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purpleposeidon's Shortform 2020-02-01T16:15:45.798Z

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Comment by purpleposeidon on purpleposeidon's Shortform · 2020-02-05T05:48:26.503Z · LW · GW

Deleted.

Comment by purpleposeidon on purpleposeidon's Shortform · 2020-02-01T16:15:45.977Z · LW · GW

Veto's a veto.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Link: The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce - Wait But Why · 2015-11-21T05:33:03.559Z · LW · GW

Worth reading. Over-repeated some points a bit too much. The "Musk Program" looks wrong in the way that "just brute force a path to victory" is wrong.

Comment by purpleposeidon on [Link] Valproic acid, a drug for brain plasticity · 2014-01-05T07:53:40.724Z · LW · GW

Here is the paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3848041/

Comment by purpleposeidon on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 · 2013-07-03T07:32:54.863Z · LW · GW

This has got me quite convinced that Fred and Fred is going to happen. They are probably connected magically, rather than acoustically, so they might be able to communicate across time. This setup might create the time beacon Harry was wanting.

Or, maybe their connection does not link through time. Send a pair of Weasleys back in time. You now have 4 Weasleys. Wait not-quite-an-hour, and then send 4 Weasleys back in time… 4 Weasleys is twice the number of Weasleys. Are N Weasleys N/2 times as smart as 2 Weasleys? No. It is much more interesting if it is the connections that matter. HE is the Weasley hivemind.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 · 2013-07-02T21:06:16.406Z · LW · GW

The narration in chapters 88 and 89 have left quite a bit of room for Weasley Twin shenanigans. They are referred to as "the twins" and "Fred or George" up until one gets beat up by the troll. Additionally, the twins gave a respectful nod to McGonagall's demand that they stay in the Great Hall; they could have stayed there the entire time. Harry might have been accompanied by, say, Future Fred and Further Future Fred during his broom flight. I am not sure what the use of this would be, but it might involve them being a hive mind.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 · 2012-04-11T07:11:31.040Z · LW · GW

Disclaimer: Terrible omake ahead.

She felt a little more alive and, strangely, even more exhausted.

Isn't Hermione a little young for that? And how could she manage to obliviate Harry's patronus afterwards?

Comment by purpleposeidon on Nonperson Predicates · 2012-03-08T10:03:06.825Z · LW · GW

By the time a non-person predicate returns 0, you have already potentially created a person. You'll need something more complicated: If I update this model with this data, does it create a person?

Comment by purpleposeidon on Recent site changes, Mon 4th July · 2011-07-05T08:04:38.117Z · LW · GW

Please do not use target="_blank" for the SIAI and FHI links in the header.

Comment by purpleposeidon on People who want to save the world · 2011-05-20T09:26:42.028Z · LW · GW

Our multitude of voices exalting Rain's donation rebound off the faster-approaching towers of the Singularity!

Comment by purpleposeidon on The Friendly AI Game · 2011-03-17T05:56:05.775Z · LW · GW

A variant of Alexandros' AI: attach a brain-scanning device to every person, which frequently uploads copies to the AI's Manager. The AI submits possible actions to the Manager, which checks for approval from the most recently available copy of each person who is relevant-to-the-action.

At startup, and periodically, the definition of being-relevant-to-an-action is determined by querying humanity with possible definitions, and selecting the best approved. If there is no approval-rating above a certain ratio, the AI shuts down.

Comment by purpleposeidon on The Friendly AI Game · 2011-03-16T23:06:15.801Z · LW · GW

I'm sure the designer would approve of being modified to enjoy answering stupid questions. The designer might also approve of being cloned for the purpose of answering one question, and then being destroyed.

Unfortunately, it turns out that you're Stalin. Sounds like 1-person CEV.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Rationality Quotes: February 2011 · 2011-02-04T08:50:11.228Z · LW · GW

The following reminded me of Arguments as Soldiers:

Statistics for the enemy. Anecdotes for the friend. -- Zach Weiner

I'm sorry to have not found his blog sooner.

Comment by purpleposeidon on What's happened to the front page? · 2010-12-31T09:01:53.479Z · LW · GW

My first thought is that LW got haxXxed, but ping tells me that LW and the other site are both hosted by amazonaws. I suspect the cause is amazon's cloud service making sure I won't use it.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Diplomacy as a Game Theory Laboratory · 2010-11-14T02:19:29.204Z · LW · GW

This sounds fun! Where do I sign up? Here?

Hiding the names of the players, that is, knowing only the country, would likely make pre-game contracts impossible

Comment by purpleposeidon on Pascal's Mugging: Tiny Probabilities of Vast Utilities · 2010-10-30T07:54:30.799Z · LW · GW

The probability of some action costing delta-utility x and resulting in delta-utility y, where y >> x, is low. The Anti Gratis Dining modifier is x/y. These things I conjecture, anyways.

The apple-salespeep who says, "Give me $0.50, and I will give you an apple" is quite believable, unlike the apple-salespeep who claims, "Give me $3.50, and I will give apples to all who walk the Earth". We understand how buying an apple gets us an apple, but we know far less about implementing global apple distribution.

Suppose I have a Holy Hand Grenade of FAI, which has been carefully proofed by all the best mathematicians, programmers, and philosophers, and I am (of course) amongst them. And am randomly selected to activate it! Sadly, there is an ant caught in the pin. I can not delay to extricate it, for that means more deaths left unprevented. I pull the pin and kill the ant anyways.

So, the more understanding you have about the situation at hand, the less the AGD factor applies to the situation.

Comment by purpleposeidon on The Dark Arts - Preamble · 2010-10-12T04:42:29.153Z · LW · GW

Why should I believe that the way you describe the hypothetical meat-fuck in your head is how it would have really turned out? (I imagine Bricky could have pulled it off)

Comment by purpleposeidon on Anti-akrasia remote monitoring experiment · 2010-09-28T18:48:38.051Z · LW · GW

Sharing a list of running processes and DNS lookups would be more privacy-sensitive. (I have no idea how to implement the latter, but the former could at least be done on Linux, and possibly Windows, using ksysguard) You might not want to share your screen with a random stranger, but would you share process names and DNS lookups? How about open sockets?

Comment by purpleposeidon on Arguing "By Definition" · 2010-09-23T01:38:05.349Z · LW · GW

When you say that something is so by definition, what you (most likely) actually mean is that something is so by default. If a human is defined as "a featherless biped"*, you can't say that Hermione, who has just had an unfortunate accident with Hedwig and a polyjuice potion, is no longer human because she's grown feathers. "A feathered biped" is only by default not human!

*I don't think you'll ever find a definition like that in a dictionary. "homo: any living or extinct member of the family Hominidae characterized by superior intelligence, articulate speech, and erect carriage": If you're mentally disabled, stuttering, and hunch-backed, it doesn't mean that you aren't, by definition, human. You've got bad genes (or bad nurturing), but they're still Hominidae genes.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Fall 2010 Meta Thread · 2010-09-22T22:39:29.938Z · LW · GW

I'd like to be able to read the LW archives when I'm without internet. So, it'd be nice to have a dump.

I think best would be a git repository with a file for each article, and another file for the comments.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Fall 2010 Meta Thread · 2010-09-20T05:22:02.538Z · LW · GW

Require new top-level posts to use a tag that indicates which facet of LW's interest it lies with. So each new post would have to choose on (or maybe more) of tags like "bayes", "selfimprovement", "philosophy". So, if I think that Lesswrong should really dedicate itself to the study of Victory and nothing else, I might read only posts with selfimprovement tags.

Comment by purpleposeidon on LW's first job ad · 2010-09-17T05:01:17.683Z · LW · GW

It's a threat, not a fallacy. And if I understand LW correctly, few would notice random want-ads because they wouldn't gain enough votes to make it to the front page.

I'm pretty sure the problem is EY. He could post pictures of his cat, and they'd go all the way up. (And if he doesn't have a cat, then he should know that there are several in my neighborhood who might be happy to be adopted. And kittens! Omygosh!)

Comment by purpleposeidon on Two More Things to Unlearn from School · 2010-09-13T06:27:48.615Z · LW · GW

it's possible that schools aren't doing a good job of preparing people for typical office jobs

The highschool I went to attempts to prepare students for modern jobs. I hear that the educational model (project-based learning) is spreading to other local schools.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Berkeley LW Meet-up Sunday September 5 · 2010-09-01T10:13:21.994Z · LW · GW

Would more people come if there were more than a 4 day notice? This sort of thing has happened before.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Hacking the CEV for Fun and Profit · 2010-07-09T07:25:31.302Z · LW · GW

I want bob to think he gets what he wants.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Attention Lurkers: Please say hi · 2010-04-27T06:19:53.671Z · LW · GW

Because lame community college isn't all that great. I hope Berkeley agrees with you. :)

Comment by purpleposeidon on Attention Lurkers: Please say hi · 2010-04-25T23:37:31.989Z · LW · GW

I am very familiar with python, and a little bit familiar with C. (I am also a sophomore, not freshmen :P) I spent an hour looking at lisp once, but never got into it. As for Haskell, I have seen it, and it looks weird. I've'n't done much real algorithmic work. I wrote a (Warning: shameful self-plug) parser for Lojban, but it only works through trial-and-error and dumb luck.

Comment by purpleposeidon on Attention Lurkers: Please say hi · 2010-04-20T06:35:09.641Z · LW · GW

Hi. I see that the first point is free.

I am a Bay Area (California, United States) 19 year-old Computer Science student. I imagine I'll actually be taking actual CS classes next year. I've been lurking about for about a month.