Jadagul

Canon is fairly clear that Hogwarts is the only game in Britain. It also leads to glaring inconsistencies in scale which you just pointed out. (Rowling originally said that Hogwarts had about 700 students, and then fans started pointing out that that was wildly inconsistent with the school as she described it. And even that's too small to make things really work).

But the evidence, from HP7 (page 210 of my first-run American hardback copy):

Lupin is talking about Voldemort's takeover of Wizarding society, to Harry and the others.

"Attendance is n

There's another big pile of gold, about 7,000 tonnes, in the New York Fed--that's actually where a lot of foreign countries keep a large fraction of their gold supply. It's open to tourists and you can walk in and look at the big stacks of gold bars. It does have fairly impressive security, but that security could plausibly be defeated by a reasonably competent wizard.

I believe this is a misreading; Winky was there, but the Dark Mark was cast by Barry Crouch Jr. From the climax of Book 4, towards the end of Chapter 35:

I wanted to attack them for their disloyalty to my master. My father had left the tent; he had gone to free the Muggles. Winky was afraid to see me so angry. She used her own brand of magic to bind me to her. She pulled me from the tent, pulled me into the forest, away from the Death Eaters. I tried to hold her back. I wanted to return to the campsite. I wanted to show those Death Eaters what loyalty to the Dark Lord meant, and to punish them for their lack of it. I used the stolen wand to cast the Dark Mark into the sky.

The claim wasn't that it happens too often to attribute to computation error, but that the types of differences seem unlikely to stem from computational errors.

You're...very certain of what I understand. And of the implications of that understanding.

More generally, you're correct that people don't have a lot of direct access to their moral intuitions. But I don't actually see any evidence for the proposition they should converge sufficiently other than a lot of handwaving about the fundamental psychological similarity of humankind, which is more-or-less true but probably not true enough. In contrast, I've seen lots of people with deeply, radically separated moral beliefs, enough so that it seems implausible th... (read more)

This comment may be a little scattered; I apologize. (In particular, much of this discussion is beside the point of my original claim that Eliezer really is a meta-ethical relativist, about which see my last paragraph).

I certainly don't think we have to escalate to violence. But I do think there are subjects on which we might never come to agreement even given arbitrary time and self-improvement and processing power. Some of these are minor judgments; some are more important. But they're very real.

In a number of places Eliezer commented that he's not to... (read more)

Hm, that sounds plausible, especially your last paragraph. I think my problem is that I don't see any reason to suspect that the expanded-enlightened-mature-unfolding of our present usages will converge in the way Eliezer wants to use as a definition. See for instance the "repugnant conclusion" debate; people like Peter Singer and Robin Hanson think the repugnant conclusion actually sounds pretty awesome, while Derek Parfit thinks it's basically a reductio on aggregate utilitarianism as a philosophy and I'm pretty sure Eliezer agrees with him, ... (read more)

I'm pretty sure Eliezer is actually wrong about whether he's a meta-ethical relativist, mainly because he's using words in a slightly different way from the way they use them. Or rather, he thinks that MER is using one specific word in a way that isn't really kosher. (A statement which I think he's basically correct about, but it's a purely semantic quibble and so a stupid thing to argue about.)

Basically, Eliezer is arguing that when he says something is "good" that's a factual claim with factual content. And he's right; he means something spe... (read more)

I was a grad student at Churchill, and we mostly ignored such things, but my girlfriend was an undergrad and felt compelled to educate me. I recall Johns being the rich kids, Peterhouse was the gay men (not sure if that's for an actual reason or just the obvious pun), and a couple others that I can't remember off the top of my head.

It's mentioned, just not dwelled on. It's mentioned once in passing in each of the first two books:

Sorceror's Stone:

They piled so much homework on them that the Easter holidays weren't nearly as much fun as the Christmas ones.

Chamber of Secrets:

The second years were given something new to think about during the Easter holidays.

And so on. It's just that I don't think anything interesting ever happens during them.

It occurred to me at some point that Fun Theory isn't just the correct reply to Theodicy; it's also a critical component of any religious theodicy program. And one of the few ways I could conceive of someone providing major evidence of God's existence.

That is, I'm fairly confident that there is no god. But if I worked out a fairly complete version of Fun Theory, and it turned out that this really was the best of all possible worlds, I might have to change my mind.

I would agree with Karo, I think. I'm actually surprised by how accurate this list of predictions is; it's not at 50% but I'm not sure why we would expect it to be with predictions this specific. (I'm not saying he was epistemically justified, just that he's more accurate than I would have expected).

Following up on Eliezer's point, it seems like the core of his claims are: 1) computers will become smaller and people will have access to them basically 24/7. If you remember that even my cell phone, which is a total piece of crap and cost $10, would look l... (read more)

Shane, the problem is that there are (for all practical purposes) infinitely many categories the Bayesian superintelligence could consider. They all "identify significant regularities in the environment" that "could potentially become useful." The problem is that we as the programmers don't know whether the category we're conditioning the superintelligence to care about is the category we want it to care about; this is especially true with messily-defined categories like "good" or "happy." What if we train it to d... (read more)

This talk about metaethics is trying to justify building castles in the clouds by declaring the foundation to be supported by the roof. It doesn't deal with the fundamental problem at all - it makes it worse.

Caledonian, I don't want to speak for Eliezer. But my contention, at least, is that the fundamental problem is insoluble. I claim, not that this particular castle has a solid foundation, but that there exist no solid foundations, and that anywhere you think you've found solid earth there's actually a cloud somewhere beneath it. The fact that you're ... (read more)

Eliezer: Good post, as always, I'll repeat that I think you're closer to me in moral philosophy than anyone else I've talked to, with the probable exception of Richard Rorty, from whom I got many of my current views. (You might want to read Contingency, Irony, Solidarity; it's short, and it talks about a lot of the stuff you deal with here). That said, I disagree with you in two places. Reading your stuff and the other comments has helped me refine what I think; I'll try to state it here as clearly as possible.

1) I think that, as most people use the wo... (read more)

Ah, thanks Eliezer, that comment explains a lot. I think I mostly agree with you, then. I suspect (on little evidence) that each one of us would, extrapolated, wind up at his own attractor (or at least at a sparsely populated one). But I have no real evidence for this, and I can't imagine off the top of my head how I would find it (nor how I would find contradictory evidence), and since I'm not trying to build fAI I don't need to care. But what you've just sketched out is basically the reason I think we can still have coherent moral arguments; our attr... (read more)

Especially given that exposure to different fact patterns could push you in different directions. E.g. suppose right now I try to do what is right_1 (subscripts on everything to avoid appearance of claim to universality). Now, suppose that if I experience fact pattern facts_1 I conclude that it is right_1 to modify my 'moral theory' to right_2. but if I experience fact pattern facts_2 I conclude that it is right_1 to modify to right_3.

Now, that's all well and good. Eliezer would have no problem with that, as long as the diagram commutes: that is, if it... (read more)

But Mario, why not? In J-morality it's wrong to hurt people, both because I have empathy towards people and so I like them, and because people tend to create net positive externalities. But that's a value judgment. I can't come up with any argument that would convince a sociopath that he "oughtn't" kill people when he can get away with it. Even in theory.

There was nothing wrong with Raskolnikov's moral theory. He just didn't realize that he wasn't a Napoleon.

Eliezer, I think you come closer to sharing my understanding of morality than anyone else I've ever met. Places where I disagree with you:

First, as a purely communicative matter, I think you'd be clearer if you replaced all instances of "right" and "good" with "E-right" and "E-good."

Second, as I commented a couple threads back, I think you grossly overestimate the psychological unity of humankind. Thus I think that, say, E-right is not at all the same as J-right (although they're much more similar than either is to... (read more)

Caledonian and Tim Tyler: there are lots of coherent defenses of Christianity. It's just that many of them rest on statements like, "if Occam's Razor comes into conflict with Revealed Truth, we must privilege the latter over the former." This isn't incoherent; it's just wrong. At least from our perspective. Which is the point I've been trying to make. They'd say the same thing about us.

Roko: I sent you an email.