All of tondwalkar's Comments + Replies

I'd prefer never having existed to death at the moment. This might change later if I gain meaningful accomplishments, but I'm not sure how likely that is.

Sorry, how did he stand to benefit from telling Harry about the plaque?

Does Harry even count as an enemy in MoR? Seems like he'd need the blood of someone on Dumbledore's side, and if he's just as arrogant and greedy as he was in cannon, then he'd go for the blood of Dumbledore himself.

Excellent.

Meta 1: It would be nice if reviews rated the material out of 5 or 10.

Right now, reviewers are starting with things like "Absolutely fantastic." and "Extremely, extremely, recommended", which, while are a nice indicator of high-value materials, is less efficient and more fuzzy than a rating on a standard scale. This would also motivate more people with medium value materials to come forward.

Meta 2: I think this would be much better suited to a wiki piece than a post/set of comments. Ideally it'd be in something like a collab... (read more)

0ESRogs
I like the idea of a post + set of comments to gather suggestions, and then another format to collect the finished list.

I'm not sure what you mean by "runs an app for all users", Are you writing a separate app that you want the hangout to automatically open on entry? Doesn't it make more sense to do this the other way around?

1MalcolmOcean
The app runs within Google Hangouts (like drive, chat, youtube, effects) which is part of the draw of using that platform.
1Error
Of course it does, but reality in this case does not appear to make sense. :-(

We're not comparing Dumbledore in his thirties to Snape in his thirties, but Snape in his thirties to AD at "64". If we assume that he's been using his time turner since age 11, like HP (though based on his backstory, it seems he got a large intelligence boost at 10, so that might be where he started), he's effectively over 77 when he fought Grindelwald, giving Snape upwards of 4 decades (longer than he has lived thus far) to reach Grindelwald-defeating levels of power. In addition, we know that Snape has good reasons to hide how powerful he is (... (read more)

0Vaniver
Right; by 'extra decade' I meant another decade above the three Dumbledore was already older than Snape. It seems unlikely to me that what made Dumbledore able to defeat Grindelwald at ~78 was that he was 78, rather than that he was Dumbledore. From EY several comments above: We do know now that Dumbledore had a phoenix to help him out in the duel with Grindelwald, and so we might suppose that the equipment advantage was balanced between the two instead of heavily favoring Grindelwald. (My impression is that the Elder Wand is better to have than a phoenix in a duel, but that's just an impression.) But I don't know what Dumbledore looked like in his early thirties. We see him at 18 and then at 64, and perhaps he passed through where Snape is now at about thirty. My guess is not.

While Snape is in his early thirties, it seems unlikely the extra three decades would make all that much of a difference.

Keep in mind, in HPMoR, it's heavily implied that AD's artificially aged because he's been overusing time-turners, possibly since his Hogwarts days.

0Vaniver
Assuming he's been using the full 6 hours since age 18, that would only give him an extra decade on Snape.

No, HP could go back in time and call himself Tom Riddle. Especially if he was becoming one of those "Dark Wizards who change names like you and I change clothes"

1hairyfigment
...I would dismiss this out of hand, except that "Tom Marvolo Riddle" is a ridiculously appropriate name.

Predictions: Tom Riddle is Hat-n-Cloak (95%). Tom Riddle is female (35%). Tom Riddle was Voldemort, but the title was taken over by Qmort who is not TR (20%). The feeling of doom between HP and Qmort is because of time travel (95%). Qmort is an older HP, sent back in time with memories removed (30%).

2Kindly
Doesn't your 30% prediction imply the 20% prediction?

Since Rowling follows around HP and not HG, we don't actually know how HG thinks. Since JKR wrote the story, she can use preknowledge to make HG arbitrarily smart, and since she doesn't have too large of an impact on what actually happens, she can do this without needing to account for how smart HG is; even if she were to devise some genius plan to beat voldy, she'd have to act through HP, who could easily and stupidly reject her plan offscreen. That is, I'm arguing that even if you kept making HG arbitrarily smart (but not arbitrarily powerful or prophecy... (read more)

0wedrifid
That's arguable but if true it would also demonstrate the point. An actually rational agent in her situation would have made a significant impact. No. That would not be a HG:MoR story. That would be Hermione Granger and the Excessively Upgraded Idiocy All Around Her. This just isn't true. I think you drastically underestimate the difference between the smart and conciencious girl as conceived by Rowling and an actual rational upgrade of Hermione and the consequences that would have. An arbitrary rational Hermione, even with the only the IQ of canon!Hermione, would be an active agent. If not, it isn't Methods of Rationality at all. It's Methods of being a Responsible and Slightly Clever Schoolgirl.

Have you accounted for ambient temperature being the cause of both? Being too cold to work and therefore feeling the need to wrap yourself in something warm? Alternately being warm making you less productive?

I've discovered that my productivity starts to drop off sharply above 73 Fahrenheit, for example.

Well certainly. I wrote that sentence from the perspective of "cannon happens, author follows around writing down the story" rather than "author makes up story." I guess a better way to communicate that would be to say "were we to write HGMoR in the cannon universe, we wouldn't have to change anything."

2wedrifid
That's just the thing: canon!Hermione doesn't act rationally according to the way used here or in MoR. An actual rational!Hermione would act entirely differently and the whole story would change. Rowling did not create a rational Hermione and in fact could not have if she tried. The story would be different.

I think it sounds the way an official lie would sound, and afaik the consequences of botched time travel are truly staggering.

0linkhyrule5
They start with "the Scotland Crater" and go up from there.

Disclaimer: I am thoroughly enjoying HPMOR. That said, I just don't think Eliezer is quite grokking the substance of feminist complaints.

I agree, but I don't think you're quite groking his responses either. His main point is that it's an exercise in futility to apply critical theory to an incomplete work, in particular one that claims to be more complicated than Death Note; for all we know HG asked AD to help him fake her own death, or maybe she's been outsmarting everyone from behind the scenes all long. (Though I admit that both of these are unlikely, they would be within the level of "where did that come from?" that EY's already done)

-1David_Gerard
Then he is simply incorrect. It's not just what you do, it's the way that you do it, at all steps along the way. Having an end in mind doesn't mean you can't be called out on the means.

my first thought was HGMOR would be delightful, and it wouldn't take bending canon nearly as much. It's a lot easier for me to imagine canon Hermione taking an interest in theory of how to think better than canon Harry.

It's been a while since I've read cannon, but isn't this almost exactly what happens in cannon? HGMoR sounds like it'd just be cannon written with JKR following around HG instead of HP (which, admittedly, would be rather interesting)

3wedrifid
JKR couldn't write rationalist fiction. She lacks the relevant domain knowledge. She could plausibly write a spock-rationalist fiction or perhaps responsible-academic fiction.
3NancyLebovitz
Offhand, the only thing I can remember canon Hermione saying about the theory of thinking is the bit where she explains that she remembers more than most people because she pays attention to what she perceives. This seems subjectively plausible to me, though it might be hindsight bias-- that is, sometimes when I don't remember things after first exposure, the trying to remember them just brings up a fog as though those things were never noticed, even though in some cases, I know I was paying some degree of attention. It's just that whatever it was didn't get moved from short-term attention into memory.

but all rewards are subject to Goodhart's Law. I expect to see people doing a lot of ill-thought-out somethings because the reward structure is too simplified.

Well, since the reward structure isn't explicit, and we expect McGonagoll to get much smarter on a much smaller timescale than opportunities to earn a reward by "disobeying McGonagoll according to your own judgement."

Aside from that, take a look at Hermione Granger and the Burden of Responsibility, which is a recursive fanfiction of HPMoR diverges during her trial. It's really only just getting started, but I have hopes.

I've just read the first chapter and this is excellent. Though I'm concerned that the title indicates that it might culminate in Hermonie angst-mongering. If that happens, I might just start a fanfic of order 3 with Amelia Bones as the main character.

0TobyBartels
Yes, I'm starting to think of Spider-Man. But I don't expect this story to go that way.

In my opinion, what was going on was that he wasn't sure what the boundaries that he needed to not cross were, and wasn't sure he could regulate his behavior, so he was trying to avoid further punishment by saying he was helpless and suffering enough already.

This is very enlightening. I'm going to probe this by modulating my response to it, and see what I find. Thanks; one karma point feels insufficent.

I think a post on this (?and related) would be much apprecaited if you and/or someone with similar experience could put one together.

Since then, he's a

... (read more)
1NancyLebovitz
I may write something up when I'm more sure that I'm right and have resolved more of my difficulties. At this point, I've toned down a lot of the self-hatred, but there's an underlying difficulty with doing much of anything that's still a serious problem for me. That last sentence was mostly included because I imagined people wanting to know what happened next. However, it's also evidence that what I was asking of him wasn't as impossible as he initially thought it was.

i.e. unceremoniously killed offscreen

nitpick: Hermionie wasn't just killed onscreen, she was front and center.

a natural, self-protective response to what seems like an impossible demand. Sometimes the demand actually is impossible, sometimes the demand is understood correctly and falsely believed to be impossible, and sometimes the demand is defensively interpreted as impossible because the reasonable part is felt to be not worth doing but it doesn't feel safe to just refuse it.

I'm not sure I follow. What demand?

2NancyLebovitz
This can be a response to any demand which is felt to be impossible. Here's an example which is going to be a little vague because there's some privacy I want to maintain, but recently I demanded that someone not repeat the huge social mistake he'd just made. He started talking about what an awful person he was. In my opinion, what was going on was that he wasn't sure what the boundaries that he needed to not cross were, and wasn't sure he could regulate his behavior, so he was trying to avoid further punishment by saying he was helpless and suffering enough already. Since then, he's apologized in a way which I think means he understands the issues and will do better.

I think "Spontaneous Duplication" is made-up by Minerva or someone as an explaination to wave off anyone who might see mulitple Harrys running around due to the time turner.

0Velorien
Somehow, I am unable to imagine Minerva flat-out lying to a student about an academic fact such as the existence/symptoms of a disease, certainly not without something truly staggering being at stake.

And if Yudkowsky's going to make a Fullmetal Alchemist reference, we know how to make a philosopher's stone, or even crude approximations, but only using human scarifice.

No, it doesn't.

Rather, I meant that it works fine with math mode.

Specifically, it fails on words that have accents.

It doesn't yet understand tex accents, but if you set the encoding using the tex package, you can directly enter è, é, ê, ...

To clarify, I'm not talking about "your identity" here as in the information about what you consider your identity, but rather the referent of that identity.

Ah, it appears we're talking about different things. I'm referring to ideological identity ("I'm a rationalist" , "I'm a libertarian", "I'm pro-choice", "I'm an activist" ), which I think is distinct from "I'm my mind" identity. In particular, you can be primed psychologically and emotionally by the former more than the latter.

1Armok_GoB
It seems like we both, and possibly the original Keeping Your Identity Small article, are committing the typical mind fallacy.

Dibs on 'A Utilful Mind' if you don't take it?

1Peter Wildeford
I ended up going with Everyday Utilitarian, so you can have it.

things like episodic memories (separated from believing the information contained in them)

I'm not sure what you're saying here; you think of your memories as part of your identity?

realtionship[sic] in neutral groups such as a family or a fandom, precommitments, or mannerisms?

These memberships are all heuristics for expected interactions with people. Nothing actionable is lost if you bayes-induct for each situation separately, save the effort you're using to compute and the cognitive biases and emotional reactions you get from claiming "membersh... (read more)

1Armok_GoB
@episodic memories: I don't personally have any like that, but I hear many people do consider the subjective experience of pivotal events in their life as part of who they are. @relationships: I'm talking the literal membership here, the thing that exists as a function of the entanglement between states in different brains. To clarify, I'm not talking about "your identity" here as in the information about what you consider your identity, but rather the referent of that identity. To many people, their physical bodies are part of their identity in this sense. Even distant objects, or large organizations like nations, can be in extreme cases. Just because it's a trend here to only have information that resides in your own brain as part of your identity doesn't mean it's necessary, or even especially common in it's pre form in most places.
0[anonymous]
No, it doesn't. Specifically, it fails on words that have accents.

Paul Graham suggests keeping your identity as small as sustainable. [1] That is, it's beneficial to keep your identity to just "rationalist" or just "scientist", since they contradict having a large identity. He puts it better than I do:

There may be some things it's a net win to include in your identity. For example, being a scientist. But arguably that is more of a placeholder than an actual label—like putting NMI on a form that asks for your middle initial—because it doesn't commit you to believing anything in particular. A scienti

... (read more)
0Armok_GoB
This goes well for belief's included in your identity, but I've always been uncertain about it it's supposed to also extend to things like episodic memories (separated from believing the information contained in them), realtionship in neutral groups such as a family or a fandom, precommitments, or mannerisms?

Hmm, I think I may be misunderstanding what you mean by "many weak arguments." As in, I don't think it's uncommon for physicists to make multiple arguments in support of a proposition, but even each of those arguments, IME, are strong enough to bet at least a year of one's career on (eg the old arguments for renormalization), by contrast with, say, continental drift, where you probably wouldn't be taken seriously if you'd produced merely one or two lines of evidence. What this shares with the "one strong argument" position is that we're... (read more)

With the exception of people on Less Wrong and people in the mathematical community, I’ve almost never seen high functioning people use the “relatively one strong argument” approach.

I think it's more general than that (depending in your definition of the 'mathematical community'). For example, I rarely see physicists attempt to argue something based on many weak arguments, and I think you would find the same to be true of engineers. More generally, I think that anyone who's used to formalism is used to being presented with extremely strong arguments, an... (read more)

2JonahS
The best physicists use the "many weak arguments" approach at least sometimes. See my post on Euler and the Basel Problem for an example of this sort of thing. (Nowadays, physicists fall into the Eulerian tradition more than mathematicians do.) A close friend who's a general relativity theorist has told me that the best physicists rely primarily on many weak arguments.

It's a way to cash out on your reputation. The team that won the Netflix Prize may have ended up with a net gain, if you count the value of having "won the Netflix Prize" on their resume (in terms of both job opportunities and higher salaries afforded), and in order to offer such a reputation boost, Netflix had to have built up a reputation for itself.

Flip-flops are excellent for that reason. I have really sweaty, weird-sized feet, so they're especially nice, and if, like me, you already have a reputation for being eccentric, people won't mind when you show up to nicer events in a blazer, jeans and flip-flops.

Bludgers are still magical and therefore could still "get at" the 'mind' regardless of the physical brain.

A satirization of the mahou shoujo genre? Complete with costumes!

An aside, they way you used "feminist critique" isn't the standard meaning of the phrase. A feminist critique would be a critique from a feminist framework, not a critique of feminism, much like a Bayesian critique of something would argue that it's fallaciously reasoning about probabilities.

3Eliezer Yudkowsky
That is what I mean; HPMOR's Hermione represents a critique of something, but not a "critique from a feminist framework" of that thing.

I suffer the same symptom. (and have an excessive amount of body hair, not that that's more than negligibly indicative of high testosterone levels)

What's the cheapest/easiest way to get tested? (more out of curiosity than anything else)

1[anonymous]
If I understand it correctly, you can go to your physician and ask for it. The test itself is quick, requires a blood sample, and I don't think it is very expensive.

Even if you place literally infinite value on being immortal, I imagine you'd rather spend the time wasted praying on something more likely to make you immortal, eg minimizing your chance of heart disease.