All of DaveX's Comments + Replies

If the models depend on factors which cannot be reliably forecast (e.g. "PDO, AMO, and solar cycles" above), then it is a bit of a fake explanation and you can't use them as reliable inputs to a forecast model. Would it be it reasonable to use Akasofu's sine-wave extrapolation of the multi-decadal oscillation in light of the prior two observed "cycles" ?

Also the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation indices are measures of the response of the system, and treating them as a driver of the system smuggles some of the dependent response variables into the supposedly independent predictor variables.

I've enjoyed the Mindhacks tip to write in books -- If you can see how to write it better, summarize it better, index it better, or organize it better, doing so is an active use of the information.

1[anonymous]
One of the main reasons that I still print the electronic copies of scholarly papers I read for my yeast metabolism projects.

Incremental synchronizations are interesting -- if Horcruxes can get out of sync, then the "soul" recovered from each may develop conflicting objectives.

Perhaps Harry will do something with his personal copy of Hermione and a hack of Merlin's computer.

Just hours before:

"Of course there is!" Harry said. The boy suddenly looked a bit more vulnerable. "You mean there isn't a copy of me living in your head?"

There was, she realized; and not only that, it talked in Harry's exact voice.

Given Voldemort's novel formatting of his brain, Harry's apparently already got the hardware to contain or access one extra soul, how much more would he need for another?

It seems that it would be easier to keep one's identity small the less one deviates from the norms.

Literally screaming racial slurs in a person's face is an offensive act. Acting cool may be one good defensive strategy, but other strategies are not unwarranted.

Maybe I'm having a problem with 'offended' as a mental state as opposed to something like 'angry'. 'Angry' seems more of a mental state or feeling within yourself, while 'offended' seems less of a feeling but more a description of an act that you are attributing to the other person.

I read this post more as "Don't get angry" than as "Don't get offended" or "Don't feel attacked"

7Eugine_Nier
A large part of one's identity is acquired by conforming to and identifying with social norms.
2satt
Not least because identity isn't just under one's own control — it's also imposed from without by other people. So if person X is unusual in some salient way, other people are likely to end up impressing that fact upon person X, even if person X wants to discount that aspect of their identity.

How much loss is acceptable in the reconstruction?

I'd imagine the reconstructed minds would be happier with their own fidelity than the deconstructed minds. And that the reconstructor might trade off some fidelity for utility towards whatever purpose they had in doing the reconstruction.

I see http://lesswrong.com/lw/b93/brain_preservation/ and http://lesswrong.com/lw/bg0/cryonics_without_freezers_resurrection/ -- are there other good discussions?

The gap between creating a working mind and producing an exact reconstruction seems large.

My roomba does not just keep sweeping until it runs out of power. It terminates quickly in a small space and terminates slower in a large space. To terminate it must somehow sense the size of the space it is working in and compare it to some register of how long it has operated.

Roombas try to build up a (very limited) model of how big the room is from the longest uninterrrupted traversal it can sense. See "Can you tell me more about the cleaning algorithm that the Roomba uses?" in http://www.botjunkie.com/2010/05/17/botjunkie-interview-nancy-dussault-smith-on-irobots-roomba/

2fubarobfusco
Oh, cool. *updates*

I'm confused about the "hide" part of the initial task, or the "fooling" that needs to be unfooled. The objective function rewards ineffective fooling.

It seems you simply mean "store" such that you can find it.

5Vaniver
Congrats, you got the joke!

Eliezer covered some of this in description of the twenty-ply GLUT being not infinite, but still much larger than the universe. The number of plys in the conversation is the number of "iterations" simulated by the GLUT. For an hour-long Turing test, the GLUT would still not be infinite, (i.e., still describe the Chinese Room thought experiment) and, for the purposes of the thought experiment, it would still be computable without infinite resources.

Certainly, drastic economies could be had by using more complicated programming, but the outputs would be indistinguishable.

We know Hermione didn't send herself a signal she could notice instantly on a second iteration. As of ch76, we do not know if she sent herself a signal not instantly noticable.

You might not want to use a signal that could be detected by yourself during an obliviation event in order to make sure the signal isn't telegraphed to the obliviator.

Harry might think that if one needed to signal obliviation, it might be best to detect it safely in the future, unless he thought he could make use of an instantly detectable signal and a tactical response would be wo... (read more)

I doubt the Ch. 6 signal was magic, since he'd invented it and the recognition code before knowing about magic, and implemented during his first shopping trip. I don't think you'd need magic to signal obliviation or a full-on groundhog day attack.

Magic-wise, I'd suppose that obliviation would make a rememberall signal permanently, but then it seems like that would be important to for obliviators to counter somehow.

Magic leaves an armory worth of potential Chekov guns laying around. If owling hand grenades isn't enough to win the next war, it should be something interesting.

1wedrifid
Oh, I agree. I speak of upgrades to his precaution measures which I would expect him to have by now. Your point regarding countermeasures is important. Particularly savvy wizards can be expected to think of that. For this reason I would expect harry to maintain his mundane tactics as well. This exploits the known blind spot of nearly all non-Quirrell wizards. Improving his mundane signalling system has also been raised in importance now that Harry is aware of the possibility of Obliviation and has more reason to expect enemies to be motivated to use it. An example being the money earning scheme. I would probably enjoy reading about other tactics that Harry considers even if they do not end up being Chekov guns!

I'd think the chances are fair that Harry passed his Chap 6 obliviation signaling method onto his allies. If she is paranoid enough to key it for disorienting encounters with powerful wizards, the chances are high they might end up talking about encounter N.

What would signal would Harry think best? Something you could detect at the time of signalling, like a broken toothpick in your pocket, or a signal detectable safely in the future, like a penmark on the inside of your pocket? Probably both.

2orielwen
But we know Hermione didn't send herself a signal. Anything simple and quick enough to do unobtrusively (like biting her lip) would have been instantly noticeable to her on the second iteration.
8wedrifid
A rememberall. Surely this would also be a relatively high priority for his research too. In fact Harry explicitly made a note to himself to research mental magic near the top of his todo list. That should have turned up a device or spell that detects obliviations and he should be in the habit of using it on himself regularly. Which reminds me about the research he is supposedly doing. What has he discovered? What useful spells has he learned? He's supposed to be a genius of near-Hermione level academic skill and far more strategic thought. When are we going to start seeing him pull out awesome, practical magical knowledge or skill?
2Nominull
Unfortunately that strategy only works if you suspect you're about to be obliviated. Which makes it mostly ineffective except against people who play fair and ask before mucking with your memories.

With a lever, and a place to stand, you can lift the barbell.

Defining omnipotence in respect to all possible beings seems more like "suprapotent" or "ultrapotent".

How is this the actual meaning of "omnipotence" and how does it relate to "a descriptor who's actual meaning makes an argument self-evidently bad, but which is sound if you do really think about it"

I'd taboo "actual" and "really".

Hams do this sort of thing already. If they could hook their G3 cell phone to a car battery and easily make it into a G3 APRS digipeater, they would do that too.

If the cell phone towers are down, maintaining a charge cell phone battery is near useless in current emergencies.

You need the distinct transmit/receive channels for full-duplex communication. The frequencies often only differ by <10MHz or so, with the uplink band being adjacent to the receiving band so they can share the same antenna an RF circuitry. The RF circuitry isn't the technical difficulty, it's in the software/firmware that is controlling the hardware. With some firmware/software changes, cell phones should be able to do some ham-APRS-like protocol.

The Hams have already solved this once using APRS at 144.39MHz, and it's dumb that we don't have a similar solution ported to cell phones at a convenient one of their working frequencies when not in reach of an on-line tower.

I think I saw a demo, or video a demo, about 15 years ago, of the ERICA gaze-tracking program at UVA where onlookers could see the screen change characters while the person whose gaze was being tracked couldn't see the changes. If I remember correctly, it was a screen of normal text in MS-Word or something that would mutate into gibberish where the user wasn't watching.

0TobyBartels
OK, then somebody else remembers it! (I don't remember that it was text, but this is close enough.)

After reading that Bones and Dumbledore had timeturners, and remembering that if the ministry hands them out to schoolchildren, I thought probably any ministry official rating an iPhone, Blackberry, or Franklin Planner would have one as well. So, certainly the Dark Lord should/could/would have recognized their utility and gathered a few for his side.

A 6 hour simulation buffer would explain a T-6hour limit, but not that you couldn't go back into the same simulation buffer more than once, or that you couldn't operate on the 4 disjoint 6-hour segments of the 24 hour limit.

With an un-shelled Time Turner, could Harry go backwards from 23:59 to 17:59, then cover most of the same 6 hour interval again by jumping back from 00:01 the next day to 18:01?

Depending on how the 6 hours in 24 constraint is imposed, (Scotland's midnight-midnight, noon-noon, whenever the operator's variable 24-30hour days roll over, 9:00pm-9:00pm, a leaky-bucket token at 15sec/min, or whatever), what happens at 9 hours past lunch could be odd.

3shokwave
If it is a simulation, and time travel devices are limited in ways to save on computation and such, some of these restraints make sense: the quibble over what counts as information is resolved as "anything that will force the simulation to recalculate futures", the simulation buffer is locked to one per time-turner because allowing an arbitrary number of retries would cause the computation requirements to explode, and Harry can get around the limit by using someone else's "turn", even if they can't use it, because they have information that the simulation won't allow to travel. My money is on Dumbledore's timeturner. McGonagall, Snape, and Amelia Bones won't suspect it, all having witnessed Dumbledore receive future information (therefore he can't travel back in time far enough). Harry will capitulate to Dumbledore's offer of the Timeturner once he determines that a) Dumbledore knows Harry was involved in the Azkaban break, and b) being able to travel the full 6 hours will convince the rest of the wizarding world, including his teachers, that Harry was not involved. Dumbledore will do this because it suits his interests (or sense of drama) to have war declared on Voldemort.

Any reasoning from Bella's apparent knowledge should take into account the Dementor-induced censoring of good memories, (e.g., sun, clouds).

Perhaps she can still remember parts of the plans that went wrong without remembering the successful parts.

Two materials is true for a solid rocket motor, casing/nozzle + propellant. However, instead of a bare motor lit with a simple Incendio, this muggle tech seems to be a fully tricked out Berserker PFRC rocket complete with an electronic ignition.

Conflicts between subgoals indicate premature fixation on alternative solutions. The alternatives shouldn't be prioritized as goals in and of themselves. The other aspects of their evaluation would fit better as goals or subgoals to be optimized. A goal should give you guidance for choosing between alternatives.

In your example, one might ask what goal can one optimize to help make good decisions between policies like "replace old buildings with better ones" and "don't lose architectural masterpieces"?

In your example, money versus happiness is a choice between alternatives. Whatever goal you are trying to optimize towards should provide the guidance in making the choices between alternatives.

Language about "Over-optimizing" one alternative at the expense of another distracts from identifying your real goals and how you make the tradeoffs to achieve them

My posts was fuzzily asking a couple things: one about what Voldemort in MOR would/should/did do, where I read your answer as that we should look to the natural world, and a more general one about beings in general, where it is obvious that they do indeed copy themselves.

In the biological world, resources are limited, and we're in competition with fairly evenly matched competitors. AI-wise, I don't see how we could effectively limit the resources or interfere with the fidelity for a sufficiently advanced AI.

Back to the particular example of horcruxes in MOR, It seems like the costs and perhaps fidelity are significantly different than canon (Bacon's diary?), and I wonder if that will have interesting implications.

If it is a "very recently" created horcrux, one thing it means is that the maker is healthy enough to make horcruxes. Taken with Ch54, killing-curse ricochets might not be as damaging as one expects.

1wedrifid
Perhaps for similar reasons that death by basilisk glare isn't all that that damaging when reflected.

A copy with knowledge of a Azkaban at a certain time seems forbidden from approaching/entering Azkaban at a prior time. See "Azkaban's future couldn't interact with its past, so she hadn't been able to arrive before the DMLE had gotten the message," in Ch55. The restraint isn't so much when the DMLE gets the message, it's when Azkaban sends the message. It can't send a message that affects its past.

Azkaban might be a good place to try a can of Comed-tea.

1bogdanb
You’re right, I had forgotten that passage. I’m still curious how it actually works. The portal she used could simply refuse to work, but how would you be prevented from simply walking in? An invisible wall you can’t walk through, or just a sequence of increasingly improbable events happen that keep stopping you? (If Harry’s explanation of how Comed-tea is right, it probably means just that you won’t get the urge to drink it. That “or your money-back” line suggests that you can drink it without a result, presumably if you figured it out. Though the charm might also inhibit your wanting to drink it when nothing will happen; otherwise, there would be a lot of unsatisfied customers who drank it just because it was hot and they were thirsty. If it does, you might not get the idea to test it.)

How do we know that one needs to eliminate another soul in order to do horcrux-like magic?

If copies require wiping out of existing virtual machines, population growth should be impossible. Since, at least in the muggle world, population growth happens, would this be evidence against a theory of a simulated world?

Also, if the Bacon Diary is a "very recent" Horcrux, wouldn't that imply the cost to the original is not a strict division?

3thomblake
I think that was a reference to canon - creating a horcrux requires murder (Confirmed in MoR by Dumbledore in chapter 28)

Perhaps I'm dense, but the obvious bits seem interesting. If resources are limited, each copy would end up sharing a smaller fraction of the same pool. If there is some fidelity loss in the copying, copies may have conflicting objectives. The risk of a duplicate becoming a rival seems non-trivial. If there a significant cost/damage to the original in the copying process, perhaps most would not.

MOR's horcruxing process seems different than canon, and the differences between what is required by the author's narrative, by what actually happens in biol... (read more)

3TobyBartels
You're not dense; they are interesting. It was Darwin's great discovery! And you're right to suggest that under certain conditions (such as limited resources and poor fidelity) they would not. I certainly didn't intend to say anything about ‘ought’. Maybe it's bad that most beings with the ability to copy themselves do so; then how can we stop it? (Perhaps we should limit resources and interfere with the fidelity!)
0wedrifid
He does not.

Copying mind state differs from sexual or asexual reproduction. I was wondering how the MOR soul-splitting, copying, backup, imprinting, and possession mechanism works and how it might be exploited.

Could, for instance, Harry split his soul into its separate agents without the act of murder? Or is the important part of the Horcrux magic stealing someone's soul to use as media to make a copy your own soul? How close are Harry's suppositions in Ch20 to the MOR-reality?

3wedrifid
Evidence for a 'soul' and the need to eliminate another in order to do horcrux like magic gives some credence to theories that MoR is in a simulated world. You need to wipe out an existing virtual machine in order to put an extra instance of yours there, splitting your own may require dividing your 'soul/computational resources' between multiple instances, etc.
0wedrifid
In which case change 'do' to 'would' in Toby's comment, keeping reasoning the same.

Chap 65:

Harry's treatment of the different (agents?) in his head make me wonder about the MOR Horcrux mechanics and the possibility of making copies of a being. If the horcrux copying process is repetatively damaging, like analog copies of a wax cyinder recording, there would be a degradation in each stage, and the last horcrux, Harry would be the poorest copy. Or if each horcux was same-quality, there might have been only something like limitations on the first analog-digital conversion, and successive generations of copies might be exact, like digita... (read more)

8TobyBartels
Most of them do, for reasons that should be obvious.

Ch 54 (emphasis in original)

Are things like the "insanely powerful opponent", the spell caught on the end of the wand, and wizardry run wild and then controlled when "[t]he man threw his wand away from himself (he threw away his wand!)" like stuff in canon, Or is this something we should take particular note of?

Perhaps Voldemort/Quirrell are manifestations of something insanely powerful that really does not want to be examined by human science?

I read it as too late for Harry to save himself. And before that, Voldy was already gone, prior to Bahry's reflexive stunner spell.

Auror Bahry threatened some "area effect curses" and "anti-disillusionment" charms, so they seem to have some effective methods if they suspect invisible adversaries.

I think the title was redacted in order to not give the game away too early, as in Chapter 9.

Maybe the magical incompatibility is real, and perhaps the dark social engineering behind the Stanford Prison Experiment relates to Chapter 16, Lateral Thinking. In Ch16, there's almost the same words in all-caps dizzying his brain. It might be explained by the sense of doom and magical incompatibility. Also Ch16 has “Mr. Potter, I never said you were to kill. There is a time and a place for taking your enemy alive,..." If Quirrell senses similar doom on h... (read more)

My favorite method is to cut it in half vertically/meridianally without cutting the core nor the stem portion, crack the two sides away from the core and discard it, then flatten and slice up the sides. With care, the core is undisturbed and intact, and you can slice up the rest quickly--maybe 15-20 sec per pepper to julienned, another 15 to diced.

However, if you are looking for pretty rings, which I think are often far too large to be bite size, my* method doesn't produce them.

(* 'my method' meaning as a friend/chef taught me, and is partially illustra... (read more)

2mattnewport
My preferred method.

"Hence our truth is the intersection of independent lies."

-- Richard Levins, "The Strategy of Model Building in Population Biology" American Scientist, V. 54, No 4, Dec 1966, pp421-430.

It is part of this paragraph on p. 423:

"Therefore, we attempt to treat the same problem with several alternative models each with different simplifications but with a common biological assumption. Then, if these models, despite their different assumptions, lead to similar results we have what we can call a robust theorem which is relatively free of the details of the model. Hence our truth is the intersection of independent lies."