Desrtopa

• Desrtopa 17 Dec 2012 17:33 UTC

  43 points

  in reply to: ChrisHallquist’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 17, chap­ter 86

  Suddenly Quirrell’s using it in the duel with Bahry is looking a lot weirder. What happens when he dodges it, does it go straight through the wall and keep on going indefinitely until it hits someone? Isn’t that a massive liability since he risks someone seeing it, thereby giving away his presence?

  Being able to be blocked by inanimate objects might seem “lame” for an epic forbidden spell, but being able to pass through solid matter like a jet of neutrinos turns it into yet another game-breakingly borkable element like the Bag of Holding. Combined with the Eye of Vance, Moody should mostly be able to avoid dueling in favor of sniping dark wizards through buildings.

  This seems like an uncharacteristic failure by EY to think things through.

Belief in Belief vs. Internalization

• Desrtopa 4 Apr 2012 13:12 UTC

  41 points

  in reply to: MarkusRamikin’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 14, chap­ter 82

  In canon, when Dumbledore and Voldemort fought in Order of the Pheonix, they weren’t just launching high level spells like missiles, they were apparating around and manipulating the landscape around them. On one occasion, Dumbledore has Fawkes catch an Avada Kedavra for him (reducing him to a chick,) and I believe he may also have blocked another with an animated statue (although that might have been a different spell.)

  I was extremely disappointed that the movie adaptation reduced their confrontation to a highly pyrotechnic instance of magical arm wrestling. J. K. Rowling may not have thought all her ideas out properly, but at least she managed to show that when wizards of Dumbledore and Voldemort’s caliber duel, they get creative.

• Desrtopa 8 Jan 2011 19:45 UTC

  41 points

  on: A Bayesian Ar­gu­ment for the Re­s­ur­rec­tion of Jesus

  One of my favored arguments against the historicity of the miracle accounts in the gospels is drawn directly from my own experiences in middle school.

  I went to some lengths to convince other children at school that I was an alien. I was smarter than the vast majority of students at my school, and was able to blind them with science so that a fair number actually came to believe my claims. Not only did I manage to convince a number of students myself, many went on to convince other students, making up feats I had not and could not perform as “evidence.”

  I can’t say for sure that all the students who claimed to believe that I was an alien actually did, but a number staked a considerable amount of social status on their belief in my claims, so I’m fairly confident they were not all faking it.

  Anyway, it was that experience that taught me about people’s propensity to simply make up evidence to convince others of their beliefs.

  My favorite part of this anecdote is that it still gets the point across even if I am lying, and made the whole thing up myself.

• Desrtopa 4 Sep 2012 17:36 UTC

  40 points

  in reply to: imaxwell’s comment on: Ra­tion­al­ity Quotes Septem­ber 2012

  Unfortunately, doing bad shows is not only a route to doing good shows.

• Desrtopa 17 Dec 2012 21:17 UTC

  38 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 17, chap­ter 86

  I was thinking that as of this chapter, Harry now had enough evidence to promote to attention the hypothesis that Quirrell is actually Voldemort. He has reason to believe that Voldemort has access to a mechanism which allows him to take control of people and give them a portion of his power, and Quirrell’s apparent backstory entails his having undergone a conspicuous increase in apparent competence, much like that which Moody and Dumbledore suspect of having happened to Lockheart. And he has the assurances of the Order of the Pheonix that Voldemort was really smart, no, seriously smart, trust us, you’re still underestimating him. And he knows Quirrell is heavily misanthropic and cavalier with people’s lives, and also he went out of his way to remove Voldemort’s premier servant from Azkaban, who might be useful to other enterprising wizards if she was taught some of the lore of Salazar Slytherin, but also, as Harry has been told, is a key component in restoring Voldemort to power.

  But then it occurred to me that given the fact that Quirrell’s sudden spike in competence in his backstory occurred while Voldemort was still around, not after his death, he would have to draw the conclusion that Quirrell was playing both sides back then. I’ve been operating under that assumption for a while, so I’m biased with respect to evaluating how obvious it should be given what Harry knows. This may be enough to drop the hypothesis below the attention-worthy threshold for Harry right now. But Harry does have the information to raise this particular question: if Quirrell is so smart, and was fighting against Voldemort, why didn’t Voldemort lose, the way Harry thinks the Order of the Phoenix would have if they were up against a really creative and powerful wizard?

  Primary piece of evidence against: Voldemort tried to kill Harry, Quirrell has passed up multiple opportunities to let Harry die. If it weren’t for this, I’d think Harry was being a bit thick for not having considered the possibility already, but this is awfully strong counterevidence.

The Sin of Persuasion

• Desrtopa 28 Mar 2012 18:23 UTC

  37 points

  in reply to: Xachariah’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 13, chap­ter 81

  I think that taking advantage of muggles in lots of ways is against the law, so imperiusing or memory charming a billionaire would be forbidden. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if people have thought of and maybe tried using time turners to cheat the muggle lottery, so I’d give fair odds that’s illegal too. When it comes to arbitrage though, remember that while wizards in general may not be tremendously stupid, they tend to be incredibly clueless about the muggle world; remember that Arthur Weasley can pass as a premier expert on muggle artifacts. The fact that the values of gold and silver in the muggle world are totally divorced from their value in the wizarding world is likely to be very little known, and the concept of arbitrage may be completely foreign to them as well (look how primitive their whole financial system appears to be.)

  The fact that Mr. Bester, Harry’s occlumency instructor, said he wished he could remember “That trick with the gold and silver” implies that a) the idea is not obvious to most wizards, and b) he thinks he would at least stand a chance of getting away with it.

  What links here?

  • Desrtopa's comment on Dou­ble­think (Choos­ing to be Bi­ased) by Eliezer Yudkowsky (14 Apr 2012 3:54 UTC; 1 point)

• Desrtopa 23 Dec 2012 14:55 UTC

  35 points

  on: In which I ask an in­ap­pro­pri­ate ques­tion...

  From a strictly utilitarian perspective, would there be anything to be gained by, say, starting a campaign of assassination against executives of tobacco companies?

  Well, it would be unlikely to convince people not to smoke. It would create a kooky outgroup faction, the Violent Anti-Smokers, that people would be afraid to be associated with, so people would become uncomfortable with being too vocally anti-smoking lest they be mistaken for one of Them. No such campaign is likely to be effective enough to make people unwilling to become the executive of a tobacco company to the point that positions aren’t filled, they’d just ramp up security.

  Also, deaths-caused isn’t really the best metric for toll on human society. Cigarettes rarely do anyone in at thirty, while car accidents don’t discriminate. Adjusting to life-years-lost would be a step in the right direction.

  What links here?

  • Desrtopa's comment on New cen­sor­ship: against hy­po­thet­i­cal vi­o­lence against iden­ti­fi­able people by Eliezer Yudkowsky (24 Dec 2012 20:10 UTC; 4 points)

• Desrtopa 11 Sep 2012 23:24 UTC

  35 points

  on: Ran­dom LW-par­o­dy­ing State­ment Generator

  In the new version of Newcomb’s problem, you have to choose between a box containing death and a box containing Quirrellmort.

  One of the few cases where it’s a good idea to open a box containing death.

Ex­ist­ing Ab­surd Technologies

• Desrtopa 4 Dec 2012 4:39 UTC

  34 points

  in reply to: ialdabaoth’s comment on: Fac­tions, in­equal­ity, and so­cial justice

  In my view, these are not MRA issues. These are feminist issues. There doesn’t need to be a “Men’s Rights Movement”; because men’s rights should be an inherent component of the feminist perspective, which is that femininity should be nurtured and encouraged instead of being stamped out. Whether a feminine [i.e., nurturing, compassionate, cooperative and socially-conscious] personality happens to bud within a body with a vagina or a penis should be irrelevant.

  Personally, I think the idea that being nurturing, compassionate, and socially conscious, are inherently feminine and thus the natural province of feminism, is just as unreasonable and offensive as saying that courage and proactiveness are inherently masculine and therefore causes like getting more women involved in the military or police work are naturally not the province of feminism.

  I would agree that there was no need for a Men’s Rights Movement if there were a Gender Egalitarianism Movement that reliably functioned as such, but feminists do not reliably support addressing all issues of gender inequality. I think most people would agree that women are, on net, more societally disadvantaged than men, but from this, many feminists conclude “therefore, bias and discrimination faced by men is not an important problem to deal with now,” whereas I think that a more appropriate Gender Egalitarianism Movement would take the position “we should address issues of bias and discrimination in order of the importance of the specific issues and the return on the investment in addressing them, not on the basis of which gender is more disadvantaged.”

  I may identify myself as a Feminist rather than a Gender Egalitarian depending on what connotations I feel will be advantageous in a particular discussion, but I’d sooner get behind an argument that with a proper Gender Egalitarian Movement, there is no need for Feminism, than one that with a proper Feminist Movement, there’s no need for a Men’s Rights Movement.

• Desrtopa 18 Jul 2013 12:04 UTC

  33 points

  in reply to: Emile’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 24, chap­ter 95

  (though it’s pretty likely that in HPMOR-verse, all volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. are caused by Magic Gone Wrong)

  I doubt it, since first off, many of them long predate humans, and second, something would have to be seriously wrong with our model of geology for plate tectonics to not sometimes result in volcanoes or earthquakes.

• Desrtopa 2 May 2011 16:44 UTC

  32 points

  in reply to: Nick_Roy’s comment on: Ethics and ra­tio­nal­ity of suicide

  When is suicide without cryonics ever rational, aside from rare situations where altruism demands it? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I can’t think of any personal situation with zero possibility of improvement.

  Neither can I. Nor does a lottery ticket have zero chance of winning.

  There’s no reason, in a world fundamentally unmoderated for fairness, that a miserable life must be destined to get better, or even be more likely to get better than worse.

  I’ve personally talked two people down from suicide, because I was convinced that given their prospects, they were indeed better off alive than dead. I promised one of them, with whom I am very close, that if I ever truly believed that her prospects were bad enough that she was better off dead, I would assist her suicide.

  She told me it was a great help, knowing that, and to the best of my knowledge given her promise that she would call me if she was ever considering it again, hasn’t considered suicide since.

• Desrtopa 14 Jul 2013 15:39 UTC

  31 points

  on: Writ­ing Style and the Typ­i­cal Mind Fallacy

  Another hypothesis that occurs to me is that people with short attention spans could prefer my more skimmable style. But I haven’t tested this.

  Speaking as someone with fairly serious attention deficit disorder, I find Eliezer’s style (and Yvain’s as well) is particularly good at holding my attention for long periods of time. Where a more bare-bones article would require me to use willpower to finish reading, I will tend to become hyperfocused (a less commonly recognized aspect of ADD) on one written in a style I find entertaining.

• Desrtopa 1 Mar 2013 0:35 UTC

  31 points

  on: [Er­ror com­mu­ni­cat­ing with LW2 server]

  This seems rather like the adult version of being that kid who’ll eat worms for a nickel.

  Yeah, it might seem clever to the kid, worms aren’t that gross, but then, what it’s really costing you is the social burden of being that kid who eats worms for a nickel.

  Don’t be that kid.

• Desrtopa 17 Dec 2012 17:22 UTC

  31 points

  in reply to: Cakoluchiam’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 17, chap­ter 86

  Not necessarily; someone who’s as deeply misanthropic as Quirrell might wish most people dead (having killed before, he can, as per Moody’s explanation, wish people dead rather more casually than non-murderers.) If you’re already capable of bringing intent-to-kill to bear on pretty much anyone who crosses you, you can probably use it strategically the way Quirrell suggests.

  On the other hand, even if Quirrell’s explanation holds true, it does suggest Harry should revise upwards his estimates of just how cavalier Quirrell is with other people’s lives.

The Santa de­cep­tion: how did it af­fect you?

• Desrtopa 18 Oct 2021 1:55 UTC

  30 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: My ex­pe­rience at and around MIRI and CFAR (in­spired by Zoe Curzi’s writeup of ex­pe­riences at Lev­er­age)

  So, it’s been a long time since I actually commented on Less Wrong, but since the conversation is here...

  Hearing about this is weird for me, because I feel like, compared to the opinions I heard about him from other people in the community, I kind of… always had uncomfortable feelings about Mike Vassar? And I say this without having had direct personal contact with him except, IIRC, maybe one meetup I attended where he was there and we didn’t talk directly, although we did occasionally participate in some of the same conversations online.

  By all accounts, it sounds like he’s always been quite charismatic in person, and this isn’t the first time I’ve heard someone describe him as a “wizard.” But empirically, there are some people who’re very charismatic who propagate some really bad ideas and whose impacts on the lives of people around them, or on society at large, can be quite negative. As of last I was paying attention to him, I wouldn’t have expected Mike Vassar to have that negative an effect on the lives of the people around him, but I was always stuck in an awkward position of feeling like I was surrounded by people who took him more seriously than I felt like he ought to be taken. He evoked in a lot of people that feeling of “if these ideas are true, this is really huge,” but… there’s no shortage of ideas of ideas you can say that about, and I was always confused by the degree of credence people gave that his ideas were worth taking seriously. He always gave me a cult leaderish impression, in a way that, say, Eliezer never did, as encouraging other people to take seriously ideas which I couldn’t understand why they didn’t treat with more skepticism.

  I haven’t thought about him in quite some time now, but I still distinctly remember that feeling of “why do these smart people around me take this person so seriously? I just don’t see how his explanations of his ideas justify that.”

• Desrtopa 9 Apr 2013 23:21 UTC

  30 points

  in reply to: mwengler’s comment on: Prob­lems in Education

  The variation in educational standards and practices between districts in America is too large to make generalizing from one’s own experience very useful except insofar as it demonstrates that the critiques given in the article cannot be universal.

  When I talk to friends who went to decent schools (which is pretty much all of my friends,) their experiences, cynical though they might be about them, don’t reflect the sort of scandal the OP describes. When I talk to acquaintances who work as teachers for seriously disadvantaged schools through programs like Teach For America, the general consensus appears to be “No matter how bad you think it is, it’s always worse.”