All of hirvinen's Comments + Replies

They wanted to be able to testify under veritaserum that they had not been profiting.

I do not recall Harry or Hermione requiring adult input to enter their contract except for McGonagall advising them on the form and possibility of such contract. Granted, it was overseen by the Wizengamot and their legal guardian, but if they could not have done it legally by themselves, we should have seen Dumbledore's explicit approval instead of just lack of overruling it.

A: ". [] Do you understand?" B: "I understand."

I claim that in normal human communication that type of exchange is viewed as B accepting what A says, unless B somehow signals explicit disagreement. Then, if B knows this, and assumes that A thinks likes this, and only explicitly affirms understanding while withholding knowledge of their disagreement, B is at the very least deceiving A.

Of course Moody should know to be more paranoid in what he forbids Harry from doing. Especially with him having witnessed Harry showing cunning and paranoia on a level he finds promising.

Do we have evidence that his Eye sees through things like that? It sees in all directions and through hiding-magic but does it see e.g. through walls?

From what we have seen so far, it would rather appear that Harry's signature is just as valid as if he had been an adult. He can be overruled by Dumbledore but it is not required that Dumbledore signs the papers for him.

"Do not sign anything that Lucius Malfoy gives you," Mad-Eye Moody said. "Nothing, do you understand me, lad? If Malfoy hands you a copy of The Wonderful Adventures of the Boy-Who-Lived and asks you for an autograph, tell him that you've sprained a finger. Don't pick up a quill for a single second while you're in Gringotts. If someone hands you a quill, break the quill and then break your own fingers. Do I need to explain further, son?"

"Not particularly," Harry said. "We also have lawyers in Muggle Britain, and they'd th

We do have RSS.

I think a language/country subreddit or language-tagged threads might better solve the objective of a country/language specific mailing list.

Blaming the Pioneer Plaque for the progressive degredation sounds like it makes sense at first, but the point of the Pioneer Plaque thing is that this Voldemort is supposed to be smarter than canon Voldemort, and a Pioneer Plaque horcrux superior. That theory makes the Pioneer Plaque horcrux inferior.

Smart people still overlook things. A lightspeed delay problem in horcrux syncing would not have come up ever before, so it could have been easily overlooked even by a very smart person, especially one that is not scientifically oriented. If he had been mor... (read more)

The spell hides current environment, except for a floor/ground "disk." It could be oriented so that the sun is down and thus out of sight.

Isn't AK supposed to destroy the soul?

I hate mailing lists. Are there many people on it that are not on e.g. fb? Language subreddits or [lang] tagged threads here if wanted?

From "So you do really care" and his well-established view that most people are painfully stupid, he should deduce also the latter, as it is more unlikely that Harry is both exceptionally rational and exceptionally caring unless he has a reason to believe that the former causes or at least strongly correlates with the latter.

Then again, someone who has a low opinion of others' intelligence should already believe that others are not rational enough to seek resurrection, even if they cared to want it.

I think a simulation (Y) is a process of mimicking something else (X). In which case we should not observe in Y something (Z) that couldn't happen in X.

So maybe we should rather say that Y is a game with otherwise X-like rules, but additional rules that allow Z, rather than calling it simulation. Or at least I think if "simulation" Y is not an accurate simulation of X, we should use some explicit qualifier to indicate its non-accuracy.

• 1,920 hours of SI staff time (80 hrs/week for 24 months). This comes out to about $48,000, depending on who is putting in these hours.
• $384,000 paid to remote researchers and writers ($16,000/mo for 24 months; our remote researchers generally work part-time, and are relatively inexpensive).
• $30,000 for wiki design, development, hosting costs

• Dealing with spam shouldn't be counted under "design, development and hosting".
• The first item establishes SIAI staff time cost at 25 $ / h. If the (virtual) server itself, bandwidth and technical exper

The random is not in the dice, it is in the throw, and that procedure is never identical. Also, XdY is a distribution, always the same, and the dice are just a relatively fair way of picking a sample.

The price tag of the wiki itself sounds too high: If 1920 hours of SI staff costs USD 48000, that's USD 25/h. If hosting and maintenance is 500 / month(should be much less), over 24 months that would leave USD 18k to design and development, and at SI staff rates that would be 720 hours of work, which sounds waaay too much for setting up a relatively simple(?) wiki site

There are several relatively mature wiki engines beside mediawiki, with different markup languages etc. The low barrier of entry for wikis, even with less familiar markup languages is a very important consideration.

With good collaboration tools, for many kinds of tasks testing the commitment of volunteers by putting them to work should be rather cheap to test, especially if they can be given less time-critical tasks, or tasks where they help speed up someone else's work.

Serious thought should go into looking for ways unpaid volunteers could help, since there's loads of bright people with more time and enthusiasm than money, and for whom it is much easier to put in a few hours a week than to donate equivalent money towards paid contributors' work

That 1920 h should be 24 months of 80 h/month, not 80 h / week.

... at zir expense

Kind of goes against the very good point

Then you will achieve your aims more efficiently if nothing about the form distracts from the content.

(edited fixing formatting)

That's a value judgement. He appears to think the risks he places himelf in when he's not in control are an acceptable price for the utility he derives from his bicycling.

(approximate, my translation)

Blessed are those who believe without seeing. Who wants to be blessed when they could see.

-- Esa Lappi, my high school math teacher when showing us the proof of some theorem.

By applying software patches that detect hardware faults and compensate or work around them.

Did Eliezer or someone else with admin rights just edit the tags? I don't think this is really relevant to akrasia, as it isn't about doing something that wouldn't otherwise be done at all, but ignoring thoughts known to be erroneous("I'm at the limit of my strength"), making a convulsive effort and doing the winning thing instead of the "sensible" or "rational."

Ha! Buying a house and even more so moving is hard work, even with hired help. No way I'd do that right away.

As kpreid already said, that's pretty much Crocker's Rules, but few people can manage them, so assuming them or expecting people to declare them is a bad idea.

Stereotypes imply lack of individuality, which is usually low-status. As does grouping them as a single entity, especially if that grouping is made with a hint of sinisterity as would often be the case when talking about financial system -controlling jews.

for every enthusiastic fan you produce with a work, you must also produce someone who hates it.

Kathy Sierra arguing along those lines, with emphasis on software expanding on Scott Adams on the subject. Sounds plausible.

ETA: I mean, useful as a general heuristic when thinking about whether something should be done or not for a product. Of course especially in software some things that gain undying love can be added in a fashion that does not distract those who don't want it.

I've seen a lot of talk and advocacy of menstrual cups on all kinds of Finnish IRC channels with widely varying population counts. Anonymity isn't a strong factor as a very large fraction of people on that network use their real names.

Oh, come on... Of course it's not just Russia. TV is so last millennium. Never owned one.

sometimes it really is pretty obvious that a particular error has been committed

The degree or lack of obviousness is a fact about the reader's mind, not about the error.

Thanks to fast internet connections, good web search and online dictionaries, failing to expand an acronym only increases the cost from 5 seconds to 5 seconds per reader...

That "way too many" sounds more like "in retrospect, I can't believe how much whacking it took to convince me / how thickheaded I was."

At least that's how I feel about it WRT myself.

It works in Konqueror and apparently would in Opera if mine didn't have a general problem with youtube. Not in Firefox, though.

(Osmo A.) Wiio's first law of communication

Communication usually fails, except by accident

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/wiio.html

Less posts by Eliezer is bad.

Less work on Things Not To Be Discussed before May is much worse.

Thank you. It's been a truly wonderful time. Not thanks to you alone, even if you were the driving factor. It will be difficult for anyone to fill your shoes, but then again, LW has shown many others having great promise, well enough that it can become a community much greater than it already is, and thus meaning success for you in this endeavour.

While I'm sad to see you give up your central role, for yours are the posts that I've in general found to be the most eye-opening and enjoyable, it is a also a relief to see you returning focus to the core job of ... (read more)

I think we mean here by existential risks something alone the lines of, in Bostrom's words " - - either annihilate Earth-originating intelligent life or drastically and permanently curtail its potential", making countries irrelevant.

Related, but different: Which of these world-saving causes should receive most attention? (Maybe place these in order.)

• Avoiding nuclear war
• Create a Friendly AI, including prevention of creating AIs you don't think are Friendly
• Create AI, no need to be Friendly.
• Prevent creation of AIs until humans are a lot smarter
• Improve human cognition(should this include uploading capabilities?)
• Defense against biological agents
• Delay nanotechnology development until we have sufficiently powerful AIs to set up defenses against gray goo
• Creation and deployment of ant

The likelihood of the creation of an AGI leading to an intelligence explosion?

ETA: The likelihood of human uploads leading to an intelligence explosion?

Does the first AGI have to be Friendly, or we're screwed?

The Political Compass seems to me, based on my own and friends' experiences to have a strong pressure towards the lower left corner. As one of them said, "you would have to want to sacrifice babies to corporations to end up in the upper right corner."

The World's Smallest Political Quiz isn't entirely neutral, but to me it would seem to spread people much more evenly, and importantly all questions are clearly on the two axis along which it measures political stance.

The likelihood of an existential risk actualizing during this century.

Strongly disagree on Political Compass being better. The questions are heavily loaded, the very first question being

If economic globalisation is inevitable, it should primarily serve humanity rather than the interests of trans-national corporations.

and many questions such as

Astrology accurately explains many things.

aren't at all about what should be done or what should be the state of things. What are you going to infer about my political beliefs based on my answer to that?

(Edited to fix formatting.)

Looking into U.S. political parties especially beyond the big two doesn't look like a good use of my time. Consider replacing that with the scores from the World's smallest political quiz

Using the martial arts metaphor, at least Mensa appears to be more about having a lot of muscle, not about fighting skills, and there isn't a strong agenda to improve either.

I don't know of such cases. From http://www.alcor.org/Library/html/neuropreservationfaq.html

"Neuroseparation" is performed by surgical removal of the body below the neck at the level of the sixth cervical vertebra at a temperature near 0ºC. - - The cephalon (head), is then perfused with cryoproectants via the carotid and vertebral arteries prior to deep cooling. For neuropatients cryopreserved before the year 2000, neuroseparation was performed at the end of cryoprotective perfusion via the aorta.

If I understand correctly, at least Alcor's c... (read more)

If memory serves, you've said that your plan is to wait until your parents die and then kill yourself. Even if you do that and donate your organs, you should cryopreserve your head for a chance at waking up in a world you'd want to live in or could better help you with that. It's much worse a strategy than just trying to live to see it, but still better than final death.