; why not? What are the benefits of servitude over marriage?
Before McGonagall's stunt, I was worried the marriage would require consummation to be legally binding.
It comes from his 7 point scale for measuring belief along the theist/atheist spectrum.
It sounds like you are talking about Khan Academy, Just Math Tutorials, Math TV, Midnight Tutor, or a similar website. As far as I'm aware, none of the people involved with those sites post at LessWrong.
For pure anecdote, I am a nice guy (I think) who always complained about the "bad boy" thing, and now I am raising a step-daughter from my wife's youthful short term relationship with a guy everyone would still call a "bad boy." My wife is winning at natural selection! As is that jerk :(
Reading this anecdote made me wonder if it would be possible for a group of rational "nice guys" to cooperate with each other, refusing relationships with and shunning women who had previously been involved with and fathered children by "bad boys" even though each one of them would have to sacrifice the benefit they would individually get from entering into such a relationship. The idea being to make having a later father care for a baby sired by a jerk not a viable strategy for women, thus incentivizing them away from that behavior.
(I also thought about what would happen if nice guys switched to a jerk strategy until they were ready to settle down and then switched back, since that mixed strategy appeared to dominate either pure strategy, but then I realized that that would reduce the number of childless women for guys to marry, thus leading to a tragedy of the commons.)
Or any other demographic whose primary defining characteristic is their age group, really.
Here's the chapter 77 PDF in case you want it.
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but is the opening line just a framing device for a short story with abrupt transitions, or does it mean that this is an actual draft of a book that won't be finished for whatever reason?
Go to Preferences and click on "DELETE", give confirmation and your account will be deleted. Old comments and posts will still work, but the account name on them will be replaced with "[deleted]" (you could manually edit all your posts to blanks, if you should feel the need to, but please don't; it harms the blog).
I agree that such looking ought to be one's first recourse, for exactly the reasons you cite. I note, however, that one should look at subcultures for ideas as well, not just at the mainstream cultures of different geographical regions. For example, if I were to look at methods of solving the issue of shelter mentioned in the quote, I would not just look at how regular people lived in the cities of Japan or the countryside of North America, but also at how, say, people in the frugality movement or soldiers in the military dealt with it. Maybe some historical cultures, too, if I could easily find enough information about them.
Is the 50% a conjunction of it not passing and then returning to cause an uproar, or is it conditional on it not passing?
Upvoted for bullet-biting.
You may find one of these helpful. As a heads up, though, you may want to begin with the essays on Eliezer's website (Bayes' Theorem, Technical Explanation, Twelve Virtues, and The Simple Truth) before you start his OB posts.
At present, 150 of the 270 comments are children of Bakkot's comment, arguing about infanticide. It seems obvious to me that we ought to seriously discourage promoting discussion on ideas in introduction threads, and instead point people to open threads / a primer on writing discussion posts.
Another possible solution is to have new introduction treads on a more regular basis. Say, monthly, like quotes threads, or as they fill up, like MoR threads.
This should be an offspring of the Meta Thread.
Fixed, thanks!
The professor isn't arguing a different point to his wife than he was lecturing to his students; he's just responding to her from the viewpoint of the philosophy he is teaching. Interestingly, some of what he says isn't that different from LW ideas. His problem is that he forgets that his view of reality should add up to normality. Just because people can't see things directly but must instead look at copies of things within their own brain does not make vision "mere" or mean that fixing his daughter's eyesight is somehow less important (as his wife amusingly reminds him).
Professor: So, the invalidation of the senses and cognition as a means of knowing reality is a common thread through eastern mysticism and platonic philosophy. We will study the resurgence of these ideas within secular western philosophies starting with the explanation of how it's impossible to know things "as they are" versus things as they are within the bounds of our minds.
Phone: Beep Beep Beep ♪
Professor: See you on Monday.
(He answers)
Professor: Yes?
Wife: Honey, Angelica is having trouble with her vision. I'm going to use some of the rainy day account to take her to the optometrist.
Professor: Hahah! Actually, vision is merely a sense that supplies the mind with perceptions, interpreting with all biases and forming only-
Wife: Honey.
Professor: Oh. Yes dear. Go ahead.
~Jay Naylor, Original Life
Science isn't just a job, it's a means of determining truth. Methods of determining truth that aren't trustworthy in the laboratory don't become trustworthy when you leave it. There is no doctrine of applying scientific methodology to every aspect of one's life, you either follow trustworthy methods of investigation or you don't, and "follow trustworthy methods of investigation" is the core of science.
~Desertopa, TVTropes Forum
Human behavior is predictable if sad. As much as we like to delude ourselves we are rational thinkers we usually tend to fall back on habit and mental shortcuts. You can easily train your brain to overcome this but it does take some work on your part. So it probably isn’t going to happen. But I’ll do my part trying to point out your many and varied shortcomings and you can go along, nodding wisely and congratulating me on my benevolent teachings while all the while planning to ignore me and do things the same way as before. [...]
The family house you grow up in is what you see as normal. That is the definition of shelter in your life. If you encounter a new product, that first price is what you use as a “normal” one. So everything can suffer from your first encounters ( or look better in comparison ). This is why most people won’t look for shelter. They look for a house. Or an apartment. Whatever they are used to. They are not used to finding a way to keep the elements out, they are used to finding a house or apartment. This is the way it is done and any suggestion otherwise is ignored. They might pretend to be open to new ideas but once they find fault with any way other than their own they can claim to be objective while remaining safely cocooned in their normal world.
People don’t look at how to get from one point to another. They don’t look at the need for transportation, they look at the need for a car. So by comparison shopping for cars they ignore scooters or bicycles or public transport or even carpooling. They are used to having a car and that is the only way to do it. People don’t look at how to become secure, they look at how to make money. To them money equals security and there is no other way. They ignore being out of debt, they ignore decreasing dependence on a paycheck ( note I said decrease, not eliminate ). They ignore all but getting money. This is how it was done before and it is how they are going to continue to do it.
~James Dakin, throwing the anchor overboard
Just in Main? I think this belongs in a professional science-fiction publication that accepts reprints. It's really high quality, and the inferential distance is short enough to an SF fan.
Ryvrmre npghnyyl vffhrq n Jbeq bs Tbq (JNEAVAT: GIGebcrf) ba gur znggre va bar bs uvf rneyl nhgube abgrf nsgre abgvat gung znal bs uvf ernqref jrer choyvpyl jbaqrevat nobhg gur vffhr, ohg gura ur tbg n pbhcyr bs erivrjf gung pbaivaprq uvz gb yrg gur zlfgrel fgnaq. Lbh pna fgvyy svaq gur abgr ba NqryrarQnjare'f nepuvir (gur bar yvaxrq gb va gur bcravat cbfg). Whfg tb gb gur frnepu one naq ybbx sbe gur jbeq "ubyl". Ubjrire, n ybg bs crbcyr jub unir ernq gur cebpynzngvba nccneragyl pbafvqre vg gb or n uhtr fcbvyre, fb ernq vg ng lbhe bja evfx.
Be ner lbh abg grpuavpnyyl ylvat ol fnlvat "ab bssvpvny fgngrzrag gung gur nhgube raqbefrf"?
The linked picture has sadly been deleted, but this paper corroborates.
Every LW comment has its own RSS feed. You can find it by going to the comment's permalink URL and then clicking on "Subscribe to RSS Feed" from the right column or by adding "/.rss" to the end of the aforementioned URL, whichever is easier for you. The grandparent's RSS feed is here.
The gloriously androgynous creature of pure information (henceforth GACoPI) that you wish you were cannot prioritize one love over the other in a timely fashion, and will simply babble ineffectual encouragement to both until professional rescuers arrive, during which time there is some chance that somebody's arms will get tired or the cliff will shift due to other factors, killing them both.
The grandparent uses "winning cleanly" to mean winning without resorting to doublethink. To go from that to assuming that a GACoPI is unable to enact your proposed ape solution or come up with some other courses of action than standing around like an idiot smacks of Straw Vulcanism (WARNING: TVTropes).
It's only the posts of whichever section you are on when you click it. There's http://lesswrong.com/recentposts for the main section and http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/recentposts for the discussion section.
Well, he didn't sue over the play.
Unless there's a particular reason to expect LWers in the U.S. to be significantly smarter or dumber than other LWers, it should be a useful sample.
Hermant Mehta on math education
This is relevant to my interests.
Also, thank you very much for your many transcripts; they are very helpful.
Free Software is Open Source Software.
*infodump ahead*
Richard Stallman came up with the idea of using copyright to safeguard the Four Essential Freedoms (which he considers ideologically/philosophically/morally/ethically/politically important in the same way many people consider Free Speech important) and called software guaranteeing these freedoms Free Software. Years later, Eric Raymond and others came up with the term Open Source Software; they felt that Free Software's adoption among mainstream businesses was being slowed down by its ideological focus and that they should switch to a practical name which emphasized the alternative development model and technological advantages that came along with giving people access to the program's source code and freedom to make changes and improvements. Stallman thinks they are missing the point. Raymond thinks it was a marketing success. Stallman concludes that "Open Source is a development methodology; Free Software is a social movement."
Can someone remind me how much I am now required to donate to Singinst for having wasted time speculating on CEV's output?
The CEV document mentions the following tariffs for arguing about CEV's output on SL4:
- $10 to argue for 48 hours.
- $50 to argue for one month.
- $200 to argue for one year.
- $1000 to get a free pass until the Singularity.
I see quite a bit more stuff among the regular middle classes that looks like pure signaling waste
Could you please list some examples? I've been trying to think of some myself, and I came up with things like gift-based holidays (Christmas, Father's day, birthdays, etc...), brand-name color-and-style-matching clothes, and the search for high status jobs (there is a reason "flipping burgers" is an insult). But it feels like there is so much difference between a homeless man living in a shelter with cheap food/clothing/electronics and a typical middle class man that I fear I might be missing something big, even after reading all the things you and lessdazed already mentioned. Which would bother me, because if it means I am unable to see the middle class as a special case of how to live a life.
If we're going to try to preserve ourselves through recorded information, wouldn't it make much more sense to instead spend a few hundred/thousand dollars on lifelogging?
But that does not have the advantages over cryonics that gworley uses to argue for writing. Cryonics at its cheapest costs $1250 for a lifetime CI membership plus the recurring life insurance payments. An initial investment on lifelogging combined with the periodical maintaining and/or replacing of equipment ought to be comparable (although you could count on technological advancement to bring these costs down as time goes on). And I don't think lifelogging is significantly more socially acceptable than cryonics.
Not exactly what you asked for, but some extremely interesting arguments about the feasibility of an intelligence explosion occurred in The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate.
My biggest problem with this story is that Jacob, the narrator, has no assets to sustain himself after he loses his job. He doesn't have funds in his bank account, he doesn't own anything that isn't rented, and when the robot asks him if he has any means of support unknown to the system, he replies "no".
Well, why the fuck not? He has been working as an administrator for 20 years, on top of his previous work as a teacher and as a fast food employee. What in God's name has he been doing with all his money? The cost of living can't possibly have increased when the whole point of Manna and the robots is that they are more efficient than human beings, hence why they replace them. Even land should get cheaper once people start being shipped off to the Terrafoam projects, which we know from Burt's case was already happening 10 years prior to the date Jacob gets fired. It should be cheaper to live in the 2050 the story presents that it is right now.
I know people often make financially stupid decisions because humans are not automatically strategic and because a lot of their choices are motivated in large part by status rather than by solely fiscal considerations, but this is too much to be plausible. Jacob has known for at least 10 year that people who can't sustain themselves end up on welfare and get shipped to Terrafoam, yet he hasn't been keeping a savings account, a retirement plan, an investment portfolio, or even a property of his own? What did he do, blow through his entire paycheck every month by living like a millionaire and renting stuff he couldn't afford to buy until the day he inevitably lost his job and got corralled into the lowest rung of society? Is that the fashionable thing to do in 2050? And very fashionable it must have been indeed, since the story implies that everyone from the poor to the middle class, except for a relatively small number of "rich", have all ended up on the projects.
I like the use of rhetoric in "Explain/Worship/Ignore?". It starts with a story, which is a nice and concrete way to draw the reader in. It also uses a computer control convention combined with underlining to repeatedly draw attention back to the main point. And then there's this little gem:
We can hit Explain for the Big Bang, and wait while science grinds through its process, and maybe someday it will return a perfectly good explanation. But then that will just bring up another dialog box. So, if we continue long enough, we must come to a special dialog box, a new option, an Explanation That Needs No Explanation, a place where the chain ends - and this, maybe, is the only explanation worth knowing.
There - I just hit Worship.
Yes, that's what I was looking for! Thank you very much for the link.
Awesome! Thanks for Calamus, Alicorn, he's perfect.
Also, I really like Strange Loop and Seafoam.
I'm having trouble finding a piece which I am fairly confident was either written on LW or linked to from here. It dealt with a stone which had the power render all the actions of the person who held it morally right. So a guy goes on a quest to get the stone, crossing the ocean and defeating the fearful guardian, and finds it and returns home. At some point he kills another guy, and gets sentenced by a judge, and it is pointed out that the stone protects him from committing morally wrong actions, not from the human institution of law. Then the guy notices that he is feeling like crap because he is a murderer and it is pointed out that the stone isn't supposed to protect him from his feelings of guilt. And so on, with the stone proving to be useless because the "morality" wasn't attached to anything real.
If somebody knows what I'm talking about, could they be so kind as to point me towards it?
I applaud his attempt, but the 12 month goal strikes me as ridiculous; this will likely become yet another example of the planning fallacy.
Also, why is he studying physics 1 before calculus 1?
Your welcome. Though, if you are going to read GEB, I think this DJVU has better formatting... does anybody know if there is a good DJVU reader for iPad?
If you go to 4shared, you can find a lot of PDF books that have seen prominent mentions or recommendations around here. For example:
Gödel, Escher, Bach
Probability Theory: The Logic of Science
The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences
How the Mind Works
The Nature of Rationality
Good and Real
The Strategy of Conflict
You can also take a look at Bostrom's or Hanson's papers, or at SIAI's list of publications. They are pretty interesting.
"But," says the causal decision theorist, "to take only one box, you must somehow believe that your choice can affect whether box B is empty or full - and that's unreasonable! Omega has already left! It's physically impossible!"
...
Unreasonable? I am a rationalist: what do I care about being unreasonable? I don't have to conform to a particular ritual of cognition. I don't have to take only box B because I believe my choice affects the box, even though Omega has already left. I can just... take only box B.
Looking back on it, this post is what finally shifted my intuition from two-boxing to one-boxing on Newcomb's. I guess that counts as anecdotal evidence for the power of rationalist fanfics.
I'm totally shipping that threesome. And wondering just what their parents would say about it.
I thought the Tootsie Pop bit was just a reference to this.