All of NoriMori1992's Comments + Replies

To me, it's hard to ignore how this post skates over why some vegans are pushy, and how that makes statements like "There's a big difference between you making choices according to your values, and you telling other people to make choices according to your values" and "If you tell other people they should make choices according to your values instead of their values, then other people won't like you" difficult for them to swallow. If a vegan is "radical" or pushy, it's probably because they think killing animals is wrong; possibly to a similar, identical, ... (read more)

Canon already acknowledges that it might be detrimental. "Sometimes I think we Sort too early."

Not to mention, why would Harry continue to wear the ring on his person where anyone could Finite the Transfiguration away? He would either keep it somewhere else, or (as you say) he'd put a metric ton of protections on it so that a simple Finite wouldn't bring back Voldemort.

In that case "wokking" would be less confusing.

2lsusr
That's a good point. I've changed it to "wokking".

For what it's worth, I still prefer the original title, even after seeing the rationale for changing it. Oh well.

2lsusr
I like the original title [NSFW] The Subspace Jhana better too. I wrote the entire post with that title in mind. This version loses the original's elegance. [Note to future readers: This post went through many different titles. Some of these comments are out-of-date.]

How did you even discover that you have aphantasia without discovering that "picture something in your mind" isn't metaphorical?

You're using "analogy" to describe what I was always taught is a "simile".

1CstineSublime
I think you're right. Although I'm having a hard time expressing where to draw the line between a simile and a analogy even after glancing at this article; https://www.grammarpalette.com/analogy-vs-simile-dont-be-confused/ 

if people are as astonishingly bad at the task as the paper says, that just reflects on their memory, not the acuity of their mind's eye.


What makes you think that? And what makes you think it has to be one or the other, rather than a combination?

I mostly miss people retroactively. When I see someone again after a long separation, I might get emotional. And I get really emotional at the moment of re-separation. But I don't usually feel the pain of their absence during their absence. Apparently (according to adhd-alien) this can be a symptom of ADHD, which I was diagnosed with before I noticed this fact about myself.

I'm not sure how the "loud sounds" one corresponds to a phrase that people commonly use, metaphorically or otherwise.

2the gears to ascension
I suppose that one might be a me thing. I haven't heard others say it, but it was an insight for me at one point that "oh, it hurts because it's an impact". It had the flavor of expecting a metaphor and not getting one.

I confess that the ending is lost on me.

2lsusr
Maybe the ending doesn't make sense to anybody and I'm just measuring how dadaist I can write before someone calls my bluff. Unless that is the meta-commentary I'm attempting to make about Scott Alexander's insinuation that sophistication is mostly just shibboleths. Which would make this post truly meaningful, but only on the meta-level. That would be appropriate for a story exploring the nature of fine art. Of course, the real heist would be to do both; to write a scissor statement, where some people extract an obvious indirect meaning, while others conclude that the Palace of Hidden Doors contains only a small, featureless room. Is taste a priesthood, a science, or a game of poker? I call your blind and raise you one hundred and twenty-seven words.

I think if you're describing planecrash as "the single work of fiction for which I most want to avoid spoilers", you probably just shouldn't read any reviews of it or anything about it until after you've read it.

If you do read this review beforehand, you should avoid the paragraph that begins with "By far the best …" (The paragraph right before the heading called "The competence".) That mentions something that I definitely would have considered a spoiler if I'd read it before I read planecrash.

Aside from that, it's hard to answer without knowing what kinds of things you consider spoilers and what you already know about planecrash.

Neither there nor in Cheliax's world are there really any lumbering bureaucracies that do insane things for inscrutable bureaucratic reasons; all the organisations depicted are all remarkably sane. Important positions are almost always filled by the smart, skilled, and hardworking. Decisions aren't made because of emotional outbursts. Instead, lots of agents go around optimising for their goals by thinking hard about them.

 

(I'm spoiler tagging my entire response to this because I don't know what kinds of spoilers are acceptable in this context and I'd... (read more)

I've always thought Smullyan missed the mark with this story. I think the epistemologist would have been right (or at least, could have been right, in a very meaningless Technically Correct sort of way) if Frank had started out saying "I think the book is red", because as a matter of fact he didn't truly wholeheartedly think the book was red. But what Frank actually said was "The book seems red to me", which is an entirely different statement and which, no matter how I think about it, seems to me like it ought to cover the state of mind "the book looks for... (read more)

What was the title before?

3Richard_Ngo
The Minority Faction

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

 

The linked PDF has a number of typos (OCR errors, perhaps?). Might be better to link to an Internet Archive version, such as this one (from New Dimensions 3; I can't find The Wind's Twelve Quarters on IA to link to that one).

Why would we stretch the definition of lawyer in such a way? That's not what the word "lawyer" means, either in the dictionary sense or in the sense of how people use the word. And even if you can come up with a reason to stretch it to include all those professions, what makes you think that's what Eliezer was doing?

Dang, I missed seeing this before the solution was posted. And oh dear, it's high-complexity. Oh well, I'll give it a shot anyway!

Edit: Hah, I spent an hour checking one thing (which went nowhere), and then ran out of steam, and now I can no longer resist checking the answer. So much for that 😅 Next time I'll try to check my notifications more often so I see the next one before the answer is up, maybe that'll give me more drive to keep at it.

I normally just read these for fun and make no effort to solve them (I know nothing about data science or data analysis). This time I fooled around with the dataset for about half an hour, and managed to get a small inkling that the Phantom Pummelers disliked Sliminess and maybe liked Corporeality. I feel inordinately proud of myself for that minor achievement. (Full disclosure, I also got some inklings that were wrong, like thinking PP also disliked Hostility.)

Feels weird to be at the end. Looking forward to the next one. Might actually try to solve it, even though I will have absolutely no idea what I'm doing.

A shame that the dataset links don't work anymore :(

2Measure
I have a copy. [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nuoPaQM4Ufc4LaCJ47wPavt-bACxlbMp/view]
2J Bostock
Oh no! Appears they were attached to an old email address, and the code is on a hard-drive which has since been formatted. I honestly did not expect anyone to find this after so long! Sorry about that.

Vaarsuvius’ Law (“every trip between plot-relevant locations will have exactly one random encounter”)

 

I appreciate the Order of the Stick reference!

The other day I bought some quick oats and raisins and dried cranberries, and have been serving myself some very delicious bowls of oatmeal. Thanks, bhauth, for reminding me this exists.

Still, when several individually-questionable pieces of evidence are pointing in one direction, and nothing in particular is pointing in the other, that seems like the correct conclusion. I think the story is probably true.

 

…Huh? The entire rest of the post gave me the exact opposite impression. It sounds like most of the evidence points to the story being false, while hardly anything points to the story being true. Did I miss something?

Most people's experience with oatmeal has been from one of:

  • packets of instant oatmeal that have low-quality cheap flavoring and might have gone stale
  • quick-cooking rolled oats without any flavoring

 

Those are my only experiences with oats, but I like both of those experiences. I love instant oatmeal, and I love quick oats boiled on the stove, though of course in the latter case I have to supply my own flavouring. Even just sugar is enough to make it great. But adding raisins takes it to another level; especially adding them while the oats are still boil... (read more)

4NoriMori1992
The other day I bought some quick oats and raisins and dried cranberries, and have been serving myself some very delicious bowls of oatmeal. Thanks, bhauth, for reminding me this exists.

You don’t learn it from journals; few journals embrace the Pottery Barn rule, and the process of getting a criticism published, much less a retraction, would put Kafka to shame.

 

I can't figure out how the Pottery Barn rule is relevant to this sentence.

7gwern
ie. you break the scientific literature (by publishing something so bad it should be retracted), you are responsible for fixing it (by investigating it, retracting it, and publicizing that). Whereas the way journals actually work is 'heads I win tails everyone else loses': they get all the prestige and fame (and extremely lucrative financial payments) from publishing influential research, while taking no responsibility whatsoever for publishing bad research (regardless of the harms, eg. Wakefield), not lifting a finger to investigate any claims or criticisms, and generally adopting an attitude that anything which has been "published after peer review" has therefore been handed down from Mount Sinai and critics should have to work like dogs to justify even getting a few paragraphs into the journal buried where no one can read it and never mentioned anywhere else.

My favourite way to deal with late assignments is to have the option to not do them in the first place. My psychology professor gave each of us three options: 1) do two assignments that count X%, and have the tests count Y% (default option); 2) do one assignment, and have the tests count proportionally more; 3) do zero assignments, and have the tests count for everything.

My ADHD ass chose the last option, and it was the only course that I scored 100% in.

I might be biased about this approach by the fact that I was the student in this scenario, but I'm willi... (read more)

Ohhhh now I get it. I was about to ask what the point of that scene was!

2Mati_Roy
thanks, it worked! https://web.archive.org/web/20150412211654/http://reducing-suffering.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/wild-animals_2015-02-28.pdf

several-decades-old network of tunnels build inside of a mountain

 

built

2lsusr
Fixed. Thanks.

You paperwork's fine.

 

Should be "your".

2lsusr
Fixed. Thanks.

If you were trying to spoiler tag that, it didn't work.

My teacup does has a choice.

 

Should be "does have"; or just "has" (without "does").

2lsusr
Fixed. Thanks.

You believes Bayesianism

 

Should be "believe"

2lsusr
Fixed. Thanks.

"I am a Jew. If there's one thing I know about this universe it's that there's no such thing as God," said Moses.

 

Is this a joke I'm not religious enough to understand?

They think a bunch of nerds on the darkweb somehow knows more about this Jining then I do living here and administrating it

 

Should be "know" and "than"

1lsusr
Fixed. Thanks.

That's what had bought Alia to the entryway

 

Probably should be "brought".

2lsusr
Fixed. Thanks.

My solution for this particular kind of spoiler is to save the links for both stories in a note, make sure the first link's display text doesn't say what it is, and write a warning to not click on it or look at the URL. Given my lag rate on combing through my notes for stuff I've saved for later, I'm pretty much guaranteed to have forgotten where the hell I found the story or why it caught my attention by the time I get to it. It's possibly the only area in my life where procrastination and forgetfulness are my friends.

Also note, we do much worse to children all the time.

 

Yes, but most of it doesn't happen because approximately everyone in the world got together and shared all their knowledge and thought really hard about it and talked about it and then still decided it was a good idea.

I would be interested to see how this goes if you remove the requirement that B has to be stronger at chess than A. (Which, to my knowledge, is not a requirement of the test as Eliezer posed it, but was introduced in Zane's proposal.) Of course, a B that is weaker than A will be easier to beat, which means a win would prove little; which I assume is why Zane introduced this requirement. But it would also mean a loss would prove more. If B is weaker than both C and A, but A loses anyway thanks to C's deception, that would be much more damning than losing against a B that is natively stronger than A to begin with. Maybe you should run the test both ways? (And maybe not tell A which type of B they're facing?)

Why does B have to be better at chess than A but worse than C? Eliezer's post only specifies that B has to be weaker than C; unless I missed something, it doesn't say they have to be stronger than A.

1Zane
If B were the same level as A, then they wouldn't pose any challenge to A; A would be able to beat them on their own without listening to the advice of the Cs.

Are the quotes pulled from the Poor Economics book?

2Lyrongolem
Yes, they are. In the main post my only quote blocks are direct copy/pastes from the web version of the book. 

Thanks. Unfortunately that didn't work when I tried it. Edit: Googled it. ">!" in front worked.

But I would be really upset if I didn't read it earlier.

Yeah, I don't blame you! I'm really glad I didn't spoil it for you, and sorry again for being careless.

It took Robutil longer still to consider that perhaps humans (with their current self-awareness) not only need to prioritize their own wellbeing and your friendships

 

Should be "their friendships", yes?

Oh my gosh, you're absolutely right! My apologies! But now that I'm trying to add them, they're an option that isn't showing up in the editor! Do you know how I can add them?

(And if I spoiled that for you, I'm seriously really really really sorry. I hate spoilers, and I'm always riding people about being too loose with them. I can't believe I did that. Was not thinking. I'm sorry.)

1quetzal_rainbow
Fortunately, no! But I would be really upset if I didn't read it earlier. Spoilers can be put in markdown using syntax like this:

it's easier to describe what the results of a complex system should be than to describe how to do it.

 

Sure, but I'm almost tempted to ask what the point of the AMA was, if he wasn't going to explain how dath ilan actually accomplishes things. (I'm not going to actually ask that, because questions merely asking what dath ilan is like, without asking why or how, are also valuable to ask and answer.)

Many questions were "How does dath ilan avoid and/or solve such-and-such problem?", and often the response was essentially, "We're good at [economics/coordin... (read more)

1[anonymous]
So dath Ilan I understand is the thought experiment of "every human has about as much intelligence as Eliezer Yudnowsky". Starting with that assumption - the flaw is that I think a lot of the issues with current civilization isn't that people are stupid, it's Moloch. The rules of the adversarial game creates situations where every actor is stuck in an inadequate equilibrium. No one has the power to fix anything, because each actor is just doing their own role and acting in their own interests. Making the actors smarter doesn't help - they just try hard their jobs even more. This might make the situation worse. For an example: the FDA doesn't exist to help human beings live longer, healthier lives. It exists to ensure every drug is "safe and effective". Making then smarter means they allow even less errors in drug applications. But drug company workers also are smarter and make less obvious errors and cover up any lies in their clinical trial reports better, since their role is to get a drug approved so their parent company doesn't go bankrupt. So you are stuck in the same inadequate equilibrium where everyone is doing their role and the actual people humans should care about - human patients - suffers.

There's perhaps more detail in Project Lawful and in some nearby stories ("for no laid course prepare", "aviation is the most dangerous routine activity").

Hobbes said, "I don't know what's worse, the fact that everyone's got a price, or the fact that their price is so low."

 

You don't specify which Hobbes. When I Googled this quote trying to find out, I didn't find any results that didn't trace back to this post. I kept reducing the strictness of the exact wording, and still didn't get any not-this results, until I reduced it to "got a price" and "so low", which turned up basically the same quote, differently worded, on TV Tropes, attributing it to Calvin and Hobbes. I had assumed that might be the sourc... (read more)

Had to look up what LK-99 is. Now I wonder, was this inspiration for

the supercriminal motive in "aviation is the most dangerous routine activity"?

3quetzal_rainbow
Such comments should be under heavy spoilers.
3Algon
Almost certainly, given the timing, how LK-99 and the story-superconductor were published ahead of schedule, and the focus on prediction markets.

I'm genuinely puzzled by this sort of hostile reaction to what was really a pretty mild request for gender neutral language/examples. It seems utterly out of proportion to the original comment(s).

His reaction wasn't all that hostile. And a request being mild doesn't make the request reasonable, or make it unreasonable to be annoyed by it.

And using gender neutral language/examples is really easy - much easier than jumping through actual hoops, and probably also easier than writing comments telling people how annoyed you are about their nitpicking. The

... (read more)
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