NoriMori1992

Karma: 86

NoriMori1992 14 Jan 2026 3:28 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Bridgett Kay’s comment on: The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect
I enjoy the fact that despite having read very little Douglas Adams and almost none of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I was able to correctly guess that this is a Douglas Adams quote. I’ve just seen so many quotes from his books, and he has such a distinctive narrative voice and sense of humour.

NoriMori1992 11 Jan 2026 22:17 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Cole Wyeth’s comment on: The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect
If anyone couldn’t tell it was about ASI, I doubt they would have made it that far (because it would just seem like a very weird and implausible story).
I got that far, but that was because I found Humman entertaining, and because I was expecting the story to be an interesting character study where his defense mechanisms face repeated challenges and eventually either break down or bring him to ruin. (In retrospect I don’t know why in the world I ever thought that in this day and age Eliezer might be writing a story that wasn’t about AI.)

NoriMori1992 11 Jan 2026 22:07 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: J Bostock’s comment on: The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect
Humman was actually my favourite part of the story. The depth of his denial and his weird, obnoxious personality were hilarious and intriguing to me. The story started going downhill for me when it dropped all pretense at analogy and started addressing the real issue explicitly. Partly because it felt clumsy. Partly because it felt like the story had suddenly gotten bored of its own framing device halfway through and unceremoniously dropped it. But mainly because from that point forward, Humman’s denial about his chess skills and his weird personality became quite irrelevant, such that all the time spent establishing them had in fact been a complete waste; the dialogue that ensued could have occurred between characters who only had a few lines or maybe a couple paragraphs of setup. (Or no setup at all; Eliezer has done dialogues where the characters’ preconceptions are established almost entirely through the dialogue.)
I wish the story had just been what it initially seemed to be on the surface: A character study where ultimately Humman’s defense mechanisms would either break down or bring him to ruin. I don’t know how it would go; I sort of imagine that over time Humman has enough interactions with people like Assi — not all of whom are as kind or as resigned — and possibly also with Tessa, that the house of cards starts to wobble and eventually falls down. I was genuinely invested in where it was all going — and then it turned out that for all intents and purposes it wasn’t going anywhere. It stopped in its tracks, to make way for a dialogue that didn’t need that setup and also didn’t pay off that setup.

NoriMori1992 11 Jan 2026 21:24 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: romeostevensit’s comment on: The Tale of the Top-Tier Intellect
If you try to have conversations about things that actually matter, many humans immediately become exactly that unlikeable.
Not sure how that’s relevant to Bostock’s comment. A fictional character does not need to be as unlikable as the real person/people they’re standing in for.

NoriMori1992 22 Nov 2025 13:18 UTC
4 points
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on: The Best Textbooks on Every Subject
On basic Bayesian statistics, jsalvatier recommends Skilling & Sivia’s Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial
That link doesn’t work anymore. This one does.

NoriMori1992 11 Nov 2025 12:43 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Measure’s comment on: D&D.Sci GURPS Dec 2021: Hunters of Monsters
Oh neat! Thanks!
I assume this is the Hunter’s Log? Do you happen to have the other two datasets as well? Or is this all three datasets combined?

NoriMori1992 6 May 2025 3:02 UTC
1 point
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on: D&D.Sci Tax Day: Adventurers and Assessments Evaluation & Ruleset
Honestly, I’m just proud of myself for managing to figure out that Cockatrice Eyes seemed to have a negative tax rate 😅

NoriMori1992 11 Mar 2025 4:50 UTC
3 points
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on: Weirdness Points
To me, it’s hard to ignore how this post skates over why some vegans are pushy, and how that makes it difficult for them to swallow statements like “There’s a big difference between you making choices according to your values, and you telling other people to make choices according to your values” and “If you tell other people they should make choices according to your values instead of their values, then other people won’t like you”. If a vegan is “radical” or pushy, it’s probably because they think killing animals is wrong; possibly to a similar, identical, or perhaps even greater degree than killing humans is wrong. And I don’t think anyone trying to convince a serial killer to stop murdering people would appreciate being told “There’s a big difference between you making choices according to your values, and you telling other people to make choices according to your values”, or “If you tell other people they should make choices according to your values instead of their values, then other people won’t like you.” That isn’t necessarily less true about serial killers than it is about a meat-eaters, but I’m sure it’s intuitive to you that if you said that to an anti-serial-killer (i.e. most normal people), the response would be something like “Excuse me?” I get the sense that your argument is meant to be a purely pragmatic one — “You’re not going to get anywhere with this, and it’s wasting resources you could use on more tractable problems, so you should change your approach or just stop entirely” — but I think that the people who most need to hear that argument (on any subject where it obtains, not just veganism) wouldn’t even realize that’s your argument. They view their bugbear as an extremely important moral problem; insofar as your argument fails to address that perspective, and instead treats the bugbear as a mere cultural difference that they’re “weird” for objecting to, I think it isn’t going to sound like a pragmatic argument that their approach simply isn’t working. At worst, it will sound like you’re saying “Why are you so worked up about murder? Don’t you know that murder is acceptable in some cultures? Why are you so intolerant?” At best, it will sound like you’re missing the point, because it will sound like you’re just saying they would have more friends if they got less worked up about murder. I’m sure you can see why they would not even find that argument relevant, let alone persuasive. They wouldn’t be so pushy in the first place if they cared more about having friends than about people doing less murder.

NoriMori1992 26 Feb 2025 10:00 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: PhilGoetz’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3
Canon already acknowledges that it might be detrimental. “Sometimes I think we Sort too early.”

NoriMori1992 25 Feb 2025 20:03 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Elias’s comment on: Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 11
Not to mention, why would Harry continue to wear the ring on his person where anyone could Finite the Transfiguration away? He would either keep it somewhere else, or (as you say) he’d put a metric ton of protections on it so that a simple Finite wouldn’t bring back Voldemort.

NoriMori1992 25 Feb 2025 19:40 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Measure’s comment on: Luna Lovegood and the Chamber of Secrets—Part 10
In that case “wokking” would be less confusing.

NoriMori1992 25 Feb 2025 8:06 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: lsusr’s comment on: [NSFW] The Fuzzy Handcuffs of Liberation
For what it’s worth, I still prefer the original title, even after seeing the rationale for changing it. Oh well.

NoriMori1992 16 Feb 2025 7:35 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: TriflingRandom’s comment on: Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?
How did you even discover that you have aphantasia without discovering that “picture something in your mind” isn’t metaphorical?

NoriMori1992 16 Feb 2025 7:34 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: CstineSublime’s comment on: Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?
You’re using “analogy” to describe what I was always taught is a “simile”.

NoriMori1992 16 Feb 2025 7:33 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Richard_Kennaway’s comment on: Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?
if people are as astonishingly bad at the task as the paper says, that just reflects on their memory, not the acuity of their mind’s eye.

What makes you think that? And what makes you think it has to be one or the other, rather than a combination?

NoriMori1992 16 Feb 2025 7:23 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: keltan’s comment on: Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?
I mostly miss people retroactively. When I see someone again after a long separation, I might get emotional. And I get really emotional at the moment of re-separation. But I don’t usually feel the pain of their absence during their absence. Apparently (according to adhd-alien) this can be a symptom of ADHD, which I was diagnosed with before I noticed this fact about myself.

NoriMori1992 16 Feb 2025 7:13 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: the gears to ascension’s comment on: Which things were you surprised to learn are not metaphors?
I’m not sure how the “loud sounds” one corresponds to a phrase that people commonly use, metaphorically or otherwise.

NoriMori1992 2 Feb 2025 4:13 UTC
5 points
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on: Re: Taste
I confess that the ending is lost on me.

NoriMori1992 31 Jan 2025 4:47 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Eli Tyre’s comment on: Review: Planecrash
I think if you’re describing planecrash as “the single work of fiction for which I most want to avoid spoilers”, you probably just shouldn’t read any reviews of it or anything about it until after you’ve read it.
If you do read this review beforehand, you should avoid the paragraph that begins with “By far the best …” (The paragraph right before the heading called “The competence”.) That mentions something that I definitely would have considered a spoiler if I’d read it before I read planecrash.
Aside from that, it’s hard to answer without knowing what kinds of things you consider spoilers and what you already know about planecrash.

NoriMori1992 31 Jan 2025 4:24 UTC
2 points
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on: Review: Planecrash
Neither there nor in Cheliax’s world are there really any lumbering bureaucracies that do insane things for inscrutable bureaucratic reasons; all the organisations depicted are all remarkably sane. Important positions are almost always filled by the smart, skilled, and hardworking. Decisions aren’t made because of emotional outbursts. Instead, lots of agents go around optimising for their goals by thinking hard about them.
(I’m spoiler tagging my entire response to this because I don’t know what kinds of spoilers are acceptable in this context and I’d rather err on the side of caution.)
While this paragraph is technically true at its most literal (most of the clauses aren’t strictly false), I don’t think the overall picture it’s painting is quite as applicable to Cheliax as you make it out to be. Most of what we see of Cheliax is how it functions when it has so much to gain from a project that its two most powerful people spend a ridiculous amount of their time personally overseeing or intervening in it, and when the project’s success depends on obliging and learning from someone who demands competence and coordination and can’t be forced to help them. In other words, we’re seeing (a tiny piece of) Cheliax when someone with unprecedented leverage is forcing it to be on its best behaviour. This is not their natural mode. Recall that almost the moment that Keltham and Carissa are both gone, the enterprise essentially falls apart, because the remaining overseers actually aren’t all that competent when they don’t have Keltham and Carissa around forcing them to restrain their worst foibles or care more about results than method. Indeed, one of Cheliax’s major weaknesses is that it actually tends to optimize against people thinking very hard or being honest with themselves, unless they’re either so psychopathic or so thoroughly brainwashed that they can think very hard without having any unAsmodean thoughts (or so powerful that no one can punish them for heresy, e.g. Abrogail Thrune).
Don’t get me wrong, baseline Cheliax still gets a remarkable amount accomplished for a dystopian hellscape, especially compared to its nearest cultural and geographic peers, which does indeed suggest an unusual amount of competence. But Asmodeanism inherently shoots itself in the foot so much that the text itself devotes a decent word count to Carissa realizing this fact and trying to figure out why. I wouldn’t call them “remarkably sane”, just more sane than their neighbours, who aren’t exactly a high bar.