Fifteen right now, a sophmore at a magnet high school. Quite shallow (for instance, my biggest concern right now is my upcoming Haruhi Suzumiya cosplay). Too emotional (my AP Computer Science teacher makes me cry twice a week). Pitiably immodest (see aforementioned gratuitous reference to AP Computer Science and AP BC Calculus). I fooled around on the sl4 wiki when I was about twelve. Some people might still remember that.
tenshiko
EDIT: Spoilers even if you have read all chapters (particularly spoilery to those who have not read the original books). Following post is in rot13. Collapse thread from this comment if you want to avoid said spoilers, as some repliers commented in rot26 before it was established this information qualified as spoilage.
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Gurer unf orra fbzr pbaprea nobhg ubj vg qbrfa’g frrz gb or pbzzba xabjyrqtr gung Dhveery vf orvat cbffrffrq ol Ibyqrzbeg va guvf fgbel (pbeerpg zr vs V’z jebat, ohg V xabj gung nppbeqvat gb gur nhgube’f abgr nepuvir ba uggc://jjj.obk.arg/funerq/skq7ce100m Lhqxbjfxl fgngrq gung “gur ernqre vf fhccbfrq gb xabj ng guvf cbvag gung CD vf YI”). Ubjrire, nf sne nf V haqrefgbbq, gb znal ernqref (zlfrys vapyhqrq) vg fgvyy frrzf fbzrjung nzovthbhf. N cebcbfrq pnhfr bs gur ceboyrz:
N: Dhveeryy vf cbfrffrq ol Ibyqrzbeg. O: Gur jnl Dhveeryy npgrq va pnaba va sebag bs Uneel, cevbe gb gur erirny gung ur jnf Ibyqrzbeg, jnf trarenyyl cynlvat gur ebyr bs n zvyq-znaarerq cebsrffbe. P: Gur jnl Dhveeryy npgf va ZbE va sebag bs Uneel vf nf n onqnff cebsrffbe.
Gur xrl nffhzcgvba orvat znqr ol pregnva ernqref vf gung N--->O naq bayl O, naq fb ~O--->~N, naq fb P--->~N. Guvf vf n pyrne snyynpl jura fgngrq rkcyvpvgyl, ohg jura yrsg vzcyvpvg gur vzcebcre ybtvp tbrf haabgvprq ol zbfg. Fbzrguvat gung zvtug uryc va guvf ertneq zvtug or gb unir fbzr nqhyg cbvag bhg gung Dhveeryy unf punatrq fvapr gurl ynfg zrg uvz, rg prgren, nygubhtu ng 50 puncgref vg’f engure uneq gb chg gung va fzbbguyl naq vg jbhyq pbzr bss gb ernqref cerivbhfyl pbaivaprq gung Dhveeryy jnf abg Dhveeryyzbeg (jurgure sebz vaabprapr gb UC pnaba be whfg abg guvaxvat vg nccyvrq va guvf cnegvphyne fgbel) nf urnil-unaqrq sberfunqbjvat, naq gb ernqref jub unq haqrefgbbq gur znggre sebz rneyl ba vg jbhyq frrz gb or znxvat n cyrnfnagyl fhogyr cbvag gbb boivbhf.
I apologize if you or anyone else reading does in fact feel spoiled by my previous comment. Unfortunately I don’t think it’s really possible to revise the spoilers out of the comment and maintain the meaning; the matter is referred to within the following comments anyway, and since there are following comments it would be disingenuous to remove the comment altogether.
However, I would point out that, considering the matter has been referenced explicitly by the author a long time ago, it would seem that at this point that there is an aspect of the story that isn’t being appreciated by readers without this knowledge. Compare the resolution of chapter 26 for readers not familar with certain aspects of GOF, or certain interesting aspects of who Hermione and Harry’s generals in the armies are.
Hmmmm. Does this count as “inside knowledge of future chapters” or not? It’s stated that any published chapters of MoR as well as HP in general are fair game for no spoilers in these comments, and the public nature of the author’s notes makes the moniker of inside knowledge dubious.
Edit has been made. My apologies for having missed the note where you retracted the statement on which I based my previous comment.
Also… (rot13 for potential spoilers) abgr sbe puncgre 18 pynvzrq gung Fancr “jnf qngvat Yvyl Rinaf”, nppbeqvat gb gur Rireabgr nepuvir. Zl zrzbevrf bs pnaba nf jryy nf uggc://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Frirehf_Fancr pynvz gurl jrer whfg sevraqf, gubhtu Fancr jnf va ybir jvgu ure. Jnf guvf na reebe gung jnf ergenpgrq yngre, na reebe gung jnf arire ergenpgrq, be qryvorengr?
I’m afraid you don’t, sorry. The “-ku naritai” pattern only works for the “i-adjectives” (it goes like tsuoyi->tsuyoku, ureshii->ureshiku), and hardly any loanwords turn into those—at least, not while they’re still recognizable as having originally been English. Otherwise it would be “XXXX ni naritai”, as the commenter above you suggested. Also note that this only works for “[subject] wants to become X”; “[subject] wants Y to become X” is completely different (something like Y ni X(ku/ni) natte hoshii, correct me if I’m wrong).
Examples:
tadashiku naritai—I want to become right (in the sense of right answer on a test, right thing to do)
beisutsukai ni naritai—I want to become a Bayesian (Personally I’ve always thought that risei-ryokusha, “one with the powers of reason”, would be way cooler, if only because it would then play well with “First off, I’m not interested in ordinary people. But if any of you are transumanists, Singularitarians, or Bayesians, please come see me! That is all.”)
Objection: Why is the line drawn between vertebrates and invertebrates? True, the nature of spinal cords means vertebrates are generally capable of higher mental processing and therefore have a greater ability to formulate suffering, but you’re counting “ones that lack self-concepts sufficiently strong to have any real preference to exist”. Are you saying the presence of a notochord gives a fish higher moral worth than a crab?
I believe that virtually perfect gender egalitarianism will not be achieved within my lifetime in the United States with certainty of 90%.
This depends on the assumption that I will only live at most about eighty more years, i.e. that the transhumanist revolution will not occur within that time and that I am either not frozen or fail to thaw. My belief in that assumption is 75%.
I have to admit that I knew in my heart I should define it but didn’t, mostly because I know that the tenets are purely subjective and there’s no way I can cover everything that would be involved. Here are a couple points:
No personality traits are considered acceptable in males and unacceptable in females, or vice versa. E.x. aggressiveness, confinement to the domestic sphere, sexual conquest.
Gender is absent from your evaluation of a person’s potential utility, except in specific cases where reproduction is relevant (e.g., concern about maternity leave). Even if it is conclusively proven that average men cannot work in business companies without getting into some kind of scandal eventually or that average women cannot think about math as seriously, that shouldn’t affect your preconceptions of Jane Doe or John Smith.
For the love of ice, please let the notion of the man as the default human just die, like it should have SO LONG AGO. PLEASE.
I hope this doesn’t fall into a semantics controversy.
Perhaps an aesthetic preference isn’t a problem (obviously there are certain physical traits that are attractive in one sex and not another, which does lend itself to certain aesthetic preferences). Note that I used the word “personality traits”—some division of other traits is inevitable. Things that upset me with the current state of affairs are where one boy fights with another and it is dismissed as boys being boys, while any other combination of genders would probably result in disciplinary action. Or how the general social trends (in Western cultures, at least) think that women wearing suits is commendable and becoming ordinary, but a man in a dress is practically lynched.
Potential utility produced, for your company or project. I think I phrased this one a little wonkily earlier—you’re right, under the proofs I layed out, if all you know about John and Jane are their genders, then of course the Bayesian thing to do is assume John will be better at math. What I mean is more that, if you do know more about John and Jane, having had an interview or read a resume, the assumption that they necessarily reflect the averages of their gender is like not considering whether a woman’s positive mammogram could be false. For an extreme example, the majority of homocides in many countries are committed by men. Should the employer therefore assume that Jane is less likely than John to commit such a crime, even if she has a criminal record?
I don’t see why having an ungendered default is so difficult, besides for the linguistic dance associated with it in our language (and several others, but far from all of them), which is probably not going to be a problem for many more generations due to the increasing use of “they” as a singular pronoun. For instance, having a raceless or creedless default has proven not to be that hard, even if members of different races or creeds would react differently in such a situation. If one of the things I’m talking about actually happens in a cishuman lifetime, my bet would go on this one. Now, in situations where you need a more specific everyman, who goes to church every Sunday and has two children and a dog, there might be more use in a gendered, race-bearing, creed-bearing individual.
Maybe I should just go back and say “where virtually perfect acknowledges that there are some immutable differences between the sexes but that all others with detrimental effect have been eradicated”.
This is why it surprises me so much that the levels of communication post had so little focus on the level of values or potential misunderstandings that can occur on the level of facts due to the ambiguity of language. The value that I am trying to express, and which I assume that you are as well or something close to it, is that men and women should be treated equally, but completely equal treatment would be impractical and not equal in the terms of benefit conferred. (For example, growth of breasts in men should be taken as a health concern, not a sign of attractiveness.) So we are forced to add specifics to our definitions that make them less clear.
Unless you still think something is wrong or missing in my definition to the point that we’re talking about significantly different things, I would appreciate it if we moved on from this aspect of the issue.
...I have to say that the only thing that can make me feel less shell-shocked by the latest chapter (55) is imagining this exchange (rot13ed for the spirit of the thing, and because this is a joke instead of insight and therefore not worth accidentally reading):
Rzzrgg: Bu zl tbq, gurl xvyyrq Rqjneq!
Wnfcre: Lbh onfgneqf!
Although I cling to the hope that Bella has been misled, the way you phrased your author’s note makes me highly doubt it. D:
If I’m understanding the chronophone correctly, the thing is that what comes out cannot be anachronistic. Maybe I’m not. If I’m understanding it as a strategy-conveying phone, then it would just tell Archimedes that you’re trying to trick him into believing an anachronism.
Personally I’d eagerly chirp about awesome technology like nanobots and solar power and high-speed trains that so many countries seem to be ignoring right now, and hope that it would pick up the kind of stuff Hero of Alexandria was doing with steam and such. (Although this might not work. It’s such a shame that he came after Archimedes). It would be very interesting to see how this would turn out in conjunction with the whole space travel --> naval expansion idea...
General question about biology in this fanfic: What would happen if a vampire was just completely deprived of blood? Say they were trapped in a steel box with no seams and couldn’t get out. Would they just sit there suffering forever? Or would a lack of blood for that long eventually kill them?
Anecdotal: Approximately 30% of the material on Quizilla et al. Whether they’re writing/reading about it solely because they think it’s adult and edgy is a different matter, but there are clearly many children thinking about this kind of thing at the very least.
May I be enlightened as to what this mysterious “consitency” mentioned in your tags section is?
I’d love to be in, if my spot hasn’t already been taken by more interesting people.
I’m sure I’m not the only one tempted here to make up some top-level post about how Eliezer chooses what he had for breakfast in a completely rational manner, and carefully avoids biases such as how his mother raised him on boiled eggs or how delicious chocolate chips taste, but thinks things out well enough that he does not have to jump through the same logical hoops every single morning...
The more that I think about it, the more that I like the idea. It could actually be a relatively amusing cliff notes on various facets of rationality, a kind of who’s who to the memes around here (e.x. “Luminosity Bella consults her notes on how she liked what she had last week, seeing what kind of impact her introduction of cougar blood is having”).
Or it could just be like one of those angry essays Eliezer does sometimes, with such lines as “and they just THROW THE BUTTER ONTO THEIR POTATOES like it’s a friend of the family”, in which case healthy eating would be a metaphor for cyronics.
This would probably be exactly the kind of thing that would be being opposed—i.e. that we have deep sentimental attachments to things like butter, partly due to their nature as superstimuli (although as superstimuli go, butter is pretty mild). And even if butter feels like a friend of the family, a sentimental attachment is probably not paying a ton of rent.
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This is a very old thread, but I would still like to comment to make the point that I had assumed for a couple years (seriously, years) that, like so many other places on the internet, “open to anyone” actually meant “open to anyone over eighteen”. And then I had assumed that I would make an embarassment of myself here, like I did some years ago on the good old sl4 wiki.
Seriously, you want us to come along with our /argumenta ex silentium/ and all? …if this is really the community sentiment I have to wonder why the “popular Harry Potter fanfiction” angle isn’t being milked more for its recruiting potential. I suppose that’s what dignity is.