Be sufficiently averse to the fire department and see if that suggests anything.
I do believe it suggests libertarianism. But I can't be sure, as I can't simply "be sufficiently averse" any more than I can force myself to believe something.
Still, that one seems to be a fairly reasonable sentence. If I were to learn only that one of these had been used in an LW article (by coincidence, not by a direct causal link), I would guess it was either that one or "I won't socially kill you".
I find it odd that Unicode doesn't have a Latin Letter Small Capital Q but does have all the others.
I don't see it as bad at all and suspect most who do see it as bad do so because it's different from the current method. These minds are designed to have lives that humans would consider valuable, and that they enjoy for all its complexity. It is like making new humans in the usual method, but without the problems of abusive upbringing (the one pony with abusive upbringing wasn't a person at the time) or other bad things that can happen to a human.
The aliens with star communication weren't destroyed. They were close enough to "human" that they were uploaded or ignored. What's more, CelestAI would probably satisfy (most of) the values of these aliens, who probably find "friendship" just as approximately-neutral as they and we find "ponies".
An even-slightly-wrong CAI won't modify your utility function because she isn't wrong in that way. An even-slightly-wrong CAI does do several other bad things, but that isn't one of them.
Yes. The author wrote that part because it was a horrifying situation. It isn't a horrifying situation unless the character's desire is to actually know. Therefore, the character wanted to actually know. I can excuse the other instances of lying as tricks to get people to upload, thus satisfying more values than are possible in 80-odd years; that seems a bit out of character for Celestia though.
I suspect your fridge logic would be solved by fvzcyl abg trggvat qb jung ur jnagrq, hagvy ur jvfurq ng fbzr cbvag gung ur jbhyq abg or n fbpvbcngu. I'm more worried about the part you rot13ed, and I suspect it's part of what makes Eliezer consider it horror. I feel that's the main horror part of the story.
There are also the issues of Celestia lying to Lavendar when clearly she wants the truth on some level, the worry about those who would have uploaded (or uploaded earlier) if they had a human option, and the lack of obviously-possible medical and other c...
I don't know the Catholic church's current take on this, but the Bible does require the death penalty for a large number of crimes, and Jesus agreed with that penalty. If there was no state-sponsored death penalty, and nobody else was willing, my religious knowledge fail me on whether an individual or a Catholic priest would be forbidden, allowed, or required to performing the execution by this, and I'm unsure if or how that's affected by the context of a confessional.
Welcome to Less Wrong!
First, let me congratulate you on stopping to rethink when you realize that you've found a seeming contradiction in your own thinking. Most people aren't able to see the contradictions in their beliefs, and when/if they do, they fail to actually do anything about them.
While it is theoretically possible to artificially create pleasure and happiness (which, around here, we call wirehading), converting the entire observable universe to orgasmium (maximum pleasure experiencing substance) seems to go a bit beyond that. In general, I think ...
I've done that with Luminosity and Radiance over the four Twilight books (and I've only read the latter because of the former), and will probably do that with MoR once it's actually complete.
It is possible, though unlikely given his increasing zombieness, that "Quirrell" has found a way around Voldemort's curse. The one that comes to mind is that Voldemort cursed the Defense against the Dark Arts position. Quirrell is teaching Battle Magic, not Defense against the Dark Arts, so he may be immune. Similarly, if Quirrell is Voldemort, he may be able to counter his own curse (or have put a check for himself or a loophole on the curse); if Canon!Voldemort had thought of that, he may have been able to successfully steal the Stone.
I would agree about "most" of the history and trivia, but not "all". Given his behavior in Chapter 40, it at least seems likely that he did not know as much as Harry about the Hallows at that time. This is understandable, as Harry has a Hallow and therefore cares more than the Defense Professor, who doesn't have one and doesn't have a particular reason to search for any of them. He wouldn't decline a chance to try the Stone, but he doesn't have much reason to believe it works as advertised and therefore didn't plan to seek it out. Now t...
In that case we only know of one owner who may have lived longer than standard, and we don't even know about them. James was in his 20s, Dumbledore was only around 150, and Harry is only 37 in the epilogue. It seems like people are privileging this theory beyond the little evidence it would get from the Cloak being related to the Wand and owners of the Wand tending to die.
Note also the "shall be". As Harry says in the chapter, this is future tense; therefore, the prophesy is not talking about Antioch, Cadmus, and Ignotus.
That first is the primary usage. Usually there is some way to tell a counterfeit from the real thing, but one can theoretically make a counterfeit that's indistinguishable from the original. I have only rarely heard it in the sense of "to deceive".
Just because Harry saw the snake Patronus doesn't mean he recognizes the species. He probably could recognize the same Patronus, but maybe not; Harry paid more attention to it than a regular snake, but if I saw a snake once, and then saw another snake three months later, I don't think I'd be sure they were the same even if I did have reason to think they were.
I'm fairly sure it would be easier to change your regular Patronus form than become an Animagus multiple times, even if you could choose what to become. As most people haven't learnt the True Patronus, they would be able to have animal Patroni.
It wasn't deliberate, but it wasn't coincidental either. Snape's Patronus was the same as Lily's because Snape loved Lily.
Even if that was sufficient understanding, neither of those gentlemen seem to absolutely reject death as the natural order. Nor, for that matter, do Harry or Eliezer. They reject death as proper and good, but I'm confident that most would admit that it is natural. The other people present don't seem to do that, though, and would be unlikely to be able to cast a True Patronus.
In canon, Hermione says it means exactly as Lupin thought, and Harry believes her (and J.K. Rowling intended it like that). As some of J.K. Rowling's quotes (no sources at the moment) about canon seem to imply that she does not see her interpretation of the books is just as valid as anybody else's, the idea that a descendant of Harry's could go to the graveyard of the Peverells, announce plans to defeat Death, and get HJPEV's results is canon-compliant.
This is somewhat likely, but in canon that's a quotation from a fairy tale. Given the apparent attitude the Peverells had towards Death in MoR, I doubt things played out the same way in MoR as in The Tale of the Three Brothers, whether or not that's how it happened in canon.
Dumbledore merely asked to borrow the cloak from James:
...“You. You have guessed, I know, why the Cloak was in my possession on the night your parents died. James had showed it to me just a few days previously. It explained much of his undetected wrongdoing at school! I could hardly believe what I was seeing. I asked to borrow it, to examine it. I had long since given up my dream of uniting the Hallows, but I could not resist, could not help taking a closer look. . . . It was a Cloak the likes of which I had never seen, immensely old, perfect in every respe
I think I heard a Catholic person use those exact words seriously less than a month ago, about this very subject, but I might not remember correctly.
For those who are here and are unfamiliar with canon, I believe BT_Uytya meant this YouTube clip, or a similar one like it; as far as I know, none of them are authorized by Warner Bros. or J.K. Rowling, but may be short enough to qualify as fair use in many jurisdictions. I am not a lawyer.
That would, aside from being completely impossible in various ways, actually answer a few questions. Such as how the Defense Professor (don't want to assign him an actual name when talking about who he might be) is able to do intricate and powerful magic in any body he wears. It would be, to use his word, inefficient to just be that powerful and that in control of his magic. We already know, from Tonks-as-Susan, that a Metamorphmagus can do amazing magic while Metamorphed (probably because they have no "natural" form and are equally comfortable w...
I'm not sure about the disappearing of Hermione's body. I believe that Dumbledore believes that Harry did not take Hermione's body. I'm not sure if I agree with that—Harry didn't seem too worried about its disappearance despite taking the five Rs as his stages of grief—but I doubt he'd take Voldemort stealing the body as evidence that Harry wants to resurrect her.
It does seem that a large number of people (Dumbledore, Snape, Quirrell, and Hermione—all intelligent, but not all likely to credit random crackpot theories) all know about the Cloak, and Quirrell at least has heard of the Stone and credits if existence if not the standard explanation for its powers. There's no evidence that many people know of the Wand, but the subject has never really come up so we wouldn't know if that's common knowledge. I expect that those who study wandlore would know about it, as in canon.
Probably all three artifacts' existence is c...
I would definitely take the first of these deals, and would probably swallow the bullet and continue down the whole garden path . I would be interested to know if Eliezer's thinking has changed on this matter since September 2009.
However, if I were building an AI which may be offered this bet for the whole human species, I would want it to use the Kelly criterion and decline, under the premise that if humans survive the next hour, there may well be bets later that could increase lifespan further. However, if the human species goes extinct at any point, the...
It gets even worse than that if you want to keep your intuitions (which are actually partially formalized as the concept natural density). Imagine that T is the set of all Unicode text strings. Most of these strings, like "🂾⨟ꠗ∧̊⩶🝍", are gibberish, while some are valid sentences in various languages (such as "The five boxing wizards jump quickly.", "print 'Hello, world!'", "ἔσχατος ἐχθρὸς καταργεῖται ὁ θάνατος·", or "וקראתם בשם אלהיכם ואני אקרא בשם יהוה והיה האלהים אשר יענה באש הוא האלהים ויען כל העם ויאמרו טוב...
I had this theory before the current arc, but updated towards it once it became more important to Harry in chapter 89.
In Humanism, Harry thinks about vanquishing future death, but that would not help the majority of the world's population (which has already died). What with the only known method of backwards time travel creating stable time loops, and with people already having died, this makes sense to a degree. But if he were to find a way to upload just prior to death, then technically everybody would have died, but in most ways that count they would no...
I thought approximately the same thing, but along the lines of wanting the student to focus on the tone, meter, and rhythm (which apparently carry much of the meaning) so taking away the meaning of the actual words to remove distractions.
I recently started yet another re-read of HPMoR, and noticed something I don't think has been discussed before.
In chapter 1, Petunia is talking about Lily making her pretty (which I believe she did using a potion of eagle's splendor with the blueberries replaced by Thestral blood), and says
And Lily would tell me no, and make up the most ridiculous excuses, like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to - the most ridiculous things, and I hated her for it.
I used to think that Lily just wanted to protect Petunia fr...
In the top-right corner of the Hangouts window is a light-grey-on-white button of a gear (along with other similarly-colored buttons). The gear indicates settings, which in this case means webcam, microphone, and speaker settings. From there you can set up your microphone better.
In my experience (though I believe other people have differing experience in this regard), once you find this button, you can get Google Hangouts to properly use any audio equipment that your computer and OS can recognize and use.
I haven't studied this in nearly enough detail to be sure of what I'm saying, but it is my understanding that we quite possibly ARE wrong about the observable universe's size, simply given the newness of the science saying there is an "observable universe". Newton was wrong about gravity, but mostly in edge cases (pun intended); could Hubble et. al. be wrong about the observable universe's size? Could we find a way to send messages faster than light (there are several theories and only one need work)? Or could we possibly cram more people into th...
This can help when a discussion is started, but it cannot really help start the discussion. It is useful, though, and I'll remember it. Thanks.
If this post had the irony suggested by brilee, I wasn't able to pick it up and am responding as though it is serious.
As I said in response to Alicorn, I refuse to use dark arts. Not only would I not be good at it, it violates my morality in many ways. You'd have better luck convincing EY to use the dark arts for Singularity talks, simply because that's a bigger issue. If he's not willing to use dark arts when it's the entire world or more at stake, it's his Something To Protect and he needs to Shut Up and Do The Impossible, then I have no excuse using the...
As others have said, that option is no longer available. I don't find it as bad as you do though, for three reasons:
She's a relative, not a stranger, so this kind of discussion would have happened anyway if I'd cleared my cryonics cache before six months ago
She has reasons to accept it that she accepts; the problem with a lot of religious conversions is that the only reason I should believe in the religion is because it says to and anecdotal evidence; for cryonics, the reason to believe in it is the standardly-accepted science and evident technological
I considered this because of your article Light Arts, and rejected it because I disagree with that article in at least some cases, this being one of them. I could talk about it as I think about it -- a good idea that people, even scientists who should know better, reject because of unwillingness to think about death and unwillingness to believe it isn't final -- and let him draw his own opinions on why it isn't common knowledge (like I could prevent him anyway), but saying myself that it has a reasonable chance of being a conspiracy, or even implying it, is not something I could do.
With cryonics, if somebody messes up at any point (the cryonics company goes broke, the LN2 production company experiences unexpected problems and any local stores are running low, an employee mishandles your body, etc.) then you are unlikely to be revived. With plastination, there's a lot less that can go wrong; even if the future caretakers of your brain don't believe it will work, it is more effort to destroy your brain than to leave it be. They may decide to bury it in a graveyard, but that's less likely to prevent revival than thawing from cryonics.
In...
As I understand it, the money is available.
Playing chess for 5 hours a day does not make chess your "sole study and business" unless you have some disorder forcing you to sleep for 19 hours a day. If you spent the rest of your waking time studying chess, playing practice games, and doing the minimal amount necessary to survive (eating, etc.), THEN chess is your "sole study and business"; otherwise, you spend less than 1/3 your waking life on it, which is less than people spend at a regular full time job (at least in the US).
I did not mean to imply that I had actual knowledge of QM, just that I had more now than before. If I was interested in understanding QM in more detail, I would take a course on it at my college. It turns out that I am so interested, and that I plan to take such a course in Spring 2013.
I also know that there are people on this site, apparently a greater percentage than with similar issues, who disagree with EY about the Many Worlds Interpretation. I have not been able to follow their arguments, because the ones I have seen generally assume a greater knowle...
TL;DR: I found LW through HPMoR, read the major sequences, read stuff by other LWers including the Luminosity series, and lurked for six months before signing up.
My name, as you can see above if you don't have the anti-kibitzing script, Daniel. My story of how I came to self-identify as a rationalist, and then how I later came to be a rationalist, breaks down into several parts. I don't remember the order of all of them.
Since well before I can remember (and I have a fairly good long-term memory), I've been interested in mathematics, and later science. One ...
That would probably be a good thing. I think that the company says they pay out in the event of legal death, so this would mean that they'd have to try to get the person declared "not dead". By extension, all cryonics patients (or at least all future cryonics patients with similar-quality preservations) would be not dead. If I were in charge of the cryonics organization this argument was used against, I would float the costs of the preservation and try to get my lawyers working on the same side as those of the insurance company. If they succeed, ... (read more)