Raven

• Raven 17 Oct 2020 21:00 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Kenny’s comment on: Is Stu­pidity Ex­pand­ing? Some Hy­pothe­ses.

  Yes. I vaguely re­call read­ing about it some­where, in the con­text of prob­a­bil­ities adding up to way past 100%. For ex­am­ple, if there’s an elec­tion and there’s four can­di­dates then if you ask some­one to es­ti­mate the chances of each then the sum will be much more than 100%.

  Un­for­tu­nately I don’t re­mem­ber what it’s called.

• Raven 17 Oct 2020 19:30 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Ashley Robinson’s comment on: How long does it takes to read the se­quences?

  Here you go: https://​​drive.google.com/​​file/​​d/​​1G0xr8EJb68p5Fwt­gLEM06Ji5jjdCRBE0/​​view?usp=sharing

• Raven 16 Oct 2020 18:11 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: tomcatfish’s comment on: Yoda Timers 2

  I was not able to lo­cate it.

• Raven 10 Sep 2020 3:23 UTC

  2 points

  on: How long does it takes to read the se­quences?

  I read the ebook ver­sion in about a month, mostly in one hour chunks while rid­ing the bus. I also stopped fre­quently to think about what I had just read, al­though I didn’t take notes or oth­er­wise study it. At a guess, I spent 75% of my time read­ing, or around 22 hours.

• Raven 10 Jul 2020 13:54 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: habryka’s comment on: How far along are you on the Less­wrong Path?

  There’s also Ali­corn’s se­quence on lu­minos­ity, which ex­plic­itly deals with emo­tions de­spite (ap­par­ently) not be­ing tagged as such: https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​s/​​ynMFrq9K5iNMfSZNg

• Raven 7 Jul 2020 23:10 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Klen Salubri’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and meth­ods of ra­tio­nal­ity end­ing.

  For­saken world. I don’t play any­more, but back when I did I had two ro­man­tic re­la­tion­ships and a bunch of friend­ships.

  I’m play­ing COD from time to time, mostly be­cause it in­cludes sev­eral build­ing from my home city (Sta­dium, Air­port and sev­eral more), so event in the game on some ex­tent mir­ror what’s hap­pen­ing on the streets of my hometown

  That’s pretty cool.

  You said that you would like to have friend that would tell you to move one when you lost some­body, and ex­plain why it might be best solu­tion.

  Oh. There’s been a ter­rible mi­s­un­der­stand­ing. I meant that Harry was the sort of friend I’d want, some­one who wouldn’t “move on” just be­cause it was the stan­dard script pro­vided by so­ciety.

  re­mov­ing some big ob­ject from the cluster of stars could also af­fect all the near­est stars en­tan­gled to­gether by grav­ity field

  That’s not how grav­ity works. The [for­mula](https://​​courses.lu­men­learn­ing.com/​​bound­less-physics/​​chap­ter/​​new­tons-law-of-uni­ver­sal-grav­i­ta­tion/​​#:~:text=The math­e­mat­i­cal for­mula for grav­i­ta­tional,G is the grav­i­ta­tional con­stant.) for the force be­tween two stars due to grav­ity is F = (GM1M2)/​r^2.

  Alpha Cen­tauri is the clos­est star sys­tem with three stars.

  • G is the grav­i­ta­tion con­stant, which is 6.6E-11

  • M1 is the mass of the first star, the sun, or 2E30kg

  • M2 is the mass of the sec­ond star, Alpha Cen­tauri, or 4E30kg.

  • r is half of the dis­tance be­tween the two stars, or 4E16m

  Put them all to­gether and you get F = (6.6E-11)(2E30)(4E30)/​(4E16^2) = 3.3E17. This sounds like a lot, but re­mem­ber that we’re deal­ing with enor­mous masses. Plug that force into f=ma and you get an ac­cel­er­a­tion of 8E-14. Ba­si­cally noth­ing, in other words.

  So liter­ally, pro­cess of death and birth is one of the main in­stru­ments of adap­ta­tion and evolu­tion… If you’re go­ing to throw away birth-de­cay cy­cle, you will need to com­pen­sate some­how tool of na­ture which en­sured species sur­vival for mil­lions of years.

  This may be cur­rently true. How­ever, by the time we’ve solved im­mor­tal­ity, hope­fully we won’t be us­ing DNA any­more. Or, at least, we’ll be able to edit that DNA and fix mu­ta­tions (among other things). We’re already un­lock­ing this tech­nol­ogy. Evolu­tion is [evil](https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​MFNJ7kQt­tCuCXHp8P/​​the-god­dess-of-ev­ery­thing-else#:~:text=your loved ones.-,I am the God­dess of Every­thing Else and my pow­ers,the end of all ages.”) and the sooner we throw off its shack­les, the bet­ter.

  As for the bug, yes, cur­rently it can be helpful. So let’s call it a fea­ture:)

  Let’s not. Death is not a fea­ture; it’s an ugly workaround that’s only nec­es­sary be­cause evolu­tion is too stupid to solve the prob­lem di­rectly.

  It is hard to ar­gue that hu­man­ity makes a quan­tum leap only on the verge of to­tal an­nihila­tion, same way as when child fac­ing a pos­si­ble hu­mil­i­at­ing pun­ish­ment from a par­ent.

  Okay, I mi­s­un­der­stood what you meant by cre­ativity ear­lier (I thought you meant gen­eral cre­ativity, not last-ditch efforts). This is very cir­cu­lar. Death is good be­cause it… pre­vents death? I re­ject the en­tire cir­cle and pro­pose an al­ter­na­tive: fix the ac­tual prob­lem. What’s the prob­lem, you ask? Hu­man­ity’s in­abil­ity to think long-term, which forces us to make those quan­tum leaps or be an­nihilated. No, we can’t do this to­day; yes we will be able to even­tu­ally (and if we don’t, we’re prob­a­bly doomed no mat­ter how much death is around).

  It’s not a sci­ence at all, i just try­ing to find some pos­si­ble sci­en­tific ex­pla­na­tion to some un­scien­tific stuff like “soul”, and prob­a­bly i will burn in the­o­ret­i­cal hell for do­ing so. Sure he is, as any liv­ing hu­man be­ing that put a lot of effort into build­ing of its con­scious­ness and adding changes into the world which will re­quire much more time show up then hu­man life al­lows. Pity he can’t join our con­ver­sa­tion and share his valuable opinion on con­tro­ver­sial ques­tions we have risen here.

  Why bother? Just con­sign souls to the fan­tasy bin and wash your hands of the whole mess. Don’t you re­mem­ber the part of the se­quences where he ex­plains that if you write your con­clu­sion down first, it doesn’t mat­ter what clever ar­gu­ments you come up with to jus­tify it?

  Some frogs have a nat­u­ral mechanism called cry­opro­tec­tion, it sur­rounds cells with glu­cose, which pre­vents them from grad­ual dry­ing out, which is a side effect of in­stant freez­ing. Un­for­tu­nately, our cells lack this mechanism.

  Yes, our cells lack this mechanism. So what? That’s what tech­nol­ogy is for.

  Also, I could not even imag­ine how much pain I would feel if some­one freezes my head and then fas­tens it to an­other body.

  What? Why would you be in any pain? “Fas­ten­ing” would in­te­grate the ner­vous sys­tem of your head and new body. It’s not like you take the head and sta­ple it onto a neck. No we can’t do this to­day. Yes we have pre­cur­sor tech­nol­ogy: hand transplants

• Raven 7 Jul 2020 19:53 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Raven’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and meth­ods of ra­tio­nal­ity end­ing.

  No prob­lem, you can always try one more time, tak­ing into ac­count that mov­ing around the world or even city is kinda re­stricted now. I live by my­self in re­mote lo­ca­tion, yet it doesn’t stop me from keep­ing in touch with friends, not due to ac­tivity but be­cause they un­der­stand and ac­cept me. Not sure i un­der­stand what do you mean by “strong shared ac­tivity”, we do share ac­tivity by deeply dis­cussing lots of sub­jects here. Any­ways, it’s up to you, im­pos­ing my­self is not on my list of prefer­ences.

  By strong shared ac­tivity, I meant some­thing like an MMO or a real-life ac­tivity. Be­ing sub­scribed to the same web­site doesn’t seem quite the same, al­though I could be wrong about that.

  After think­ing a bit more about why I ini­tially said no, I think it’s best for me to state the shape of my ob­ject level.

  • I’m fine with con­tin­u­ing to talk. This con­ver­sa­tion is in­ter­est­ing.

  • I’m also fine with hav­ing more con­ver­sa­tions, with no definite end in sight.

  • If that de­vel­ops into a friend­ship, I’m also fine with that.

  • If it doesn’t, then that’s alright with me too.

  • My prior against you ac­tu­ally be­ing able to un­der­stand and ac­cept me is ex­tremely low. Please don’t take this an ac­cu­sa­tion or an in­sult or any­thing.

  What I don’t think will work is declar­ing my­self to be your friend and vice versa, which is es­sen­tially what I’ve tried to do be­fore. Yes, I can try again, but I have no rea­son to ex­pect that any­thing will be differ­ent if I sim­ply re­peat the same course of ac­tions as last time.

  What do you think about sim­ply con­tin­u­ing as we are and see­ing what hap­pens?

  imho it is only from the per­spec­tive of the one who wants more en­ergy and thinks that he’s alone and only, sub­jec­tive, not ob­jec­tive per­spec­tive. Who knows how sun’s “waste­ful” ra­di­a­tion and grav­ity af­fects ev­ery­thing around.

  Sure, there’s no way to know with ab­solute cer­tainty. But if I had to live in a world where the sun gets ripped apart to cre­ate a bunch of fu­sion re­ac­tors and one where we leave it burn­ing just in case there’s some alien race on Nep­tune or some­thing… I’m go­ing to have to go with the former. If a prob­lem crops up, I’m sure the hy­po­thet­i­cal civ ca­pa­ble of putting out the sun can han­dle it, even if only by jam­ming all the hy­dro­gen back to­gether and restart­ing the re­ac­tion.

  Re­mov­ing death may well mean re­mov­ing it’s op­po­site, birth. Also, some­times this “bug” helps peo­ple to eval­u­ate their ac­tions and fo­cus on more im­por­tant stuff. Even the laws of physics, or rather their in­ter­pre­ta­tion, some­times turn out to be im­perfect.

  This strikes me as non­cen­tral fal­lacy. When you say re­mov­ing birth, that sounds bad, but if the rea­son no­body has any more ba­bies is be­cause ev­ery­one is im­mor­tal… is that re­ally so bad?

  As for the bug, yes, cur­rently it can be helpful. That doesn’t mean it’s the only way to nudge peo­ple into eval­u­at­ing their ac­tions or fo­cus­ing on what’s im­por­tant. It seems ex­traor­di­nar­ily un­likely that our cur­rent brain de­sign is op­ti­mal for ei­ther of those ac­tions, given how stupid a de­signer evolu­tion is.

  (Hon­estly, I find it difficult to an­swer who is more dan­ger­ous: Harry or his teacher).

  What? Volde­mort’s a bored so­ciopath god whose grand am­bi­tion is to play Civ­i­liza­tion with hu­man­ity as the pieces. Harry’s dan­ger­ous but at least af­ter HPMOR, he’s shack­led by the Vow and his val­ues are far nicer than Volde­mort’s.

  Wow. This is not what i said, but you might have a point. I said that struc­ture of brain might define prop­er­ties of en­ergy it stores and this prop­er­ties could mir­ror mem­ory. And that de­struc­tion of brain might lead to re­lease of this en­ergy to the sur­round­ings.

  Ah. I didn’t un­der­stand what you were say­ing and took a stab at it (that I got wrong). I un­der­stand now. My gut says this pat­tern matches as “im­plau­si­ble pseu­do­science”, but I don’t know enough sci­ence to re­fute or jus­tify that claim. How­ever, afaik Yud­kowsky doesn’t sup­port any view like this (he’s a big cry­on­ics pro­po­nent) and so I think it’s un­likely that this is what he had in mind when he was de­cid­ing what HPMOR souls are.

  As far as i know, brain of peo­ple in coma or even frogs frozen in wa­ter not “turned off” and show slight ac­tivity.

  I knew the coma one, not the frozen one. That’s… kind of in­cred­ible, that there can be any­thing hap­pen­ing when it’s frozen. But by turned off, I meant be­ing warm and los­ing oxy­gen flow and cells dy­ing, or what­ever ex­actly hap­pens when your heart stops beat­ing for a cou­ple min­utes.

  As for hu­man brain freez­ing it will likely cause cell mem­branes to be torn apart by asym­met­ri­cally freez­ing wa­ter, as it in­creases its vol­ume while turn­ing into ice.

  This is true if you sim­ply stick it into a freezer. How­ever, “freez­ing” brains for cry­on­ics is much more in­volved than brain + freezer. Tech­ni­cally speak­ing, the cry­on­ics pro­cess is vit­rifi­ca­tion, which doesn’t cre­ate ice crys­tals.

• Raven 7 Jul 2020 15:02 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Klen Salubri’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and meth­ods of ra­tio­nal­ity end­ing.

  Oblivi­a­tion, right. Does any­one ask Draco where he was and what he was do­ing? I mean, don’t think that this spell can ac­tu­ally work, or, if it does, should cause un­ex­pected side effects. Prob­a­bly, ap­pear­ing of fake mem­o­ries which will dwell like ghosts in sub­con­scious­ness un­able to in­te­grate into a chain of causes and con­se­quences un­til the mo­ment vic­tim would figure out what have hap­pen or de­cide to over­come fear and gaze into the eyes of truth. Imag­ine you had zero ap­ples, then one ap­ple fell on your head, which led to a loss of mem­ory. You wake up and find your­self with an ap­ple in your arms. Will you start in­ves­ti­ga­tion or sim­ply eat an ap­ple? Or you find an ap­ple tree, then you de­cide to erase your mem­o­ries so no one will find an ap­ple tree un­til the mo­ment peo­ple learn how to pre­serve and cul­ti­vate trees. Yet you take one ap­ple with you. I guess, in both cases it is just a mat­ter of time when your mem­o­ries will be log­i­cally re­con­structed. “rien ne se perd, rien ne se cree, tout se trans­forme”.

  I don’t think any­one ques­tions Draco; Harry did the Oblivi­a­tion while Draco was os­ten­si­bly sit­ting around wait­ing for some­thing, so it’s hard to see how that’d be sus­pi­cious. Re­gard­ing the sec­ond point with Obli­va­tion… I’m not so sure it’s that sim­ple. If I took an ap­ple and erased my mem­ory of the tree, I’d prob­a­bly be puz­zled. But Volde­mort would pre­sum­ably make sure I didn’t take any ap­ples with me. In the book, mind magic seems to be some­thing of an art. Volde­mort’s use on Hermione and Draco both in­volved Volde­mort tweak­ing some­thing that hap­pened such that the new mem­ory was en­tirely plau­si­ble. We don’t know much about Skeeter, but Volde­mort chose to make sure the Weasley twins thought that their dealer was re­spon­si­ble.

  I’m not sure that i’m the right kind of a per­son you need, nor can’t guaran­tee that i always be there when you need me (life is full of un­ex­pected stuff and i live in pretty dan­ger­ous and un­sta­ble place), yet i could try to be your friend.

  I’ve never man­aged to be friends with some­one on­line in the ab­sence of a strong shared ac­tivity. Sorry.

  Troll did. In­ter­est­ing that Dum­ble­dore offered Hermione to try to be a hero her­self, yet for­got to men­tion that Harry have sev­eral pow­er­ful “white” mages to cover his back and most pow­er­ful “black” mage to guide him, teach how to pro­tect him­self, how to sur­ren­der sav­ing dig­nity, re­treat when it is nec­es­sary and keep emo­tions un­der con­trol. Also, i can’t re­mem­ber clearly, have Volde­mort kil­led any­one dur­ing the book?

  Yeah, okay, tech­ni­cally the troll kil­led Hermione. Asides from that quib­ble, Volde­mort kil­led Skeeter, a cen­taur, the real Quir­rel, and a name­less Death Eater. He might have kil­led other peo­ple, but those are the deaths I can re­call off the top of my head.

  By “tran­shu­man­ist” you mean some­thing like deny­ing death as es­sen­tial part of birth-to-death cycle

  Ehh, kind of. Tran­shu­man­ist might be the wrong word, but from an ob­jec­tive per­spec­tive, the sun is stu­pen­dously waste­ful. Far bet­ter to stop the fu­sion re­ac­tion, ex­tract all the hy­dro­gen, and fuse it un­der con­trol­led con­di­tions to ex­tract more value. Aka “tear apart the stars”. Same idea with the earth (which would, liter­ally, end the world). This seems to be the in­tended in­ter­pre­ta­tion, but you could be right—af­ter all, Harry al­most de­stroys the world at the very end of the book via un­in­tended side effects.

  Also, if fear of death is the mov­ing force for cre­ativity, the tran­shu­man­ist an­swer isn’t to keep death around. It’s to re­move death, and find an­other way to solve cre­ativity. Same with work ex­pand­ing to fill the al­lot­ted time; that’s not a law like a law of physics, it’s a bug in our brains.

  Peo­ple of­ten call “evil” some­thing they can’t con­trol or un­der­stand. Pre­cisely, they call some­thing “evil” if it takes some­thing valuable away and call it “mir­a­cle” if it adds some­thing valuable.

  True enough. Volde­mort was the first time I could re­ally re­late to a char­ac­ter but even I would con­sider him evil (and, more im­por­tantly, in­sanely dan­ger­ous).

  Yep. But strictly in terms of the­o­riz­ing, can we con­sider the body and brain as a ca­pac­i­tor which stores some type of en­ergy with unique prop­er­ties? Can com­bi­na­tion of this prop­er­ties store some in­for­ma­tion? What will hap­pen when ca­pac­i­tor is de­stroyed, will this cause some effect to sur­round­ing field?

  What? Are you say­ing that once you turn a brain off, there’s no way to turn it back on, be­cause ev­ery­thing is stored in the equiv­a­lent of volatile mem­ory?

• Raven 7 Jul 2020 12:57 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Davidmanheim’s comment on: When a sta­tus sym­bol loses its plau­si­ble de­ni­a­bil­ity, how much power does it lose?

  Ah. Then I don’t think it mat­ters.

  Em­ploy­ers will still want to hire Har­vard stu­dents. Net­work­ing means em­ploy­ers won’t even get a chance to con­sider other can­di­dates, and when they do, the halo of sta­tus means other can­di­dates won’t be con­sid­ered fairly.

  Stu­dents already treat col­lege as a “you are now em­ploy­able” stamp ma­chine. Yes, a few don’t. They might stop go­ing to Har­vard, news which I’m sure the other [95.5% of ap­pli­cants](https://​​www.the­crim­son.com/​​ar­ti­cle/​​2019/​​3/​​29/​​2023-ad­mit-num­bers/​​#:~:text=A record-low 4.50 per­cent,se­cur­ing places in the class.) will re­ceive with joy. Em­ploy­ers won’t care if Har­vard is the top 4.5% or the top 9%; I bet the av­er­age per­son couldn’t even tell you if Har­vard skims off the top .1% or 10%. They just feel that Har­vard is “pres­ti­gious”.

• Raven 7 Jul 2020 1:24 UTC

  2 points

  on: When a sta­tus sym­bol loses its plau­si­ble de­ni­a­bil­ity, how much power does it lose?

  By sta­tus sym­bol, are you say­ing that the Har­vard grad­u­ate is liter­ally no more skil­led than the av­er­age per­son? Real sta­tus sym­bols are gen­er­ally cor­re­lated with re­al­ity (the ex­pen­sive car is, well, ex­pen­sive and most peo­ple can’t af­ford it).

  If there was zero cor­re­la­tion I think it would stop be­ing seen as a sta­tus sym­bol even­tu­ally. If go­ing to Har­vard was widely seen as a sta­tus bid like buy­ing a sports car, but the sig­nal re­tained some value (like hav­ing to do an IQ test, for sim­plic­ity’s sake) then it wouldn’t mat­ter that it was about sta­tus.

• Raven 6 Jul 2020 3:45 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Hazard’s comment on: Meta-Hon­esty: Firm­ing Up Hon­esty Around Its Edge-Cases

  As some­one who uses this strat­egy as their de­fault, It’s re­ally hard. I avoid talk­ing irl about ra­tio­nal­ity and be­ing trans. The lat­ter is pretty easy since it’s not re­ally a big part of who I am. But avoid­ing any hint of ra­tio­nal­ity and main­tain­ing a mask of nor­mal­ity is ex­haust­ing. It’s not just not an­swer­ing ques­tions, it’s about not cre­at­ing situ­a­tions that lead to the ques­tions. It is said in the se­quences that if you tell one lie, the truth is ever af­ter your en­emy. That’s an ex­ag­ger­a­tion but not by much. AI, ag­ing, ge­net­ics, all sorts of things are dan­ger­ous top­ics due to their prox­im­ity to my weird­ness. I have to model the re­ac­tions to ev­ery­thing I say one or two steps ahead and if I get it wrong I have to evade or mis­di­rect. This has got­ten a lot harder since I started study­ing ra­tio­nal­ity and had my head stuffed full of ex­cit­ing con­cepts that are difficult to ex­plain and sparkly enough to be difficult to think past.

  It should be ob­vi­ous from this that I don’t prac­tice hon­esty in gen­eral, but I usu­ally an­swer a di­rect ques­tion with hon­esty to miti­gate the costs some­what.

  Less visi­ble costs are that I’ll never meet a ra­tio­nal­ist in real life (bar­ring in­ten­tional mee­tups). I get to prac­tice the virtue of ar­gu­ment a lot less… al­though be­ing cut off from peo­ple has some se­ri­ous ad­van­tages as well. There’s prob­a­bly oth­ers, but what’s the al­ter­na­tive? Not ev­ery­one can be Yud­kowsky and I just want to live my life in peace.

• Raven 6 Jul 2020 2:46 UTC

  2 points

  on: Per­sonal ex­pe­rience of coffee as nootropic

  My body doesn’t do any­thing on caf­feine—I took 600mg in pill form and al­most fell asleep a few hours later. I know this isn’t just me ei­ther; some peo­ple just don’t re­spond to it. Per­haps there’s an­other end to the ex­treme that causes ex­pe­riences like yours. My gut sense is definitely that what you de­scribed isn’t the stan­dard coffee ex­pe­rience.

• Raven 4 Jul 2020 18:26 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Qiaochu_Yuan’s comment on: The Village and The Mission

  I don’t have Face­book but as some­one con­sid­er­ing deeper par­ti­ci­pa­tion in the ra­tio­nal­ist com­mu­nity, I would greatly ap­pre­ci­ate what­ever in­for­ma­tion you have, no mat­ter how messy or di­s­or­ga­nized.

• Raven 3 Jul 2020 14:02 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: wizzwizz4’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and meth­ods of ra­tio­nal­ity end­ing.

  Oh. Yeah, that seems ob­vi­ous now, thanks for point­ing that out.

• Raven 3 Jul 2020 14:00 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Sunny from QAD’s comment on: The alle­gory of the hospital

  That works, but in case you aren’t aware, you don’t have to pay for a cer­tifi­cate: Let­sEn­crypt offers them for free.

• Raven 3 Jul 2020 3:11 UTC

  2 points

  on: What’s the most easy, fast, effi­cient way to cre­ate and main­tain a per­sonal Blog?

  I’m a web de­vel­oper and I ac­tu­ally did this a few years ago. The steps were, roughly, as fol­lows:

  De­cided on be­spoke vs CMS. CMS is Word­press/​Wix/​what­ever and is so dead-sim­ple that even a noob with zero cod­ing ex­pe­rience can do it. I went for be­spoke be­cause, well, I’m a de­vel­oper and I wanted the ex­pe­rience. I also didn’t want a .word­press.com sub do­main, and I wanted full con­trol over the web­site.

  De­cided on a host­ing solu­tion. I went with AWS EC2, mostly be­cause I hadn’t heard of the con­cept of ex­plore/​ex­ploit back then. But in ret­ro­spect I think AWS was a perfectly rea­son­able choice, and my heuris­tic of “pick the big one” worked out. The re­ally nice thing about AWS is that there’s no CMS-like stuff—it’s just a cloud server that you can do any­thing on. The cheap­est op­tion will cost you ~$30/​year.

  Buy a do­main. AWS sells do­mains (the key­word to google is “route53”) for about $12/​year for a .com (un­less you want a high-de­mand one). There are other sites, but the benefit of do­ing it through AWS is sim­plic­ity (as­sum­ing you de­cided on AWS host­ing). If you buy from a differ­ent provider, you’ll have to trans­fer it.

  De­cide on server vs client ren­der­ing vs static HTML. Client ren­der­ing is a Javascript frame­work like Re­act, and it’s meant for highly in­ter­ac­tive apps. It’s cool and awe­some to code in, but it’s ter­rible for blogs be­cause it has a high over­head cost and the awe­some fea­tures are wasted on static con­tent. That leaves server ren­der­ing or static HTML. I picked static HTML be­cause it’s easy to start with, but in ret­ro­spect I’d prob­a­bly go with server ren­der­ing in­stead be­cause it’s eas­ier in the long run.

  Ac­tual cod­ing. HTML is a pro­gram­ming lan­guage that de­scribes the struc­ture of your web­page. CSS de­scribes the the ap­pear­ance. Javascript is for in­ter­ac­tivity and you prob­a­bly won’t need much, if any. For ex­am­ple, the “add a com­ment” but­ton be­neath my com­ment is an <a> tag in HTML, the color of the text in­side it is CSS, and the ap­pear­ance of a box to type your re­ply in is Javascript.

  If you don’t already have good de­sign skills, you’ll need to spend a lot of time googling the ba­sics of light vs dark themes (no it’s not as sim­ple as color in­ver­sion), sat­u­ra­tion, con­trast, whites­pace, gestalt, ty­pog­ra­phy, and a whole bunch of stuff I’m prob­a­bly for­get­ting. The most im­por­tant part is not to rely en­tirely on your own sense of aes­thet­ics. If it was that sim­ple, the field of graphic de­sign wouldn’t ex­ist—the meme “en­g­ineers are bad at art” sur­vives be­cause it’s of­ten true.

  I also highly recom­mend us­ing Mark­down for the text. I wrote my posts in Google Docs and pan­doced it into html, but Mark­down is way eas­ier and you can more eas­ily mess with the styling.

  Of course, af­ter read­ing all this, you may be feel­ing lost and over­whelmed and won­der­ing if it’s all worth it. If that’s the case, I strongly recom­mend that you con­sider the CMS op­tion. No, it’s not as glamorous or high qual­ity as a be­spoke site but it’ll get the job done.

• Raven 3 Jul 2020 2:43 UTC

  2 points

  on: The alle­gory of the hospital

  The cer­tifi­cate for ques­tion­sand­daylight is in­valid (NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID). I don’t know enough about net se­cu­rity to di­ag­nose the prob­lem, but I thought you should know.

• Raven 2 Jul 2020 19:28 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: wizzwizz4’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and meth­ods of ra­tio­nal­ity end­ing.

  I was un­der the im­pres­sion that the In­ter­dict was some­thing Yud­kowsky added. It’s been a long, long time since I read the origi­nals, but this stack­ex­change post has a bunch of peo­ple say­ing the In­ter­dict is a HPMOR-ex­clu­sive. There’s also a coun­terex­am­ple: in canon, Harry learns sec­tum­sem­pra by read­ing it out of Snape’s old po­tion book.

• Raven 2 Jul 2020 16:42 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Klen Salubri’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and meth­ods of ra­tio­nal­ity end­ing.

  Thank you! I just thought that us­ing same word “fel­lows” in con­se­quent sen­tences will sound ugly. It is usual for chil­dren to call a friend any­one they share ex­pe­rience with. And no, i don’t think that Harry will be able to befriend with any pupil which par­ent he have kil­led, no mat­ter if they know he did it or no. More­over, i don’t think that Harry can be friend for any­one among stu­dents of Hog­warts tak­ing into ac­count all the se­crets that he keeps. Also, oblivi­at­ing of friends is not cool, so i’m not sure Harry even knows what it means to be a friend to some­one.

  Yeah, on sec­ond thought I think you’re right. He already had a hard time in­ter­act­ing with them be­fore the end­ing; now I imag­ine the gulf will be too wide to over­come. But I do sup­port him tel­ling Draco—the choice was ei­ther tell draco + oblivi­a­tion or keep it a se­cret. Harry also went to ex­traor­di­nary lengths to bring Hermione back, when ev­ery­one else, even Quir­rel, told him he should move on. That’s the kind of friend I want in my life.

  This re­lated to all quotes of Volde­mort. What made you think that he’s tel­ling truth? Would he tell Harry that re­s­ur­rected Hermione will cause trou­ble if he knew it? What plans Volde­mort had for Harry and Hermione if his plan worked out? Maybe his plan was to force Harry to kill peo­ple, to taste the blood and be­come evil him­self. And then to feel the loneli­ness that dark mage felt be­fore be­com­ing re­ally dark.

  I don’t get it. Why would in­de­struc­tible Hermione would serve as re­straint on Harry? Would re­strain him from do­ing what? Does Harry ever tried to de­stroy her?

  Most of the quotes I posted were in Parsel­tongue, which is es­tab­lished later as be­ing im­pos­si­ble to lie in (Harry tests it). Volde­mort also ex­plained that his plan was to turn Harry to be a sec­ond Dark Lord so Volde­mort would have some­one to play Civ­i­liza­tion against. But he aban­doned that plan af­ter kil­ling Hermione, be­cause he heard a prophecy (nar­rated to us in the Defense Pro­fes­sor in­ter­lude):

  Unseen by any­one, the Defense Pro­fes­sor’s lips curved up in a thin smile. De­spite its lit­tle ups and downs, on the whole this had been a sur­pris­ingly good day— “He is here. The one who will tear apart the very stars in heaven. He is here. He is the end of the world.”

  Later in the grave­yard to Harry, in Parsel­tongue:

  When girl-child died, wass in com­pany of ss­chool’ss Sseer, heard prophecy sspo­ken that you would be­come force of vasst desstruc­tion. You would be­come threat be­yond imag­i­na­tion, be­yond apoc­a­lypsse. That iss why I went to ssuch lengthss to undo my kil­ling of girl-child, keep it un­done.

  He freaked out be­cause the last prophecy saw him end up in hor­cruxes for ten years. He de­cided he had to stop Harry, be­cause oth­er­wise he would “end” the world. The most likely in­ter­pre­ta­tion is a tran­shu­man­ist one, but Volde­mort doesn’t re­al­ize that and thinks Harry will just kill ev­ery­one and de­stroy ev­ery­thing. Volde­mort’s evil, but he doesn’t want that.

  So he de­cides to rez Hermione, rea­son­ing that Harry would be less likely to de­stroy the world if she’s in it, be­cause he’s ob­sessed with get­ting her back. His ini­tial plan to cre­ate a sec­ond Dark Lord is dis­card be­cause sav­ing the world is too im­por­tant.

  The ex­act word­ing of the Vow Volde­mort forces on Harry:

  “I vow...” Harry said. His voice shook, but he spoke. “That I shall not… by any act of mine… de­stroy the world… I shall take no chances… in not de­stroy­ing the world… if my hand is forced… I may take the course… of lesser de­struc­tion over greater de­struc­tion… un­less it seems to me that this Vow it­self… leads to the world’s end… and the friend… in whom I have con­fided hon­estly… agrees that this is so. By my own free will...

  And she was eaten by troll be­fore she was able to be­come hero, due to lack of power, knowl­edge and ex­pe­rience. Yet, when she ob­tained enough pow­ers to con­quer the world she clearly stated that she is deffi­nately don’t want to be­come a hero be­cause she’s just a hu­man (which is ob­vi­ous lies, she’s not a hu­man any­more)

  Hermione doesn’t have world-con­quer­ing pow­ers; her magic is still that of a first year; and she’s not in­vuln­er­a­ble. Troll re­gen­er­a­tion is weak to acid and fire iirc, never mind stuff like Harry’s acid trans­figu­ra­tion or a Killing Curse. She doesn’t know about the Hor­crux ei­ther. Her claim that she’s just a hu­man isn’t a lie; she’s men­tally a hu­man with a tran­shu­man body. I also took both the hu­man and not a hero claims as less fac­tual state­ments, and more sig­nals that she doesn’t think she’s above ev­ery­one else. Which is to­tally rea­son­able, given that Harry (the hero) con­sis­tently acts like he’s above ev­ery­one else.

  So your rea­son­ing are the words of Volde­mort, right? Souls are not real, yet ghosts are real, magic is real, troll pow­ers im­bued into some­one’s re­s­ur­rected body is real… there are some con­tra­dic­tions and puns. Maybe all these con­cepts have some­thing on com­mon? So, be­fore we say that souls aren’t real and ghosts are real, we should define what is soul and what is ghost and are there re­ally any differ­ence.

  Ghosts definitely aren’t souls. They’re par­tial copies of a mind im­printed on the sur­round­ings—this is im­plied with this Volde­mort (Parsel­tongue) quote:

  Ssud­den death ssome­times makess ghosst, if magic burssts and im­printss on nearby thing.

  Hermione:

  I thought maybe when You-Know-Who died right next to you, he hap­pened to give off the burst of magic that makes a ghost, and some of it im­printed on your brain in­stead of the floor.

  Im­ply­ing that ghosts aren’t re­ally peo­ple (talk­ing to Quir­rel about the basilisk, this is Harry’s thoughts not Quir­rel’s):

  Pow­er­ful wiz­ardries couldn’t be trans­mit­ted through books or ghosts

  Draco says Mug­gles don’t leave ghosts be­hind be­cause they have no souls, but Draco’s an ob­vi­ously un­re­li­able source of in­for­ma­tion. Plus, the ghost-as-magic-im­print hy­poth­e­sis is com­pat­i­ble with Mug­gles not leav­ing ghosts.

  Early in Dum­ble­dore’s office, Harry talks about ghosts and says that Hermione said they’re af­ter­i­mages. Dum­ble­dore tries to defend his po­si­tion but is un­able to provide any­thing even re­sem­bling proof. Volde­mort later says that if he thought there was an af­ter­life, he would have left the world. I don’t think that was in Parsel­tongue but I be­lieve him; Volde­mort con­sis­tently dis­plays a weary con­tempt and dis­gust for the world.

  This is me the­o­riz­ing, but I think that HPMOR takes the stance that there are no souls, but there’s lots of mis­in­for­ma­tion. When your body dies, your mind dies with it. Hermione got around that be­cause Harry froze her body. The origi­nal Hor­crux just made a copy of your mind-state, why do that if souls are real? Volde­mort’s su­per-hor­crux cre­ates a bet­ter backup, but it’s not re­ally a “soul”. De­stroy the hor­crux and he’s gone for­ever.

• Raven 2 Jul 2020 16:04 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Klen Salubri’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and meth­ods of ra­tio­nal­ity end­ing.

  It’s a se­quel to HPMOR. It’s not Yud­kowsky-level but it’s okay.