pku

Karma: 86

pku 7 Dec 2025 23:09 UTC
1 point
0
on: Eliezer’s Unteachable Methods of Sanity
Translating this to the mental script that works for me:
If I picture myself in the role of the astronauts on the Columbia as it was falling apart, or a football team in the last few minutes of a game where they’re twenty points behind, I know the script calls for just keeping up your best effort (as you know it) until after the shuttle explodes or the buzzer sounds. So I can just do that.
Why is there an alternative script that calls to go insane? I think because there’s a version that equates that with a heroic effort, that thinks that if I dramatize and just try harder (as shown by visible effort signalling), that equates with making a true desperate effort that might actually work in a way that just calmly doing my best to the end won’t. But since I know that script is wrong, I can just not play it.
(Why does that script exist? I think for signalling reasons—going insane over something is a good way to shallowly signal I think it’s significant. But it’s not a good way to solve the underlying problem when it’s the underlying problem that needs solving, so I just choose not to do it when that’s the case.
A similar example: If I imagine seeing a news article about a child going missing, it’s easy for me to picture myself remarking “oh that’s terrible, I’m crying just imagining the parents”. If I imagine a child of mine or of a close friend going missing, my mental script’s next step is “okay track down where he was, call the police, think of more action steps”. Because there I care more about finding the child than about signalling that I care about finding the child).

pku 30 Jul 2025 23:06 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: Gretta Duleba’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
After thinking about this a bit more, this says something about Voldemort’s perfect occlumancy in that while he could convincingly become a lot of different characters, there were still parts of his underlying person (CEV?) that genuinely were so unlike other people he couldn’t easily fake not having them.
(Which I guess is semi-confirmed in-story in that it says occlumancy and veritaserum enters the mind through specific surfaces that can be defended, but powerful methods like unbreakable vows/parseltongue/the mirror can’t be blocked with it)

pku 26 Jul 2025 15:13 UTC
6 points
1
in reply to: philh’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
Iirc when they discover filch is a squib Ron explicitly says this is what a squib is (“like muggle born wizards, but in reverse and much rarer”).

pku 26 Jul 2025 3:28 UTC
7 points
2
in reply to: Gretta Duleba’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
Another nitpick, but footnote 14 is wrong: Tonks was a metamorphmagus, not using polyjuice.

pku 26 Jul 2025 2:44 UTC
4 points
2
in reply to: pku’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
Actually now I want to write a spin off short story about this. It always bothered me that hpmor Dumbledore didn’t really get any onscreen moments of awesome, I want to write a story set early in the Voldemort war where, for the first time, a relatively young inexperienced Voldemort has someone pull a successful plot against him by being proactive and he barely escapes (and rewrites some of his list with lessons).

pku 26 Jul 2025 2:39 UTC
11 points
4
in reply to: sunwillrise’s comment on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
Minor comment but Quirrel doesn’t have a time turner; he just figured out a way to hack the protective shell around Harry’s (which, given it was made to protect against interference by an eleven year old, it’s pretty reasonable he can do).

pku 26 Jul 2025 2:28 UTC
1 point
0
on: HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore
My open question is: how did Dumbledore know Voldemort was Tom Riddle? When he set himself up as dark Lord he presumably didn’t intend to leave a trace (he didn’t with his David Monroe persona). Did Dumbledore discover it in some plot? Did he conclude it because Voldemort openly use parseltongue somewhere? Was it in the prophecies?

pku 14 Jan 2024 21:30 UTC
0 points
−1
in reply to: paulfchristiano’s comment on: Introduce a Speed Maximum
This assumes speed limits were correctly calibrated at some point. I think the actual cost of road deaths (which are arguably the top single cause of QALY loss even at current historically low rates) is high enough that I suspect it was originally set way too high and is still unreasonably high given the costs.

pku 18 Mar 2023 19:53 UTC
14 points
9
on: “Publish or Perish” (a quick note on why you should try to make your work legible to existing academic communities)
I think this describes how Eliezer’s grudge against academia has set back AI alignment (even the parts that aren’t related to his organization, since his cultural influence has made this a wider norm).

pku 17 Jan 2022 1:37 UTC
8 points
0
in reply to: jasoncrawford’s comment on: Why haven’t we celebrated any major achievements lately?
Partly street design to reduce speeding, partly encouraging other mode shares over private cars (see e.g. here https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/how-helsinki-and-oslo-cut-pedestrian-deaths-to-zero )
(Disclaimer: I’m ideological about disliking cars, which makes me less objective than I’d usually prefer to be on LW)

pku 16 Jan 2022 18:31 UTC
6 points
0
on: Why haven’t we celebrated any major achievements lately?

We haven’t solved traffic or auto accidents

Worth noting that this is a policy failure, not a technological one. Some places have solved this—e.g. Oslo has 0-1 car deaths a year—but American cities are unwilling or unable to make the infrastructure changes it takes. I think this is related to the lack of celebration issues—we celebrate change and progress less, and achieve less progress that would require change, because we value progress less than we used to.

pku 20 Sep 2021 1:43 UTC
1 point
0
in reply to: JBlack’s comment on: Lessons from covid predictions: Always use multiple models
I think I was at about the same place for most of it, but unfortunately I didn’t write that one down and can’t go back and check :/.

pku 29 Apr 2018 20:09 UTC
1 point
0
on: Does Thinking Hard Hurt Your Brain?
This mostly matches my experience. By far the most intense version of this I’ve had was the time I tried to play Chess and Go simultaneously (against two different people). I started sweating and shaking. This seems to suggest that not only is thinking a physical effort, you can push yourself much harder under some conditions than others (just like how deadlifts will physically exhaust you much faster than pushups, even if you push yourself to do pushups as hard as you think you can).

pku 21 Apr 2018 23:58 UTC
8 points
0
on: Funeral Ritual
One of the functions/problems of funeral rituals is coordinating the direction support needs to go—people support people who were closer to the deceased/are having a harder time, and get support from people who are having less of a hard time.
I guess this means a funeral is a two-group event, at least along that axis—you have the group of people being comforted (family and close friends), and then the group of less-close acquaintances, who (aside from being there to deal with their own grief) are also there to comfort the first group (both by direct action, and by showing them the person they lost mattered to people).
I guess the implications of that are (a) sometimes (like with your friend) you need separate rituals, because you have multiple important first group/second group divisions. And (b), it’s not only okay to be there if you didn’t know the person that well, it’s important (since you need the second group). And from the outside view, you should expect most funerals you go to to have you in the second group.
In terms of the ritual, I’m not sure what the implications are. Maybe it suggests that if you don’t have a direct fit for the deceased’s wishes, you should look for something representative of group 1 instead of the general attendance (though this raises the problem that identifying group 1 isn’t easy—the roommate the person moved in with two months ago may be either a total stranger, or closer than their estranged family). It does suggest that the ritual needs to leave room for unidirectional comforting, but that seems easiest to do by leaving unstructured communication space.

pku 17 Mar 2017 19:08 UTC
3 points
0
in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: I Want To Live In A Baugruppe
I’m interested. I’m moving to the bay (work in MTV) in August. (I’m also interested in group houses and like kids, so if there’s a shortage of grouphouse pro-kids people I totally have comparative advantage there).