I wonder whether there are visible conversion effects on the redwood question for native metric users? Estimates slightly on the short side and neatly divisible by three because the quick and dirty meter → feet conversion is multiplying by three?
FAWS
Karma: 2,626
Presumably you relatively recently gained access to research Singinst does not make public, if any. Were you surprised at the level of progress already made, either positively or negatively?
“But I—” Her excellent memory helpfully replayed it for the thousandth time, Draco Malfoy telling her with a sneer that she’d never beat him when he wasn’t tired, and then proceeding to prove just that, dancing like a duelist between the warded trophies while she frantically scrambled, and dealing the ending blow with a hex that sent her crashing against the wall and drew blood from her cheek—and then—then she’d -
This seems to suggest that her memories of the duel are a fabrication (or the “Draco” she was fighting was someone else under the influence of polyjuice). Draco has no particular reason to further provoke her and was genuinely unsure whether he could beat her. It doesn’t seem obvious why anyone would do that if there was going to be a genuine duel anyway, though. Maybe the the genuine memories were just touched up a bit? Alternatively, why might Draco behave as in that memory when there’s no one else around? (the behavior would have made more sense for the second, public duel)
The poster in question at least wouldn’t be immediately obvious as a troll to outsiders reading only a small part of the discussion, more proactive ways to deal with posters like that would seem to carry a serious risk of making less wrong appear even more cultish (group-think).
For whatever measures we take we should first consider how much ammunition against less wrong they offer, how likely they are to cost us genuinely valuable contributions due to seeming closed to dissent, and whether the expected magnitude of intended effects is worth that.
That includes using the word “troll”. After the various facts about their behavior and motivations there is no additional fact as to whether they are a troll. Using the word troll might easily lead people who only took a quick look to come away with the impression that we generally dismiss non-bayesians as trolls, whereas talking about how to prevent endless discussions not aimed at resolving disagreements seems less dangerous that way.
The fic now has a hate blog dedicated to it.
Why does Dumbledore not give a quick Summary of the worst consequences of being in debt to Lucius Malfoy? It’s hard to see how that could necessitate telling secrets that cannot be revealed in public, the laws involved should already be known. Naming a few of the “certain rights” Lucius would have shouldn’t take more time than Dumbledore actually spends trying to convince Harry.
I am completely clueless about SEO, but the tag line “a community blog devoted to refining the art of human rationality” is part of an image file and as such invisible to Google, right? Making it equally prominently visible to Google as it is to humans seems like the sort of thing that would help. I don’t know what the best way to do that would be though, alt text?
Compartmentalized ships would be a bad idea if small holes in the hull were very common and no one bothered with fixing them as long as they affected only one compartment.
Luminosity (Twilight fanfic) discussion thread
But there’s no such conceptual connection between neurons-instantiating-computations and consciousness
Only for people who haven’t properly internalized that they are brains. Just like people who haven’t internalized that heat is molecular motion could imagine a cold object with molecules vibrating just as fast as in a hot object.
Eliezer’s anti-philosophy rant Against Modal Logics hovers near 0 karma points, while my recent pro-philosophy (by LW standards) post and my list of mainstream philosophy contributions were massively upvoted.
The karma of pre-LW OvercomingBias posts that were ported over should not be compared to that of LW post proper. Most of Eliezer’s old posts are massively under-voted that way, though some frequently linked to posts less so.
World-destroying black hole caused by LHC. Autism through vaccination. Cancer from low intensity radio waves (i.e. a cell phone rather than a radar station). A meteorite hitting your house. A plane crashing into your house if you don’t live in a landing vector of an airport. Terrorists capturing the plane you are on if you fly rarely.
Harry nodded. ” At least nobody’s going to try hexing you, not after what the Headmaster said at dinner tonight. Oh, and Ron Weasley came up to me, looking very serious, and told me that if I saw you first, I should tell you that he’s sorry for having thought badly of you, and he’ll never speak ill of you again.”
“Ron believes I’m innocent?” said Hermione.
“Well… he doesn’t think you’re innocent, per se...”
Ron approves of trying to murder Draco Malfoy?
Why wasn’t one of the first things Harry did when returning from the trial exposing Hermione to the light of the True Patronus while she was still unconscious (it looks like it didn’t happen at least)? He already knows it restores recent Dementor damage, has a plausible reason to know in that he experienced it himself under Dumbledore’s eyes and could have told Dumbledore to secure his cooperation. Is his anger at Dumbledore getting in the way?
The only similarity between those cases is that they involve utility calculations you disagree with. Otherwise every single detail is completely different. (e. g. the sort of utility considered, two negative utilities being traded against each other vs. trading utility elsewhere (positive and negative) for positive utility, which side of the trade the single person with the large individual utility difference is on, the presence of perverse incentives, etc, etc).
If anything it would be more logical to equate Felix with the tortured person and treat this as a reductio ad absurdum of your position on the dust speck problem. (But that would be wrong too, since the numbers aren’t actually the problem with Felix, the fact that there’s an incentive to manipulate your own utility function that way is (among other things).)
Meta: Karma and lesswrong mainstream positions
Unlike most of the room she knows Harry well enough that even him scaring a Dementor, no matter how surprising, wouldn’t make her personally afraid of Harry; she might be worried about what trouble he could cause but she knows perfectly well that he wouldn’t do anything to her. Besides it was less of a surprise for her since Dumbledore already told her Harry had developed a new charm.
What’s to stop the Countess from having precommitted to never respond to blackmail?
Or to have precommitted to act as though having precommitted to the course of action having precommitted to in retrospect seems the most beneficial (including meta-precommittments, meta-meta-precommitments, meta^meta^meta precommitments etc up to the highest level she can model)?
Which would presumably include not being blackmailable to agents who would not try to blackmail if she absolutely committed to not be blackmailable, but being blackmailable to agents who would try blackmail even if she absolutely committed to not be blackmailable, except agents who would not have modified themselves into such agents were in not for such exceptions. Or in short: Being blackmailable only to irrationally blackmailing agents who were never deliberately modified into such by anyone.
Incorrect, since nyan_sandwich’s post lacks the asterix after the posting time marking an edited post.
Took the survey.