I’d like to see less discussion about karma.
Pavitra
Karma: 2,339
I can’t believe I didn’t realize this before.
Someone complained elsewhere (I think it was in the other thread) about Harry being the Boy-who-Lived and having a prophecy and having a cold dark side and being super-rational.
From MoR itself:
It’s too much coincidence for one girl to be the strongest magically and academically unless there’s a single cause.
It’s plausible that one of the Muggle-raised students at Hogwarts could be a science nerd. It’s not plausible that that student would also be the Boy-who-Lived. There must be a single cause.
I think it’s most likely that Harry’s dark side is somehow an effect of being AKed. Perhaps he’s a horcrux, like in canon. The hat said no, but it’s possible that Harry was killed and the only soul left in him is Voldemort’s fragment. Or, without positing souls, maybe horcruxing a person overwrites the victim with a copy of yourself.
Harrymort has a warm side because he was raised in a loving household; he doesn’t remember being Voldemort because he was stuck in a child’s brain, with the plasticity and pruning that entails (or maybe V. wiped Harrymort’s memory for some reason?); he didn’t survive the attack, but rather his fresh corpse was appropriated as a horcrux.
This also explains his prodigious intellect and indignation at being treated as a child: he’s really an adult mind, overwritten onto a child’s brain. This is also why the Remembrall reacted the way it did: he’s forgotten decades of his former life as Voldemort.
Every creative act is open war against The Way It Is. What you are saying when you make something is that the universe is not sufficient, and what it really needs is more you. And it does, actually; it does. Go look outside. You can’t tell me that we are done making the world.
Free Will as Unsolvability by Rivals
Part of that seems to be from HPMOR. I’m not sure where the rest comes from.
Recall that the goal isn’t to undershoot reality every time, but to do so half the time.
Perhaps I’m overestimating human nature, but Lars reads to me like an outgroup stereotype.
These threads would be very sparsely populated if we avoided quoting humans.
Did this retest ever happen?
I think 40% is about right for China to do something about that unlikely-sounding in the next five years. The specificity of it being that particular thing is burdensome, though; the probability is much lower than the plausibility. Upvoted.
I just donated to the SIAI.
I think the real reason people are reluctant to sign up for cryonics is that it raises all the classic red flags for a scam. People are asked to invest a significant amount of money in a non-mainstream plan that, even if it works exactly as claimed, won’t pay off until well after the mark is no longer able to sue.
Consider the situation from the perspective of someone just hearing about cryonics for the first time: if cryonics is a sham, then they should expect to be presented with a lot of generally plausible-sounding (but falsified) evidence, most of which will probably be too technical for them to follow (so that they can’t figure out that it’s bogus).
the growth in GDP depends primarily on the current GDP and that it has been this way for a very long time.
If this were the case, we should expect any noise to accumulate as a random walk. After the Great Depression, the data goes back to where it would have been without the interruption.
Dumbledore is an r-strategist.
He tells Harry to carry around a random object purely on the theory that “it is wiser to do than not”, and he tells Blaise that it’s important to have multiple plots going at once. His basic strategy is to try as many things as possible, in the hopes that a few of them will work.
Furthermore, he’s in pretty much the ideal situation for r-strategy: a highly chaotic environment, and few to no direct rivals or real peers.
Chapter 14:
Otherwise we shall see you again three months later and you will be two years older and dressed in a loincloth and covered in snow and that’s if you stay inside the castle.
If this sort of time-stretching effect could be controlled, it would be incredibly useful. One could research and prepare at leisure for an imminent attack, at a much better speedup than the mere 25% offered by Time-Turners. If it can go the other way as well, Salazar Slytherin might very well still be alive somewhere in Hogwarts.
Because he withdrew before any of the dice were cast, he should have been allowed to do so, but not then allowed to eat the loser.
The original reason I’m here is because Eliezer is an engaging essayist. I started reading the sequences and didn’t stop until I was finished.
I’ve since noticed that I’m disappointed in other internet forums; they seem now muddled and sluggish-thinking by comparison. I don’t know if I’ve become spoiled, or if I’ve justifiedly altered my rationality set-point, or if I’m becoming a narrow-minded crank. But LW seems to me to have that magic balance of intelligent people saying intelligent things, together with the ideas being presented in a clear, accessible fashion.
I rather doubt it would go that far.
I rather doubt it would stop at only that.
Probably more accurate to say that they can recite the fact, but don’t take it into account during decision-making.
75%: Large groups practicing Transcendental Meditation or TM-Sidhis measurably decrease crime rates.
At an additional 20% (net 15%): The effect size depends on the size of the group in a nonlinear fashion; specifically, there is a threshhold at which most of the effect appears, and the threshhold is at .01*pop (1% of the total population) for TM or sqrt(.01*pop) for TM-Sidhis.
(Edited for clarity.)
(Update: I no longer believe this. New estimates: 2% for the main hypothesis, additional 50% (net 1%) for the secondary.)