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ph'nglui mglw'nafh Eliezer Yudkowsky Clinton Township wgah'nagl fhtagn
Doesn't really roll off the tongue, does it.
"Oh, the little fiddly things?" said Dumbledore. "They came with the Headmaster's office and I have absolutely no idea what most of them do. Although this dial with the eight hands counts the number of, let's call them sneezes, by left-handed witches within the borders of France, you would not believe how much work it took to nail that down."
I know it's supposed to be a joke, but.... How? Is Dumbledore monitoring every wizard and witch's sex life? And how did he manage to crunch that data? Do wizards have calculating machines?
Or maybe he meant to say "the documentation took a lot of work to find and decipher"?
ETA: If it was Rowling writing this, the 'device with the golden wibblers' mentioned in the very next sentence would become a major plot point later in the series.
Considering the ridiculous context of the rest of the conversation, (i.e. Dumbledore either pretending to be insane or actually letting some real insanity slip through) is it too far outside the realm of possibility for that comment to be a joke? It seemed like Dumbledore was going out of his way to screw with Harry in this chapter. Even if the machine actually does what he said it does, I could easily see the comment about "how much work it took to nail that down" being a joke Dumbledore told for his own amusement, knowing that Harry was too young to "get it".
Poe's Law, anyone?
I had to look it up, but I definitely agree. Especially considering how quickly the karma changes reversed after I edited in that footnote.
In response to
Is That Your True Rejection?
I have spent years in the Amazon Basin perfecting the art of run-on sentences and hubris it helps remind others of my shining intellect it also helps me find attractive women who love the smell of rich leather furnishings and old books.
Between bedding supermodels a new one each night, I have developed a scientific thesis that supersedes your talk of Solomonoff and Kolmogorov and any other Russian name you can throw at me. Here are a random snippet of conclusions a supposedly intelligent person will arrive having been graced by my mathematical superpowers:
1. Everything you thought you knew about Probability is wrong. 2. Existence is MADE of Existence. 3. Einstien didn't know this, but slowly struggled toward my genius insight. 4. They mocked me when I called myself a modern day Galileo, but like Bean I will come back after they have gone soft.
I can off the tip of my rather distinguished salt-and-pepper beard name at least 108 other conclusions that would startle lesser minds such as the John BAEZ the very devil himself or Adolf Hitler I have really lost my patience with you ElIzer.
They called me mad when I reinvented calculus! They will call me mad no longer oh I have to go make the Sweaty Wildebeest with a delicately frowning Victoria's Secret model.
I wish I could upvote this post back into the positive.
(It seems pretty obvious to me that is a direct satire of the previous post by a similar username. What, no love for sarcasm?)
In response to
Explain/Worship/Ignore?
"God and the gods were apparitions of observation, judgment and punishment. Other sentiments towards them were secondary. The human organism always worships. First, it was the gods, then it was fame (the observation and judgment of others), next it will be self-aware systems you have built to realize truly omnipresent observation and judgment. The individual desires judgment. Without that desire, the cohesion of groups is impossible, and so is civilization." --- A reply to anonymous from a fictional character
Such a great game. Seeing this makes me want to play it again, having discovered this site and done some actual reading on transhumanism and AI. It might change the choice I'd make at the end...
Of course, this goes even further than just proving the old saying about Deus Ex, considering you never even mentioned the title!
I know this is a serious necro-post, but I felt compelled.
Yes - see Knowing about biases can hurt people.
There's probably a more general term for what I'm getting at.
Survivorship bias?
Now that I think about it, "natural selection" seems more appropriate.
Welcome to LW!
I like the "just with bigger guns" metaphor a lot; the trouble with intelligence is its ability to produce smart-seeming arguments for nearly any silly idea.
Exactly. I also suspect that logical overconfidence, i.e. knowing a little bit about bias and thinking it no longer affects you, is magnified with higher intelligence.
I can't help but remember that saying about great power and great responsibility.
In response to
Welcome to Less Wrong! (2012)
Hello, Less Wrong.
Like some others, I eventually found this site after being directed by fellow nerds to HPMOR. I've been working haphazardly through the Sequences (getting neck-deep in cognitive science and philosophy before even getting past the preliminaries for quantum physics, and loving every bit of it).
I can't point to a clear "aha!" moment when I decided to pursue the LW definition of rationality. I always remember being highly intelligent and interested in Science, but it's hard for me to model how my brain actually processed information that long ago. Before high school (at the earliest), I was probably just as irrational as everyone else, only with bigger guns.
Sometime during college (B.S. in mechanical engineering), I can recall beginning an active effort to consider as many sides of an issue as possible. This was motivated less from a quest for scientific truth and more from a tendency to get into political discussions. Having been raised by parents who were fairly traditional American conservatives, I quickly found myself becoming some kind of libertarian. This seems to be a common occurrence, both in the welcome comments I've read here and elsewhere. I can't say at this point how much of this change was the result of rational deliberation and how much was from mere social pressure, but on later review it still seems like a good idea regardless.
The first time I can recall actually thinking "I need to improve the way I think" was fairly recent, in graduate school. The primary motivation was still political. I wanted to make sure my beliefs were reasonable, and the first step seemed to be making sure they were self-consistent. Unfortunately, I still didn't know the first thing about cognitive biases (aside from running head-on into confirmation bias on a regular basis without knowing the name). Concluding that the problem was intractable, I withdrew from all friendly political discussion except one in which my position seemed particularly well-supported and therefore easy to argue rationally. I never cared much for arguing in the first place, so if I'm going to do it I'd prefer to at least have the data on my side.
I've since lost even more interest in trying to figure out politics, and decided while reading this site that it would be more immediately important anyway to try figuring out myself. I've yet to identify that noble cause to fight for (although I have been interested in manned space exploration enough to get two engineering degrees), but I think a more rational me will be more effective at whatever that cause turns out to be.
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Inspired by maia's post:
“When life gives you lemons, don’t make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back! Get mad! I don’t want your damn lemons, what the hell am I supposed to do with these? Demand to see life’s manager! Make life rue the day it thought it could give Cave Johnson lemons! Do you know who I am? I’m the man who’s gonna burn your house down! With the lemons! I’m gonna get my engineers to invent a combustible lemon that burns your house down!”
---Cave Johnson, Portal 2
When life gives you lemons, order miracle berries.