Just musing on how LW has had a profound impact on my life. It was a strong influence in my deconversion from theism, it's helped me make significant medical decisions, and I'm in love with someone I met at a LessWrong meetup, as well as another person whose first interaction with me was a Bayes theorem joke.
Believing in Santa was not acceptable to my Christian fundamentalist parents. However, they also had the excuse of being immigrants, so they implied (and perhaps it's even true) that believing in Santa was not common in their culture: "The children in this country think that Santa is real. I don't know why their parents want them to believe in fairytales!" I was never told to hide the truth from other kids, and I don't recall if the subject ever came up in my interactions with other kids. We still had Christmas gifts, a tree, sang Christmas songs...
My preferred transhumanist "eutopia" is one where people generally do not die, and new people generally are not created, but if for some reason people do have to be created, they are created with adult-level competencies such as I described above.
I think that the vast majority of people who currently have parental desires would not get to satisfy those desires in my eutopia, because their desires can only be satisfied in a world with a class of temporarily less-competent people. Are you suggesting that "people whose parental desires can only...
Of course I chose that word because it's vague. I guess, if I have to narrow it down, it's a feeling that something is disrespectful.
I think people's reasons for having kids usually fall into one of the following categories:
It might be more obvious why I find 1, 3, and 4 to be disrespectful? So I'll...
I probably would not join, but I would try to research it to figure out why people who join usually like it. Depending on what I learned, I could change my mind.
What I would prefer is to have the option of sending/receiving thoughts/emotions/memories when and with whom I choose, with consent of those involved. Other mental abilities would of course have to be implemented as well, to allow this kind of telepathy to be manageable.
Awhile back I posted a comment on the open thread about the feasibility of permanent weight-loss. (Basically: is it a realistic goal?) I didn't get a response, so I'm linking it here to try again. Please respond here instead of there. Note: most likely some of my links to studies in that comment are no longer valid, but at least the citations are there if you want to look those up.
Being a transhumanist, and being good at the kind of mental gymnastics that allowed him to do partial transfiguration, Harry might be able to change his Patronus into any form he likes if he tries hard enough. We know mental stuff can change Patronuses in canon: Tonks' Patronus changed due to her feelings for Lupin, though she didn't do it on purpose.
The episodic nature of this story is wearing on me a bit. I'm not talking about wanting to know what happens and having to wait for that knowledge to be doled out bit by bit. That's pretty much fine. It's the feeling that there's a grand overarching plot that's being distracted from by Plots of the Month. Even if the PotM do contribute to the overall plot--and they probably do--it feels like they do so in a rather meandering, patchwork way. Where's my beloved "use science to figure out the nature of magic, and use that to cure death for everyone" plotline? Will we finally get back to it now that Hermione's dead?
I was confused by the way he was using the term "non-determinism". Then I read this:
It's important to understand that computer scientists use the term "nondeterministic" differently from how it's typically used in other sciences. A nondeterministic TM is actually deterministic in the physics sense
-Theoretical Computer Science Stack Exchange
Assuming that person was correct, then it seems like Aaronson is responding to an argument that uses the physics sense of "non-determined", but replying with the CS sense--which I'm thin...
I'd really like it if someone could explain to me what Aaronson is saying here:
...I've often heard the argument which says that not only is there no free will, but the very concept of free will is incoherent. Why? Because either our actions are determined by something, or else they're not determined by anything, in which case they're random. In neither case can we ascribe them to "free will."
For me, the glaring fallacy in the argument lies in the implication Not Determined ⇒ Random. If that was correct, then we couldn't have complexity classes lik
In the absence of other evidence, could you not use some sort of complexity measure to estimate that, if our universe is being simulated, the simulating universe is more likely to have simpler laws than more complex ones? (And maybe even that having no simulating universe--meaning our universe is not a simulation--is even simpler, and therefore more likely?) But I have no idea what the actual difference in probabilities would be, if you could.
Well, people usually enjoy yummy food even if they have no, uh... co-eating attraction? to the person they're eating it with. Something like "co-eating attraction" could exist, maybe there are people out there who have that, where they experience an arousal of their gustatory desires in response to another person, but I don't think that's typical. (I hope it's clear that what I'm talking about is different from the quite common phenomenon of food being more enjoyable when other factors, such as the company, ambiance, etc. are also enjoyable.)
Sexu...
My sexual weirdtopia is that the majority of people self-modify (using some sort of technology) to eliminate their sexual attractions and romantic attractions. They still feel other kinds of love and affection, and they still desire closeness with others. They might choose to enjoy pleasures* as intense as sex together with someone they love, but it's more like people eating delicious pie together; it's not driven by attraction. Sexual and romantic love only remain to a minority of people who chose not to follow the trend.
(*Intense pleasures delivered via a little light wire-heading, perhaps, but not to the level that would cause you to ignore the rest of life.)
Sometimes players like to feel they've stymied the DM, for instance by using a loophole to bypass a whole series of obstacles and jump straight to the win. As DM I would sometimes set up situations like that, hoping that they would think of the loophole, and then acting all chagrined when they did. :) But of course the win came with complications of its own, which led to the main plot I was actually trying to get to. (Or if they don't win, I'd have another way to get them there.) Anyway, the point is that it can be fun for the players to feel like they hav...
Some strangely common childhood beliefs:
Everyone except you is a robot
Your life is like the Truman Show
In the "Probability" section, you say:
Suppose you start out 85% confident that the one remaining enemy soldier is not a sniper. That leaves only 15% credence to the hypothesis that he is a sniper.
But in the next section, "The Problem of Priors", you say:
In the example above where you're a soldier in combat, I gave you your starting probabilities: 85% confidence that the enemy soldier was a sniper, and 15% confidence he was not.
Seems like you swapped the numbers.
Potential scenarios:
1: Alfred and Bob really do support the same agenda, but Alfred thinks Bob's tone makes him unpersuasive.
Alfred pretends to support Bob's agenda, but is just a concern troll.
Alfred is open about disagreeing with Bob's agenda, and directs his criticisms at Bob's tone rather than engaging with Bob's actual argument.
I interpret the opening sentence of that page as referring to scenarios 2 and 3, in that order:
sometimes by Concern trolls and sometimes as a Derailment
Here's some more stuff from that page which seems to describe s...
It's pretty cool that you are a friendship slut platonically promiscuous less likely than average to reject someone approaching you for affection. Advertising this might reduce your status, but you'll probably get more hugs overall. I say, go ahead and publicly spell out your unusual openness (by telling people your rules, etc).
I was going to reply to you about the feasibility of weight loss in general (you haven't said you're interested in weight loss, but that's what people usually do Atkins for), but my comment really wasn't answering your question, so I posted in the open thread instead. Here it is if you're interested.
Liron's post about the Atkins Diet got me thinking. I'd often heard that the vast majority of people who try to lose weight end up regaining most of it after 5 years, making permanent weight loss an extremely unlikely thing to succeed at. I checked out a few papers on the subject, but I'm not good at reading studies, so it would be great to get some help if any of you are interested. Here are the links (to pdfs) with a few notes. Anyone want to tell me if these papers really show what they say they do? Or at any rate, what do you think about the feasibilit...
do you think anyone would complain about actual people smelling gender-inappropriately?
I've never heard anyone complain about someone else's scent being gender-nonconforming, but I have noticed a few men being careful that their own scented products conform. Not that often, though. Actually it's more common in my experience for people to worry that someone else (like, someone they're buying a gift for) won't want to wear other-gender-associated scents. For example, my mother-in-law gave us some floral-scented fabric softener while implying that my husband might not like it used on his clothes (in fact he likes it).
I guess your post isn't really suited for this context because it's basically just telling us what your preferences are. Oh, well, I find it interesting to see what people's preferences are. And it gives me an excuse to tell you mine. I would prefer a world in which existing people did not die and new people were not created. If for some strange reason new people simply had to be created, they definitely would not be created as utterly dependent creatures who gradually develop personhood. Imagining a world with few children gives you a feeling of wrongness? Well, thinking about childhood gives me a feeling of wrongness. I really hope we get rid of childhood someday.
It's posted in the hpmor.com author's note due to FFN being unresponsive: http://hpmor.com/notes/83/
In Ch 45, Harry thinks:
I comprehend your nature, you symbolize Death, through some law of magic you are a shadow that Death casts into the world.
If this is true, it's possible that as long as death exists (for wizards, anyway), it will continue to cast its shadows, and so the dementors can never be all destroyed. Maybe they'll just respawn or something. In fact, maybe when Harry destroyed that one in Ch 45, a dementor respawned back at Azkaban without anyone noticing. Do the guards keep a count of dementors?
That's an interesting possibility, but I favour the interpretation that this is the source of dementors:
Even so, the most terrible ritual known to me demands only a rope which has hanged a man and a sword which has slain a woman; and that for a ritual which promised to summon Death itself - though what is truly meant by that I do not know and do not care to discover, since it was also said that the counterspell to dismiss Death had been lost.
- Quirrell, Chapter 74
It fits very nicely. Dementors (Death) were unkillable (undismissable) because the "true" patronus charm (counterspell) had been lost.
Has Sam Harris stated his opinion on the orthogonality thesis anywhere?