'Tis a shame that an event like tonight's debate won't, and ostensibly never would have, received any direct coverage/discussion on LW, or any other rationality sites of which I am aware.

I know (I know, I know...) politics is the mind killer, but tonight—and the U.S. POTUS election writ large—is shaping up to be a very consequential world event, and LW is busy discussing base rates at the vet and LPTs for getting fit given limited square footage.

Reminds me of a joke where a kid in great pain is asked by a doctor to rate how much it hurts on a scale from 1 to 10 where 10 is the most pain he can imagine, and the kid says "1."

I completely agree: the fact that something isn't simple and one-dimensional and perfectly unambiguous doesn't make it completely unreal or completely useless. So, for the avoidance of doubt, if anyone says "intelligence is multidimensional and hard to measure and culturally loaded; therefore there is no such thing as intelligence" and means the Stupidest Possible Thing by that last bit rather than something subtler, then I think they're wrong.

Incidentally, so far I think everything I have posted in this discussion has been downvoted exactly twice. I guess one is Eugine/Azathoth/VoiceOfRa; would anyone like to lay claim to the second lot? I'm curious in particular, about whether there's any information in the downvotes beyond what I already have from Zoltan's disagreement with me plus the fact that, duh, I'm posting non-neoreactionary opinions in a discussion of race and intelligence, so of course VoiceOfRa is going to downvote me. So: if you're reading this and downvoted me for a reason other than seeing me as a sociopolitical enemy, you can probably improve the effectiveness of your downvote by telling me why you gave it. Thank you.

A. I think at least some people do mean that concepts of intelligence and race are, in some sense, inherently meaningless.

When people say

"race does not exist because it is a social construct"

or that race does not exist because

"amount of variation within races is much larger than the amount of variation between races,"

I think it is being overly charitable to read that as saying

"race is not a scientifically precise concept that denotes intrinsic, context-independent characteristics."

B. Along the same lines, I believe I am justified in taking people at their word. If people want to say "race is not a scientifically precise concept" then they should just say that. They should not say that race does not exist, and if they do say the latter, I think that opens them up to justifiable criticism.

I was not trying to suggest that intelligence and strength are as alike as race and strength. Rather, I was motivated by the observation that there are a number of arguments floating around to the effect that,

A. Race doesn't exist

B. Intelligence doesn't exist.

and, actually, to a lesser extent,

C. Rationality doesn't exist (as a coherent notion).

The arguments for A,B,C are often dubious and tend to overlap heavily; I wanted to write something which would show how flawed those arguments are through a reductio ad absurdum.

To put it another way, even if strength (or intelligence or race) really was an incoherent notion, none of the arguments 1-7 in my post establish that it is so. It isn't that that these arguments are wholly wrong -- in fact, there is a measure of truth to each of them -- but that they don't suffice to establish the conclusion.

Called it on the power the Dark Lord knew not.

So, I don't know how these stable time loops are supposed to work. My working model is that they function by trial and error, that time iterates through a universe until it encounters paradox, at which point it returns to pre-paradox, inserts some change into the world through prophecy or whatever, and tries again. This continues until a stable timeline is found, with an unknown number of them being discarded/destroyed. It appears from within that things worked on the first pass, but they did not. Our viewpoint never follows into one of those dead ends, but they exist(ed).

If the world really works that way, Harry would be potentially throwing his victory away by forcing a paradox. Time would have to reset to before the paradox and insert a change into the world to ensure a different outcome. He may or not be victorious in that new timeline. Harry dying was already a high probability and it would certainly resolve things to Time's satisfaction. His best chance of securing his immediate past as part of the real and continuing world would be to make sure this timeline remains self-consistent.

(Plus, he's prophesied to destroy the stars and creating a time-paradox seems like a really obvious possible way to do that.)

The only other possibility I can think of for these apparently stable timelines is that the whole universe is pre-determined and no one has any free will at all. I read something from EY about universes with time travel and he seemed to be in support of this second possibility. Any other possibilities for how this would work?

Thanks. Having the title was enough to find the post. I turned out to be looking in the wrong place. The comment was on SSC, not LW -- which I find amusing given that you were the one to respond.

The book is irritatingly expensive. I might read The Moral Animal instead. Both seem to be widely recommended around here. Searching on the former consistently turns up the latter as well, often in the same breath.

Motivation: I noticed that I can't distinguish between just-so stories and genuine evopsych insights. I think seeing a known example of it being done right might help fix that.

Wait a minute, aren't all human CEVs supposed to converge to roughly the same thing? (tell me if I've catastrophically misunderstood or misremembered the concept, it's been a while since I read the sequences)

Where?