wiserd

I feel like the most likely implementation, given human nature, would be a castrated genie. The genie gives negative weight to common destructive problems. Living things moving at high speeds or being exposed to dangerous levels of heat are bad. No living things falling long distances. If such things are unavoidable, then it may just refuse to operate, avoiding complicity even at the cost of seeing someone dead who might have lived. Most wishes fizzle. But wishing is, at least, seen as a not harmful activity. Lowest common denominator values and 'thin skull' type standards are not ideal from a utilitarian standpoint. But they facilitate write-once run-anywhere solutions and mass marketing. 

I'm guessing... (read more)

I 95% agree with this argument. 

The one exception I'd make is... I think you under-estimate Behe. He already had a paper debate with Ken Miller, a professor flush with accolades, where Behe argued that the TTSC descended from the flagellum and Miller argued for the reverse. 

Additional research conducted after their debate seems to support Behe. Now granted, Miller really should have known enough to realize that an adaptation for parasitizing complex plants would not have evolved before complex plants, themselves, did. But he didn't and Behe scored a legitimate, predictive, falsifiable assertion, albeit one very narrow in scope. It underscores the point that, in discussing the evolution of complexity, we really should... (read more)

Gwern: 

"Remember how heritability works. If environments improve, genetics will explain more and more of variance. It's Liebig's barrel. Shared-environment in the USA is very small."

I'm not sure that this can be assumed true (and forgive me if the point is addressed elsewhere. I have mostly only  read this comment). If someone is phenylketoneuric, improved environment will eliminate what would otherwise be a profound difference between them and their cohort. 

Harsh environments tend to accentuate differences, including genetic differences. There's been some push to put lab animals through more rigorous trials to better observe subtle differences between them. 

If genetic susceptibilities to environmental insult explains many differences between populations then it's entirely possible for environments... (read more)

What's our standard for intelligence? Evolution has, with a planet and a few billion years, produced many, many things that humans have not yet been able to replicate. Or which we can't replicate efficiently. That's starting to change. But a process that can outperform a few billion people with a few thousand years of accumulated knowledge is still pretty formidable.

I <i>do</i> think that there are many people in the biological sciences who portray evolution as being more 'stupid' than it is. And that is a problem because it's a false prediction.

https://bereanarchive.org/articles/biology/functional-dna-predictions

IDers seem to be cherry picking their 'early supporters of a functional genome. Most IDers I talked to during the... (read more)

I really do like dxu's "If you harm me greatly, the universe will end" or something similar in Parseltounge, though. (Since it will end with or without Harry's intervention, this is still true.) It seems the most elegant solution and would buy time to implement some other solution. hm. This system ate my previous post.

I'll have to rewrite it.

While this might be a little deus ex machina for Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry can create a doppleganger of himself. He's recently learned more complex transfigurations. Dumbledore had access to the Philosopher's Stone, which could make such transfigurations permanent. Harry's special patronus seems to help the process in some cases. These are... (read more)

Here's my idea, which I've posted as a review on FF.net. Harry has advanced transfiguration. The Philosopher's Stone can make transfiguration permanent. Harry can bring life to dead things. This is very close to Harry being able to create copies of himself, which would surely be attractive to Harry. The question, then, is; when did Harry first realize this capacity?The possibility of creating a body double might very well have been enough to have persuaded Dumbledore to let Harry use the Philosopher's stone, which he seems to have access to. Or Harry might have procured the stone himself, which he seems able to, intellectually. It's just a matter of procuring a confundus... (read more)

"We should put more trust in larger scale organizations who are doing exploring, like GiveWell, and pool our resources."

I wonder about the notion of scalability, because with any information provider there's the possible issue of corruption. Is it better to have a large organization which is easy to track? (Goodwill and the Red Cross seem to give their CEOs pretty high salaries, considering that they're charities.) Or is it better to have a system which is more robust to corruption and tunnel vision due to multiple redundancies? Do larger organizations attract a certain type of social climber? I have no doubt that there are economies of scale. Part of the reason I'm... (read more)

"Simplest; The goblins, and wizard society just do not approve of outright theft, even from muggles, and there are magics that will reliably mark stolen goods"

This makes a lot of sense. In a society where theft from even most wizards should be theoretically pretty easy, blanket 'anti-theft' measures seem most workable. Which, of course, implies that ownership is an intrinsic property of matter in the wizarding verse. Ayn Rand would squee.

Alternative; HPMOR is a sometimes a sideways critique of the Rowling universe, and should, perhaps, sometimes be viewed in that light.

Rowling's universe does have poor wizards, and it does have money and currency constraints. Gold seems to be both intrinsically valuable and... (read more)