Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102

David_Gerard

New chapter!

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 102.

There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

New chapter!

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 102.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

I assume you read Griffiths' Quantum Mechanics or a similar introductory book and came to your own conclusions?

FWIW, I have a master's degree in physics and I'm working to get a PhD (though in a subfield not closely related to the basics of QM; I'd trust say Scott Aaronson over myself even though he's not a physicist).

Another perfectly valid interpretation is that "Particle of type
at L1, Particle of type
at L2" is the actual state -- that is to say that the particles keep their identity but identity doesn't factor into the probabalistic calculus.

What do you mean by identity?

FWIW, I have a master's degree in physics and I'm working to get a PhD.

Awesome. Please forgive my undeserved snark.

What do you mean by identity?

Honestly I'm not sure. I only envoke the concept of identity in response to nonsense arguments appearing on LessWrong. Normally when I say 'identity' i mean the concept of 'self' which is the whatever-it-is which experiences my perceptions, thoughts, inner monologues, etc, or whatever it is that gives rise to the experience of me. How this relates to distinguishability of particles in quantum mechanics, I do... (read more)

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102

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