To be great at anything creative, you must have both skill and taste. Painting, music, programming -- every art I've ever studied, or even heard of, has worked this way. You need the technical skill to create, and the eye that decides what's worth trying, and worth keeping.
You've made a good case that math, like music, requires taste for true greatness. And you've persuaded me that Scott Alexander has it. But you also seem to be saying that math doesn't have a skill component, in the sense I mean here, and I do not find that part of your argument persuasive.
I'm a professional programmer and I know Haskell, but I've only ever written one real Haskell program (an AI for double-move chess). Nevertheless I recommend it. All I can tell you is that if you master it -- I mean really master it, not learn to write Python in Haskell -- then your Python programming will reach a new level as well. You will be able to solve problems that once seemed intractable, which you'd persuade your product manager to scope out.
It used to be that you could get this effect by learning Lisp, but I don't think that works anymore; too many of Lisp's good ideas have since been taken up by more ordinary languages.
The problems you're describing don't sound like "failure to make plans for after the villain is defeated" so much as "failure to accurately assess whether your target is a villain or not". I think Zubon's point is that even after you've found a real live villain and come up with a workable plan to defeat him, you're still not done.
Yes, I agree. That's why I like the analogy to composition: most of the songs you might write, if you were sampling at random from song-space, are terrible. So we don't sample randomly: our search through song-space is guided by our own reactions and a great body of accumulated theory and lore. But despite that, the consensus on which songs are the best, and on how to write them, is very loose.
(Actually it's worse, I think composition is somewhat anti-inductive, but that's outside the scope of this thread)
My experience is that naming is similar. There ...
Code Complete has a section on this. But we don't have a precise understanding of what a "good name" is, for the same reason that we don't have a precise understanding of what a "good song" is: the goodness of a name is measured by its effect on its reader.
So I think the high-level principle, if you want to do a good job naming things in your program, is to model your intended reader as precisely as you can. What do they know about the problem domain? What programming conventions are they familiar with? Why are they reading your pro...
I suspect that the point was that the typical Muslim, insofar as there is such a thing, is not an arab. The founder was an arab, the Muslims on American TV are almost all arabs, but in the modern world the two concepts are less related than one might think.
I read that the quiverfull movement has around a 20% retention rate. Of course, given exponential growth that doesn't buy all that more time.
Typo? If each pair of Quiverfull parents produces 8 children, and 8/5 = 1.6 of those grow up to become Quiverfull themselves, then the movement needs to proselytize aggressively just to hit replacement.
Also, anecdotally, my friends who are true-believer evangelicals don't think the demographic strategy is going to work; they think they're losing too many to the world.
Almost nobody has heard of Less Wrong or Eliezer. There's a mean article on RationalWiki (though honestly it doesn't look that mean anymore), there's a hostile thread on DarkLordPotter, but almost nobody has heard of those, either. This was even more true two years ago.
I'm not wedrifid. But I suspect his point is that, outside of a few incredibly narrow sub-sub-cultures, nobody knows anything about Less Wrong and no one who knows you personally will judge you by your connection to it, no matter how public or overt.
Oh, sorry, my mistake.
How do we know the crisis was war, and not (for example) people gradually reinventing the arts with which the Atlanteans destroyed themselves?
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-quick-informal-post-on-yudkowskys.html
I think "stupid" is a little strong, personally. But I like the canon ending better.
Conditional on it being nominated at all, I think it would definitely beat No Award. Have a look at the raw stats from 2013 and 2014; for Best Novel, No Award gets crushed by everything. In 2014, for example, No Award got 88 votes out of 3587 ballots. In a world where MOR made it into the top 5 for Best Novel, it can definitely do better than that.
(Okay, yes, it happened to Vox Day, but that was for Novella, or maybe Novellette, whichever).
EDIT: On re-reading, I think this is a little misleading. The Hugo uses preference voting, so it's possible for No...
Man, that's beautiful. What does Bellatrix Black want most, that Harry can offer?
She wants Tom Riddle to love her.
Are you interested in making more bets of this type?
Resonance. He doesn't dare involve himself with Harry's magic in any way.
I think you have the right idea, but it's a mistake to conflate "needs a big corpus of data" and "needs lots of hardware". Hardware helps, the faster the training goes the more experiments you can do, but a lot of the time the gating factor is the corpus itself.
For example, if you're trying to train a neural net to solve the "does this photo contain a bird?" problem, you need a bunch of photos which vary at random on the bird/not-bird axis, and you need human raters to go through and tag each photo as bird/not-bird. There ar...
I thought so too, after the troll. I've changed my mind.
Or, did you mean that we knew that it was for practice at keeping things transfigured thirty chapters ago? If so, I just missed it.
And now we really know why Harry had to carry around his father's rock. For practice:
And meanwhile, just like magic hadn't defined a Transfigured unicorn as dead for purposes of setting off wards, Voldemort's horcruxes wouldn't define a Transfigured Voldemort as dead and try to bring him back.
That was the hope, anyway.
Harry's scar twinged one last time when the steel ring went on his pinky finger, holding the tiny green emerald in contact with his skin. Then his scar subsided, and did not hurt again.
Is it really that much better than being the hero who defeated Voldemort once, though? Putting on Hermione does seem pretty mean, but I think it's a very in-character sort of mistake, especially after the kind of day he's had.
I agree with this interpretation. But given that, I'm not sure why Harry thinks he didn't kill Voldemort.
Thanks for elaborating. Is British English generally freer with plural verbs on collective nouns, would you say? I was taught that it is, but by American grammarians.
Somewhat off-kilter way to get the Time Turner into the story? Does it need more explanation than that?
You have asked a difficult grammar question. I prefer "lives". This is definitely not correct (the two nouns and the verb should agree in number), but at some point you have to stop letting mere grammar push you around.
Collective nouns like "everyone" can be treated as either singular or plural, depending on whether you want to treat the collection as single entity, or deal with each part of the group separately. In your case, each person in "everyone" has their own life, they're not all living the same life, so we should t...
It does not. It doesn't quite not say it, either:
1) At 15, Voldemort creates his first Horcrux from Abagail Myrtle.
2) After he "grasp[s] the stupidity of ordinary people", Voldemort decides to invent a better ritual.
3) He spends "years" refining it in his imagination.
4) Quirrel finds one of the Horcruxes which Voldemort had hidden in the "hopeless idiocy of [his] youth"
So, is "when he grasped the stupidity of ordinary people" + "years" < "youth"? It seems unlikely. But I do not think that it is quite ruled out.
There's one thing for which it's genuinely impossible for V to have a counter: the realization that killing Harry is not in his interests. Speaking in Parseltongue, bound by the Vow, Harry is uniquely prepared to make that case -- assuming it's true.
I think that must be the role of the stirring and heating requirements: to control which aspects of the thing's creation, and how much of them, are infused into the potion. There may well be a way to call forth solar fusion from common iron. But of course we know that no one has ever done it.
Here's the passage from chapter 1:
...Verärgert schnaubte Professor McGonagall durch die Nase. »O Ja, alle Welt feiert, sehr schön«, sagte sie ungeduldig. »Man sollte meinen, sie könnten ein bisschen vorsichtiger sein, aber nein - selbst die Muggel haben bemerkt, dass etwas los ist. Sie haben es in ihren Nachrichten gebracht.« Mit einem Kopfrucken deutete sie auf das dunkle Wohnzimmerfenster der Dursleys. »Ich habe es gehört. Ganze Schwärme von Eulen ... Sternschnuppen ... Nun, ganz dumm sind sie auch wieder nicht. Sie mussten einfach irgendetwas bemerken.
Don't have it in front of me, but my sense was the timeline was more nuanced. First he made some Horcruxes. Then he invented the True Horcrux, and made some of those. Then he invented the True Horcrux Hiding Place, and made about a zillion of them. Quirrel found Horcrux v2 in Hiding Place v1.
I kinda agree, but...the Time Turners really didn't have protective shells. If you see what I mean.
I'm not sure I agree. Everyone Is An Idiot Except Quirrel And Maybe Harry is a major theme of the whole series, not stronger than anti-deathism but certainly more consistent. Dumbledore bought the first level of Riddle's two-level bluff; in context that's pretty dumb, but not unusually so by MOR NPC standards.
Harry is the viewpoint character, and he thinks everyone is an idiot except him and Quirrell. He is in error. He has been consistently in error about this since ... forever. It's probably a character flaw that he shares with Voldemort, although Harry has a somewhat less murderous form of it.
For instance, Harry believes that the wizarding economy should be trivially exploitable via exchange with the Muggle precious-metals market. He believes this because even though he knows about half-bloods (i.e. witches and wizards who have a Muggle parent), he thinks th...
Dumbledore behaves very strangely in this chapter.
He likens Riddle's spirit to a dumb animal, which does not know that it was sent away. That's a sad, sympathetic image.
He laughs at the skewed symmetry between Good Riddle and Evil Riddle, saying that this is what Riddle could have been if he'd been raised by parents who loved him. If you feel any sympathy for Riddle at all then that's not funny, it's tragic: Riddle's crimes and suffering, his whole live, arose from sheer bad luck on his part. To think it a joke, or to expect Riddle to share it, is somet...
His original plan was to set Harry up to retrieve the Stone for a selfless reason, then steal it from him. But Harry figured out the truth, and so that became impossible. I suspect that he had other plans, but that he abandoned them when he realized that Harry understood Dumbledore better than he did.
Having said that, yes, I think he should have spent a few more minutes looking for potential solutions.
Why do you not see "people skills" as, say, being a specialist in dealing with people?
This is my objection too. This is an interesting idea but when I try to use it, I find that it's harder to distinguish "generic" from "specific" than I expected.
So, Voldemort is explained, and in a way I find persuasive. I wasn't sure it was possible.
My understanding is that new posts don't show their vote totals right away, to help prevent snowball effects.
I think that claims of the form "This is what you should eat" are held to a lower standard than "This is who you should kill." Does that seem unreasonable to you?
Interesting guesses in the responses here. It never occurred to me that this organization might be anything other than "the next iteration of the Death Eaters".
So I guess the quality unit would be the Wild?
Anecdote: I have several of these and love them. If you live in the Frozen North, I recommend them highly.
I had a similar problem a while back (given a bunch of one-sided cards, I wanted to programmatically generate their inverses). I couldn't find anything either, and wound up scripting my browser(!?).
I'd like to address your other points, but I think we have to talk about your last paragraph first.
You're quite right; that the cold war did not end the world in our particular branch is not proof that the cold war was survivable in more than a tiny handful of possible worlds. But let me remind you in turn that "von Neumann's plan would have been worse than the cold war" is not the same as "the cold war was safe", "the cold war was good", "the cold war doesn't share any of the weaknesses of von Neumann's plan", or e...
(Though for what it's worth, I actually do agree with your point about AI, insofar as the analogy holds: we could get into a Cold-War-like situation and humanity would probably not enjoy the result. I just don't think world conquest is the answer.)
So one of the involved researchers - a bona fide world-renowned genius who had made signal contributions to the design of the computers and software involved and had the utmost credibility - made the obvious suggestion. Don’t let the arms race start. ... Instead, Nacirema should boldly deliver an ultimatum to the rival: submit to examination and verification that they were not developing the tech, or be destroyed.
Damn those politicians! Damn their laziness and greed! If only they'd had the courage to take over the world, then everything would have bee...
Short answer: this popped up on r/programming the other day. Lots of interesting questions there, and they don't come with answers. This will force you to solve them yourself, without spoilers, which is an incredibly valuable exercise which I strongly recommend for any questions you ask.
Long answer: you're going to have to unpack your intentions a little. You only have an hour (or less!), and you want to provide the maximum possible resolving power, so to do the best possible job you must know what your company's decision criteria are for this employee,...
Because certainty is higher status than uncertainty.
Just a matter of time.
Unfortunately perf isn't the only roadblock here; middleware is a real problem too. Even if you write your game in Python, your AI, physics, and tree-drawing components were all written by somebody else, in C++. No matter how good your bindings are you have to do some data conversion every time you talk to one of those libraries, or else use C++ data types in your Python game engine.
That's not to say that soft real time constraints and tight bounds on memory usage and so forth aren't also hard problems, just that even if you have...
What is she ultimately trying to achieve? More aggressive reminders than a normal calendar app can give you?
Also: computer or smartphone?
Yes, it's pretty much impossible to tell a lie without hurting other people, or at least interfering with them; that's the point of lying, after all. But right now we're talking about the harm one does to oneself by lying; I submit that there needn't be any.
You've drawn an important distinction, between believing a lie and telling one. Your formulation is correct, but Eliezer's is wrong.
I'm not sure what to make of this quote. It is better to be ignorant than to believe the wrong thing; ignorance is much easier to identify and fix.
Or maybe he's saying that the fear of contamination is unjustified? That doesn't seem accurate either.
EDIT: My bad, it's Steve Sailer, I read the article and of course he was talking about racial bias, not biases generally.