Well, part of it is that Quirrel is Voldemort in canon, which is significant evidence that Harry doesn't have.
I don't think it's a good idea to do a formal memorization of something that's not based on any kind of scientific research.
On the other hand, one should consider not only what was said, but also what should have been said.
Neutral plot possibility: usually, dying minds aren't felt in the wizarding world. Something unusual was going on, and I don't know what it was.
This seems unlikely. There was a mention about ghosts being caused by "the burst of magic that accompanied the violent death of a wizard" (or something along those lines -- I don't feel like looking up the exact quote right now.)
Counter-evidence: Harry produces blue and bronze sparks at Ollivander's.
As long as we're sticking necks out, though:
Definitely: The horcrux technology uses the ghost phenomenon. Specifically, by causing the violent death of a wizard under controlled conditions (i.e., murder) it's possible to harness the powerful burst of magic to make a ghost of the living caster instead of of the dying victim: a backup copy. A ghost may be static data rather than a running instance, but hey, so is a cryo patient.
Definitely: Baby Harry was overwritten with a horcrux-ba
It's not obvious to me how to fake the soul releasing. It was perceived by the magic-sense, not just with the muggle senses.
Just because $CELEBRITY uses it that way doesn't make it right. This usage is conflating two usefully distinct concepts.
It's only testable in one direction -- if you like, "never" is testable but "ever" isn't. I don't have a formal argument to hand, but it seems vaguely to me that a hypothesis preferably-ought to be falsifiable both ways.
The story is, in large part, about the structure of the story: Pluto's tragic flaw is that he's thinking about his real life in terms of story structure.
Consider the epistemic state of someone who knows that they have the attention of a vastly greater intelligence than themselves, but doesn't know whether that intelligence is Friendly. An even-slightly-wrong CAI will modify your utility function, and there's nothing you can do but watch it happen.
Not really relevant here, but I only just now got the pun in CFAR's acronym.
You may be right, but I don't trust a human to only arrive at that conclusion if it's true. I think we ought to refrain from pressing D, just in case.
Depending on how smart I feel today, anywhere from -10 to 40 decibans.
(edit: I remember how log odds work now.)
I think a more plausible scenario for the atomic theory being wrong would be that the scientific community -- and possibly the scientific method -- is somehow fundamentally borked up.
Humans have come up with -- and become strongly confident in -- vast, highly detailed, completely nowhere-remotely-near-true theories before, and it's pretty hard to tell from the inside whether you're the one who won the epistemic lottery. They all think they have excellent reasons for believing they're right.
You are way overconfident in your own sanity. What proportion of humans experience vivid, detailed hallucinations on a regular basis? (not counting dreams)
The original question was:
Do you really think encouraging this idea in general is good?
That is: assuming it is possible to reduce bad uses at the cost of also reducing good uses, should one do so?
Your reply seems to assume that the bad uses can't be reduced, which contradicts the pre-established assumptions. If you want to change the assumptions of a discussion, please include a note that you are doing so and ideally a short explanation of why you think the previous assumptions should be rejected in favor of the new ones.
So it's a great idea as long as only causes you agree with get to use the superweapon?
Well, if you can't stop people from using a superweapon for bad causes, it may be an improvement to see to it that it's also used for good causes.
Note that the actual children's program includes plague and famine, more famine, slavery, mind control, plague again, more mind control, recreational infanticide, and slavery again.
Can you guarantee that a TSPO wouldn't see epiphenomenal consciousness?
I vaguely object to the common practice of soliciting responses, and implying that the results will/may be meaningful, without simultaneously precommitting to a particular mapping of raw results to inferred meaning. (The precommitment can be done while keeping the mapping secret, by using a hash algorithm.)
Recall that the goal isn't to undershoot reality every time, but to do so half the time.
assuming symmetry and some relation to a linear component of your utility fuction, and so on...
Unfortunately, if there is disagreement merely about how much prior uncertainty is appropriate, then this is sufficient to render the outcome controversial.
My general impression is that Bayes is useful in diagnosis, where there's a relatively uncontroversially already-known base rate, and frequentism is useful in research, where the priors are highly subject to disagreement.
1000 - (random 6-digit integer)*(10^-(the XKCD number))
Zork is a classic computer game (or game series, or game franchise; usage varies with context) from c.1980.
Insufficient: the colony ship leaves no evidence.
I suspect that the answer to the alien-ball case may be empirical rather than philosophical.
Suppose that there existed quantum configurations in which the alien threw in a red ball, and there existed quantum configurations in which the alien threw in a blue ball, and both of those have approximately equal causal influence on the configuration-cluster in which we are having (approximately) this conversation. In this case, we would happen to be living in a particular type of world such that there was no fact of the matter as to which color ball it was (except that e.g. it mostly wasn't green).
My first reaction is that this would increase the expected cost of revival, for the same reason that it's harder to get plane tickets if you're in a group that wants to sit near each other.
That is a valid line of reasoning that arrives at the same conclusion, but it's not the reasoning put forth in the fic.
I started reading this fic, and... we need to talk.
In chapter 2, the protagonist tries to think through the practical implications of being female. The result is one of the worst examples I've seen of male nerd cluelessness about women, to the point that I would have sooner expected to see it as a satire than as a real example.
Lest anyone who hasn't read the fic think I'm exaggerating, the offending paragraph runs as follows:
...I waved [my tail] back and forth again, and as it brushed against my hind end... I might as well face up to another aspect of my ch
Oh, come now; if I suddenly acquired new sex-related complications on the order of being able to get pregnant, and I was also a new species, I'd probably want to avoid that for at least a while. The character doesn't know about what birth control may or may not be available, what STDs may or may not be rampant, what pregnancy and childbirth are like for cows, or what the sexual mores of the society she's in might be! And also has much more on her mind than figuring out how to get laid, let alone with species she's never considered fornicating with - and ...
For strength, you use Dugbogs that were crushed by a strong Re'em.
For heat, you use bronze that was forged in a hot forge.
For immortality, you use a corpse that was burned by an immortal phoenix.
There's not (last I checked) a community consensus on the issue, and I'd rather isolate the meta-discussion to its own thread, rather than splattered all over anywhere Alicorn posts a comment.
An ignore feature would indeed be a significant improvement. I'm not convinced that it's strictly necessary or sufficient, but I do think that it would be better to do than not.
The votable texts on Fimfiction are generally much longer, so one is less likely to pay attention to a thing unless one already expects it to be worth reading.
Perhaps I'm overestimating human nature, but Lars reads to me like an outgroup stereotype.
I doubt that a rogue moderator would receive express advance approval of abusive actions. If Eliezer says that Alicorn may ban certain comments, then it is not abusive for Alicorn to ban those comments.
If Eliezer's approval makes the action tautologically non-abusive then please act as if I substituted a different word that means something along the lines of "detrimental, innapropriate, politically ill advised, deprecated and considered 'naughty' by user:wedrifid". ;)
Citation needed. This sounds plausible enough that people are likely to listen to it, so I'd like some sort of confirmation that it's based in fact.
Crossposted from the WMG page.
Under the potion conservation rule, creating an Elixir of Life would require inputting some sort of immortality. Fawkes killed Narcissa to create an Elixir ingredient.
Edit: I'm an idiot.
This should have been called The Iterated True Prisoner's Dilemma. I thought the number of rounds was going to be randomized on a waiting-time distribution.
Advertising is regulatory capture of the peer-to-peer reputation system.
The cluster is more visible among the categories as such than among the persons who are members of the categories.
Downvoted on a technicality. I think that as we reach the limits of what silicon can do for us, Moore's law will continue via some other kind of technology.
Assuming our MMS-prior uses a binary machine, the probability of any single hypothesis of complexity C=X is equal to the total probabilities of all hypotheses of complexity C>X.
Yes. However, since the point of the game is to display beliefs that you hold and others don't, you should choose the phrasing that makes your confidence higher than LW's. That is: if you think other LWers are 5% confident of X, then you should say you're 10% confident of X; and if you think other LWers are 15% confident of X, then you should say you're 90% confident of not-X.
The logo seems to be being loaded from cfar.katiehartman.com; this should instead be hosted locally.
That's a good point, but I'm still not convinced.
Hugging is, potentially, fast: if A tries to hug B and B pulls away, a hug has still occurred. Sex takes longer: there's complicated steps involving disrobing and so forth. Your argument applies to, say, groping; but if B doesn't want to cooperate then that becomes relevant before sex has occurred. It's clear ("safe", "take matters into her own hands") that there is not a reliable way of getting out of sex.
Also, the dialogue ("Prohibition", "too much") seems to suggest social acceptance.