All of William_Quixote's Comments + Replies

People should base self eating on accomplishment not rationality. It is very easy to be wrong about internal mental states, it's much harder to be wrong about real world observables.

If the universe was non differentiable and non continuous I would consider that to be evidence for simulation. And in fact I've heard that argument. Everything is discreet like it's all bits at the bottom is evedence its run on bits and so a simulation. But continuity and discreetness can't both be evedence for the same thing.

I will note that you can't improve the past and have limited ability to improve other countries. So criticism of those won't lead to anything useful. Critical views of where you are right now can lead to effective action. So I don't know if the pattern being criticized is a bad pattern

I down vote posts I think are bad for the sites reputation / public image. I think people who like controversy or trolling privately benefit from such posts and externalize reputation all harms onto the site overall. I also think people in general benefit from a forum with good members and don't factor in long term reputational effects. I use karma to help people internalize these better.

I like this post a lot. It's very clear and seems to be pointing to something. So did the first post. By contrast the second post felt more handwavey to me. That's some indication that you may be missing a step in your chain of reasoning. You may want to mentally walk through the second post "showing your work" in more detail as a double check in case you missed something.

These sound like great tools. Thanks for making them available.

On a meta level I don't mind if members of the community promote their own work here if it's something that other community members will find useful. I'll also note that these seem lik tricky enouph things that they could also have been mentioned in the bragging thread when you finished them.

I think this post jumps the gun. We don't have a really meaningful concept of happened outside of experience or consciousness. At present I think we have very little clue about how those work, how they arise, and what they even precisely are. The later question of happiness doesn't really make sense until we have the first one.

It may just be a coincidence, but I notice this was published at the end of March. Historically there have been a lot of spurious results published on or immediately before April first.

Some paleo diets and blogs claim that people should avoid plants from the nightshade family (tomatoes, eggplants etc). Some inflammation and auto immune blogs claim the same thing. Does anyone know if these claims have a scientific basis and, if so, what mechanism is purportedly driving the effect?

I figure there has been enough interest on paleo here, that before I invest hours into digging through Google scholar it makes more sense to ask if anyone already knows the answer. Thanks in advance

I think this is a good post and I upvoted it. That said, I do want to present an alternative view. Rather than aiming to boost life expectancy by increasing your odds of survival given a life threatening situation, aim to reduce your odds of being in a dangerous situation in the first place. In the amount of time it would take you to arrange one round of paintball you could probably check detailed crimes stats for several neighborhoods including things like time of day.

I think Snape has a big part in HPMOR. At least he consumes a lot of narrative space. He essentially drives the whole hermione and the hero club arc, since if he didn't help them it would have been over fast. He does a lot to help Harry mature.

Yeah, that's Harrys MO. By this point it's almost a running gag (or it would be if it were less sad). In the first bunch of chapters Harrys lectures are really funny for just how out of place they are if you actualy imagine them coming from an 11 year old. In fact they are out of place if you imagine them coming from any real person at all, rather than from a character in a book. In the early chapters this is played for laughs and then even called out when Hermione notices that people in books speak like books.

Here though the exact same behavior goes from funny to sad. Stakes are too high.

This is a different, McG mentions the existince of a reversible memory charm to seal away but not lose memories to Hermione after she gets back from her trial. Which I now realize was foreshadowing this.

The question Harry asks Draco and Draco's final non answer seem like a reference to the book The Sunflower by Simon Weisenthal.

Simon was in a concentration camp and called to the bed of a dying SS officer who asked for forgiveness. He felt pulled to both forgiveness and to the justness of telling the nazi that what he had done was unforgivable. In the end he said nothing.

The book has Weisenthal discussing the dilemma and then 53 other people of note commenting on what they would have done ranging from the Dali Lama to Desmond Tutu.

As further evidence that the vow blocks killing all the people consider this.

The vow blocks Harry from telling muggels about magic and starting mass healing. At the time it blocks him the ideas he thought of were transfiguring nuclear weapons and plagues that could replicate before the transfiguration wore off. Neither of those poses any danger to "the world" but they pose great danger to the worlds people. Harry doesn't think of up quarks until after he has already been blocked. So the vow seems to be interpreted as killing everyone being the end of the world. Which is quite possibly how Harry understood it.

She knows it killed all the death eaters and that it doesn't even register as magic on their wards. That's somethjng she couldn't do. And it's thh kind of dangerous weapon she might think should be a secret to everyone.

Based on that timing the stone was Gilgamesh's pearl

I think there is evidence that "magic" has natural language processing and is capable of taking context and intent into account. I don't know that Harry wouldn't be unable to interpret distorting the world as killing everyone. Particularly dice the person he gave the vow to was particularly concerned about and motivated by the death of people (or at least of one specific person).

Unlike Harry, the death eaters have lots of wandless options. Not just one.

I begin to wonder if we (the community) really found the best plan or if we are reading a sadder ending. Maybe there was a plan that saved everyone.

Yeah. I meant Albus Dumbledore. For some reason my brain saw DumbleDore and abbreviated that as DD. Probably symmetry with QQ.

It's a nice story. But it won't work.

Harry wants folks to think LV killed the death eaters and not him. But he has trained Draco too well. Given priors on someone defeating Voldemort you would assume it's Harry, DD, or QQ in that order. Draco knows Harry and QQ were up to something because he and several other kids bumped into them and had a scuffle at the third floor corridor. If that wasn't entirly obliviated away, Draco will figure out that Harry was involved.

You're right about the last sentence. Perils of typing on a cell phone. I've edited it to make sense.

I think there may be some hindsight bias here. We know that Harry has partial transfiguration and we know that it turns out poorly for LV. LV himself did not know these things. To the best of his knowledge (which he has good reason to believe is considerable and maybe exhaustive) there is no magic Harry can cast wordlessly with his wand down.

For LV to enact the additional precautions above, magic would be needed. He can't use magic on Harry, so taking them means reducing the size of the death eater guard by 1 or more during the time needed to take those p... (read more)

Other note. Dumbeldore defeated Voldemort. He placed Minerva to intercept any discoveries of Harry and he made Harry swear not to tell anyone about it. This left Voldemort underprepaired against the weapon that got him in the end. Dumbeldore had a million plots going, and this one worked. Sometiems one is all you need.

I think Harry went with a slightly more risky PT solution than the one I suggested, but it's satisfying and considerably more in character than the PT => time turner escape solution path.

I suppose if I thought more narratively I would have discarded every solution that didn't involve killing his enemies.

If you check the survey results you will find that the large pluralality of less wrong types range from socialist / progressive / center left rather than libertarian.

Posted-

This is a two step solution. The first part succeeds or fails deterministically. If the first part fails the fallback comes into play and that succeeds or fails probabilistically, so you may need to generate a pseudo random number to evaluate this proposal.

Part 1: this part uses partial transfiguration and his newly practiced skills from the 6th year textbook.

Harry must transfigure something touching his wand, so the object transfigured is a small patch of skin touching his wand. He will probably lose that bit of skin when the transfiguration wear... (read more)

Note that to save the story you need to post at fan fiction as a review, not just here

I agree with you about the writing but I have a nearly opposite prediction.

I notice that in all the Harry talking to himself or reflecting quietly chapters he allways thinks something along the lines of "there seems to be almost no limit in what you could accomplish with magic if you really understood it". Several times his mind circles around the becomus godus spell and considers some avenue and decides it wouldn't work for some reason or another. In each case after thinking that his mind goes off on some other tangent.

So my prediction is that... (read more)

Your last statement is not correct. Many of the works of literature regarded as the best do that very heavily. Dante does that like crazy in the inferno. Joyce does it non stop in Ulyesses. Most of the works of Vladimir Nabokov do it very heavily. As does Pynchon. It may be that you just don't notice it in literature and do notice it here because you are more familiar the the animie canon than the literary canon.

This may be true. But we don't know that. If you are saying something that we dot know is true, it should be hedged. If something is true for sure then sound confident, or even better cite a source.

QQ has Harry's wand, so how is Harry going to get out of this mess? One of my theories is wandlessmagic. The existence of wandless magic at all is evidence the wand isn't strictly needed.

This makes sense if you buy that a wizard is pulling levers on the source of magic rather than actually enacting the spell

From Chapter 25

If magic had been like that, a big complex adaptation with lots of necessary genes, then a wizard mating with a Muggle would have resulted in a child with only half those parts and half the machine wouldn't do much. And so there would

I noticed that as well. However, at Azkahban QQ reserved an extra use of the time turner for the end and it proved necessary. He may just think that as a best practice for plotting one should leave an extra use of time turners in as margin of safety.

I second this opinion. Surveys indicate LW is about 10% women, so its undoubtedly worth changing this sentence to speak to more of the sites population.

Changing the books stealing them or altering library records may be harder than it seems. The day of Hermiones death QQ went to the library and added a number of additional wards, nominally around the restricted section, but who know what else they cover.

A spell to grade tests is probably not an old spell that's been around forever since no one else seems to use it, but QQ may have invented it for this purpose.

Either way, it's existence is a further hint to the nature of magic in the world of HPMOR. It involves some pretty sophiscated natural languge processing. The fact that magic can do natural language processing is hinted as significant in chapter 6 while Harry is studying the retrieval charm and trying diffent phrases that point to "bag of gold". If we knew how magic could read a test and p... (read more)

Draco's plan at the start of the chapter is entirely correct and Harry should have been doing it on his own. They will find out that Hermione was reading about the stone before she was killed.

In fact she was probably killed precisely because she was getting too close to the stone in her readings. She may even have said something out loud like "eureka" that gave away that she had gotten it. This, by the way, points to her being killed by someone other than QQ, since he would want her to succeed since she would tell Harry and harry would tell him.

That's fair enouph. So long as it is remembered that it's a heuristic and is used to guide thinking rather than stop thinking it is certianly valuable.

I am not very knowledgeable about bitcoins but I do have some famiality with banks responsiblies under US and EU anti money laundering regimes. I think that bit coins would pose a number of complience challenges and that it would be pretty tough for banks to be confidbet they weren't running afoul of regs. So my guese is that but coins probably have very little bank activity. Similarly I bet they don't have much activity from the large hedge funds. It's probabky limited to small funds.

It's worth noting that efficient markets are a modeling assumption to make certain economic problems computationally tractable and easy to model. It's not a law of nature confirmed by observation. On the contrary a lot of times markets are observed to be inefficient (eg the housing market mid 2000s or at a higher level of sophistication the mortgage backed securities market in the same period).

Even very liquid markets like the FX market with technically sophiscated arbitrage free pricing models still have had long running well known ineffiencies like the forward rate bias.

That's fair. It's certianly true that poverty reduction also reduces pandemic risk. But it does so inditectly and slowly. There are probably faster ways to reduce pandemic risk than working on poverty.

The problem is that he didn't describe it accurately. He described it with a very simple bias that is different from the actual view and makes bad predictions oi you try to use it to think instead of using it to caricature political opponents.

Once again pandemic is the leading cat risk. It was the leading cat risk last year. http://lesswrong.com/lw/jj0/2013_survey_results/aekk It was the leading cat risk the year before that. http://lesswrong.com/lw/fp5/2012_survey_results/7xz0

Pandemics are the risk LWers are most afraid of and to my knowledge we as a community have expended almost no effort on preventing them.

So this year I resolve that my effort towards pandemic prevention will be greater than simply posting a remark about how it's the leading risk.

Austrian economics has consistently made bad predictions. It doesn't give you the right answers for rates, fx, gdp or inflation.

I used to use it, but as I shifted to doing more on my mobile device I found it was a pain to use and so stopped. If it had a good app then I would use it again.

Due to a job that involves a lot of time sitting at computers I had been chronically stiff and in pain for a while. Over the last month I've started and maintained a yoga practice several times a week. This has significantly reduced stiffness and random back / joint pain.

As a historical note, the LTCM crisis was caused by Russias default, but LTCM did not bet on Russia or rely on Russian banks. LTCMs big bet was on a narrowing of the price difference between 30 year treasurys and 29 year treasurys. When Russia defaulted people moved out of risky assets into safe assets and lots of people bought 30 years. That temporary huge burst in demand led to a rise in the price of 30s. Given the high leverage of LTCM that was enouph to make them go bust.

Post needs an executive summary / abstract

there is a familiar phenomenon here, in which a certain kind of would-be economic expert loves to cite the supposed lessons of economic experiences that are in the distant past, and where we actually have only a faint grasp of what really happened. Harding 1921 “works” only because people don’t know much about it; you have to navigate through some fairly obscure sources to figure out [what actually happened]. And the same goes even more strongly — let’s say, XII times as strongly — when, say, [Name] starts telling us about the Emperor Diocletian. The point... (read more)