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Stalin's soviet Russia suppressed religion, not faith. It wasn't exactly a haven for critical thinking.
Personally I agree, but if I were a devil I’d just fall in love with the kind of double-think you’d need to . After all, I wouldn’t actually want to suppress faith, I’d just want to create in people’s minds associations between atheism and nice places like Stalinist Russia. Phrases like “scientific socialism” would just send nice little shivers of pleasure down any nice devil’s spine, wouldn’t they?
I'm actually surprised that Turing machines were invented before anyone ever built an actual computer.
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The Up-Goer Five Game: Explaining hard ideas with simple words
I see your point (I sometimes get the same feeling), but if you think about it, it’d be much more astonishing if someone built a universal computer before having the idea of a universal computer. It’s not really common to build something much more complex than a hand ax by accident. Natural phenomena are often discovered like that, but machines are usually imagined a long time before we can actually build them.
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Types of recursion
Human working memory (aka the magic number 7, plus or minus 4 depending on type) is very chunking-aggressive. Everyone can remember a phone number because it's three numbers, where they might have problems remembering ten separate digits, and similarly very complex sentences can be burned down to three or four fragments that each are only one object in memory.
But chunking doesn't work well when there is ambiguity or where the parts can not yet be brought into a single piece. You can take "the car", then "the car" and "in" and "the driveway", then "the car in the driveway" and "of the house", and so on, until the structure of the first memory object becomes too long to recite internally.
With the second phrase, you have "the mouse" and "the cat" and "the dog" and you're adding a fourth object and it's yet another noun so the English language doesn't let /any/ of these things clearly chunk together. There are some center-embedded sentences that chunk more readily, and some languages that allow more same-part-of-speech chunking, but there's an upper limit to what you can do with human neurology.
((This is somewhat related to the preference for front-loaded active voice in writing and speaking technique.))
Everyone can remember a phone number because it's three numbers, where they might have problems remembering ten separate digits
This is slightly irrelevant, but for some reason I can’t figure out at all, pretty much all phone numbers I learned (and, incidentally, the first thirty or so decimals of π) I learned digit-by-digit rather than in groups. The only exception was when I moved to France, I learned my french number by-separate-digits (i.e., five-eight instead of fifty-eight) in my native language but grouped in tens (i.e., by pairs) in French. This isn’t a characteristic of my native language, either, nobody even in my family does this.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
IIRC unbreakable vows require some large, permanent sacrifice of magical power and as such are fairly rare in HPMoR.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
You’re right, I remember now.
Hmm, it still sounds like they should be used more often. If you’re falsely accused and about to be condemned to Azkhaban, wouldn’t you sacrifice a portion on of your magic if it could compel your accuser to confess? As corrupt as the Wizengamot is, it should still happen on occasion.
Also Vetinari is basically the best thing ever.
Yeah, but I think he was mentioned before (and he shows up in most of the guards books). Vetinari is awesome in kind of an obvious way, but he’s not very relevant outside the city. (Well, except for a few treaties with dwarves and the like.)
In contrast, Granny (and sometimes the other witches) arguably saved the entire world several times. There are other characters who do that, but it’s more... luck I guess. The witches actually know what they’re doing, and work hard to achieve their goals.
(For example, though it’s never explicitly said, I got a very strong suspicion that Granny remained a life-long virgin specifically because she expected that it might be useful against unicorns.)
Read the City Watch series and I highly recommend.
I’ve seen people here repeatedly mention the city watch books, but I’m surprised the witches books are almost never mentioned. Seriously, am I the only one who thought Granny Weatherwax and her team are basically the most useful people on the disc?
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
Point.
That said, I suspect that to Dumbledore Hermione's self-proclaimed hero status automatically signals "willing to die for the cause", whereas Harry's parents are innocent bystanders in every possible way.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
Perhaps, although “story logic” can imply parents being willing to sacrifice for their children. That’s a problem with thinking of the world in terms of stories, you can find a trope to justify almost anything. Authors always can (and often do) pull deus ex machinas out of their nether regions.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 27, chapter 98
This makes sense, but thinking along the same lines, I would see a lot of the upperclassmen getting upset at being told what to do by firsties.
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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 27, chapter 98
I wouldn’t be surprised if it did happen, at least once or twice. After all, it happened with the adults too, e.g. Juergen or whatever his name was.
The United States legal system, for example, is the end result of two hundred and twenty years of folk trying to establish a workable constraint system for humans.
Well, a lot of that was people attempting to manipulate the system for personal gain.
Well, yes, but the whole point of building AI is that it work for our gain, including deciding what that means and how to balance between persons. Basically if you include in “US legal system” all three branches of government, you can look at it as a very slow AI that uses brains as processor elements. Its friendliness is not quite demonstrated, but fortunately it’s not yet quite godlike.
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Cephalopods in general have actually been shown to be rather intelligent. Some species of squid even engage in courtship rituals. There's no good reason to assume that given the fact that they engage in courtship, predator/prey response, and have been shown to respond to simple irritants with aggressive responses that they do not experience at the very least the emotions of lust, fear, and anger.
(Note: I model "animal intelligence" in terms of emotional responses; while these can often be very sophisticated, it lacks abstract reasoning. Many animals are more intelligent beyond 'simple' animal intelligence; but those are the exception rather than the norm.)
I agree, but I’m not sure the examples you gave are good reasons to assume the opposite. They’re certainly evidence of intelligence, and there are even signs of something close to self-awareness (some species apparently can recognize themselves in mirrors).
But emotions are a rather different thing, and I’m rather more reluctant to assume them. (Particularly because I’m even less sure about the word than I am about “intelligence”. But it also just occurred to me that between people emotions seem much easier to fake than intelligence, which stated the other way around means we’re much worse at detecting them.)
Also, the reason I specifically asked about Cephalopods is that they’re pretty close to as far away from humans as they can be and still be animals; they’re so far away we can’t even find fossil evidence of the closest common ancestor. It still had a nervous system, but it was very simple as far as I can tell (flatworm-level), so I think it’s pretty safe to assume that any high level neuronal structures have evolved completely separately between us and cephalopods.
Which is why I’m reluctant to just assume things like emotions, which in my opinion are harder to prove.
On the other hand, this means any similarity we do find between the two kinds of nervous systems (including, if demonstrated, having emotions) would be pretty good evidence that the common feature is likely universal for any brain based on neurons. (Which can be interesting for things like uploading, artificial neuronal networks, and uplifting.)