All of linkhyrule5's Comments + Replies

1TLW
Do you have a pointer for this? Traversable wormholes tend to require massive amounts of energy[1] (as in, amounts of energy that are easier to state in c^2 units). Note: this isn't strictly hypercompute. Finite speed of light means that you can only address a finite number of bits within a fixed time, and your critical path is limited by the timescale of the CTC. That being said, figuring out the final state of a 1TB-state-vector[2] FSM would itself be very useful. Just not strictly hypercomputation. 1. ^ Or negative energy density. Or massive amounts of negative energy density. 2. ^ Ballpark. Roundtrip to 1TB of RAM in 1us is doable.
What I meant by #2 is “a crowd of people who are trying to be more X, but who, currently, aren’t any more X than you (or indeed very X at all, in the grand scheme of things)”, not that they’re already very X but are trying to be even more X.

Fair. Nevertheless, if the average of the group is around my own level, that's good enough for me if they're also actively trying. (Pretty much by definition of the average, really...)

Empirically, it seems rather hard, in fact.
Well, either that, or a whole lot of people seem to
... (read more)

Actually, no, I explicitly want both 1 and 2. Merely being more X than me doesn't help me nearly as much as being both more X and also always on the lookout for ways to be even more X, because they can give me pointers and keep up with me when I catch up.

And sure, 3 is indeed what often happens.

... First of all, part of the whole point of all of this is to be able to do things that often fail, and succeed at them anyway; being able to do the difficult is something of prerequisite to doing the impossible.

Secondly, all shounen quips aside, it's a... (read more)

7Said Achmiz
What I meant by #2 is “a crowd of people who are trying to be more X, but who, currently, aren’t any more X than you (or indeed very X at all, in the grand scheme of things)”, not that they’re already very X but are trying to be even more X. EDIT: Empirically, it seems rather hard, in fact. Well, either that, or a whole lot of people seem to have some reason for pretending not to be able to tell…

The thing is -- and here I disagree with your initial comment thread as well -- peer pressure is useful. It is spectacularly useful and spectacularly powerful.

How can I make myself a more X person, for almost any value of X, even values that we would assume entirely inherent or immutable? Find a crowd of X people that are trying to be more X, shove myself in the middle, and stay there. If I want to be a better rationalist, I want friends that are better rationalists than me. If I want to be a better forecaster, I want friends that are better forecasters th... (read more)

8Said Achmiz
You’re equivocating between the following: 1. To become more X, find a crowd of people who are more X. 2. To become more X, find a crowd of people who are trying to be more X. Perhaps #1 works. But what is actually happening is #2. … or at least, that’s what we might charitably hope is happening. But actually instead what often happens is: 1. To become more X, find a crowd of people who are pretending to try to be more X. And that definitely doesn’t work.

That, and the fact that when making decisions, it's *really important* to have non-subjective reasons -- or if you have subjective reasons, you still have objective reasons why they matter, like "if I don't like someone on a personal level, I really shouldn't spend the rest of my life with them" in dating.

So people are used to a mode of thought where a subjective opinion means "you're not done explaining"/"you haven't spent enough mental effort on the problem," and they engage the -- honestly, very productive, very healthy -- same mechanisms they use when justifying a command decision. It just happens to be mis-applied in this case.

I'd like to point out that technically speaking, basically all neural nets are running the exact same code: "take one giant matrix, multiply it by your input vector; run an elementwise function on the result vector; pass it to the next stage that does the exact same thing." So part 1 shouldn't surprise us too much; what learns and adapts and is specialized in a neural net isn't the overall architecture or logic, but just the actual individual weights and whatnot.


Well, it *does* tell us that we might be overthinking things somewhat ... (read more)

I was kind of iffy about this post until the last point, which immediately stood out to me as something I vehemently disagree with. Whether or not humans naturally have values or are consistent is irrelevant -- that which is not required will happen only at random and thus tend not to happen at all, and so if you aren't very very careful to actually make sure you're working in a particular coherent direction, you're probably not working nearly as efficiently as you could be and may in fact be running in circles without noticing.

As someone who does a whole lot of pull-based learning, I'm going to chime in and say that using it as your main method of learning is probably not the best idea. tl;dr: Learning on the job is powerful, but it overfits by nature; while there's probably more than a little confirmation bias from us ivory tower types, it's almost certainly drowned out by "everything comes back to math and logic" and "the truth is all of a piece".

There is a fairly natural divide, IMO, between "engineering fields" and "theoretic... (read more)

All of your advice seems designed for a longer post published outside LW. None of them seem appropriate for a ~1k word short published in the same place as and three days after both the last chapter of Inadequate Equilibria and "Hero Licensing," both of which I mention in the text.

With the partial exception of the first, but I have been using "linkhyrule5" as an alias and "link" as a nickname for the better part of two decades now, and have not been led to believe that it was particularly hard to decypher. Illusion of transparency, yes, but also evidence to the contrary.

A final note, a postscript that doesn't belong in the main article:

The correct word for the final concept is not "arrogance," because arrogance has, as I note in the first sentence, long since been conflated with the other two, with "hubris" and "pride". It is, nonetheless, what I believe many people mean, when they say "arrogance", and so it is the word I use here. And because it is something to be discarded, its linguistic affinity to "hubris" and "pride" mean those related concepts are th... (read more)

There we go. No wonder I couldn't find it, it wasn't on LessWrong, and also a lot older than three years. Thanks!

So there's a post that was written, geez, about three years back, about the estimated risk of a catastrophe from an anthropic perspective. I forget most of the logic (or I'd've found it myself), but one of the conclusions was that from the perspective of an observer who requires a "miracle" to exist, miracles seem to occur at approximately evenly spaced intervals. Does anyone remember which post I'm talking about?

7gwern
https://mason.gmu.edu/~rhanson/greatfilter.html http://hanson.gmu.edu/hardstep.pdf https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Great_Filter ?

As dxu notes, Hermione is likely to use it more than he is. And if Harry does go out, he'll do it with Hermione, and can borrow her Cloak.

It's not "Harry will never use the Cloak again", it's "it's Hermione's now because she'll get the most use out of it."

On the contrary.

The best way to keep yourself safe, now that Hogwarts no longer has literally Lord Voldemort in it, is to sit in the tallest tower of Hogwarts and never leave. Anyone that manages to get past the wards is not going to be stopped by the Cloak, Hallow or not.

0Velorien
I don't think that's realistic. Harry's acknowledged that he needs to mature into a worthwhile adult in order to be able to save the world, and he's not going to gain the experiences he needs to do that (or indeed maintain a reasonable standard of mental health) by becoming a full-on hikikomori.
0[anonymous]
It's still one ring of safety less. If the story didn't require a "passing the torch" moment, I wouldn't have predicted that to happen; though I might see Harry loaning the cloak for sufficiently important missions.

Nah. There are better ways to keep yourself safe than invisibility, whereas Hermione will be running around adventuring. Sure, it's very hard to kill her, but if she needs to, say, rescue a hostage or something, that won't necessarily be relevant.

7Velorien
Not many, especially for someone too young to have the raw magic for most powerful spells. When it comes to protection, having no one know you're there is the next best thing to not being there. Additionally, Harry's first instinct when he realised how much personal danger he was in was to wear the Cloak 24/7. It seems odd that this instinct is 100% absent now that his survival also represents the survival of the entire world.

Yes - but achieve what?

He just... wants immortality. And then... that's it. No real idea of what he wants to do with it.

... You know, if I had had to predict which character would end up as a magical girl, Voldemort would've been at the bottom of my list...

0knb
I was thinking of this. Note that the Soul Gem is green...

He could have spent that hour sending a Patronus to Lucius, though.

Didn't think of it, though.

All he really has to do is convince Lucius to be a rock for about five minutes while he would have been summoned. Heal anything with transfigurative healing + the Stone.

0Transfuturist
That would require physical availability.
1gattsuru
Dumbledore gave Harry a pack of cards that had portkey functionality, under the name Santa Claus and claiming that they were a portkey to Salem, but instead heading to a location somewhere in London. Harry gave them back for further investigation, thinking that they might be a trap, Dumbledore took them back but didn't activate the portkey. It's possible that this was just a short reference, meant to establish Dumbledore's steps of trust in parallel to the gift of the Cloak of Invisibility, and that Harry did not retrieve the portkey and Dumbledore did not place it upon Harry's person... But activation trigger was to rip the King of Hearts -- a king card known for its face character stabbing itself in the back of the head -- in half.
2Jost
Chapter 63:

But it does not serve as a solution to say, for example, "Harry should persuade Voldemort to let him out of the box" if you can't yourself figure out how.

It's a shame that nobody's going along this line of thought. It would be cool to see a full, successful AI-Box experiment out there as a fanfiction.

(I'd do it myself, but my previous attempts at such have been.... eheh. Less than successful.)

6Duncan
Actually, this isn't anywhere near as hard as the AI Box problem. Harry can honestly say he is the best option for eliminating the unfriendly AGI / Atlantis problem. 1) Harry just swore the oath that binds him, 2) Harry understands modern science and its associated risks, 3) Harry is 'good', 4) technological advancement will certainly result in either AGI or the Atlantis problem (probably sooner than later), and 5) Voldemort is already worried about prophecy immutability so killing Harry at this stage means the stars still get ripped apart, but without all the ways in which that could happen with Harry making the result 'good').
2Shmi
LV clearly doesn't want the world to end. What would make him believe that killing HP ends the world?

Was it?

I really don't think the alternative was better than the canonical "Harry gets her out of there at a reasonably low cost considering all the myriad ways he has of making tons of money".

I mean, given that his opponent turned out to be Quirrell, maybe, but otherwise...

Which earlier mistakes were these?

4Vaniver
The chief of them is the one that Harry realizes:

To be fair to Harry, neither of those are good examples - Voldemort's plan also had Hermione in Azkaban thinking she had murdered Draco Malfoy for two weeks, which would have had... unpleasant effects on her mental health, and there's a pretty sharp limit to how much you can count "going along with a hostage situation at gunpoint" as "meddling." A mistake, yes, intentional meddling, no.

0Vaniver
I'm not saying that the alternative was good--just that the alternative was better. I am considering primarily the earlier mistakes Harry made with respect to Quirrell.

Don't think the curse actually enforces oaths, just ensures that you're telling the truth at the time you said it.

Besides, Voldemort, from his point of view, isn't harming Hermione - since, after all, he just went ridiculously out of his way to make sure she wouldn't care.

I would guess that the True Patronus would fail in that case, because it is no longer true that "the only thing wrong with this body is that it's dead."

Something about that line reminded me of a very, very old quote:

Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...

(black robes, falling)

...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word.

We've got the robes and the moonlight and the context, but... Harry's naked, so that can't be Harry falling and Hermione screaming. I ... don't think Harry would scream for Voldemort at this point.

... So. That was a thing.

Let's see here. My current best guess for Voldy's extremely redundant anti-apocalypse plan looks something like this:

1) Kill Harry Potter. 2) Thoroughly kill Harry Potter with thirty-odd Death Eaters. 3) Have Harry Potter kill himself 4) Convince Harry Potter that if all else fails and he somehow manages to, I don't know, stab himself in the Resurrection Stone and set off a chain reaction that throws his other 108 Horcruxes into the Sun, he'll kill himself anyway 5) If he doesn't kill himself, ensure that Hermione Granger is around to keep him sane.

2Vladimir_Nesov
"Remember that, in casse something goess wrong with next movess." might be referring to this: if the plan to permanently incapacitate Harry is somehow unsuccessful, he's to have the instructions for keeping Hermione around.
2Gondolinian
I think Voldemort wants to actually kill Harry last, after he's already meticulously taken apart the prophecy in as many ways as he can think of, in case Harry's death sets something off. In the meantime, he wants to limit Harry's influence on the world as much as possible, by not allowing him to move or speak.

Extremely confused.

Worried for Harry, worried for Harry's morality, which immediately leads into "wait what exactly did they do to me*"?

2Astazha
Yeah, no one has actually consulted Hermione on whether she would like to be immortal. She might take it poorly even without factoring in her disapproval of the dark arts used to accomplish it. Adding that in, I don't think her reaction is going to be any version of "THIS IS AWESOME!"

...

Seriously, EY? You split it up into two chapters just for that? -.-

It is if the poison's effect is to make the person a complete drooling moron.

Google Bahl's Stupefaction, and then Idiot Ball.

General prophecy shenanigans. There are now two different prophecies orbiting Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, one of which certainly seems to imply that he's going to survive to destroy the world. Obvious, predictable solutions are likely to fail.

0lerjj
Do we have a source for prophecies coming true reliably? Back in ch 108 Quirrell seemed to think it possible to avert a prophecy.

Be stupid?

There's no excuse for letting Harry have his stuff back, after all.

On a side note - Blood Fort sacrifice, hm? *amused*

"Fal-Tor-Pan" similarly, though I had to Google that one.

0[anonymous]
That's the only one I recognized instantly. Good old Star Trek...

Partially, blindness due to not wanting to be bored again. Friendship is magic and alicorn princesses :p.

Partially, because he's not sure that he can kill Harry.

0lerjj
Is there any legitimate reason why a gun wouldn't work? I mean, I now strongly suspect it wasn't loaded, but in theory it should do. I admit the uncertainty as to how the horcrux system works could mean that killing Tom R. Jr is a bad idea.

If your prediction is lower than 50%, what you're really saying is, "Of all the hypotheses I that have been elevated to my attention, this one is most likely; however, I am so uncertain that I am more likely to be wrong than right."

Or in other words, to paraphrase Eliezer, I'm fairly sure that random person's name isn't Klein, but I'm very sure it's not Ktlzybplq.

Alsadius100

I've spent too long on LW, I think - I saw "Ktlzybplq" and assumed it was rot13.

I think it's mostly because of Trelawney's prophecy. The second Hermione died, Trelawney blurts out: "HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD."

Which, y'know. Is a tad ominous.

... oh dear gods I wish I had not made that connection.

Um. I really really hope that's not indicative of how horrible what he did to Snape was...

0[anonymous]
It's probably even worse. The Foundation doesn't use magic in their containment protocols.

He doesn't actually know that ritual, though. Quirrell does stuff with his wand and Harry knows better than to just blindly copy whatever off his memory.

The resurrection ritual, as near as I can tell, requires only going to that obelisk, placing flesh on the slab, and saying "X, X, X so wisely hidden", where "X" is whatever you you have - blood, flesh, bone, vitreous humors of the eye, whatever.

Pretty much. It's not mass producible, is the problem here.

It's a start, and a pretty good start at that, but it's not done.

Nnnnot quite. Remember, for Harry, part of defeating death is mass true resurrection. And the only method of resurrection Harry knows of requires a finite amount of his own life-force. (I suppose that may not apply to Muggles, though.)

Also, he needs the body, which doesn't usually exist for anyone dead too long ago...

0DanArmak
I said he would defeat death if he got the Philosopher's Stone (and it didn't have a finite charge). It can be used to return any living or recently dead human to a healthy young state. Granted, Harry can't use it as fast as people die (roughly 2 people per second around the world). So he would still need to make more Stones.

Presumably, the body was repaired to true health - which also means that the brain was restored to its original state, that is, functional.

At that point, a Muggle can be revived by simply restarting her heart. A witch, apparently, requires a bit of magic.

2Scott Alexander
But that suggests that you can resurrect someone non-permanently without the Stone - and possibly keep them alive indefinitely by expending constant magic on it like Harry does with his father's rock.
2[anonymous]
Electricity and drugs would probably have produced muggle-Hermione. Probably the system doesn't assign new usernames to beings that appear out of thin air except for patroni, and Hermione's account is long-retired in any case.

While I'm not at all sure this is all real (we did end the last chapter with Harry staring into the Mirror, after all), Quirrell's continued NOPE-ing over Trelawney's star prophecy remains utterly hilarious.

It's like he thinks that his own life depends on Hermione Granger being alive, somehow.

For I would never want you to be deprived of Hermione Granger's counsel and restraint, not ever while the stars yet live.

snickers

1lerjj
What's interesting is the irony- he seems to think that Hermione can stop Harry making world domination choices. Harry. This is Voldemort here, and he genuinely believes that his nemesis, who is very much against death (even more so than him) is a greater threat to the world. And his solution: make sure he has friends. I neither see how Voldermort sees Harry as a more credible threat than himself, nor why he thinks Hermione is a better option than simply killing Harry.
1CodingHare
It's interesting that Voldemort is so attached to the idea of this restraining power Hermione has over Harry. Does Voldemort believe that this restraint weakens Harry significantly, by restricting him from making morally ambiguous choices? There's strong evidence that Harry shies away from evil solutions (Horcruxes are not a valid immortality method while they require human sacrifice), but he is certainly capable of morally neutral solutions. Hermione's emphasis on doing the Right Thing in all cases might strike Voldemort as a weakness he can then go on to exploit in his counterpart.

Further speculation along this line: Even if this is a dream, what has Harry gained from this vision?

  • A reasonably non-Dark way of resurrecting Hermione. (!)
  • Insight into the Dark Lord's motives, assuming that this is all things he "might have" said.
  • A hint into how he might be killed.
0DanielLC
A reasonably non-dark way of making people nigh-immortal, though he might have to leave out the troll part if they turn out to be sapient.
1[anonymous]
How to resurrect Hermione when he gets around to it. After all, she has to become an alicorn princess!

Meta-level evidence for this: Eliezer doesn't usually post two chapters, short or not, in one day.

Not wasting his readers time speculating about a "dream" would be a good motive for that.

Random note of confusion - Why is the mirror blank? Harry should be seeing his CEV right now, since he's unCloaked in front of the mirror.

Also, the Cloak is Harry's, yes? If Harry claims the Cloak right now, while Quirrell's wearing it, will that trigger resonance?

2RomeoStevens
If Tom Riddle is the true owner of the cloak the behavior of the cloak under various circumstances is unknown. But no times like desperate times for nondeterministic saving throws.

I had been thinking that Harry needed to get some mileage out of being the true owner of the Cloak too.

Meh. The big Dath Bey Yewoonen prophecy may not apply to this one, but Harry will certainly consider this to be "death" for his purposes - and Harry does not intend to leave anyone dead.

And what magic can do, an immortal rational wizard can undo...

... Huh.

... Is it just me, or is Harry Potter now in the same room as the Elder Wand and the Philosopher's Stone?

... Well, there's a great big Dark Lord in the way, but.

0Michael Wiebe
Does Quirrell have the Resurrection Stone? If so, that's 3/3 Deathly Hallows (invisibility cloak and elder wand).
0[anonymous]
My reading was that he threw the objects aside, not through the mirror, so they got sealed together with Dumbledore's pocket mirrorverse (a mirrorverse... he must have been hiding a goatee under that fake beard!)
0Gondolinian
Also Dumbledore's scepter-thing (Line of Merlin Unbroken?), if that has any power.

Right, but the Mirror (in theory) has no power over anything not reflected in it, and Harry's still invisible.

0Transfuturist
It might have inverted the whole room, with Harry being caught up in it. The Cloak allegedly only evades the Mirror, not challenging its perfect reflection.
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