All of undermind's Comments + Replies

Love it -- mainly because it invokes one of my favourite paradoxes.

If you preach hypocrisy, and you are in fact hypocritical, than you're not a hypocrite. And if you aren't a hypocrite, then you are.

3DanielLC
The paradox arises only if you aren't hypocritical about anything else.

“Clever kids in Ravenclaw, evil kids in Slytherin, wannabe heroes in Gryffindor, and everyone who does the actual work in Hufflepuff.”

You've already said it. But it doesn't hurt to repeat.

7[anonymous]
My girlfriend and I always joke that Hufflepuff needs to seize the means of production.

I'm skeptical that experiments involving rubber hands are an effective way to gain social status.

You have some decent arguments (though ChristianKI's critiques show where they need work), but I think the weirdness factor is just too high. Even if someone were personally convinced, what happens when they try to tell their friends?

Mainly I found it very cool to read about Ramachandran and the table. It's especially interesting in the context of embodied cognition. If our mental lives are determined and made meaningful by the fact that we have physical bodi... (read more)

2Gram_Stone
Maybe that was a joke, but just in case it wasn't: It's not something I can prove here, but I said that because I assumed that the demonstration would impress someone in the same way that an optical illusion or a magic trick does. I'm not so impressed by magic tricks these days (unless they're absolutely nuts of course), but I can imagine that happening to a lot of people. And I think that it can be leveraged further than your average magician leverages a magic trick because the people at CFAR wouldn't just stop at 'magic tricks'; they would have other interesting exercises to show you: "Now that you've seen how your perceptions can be affected by heuristics, I'm going to show you how your thinking can be affected by them." Where do my arguments need work? If you're talking about ChristianKI suggesting that this could be empathy rather than the anticipation of pain, I don't think that that's the case here because, as I mentioned in my conversation with him below, some subjects reported mistaking the rubber hand for their 'real' hand: Some subjects also withdraw their 'real' hand from the experimenter as if it were at risk of injury: I was really imagining this in the context of a CFAR workshop. I'm not sure how it would go for people trying to show/tell their friends about it either. I'm willing to bet that the success rate would be positively correlated with the amount and quality of the rationality training that the experimenter had received. What exactly do you mean by the 'weirdness factor?' Like: "Hey man; why are you coming towards me with that rubber hand?" I think that it would be pretty rare for people to just refuse to see the demonstration, because then they would look afraid or close-minded. Slightly related to this and pretty cool in my opinion: I was thinking about this as I was falling asleep, and I looked at my body, and for a few seconds it looked like it was part of the environment instead of 'me.' It was pretty amazing.

In any reasonable class, the score should have exceeded 100%.

Perhaps in any ordinary class at a North American institution. But I don't think such grading schemes are reasonable -- there's more to reach for (and more humility, and much finer discrimination) when 80% is difficult to achieve.

5Nornagest
Yeah, bearing in mind that the mapping from percentage scores to letter grades or the equivalent is pretty much arbitrary, I much prefer systems where some of the problems presented are really hard and the grade boundaries placed correspondingly lower. It allows for more ambition and more flexibility, and perhaps more importantly it's just more interesting than a system where you get a perfect score if you don't screw up each of twenty virtually identical basic exercises. I still have fond memories of a high-school physics class where I once earned an A on a test with a score of 57%. (The median was somewhere in the 30s.) That presumes it's real difficulty rather than busywork or pointless procedural stuff, though, which is harder to design and in some fields harder to grade: in mathematics you can grade only on the final answer (with partial credit if you e.g. obviously lost a sign somewhere), but that's not true for something like e.g. physics lab notebooks.
4zedzed
Well, yes, but in my judgement, OP has at least reached the point where marginal skill at algebra won't translate into marginal gains in things OP's interested in. In particular, learning algebra is a means to an end, and that end is calculus. That requires being good enough to not be limited by sketchy knowledge of algebra when you get to calculus, not being good enough to ace the AMC10 (warning: nerd snipe). I've updated my comment to reflect that getting all the way to AMC10-acing levels is a poor use of time, and were I running the class, I wouldn't encourage it. (On the other hand, if you're under the age of 16 and have talent for math, then getting to AMC-acing levels of algebra is a fine use of your time. If you plan on attending university in America, I'm given to understand that the elite universities you're going to want to gain admissions to take AMC scores because they have so many indistinguishable SAT-math scores. Even if not, getting that good at algebra may be a good use of your time if it means you can have high scores in math competitions to your name. If that's not true, then your time is probably better spent reading, say, Spivak or something like 6.042J (for anyone interested, read the first 4 chapters of the 6.042J text, then Spivak, then the rest of 6.042J. And (this should go without saying), watch the lectures and do the problem sets. One does not simply get good at math without a ridiculous amount of practice.))

No, you didn't.

And kudos (in the form of an upvote) to you for suggesting something to improve the niceness of rationalists -- as has been pointed out many times, that's something we should work on.

Yeah, instrumental rationality is (epistemically) easier -- on the writer as well as on the reader. Epistemic rationality requires rigor, which usually implies a lot of math. Instrumental rationality can be pretty successful with a few examples and a moderately useful analogy.

I had that problem too (from the commentary here, this lack of specific examples is the post's biggest issue) -- whatever examples I could come up with seemed distinctly unspectacular.

However, I think avoiding common failure modes -- being less wrong -- is a decent way to increase the expected value of your power.

-1Jonathan Paulson
Unfortunately, it seems much easier to list particularly inefficient uses of time than particularly efficient uses of time :P I guess it all depends on your zero point.

Sure, it was snarky, but I thought it was funny.

It's a decent criticism of a decent chunk of LW, such that I don't have a great response to it. Check your accuracy at a meta-level to determine when to lie to yourself? That seems to be how this technique is used, but it feels like an unsatisfactory response.

2JoachimSchipper
I didn't exactly disagree with the content, right? Part of the problem is just that writing something good about epistemic rationality is really hard, even if you stick to the 101 level - and, well, I don't really care about 101 anymore. But I have plenty of sympathy for those writing more practical posts.

I'm wary of advice that doesn't generalize.

I'm wary of advice that does claim to generalize. Giving good advice is a hard problem, partly because it's so context-specific. Yes, there are general principles, but there are tons of exceptions, and even quite similar situations can trigger these exceptions.

Kant got into this kind of problem with (the first formulation of) the categorical imperative. There are many things that are desirable if some people, but not everybody, does them -- say, learning any specific skill or filling a particular social functi... (read more)

I probably am going to leave nursing.

This makes me sad to hear. It sounds like you've been really enjoying it. And I think that those of us here on LW have benefited from your perspective as a nurse in many ways -- you've demonstrated its worth as a career choice, and challenged people's unwarranted assumptions.

Also, as an aside to the tangent, tangent is a strange phrase, since it doesn't actually touch the main point. Should be polar line or somesuch.

"Tangent" is perfectly appropriate -- it touches a point somewhere on the curve of the main argument, and then diverges. There is something that made the association with the tangent.

And, to further overextend this metaphor, this implies that if someone's argument is rough enough (i.e. not differentiable), then it's not even possible to go off it on a tangent.

Thanks! :)

I know, and I also felt that was a weakness of this post. But examples of real life would be ways to beat the market, and if I knew how to beat the market, I'd be doing that, not writing about it.

0Viliam_Bur
Maybe real examples from the past.

What impresses me is that this post not only argues persuasively for using LessWrong as social resource, but it has provided me with convenient links to many posts I otherwise would have missed that are pretty high-quality (both for choosing what to do with my life, and general quality).

Survey done, including digit ratio. And I learned something new.

But not particularly confident in the accuracy of my measurement.

Yeah, that original phrase about sunk costs was pretty unsubstantiated. What I meant to say (which I've edited in) is that much of the time, past investments are not in fact sunk costs.

I guess I was trying to say that the hard work montage is one common narrative, but it is far from the only one.

And yes, there are inevitably constraints that get in the way of investing effort in any particular place, and correspondingly to gaining power by one particular means. But even when the path with the highest payoff is blocked, some of the remaining options will be more beneficial than others. For example, if someone has a low IQ but is strong, they could become a lumberjack, or they could become a henchman to their local supervillain.

0common_law
I don't see how your argument gains from attributing the hard-work bias to stories. (For one thing, you still have to explain why stories express this bias—unless you think it's culturally adventitious.) The bias seems to me to be a particular case of the fair-world bias and perhaps also the "more is better" heuristic. It seems like you are positing a new bias unnecessarily. (That doesn't detract from the value of describing this particular variant.)

(My first post. I don't know if it's good enough for Main, but I thought I'd go for it. If you don't think so, move it and/or let me know.)

I would appreciate any feedback too!

1VAuroch
It's a very good first post. I don't think it's quite Main-worthy (it seems a bit underdeveloped), but I would not be surprised if your next post is.
6Shmi
Posting to LW Main instead of, say, your tumblr account seen maybe by a couple of your online friends, seems like an example of an easy power multiplier. So, you are being consistent :)
4Viliam_Bur
Good article! I would appreciate more examples from the real life.

What I enjoy most about this, after getting past the odd fictional conceit, is its sheer scope - I haven't seen imagination on this scale in a long time, and I miss it.

Thank you, Eliezer.

Now we have to get to work.

Upvoted before reading past the summary, but not really for bravery - more for sheer fun. Advocating "wrong" viewpoints, and coming up with counterintuitive solutions that nevertheless work, and in fact work better than conventional wisdom, is one of the best feelings I know.

Please write your own article. This is worthy content, but thousand-word comments are an awful medium.

Not recommended with a Rabbi's foot, either.

Did the survey.

Results: I'm better at estimating continental populations than I had thought; I am frustrated by single-option questions in many cases (e.g. domain of study, nothing for significantly-reduced-meat-intake-but-not-strict-vegetarian, interdependent causes of global catastrophe) and questions that are too huge to be well-formulated, let alone reasonably answer (supernatural/simulation/God).

Also the question about aliens made me unaccountably sad: even if I retroactively adjust my estimates of intelligent alien life upwards (which I would never do), I have to face the incredibly low probability that they're in the Milky way.

Oh, Death was never enemy of ours!

We laughed at him, we leagued with him, old chum.

No soldier's paid to kick against His powers.

We laughed, -knowing that better men would come,

And greater wars: when each proud fighter brags

He wars on Death, for lives; not men, for flags.

-Wilfred Owen

0gwern
From "The Next War" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Next_War_%28poem%29 http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Next_War

For most people, probably not, but having the support of the masses might be more valuable for a house that is either not a major player among the existing alliances, or not going to win any friends anyway (such as Malfoy).

5atorm
The House of Malfoy seems to win friends among Slytherin very easily.

I'm just imagining the professors' frustration: "Well done, , and five points for AAAAGHHH CURSE YOU HARRY!"

A clear win for the Quirrel Points system.

Where it goes from here: If the enemy actually wants to defeat this coalition, nothing happens. This is a temporary alliance against an outside threat, and if said threat goes away, the alliance will probably collapse of its own accord. (It may bring some lasting changes to the leadership of Hogwarts, but people will chafe against the strict security, and old and new grudges will emerge, and the coalition will break.)

If the enemy has been breeding Harry/Draco as the future leader of Magical Britain (much more likely), they will continue to attack or otherwise be active, probably conceding many victories to the new Kids' Coalition.

1WalterL
Well said. I do think there's a difference between the enemy setting up Harry and Draco as future leader though. If they wanted Draco, well and done, and they'll do as you say. If they want Harry to lead, however, they are unlikely to be thrilled with his new role of invisible assassin.

It reads like a very forced solution - there would be significant gains to one noble house going against the tradition, so their heir could have several years of Hogwarts students rally behind them - and also kind of impossible to implement, given that we don't know much about their birth control methods, and the Noble Houses are unlikely to all marry at the same time etc.

That said, the HP universe which Eliezer took on as his setting is full of such bugs, and this is a reasonable patch.

2ChristianKl
I guess there should be spells for that purpose ;)
4Desrtopa
That doesn't make it impossible to implement, it just means it draws on implicit background information we don't have access to. Considering the edges that wizards appear to have on muggles in terms of medical care, I suspect that not only do they have access to effective magical contraception, they also have access to magical methods of conception promotion.

Several years of poor commoners are not worth weakening alliances with great houses

Yes, obviously. Even in the unlikely event this wasn't all planned by Quirrell with his talk of unity, and role in the Hermione Affair, it is now really easy for him to accomplish this goal.

I also doubt it will be an issue. But it will be fun. And I'm wondering if we could try to get a head start...

4roystgnr
I hope we don't have to get a head start. There's something to be said for enjoying a mystery yourself before collaborative problem solving explains it for you and you have to shift to enjoying it as dramatic irony immediately rather than upon reread. I've been refraining from trying to evangelize my most certain personal theories here in part because I don't want to spoil The Eventual Reveal for others, but if there's a strong likelihood that reader preparation is going to, say, make the difference between dead-Hermione and revived-Hermione, then it's going to be likely-spoilers time...

I agree that it's important and has serious consequences, but what is the puzzle?

6EternalStargazer
In a previous story, EY posted the penultimate chapter along with an ultimatum: You will earn a Bad Ending by doing nothing, and a Good Ending by guessing, following the internal logic of the story, what the correct solution to this problem is. The problem could be solved by combining a revelation in the latest chapter with information from an infodump in the first chapter, explaining how space travel worked in universe. It was in fact solved, and he posted both endings. This is the danger, that he may do the same thing here, and we must be ready to solve the problem. I doubt it will be much of an issue however, the raw processing power we have to work with here is much higher, since HPMOR is much more popular than Three Worlds Collide.

Now you're just being paranoid.

Which is totally appropriate.

So...maybe.

4fezziwig
"What the crap" is also not a very Moody-like exclamation.
7snafoo
CONSTANT VIGILANCE

I, for one, liked it. I'm not sure here is where it belongs (though I couldn't say where else it does).

Seems pretty well-written and reasonably plausible; I like being reminded that Voldemort winning is a real possibility, and this seems like a way he might do so.

7Fermatastheorem
Maybe on ff.net as a one-shot spinoff?

On the topic of illogical career paths, Bones has a real job that requires being a very good auror, rather than being an errand-boy for Dumbledore, as Moody seems to be.

And as for "what are these people doing running a boarding school", they run a school based on reward and (mostly) punishment, rather than the growth of their pupils; they teach a rigid curriculum that seems to have remained unchanged for centuries, in spite of advances in both the magical and muggle worlds; and they socially condition people into narrow roles, largely defined by negative attitudes towards others, based solely on the House a piece of fabric sorts them into.

3MugaSofer
Source?

To be fair, that's more support than Muggles give students choosing a major in college.

9Velorien
As a point of accuracy, it's been stated a couple of times that Hogwarts is meant to follow the Ministry-mandated curriculum, so this one is not entirely "these people"'s fault.

I think it's relatively plausible, actually. The troll did not necessarily have specific orders to eat her feet-first.

As a matter of character, Dumbledore does have odd notions of what it takes to be a hero. And he may think Harry needed to see the real toll of wars by having someone close to him die.

Or he really was confident that Harry would save her, and he would use the troll attempt as evidence against Malfoy (which would have worked).

And my favourite part of your comment:

"Invisibility cloak not doing what it was supposed to? Well, I can see that."

Yes; that's the problem :)

2TobyBartels
So it's Dumbledore who's the sexist fridger, not Eliezer!

It's even worse than this; Harry did not have his pouch as he went in.

A plausible response is that Harry wrote it out during the waiting period before the Malfoys entered.

0Gurkenglas
Nope.
4OnTheOtherHandle
Wait, even if he did write it in the meeting room, can't the Eye of Vance see through walls? Now I want to know what exactly the limit of Moody's superpower is. How far can the Eye see in every direction? How many barriers can it see through? How far can it "zoom", if at all? To what resolution? Can the Eye read fine print from 1000 feet away?
0JTHM
Ah, you're right. This raises the question: is this a plot hole, or is Eliezer giving us a subtle hint that the person we think is Moody was in fact someone polyjuiced as Moody, without the real Eye of Vance?

Now is the time to start speculating as to the contents of the secret agreement between Harry and House Malfoy...

You miss the point - he is still hiding it. The eye provides full 360-degree vision at all times, but few people know this, so he maintains an appearance of some level of vigilance.

This means that anyone who sees him respond quickly to a threat (i.e. evidence of vigilance) will have an immediate explanation of how he was able to do so (being vigilant), and not look beyond it to find out the extent of his abilities.

Quite well thought out, really.

Counterpoint: it appears that Harry is now serious about using Transfiguration as a weapon. However, he has not recently been considering very much else, meaning that he has fewer backups than perhaps he should, in the case where someone counters his Transfigurations (e.g. with good shields, or casting finite on Harry before a fight).

9JoshuaZ
Well, that destroys that hypothesis

The character who seems to be the best response to this, and whom I hope we will see again shortly, is Amelia Bones. She seems to kick just as much ass as Moody, without the significant aid of a literally all-seeing eye. Watching her Azkaban defense was quite impressive, and I hope that the hints of "Bones" in this chapter mean we'll see her in action again, and not just as a potential signatory.

I would have loved to read a counterfactual HPMOR with Bones in the role of McGonagall (or McGonagall with the personality of Bones). It's true that her personality makes more sense in an Auror than a teacher, and that means we don't get to see her very much. But then again, virtually every major male authority figure in Hogwarts looks like he should belong in an elite war chamber rather than a classroom. Seriously, what are these people doing running a boarding school?

Moody should have expected Harry to outprepare him (and probably did) - based on past experiences, plus general caution. What Moody completely missed was the direction of Harry's preparation - of having set up the meeting with his own goal in mind.

7ThrustVectoring
Yeah, the entire direction of Moody's advice was basically "don't let the adults take advantage of you". It didn't even cross his mind that Harry was willing or able to get an advantage out of Lucius.

Harry's reason given to the Malfoys for suspecting Quirrell is "just because he's the defense professor." I'm sure he knows all of this other evidence as well, and would consider it appropriately if actually given a chance to sit down and consider the possibilities (though he might be rather distracted by Draco's Dumbledore hypothesis).

Has it been pointed out yet that while Hermione lay dying and Harry was trying to save her, he neglected to cover her in the cloak that hides the wearer from death, and also neglected to notice this fact during the time afterwards when he was getting mad at himself for everything he had screwed up?

1Decius
If the cloak protects all within it from death, I predict that Harry will simply /turn it inside out/.
3Velorien
Do we actually know that Harry has made the connection between "hides the wearer from death" and "may have life-prolonging effects"? For that matter, does evidence of same exist, beyond the fact that no known owner out of three or so died with it in their possession?
0Gurkenglas
He sat there for hours thinking about what he overlooked. We might simply not have seen all his thoughts.
2Spurlock
Hat & Cloak turning out to be McGonagall would be the most mind-bending and awesome plot twist ever. Unfortunately Hat & Cloak isn't a canon character (right? I didn't read the books), so this wouldn't fit EY's hint.

In any fic that comes out in installments, there's incentive for the author to have ever-more-gripping plot, for the sake of readers' short attention spans. I'm glad Eliezer has not fallen into this spiral, and still feels able to post a chapter in which no new plot developments happen (other than characters finding out about previous events).

So have a heart-shaped red-foil-wrapped candy.

4Protagoras
There is a little too much of that for my taste. There are plenty of other things going on as well in the story, enough of them to keep me interested, but the bits that seem to be just Ender's Game don't impress me. Being smart isn't nearly that reliable at producing victory in battle; there are too many details of execution that matter tremendously, and there's just generally too much unpredictable stuff going on. Admittedly, there have been historical generals who consistently won, but they always had some consistent edge that for some reason their enemies couldn't fully duplicate or counter (higher technology being an obvious possibility, or perhaps ability to recruit soldiers from a population that already possessed useful, difficult to develop military skills not practiced elsewhere).

I was enjoying the interpretation that each of them gets their own magical world optimized as they see fit, which would be such a lot of fun, though I agree that the "all but a remnant" line shoots that down, unless you want to be really dodgy in your interpretation of it (e.g. Harry's mortal body dies, but he gets uploaded).

Just leaving the Pioneercrux going slowly out to infinity, to possibly have Voldy reform in a galaxy far, far away means that we don't get any actual story in space. (Well, it doesn't necessarily eliminate the possibility, ... (read more)

Prophesies are good things to read closely:

...for those two different spirits cannot exist in the same world.

Given the large amount of magic-space travel that's been hinted at, I see this as a pretty clear indication of the final outcome of this fic: Voldy and Harry each get their own planets. It could also be the reason Voldemort has deliberately left Harry alive on many occasions (twice Quirrell saves him, on top of deliberately making him into a living horcrux instead of simply killing him. (comment here)

4[anonymous]
It might also be possible that spirit is meant, not as in soul, but as in attitude. E.g. "the enlightenment spirit".
4pedanterrific
Yeah, the surface meaning of the "different worlds" and "all but a remnant" changes is that Harry won't have to track down the Pioneercrux. So?
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