Thinking about it, the situation is basically the AI box experiment from Voldy's point of view. He has a boxed unfriendly super-intelligence (Harry) that he's going to destroy just as soon as he finishes talking to it.
Interesting, so it all comes down to a version of the AI box experiment.
Of course Keats isn't alluding to contemporary literature, but to works that have lasted long enough that one can be confident their popularity isn't limited to a particular moment.
If the laws of reality are simulated, then they must be computable.
Depends on what they're being stimulated on.
From a RL point of view it's because Eliezer, for his post on the importance of learning from history, is extremely unfamiliar with cultures and times other than his own.
Well, that raises the question how exactly does magic interact with aliens? Come to think of it how do hocruxes interact with Terran non-human sentients?
Magical Britain's culture is subtly but deeply different from that of the muggle country that shares its borders; it would be profoundly weird if there were no surprises, no culture shock.
The jarring thing is precisely that it isn't. The sexual attitudes of the fanfiction community have a lot more in common with general contemporary western post-protestant sexual attitudes then with the sexual attitudes of any other (contemporary or historical) culture.
Then again Eliezer has been imposing modern sexual attitudes on the Wizarding World, whether out of ignorance or a desire to be politically correct I'm not sure. In any case, I find it one of the most jarring aspects of the fic.
Given the state of computing at the time, it's possible that computer time really was more valuable then graduate student time.
If you're going to be using old definitions "lovers = having sex" is a pretty recent change in meaning.
but it's just the fact that "virgin = intact hymen" is a pretty silly notion to begin with.
Um, the relevant property is that the man can be sure the woman's child will be his, and for that "virgin = intact hymen" is useful.
The Pioneer horcrux might just be an evil surprise for another planet some day.
Probably not, space is incredibly empty.
What's a full system of numerals? Even in Proto-Uralic, you could say ‘four and one’, and a human mind would understand that
Are you sure? My understanding (from reading some anthropology paper I chanced across is that people in cultures without full number systems do get more confused by large numbers.
Who said anything about killing anybody.
Except most examples aren't this harmless.
One problem is that things like this tend to lead to affective death spirals. You start praising virtue X (which is a virtue because it leads to positive effect Y), then you start especially praising the extremely virtues practitioners willing to do X even when it doesn't lead to Y.
It could be that EY is overestimating how "obvious" (for lack of a better word) everyone else will find something "obvious" to him.
Nassim Taleb