And… done. I would like to point out that X-Risk question may be confusing when skimming. P(X-Risk) looks as if it were asking for probability of catastrophe coming to pass, but the explanations spells out that the probability of humanity successfully avoiding catastrophe should be entered.
marchdown
Karma: 311
It may be benevolent and cooperative in its present state even if it believes FAI to be provably impossible.
When you use the PIN to your bank account you expect both the bank and ATM technicians and programmers to respect your secret. There are laws that either force them not to remember the PIN or impose punishment for misusing their position of trust. I don’t see how such situations or cases of blackmail would be resolved without assuming one person’s right to have their secrets not made public by others.
I’m not just nitpicking. I would love to see a watertight argument against communication perversions. Have you written anything on the topic?
On Will Newsome’s IRC channel someone mentioned the idea that you could totally automate the ITT into a mass-league game with elo ratings and everything (assuming there was some way to verify true beliefs at the beginning.) Make it happen, somebody.
Ooh, this would be so great!
Email sent.
This is a very nice way to close the feedback loop between the practice of research and the sort of theory preached here.
I believe that Quirrel, being the overeducated ruthless genius that he is, has already understood Harry’s revelation, but has his own obstacles to casting human patronus, some that are not so easily overcome. For one, he may already be a bit too dead.
What is wrong with your example sentences? They are not arguments, there is no logic to be flawed. Sure, they can be interpreted to refer to factually wrong conjectures, namely that all men at some early point in their live are literally identical and that there is a god with associated bunch of problematic properties.
But this is not necessarily or even often so. For one, these sentences easily lend themselves to non-problematic interpretations: (1) says that all men are similar in significant ways, or that the commonalities are more important than differences, or that they start with the same machinery and may or may not develop it in different ways; while (2) simply means that life and human condition is good and death and non-existence is bad.
Finally, you’ve got to look at how these are actually used in speech. I’m beginning to see your point here, these sentences are often used as universal rebuttals, or refer to some vague moral maxims which are hard to argue against, they fulfill several patterns, trapping thought and leaving impression of closure where there is none. Is this why you react to them so badly? Do they simply trigger facepalm response without you actually struggling against bad logic?
That’s why I think that Dumbledore is covering up for Harry to a certain extent.
Malfoy.
Survey taken.
Immersion is not an option for me currently.
Whatever you do, immerse yourself as much as possible in your circumstances. This most likely means having radio blaring in Hebrew most of the time when it’s not actively obstructing whatever you’re trying to do; plastering your living space with labels, adding Hebrew blogs to your blogroll, seeking social activities outside your comfort zone such as volunteering at a retirement home with lonely seniors or attending insipid school plays at your local center for Hebrew language and culture.
I think that the story leaves a lot of uncertainty in its depictions of other characters’ disposition towards Harry and each other. We still don’t know what level Dumbledore’s playing on. Did he notice Harry in the prison cell (he could, since he might have mastered the deadly hallows)? Did he connect the hole in the wall or transfigured rocket fuel with Harry’s magic style? Could he stop rocket-powered broomstick in time? Is he Santa Claus? Did he mislead McGonagall to try the flawed test? Did he prompt Snape to confront Quirrell at Mary’s Place? What does he know and suspect about Quirrell?
McGonagall seems to be irrationally optimistic about everything and hopeful about Harry. Snape underestimates Harry, or at least doesn’ t interfere with him all that much. Mad-Eye doesn’t know Harry personally, or else he would probably instantly unravel all of his plots and half of Quirrell’s and Dumbledore’s for good measure.
All this is trivially circumvented. Remember those instruments Dumbledore regretted inspecting? Well, just build a backdoor into them to modify their readings, and make sure that you’re the only one that the backdoor lets through. Messing with sensory input is less dangerous than messing with the mind. Can’t use rely on some vague instruments when you are an active participant of events? What about plain old glasses or a mask? Can’t unsee your future self? Well, as long as your previous self knows that your future self is able to make glasses show you anything they wish, you’re free not to believe your eyes. Might throw an extra hallucination once in a while just to make sure. Plausible deniability FTW!
Please, no. The world already has a sickening amount of steampunk.
Does it now? Care to recommend some?
I would also mention Deborah Anapol’s “Polyamory: the new love for the 21st century”. I think about it as a survey of polyamorous practices, struggles, communities. It was crucial for me to get the sense of normality. Haven’t read Taormino.
This is weird. I haven’t noticed that until you’ve pointed it out, but I believe that my masculinity score was only a little lower than all the benchmarks and not extremely low only because I’ve considered how my partner would gauge BSRI questions. They seem to push me towards expressing masculine traits. Isn’t it interesting that a sex-role inventory doesn’t make allowances for situations priming different sex roles in people?
Draco doesn’t even need to know about this.
Ah, the old irresistible force acting upon immovable object argument.
This seems (dis)solvable by representing changing beliefs as shifting probability mass around. You might argue that after you’ve worked your way through the proof of T step by step, you’ve moved the bulk of probability mass to T (with respect to priors that don’t favor either T or ~T too much). But if it were enough, we would expect to see all of the following: 1) people are always certain of their conclusions after they’ve done the math once; 2) people don’t find errors in proofs that have been published for a long time; 3) there’s no perceived value in checking each other’s proofs; 4) If there is a certain threshold of complexity or length after which people would stop becoming certain of their conclusions, nobody has reached it yet.
None of this is true in our word, which supports the hypothesis that a non-trivial amount of probability mass gets stuck along the way, subjectively this manifests in you acknowledging the (small, but non-negligible) possibility of having erred in each part of the proof.
Now, the proper response to TM would be to shift your probability according to the weight of Ms. Math’s authority, which is not absolute. If you’re uncomfortably uncertain afterwards, you just re-examine your evidence paying more attention the hardest parts, and squeeze some more probability juice either way until you either are certain enough or until you spot an error.
And it doesn’t simply degrade into bullshit because you think that you can explain why things work as expected for some physical reasons. You may have a certain level of reductionistic insight, you may expect things to stop behaving as usual, but magic is lawful, and so it continues working according to naïve physics, according to expectations of somebody who does not even pretend to understand world in physical terms.
Technology is (bastardized ancient) Greek for trickery. Electricity works, gravity works, macroscopic thermodynamic works. Counterintuitive trickery without Atlantis-issued license doesn’t.
This last one actually works!