I like seeing these numbers. Transparency + people organizing the information is great. Seeing this presented here (on Less Wrong) where I am likely to see it makes me more likely to donate. Thanks!
jasonmcdowell
Me too. I’ve even done it before:
I have a facebook friend who writes thoughtfully, seems reasonably clever and cares about deep questions. He is a speaking-in-tongues, deeply religious, Prosperity, Charismatic, Word of Faith, Christian. A few of his interests and landmark-experiences match my own.
I was excited to talk to him because I thought he would be able to teach me something about religious people that ‘normal people’ couldn’t.
I also thought the skeleton of his personality was similar enough to mine that he might have made an ‘interesting mistake’. Due to the similarities between us, I wondered if I could also be susceptible to whatever ‘wrong turn’ his thinking took. I wanted to identify and analyze that ‘interesting mistake’, so I wouldn’t make it, and because I expected it to be weird and interesting.
It turned out his mistake wasn’t interesting and I was disappointed.
Here is a really good encapsulated chunk near the beginning of chapter 6:
It has the setup for Harry’s background, the basis for what makes this version of Harry different (science), a dramatic challenge, and finally promises of epicness and wry humor.
The Muggle world had a population of six billion and counting. If you were one in a million, there were twelve of you in New York and a thousand more in China. It was inevitable that the Muggle world would produce some eleven-year-olds who could do calculus—Harry knew he wasn’t the only one. He’d met other prodigies in math competitions. In fact he’d been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably spent literally all day practicing math problems and who’d never read a science-fiction book and who would burn out completely before puberty and never amount to anything in their future lives because they’d just practiced known techniques instead of learning to think creatively. (Harry was something of a sore loser.)
But… in the wizarding world...
Ten Muggle-raised children per year, who’d all ended their Muggle educations at the age of eleven? And McGonagall might be biased, but she had claimed that Hogwarts was the largest and most eminent wizarding school in the world… and it only educated up to the age of seventeen.
Professor McGonagall undoubtedly knew every last detail of how you went about turning into a cat. But she seemed to have literally never heard of the scientific method. To her it was just Muggle magic. And she didn’t even seem curious about what secrets might be hiding behind the natural language understanding of the Retrieval Charm.
That left two possibilities, really.
Possibility one: Magic was so incredibly opaque, convoluted, and impenetrable, that even though wizards and witches had tried their best to understand, they’d made little or no progress and eventually given up; and Harry would do no better.
Or...
Harry cracked his knuckles in determination, but they only made a quiet sort of clicking sound, rather than echoing ominously off the walls of Diagon Alley.
Possibility two: He’d be taking over the world.
The beginnings of older religions are lost in myth and so are somewhat protected from scrutiny.
Newer religions like LDS and perhaps Scientology have much more detailed historical information available. For these newer organizations, there are verifiable primary sources for many historical details. The public record (internet accessible) tells a different story than church doctrine on some of these details.
The question: Have you done a due diligence study of the roots and founding of your faith?
Yes on this question. Here is his conversion story which someone else posted in a different reply.
Yeah, this.
I think that when you choose the part to quote for the trailer, you should make sure to leave the viewer wanting more. The viewer should be thinking “what’s next?” and then go looking for it.
“Bag of element 79,” Harry said, and withdrew his hand, empty, from the mokeskin pouch.
Most people would have at least waited to get their wands first.
“Bag of okane,” said Harry. The heavy bag of gold popped up into his hand.
Harry withdrew the bag, then plunged it again into the mokeskin pouch. He took out his hand, put it back in, and said, “Bag of tokens of economic exchange.” That time his hand came out empty.
Harry Potter had gotten his hands on at least one magical item. Why wait?
“Professor McGonagall,” Harry said to the bemused witch strolling beside him, “can you give me two words, one word for gold, and one word for something else that isn’t money, in a language that I wouldn’t know? But don’t tell me which is which.”
“Ahava and zahav,” said McGonagall. “That’s Hebrew, and the other word means love.”
“Thank you, Professor. Bag of ahava.” Empty.
“Bag of zahav.” And it popped up into his hand.
“Zahav is gold?” Harry questioned, and McGonagall nodded.
Harry thought over his collected experimental data. It was only the most crude and preliminary sort of effort, but it was enough to support at least one conclusion:
“Aaaaaaarrrgh this doesn’t make any sense!”
The witch beside him lifted a lofty eyebrow. “Problems, Mr. Potter?”
“I just falsified every single hypothesis I had! How can it know that ‘bag of 115 Galleons’ is okay but not ‘bag of 90 plus 25 Galleons’? It can count but it can’t add? It can understand nouns, but not noun phrases that mean the same thing? The person who made this probably didn’t speak Japanese and I don’t speak any Hebrew, so it’s not using their knowledge, and it’s not using my knowledge—” Harry waved a hand helplessly. “The rules seem sorta consistent but they don’t mean anything! I’m not even going to ask how a pouch ends up with voice recognition and natural language understanding when the best Artificial Intelligence programmers can’t get the fastest supercomputers to do it after thirty-five years of hard work,” Harry gasped for breath, “but what is going on?”
“Magic,” said Professor McGonagall. She shrugged.
“That’s just a word! Even after you tell me that, I can’t make any new predictions! It’s exactly like saying ‘phlogiston’ or ‘elan vital’ or ‘emergence’ or ‘complexity’!”
Professor McGonagall laughed aloud. “But it is magic, Mr. Potter.”
Harry slumped over a little. “With respect, Professor McGonagall, I’m not quite sure you understand what I’m trying to do here.”
I’m going to start having kids in a few years. I have my eye of some of the sequenences—such as Mysterious Answers to Mysterious Questions. I need to find a way to distill this stuff down, so I can teach it to my children.
Sanity can be a quantity measured relative to some standard value, just like elevation.
If we’re 100 meters below sea level and fall an additional 20 meters, we can have a rally to restore height to get back up to −100.
We have competing feelings in our minds, and sometimes those feelings are stronger than our “rational sides”. Facing our fears might be a good exercise. Facing legitimate fears (fears where the danger is real) might be useful too, but I’m specifically thinking about irrational fears.
Fear of “monsters” a la Bloody Mary in the mirror would be a good one. (Do it).
Fear of bad luck or divine retribution. (Break a mirror, step on a crack, say the forbidden thing).
Fear of the dark in your own house. (Walk around in the dark, make it fun).
Fear of social situations. (Purposefully put yourself in situations you are uncomfortable in but that won’t hurt you).
Fear of heights (Safely).
Fear of failure. (Fail at something and make no excuses).
The goal of this exercise would be to acclimate yourself to these strong emotions so that they don’t override your other instincts/thinking when it is important. Part of the challenge might be identifying fears you are unaware of.
Hi.
My favorite large CGoL object is the MetaPixel. It is a life object implementing a life unit cell, which actually looks like a life unit cell when zoomed out. A copy of it and some meta-simulations come with Golly.
I put the randomized-trials-for-policy thing on facebook earlier today. I love that idea. It is one of those obvious-to-me ideas that I once I had it, I couldn’t believe that we weren’t doing it routinely. As if people weren’t thinking or something. You want to know whether something works? Try it and find out.
I had a similar feeling when I found out about homosexuality in ancient greece. When I was a kid: Many cultures are weird about homosexuality? Oh, it must be a new thing. What? It has been a well-known, standard minority fraction of human sexuality for thousands of years?
I’m reminded of a story in Orion’s Arm where a super intelligence is simulated with pencil and paper. This depiction isn’t a flipbook of course. In the story, a bunch of volunteer baseline human carried out the algorithm of a super intelligence doing the arithmetic by hand on pieces of paper. They did it as a hobby.
After searching for a while, I found the story.
For positive reinforcement: I’ve found your writing on less wrong good enough to be here so far. Reinforced bits: organization, use of emphasis, footnotes, engaging style, neutral tone, not taking incompatibility personally, a focus on sharing compatible, mutually useful knowledge.
In the story Initiation Ceremony, a character is asked if he ‘wants to know’.
In that context, do you want to know? Does knowing motivate you? Are you interested in the ‘truth’ about the nature of the universe and how it works?
Do you care about reality as opposed to socially constructed ‘realities’
I’ve just started reading your blog which someone linked to.
Yes. But the reason why we should listen to him is self-evident. He has written things that are valuable. If he maintains his interest in the community here, and the quality is good, he could be a value-multiplier. A catalyst. His writing here is the intersecting part of a Venn diagram, his interests overlapping with Less Wrong.
His allusions to his missionary work are provoking an immune response from many here, including me (not that I write much). I think this is why (from a quote thread):
What frightens us most in a madman is his sane conversation. —Anatole France
I am especially interested in this question.
I watched the trailer. The first thing I thought after I saw the other Earth in the sky next to the moon: “Uh oh. Is that going to screw up the orbits of the planets and kill everyone??”
Loā Hô, a Taiwanese physician and poet.