The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that’s the way to bet.
-Damon Runyon
WalterL
Karma: 1,658
The fact that he’s wearing it at all stuns me. It needs to be maintained by a coven of the greatest wizards around.
Imagine: Harry dies (heart attack, stroke, stabbed by Goyle, whatever) Handless amnesiac Voldemort appears, dies of human transfiguration sickness after a few deeply confused minutes Horcrux network activates.
Best case, this amnesiac being can’t figure out how to possess anyone. Medium case, somebody gets possessed by the clueless shade.
Worst case: network was built to supplement current memories with dump of previous ones (we can see by the part where Voldemort Confounds himself before the Mirror that he had thought about the concept of changing his mental state), and the Dark Lord is back in business
C. S. Lewis describes the protagonist in The Man Who Was Thursday’s relationship with the antag roughly like this. “He was coward enough to be frightened of force, but not coward enough to worship it.” That’s basically my relationship with the left.
I grew up in Massachusetts, so I became conservative initially through disgust at the excesses of the dems. I’m not proud of this, I’m sure if I grew up in RepublicTown USA I’d have started out a dem, basic smartypants contrianism. Like so many who fancied ourselves prodigies (I got a 1600 on my SAT, I read Calvin and Hobbes, Encyclopedia Brown, etc.)I regarded myself basically as a defender of a bastion of truth from a sea of fools.
Moving to college, however, I started seeing over the walls a different class of liberal, the Uruk Hai, if you will. I could never join them, but I deeply wanted to understand them. Why are the worst filled with passionate intensity? What was this movement that could only speak in irony? Why were the John Stewarts the real leaders, not the politicians? What’s up with the left?
The reverse question was also demanding my attention. Why were my Right buddies so dreadful? Shouldn’t these racists, these homophobes, these uneducated plebes be on the other side? Hard to defend truth alongside someone who wouldn’t know it if it throttled him.
The task was impossible, I feared. The rank and file didn’t understand themselves, and I wasn’t confident that their existed a second tier. (As a conservative, I was super familiar with the “You are under the control of evil masters” meme, and it was rubbish when applied to us, so I figured it wouldn’t be any better aimed at the left. Just Love the Sinner, Hate the Sin repurposed).
When President Bush took over I was ready for a golden age. Watching how the successfully elected conservative politicians fared against the Left was an eye opener. When Congressional Democrats, and then President Obama took over I thought that the Darkest Timeline had come, and once again the results were a revelation. I had been surprised twice, I took stock.
I watched Yes Minister around this time, and had my first realization. This was comedy, sure, but not really. This explained the Obama/Bush paradox. They, and their whole stable of fellow politicians, hadn’t had the power to change anything, who did? Sir Humphrey. Not incarnate and hilarious, of course, but my experience in the corporate world had given me plenty of examples of the power of the rank and file to influence the bosses. I didn’t quite articulate it, but I understood that the unelected G10+’s must be running the show.
I encountered Less Wrong at some point, and became familiar with the notion of dissolving a question. From there it was a brief hop to Moldbug’s site (forget which post took me exactly, hang around long enough and you’ll see mention of it on here). His open letter and introduction series took many of my own realizations and slotted them together into a cohesive framework, which made sense of the world.
I think we’ve got Dumbledore to thank for this one, honestly.
CanonVoldemort went to every effort to kill Dumbledore, but it seems clear that RationalistVoldemort could have murdered him at leisure. He keeps Dumbledore around as a sort of Batman to his Joker. It puts the story where he taught him not to respond to hostage taking in perspective.
Despite his disdain, Voldemort has to recognize that Dumbledore’s madness is occasionally an advantage. Since he elects not to kill Dumbledore, he has to compensate for it. I’d argue that he actually enjoys it on some level.
Thus, while all logic has Voldemort dead long ago (for all the reasons Harry/Quirrel discuss) Dumbledore leaps to the conclusion that Voldemort is alive and behind everything. That is, he leaps to the correct conclusion, for no reason.
Similarly, given a belief in the existence of Voldemort somewhere in the world, any other wizard would be searching diligently and inventively. Dumbledore, by contrast, sets up a trap that couldn’t be more obvious if it was a box propped up by a stick. Quirrel openly mocks it earlier in the tale.
Its a trap that should never work, and yet, here we are, with Lord Volodemort entering the trap.
Harry is, to Voldemort’s mind, mostly just a subset of his own abilities. Not as smart, shackled by stupid teachings, not as magically powerful. If the creator of the defenses was some kind of RivalVoldemort there would be no need whatsoever for him to bring the potentially traitorous Harry, but the defenses were designed by Dumbledore, and will be just as stupidsmart as you’d expect.
The traps set up by faculty are more or less just foreplay. They are set up by the Snapes of the world, just weaker and dumber versions of Voldemort. But Dumbledore’s might be a whole other kettle of fish.
Perhaps, in order to reach the mirror you must pass a Dementor? Its a stretch to imagine him having a dementor in the school, but maybe its trapped somehow so it can’t kill students?
Maybe you have to persuade a phoenix to bring the mirror? Or casting the spell to get to it requires your life energy so that if you don’t have a phoenix giving you strength you’ll die in the process.
Perhaps its as simple as the magical equivalent of a rock that only Dumbledore is strong enough to life. Or it is just keyed to only open for Harry Potter, because Dumbledore irrationally believes that Harry will be the next Great Hero.
The edges of Voldemort’s abilities, those minor tricks and habits that Harry has that Voldemort hasn’t deigned to acquire yet, might be the key to Dumbledore’s final barrier. Its worth bringing Harry along for that.
Beyond that, I think there is a bit of Steerpike syndrome here. Voldemort is probably, on some level, lonely, and Harry/Tom is useful as a sop to this.
“There’s no way in hell or double hell- ”—Mad Eye Moody
See! Double hell is real. Its where double witches go, twice.
I read that paper, and was distressed, so I set about finding other papers to disprove it. Instead I found links to it, and other works that backed it up. I was wrong. Liers are the larger tribe. Thanks for educating me.
Rainmaking
“People who voted for Trump are unrealistically optimists,”
I don’t think that’s really a fair charge.
Like, reading through Yudkowsky’s stuff, his LW writings and HPMOR, there is the persistent sense that he is 2 guys.
One guy is like “Here are all of these things you need to think about to make sure that you are effective at getting your values implemented”. I love that guy. Read his stuff. Big fan.
Other guy is like “Here are my values!” That guy...eh, not a fan. Reading him you get the idea that the whole “I am a superhero and I am killing God” stuff is not sarcastic.
It is the second guy who writes his facebook posts.
So when he is accusing us of not paying sufficient attention to the consequences of a Trump victory, I’m more inclined to say that we paid attention, but we don’t value those consequences the way he does.
To spell it out: I don’t share (and I don’t think my side shares), Yudkowsky’s fetish for saving every life. When he talks about malaria nets as the most effective way to save lives, I am nodding, but I am nodding along to the idea of finding the most effective way to get what you want done, done. Not at the idea that I’ve got a duty to preserve every pulse.
That belief, the idea that any beating heart means we have a responsibility to keep it that way, leads to the insane situations where the bad guys can basically take themselves hostage. It is silly.
The whole “most variations from the equilibria are disasters”, only really works if you share my guy’s mania about valuing the other team’s welfare. In terms of America’s interests, Trump is a much safer choice than Hillary. Given our invincible military, the only danger to us is a nuclear war (meaning Russia). Hillary → Putin is a chilly, fraught relationship, with potential flashpoints in Crimea / Syria. Trump → Putin is less likely to involve conflict. Putin will thug around his neighbors, Trump will (probably not) build a wall between us and Mexico.
I didn’t reply to Yudkowsky’s facebook post. I don’t know him, and it wouldn’t be my place. But he is making a typical leftist mistake, which is dismissing the right as a defective left.
You’ve seen it everywhere. The left can’t grok the idea that the right values different things, and just can’t stop proving that the left’s means lead to the left’s ends way better than the right’s means lead to the left’s ends. “What’s the Matter With Kansas”, if you want a perfect example. The Home School wars if you want it rubbed in your face.
Yes, electing Hillary Clinton would have been a better way to ensure world prosperity than electing Donald Trump would. That is not what we are trying to do. We want to ensure American prosperity. We’d like to replace our interventionist foreign policy with an isolationist one.
LW isn’t a place to argue about politics, so I’m not going to go into why we have the values that we have here. I just want to point out that Yudkowsky is making the factual mistake of modeling us as being shitty at achieving his goals, when in truth we are canny at achieving our own.
A cause, any cause whatsoever, can only get the support of one of the two major US parties. Weirdly, it is also almost impossible to get the support of less than one of the major US parties, but putting that aside, getting the support of both is impossible. Look at Covid if you want a recent demonstration.
Broadly speaking, you want the support of the left if you want the gov to do something, the right if you are worried about the gov doing something. This is because the left is the gov’s party (look at how DC votes, etc), so left admins are unified and capable by comparison with right admins, which suffer from ‘Yes Minister’ syndrome.
AI safety is a cause that needs the gov to act affirmatively. It’s proponents are asking the US to take a strong and controversial position, that its industry will vigorously oppose. You need a lefty gov to pull something like that off, if indeed it is possible at all.
Getting support from the right will automatically decrease your support from the left. Going on Glenn Beck would be an own goal, unless EY kicked him in the dick while they were live.
At the risk of sounding Deeply Wise, I’m unconvinced that having a core dogma that doesn’t sound batshit ridiculous is an advantage.
Getting money for the invisible goblin doesn’t need violence or intimidation. You tell your followers that the goblin commands we help those less fortunate, and they open up their wallets. You tell them that the goblin must have churches, and they vote to set aside land and exempt you from taxes. You may call this social pressure or anti-epistemology if you want, but they want a goblinist present when they die, and they want to be buried on the goblin’s soil.
It isn’t about proving that the sky is blue. The goblin doesn’t dispute that. Rockets and Internets probably won’t kill religion any more than boats and telephones did. The man in the lab coat can invent as much stuff as he wants, and the people will buy it and use it and go to the man in the goblin outfit every Holy Day to hold their snake sticks aloft. They don’t see a contradiction. (For the most part. Obviously their are a few dragons whose priests forbid modern technology to their followers, but they are not usually your competition).
Atheist says The God Of Physics can tell you everything about the world. He’ll be exactly as forgiving of anything you do regardless of what you believe. Theist says The God of Physics ++ delegates all questions about the world to the God Of Physics, and when you die he judges you based on your deeds and you get to live forever in bliss and be reunited with your loved ones if you obeyed him in life, otherwise you burn eternally in a lake of fire.
I don’t think the debate that is happening is the one that you think is happening. Atheism vs. Theism does not reduce to Science Vs. Religion. Atheism and Science aren’t close friends, rather Atheism is Science’s fan. Science is a rock star, giving iphones and new cars to Theists and Atheists alike. Atheism is the guy in the back of the video, screaming out “You Got Served!”, but he’s never made a single thing of his own.
A long time ago, when I was very young (I don’t know how young, early elementary school I believe), I did something wrong. It wasn’t something that anyone knew about, or something that was irreparable. In point of fact, I broke one of my own toys while playing outside.
I became terrified that an adult would demand to know what had happened to this toy. (This would never actually happen, this hunk of plastic was, to the eyes of an adult, utterly indistinguishable from the rest of my Battle Beasts.)
I quickly resolved that I needed a scapegoat. This couldn’t be my fault, so I’d have to lie about who was at fault. Then I wouldn’t get BLAME. I decided that a monster had broken it.
Simple, efficient. The Midnight Monster (as I dubbed it) wasn’t real and couldn’t be sad that it was blamed. No one could prove that I hadn’t seen it (I set it up as a Dragon In The Garage sort of scenario. I’d seen it on the roof of the garage when no one else was around.)
I implemented this brilliant strategy and was dismayed to note that all of the adults didn’t believe me about the Midnight Monster. They didn’t care about the toy, but they insisted that I hadn’t seen any monster on the ceiling of the garage. But I KNEW that none of them had been there. I’d looked around. So they had no proof. I was saying that I had proof, so I should have been winning these debates. From whence came their strange certainty?
I stuck to my guns, and over time I expanded the Midnight Monster defense to several other matters. Strangely I only claimed that he was there when no one else could see. Equally strangely, despite the evidence of my repeated sitings of him (and related sitings when I saw his footprints, etc, but adults didn’t believe that these hastily crafted signs actually revealed his presence) I didn’t gain any credibility on the matter.
Eventually I moved on to other excuses, which worked much better. The Midnight Monster is a harmless childish anecdote to me. Except...
At some point during one of my excuses someone asked me to describe the monster. I did so, with the relish of the very young. I remember creating the portrait in my mind. I remember doing so, consciously falsifying the memory of a nonexistent monster.
The scary part is this. I also remember the monster. I remember seeing it, just as I’d described seeing it. I have a vivid memory of seeing it looming up over the garage of my childhood home.
If I didn’t remember creating the memory, rehearsing it (as I did after the initial inquiry) and drilling it into my mind I might believe it to this day. I remember it like I remember my buddy’s faces. It is indistinguishable from the rest of my memories.
That’s scarier than a monster to me.
I’ve always thought that a site or subreddit simulating the gradual creation of a legal system might be worthwhile. Call it YouBeTheJudge or something similar.
That is, each week you give the readers an incident. Details should look vaguely like Mock Trial, They render judgement, guided only by their own morality. Initially nothing constrains the court, thereafter it is limited only by the precedent that it has established.
Spin off new world any time one world gets too far into the weeds, maybe they are nations and you can do international incidents eventually?
Seems like it might be popular enough to sell to someone eventually. Long shot, but then I’d never have predicted that Epic Rap Battles of History would have succeeded.
A lot of people (not in this thread) have been generalizing from America’s difficulties with the Taliban to what Russia might expect, should they conquer the Ukraine. I do not think that the experiences will resemble one another as much as might be expected, because I think insurgencies require cooperative civilian populaces in which to conceal themselves, and I expect Russia’s rules of engagement will discourage most civilians from supporting the Ukrainian partisans.
You must not fight too often with one enemy, or you will teach him all your art of war.
Napoleon Bonaparte
My life places me in a position to observe an uncommon number of people repenting and trying to change. As you might expect, humans being what we are, few accomplish their goal.
A fact that I’ve observed is that NONE of those who other themselves and blame the shard get it done. If someone says “I’ve got a terrible temper”, he will still hit. If he says “I hit my girlfriend”, he might stop. If someone says “I have shitty executive function”, he will still be late. If he says “I broke my promise”, he might change.
So, when you say “I have an addiction”, I’m a bit concerned. A LW truism is that we don’t have brains, we are brains. We aren’t ghosts manning machines, we are machines.
I think it is some old “devil made me do it”, stuff. The “other me” isn’t real, so energy spent fighting him is wasted. Effort spent changing my behavior might bear fruit.
I’m reading a lot into phrasing, so if this isn’t you, my bad. Just...my advice… be sure to own your stuff man. You either “have an addiction”, or “screwed some randos without protection”, and my experience suggests that thinking of it as the second one will help you more.
My instinct is that cheerleaders don’t improve results for sports teams, but that that also isn’t their function.
On the original topic, I’ve actually encountered the situation of “environment filled with dude programmers with poor social skills suddenly gets a few very attractive ladies who have incentives to be nice to them.” My frat went co-ed senior year.
To put things mildly, productivity did not improve.
On the other hand, a lot more guys wanted to join up. So my guess is that the office cheerleaders do not make existing programmers more productive (and may in fact do the opposite), but that they may make the office more desirable as a work environment to prospective hires.
I’ve always loved the initial exchange between Gregory and Syme in “The Man Who Was Thursday”.
Context: Gregory is an anarchist poet, Syme is claiming to be a poet of respectability, which Gregory maintains is impossible.
....The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.”
“So it is,” said Mr. Syme.
“Nonsense!” said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox. “Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!”
“It is you who are unpoetical,” replied the poet Syme. “If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!”
Methinks Voldemort is about to betray the Death Eaters. They are summoned here to be killed. Pointing their wands away from him is a precaution.
I used to be a dedicated Hand cannon/Shotgun user in Destiny, but I noticed that I never placed as highly as I thought I was capable of. I was aware that most of the stronger folks used Assault Rifle/Fusion Rifle, but I’d persuaded myself that I didn’t enjoy that playstyle.
I decide to give the Assault Rifle/Fusion Rifle playstyle another chance, resolutely not thinking about bragging rights. I used the conventionally “best” weapons and lo and behold I did better. Moreover, it was just as fun as it usually was. The whole “playstyle” excuse I used to give for using the wrong ones was just a cover for trying to be a special snowflake.
Nowadays I go Assault Rifle/Fusion Rifle, and if Bungie changes the weapon balance to favor another setup I’ll try it out too.
I can’t believe Hermione Granger has been framed for murder by Tom Riddle....again.