I don’t care if it’s a mistake or a clue. Writing a book of this sort, and then dropping this test on us, makes him 100% fair game for treating all mistakes as clues, poking at them, and generally getting any advantage we can out of their existence.
Normal_Anomaly
Karma: 4,250
Re the no kids thing: as of the latest survey, LW is 81% childless but with a median age of 27.67. It’s possible that a lot of the people on here today will be parents in 10 years.
Can people who have posted their solutions to FFN state as much in their comments so we don’t have to wade through the FFN reviews?
Warning for minor grossness: Harry can Transfigure bits of his body hair/skin into things, without appearing to move his wand. I don’t currently see any particular use for this, but I wanted to mention it just in case.
From the minutes after Trelawney’s interrupted “he is coming” prophecy:
“If someone’s going to tear apart the Sun we’re really in trouble!” That seemed rather unlikely to Harry, unless the world contained scary things which had heard of David Criswell’s ideas >about star lifting.
Harry, you are the scary thing. (And I really hope Harry ends the world as we know it.)
Here’s a possibility. Harry is currently in a pretty bad position, perhaps the worst part of which is that anything he can think of, Quirrelmort can think of. He needs an advantage Quirrelmort won’t expect. Meanwhile, a fairly intelligent, highly motivated and nearly impossible to kill young woman, who Quirrel thinks of as totally safe and harmless, is right over there. I’m not ready to predict that Hermione will at some point wake up and do something really useful, but it would be really cool if she did.
The physical evidence indicates atheism is probably true
Only atheists can honestly assert that statement.
Anecdote time! There was a period when I loved pasta but wouldn’t eat pizza because I had not yet grasped that Tomatoes Are Awesome. Also that book made me classify Turkish Delight as a drug, and Drugs Are Bad don’tcha know. And then when I finally got some I realized it also tastes bad.
So you’d be happy with this world if it all existed inside a small piece of the galactic computronium-pile, and there was lots more of it? I actually hadn’t considered that, because I just assume all post-Singularity futures are set inside the galactic computronium-pile unless explicitly stated otherwise.
Update: I kept the gym habit, but stopped posting on LW and never bothered writing the post. mild embarassment
I did part of the design of a mechanical turk study on sound perception during my summer research job. I don’t know if we have any data yet, but I don’t recall any IRB weirdness.
I think the point that fubarobfusco was trying to make with that was a partial refutation of the “narrowing circle” thesis that says we care less about people not like us today than in the past. S/he was trying to say, “we haven’t stopped caring about anyone we used to care about, we’ve just stopped believing in them. If we still believed our dead ancestors had feelings, we’d still care about them.”
You’re correct that all that matters for the question “did ancestor-worshippers care for non-humans” is whether the ancestor-worshippers thought their ancestors were human.
I’ve been using “lifeist” in my head for a while.
Another good word that’s already taken: survivalist.
I know I’m doing that and I can’t stop doing it. “A trillion planets each with a trillion humans on them” is something important, but I can’t visualize it at all.
Thanks! I didn’t realize that’s how it worked.
This is a site functionality question, so I don’t know if it goes here. Why can’t I see my overview page? I mean the one with my karma and all the comments I’ve made. When I click on my username, in the top right corner or on a comment, it goes to a blank wiki page. The same thing happens for some other users, but not all of them. For some people it goes to their overview page, for some to the wiki page about them. Is there a way to get my overview page back without deleting my wiki account?
IAWYC, but I see a potential objection.
I would like to flat out ask Brin and PZ what the optimal lifespan is for the good of society. If they don’t have a specific range which they can justify, then they are not in a position to reject immortality on that basis.
I am pro-immortality, but the above isn’t entirely valid. It’s possible not to know the optimal human lifespan, while still believing, for instance, that 500 years is too much.
Actually, all he needs is someone who believes the first AI will be friendly and who think they’ll have a use for money after a FAI exists. Then they could make an apocalypse bet where Unknowns gets paid now and then pays their opponent back if and when the first AI is built and it turns out to be friendly.
Good point! I’ll write a post either way, probably some time in August.
Of course, having committed to writing a post about how I either succeeded or failed is going to be another incentive to succeed.
Make sure you post this in a review, even if it doesn’t end up being directly relevant to the solution you post. And mention that this fact should be considered in the judging of everyone else’s solutions.