All of fezziwig's Comments + Replies

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.

fezziwig100

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.

8JonahS
There's an enormous skill component: it matters roughly as much as the aesthetic component. Even if I were as aesthetically discerning as Beethovn, I still wouldn't be able to invent the fast Fourier transform in the early 1800's like Gauss did. You need both for achievement at the highest levels. I'm counterbalancing the standard attitude of the type "huh? Aesthetic component? What's that?"

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.

1Val
A villain is not necessarily a person or an institution. I was referring to people viewing certain social and cultural norms as "villains", without any serious study into what long term effects the abolition of these norms would cause, or how an alternative norm they would propose instead of the old would fare in the long term. I'm not claiming that a traditional norm is good solely because it's traditional, I'm open to new ideas. However, I believe that in case of a conflict between an old and a new norm, the burden of proof lies on the new norm, especially if the old norm was keeping society functional for many generations, and the new wasn't seen in effect in real life for long enough.

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 ... (read more)

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... (read more)

1ChristianKl
I'm not sure whether I buy that argument. It would be quite possible to go out and study naming in the real world and study problems that arise and what goes well.

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.

0skeptical_lurker
Well, if 1% of Christians in general become Quiverfull, and 8/5=1.6 Quiverfull children per mother remain Quiverfull, you get 1% first generation converts, 0.99 x 0.01 + 0.01 x 0.8 = 1.79% second generation ... Of course its more complex than that, and many of the children who do not remain Quiverfull will still be 'carriers'. But without working out the equations, it still seems clear that genes that predispose people towards Quiverfull will have higher fitness, but its not going to quadruple every generation. Essentially, the quiverfull people aren't spreading memes well, but are spreading genes that predispose religiosity. And sure, your evangelical friends might not think it would work, but then they probably don't believe in evolution.

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.

How do we know the crisis was war, and not (for example) people gradually reinventing the arts with which the Atlanteans destroyed themselves?

0Izeinwinter
The description of the founding of the wizengamot. War is probably not a very descriptive term for what was going on before it - The political structure implies that it is what came after a period of feuding families. In this case, feuding families with magical might backing up the kind of stupidity bloodfeuds cause.
4Subbak
Ugh... That's such a painful read I had to stop in the middle. Seriously, how is it rational for Harry to be insulting V in English? Even if V somehow does not take offense, one of his Death Eaters will. I know I felt like Adava Kadavra-ing the stupid brat who was pretending to be HJPEV in this...
5avichapman
Brin seems to equate 'rational' with 'non-violent'. They're not always the same thing.
4polymathwannabe
I just read it, and stupid is precisely what it is.
5Transfuturist
Oh. Boy. First of all, yes it was. Second of all, Brin's critique is based on literary tropes, not logic. If it's obvious that Voldemort were referring to the train, then the train wouldn't exactly be a prime target, would it. Brin's response to the anonymous "troll" speaks to his arrogance.

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... (read more)

fezziwig260

Man, that's beautiful. What does Bellatrix Black want most, that Harry can offer?

She wants Tom Riddle to love her.

0Ben Pace
Aww crap
0[anonymous]
No. (It was not my bet in the first place, so...?)

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... (read more)

2evand
The difference between hardware that's fast enough to fit many iterations into a time span suitable for writing a paper vs. hardware that is slow enough that feedback is infrequent seems fairly relevant to how fast the software can progress. New insights depend crucially on feedback gotten from trying out the old insights.

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.

2Vaniver
I was thinking of this question in chapter 91: There are a scattering of other discussions of the usefulness of practice, and I thought there was a paragraph that explicitly stated the theory that Dumbledore had given him the rock when he knew that McGonagall was right there, so that Harry would come up with the idea of Transfiguring it, and would thus practice, but I'm not finding it easily.

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.

1Vaniver
I thought that we knew that like 30 chapters ago?

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.

0Creutzer
That's quite true. It's just that the pronoun "everyone" is a different kind of animal from collective nouns.
3Richard_Kennaway
Some fictional evidence upon the matter. :)

Somewhat off-kilter way to get the Time Turner into the story? Does it need more explanation than that?

1Shmi
That would be too clumsy for Eliezer.

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... (read more)

5Creutzer
You can't say "everyone have lived" in British English, either. But number agreement in English is generally not to be taken entirely seriously, so "everyone has ... their life/lives" is fine in both variants. The reason is that "everyone" works semantically like "all people", not like "every person", but just happens to nonetheless trigger singular agreement on the verb. That's also why you can say "everyone liked each other", like "all people liked each other", but not "every person liked each other".

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.

3Velorien
Well, that's the sticking point. Parseltongue and the Vow prove that Harry is honest. They don't prove that he's right, and Voldemort can simply choose to dismiss any of Harry's arguments as insufficient (which isn't that hard, given that the risk of keeping him alive is the end of the world, and any risk incurred by killing him is probably going to be less bad).

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.

... (read more)
3Jost
Thanks! (The translation is fine, btw.) A few lines later, McGonagall states it even more explicitly: (rough back-translation):

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.

0TobyBartels
That seems to be the only thing that makes sense, but does the text say that anywhere?
fezziwig230

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... (read more)

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... (read more)

7Velorien
We've seen that Dumbledore has worked very hard all his life to be wise and compassionate and generally fit the archetype of the true hero. I can't help wondering if Voldemort is the one person he allows himself to truly hate, which is why that hatred is unusually intense and fully brings out Dumbledore's otherwise unseen dark side (or as fully as Dumbledore has one, which is still less intense than most people's when faced with someone who's hurt them that much).
6buybuydandavis
I was wondering how EY would play this. For my part, the "pity me, I couldn't help being me" argument is not very compelling. He is what he is. I had assumed that he was busy faking divinations strategically.
fezziwig110

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.

fezziwig310

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?

0[anonymous]
Who said anything about killing anybody.

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(!?).

2ChristianKl
That's done by adding note types: Tools/Manage Note Types/Card/+

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... (read more)

5gwern
Fair enough, but a lot of the objections here seem to be based on the argument that 'the Cold War was reasonably objectively safe (and we know so for [anthropicly biased reasons]), while unilateral strikes or ultimatums are objectively dangerous; hence the Cold War was the better choice', while I think the right version is 'the Cold War was objectively extremely dangerous, while unilateral strikes or ultimatums are [merely] objectively dangerous; hence the Cold War was the worse choice'. I don't think people are directly comparing the scenarios and merely making a relative judgment.

(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.)

fezziwig150

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... (read more)

6gwern
It's not that difficult. Think about the flowchart of materials that go into atomic bombs. You don't need to control everyone everywhere. What you need to control are the raw uranium ore and derivatives, specialty goods useful for things like ultracentrifuges, monitor the rare specialists in shaped explosives and nuclear physics, sample the air for nuclear substances, and so on. There are many natural chokepoints and many steps are difficult or impossible under light surveillance: you need a lot of raw uranium ore, thermal diffusion purification requires comically much electricity, centrifuges emit characteristic vibrations, laser purification is impossible to develop without extensive experience, the USA and other nations already routinely do air sampling missions to monitor fallout from tests... I won't say that nuclear counterproliferation efforts have been perfect, but I will point out that a fair number of nations have had considerably difficulty getting their nuclear programs working (since he's come up already, how well was Saddam Hussein's nuclear program going when the issue was rendered moot by the US invasion?) and the successful members often have aid from previous members of the nuclear club & no serious interference in the form of embargoes much less active monitoring and threats from a jealous existing nuclear club member. You're right, because clearly the status quo is totally a solution 'forever'. Retrospective determinism, eh? 'Because X did not happen, it was inevitable that X would not happen, therefore, inertia was the right choice.' Nor is winning a lottery ticket an argument in favor of playing the lottery. (Not to mention that if inertia had been the wrong choice, we wouldn't be here arguing about it and so one could justify any policy whatsoever. Reasoning that 'we did Y and we survived! so Y must be a great policy' is not a good way to try to analyze the world.)
0fezziwig
(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.)
fezziwig110

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,... (read more)

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... (read more)

What is she ultimately trying to achieve? More aggressive reminders than a normal calendar app can give you?

Also: computer or smartphone?

3jobear
I'm having memory problems which make it hard to function, and I'm trying to work around those. For example, if I have started a process and want to do something else while it runs, I want a reminder to check on it/go back to it in x minutes. I want it to be on my computer instead of phone. In theory I could use the reminder feature on my iPhone, but this is a different kind of reminder and I don't want to dilute the meaning of the reminder sound. Also, I want something that will pop up and interrupt what I'm doing (and not rely on noise that will bother other people), and I want it to be easy to set. Most of the things I can find have an alarm but not a pop-up. This: http://time-in.info/timer.asp has a popup and lets me enter a custom message...but the custom message does not show on the popup window. doh. It may be the best I can do, but I imagine I could have several timers running at once, so it would be confusing without a note. this http://www.copleys.com/timer.htm has the popup behavior I want, but doesn't let me add a message.

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.

0Armok_GoB
One distinction I don't know if it matters, but many discussions fail to mention at all, is the distinction between telling a lie and maintaining it/keeping the secret. Many of the epistemic arguments seem to disappear if you've previously made it clear you might lie to someone, you intend to tell the truth a few weeks down the line, and if pressed or questioned you confess and tell the actual truth rather than try to cover it with further lies. Edit: also, have some kind of oat and special circumstance where you will in fact never lie, but precommit to only use it for important things or give it a cost in some way so you won't be pressed to give it for everything.
-2Eugine_Nier
Did you even read the comment I linked to? It's whole point was about the harm you do to yourself and your cause by lying.

You've drawn an important distinction, between believing a lie and telling one. Your formulation is correct, but Eliezer's is wrong.

5Eugine_Nier
Telling a lie has it's own problems, as I discuss here.
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