orthonormal comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Unnamed 27 May 2010 12:10AM

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Comment author: Sniffnoy 28 July 2010 08:52:40PM 4 points [-]

Can we maybe get a list of these changes somewhere?

Comment author: NihilCredo 28 July 2010 11:45:15PM 0 points [-]

Don't think so, sorry (unless archive.org or similar sites are especially zealous with ff.net). But you can do what I did and add the various chapters to the Update Scanner extension for Firefox, which will do the job for you.

Comment author: Sniffnoy 28 July 2010 11:58:08PM 3 points [-]

Oh, I was more of hoping we could prod Eliezer into supplying us with a list of such. :)

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 July 2010 02:21:03AM 0 points [-]

Well, for one thing, sometimes Orwellian Retcons are there for important future reasons. It's one thing if someone reads Chapter 7 well enough, before and after, to spot the other change I made to Draco; but having a little automatic computer notifier makes my life more nervous.

Also, what kind of load does Update Scanner put on FFN's servers?

Comment author: Sniffnoy 29 July 2010 03:01:20AM 3 points [-]

I was thinking more for the benefit of those of us who only saw the older versions rather than for those of us who only saw the newer versions...

Comment author: Blueberry 29 July 2010 06:44:37AM 0 points [-]

Yes, a diff would be great, so we don't need to read the whole thing to get the Orwellian Retcon.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 29 July 2010 02:28:44AM 2 points [-]

Well, for one thing, sometimes Orwellian Retcons are there for important future reasons. It's one thing if someone reads Chapter 7 well enough, before and after, to spot the other change I made to Draco; but having a little automatic computer notifier makes my life more nervous.

Well then, please keep notes on the different versions so that future historians can look at the versions. I estimate a small chance that historians will be interested in this work (< 5%), but if one puts a high probability of a Singularity then the probability goes up a lot. So you would presumably think that it is worthwhile to keep them.

Comment author: NihilCredo 29 July 2010 04:53:25PM 5 points [-]

The Less Wrong Drinking Game: have a shot each time someone brings up the Singularity in a completely unrelated thread.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 29 July 2010 06:37:06PM 0 points [-]

What's worse is that I'm one of the people here who seems to give a lower estimate for a Singularity type event... Maybe it should be two shots whenever it is brought up by someone who doesn't identify as a Singularitarian?

Comment author: NihilCredo 29 July 2010 07:30:29PM 0 points [-]

Maybe it should be two shots whenever it is brought up by someone who doesn't identify as a Singularitarian?

Unfortunately, which category you belong to won't be apparent from a random post, unless you happen to drop some illuminating clue (say, a screenshot of your porn folder).

Comment author: Blueberry 29 July 2010 11:39:17PM *  6 points [-]

Do Singularitarians like a different type of porn than non-Singularitarians? I guess transhumanists might be more likely to like animated or photomodified porn...

I'd love to see some Singularity porn. The Prime Intellect stories might be included in this genre, thought they're a lot more than just erotica.

Comment author: PeerInfinity 31 July 2010 04:56:37PM 4 points [-]

ok, I just have to reply to this comment...

I am a Singularitarian, and yes, I think I do like different porn than non-Singularitarians. Porn of stuff that won't be possible until after the Singularity. Porn of nonhuman beings: furries, aliens, fantasy creatures, robots... and beings of nonstandard gender. Not just remixes of the standard male and female genders, but entirely new genders too. And yes, I also like tentacle monsters :)

And that's just the sorts of images I like. There's also the role playing I do in Second Life. I do stuff that's only possible in a virtual reality. Morphing my body into whatever form I happen to find convenient, creating and manipulating virtual objects in ways I find useful, and of course defying the conventions of our universe's physics. And sometimes even directly manipulating my mental state, or doing stuff like telepathically sending out waves of pleasure and happiness.

And then there's books... My favourite transhuman sex scenes are from Greg Egan's novels. He did a good job of thinking of some genuinely original ways for transhumans to have sex. Most notably in Shild's Ladder, with the aliens whose genitals form new and interesting shapes by exchanging pheremones with their partner. And also Oceanic, which featured the "bridge", which allowed the inhabitants of the planet to swap genders with their partner after they have sex. And then there's the 7-gendered society in the novel Distress. And one brief scene of virtual reality sex in Permutation City, and also a couple of his other short stories... hehe, sex positions that are only possible in 4 spatial dimensions :)

I didn't like Prime Intellect though, it involved way too much pain. Actually, when I read those scenes, I imagined what they would be like if the people modified their minds to experience pain as a new form of pleasure. That... was interesting :)

Sorry if this is totally off-topic for LW, I just couldn't resist replying to that comment :)

Comment author: [deleted] 29 July 2010 11:55:56PM 0 points [-]

Voted up for giving buzz to Prime Intellect -- some of my favorite writing.

Comment author: HughRistik 29 July 2010 11:51:02PM 0 points [-]

I'm afraid it's over the event horizon.

Comment author: NihilCredo 29 July 2010 04:41:05PM *  0 points [-]

It's one thing if someone reads Chapter 7 well enough, before and after, to spot the other change I made to Draco; but having a little automatic computer notifier makes my life more nervous.

You mean the removal of "there's plenty of girls out there who deserve it", or some other change you made in the past?

And why is the auto-scanner anything but good for anyone? Had I not had it running, I would never have become at all aware of the changes, and the old version would have remained the only one I knew.

Also, what kind of load does Update Scanner put on FFN's servers?

Default setting is checking each page once per day, though you can set whatever you like, so don't worry, it's not bringing the site down any time soon. The comparison with the last downloaded page is done locally. Here for more.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 29 July 2010 05:54:06PM 0 points [-]

Oh, some other change I made in the past.