All of Celer's Comments + Replies

https://x.com/JacobHHilton/status/1794090561294467074

He has also explicitly told people not to expect candor from him on this issue until the situation changes. That the binding is no longer part of a contract, as opposed to implicit threat, seems of little relevance.

I am very curious how you think about this post in retrospect: parts of it seem clearly falsified. I completely understand if you currently feel bound by a non-disparagement clause and expect it to be a few weeks before that can be confirmed to no longer apply. 

Three years later, I mostly stand by this: war with China has not happened, but estimates of likelihoods have risen, and it not driven by food concerns in the slightest.

How do you expect journalism to work? The author is trying to contribute one specific story, in detail. Readers have other experiences to compare and draw from. If this was an academic piece, I might be more sympathetic.

Correction: the Youtube link should point to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZpwSNiLV-nw, not the current location (a previous video of yours).

I wish I knew! Nobody has yet explained it to me, nor do I have any theories I am particularly confident in.

This is deeply unconvincing. We didn't have a great power war in the 60s or the 70s because that would have meant nuclear war. High-level US government officials in internal documents describe Russia as an existential threat. Russian government documents, as I understand it, reflect terror of American willingness to use nukes. We haven't had a war between the US and China yet, but estimates of that holding true over the next five years are less confident than I'd like.

"Most wars have ultimately been fought over land because land determines food production ... (read more)

Priors are relative to how much evidence can be shared. There may not be agreement in a single conversation, but they should expect movement towards a common belief, though there are degenerate counter-cases. For example, perhaps both parties share a base rate and have different pieces of information that push in the same direction.

I think that the reason I don't see a lot of arguments against anti-vaxxers is that I don't know that I know of any. I think the reason that I see anti-vaxxers derided more often than average is flat-earthers are parsed as harmless and anti-vaxxers are parsed as doing harm. I think I'm not quite following what you're saying.

There's not a hard cutoff between 2005, when Ioannidis publishes, and the present, but I've worked on multiple systematic reviews, going over thousands of papers, and there's a visible improvement in quality over time, and that seemed like a reasonable date for "replication crisis attention is high."

This seems like an excessively general question to me. Yes, because we've gotten richer over time. No, because there is still suffering. Can you drill down into specifics?

Instead, we should tax the difference between what you earned and what anyone could have made by just putting the same amount of money in a savings account. That is, we should tax the stuff that is actually income, i.e. when you are actually doing work, taking risks, or exploiting connections.

I think that "savings account" is an underdefined term here, which I think causes serious problems. "doing work" and "taking risks" seem like income, and I see the argument for taxing them accordingly. Does "taking risks" mean "US Treasury Bonds" (which have a risk of... (read more)

In advance of other comments: 
1. Declining marginal utility of specific goods and non-uniform initial distributions of goods over people (this one matters).
2. There is a finite length of the production chain that one person can accomplish if something would take longer than an entire human lifetime to produce. Suppose I luck into a massive amount of unobtanium, with perfect property rights. To some extent this is 1, but I might also desire goods that I could not produce in an individual life, and by trade acquire them (this one isn't that critical).
3.... (read more)

This seems very questionable: "does X matter?" is comparable to "is X vs not-X worth the cost of investigation?" If I'm constrained by resource limitations, and trying to acquire as much knowledge as I can given that, the ability to dismiss some answers as unimportant is critical.

I would replace The Republic with a good Micro textbook for anyone who hasn't read one. A solid grasp of the mental framework that underlies Intro Micro is useful for anyone trying to parse society: not as the only framework, but an introduction to the fact that there are competing and incompatible mental frameworks. Following that, I would replace your book with an IR textbook, which must cover different and competing theories. They will be shallow introductions to complex thoughts, but they will give the reader the critical chance to test and compare the... (read more)

I think you're right, so I'll start by assuming that you're wrong, because I have an alternative explanation for those who disagree with you (and which I think is the most convincing if we assume that the signalling explanation isn't the correct one). I think Eukaryote is missing one important cause. Assume that most writers arguing for caring more or less about a cause are doing so because they believe that this is an important way to serve that cause. Particularly outside our community, people rarely write about causes just for intell... (read more)

1: dog 2: mammal 1: cat 2: feline

1: animal 2: flea 1: flyer 2: pilot

1: human 2: living 1: breathing 2: breather

I am borrowing an old acting game for this one, and modifying it slightly. I am calling it "which word." The rules are very simple, and this is a fairly fun warm up exercise.

Base: The other person replies with a word that is either a superclass or a subclass of the given word. Using words in a different sense is encouraged.

Options for increased difficulty include

Forced:: Each person must go up twice and then down twice, repeating endlessly

Time Limit:: People must respond with a word of their own in a given number of seconds. Feel free to make it ... (read more)

I don't think that Hermione needs to be fully vindicated for the story to go on. Having her be ruled innocent by the Wizengamot, possibly with a later recantation by Lucius Malfoy once he calms down, would have her be distrusted by her classmates somewhat. This could fit in nicely with her character development and her fear of becoming dark.

Hasn't Draco been with Lucius for the past hour? It would be one thing to steal the wand of a generic death eater, another entirely to steal a wand from under the nose of the head of the majority of the Wizengamot. Lucius seems to be well versed in the art of plotting and counter plotting, and getting Draco's wand from him and back to him without Lord Malfoy knowing with, at a maximum, five hours of planning, would be an extremely challenging feat even for Dark Harry. Still, I don't think that it is impossible.

I edited my comment to correct that.

That would be brilliant. I wish.

To call in favors he never earned for something he had no conscious control over to subvert the political process of a nation qualifies as at least a little bit dark. I think that it wasn't considered because Harry doesn't think of himself as being the one who killed the Dark Lord regularly, and he doesn't know that much about how debts in Magical Britain work. Only once he fully slipped into his Dark Side and became willing to do anything did he see that he could call in these debts.

I don't believe that Dumbledore would think of subverting the political p... (read more)

Chapter 38: Lucius Malfoy claims that he was under an Imperius curse cast by Lord Voldemort. In canon, that claim was made by many powerful pureblood lords.

Chapter 26: Freeing someone from an Imperius curse by killing the caster of that curse creates a debt

Chapter 4: Bounties payable to the killer of Lord Voldemort could be delivered to Harry Potter.

Conclusion: Harry Potter is owed a blood debt by a number of the lords of the Wizengamot, which might be large enough that he could call it in and save Hermione. Even if it is just Lucius who owes him this deb... (read more)

I never viewed them as really belonging in the same genre. Canon is character focused adolesence tale, MoR is plot focused epic fantasy.

Your link is broken, as is the one on the Wikipedia page. http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCMQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fciteseerx.ist.psu.edu%2Fviewdoc%2Fdownload%3Fdoi%3D10.1.1.132.6744%26rep%3Drep1%26type%3Dpdf&ei=PGG5TovEKsj4rQfGlaHGBg&usg=AFQjCNFMrZJFKOBU6M_ItHfkT4YB6gL8aQ&sig2=jI0CAN1iSRisyrwH4hIdaQ works.

I have not abandoned this. I am simply trying to rework my moral system such that it allows me to both choose whom I want to spend time with in a useful fashion while not being hypocritical in the process. I will get back to you with my results.

To make sure we are not arguing over words, Googling "tolerate" returns two definitions. "1. Allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one does not necessarily like or agree with) without interference.

1. Accept or endure (someone or something unpleasant or disliked) with forbearance."

I am using the second, not the first. I don't see the point of dealing with someone who is explicitly intolerant of a group of people based on no conscious choice of their own, and should have examined their own beliefs, without a ver... (read more)

I am going to disagree with the idea that 'being "intolerant of intolerance"' is inherently inconsistent. The problem is with the word tolerance, which contains multiple meanings. I think that it is morally wrong to discriminate against people for things that they can't change. Believing that someone of a different race can't possibly be intelligent is a moral wrong. Furthermore, it is so indicative of stupidity that I do not wish to associate with such a person, if they are in a culture where theirs is the minority view.To put it another way, to... (read more)

Blame me, because I restarted the chain. I voted this down, because it was not very amusing, and the parent up, because I assume it was an HPMOR reference and that is awesome.

I disagree here with what seems to be an unstated assumption. Namely, that the injunctive "That which can be destroyed by the truth, should be" is intended for application to the world. I instead understand it, as I think many here understand it, as applying to beliefs. If I believe something, it should not be false, and if I think it is false, it is a good thing for me to destroy that belief. Furthermore, in debates over religion, politics, and science, truth is the value that should be pursued. But the idea that I must tell the police about a crime a friend committed because "what can be destroyed by the truth, should be" seems absur, and it is not how I or, I think, many others interpret the phrase.

I am a 16 year old. To be honest, most teens wouldn't handle the site. The requirement for an understanding of mathematics, logic, and science are beyond the reach of most, and the desire of most of the rest. That said, I have introduced two friends of mine to HPMOR and they have taken to it, and I am leading them towards Less Wrong. On the other hand? I don't know how many adults would handle less wrong either. If you want my advice on how to be more appealing to teenagers, it is relatively simple.

Link everything, so that someone who doesn't understand can follow your links and find out. Useful more for teens than for adults, it is still good practice. Few intelligent teens will tolerate a teens area for long.

I assume he means an R or an R^2 of 0.6-0.8. Both are measures of correlation. R^2 would be the percent in the variation of one twins intelligence predicted by the intelligence of the other twin.

I am currently taking Stats(AP class in the USA, IB level elsewhere), and hope that I can help.
A traditional probability test will take four frequencies(Male smokers, female smokers, male nonsmokers, and female nonsmokers) and tell you if there is a correlation with an X^2 test.
Bayescraft lets you use gender as a way to predict the likelihood of smoking, or use smoking to predict gender. The fundamental difference, as far as I can tell, is that Statistics takes results about samples and applies them to populations. Bayescraft takes results about priors and applies them to the future. The two use similar methodology to address fundamentally different questions.