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Thank you!!! I know it's been almost three years, but I've just discovered LessWrong (and my account) and highly appreciate your help.
I look forward to reading the article.
Wasn't visiting LessWrong with my profile for a long while.
Thank you for the detailed steps.
I suspect the down-vote is for the Taoist references where some LW'ers are heavily against references to Chi since they haven't found substantial evidence for its existence.
For me, your post is a thumbs up: I appreciate the applicability of what you wrote.
Thank you!
Great guys!
How'd it go? Did you talk about a 2nd meeting?
I just lost a long response, because I was naive enough not to check if the "More Help" link in formatting was an in-tab link. It was. Hence a short answer (my self-allowed free-wheeling time is almost up)
First of all. Thank you for your more fulfilling answer.
First admission: In the bright light of hindsight I see that my reply was unnecessarily snide.
Second admission: Yes, I actually saw your first as being slightly noisy. Perhaps because the post on "Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate" was so fresh in my mind. Your post fit very well into the self-sabotaging conducted by rationalists attempting communities that I perceived Eliezer to have described in that post.
Now I see that of course the interjection is valid. I just think our opinions differ on following points:
(1). The effectiveness of dancing and singing. Like you I've gone through quite a lot of years of mental gardening (around 7). With my current weed-out techniques, I do not think that the proposed exercises have an effect I couldn't effectively undermine with ½-1 hour worth of auto-hypnosis. Hence my cost-benefit says (potentially) low cost and probable high benefit (low transaction cost of knowledge between me and rational-striving people who have tested approaches to subjects, or gained knowledge about subjects, I'm curious about, but have yet to explore myself).
(2). How profound the effect is. I'm obviously not a(n internet) network expert or I wouldn't just have lost my entire post, but I wouldn't liken dancing and singing together as root access. Nor as:
a cultural process that accepts everyone, and gets everyone to believe whatever is in everyone else's heads at the beginning
More like opening a few ports perhaps (or allowing more bandwidth? - again I'm not nearly as tech-savvy as I have been, which means a lot less than most LW-members).
(3). Teaching creates more of a power division than a community feeling. Learning/exploring a new subject together, on the other hand, can be a quite powerful bond creation mechanism. My deepest bond of friendship has grown through learning a wide array of skills together and sharing insights on the way to the attainment of said skills.
(4). Your proposed ritual strikes me as being way more cultish than that of the post. The process mentioned strikes me as being very close to an initiation ritual. Furthermore: benevolence criteria is dubious: that means that we should agree on an ethical code (or at least points), which I'm not sure we do.
(5a). I do not personally consider it a minus to feel connected to strangers. Quite the opposite; my ethical position actually endorses that actively. Hence:
(5b). I'm slightly saddened by you likening a strong unity feeling to a parasitic disease.
PS. I tried reading the article on smallish groups (my best social structure for learning), but it was unfortunately a paid article and I'm not currently enjoying free access to the publication. If you have a way of enlightening me that does not require 35$ for me upfront, I'll be more than willing to check it out.
PPS. When I format to use lines, is it normal that the formatting resets every number to one? IE: " 1" " 2" became " 1" and " 1". I didn't in the sandbox, and I didn't immediately find something about it in the guide (and hence ran out of patience).
If the context loses the safety property, sing out of tune, miss the beat and do some negative association exercises. In other words I regard it as overtly cautious to fear a cult sensation before the community is even at a community level.
But for those of us that are risk-averse (which should be none of us, but probably is the majority): Do you know of any community building exercises that do not have a potential negative backlash?
[... or is our kind doomed to be one of a kind? insert ominous music of own choice]
Could you enlighten us with your preferred approach to meditation then? I've had very positive experiences just with simple breathing exercises, but I'd definitely like to improve.
I'd have a hard time presuming anyone to be completely rational. But I'd have an even harder time understanding why I shouldn't point that out to someone who (presumably; due to them being here and all) wants to be more rational.
About your second point: I'm probably a bad choice for identifying your conformity filters due to the rather big amount of time I've spent at salsa and tango courses. Time which takes gargantuan proportions when contrasted to the awfully little time I've spent in Cthulhulian sects.
I disagree. Techniques for spreading rationality are highly rational to learn. Considering subjects such as Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate I dare say that it's almost essential for the project of disseminating rationality that LessWrong as a group learns how group dynamics work and how successful communities are built. If we consider being rational a good thing then we ought to make it as attractive as possible to feel as part of the rationalist group.
How is that rational?
a) I s'pose he does expect losses. Replenishing his ranks in the long term seems to be an acceptable idea (he is, more or less, immortal) b) Pity points? Perhaps the good guys held back against a pregnant woman? c) How long is she realistically out of the game, considering wet-nurses, time-turners and so on: half a year? d) If Bellatrix had gotten reckless, having a kid might have been a good way to rein her in a little bit..
... but honestly learning languages early on is a good investment for several other reasons. Not only for social and economical reasons, but also due to it becoming a lot harder to learn languages later on in life (please do correct me if this is a myth).
If you on the other hand stay learning languages during your youth, becoming fluent in a language takes less and less time (at least according to my own experience and that of all of the polyglots I know).
Also I'd say that being able to call on different aspects of your personality is a very valuable trait. If you combine the use of standard associations exercises (and hence have an above average control of your emotional state) with keying different associational patterns to different languages you'll achieve a capacity for holistic problem solving and idea generation that I'd expect to be soaring high above the average levels.
if you can be kind and moderate in your personal behavior, you can get away with incredible amounts of institutionally-mediated violence and extremism, especially to anyone who feels like they "know" you. Hypothesis: the most dangerous people are those who can give us the illusion of "knowing" them while they command an institution whose internal operations we don't see.
This suits extremely well with both local communities relationship to known criminals and to historical figures. Politics is a mind-killer and so on, but a lot of heroes of different nations have done some downright nasty stuff, but managed to keep their reputation due to perceptions about their personal manner. It has recently been used by leaders such as Chavez and Khomeini, but American presidents have also used this effect extensively (why kiss babies?) and historical figures from Cesar to Richard Lionheart and countless of medieval kings have also garnered good will by the actions they have undertaken in public while at the same time doing something in the opposite direction of way greater magnitude through their institutions of power.
My personal experience is that I've attached different parts of my personality to my different languages. I'm currently fluent in three and passable in two others. I notice that the part of my personality I attach to a given language depends on a variety of factors, but I can have a marked impact on it by focusing on my associations while learning the language. This is particularly true when I take the language from the classroom to an an experience of immersion.
In this regard I've also noticed that languages of the same root (for me: Danish, English and German) have a tendency to invoke related frames of minds whereas new language families (French, Arabic and Polish) allow me greater freedom in what kind of thoughts are likely to occupy my mind when I use them and hence what kind of person I am in this tongue. It's worth noting that the Polish me is closer to the French me than both the Arabic and Danish parts. I suspect a likeliness in grammar and syntax to have played a role in this.
Now the funny thing is that I didn't really notice this phenomena myself. While living in France I was visited by my parents. Both my dad (who was fluent in French) and my mum (who isn't and wasn't) noticed that everything from my tone of voice, to my subject matter to the way I gestured and moved changed when I changed between languages. American friends, independently, later made remarks in the same direction.
I must admit though that I haven't tried it regarding decision making. It's definitely worth a try and as it is, I'd predict that thinking in French will help me visualise a given situation, Danish would be preferred for extracting the emotional response, English for both estimating it's likeliness of happening as well as turning the given situation into a joke whereas my Polish and Arabic are not quite yet at the same level of abstraction. I'm prone to being extremely flirtatious in Polish and my Arabic has a tendency to call on my altruistic and carefree sides.
Nope, pride definitely is more attractive for me due to the enhanced sense of curves. If this is supposed to proof something, I'd be highly suspicious of the results. I'm really bad a judging men, but I figure the pride one to be better there as well. The happy one seems to fake.
Yeah, but due to the politics is a mind-killer thing, we don't really comment on it... just like a lot of other political hints are left alone (at least on my behalf) and I try to focus on making predictions and figuring out where the agents in this story will go given their apparent rationality (or lack thereof) and value sets. That's the reason why I read this: it's well-written entertainment I can use to train my ability to predict and phrase said predictions. Plus I like to see theories put to practice.
(upvoted chaosmosis) How is utilitarian not cold-blooded? As far as I understand, utilitarians work by assigning utility values between different outcomes and choosing the one with the most utility. That seems pretty cold-blooded.
100k years worth of life > 2 minutes of intense pain and loss of 2 years of life.
I'm confused. I'm curious.
Can you see his point of view?
Do you understand why people (me included) feel that you under-clarify your arguments?
Do you realise that we (me, and I guess thornblake as well) do not mean you any harm? That harming you could not possibly help us (sorry, it could, marginally so, if it actually had a behavioural impact)?
Furthermore, it is hard to get social benefits from downvoting, since others can't see anyone downvote you. This does NOT have the same social effect as denouncing something in public.
I honestly didn't know about the posting delay, but I personally wouldn't assign a lot utility to it. And even less (close to none) to the ability to downvote others. In this case I think a 10 minute delay might help if it is used to check for illusion of transparency and/or lacking steps in his chain of reasoning.
But overall, thank you for pointing out the negative consequences of low karma. I'm reading up on it and I must admit I haven't found the right post (read the faq) to cover all the consequences. Still they seem minor at best.
One major problem concerns the legal rights of magical criminals; what if you're later found to be innocent? There'll be no way to reclaim their magic. Hence I doubt Harry would prefer this solution.
"Additionally, I reject (his?) claim that "the downvotes come from you making a claim about the quoted text that doesn't seem particularly well supported". -6 doesn't happen as a result of a factual mistake, nor does +9 for a clever rationalization; both happen as a result of dislike for me as a person and because of social influences and not as a result of a flawed claim. The intensity of reactions to my posts got much stronger as it became apparent that rejecting my arguments was the hip new trend that all the cool kids were doing."
This is wrong. At least in my case. I do not know who you are and I do not care. I upvote theories I find to well-thought out and/or highly probable. Also I upvote alternative more effective solutions to Harry's problems.
Most of your posts suffer, as far as I can see, from the illusion of transparency. This goes for both the HPMOR-related and community-related comments. I honestly cannot follow your chain of thought nor your the theories you use to infer your deductions. I feel like downvoting some of your posts, not because of the unclear HPMOR-content, but due to the lack of insight in social interactions. I haven't, 'cause I don't think it'll help your understanding (but rather provide false evidence for your flawed theory).
Neither your stance against Harry's dark side being Voldemort NOR your stance for Harry's dark side being Voldemort are very well documented or contains any useful reasoning. Seemingly, you just quote a paragraph and magically arrive at your conclusion. Plus in the parent comment to this one, you don't even reference your original stance, hence it's extremely hard to know that you've just updated your point of view on a specific subject. All in all, you frankly come across as rather paranoid. I've just checked and I've both up- and downvoted some of your comments. Downvotes have been due to "clearly bla bla"-reasoning and upvotes have been for interesting points of view and/or use of evidence I hadn't noticed.
More essentially: why do you honestly care about these useless karma-points? I don't think Buddha will change them for a treat. Personally I don't click on profiles to check their karma. I hope most others don't either.
Even so, I doubt Quirrel would leave clues as to him killing anyone (due to him knowing Harry doesn't like killing and me believing b))
I doubt he is a perfect utilitarian.
Thank you; I even managed to figure that out myself (with the help of our ever vigilant and watchful google); as seen in my response to Desrtopa (24 seconds before you clicked the comment button apparently).
Makes sense. I was confused so I looked it up: "And the third wizard, the binder, permanently sacrifices a small portion of their own magic, to sustain the Vow forever." I guess the self-improvement part is out of the question then...
Still; it'd be a pretty hardcore thing to do for an ambitious dying grandfather. Make his grandson, age 3, swear the vow (something along the lines: "I will never spend an awake moment on anything except improving my abilities or the situation of my family" - it could be phrased better) and then die happily.
Not to mention perfect self-motivation.. Actually I still don't understand why it is not used that way. Unbreakable Vows only require energy until said vow is fulfilled right?
Seems to be a lot more effective than A. Robbins...
Our time zones are different (hence you might have written me in the middle of my writing), but I think I reached my goal: thank you for your help. I'm still struggling a little bit with the interface.
Yes, of course. First of all, I just updated it to 0.15-0.20. This might actually be a bit high, but I've set it higher than what I feel is right due to my bias (consisting of Eliezer finding a more interesting way of writing the story).
It is "so low" due to the following:
a) I believe that Quirrel is not seeking a physical confrontation with Harry (earlier we saw him toss Harry a knut (that could have been a portkey to a volcano))
a.1.) Harry wouldn't win such a confrontation (a sneak attack would of course be much more likely to get the job done)
a.2.) If there is a confrontation and if that confrontation ends with the death of Quirrel, I expect the wands or Lily's ritual to be the deciding factor, not any action of Harry's.
b) I consider it most probable that Quirrel tries to turn Harry to his ways (0.6 < p < 0.5)
b.1) Harry might try to counter-turn Quirrel. I do doubt though that this will end with one of them dying. Killing one another seems so irrational...
c) if Harry decides Quirrel must die, he'd do better using henchmen
[I'm now officially not a fan of the editing options here]
Prediction time!
Due to Harry's new vow he'll feel forced to kill Quirrel: 0.2 > p > 0.15 [UPDATED from 0.1 > p > 0.05]
Due to Harry's new vow he'll feel forced to kill Dumbledore: 0.12 > p > 0.08
Due to Harry's new vow he'll end up killing the wrong person (bad judgement call on Harry's behalf): 0.15 > p > 0.1
Due to Harry's new vow he'll end up killing the wrong person (bad execution on Harry's behalf): 0.1 > p > 0.05
Due to Harry's new vow he'll not kill the right bad guy at the right time hence become indirectly responsible for the deaths of innocents: 0.3 > p > 0.2
- Please add and/or comment on predictions.
Or Justine... But perhaps that was just the wrong book to steal from my dad's library. Or right. Updated evidence from encounters later in my life would suggest the latter, public opinion the former.
No. It's just a clock. But it is there, so Dumbledore knows at which point in time he should jump back to (given the option of course) {all this is an interpretation of loserthree's post}
I had planned to do as little as humanly possible at exactly that interval of time. Now, I guess I have to postpone it... Procrastination is a b**
Seems an awful lot of work to go through rather than just siccing an expert killer on the baby. No, I find it highly unlikely that killing Harry is the main goal. On the other hand Dumbledore's version of good seems to be very incompatible with Harry's...
I'd throw in son of Mr. Fantastic for good measure. (nobody says Lilly was faithful)
It'd be illegal in most countries, but getting very small mics is not that hard. I've used it myself for testing if I had a better idea generation state of mind while running/doing sports than when penning.
I suggest you reroll. I heal paper cuts in a couple of hours.
... I need a slur to describe how dumb I feel now...
Slurs? (oh you mean "idiots"? I'd refrain from that in the future; I didn't mean to be offensive EDIT: later clarified to referring to retarded which I'll also refrain from using in the future... me not being a native speaker will end up being expensive karma-wise).
Transfiguring a whole mountain would: a) take more magical energy than most wizards could muster. b) not extract any resources.
Partial transfiguring has the distinct advantage of not having to transfigure entire objects (such as mountains). Perhaps a spell could also help with actually finding valuable resources.
Besides that partial transfiguration is an excellent break in/out spell (as seen earlier in TSPE) and I do not recall saying that Harry had to stay legal. He's shown already his ability to disregard the law (again TSPE) if he thinks it's worth it.
I disagree. Harry can do partial transfiguration. If he cannot figure out ways to earn insane amounts of cash just through that then he is too retarded to be called rational (remember that he can actually extract resources in ways the wizarding world cannot - as I write in another place: mining ++).
Plus you underestimate the degree of separation between the two worlds plus the extreme lack of respect the wizarding world holds for muggles.
And about the 100.000 galleons: well if they're bright, ambitious and socially aware plus they're using questionable sources they SHOULD act surprised. Not acting surprised would give away their game to the idiots remaining.
I will be severely disappointed if EY will waste time on the money issue. It doesn't deserve much more than a paragraph. Perhaps two just to let us know that Harry won't abuse it, because he doesn't want to call too much attention to himself.
Eh no... Harry has Mining++ also known as partial transfiguration. Now EY didn't believe that to be enough so he also equipped Harry with an invisibility cloak a bag AND a suitcase of holding.
If Harry is really pressed for cash and some rules against arbitrage, stock market manipulation, insurance fraud (which he should be able to do to an amount that's not even funny to think about) exist, he still has one glaringly easy way of earning shit tons. He should be able to, as soon as he is allowed to use magic outside school (which IIRC is at 17 which is before his last year at Hogwarts' starts; the 31st of July to be exact) of doing the following:
a) Robin Hood his way through pretty much anything (Invis+teleport is an old classic) b) mine diamonds/gold/other valuable resources by using partial transfiguration, invisibility and if need be Apparation.Some mines in Somalia are just waiting for a wizard to abuse them... c) and of course just straight up gambling.
Sincerely: this stuff doesn't even require a lot of thinking. He could also just do some honest transport business of high quality wares... Teleportation is a whole lot faster than anything else I can think of.
Why do you not consider Snape to be an alternative? Yes, Quirrelmort has gained a lot by Hat's actions, but: a) Quirrel could be manipulating Snape. b) Quirrelmort probably has an extremely accurate mental model of Snape.
What is your mental model of Snape?
You may very well be right. Due to free-riding and buck-passing I'd still expect a lot of them to do nothing.
Recall also that they're all in internal power struggles over ink monopolies and what have you, plus Lucius lack of complete control has already been pointed out by Lucius.
For all those who think the blood debt will hurt their rivals more than themselves there's good reason not to change the framing of the debt. Not to forget being the one to start this campaign will be both financially and politically costly. A beautiful collective action problem. Either way, we've too little insights into the political power balances to make qualified estimates about the "wall-paper's" reaction.
A possibility. Though for some of the lesser wealthy houses that is probably not the first option. For some a blood debt might also be a good way to join Harry's side if he seems to start winning. For the opposite reason a lot might do nothing because they expect Lucius to crush him before he makes claim to his debts.
Free-riding and buck-passing are frequent solutions in the political game.
Highly unlikely: blood debts have probably been a significant political currency for a long time, and both due to institutional path-dependency and a lot of vested interests, I highly doubt that they'd change the importance of blood debts. Also: it seems like a lot of the justice system is built up around this concept. It would require a total overhaul of the justice system to deal with the blood debt. Otherwise they'd have to change the significance of being imperiuse'd which is also unlikely due to most of them otherwise being Azkaban(ne)d
It would be a bad use of political capital considering how easy he could gain money in other ways while keeping a majority(? - at least combined with some help from Dumbledore's side) vote on pretty much whatever issue up his sleeve...
My only problem with the two listed options is that they both require him to renege on important political capital. I'd rather go for some arbitraging then (perhaps with time-turn earned lottery start-up capital).
If smartly done he'd find the number of some lottery tickets, #5 or #6; buy said tickets and get the memory removed of why and how he did it.
... In general a time turner should make the whole money-making part easier than what's worth thinking about.
It was great! It also allowed me to test a couple of thesis of generating solutions. The closest I got was doing something completely different than working directly on the generating of solutions; I can't remember the name of the theory stating that this should be the case, and while having it strengthened is somewhat disheartening it is nevertheless a useful piece of information.
Now if I weren't so bad at shaving, I might even remember to use Occam's razor next time and reduce "Harry marries Hermione" to "Harry makes Hermione part of house Potter". Still much in the ways of the force have I to learn ;)
Only defence of my marriage theory was that I wasn't quite sure that people could just be adopted into houses. Even thought it makes perfect sense, having seen it in action.
I suspect/expect you'll write what power Lucius can legally claim over Harry sometimes soon?
Also I learned to actually look up the experiments you referred to...
All in all thank you for a highly entertaining and inspiring chapter!
No reason not to convince them now... With the newly won time and without the considerable risks in your good (but overly complicated) plan.
Harry has already figured out quite a few solutions to the monetary problem. The long run (and cheap solution) would be to apply himself and his side to the clearing of Hermione's name. That wouldn't just earn him a 100.000 galleons it would also improve Hermione's political standing, leave Malfoy's (and to a certain extent Dumbledore's) reputation in its currently weakened state plus strengthen his argument against the political structure of Magical Britain. Not to mention he can do all this WHILE having starting his money-making schemes. Though we might as well not care since I seem to recall that the great EY seems to have said that this story ends after the first year of Hogwarts. Regardless: the interesting part is what kind of extra power Lucius has vis-a-vis Harry now.
[Deleted: I completely forgot I'm not allowed to talk about later chapters in this discussion thread]