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...
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...
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...
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 ...
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...
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...
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?
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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