All of VincenzoLingley's Comments + Replies

Do you remember how long it took until you stopped needing alarms?

Click "Show all comments", wait for more comments to load, repeat. I suspect that there is a limit to the number of comments it loads in one go, probably to ease the load on the server.

Do you expect to reach a point where you don't need an alarm clock?

(People already doing this: do you need an alarm clock? How long have you been doing this for?)

4Puredoxyk
I've been some kind of polyphasic for a solid decade (more, but with breaks that bring it to about that overall). I use an alarm if my schedule is changing -- i.e. I'm doing a day of Uberman to get more done; or I missed a nap and so am sleeping 4.5h tonight instead of 3 -- but even then I often don't need it. Once I'm on my regular Everyman 3 schedule for a few days straight, no alarms are necessary, including popping right awake at 4am feeling great. I only use alarms for naps anymore if I want to read when I wake up, so that I don't get sucked into my book and waste too much time; I wake up so reliably after 20 minutes that my friends have used me as a timer. I love being made of programmable firmware. ;)
5JGWeissman
I have been doing this for almost a year. I expect to always need an alarm clock. I will often wake up just before the alarm, but this is not reliable. However, I can wake up to very quiet alarm clocks, as long as I recognize the sound as my alarm, so I can sleep through other noise.

Criticism of posted work is common, but I don't have the impression that discouraging people from doing and posting the work is particularly common.

5Qiaochu_Yuan
My observations suggest that criticism in general is common.

Interested.

I'm surprised by all the discouraging comments. If what you end up writing isn't good enough, chances are that the highest-voted comment will say so (and why). So I support the suggestion that you write a post and consider the reception.

That said, I can't help but notice that you've so far ignored the questions about why you consider yourself qualified.

7Qiaochu_Yuan
Really? Ah, you're new around here. This is fairly common.

I've removed that paragraph and I apologize for it.

If I may indulge in a bit of nitpicking, you misquoted me: "privacy-related procedures" is very different from "privacy issues", and I maintain that my touchiness is consistent. It is a valid position that the information leak already happened with the publication of the file (so Yvain cannot tighten security when it comes to that file), and that drawing attention to specific breaches of privacy is generally the best way to force people to think about privacy. But your position is valid too, and it was stupid of me to act as I did in a place full of people sharing your position. (Extra stupidity points for me since the place is heavily moderated.)

As long as you mean "round to the nearest in this list", sure.

But if you mean "round 8838 to 8850", the number of people per 'option' gets too low in the high karmas. Look at the top ten disclosed karmas from the last survey: 7500, 7830, 8838, 9000, 12000, 14000, 14612, 18000, 26084, 48000.

In fact, everyone over 10000 should probably be lumped together just to account for Eliezer (so that he isn't alone in his category). He didn't disclose his karma last time, but I'm strongly in favor of a system that works regardless of the users' car... (read more)

1A1987dM
As of now, the tenth top contributor of all times is Vladimir_Nesov with 17245 karma.
daenerys110

I'm just a bit touchy about privacy-related procedures.)

If you're touchy about privacy issues, the way to express that is NOT to out someone's anonymous survey answers. That is anti-social behavior, and implies that you are only interested in your OWN privacy while not at all valuing the privacy of others.

If you wanted to show how easy it was to find out someone's identity from the survey answers, the better course of action would have been to put in a comment something like "in fact, from last year's survey I was able to figure out the identity o... (read more)

If you plan to release the individual answers as you did last time, please keep in mind that karma alone is sufficient to identify a lot of people, so removing other identifying information makes more sense if you also round the karma (e.g. to nearest power of 10 or 5 or some other number).

You could do this when generating the xls file, or you could give karma ranges as options in the survey. If you do the former, some (small number of) people will lie about their karma to prevent you from identifying them.

-2AlexMennen
One possible solution is for Yvain to not publish the karma data of respondents.
3Unnamed
Ranges would work. 1000+ should be high enough for the top category; on last year's survey only 9% of respondents (80 people) were in that range. On CFAR surveys we've used: I don't have a Less Wrong account zero or less 1-99 100-999 1000 or more
5dbaupp
A third solution would be to ask everyone to round to the nearest 5, 10, 50 (etc.) when answering.

I find the following difficult to parse:

I think people who are not made happier by having things have the wrong things, or have them incorrectly.

The phrase "having things have the wrong things" is a grammatically valid noun phrase, and it took me >10s to figure out why the sentence [looks to me like it] is missing a predicate.

1TheOtherDave
For my own part, I think I'm one of those people who is not made happier by having things have the wrong things. Although I'll admit it amuses me sometimes, depending on what wrong things those things have.
0Alicorn
Would it help if I added an ellipsis between "having things" and "have the wrong things"?

For the next survey:

160 people wanted their responses kept private. They have been removed. The rest have been sorted by age to remove any information about the time they took the survey. I've converted what's left to a .xls file, and you can download it here.

Karma is sufficient to identify a lot of people. You could give ranges instead (making sure there are enough people in each range).

but chapter 20 discusses cognitive enhancement and mind uploading, and chapter 20 discusses

Was one of the 20s supposed to be something else?

0lukeprog
Fixed, thanks.

I don't want to sound rude, but what is the point of this rerun? Looking at the reposted articles from the last month, most have fewer than 10 comments each.

I like the reruns; it gives me a chance to re-read the Sequence in a structured way, without doing a full formal Archive Binge. I suggest that comments are not the metric to go by; presumably it is less interesting to make comments that Eliezer definitely will not respond to.

The comments on this post have significantly influenced my opinion on a number of people. Thanks, Will.

We already have separate Main and Discussion. Any reason not to add more? With separate feeds (and perhaps separate karma) for each, I just don't see the downsides.

LessWrong may have started as a blog about rationality, but now it is a community of like-minded people. It is natural that some members of the community want to discuss less on-topic topics with the rest of the community.

Do a quick reality check to see whether I'm dreaming.

How do you do that? How reliable is it?

1D_Malik
Here is an excellent FAQ about lucid dreaming. It says: (I know, there's lots of new age bullshit at that link, and in lucid dreaming generally. But no matter how much you cringe at the word "dreamsign", lucid dreaming is a very useful tool if you can spot and dismiss the garbage.)

It would be interesting to see checklists on less important topics too. The particular example I have in mind is travel (i.e. what to pack, what to research, what backup plans are needed, etc). In what other mundane scenarios do people find checklists useful?

5[anonymous]
onebag.com has some nice checklists for travel, advice for making your own packing list, and other advice.

Yes... this is a fact of combat.

Not in what we have seen so far. IIRC, neither Quirrell nor Dumbledore have pre-cast shields in TSPE, which (IIRC) is the only piece of serious action by competent people in MoR. I don't remember canon well, but I would have noticed consistent pre-cast shields.

"Accio frontal lobe."

This is the same idea as hover charm.

Or "Imperio, kill yourself."

Imperio can be resisted.

Or for that matter "Obliviate."

No idea how obliviate works, so maybe.

But all 3 are spells with instantaneous effec... (read more)

7pedanterrific
Funny thing about the combat in TSPE, we get this little digression: And a little later, Quirrell (and presumably Dumbledore) are on the level above where they have to worry about shielding against anyone but an equal. And do I really have to go back through Self-Actualization and come up with the list of times the bullies and Tonks had pre-cast Protegos before they entered combat? Yes, this is a change from canon. Mainly because magical combat was actually given some thought in MoR. Except a lot faster and with less expenditure of energy. Rather than bouncing someone off the ceiling- which seems difficult to do hard enough to instantly kill a wizard (who can survive a lot more blunt trauma than Muggles)- you just rip their brain out their eyesockets. As far as I know, the only word on that we have in MoR is "Powerful wizards are not so easy to Imperius," which leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

it takes several casters

Several first-year casters. Quirrell stuck 50 people to the ceiling. You might say that he has better ways to use his power - but the killing curse is not one of them. His killing curse is little better than anyone else's.

Also, it seems unlikely at best that the Hover Charm can accelerate people downwards

There's got to be a spell for that, and it it likely to work similarly to the hover charm, i.e. instant effect.

Also, it's possible that the Hover Charm could be blocked by a pre-cast shield

If by a specific anti-hover shi... (read more)

2ahartell
An unsuspecting enemy can apparate when they realize they are being affected by the hover charm. When they realize they are being affected by Avada Kedavra... they're dead.
5Rejoyce
Ah. Hundreds of girls Summoning a Harry Potter into their arms?
0Velorien
You make some excellent points. I can only conclude that the Hover Charm (and your proposed opposite) must have some built-in limitations, otherwise no-one would bother using anything else against unshielded targets. I do suspect that the spells we think of as instant are actually very fast invisible missiles - this would account both for the fact that one aims them with a wand, and for the fact that the likes of Quirrell can sneeze away spells which have no visible missiles.
3pedanterrific
I imagine SPHEW's battles vs. the bullies would have looked different if Protego didn't protect against telekinesis.

Are you assuming it can't be shielded against?

You would need to always have a shield up.

And if you can catch your opponent before he casts any shields there are easier ways to kill someone.

For example? Most purpose-built spells are in the form of a bolt that you have time to see and dodge.

8pedanterrific
Yes... this is a fact of combat. Not sure why you said this. "Accio frontal lobe." Or "Imperio, kill yourself." Or for that matter "Obliviate." Edit: Actually, I'm pretty sure Somnium is invisible. It doesn't kill immediately, of course, but that's easily rectified.

Also, I don't think it gets deadlier than the Killing Curse by definition - it is unblockable and kills instantly.

It can be dodged. My point was that if the hover charm is instant and cannot be dodged, then accelerating the victim into something (e.g. sky then ground) can kill them without giving them time before the spell hits. And with sufficient acceleration, the victim won't be able to react.

6Desrtopa
In canon, Snape was able to shut down everything Harry tried against him in combat in the sixth book, because as long as Harry hadn't mastered occlumency or silent spellcasting, his attacks were all sufficiently telegraphed that a superior duelist and leglimens like Snape could simply counter them all before he could fire them off.
4Velorien
True. But that would have to be an extreme amount of acceleration, whereas in MoR it takes several casters just to fully counter the effect of gravity on one teenage boy. Also, it seems unlikely at best that the Hover Charm can accelerate people downwards - and if you lift someone high enough for a fall to kill them, you give them time to react while they fall. Also, it's possible that the Hover Charm could be blocked by a pre-cast shield - in fact, this seems likely, otherwise people could just get around non-spherical shields by lifting the target and then shooting them from underneath.
0pedanterrific
Are you assuming it can't be shielded against? That seems unlikely. And if you can catch your opponent before he casts any shields there are easier ways to kill someone.
Xachariah140

Alternatively, the Arresto Momentum spell is quite instantly deadly if you use the right frame of reference.

I was rereading the new chapters and got very confused about what happens between casting a spell and its effects.

Hexes are slow enough to be dodged from almost point-blank range. Chapter 78:

But Granger flashed and whirled around the Tooth-Lengthening Hex, and then her own wand came around and leveled at almost point-blank range This suggests slow bolts of light, like in the movies.

But some spells have instantaneous effect. Chapter 78:

Neville was falling toward the ground and screaming "Chaotic landing!" and the Chaotics were wrenching thei

... (read more)
3chaosmosis
I'm curious why the spell has to be shot out from the wand, rather than from a completely different direction or appearing spontaneously in the middle of the target. There's an underlying assumption that magic is like lasers and wands are like guns in much of Canon!HP and in MOR, but that doesn't really seem justified. Maybe this is just another conceptual limitation?
-1Velorien
It seems to be different for different spells. For example, some spells can't be dodged because of the missile shape rather than because of speed (e.g. wide blasts rather than beams or missiles). Likewise, some require physical contact (Transfiguration) while others affect everyone in the vicinity irrespective of location, targeting or obstacles (Muffliato, the one that stops people overhearing you). Also, I don't think it gets deadlier than the Killing Curse by definition - it is unblockable and kills instantly. Any other spell we know of can be blocked by a good enough shield and/or have its effects undone before they are fatal (by an ally if not by the target themselves).