All of Random832's Comments + Replies

Random832-10

You're not likely to find a remotely reasonable hypothesis, even in the Methodsverse where magic abounds, by which the internal parts of a thinking computation can be damaged by damaging the brain, and yet removing the whole brain leaves the soul capable of internal thinking.

Has your hypothesis that thought remains possible after the whole brain has been removed, in fact, been tested?

EDIT: I read your post as meaning that the "fact" that thought remains possible after a brain has been removed [to be cryo-frozen, for instance] was evidence against a soul.

I don't even know any Haskell - I just have a vague idea that a monad is a function that accepts a "state" as part of its input, and returns the same kind of "state" as part of its output. But even so, the punchline was too good to resist making.

How do you write a function for the output of a state machine?

Monads.

0David_Gerard
"What's your utility function?" "This Haskell program." Does the use of the word "function" in "utility function" normatively include arbitrary Turing-complete things?

while they await the outcome of clinical trials and new approaches

http://xkcd.com/989/ seems relevant despite the slightly different subject matter. Clinical trials can't happen if all the potential subjects are frozen.

3lsparrish
The effect does not seem likely to be very strong to me. What we would need for this to be a problem is serious long-term delays in progress. A few short term delays would actually be acceptable in this context. Consider that: * Most potential test subjects lives are currently being wasted. Disease progression and death does not happen on a set schedule, and we only have data and brainpower to support a limited number of experiments anyway. This would give us a high precision control over the death and dying process, making it easier to study. * There is still a pretty good chance of getting volunteers, since it would be a very meaningful way to go. And further, patients who "die" could be given high quality cryonics, or reversibly suspended during the terminal phase of their disease progression. They could then await either em conversion or much better therapies. * With more time available to patients who need it, less risky trials with lower chances of loss of life could be justifiably used. This could perhaps delay the science, but at a reduced direct human death toll. * Reducing the direct political pressure for immediate results on hard to measure outcomes could actually result in less bad data and thus produce faster progress in the long term. The political pressure would be more for accurate data that does not get refuted in the long run. There are a lot of hidden benefits and costs to be considered. Would healthy people use it, like the comic suggests? If so, would it be a net negative or a net positive? It is not clear to me that even STEM people using this on an individual basis is a bad thing for progress -- e.g. some might use it to get past phases of cultural boredom that would otherwise trigger a counterproductive binge of video gaming or scientific crankery. In fact, it might remove counterproductive cranks at a higher rate than productive rationalists, because they (presumably) have lower satisfaction with their current lives. The worst hid

Well, don't forget that it will hit the ground with a force proportional to its weight. You probably wouldn't want him to have dropped it on your head - it would be a rather more unpleasant experience than having a controller thrown at your head.

General Relativity, actually. You could also look for "gravity as a fictitious force".

2Paulovsk
Yeah, I guess one future key ability will be know how keywords use to solve a problem. Using the google, of course.

Large CRTs are made of very thick curved glass. I once did hit one hard enough to chip it, which left a hole several millimeters deep and did not appear to affect the structural integrity of the tube. But I don't know about "that durable" - if you dropped one from a sufficient height it would surely break - but it's more a question of how much force you (or I) can throw a controller with.

0handoflixue
My previous basis for it was my electronics teacher talking about a friend taking one in to a shop, dropping it, and having it shatter. This would have been a height of 4-5 feet, since it was held in arms Maybe modern CRTs are thicker / more durable? Given my electronics teacher, it's also entirely possible he just enjoyed dramatic stories...

when one inevitably fractures from the force of the blows

Define inevitably. I don't think I could throw a controller hard enough to damage a CRT or a rear projector. These suggest designs for protective covers (for the former, put the TV behind thick curved glass; for the latter put it behind a durable plastic sheet held in a rigid frame.

0handoflixue
That was playful exaggeration, sorry ^.^; I am surprised to hear that a CRT is considered that durable. I can bend deadbolts and I've had friends take a metal door off it's frame, so I was raised on an odd sense of what "normal" strength is.

The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates Liouville's Theorem (has a many-to-one mapping from initial conditions to outcomes).

I don't know what Liouville's Theorem is, but this sounds like an objection to not being able to run time backwards.

2Oscar_Cunningham
Liouville's Theorem says that if you know that the state of the universe has to be one of the states in a set A, and then as time passes you run each universe in that set forwards, so that now you know that the universe is in set A', then the "volume" of sets A and A' has to be the same.

I will note that the AI box experiment's conditions expressly forbid a secure environment [i.e. one with inspection tools that cannot be manipulated by the AI]:

the results seen by the Gatekeeper shall again be provided by the AI party, which is assumed to be sufficiently advanced to rewrite its own source code, manipulate the appearance of its own thoughts if it wishes, and so on.

0FeepingCreature
Because that's not the part of the AI safety question that the AI box experiment is designed to test, so for the purpose of the experiment it says, "sure you might catch the AI in a lie, but assuming you don't--"

"escape the testing environment" is poorly defined. Some people read it as "deduce the exploitable vulnerabilities in the system, hack into it, run itself with higher privileges, somehow transmit itself to other machines / the internet at large / infecting people's brains snow-crash style", and others read it as "convince the people running the test to give it more resources (and maybe infect their brains snow-crash style)".

The former can be prevented by having a secure (air gapped?) system, the latter can be prevented by not ... (read more)

1Viliam_Bur
Environment means both hardware and people -- anything the AI has a chance to influence. We could use a narrower definition, but why should the AI respect it? By limiting our map we don't limit the territory. When the AI gets much smarter than humans, we may not understand the output of our inspection tools. They will give us huge amounts of data, and we will be unable to decipher what it all means. Imagine a group of monkeys trying to enslave a human in a cave. Monkeys bring some objects from the jungle to the human and make him produce better food and toys for them (we want the AI to do some real-life optimization, otherwise it's just money wasted on academic exercises). Monkeys understand that human getting closer to the entrance is trying to escape, and will threaten to kill him if he tries. But they don't see the danger of human quietly sitting at the back of the cave, constructing a machine gun from the spare parts.
2Random832
I will note that the AI box experiment's conditions expressly forbid a secure environment [i.e. one with inspection tools that cannot be manipulated by the AI]:
Random832-10

Quoting a physicist on their opinion about a physics question within their area of expertise would make an excellent non-fallacious argument.

"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts."

But since I am running on corrupted hardware, I can't occupy the epistemic state you want me to imagine.

It occurs to me that many (maybe even most) hypotheticals require you to accept an unreasonable epistemic state. Even something so simple as trusting that Omega is telling the truth [and that his "fair coin" was a quantum random number generator rather than, say, a metal disc that he flipped with a deterministic amount of force, but that's easier to grant as simple sloppy wording]

0TheOtherDave
In general, thought experiments that depend on an achievable epistemic state can actually be performed and don't need to remain thought experiments.

Not if their probability of cooperation is so high that the expected value of cooperation remains higher than that of defecting. Or if their plays can be predicted, which satisfies your criterion (nothing to do with my previous plays) but not mine.

If someone defects every third time with no deviation, then I should defect whenever they defect. If they defect randomly one time in sixteen, I should always cooperate. (of course, always-cooperate is not more complex than always-defect.)

...I swear, this made sense when I did the numbers earlier today.

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Specifically, I learned that if you believe suffering is additive in any way, choosing torture is the only answer that makes sense.

Right. The problem was the people on that side seemed to have a tendency to ridicule the belief that it is not.

9TimS
Yes, the ridicule was annoying, although I think many have learned their lesson. The problem with our position is that it leaves us vulnerable to being Dutch-booked by opponents who are willing to be sufficiently cruel. (How much would you pay not to be tortured? Why not that amount plus $10?)

Torture v. Specks

The problem with that one is it comes across as an attempt to define the objection out of existence - it basically demands that you assume that X negative utility spread out across a large number of people really is just as bad as X negative utility concentrated on one person. "Shut up and multiply" only works if you assume that the numbers can be multiplied in that way.

That's also the only way an interesting discussion can be held about it - if that premise is granted, all you have to do is make the number of specks higher an... (read more)

For some reason, people keep thinking that Torture vs. Specks was written as an argument for utilitarianism. That makes no sense, because it's the sort of thing that makes utilitarians squirm and deontologists gloat. What it is, instead, is a demand that if you're going to call yourself a utilitarian, you'd better really mean it.

EY's actual arguments for utilitarianism are an attempt to get you to conclude that you should choose Torture over Specks, despite the fact that it feels wrong on a gut level.

2TimS
I choose specks, but I found the discussion very helpful nonetheless. Specifically, I learned that if you believe suffering is additive in any way, choosing torture is the only answer that makes sense. If you don't believe that (and I don't), then your references to "negative utility" are not as well defined as you think. Edit: In other words, I think Torture v. Specks is just a restatement of the Repugnant Conclusion
Random832210

liquid nitrogen is not a secure encryption method for brains.

It doesn't have to be a secure encryption method to be a lossy compression method.

Random832290

I think depicting ancient philosophers seated on a throne in heaven and the large caption "thou shalt not" sends a... somewhat mixed message about appeal to authority.

3John_Maxwell
"Appeal to authority" doesn't even seem like much of a fallacy to me... If I'm an argument with a non-physicist on whether faster than light travel is possible, and I'm a non-physicist myself, am I better off explaining some elementary understanding of physics I happen to have or quoting a famous physicist? I would think that a summary of the understanding of a famous physicist would be much stronger Bayesian evidence than some elementary secondhand physics explanation from me. Of course, an entire physics textbook, complete with citations of key physics papers and findings, is probably stronger Bayesian evidence still. Edit: Looks as though the poster addresses my point: It sounds as though they're saying it's okay to borrow arguments from people in authority, but they're unclear on whether just taking their opinion at face value is okay. To make your own personal estimate as accurate as possible, it seems like you'd want to average together independent estimates from many people that were familiar with the relevant arguments and evidence, weighting folks according to their expertise/prediction track record. It seems silly to privilege your own estimate. So I'm definitely in favor of relying on this sort of authority for making your own personal estimate, but you might not want to share them to prevent information cascades. See also.
3RomeoStevens
so the poster provides an immediate pop quiz. feature not a bug?

I thought people knew she was a MoR reader.

I took your original post to mean this, and looked for other information about it, and found none.

0komponisto
See here.

Future you "will have had more time to analyze" only if present you decides to actually spend that time analyzing.

0RomeoStevens
I'll let me+1 worry about me+2.

Is there any decision strategy that can do well (let's define "well" as "better than always-defect") against a coin-flipper in IPD? Any decision strategy more complex than always-defect requires the assumption that your opponent's decisions can be at least predicted, if not influenced.

2dlthomas
No, of course not. Against any opponent whose output has nothing to do with your previous plays (or expected plays, if they get a peak at your logic), one should clearly always defect.

I have a proposal for a new structure for poll options:

The top-level post is just a statement of the idea, and voting has nothing to do with the poll. This can be omitted if the poll is an article.

A reply to this post is a "positive karma balance" - it should get no downvotes, and its score should be equal to the number of participants in the poll.

Two replies to the "positive karma balance" post, you downvote one to select this option in the poll.

This way voting either way in the poll has the same cost (one downvote), the enclosing post... (read more)

7HonoreDB
Or just embed a poll.

why do you honestly care about these useless karma-points?

Have you forgotten that people with very low or negative karma have posting delays and cannot downvote?

0SkyDK
I honestly didn't know about the posting delay, but I personally wouldn't assign a lot utility to it. And even less (close to none) to the ability to downvote others. In this case I think a 10 minute delay might help if it is used to check for illusion of transparency and/or lacking steps in his chain of reasoning. But overall, thank you for pointing out the negative consequences of low karma. I'm reading up on it and I must admit I haven't found the right post (read the faq) to cover all the consequences. Still they seem minor at best.
Random832-20

"If you have evidence, state your evidence, update on the evidence presented by others, and everybody wins."

The people who downvote the evidence win more.

In the spoiler problem from a while ago, someone else linked to an example conversation purporting to demonstrate why the policy was a good idea. I demonstrated that it was impossible, once the user had asked his question, for the conversation to have ended without causing the alleged harm done by revealing the spoiler. Someone responded by telling me that it's not up for discussion and no-one except Eliezer is allowed to have an opinion on whether it is a good or effective policy.

0pedanterrific
To clarify, I don't think this, and you are of course allowed to have an opinion (as long as you've filled out the proper paperwork). I just meant that he has veto power. (Also, I was rather frustrated with the conversation at that point. Sorry.)
0thomblake
I don't believe you.
0thomblake
To quote, add a single greater-than sign (>) before the quote.

Are we certain that the amount of time that each rotation takes you actually is an equinoctal hour, or a constant? If broomsticks can use Aristotlean physics, maybe Time Turners can be limited to six solar hours.

Why one statement plus one statement makes two statements, but one expression plus one expression makes one expression; why "x=1; y=1;" is two units, but "(x == 1) && (y == 1)" is one unit?

Because a statement is the fundamental unit of an imperative language. If "x=1; y=1;" were one unit, it would be one statement. Technically, on another level, multiple statements enclosed in braces is a single statement. Your objection does suggest another solution I forgot to put in - ban arbitrarily complex expressions. Then sta... (read more)

1DanArmak
I don't believe this is true, at least not for the usual sense of "statement", which is "code with side effects which, unlike an expression, has no type (not even unit/void) and does not evaluate to a value". You can easily make a language with no statements, just expressions. As an example, start with C. Remove the semicolon and replace all uses of it with the comma operator. You may need to adjust the semantics very slightly to compensate (I can't say where offhand). Presto, you have a statement-less language that looks quite functional: everything (other than definitions) is an expression (i.e. has a type and yields a value), and every program corresponds to the evaluation of a nested tree of expressions (rather than the execution of a sequence of statements). Yet, the expressions have side effects upon evaluation, there is global shared mutable state, there are variables, there is a strict and well-defined eager order of evaluation - all the semantics of C are intact. Calling this a non-imperative language would be a matter of definition, I guess, but there's no substantial difference between real C and this subset of it.
0Viliam_Bur
So the question "what kind of language are we trying to make?" must be answered before "what syntax would make it most legible?". Assuming an imperative language, the simplest solution would be one command per line, no exceptions. There is a scrollbar at the bottom; or you can split a long line into more lines by using temporary variables. No syntax can make all programs legible. A good syntax is without exceptions and without unnecessary clutter. But if the user decides to write programs horribly, nothing can stop them. An important choice is whether you make formatting significant (Python-style) or not. Making formatting significant has an advantage that you would probably format your code anyway, so the formatting can carry some information that does not have to be written explicitly, e.g. by curly brackets. But people will complain that in some situations a possibility to use their own formatting would be better. You probably can't make everyone happy.

If the "Muggleborns-are-weaker" theory is true, then it makes sense.

Pretty sure this theory has been unambiguously dismissed both in canon and in MoR.

I think both have been silent on the question of whether there is any notion of inherent "power levels" at all, let alone whether it is heritable or whether it is correlated to being a "muggleborn".

EDIT: It's clear in MoR that - if Harry's hypothesis on magic heritability is true (a big if), then other non-binary factors seem unlikely to be correlated to being a "muggl... (read more)

What would you replace the semicolon with?

There are a few obvious answers: One is to simply not allow multiple statements on the same visual line (even if they are closely related and idiomatic). Another is to define the semicolon (or equivalent) as a separator, with the side effect that you can no longer have a single statement split across multiple visual lines. Another is to, along with the 'separator' solution, add an additional symbol for splitting long statements across multiple visual lines - as in earlier Visual Basic. And yet another option is to have a separator and "guess" whether they meant a line break to end a statement or not - as in Javascript and modern Visual Basic.

2loup-vaillant
You can also mix approaches: optional semicolons, but use indentation to guess if it's the same instruction or not. That way: // 3 instructions blah; blah blah // 2 instructions blah blah blah // 1 instruction (indentation is significant!) blah blah blah // This one is tricky. Id' say syntax error, or a warning blah; blah blah // This looks better, more obvious to me: 2 instructions blah; blah blah // Alternatively, this one may also count for 2 instructions blah; blah blah // begin of a new block appropriate_keyword blah blah blah // end of a block (one instruction in the inner block, one instruction in the outer block). blah blah // 2 instructions (but frankly, I'd provide a warning for the superfluous ";") blah; blah; This should be flexible enough and unambiguous enough.
0Viliam_Bur
I spent a lot of time thinking about this, and now it seems to me that this is a wrong question. The right question is: "how to make the best legible language?" Maybe it will require some changes to the concept of "statement". Why one statement plus one statement makes two statements, but one expression plus one expression makes one expression; why "x=1; y=1;" is two units, but "(x == 1) && (y == 1)" is one unit? What happens if a statement is a part of an expression, in an inline anonymous function? Where should we place semicolons or line breaks then? Sorry, I don't have a good answer. As a half-good answer, I would go with the early VB syntax: the rule is unambiguous (unlike some JavaScript rules), and it requires a special symbol in a special situation (as opposed to using a special symbol in non-special situation). Another half-good answer: use four-space tabs for "this is the next statement" and a half-tab (two spaces) for "here continues the previous line". (If the statement has more than two lines, all the lines except the first one are aligned the same; the half-tabs don't accumulate.)

Why is it that wherever I see "greens and blues" mapped to real-world politics, "green" are the liberals and "blue" are the conservatives? example.

EDIT: I misread your comment.

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Well, if I were comparing it to spelling out the whole name, you'd be right. But I was comparing it to "MoR!Harry". EDIT: Which makes my response relevant to yours.

1pedanterrific
Yes, and it's Verres, not Veras. What's your point? I noticed that, I was just answering a different question.

The fact that the conversation doesn't end with her actually saying Riddle is what would prompt readers to look it up. Are you saying that readers that are still with the fic after eighty chapters haven't learned enough about rationality to take two minutes to verify an assumption after noticing they are confused?

He said he wasn't going to lie to us anymore.

If that meant he couldn't ever make a conversation that seems to be going one way but turns out to be different a few paragraphs later, it would lead to a VERY boring story.

P.S. My point was that th... (read more)

Before the date change, there was a legitimate chance that the reader would come away from the discussion thinking that the person Bones was describing actually was Riddle, and that both Bones and Quirrell understood her to have been talking about Riddle. Which if unintended is a far greater problem than "thinking Bones was about to name Riddle, then it turns out no". This was, in fact, my reading when I was actually going through the chapter.

(tl;dr: It's not a "tease" that Bones was about to name Riddle that's the problem, the problem ... (read more)

0Percent_Carbon
"OhmygodohmygodOHMYGOD! Bones is going to figure out Quirrell is Voldemort! OHMYGOD! What's he going to do?!?! He's surrounded by aurors, he's in DMLE headquarters!... Oh my GOD! Those aurors are so screwed!!" looks up Tom Riddle online because that's totally what all readers would do "Oh, hm. That's not Riddle then. I wonder who it is?" ... Are you really suggesting that EY means the reader to do this? He said he wasn't going to lie to us anymore. See's low-probability theory of tease and WHAM involves EY lying to his readers, but your take on it that they were supposed to be totally tricked until the look it up online (?!?!) is turns that up to ridiculous levels.

Do the bishops have to be in legal positions? EDIT: already answered

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0Thomas
They can be anywhere. The same color, too.

That assumes the small numbers weren't the test.

I was under the impression this was a community rule. People were certainly talking as if they believed in the logical basis for having the policy in order to prevent people from getting spoiled, rather than just doing what he says.

3pedanterrific
If Eliezer unretracted the Author's Note I highly doubt anyone would argue to keep the policy.
-3pedanterrific
What I want to know is, why are you arguing about this with everyone except the person whose opinion actually matters? Just PM Eliezer and have done.

My theory was correct: the policy did not prevent that user from being told the spoiler. You may say this is because it was violated, as of course it was, but what was the correct response?

"We can't tell you due to the spoiler policy"? "Ryvrmre fnvq fb va na rneyvre nhgube'f abgr gung jnf ergenpgrq"? Would either of those, or indeed any response, have resulted in that user not finding out about it?

If someone says something similar in the next thread, what would you have me do?

0pedanterrific
The same thing I did then: inform them that it is a spoiler, and give them the option to find out.

I'm actually a bit surprised now that I'm the only one who thought "a million paperclips doesn't really sound like a lot."

3JGWeissman
Whenever I encounter a contrived scenario designed to test my decision theory or morality, I just assume the numbers involved are large enough to be compelling.

Out of interest, and as an experimental test of the point I made earlier, what sort of responses did those comments receive?

2pedanterrific
Here's one.
Random832320

The other day I was thinking about Discworld, and then I remembered this and figured it would make a good rationality quote...

[Vimes] distrusted the kind of person who'd take one look at another man and say in a lordly voice to his companion, "Ah, my dear sir, I can tell you nothing except that he is a left-handed stonemason who has spent some years in the merchant navy and has recently fell on hard times," and then unroll a lot of supercilious commentary about calluses and stance and the state of a man's boots, when exactly the same comments c

... (read more)
2tut
Sounds like Vimes doesn't like Sherlock Holmes much.
RobinZ170

Reminded of a quote I saw on TV Tropes of a MetaFilter comment by ericbop:

Encyclopedia Brown? What a hack! To this day, I occasionally reach into my left pocket for my keys with my right hand, just to prove that little brat wrong.

Random832100

No fractional-reserve banking does not imply this - there could be lenders (whether goblins or wizards) with a large supply of their own gold which they use to make loans. Or landowners could sell property with a "rent to own" payment plan. Fractional-reserve banking is only necessary if you want to lend someone else's gold.

8gwern
I was not using implies in the logical deduction sense. Not having fractional-reserve banking eliminates a massive source of capital which could be used for mortgage lending and ceteris paribus will reduce such lending, does it not?

The rule is that it's only spoilage if you say both things in cleartext in the same post. Yes, I agree, it's a stupid rule, but it is the rule, and I was angry because that argument was used specifically against my claim that it's inconsistently enforced.

"edit the tone to something you wouldn't have to apologize for." I could only do so honestly if this did not make me angry. EDIT - done. I'm still a bit angry about it though...

4thomblake
I wouldn't normally see that as worse than doing something while apologizing for it. This isn't Brockian Ultra Cricket.
0loserthree
It may be difficult to take an apology like this at face value when you could just go back and edit the tone to something you wouldn't have to apologize for. You either put it in before you clicked 'Comment' the first time or you hit Edit to put it in. Also, he said, "you know perfectly well." This communicates that the conclusion you would draw is the correct one. And that is spoilage.

This is not a point for using it for something that the majority of people posting in the thread already know.

If spreading spoilers hurts then its hurt is not limited to vulnerable people posting in the thread, but encompasses all vulnerable people reading the thread.

The context of this post was "rot13" vs "a proper collapsing or color-based spoiler tag to be implemented in markdown", so this is not sufficient to make difficulty a point in rot13's favor, even if it ever was. The people who don't want to read spoilers don't have to... (read more)

To expand on this - a counterfactual might predict "and then we would still have dirigibles today", or not, if asking "what if the Hindenburg disaster had not occurred." It would probably NOT predict who would be president in 2012, neither would it predict that in a question wholly unrelated to air travel or lighter-than-air technology. An alternate history fiction story might need the president for the plot, and it might go with the current president or it might go with Jack Ryan. An alternate history timeline is somewhere in the middl... (read more)

Login required. Summarize?

2TheOtherDave
How odd! When I went there through google it didn't ask for a login, but when I follow the link it does. Anyway, summarized, his point is that the benefits to the right audience of using the right word at the right time outweigh the costs to everyone else either looking it up and learning a new word, getting the general meaning from context, or not understanding and ignoring it. But like much of Buckley, the original text is worth reading if you enjoy language. Googling "Buckley eristic lapidary November" should get you a link that works.

It wouldn't abolish the whole concept of copyright - just characters-and-scenarios copyright, of which I am not sure what the actual legal basis it originates in is, or to what extent it has been tested in court.

2komponisto
Yes, I meant for the word "whole" to modify the word "concept", not the word "copyright". That is, my sentence was meant to be read as: Distinguish between the scope of copyright (i.e. what kinds of items it applies to) and the force of the same (how much activity it prohibits within its scope). The emphasis of my claim was on the force rather than the scope.

For how large n can this be generalized to "any n political views form a hyperplane on which no other political view held by any person exactly lies"?

0Manfred
d-1, at least.

Only an issue if making the elixir consumes the stone (which is more what I was getting at) - one already exists, so it's a sunk cost.

It could also be an obstacle to mass production if the rate at which it can be produced with the existing supply of stones is insufficient to make enough volume for mass distribution.

-1LauralH
The best "theory" I read was that only the person who makes the Stone can drink the Elixir, which would explain why only Mr and Mrs Flamel have benefited from it.
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