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All of ntijanic's Comments + Replies

Why AI may not foom
ntijanic50

100 slaves are not going to take over the world.

One 10,000 year old human might be able to do it, though.

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-4V_V
Without any legal protection?
The Relation Projection Fallacy and the purpose of life
ntijanic00

Actually, "the ultimate purpose" seems double-confused, lacking both the object and the optimization process :)

If the object is "life", I can't tell if it is supposed to mean life-in-general, or my life, or all our lives.

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 11
ntijanic40

Hypothesis: original (probably Latin) incantations were aliased to "Wingardium Leviosa" and similar because it was easier for Hogwarts students to learn.

Evidence:

  • Powerful wizards still use some Latin spells. Perhaps only up to 7h year magic was aliased?
  • We did not see any non-English wizards cast spells yet. It's likely (and fits into the setting) there are other syntaxes.
  • Due to the Interdict of Merlin, it's possible the Latin alternatives are lost.

The aliasing could be common knowledge among wizards, but not muggleborns. That could explain ... (read more)

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0Desrtopa
Given Harry's experiments with his Bag of Holding at the beginning of the story, it seems that magic recognizes the meanings of words irrespective of whether the speakers actually know what they mean, and it doesn't have to be any particular language. I suspect that the spells mostly sounded meaningful to people of various languages throughout history the way "wingardium leviosa" sounds like a levitatey sort of spell to an English speaker.
6rdb
Last night Damian Conway talked about Lingua-Romana-Perligata as part of his "Fun with Dead Languages" talk. He makes the point that Latin's suffixes don't constrain the word order. Given Harry's dream of destroying Azkaban and Dumbledore in Ch 79 muttering strange incantations that sounded not quite like Latin and echoed in their ears in an unusually creepy fashion, maybe Latin provides a larger space to search for a mnemonic phrase that the Source of Magic will match and action, than languages with a more constrained grammar.