All of JTHM's Comments + Replies
My answer to question 3: The introduction of driverless cars needs to be sped up as quickly as possible. I think most people don't realize just how helpful these things will be. For starters, only a small fraction of those of us who used to own non-self-driving cars will need to own a self-driving car. Those who do own them will probably have them signed up with Uber or something, and their owners will be renting them out as driverless taxis when they don't need to use them personally. This means that taking a driverless taxi everywhere will be much ch...
Lying constantly about what you believe is all well and good if you have Professor Quirrell-like lying skills and your conscience doesn't bother you if you lie to protect yourself from others' hostility to your views. I myself lie effortlessly, and felt not a shred of guilt when, say, I would hide my atheism to protect myself from the hostility of my very anti-anti-religious father (he's not a believer himself, he's just hostile to atheism for reasons which elude me).
Other people, however, are not so lucky. Some people are obliged to publicly profess bel...
I use two spaces after every sentence, and I'm 23. It's not a personal quirk either, it was just normal formatting in the American public schools I attended. (By the way, anyone who points out that this very post uses single spaces after a full stop should know that LessWrong messes with formatting. I typed double spaces; it's just not displaying as written.)
Let me attempt to convince you that your resurrection from cryonic stasis has negative expected value, and that therefore it would be better for you not to have the information necessary to reconstruct your mind persist after the event colloquially known as "death," even if such preservation were absolutely free.
Most likely, your resurrection would require technology developed by AI. Since we're estimating the expected value of your resurrection, let's work on the assumption that the AGI will be developed.
Friendly AI is strictly more difficult t...
I have said nothing of the left promoting the well-being of minorities, and I have said nothing of why minorities support the left. I have said that the left tries to place left-leaning demographics in positions of power and influence (which is not always the same thing as actually helping those demographics, although helping them may be a side effect), and that leftists try to populate their social circles with those same demographics. Obviously, the right tries to place right-leaning demographics in positions of power and influence as well. For that m...
There would likely be more intellectual diversity among a demographically diverse group randomly selected from the general population than there would be among a homogenous group randomly selected from one demographic within that population. However, if the demographically homogenous group was comprised of specialists of diverse fields of study, they would likely be more intellectually diverse than the demographically diverse group selected from the general population.
What I said was, "There is likely to be more intellectual diversity between an exc...
Your argument is cogent, and yet I find the overwhelming majority of calls for diversity to be somehow underhanded. I suspect that your true motives are invisible to you. Consider this: is your motivation for valuing diversity really a product of your philosopher's thirst for pure, pristine knowledge, or do you just want every social group you see as important to be loaded with demographics which support your political faction? (Think carefully--the truth might not be obvious from casual introspection; we are masters at self-delusion when politics is at...
the cry of "Diversity!" is invoked exclusively by those who are trying to import to a group those demographics which tend to offer political support to the left.
I wouldn't mind "importing a demographics which tends to support X" assuming that we continue using the existing filters on content, and require rational comments and avoiding mindkilling politics. The difference between 55% and 44% seems unimportant, because we don't use majority voting in LW anyway. It's not like a 5% advantage would make someone win or lose an election. Un...
For what it's worth, abortion was indeed the motivating example. But maia's right, I wanted to be meta-level - I wanted to avoid people from seeing that I'm talking about tic-tac sympathisers, talking sympathetically about them no less, and assuming that I'm a dirty tic-tac sympathiser myself and have nothing to say to them on the subject of tic-tacs. (I think LW could have handled it, but I'd like to eventually have an audience larger than LW.)
The present value of a commodity reflects the market's best estimate as to the future value of that commodity. You are not smarter than the market; practically nobody is. If the market value of Bitcoin is X, then something not far from X is the best estimate of Bitcoin's near-future value. (The very best guess isn't exactly X because of cost of liquidity and time preferences.)
Since this post is obviously mostly about abortion, you might as well just say so. The only moral dilemmas we currently face in the civilized world that hinge on whether or not something is a moral agent are abortion, and more rarely, whether it should be legal to euthanize humans in persistent vegetative states.
I think the poster's intent was to invent an example so that this post would be on the meta-level, instead of being about a particular issue.
You may have interpreted it as being about a particular issue, but I don't think that was on purpose, as evidenced by the fact that someone else interpreted it as being about a different particular issue.
Was I the only person who shamelessly defected only because the defect/cooperate choice isn't really a prisoner's dilemma at all? Obviously, if enough of us defect that the payout is diminished, the winner receives less, but whoever would be paying for the prize would have that much less money missing from his pocket. I would not have defected if I expected my defection were to result in a net loss of resources. For the 2014 survey, how about we try this again, with the modification if enough people defect for the payout to be reduced, a good of equal m...
For those of you confused by this comment: I believe Manfred assumes Lucius suspected that Hermione was replaced by a polyjuiced Bellatrix Black. Lucius implies that he believes Harry to be a de-powered Voldemort in their discussion at the train station, and also believes Harry to be behind the rescue of Bellatrix from Azkaban. If you rescued your powerful minion, you would want to keep her close about you for your own protection and to accomplish tasks beyond your magical abilities. Hermione Granger is known to associate with Harry Potter, so she would be the ideal candidate for someone to replace with Bellatrix.
If Harry Potter already had the contract written before going into Gringotts, how did Moody's eye not see it? I suppose it is possible that Moody's eye cannot see into the folded space of Harry's pouch, but Harry has no reason to assume as much, and is smart enough not to take the risk. And whether or not Moody can see into folded pouch-space, this line makes no sense at all: "Moody paused as his Eye caught sight of the second half of the document as Harry Potter slowly, as though reluctantly, began to unfold the top upward." Moody's eye can e...
I believe this is a misreading; Winky was there, but the Dark Mark was cast by Barry Crouch Jr. From the climax of Book 4, towards the end of Chapter 35:
I wanted to attack them for their disloyalty to my master. My father had left the tent; he had gone to free the Muggles. Winky was afraid to see me so angry. She used her own brand of magic to bind me to her. She pulled me from the tent, pulled me into the forest, away from the Death Eaters. I tried to hold her back. I wanted to return to the campsite. I wanted to show those Death Eaters what loyalty to the Dark Lord meant, and to punish them for their lack of it. I used the stolen wand to cast the Dark Mark into the sky.
The fact that Quirrell seemed not to know the symbol of the Deathly Hallows is very strange--the symbol is reasonably well-known in the wizarding world, as Grindelwald used it as his own. Which raises the question: was Quirrell's apparent failure to recognize the symbol an oversight on Yudkowsky's part, or an important clue?
As I interpreted canon: Canon!Voldemort also didn't recognize the symbol. Inference: Grindelwald studied the Deathly Hallows particularly and thus learned that symbol, to use as his own. The Deathly Hallows in general are well-known enough to have sayings like "Wand of elder, never prosper" but not the symbol.
I think it somehow relevant that Dumbledore said, "Fred and George Weasley are the Heir of Gryffindor", not "Fred and George Weasley are the Heirs of Gryffindor".
Admittedly, I don't know what it means, but at this point, I think we can safely say that even minor quirks of grammar mean something in HPMoR.
Nicholas Flamel, who is already known to change identities frequently, is the obvious candidate.
(And Flamel could also be Quirrell; Of the canon characters, there are four people likely to be as powerful as MoR Quirrell is: Dumbledore, Grindelwald, Voldemort, and Flamel. He's not Dumbledore; Grindelwald is probably still in Nurmengard; Voldemort is a distinct possibility, but that-one-infamous-post-we-all-know-about is, in my opinion, more likely to be a red herring than truth; Flamel is most likely. If Quirrell were not Flamel, Harry would be correct in...
No, the abruptly-ended and grammatically-incorrect sentence preceding this passage indicates actual discontinuity:
"Dumbledore wasn't being very cooperative, and in any case this was several minutes after the critical location within Time"
Notice the lack of punctuation. The end of this sentence has been lopped off, and deliberately. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not make careless punctuation errors.
Prediction for Chapter 90: Time Pressure, Part 3:
"Wait a moment," you say. "Time Pressure, Part 3? Harry already lost his race against the clock. Why would Chap. 90 be called 'Time Pressures'?"
Because Harry's race against the clock to save Hermione's life has only just begun, and he has slightly less than six hours left. Eliezer mentioned that one of his most significant purposes of Chap. 86 was to update characters' states of knowledge before the next arc. If you recall, in that chapter, Harry learned the word "horcrux."...
It could be House Malfoy and Friends, but if so, we would still need some reason why Quirrell would not have told McGonagall that the troll was likely after Hermione. If Quirrell did want Hermione dead, he would most likely have kept any other potential murderers away from her so that her death could occur at a time and in a manner that would suit him best. So the most probable explanation is that it was, in fact, Quirrell.
Harry knows how smart Quirrell is, and he knows that if it occurred to him that the troll was an attempt on Hermione's life, it would have occurred to Quirrell instantly. We (and Harry) know that Quirrell said nothing to McGonagall, from which Harry will soon infer that Quirrell could have saved Hermione yet did nothing. (Which makes it likely, but not certain, that it was Quirrell who was behind the troll.) In either case Quirrell has reached a point, or is about to reach a point, in his sinister plan where it no longer matters (or perhaps even require...
It's strongly implied that in MoR, just as in canon, Dumbledore is hiding a philosopher's stone in Hogwarts at Flamel's request. Dumbledore even tries to tempt Harry to use Alohomora on the door leading to the stone.
And if Dumbledore has had a chance to examine it, we can be assured that it is real.
Well, Flamel could just use the philosopher's stone to transmute base metals to gold. So I doubt he would bother with commodity-trading. But, yeah, Dumbledore should be a suspect at this point, though I assign a low probability to him being behind this. Dumbledore does not want Harry to be indebted to Malfoy (unless MoR Dumbledore is secretly completely different from canon Dumbledore), and so he would not hinder Harry in his quest to pay off the debt quickly.
Ah, yes, that would prevent Quirrell from being the occlumency teacher. But Mr. Bester could have been allied with or imperiused by Quirrell, and so Quirrell could use Bester or another person to do the memory modifications for him.
And Harry should have mentioned that gold-and-silver scheme here because if Hermione fails to make a philosopher's stone--which for all Harry knows, she very well may--then if Harry does indeed remember his original gold-and-silver scheme, he will use it anyway. And then Hermione would know that Harry deceived her into thinkin...
I think this chapter just proved that someone, most likely Quirrell, has modified Harry's memory. Remember how Harry easily figured out how to quickly make large sums of money by trading gold and silver between the wizard and muggle markets? And now, he doesn't seem to recall that brilliant insight when Hermione mentions that they need a way to make lots of money fast. Moreover, the occlumency teacher with whom Quirrell set up a lesson (possibly Quirrell himself in disguise) mentioned that he would like to be able to remember that same trick after he re...
It can be useful to have more than one brilliant-but-speculative idea for making huge amounts of money, in case one of them fails. Harry sounds like the kind of person who would hold off on proposing uncertain but alluring solutions when the problem is difficult, important, and not urgent.
Hell, they might even come across something a lot better than currency arbitrage -- mass-producing immortality, for instance.
First: Harry and Quirrell can't interact magically. Quirrell didn't Obliviate or Legilimize Harry, and he is not Mr Bester in disguise. (Theoretically he could have Imperiused Sprout to do it, though.)
Second: why would Harry mention that idea here? What purpose would that serve other than to make Hermione feel even more useless and stupid?
Harry seems to have neglected the possibility that the Philosopher's Stone is a general-purpose transmutation device, thus explaining why it would be able to produce both gold and the elixir of life.
And since Fullmetal Alchemist was plagiarized from wizard lore, you'd think this would be a reasonably common hypothesis.