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JoshuaZ comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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Comments (651)
This is a reference to the Evil Overlord List. That's why Harry starts snickering. Indeed, it almost is implied that Voldemort wrote the actual evil overlord list. For the most common version of the actual Evil Overlord List see Peter's Evil Overlord List. Having such a list for Voldemort seems to be at least partially just rule of funny.
Did the evil overlord list exist publicly in 1991? I was actually a bit confused by Harry's laughter here. Eliezer seems to be working pretty hard to keep things actually in 1991 (truth and beauty, the journal of irreproducible results, etc.)
That's a good point. I'm pretty sure the Evil Overlord List didn't exist that far back, at least not publicly. It seems like for references to other fictional or nerd-culture elements he's willing to monkey around with time. Thus for example, there was a Professor Summers for Defense Against the Dark Arts which wouldn't fit with the standard chronology for Buffy at all.
Checking wikipedia, it looks possible but not likely that Harry could have seen the list in 1991.
Well, he and his father are described as being huge science fiction fans, so it's not that unlikely that they heard about the list at conventions, or had someone show them an early version of the list printed from email discussions, even if they didn't have Internet access back then.
I'm pretty sure they did have internet access back then. It was more available through universities than it was to the general public.
I meant even if Harry's parents didn't have access back then, someone could still have printed out the list and showed it to them.
That doesn't sound very rational. The simplest answer seems to be, "Eliezer thought it would be funny" and he would have included the Evil Overlord List in the fanfic even if the Evil Overlord he was talking about was Caligula.
Of course it was included because Eliezer thought it would be funny. But I don't see what's so irrational about Harry reading the printed copy of the list.
Yes, but that's not the same as saying Eliezer actually went and looked up the earliest conceivable date to give Harry a reasonable chance of reading the list, or that he could pass the joke up even if he did.
Well, would Harry have started laughing if he had just seen just a list before? I'm not sure, but the impression I got was that Harry was laughing because someone had made list identical in form to a well-known geek list. If he had just happened to have seen such a list before, would it be as funny? Moreover, would that be what the reader would have expected to understand from the text?
Good call, although the fic doesn't explicitly mention the evil overlord list.
The reason I think it might actually be plot relevant is that most people can't resist making a list that is much longer than 37 rules long. Plus most of the rules are just lampshades for tropes that show up again and again in fiction with evil overlords. They rarely are such basic, practical advice as "stop bragging so much."
Ah. I'm pretty sure it isn't a real list because of the number 37. 37 is one of the most common numbers for people to pick when they want to pick a small "random" number. Humans in general are very bad at random number generation. More specifically, they are more likely to pick an odd number, and given a specific range of the form 1 to n, they are most likely to pick a number that is around 3n/4. The really clear examples are from 1 to 4 (around 40% pick 3), 1 to 10 (I don't remember the exact number but I think it is around 30% that pick 7). and then 1 to 50 where a very large percentage will pick 37. The upshot is if you ever see an incomplete list claiming to have 37 items, you should assign a high probability that the rest of the list doesn't exist.
Ouch. I am burned.
Well, that's ok. Because I just wrote a review of Chapter 23 criticizing Harry's rush to conclude that magic is a single-allele Mendellian trait and then read your chapter notes where you say the same thing. That should make us even.
It just occurred to me that the odd/even bias applies only because we work in base ten. Humans working in a prime base (like base 11) would be much less biased. (in this respect)
Well, that seems plausible, although what is going on there is being divisible by 2, not being prime. If your general hypothesis is correct, then if we used a base 9 system numbers divisible by 3 might seem off. However, I'm not aware of any bias against numbers divisible by 5. And there's some evidence that suggests that parity is ingrained human thinking (children can much more easily grasp the notion of whether a number is even or odd, and can do basic arithmetic with even/oddness much faster than with higher moduli).
I seared for "human random number" in Google and three of the results were polls on internet fora. Polls A & C were numbers in the range 1 to 10, poll B was in the range 1 to 20. C had the best participation. (By coincidence, I had participated in poll B)
I screwed up my experimental design by not thinking of a test before I looked at the results, so if anyone else wants to judge these they should think up a measure of whether certain numbers are preferred before they follow the links.
A B C
(You have a double post btw)
JoshuaZ's statement implies a peak near 15 for B and outright states 30% of responses to A and C near 7. I would guess that 13 and 17 would be higher than 15 for B and that 7 will still be prominent, and that odd numbers (and, specifically, primes) will be disproportionately represented.
I will not edit this comment after posting.
Why primes?
My instinct is that numbers with obvious factors (even numbers and multiples of five especially) will appear less random - and in the range from 1 to 20, that's all the composites.