Xachariah

Punc­tu­al­ity—Ar­riv­ing on Time and Math

• Xachariah 31 Jan 2013 11:10 UTC

  86 points

  on: Sin­gu­lar­ity In­sti­tute is now Ma­chine In­tel­li­gence Re­search Institute

  The new acronym for the Singularity Institute is MIRI.

  The first google hit is the wikipedia page for the Star Trek: TOS episode Miri (S1E8). It’s about how 90% of the population of not-Earth was destroyed by an existential threat leaving nothing but irrational children. The crew find themselves under a death sentence from this threat and try to find a solution, but they need the children’s help. However the children think themselves immune and immortal and won’t assist. In the last seconds, the crew manages to convince the children that the existential threat cannot be ignored and must be solved or the kids will eventually die too. With their help, the crew saves the day and everyone lives happily ever after. Also, the episode was so ahead of it’s time that even though it was reviewed as excellent, it got so many complaints that it was never rebroadcast for 20 years.

  I think my symbolism detector just pegged off the charts then exploded.

  What links here?

  • lukeprog's comment on Thoughts on the Jan­uary CFAR workshop by Qiaochu_Yuan (31 Jan 2013 21:07 UTC; 13 points)

• Xachariah 28 May 2012 8:39 UTC

  65 points

  on: Avoid in­fla­tion­ary use of terms

  Thank you! This is the most rational post on proper word usage I’ve read on this site. There’s been an evolution in the usage of inflationary terms, where people use them instead of proper words. It wasn’t intentional; it was more of an emergent process where people added exponentially more inflationary terms until we reached a linguistic singularity.

  I was losing hope the course would reverse, but now that you’ve pointed it out I have faith we can stop it. We should cryogenically store this post in the LessWrong wiki so that others can link back to it. We could even impliment a filter that goes through each post and nano-scrapes them for offending words. It would be the rationalest thing to do to increase the utility of those who use the site. I’d definitely rather live in the Everett Branch where people communicate without so much memetically-drifted jargon.

• Xachariah 20 Feb 2012 13:28 UTC

  62 points

  on: Quan­tified Health Prize re­sults announced

  Here’s a summary of the recommendation lists, pulled (sloppily) from each of the report abstracts for those who don’t wish to read.

  • SODIUM: < 1.5 g through dietary control. Most people should reduce consumption. (Yvain & Michael)

  • POTASSIUM: > 4.7g through diet supplemented by potassium salt if necessary. Most people need to increase consumption (Yvain & Michael)

  • IODINE: + 6 mg supplement for women as Lugol’s solution or other molecular iodine (Yvain)

  • LITHIUM: + 1 mg supplement as lithium orotate (Yvain)

  • PHOSPHOROUS: Most people should reduce consumption (Michael)

  • MAGNESIUM: Many people are deficient. These people should increase intake (Michael)

  • SELENIUM: +0.1-0.2 mg per day. (Steven Kaas)

  • CALCIUM: Contradictory—Michael suggests consume lots, but men who do so should take vitamin D. Says most people are deficient, even with current RDI. Yvain suggests calcium supplements are bad. Neither give their recommendation particularly high confidence.

  • BEEF LIVER (not a vitamin. I mean an actual liver you cut out of a grass fed cow that goes moo): 4oz 1-2 times per week. (Kevin)

  Generally, supplementation is better than deficiency. Getting it through diet is better than supplements. And blood tests are cheap and let you know exactly what you need. Most of those things you heard were healthy/​unhealthy are generally right like being sure to eat your fruits and veggies, brown rice > white rice, spinach is good for you, etc.

  ---

  Please note that this is a summary of their summaries, which in themselves are summaries of other research. We’re playing god knows how many levels of telephone with the data, and I just added two more. I only wrote this post because I didn’t want to read all those reports and I was secretly hoping someone else would do it and post a summary. Then my decision theory kicked in and said “but if this site is full of clones of me, I’d never get to read a summary”, so I rolled a dice and started reading.

  I’m sure I missed lots of stuff and I omitted things I thought were common knowledge like spinach being an exceptional source for some vitamins instead. In retrospect I should have probably made a note of every recommendation instead of a personal set of cliff notes. Anyhow I digress. My point is that you should read the reports themselves if you’re considering changing your diet routine. Oh, and since I’m sure I got things wrong, don’t hesitate to tell me.

• Xachariah 22 Oct 2011 9:03 UTC

  58 points

  on: Truth & so­cial graces

  The phrase “how are you” is no different from a TCP Handshake. In order to establish communication, the first initiating computer will send out a synchronize, the responder sends a synchronize-acknowledge, then the initiator will give back a single acknowledge. This is just how human language does it, with a slight order change.

  “How are you?”—Synchronize request

  “Good, how are you?”—Acknowledge synchronize request, send sync request of your own

  “I’m good too”—Acknowledge

  Just like in computers, the purpose is not to convey information in itself. It is to establish communication including the rules of communication each side will be using. If you want to change the transfer protocol over to UDP, that is also acceptable (eg, “how are you?” “ugh terrible! ). You can also throw up halt flags before conversation begins (eg, “how are you?” “sod off”). The initial synack is also good for pinging (eg, “how are you?” … “sorry I was busy thinking”).

  However, the one thing that neither humans nor computers use synack for is transmitting information. Doing so is simply a breach of information transfer protocol and may result in you defecting by accident.

  What links here?

  • Andy_McKenzie's comment on The Best Com­ments Ever by Grognor (19 Mar 2012 23:25 UTC; 23 points)
  • fortyeridania's comment on Truth & so­cial graces by irrational (23 Oct 2011 13:00 UTC; 6 points)

• Xachariah 21 Apr 2011 10:37 UTC

  49 points

  on: Offense ver­sus harm minimization

  I notice that I would not support showing British people pictures of Salmon.

  I notice that I would support showing Muslim people pictures of Mohammad.

  These two situations seem nearly identical.

  I notice that I am confused.

  I see two analogous situations, and yet I come to two different conclusions. Therefore, there must be some difference between them, even if it only lies in my perceptions. Perhaps by carving these situations at their joints, I can find why it is I come away with different conclusions. Explicitly, I remember the stated differences.

  1) Race/​Culturism—The British are British and not Muslim

  2) Blame—The British are not “at fault” as victims of a prank while the Muslims are “at fault” by virtue of being members of a religion

  As a detirminist, I cannot say that the Muslims chose to be Muslims any more than British people chose to be waylayed by a prankster in the night. That seems very damning; this only leaves the option that I must be racist. However, there is perhaps a third option that is missing. Implicitly, I notice a number of unstated differences that can only be assumed.

  3) Treatability—The British people have an electrode installed, which implies to me they receive the same disutility for every salmon picture seen. After year of salmon pictures, the 366th day of seeing salmon pictures would hurt just as much as the 1st day. In Muslims, the disutility of seeing pictures of Mohammad decreases until it eventually disappears. It is possible to ‘cure’ a muslim of recieving disutility from pictures of Mohammad in a way it is not possible with the British.

  4) Resistance—The British people do not want to have an aversion to salmon. If given the choice to remove the salmon reaction, they would do so. The Muslim people want to have an aversion to Mohammad. In fact, they consider it morally right to hate pictures of Mohammad.

  5) Propagation—A salmon averse Briton would hate seeing pictures of Salmon all his life, and then would die. In the worst case, the world has to live without pictures of salmon for 100 years, assuming the singularity doesn’t hit before then. Muslims will teach their children to have the same aversions they do. Worst case scenario, 10,000 years from now we’ll be sending messages to our other planets across galaxies but we still can’t make pictures of the prophet Mohammad.

  6) Mutation—A Briton would be pained by pictures of only Salmon until their end of days. The aversion to pictures of Mohammad has already mutated into anything critical towards Islam. Specifically, Van Gogh died due to women’s rights, a trait only marginally related to Mohammad in as much as his film used verses from the Quran. An appropriate analogy would be if salmon-aversion mutated to hating all pictures or discussion of fish, because they’re somewhat similar to salmon.

  7) Virulence—Losing the right to show salmon to British people would only hurt a small subset of nature photographers. Losing the right to criticize Islam already hampers a number of humanitarian efforts in the Middle East (eg women’s rights). If we were to extend the salmon analogy, we would require the British to hate fighting climate change, because it’s sort of related to saving fish.

  8) Pathogenicity—The British seem to respond to seeing pictures of fish with polite inquiries to stop and social pressure. Muslim extremists respond to pictures of Mohammad or media critical of Islam with death threats, assassinations, and government blocks.

  These are significant differences, and most of them I didn’t notice until I started enumerating the differences. The question is, is the difference in my reaction caused by the explicit differences (#1-2) or the implicit differences (#3-8). I shall return to the original scenario and remove those explicit differences. If my reaction to the modified scenario remains constant, it means that I made my decision based on explicit differences. If my reaction to the modified scenario changes, it means I made my decision based on implicit differences.

  Imagine that one night, an alien prankster secretly implants electrodes into the brains of an entire country—let’s say Britain. The next day, everyone in Britain discovers that pictures of salmon suddenly give them jolts of painful psychic distress. Every time they see a picture of a salmon, or they hear about someone photographing a salmon, or they even contemplate taking such a picture themselves, they get a feeling of wrongness that ruins their entire day. The chip also modifies the British people’s behavior such that they believe having this sense of wrongness is morally right. When their children are born, they implant these salmon hating electrodes in them. Interestingly, these electrodes have a number of flaws (or features), such as repeated exposure to salmon burns out the salmon-hating batteries. Another flaw (or feature) is that this aversion to salmon can mutate to an aversion of any sort of aquatic animal or cause relating to aquatic animals. Great Briton quickly becomes currently the only country attempting to fight against reduction of Global Climate Change. A number of climate change scientists and activists receive death threats by the British people for their work. Tragedy strikes when filmmaker Al Gore is assassinated for his quote “salmon-loving ways” unquote.

  Sweet zombie jesus! That’s a scenario that sends shivers down my spine. I would do everything I could to burn out those salmon-hating microchips. It seems that the difference in my reactions really is based on implicit differences I could not easily identify. On further reflection, Race and Nationality and even (surprisingly) Religion were irrelevant to my decision making compared to the consequences caused by the salmon/​Mohammad meme.

  Now another scenario. Imagine that those Muslims who hate seeing Mohammad got chosen by the prankster to get the salmon-hating electrodes in their brain. (The original salmon-chips Yvain made, not these nightmarish self-replicating, self-mutating ones I made.) They hate seeing both pictures of Salmon and pictures of Mohammad. In this case I would not support showing the Muslims pictures of Salmon, but I would support showing the Muslims pictures of Mohammad. This is consistent with my prior decisions and internally consistent with my morals.

  Let me revisit my first statements now, with sticky and emotional words dissolved.

  I notice that I would not support showing any people pictures of anything, if it caused pain but did not make the world a better place.

  I notice that I would support showing any people pictures of anything, if it caused pain but helped make the world a better place.

  These two situations are not nearly as identical as they appeared at first glance.

  I notice that I am no longer confused.

• Xachariah 28 Mar 2012 18:04 UTC

  48 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 13, chap­ter 81

  Idea: Making the money back will be much more difficult than most people anticipate, including Harry.

  Reason: Many wizards are highly motivated towards finance and would exhaust every opportunity to generate infinite gold. The rich wizards of the Wizengamot considered 100,000 galleons to be a lot of money.

  First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market. Use a time turner and win the super-lotto. Imperius (or love potion, false memory charm, groundhog day attack, etc) any billionaire and take part of their fortune. Mind trick some bankers with fake documents (as Dumbledore does in book 6). Go rob some banks with invisibility and teleportation (and/​or a time turner). Use magic to secure a job with a 50 million dollar golden parachute with very generous terms. Make huge amounts of drug money as a courier via teleportation/​portkey. Sell 5 galleon trinkets to muggle collectors for millions of dollars each. Etc., etc., etc..

  Some of them are more risky, some of them are less risky, but I bet that any member of these forums could get at least $50 million in a week if we were wizards.

  And yet, when they mention a price of 100,000 galleons people are shocked. The reaction does not look like it’s 1/​15th of a week’s worth of effort he’s got to worry about. Dumbledore views it as a major problem that Harry is 60,000 galleons in debt. We know from chapter 70 that it’s a known thing that witches and wizards will trick a muggle with a love potion and rape them. Yet nobody thinks to slip Bill Gates a love potion, convince him to part with $2 billion, and blow Lucius out of the water with 100 million galleons. And these are among the most financially motivated people in all of wizardry, not the common population, who consider 2 million pounds as more than weekend spending money. I notice I am confused.

  I’ll brainstorm some possible explanations:

  • Gringotts won’t mint your gold for a nominal fee: Griphook could have been lying, mistaken, or omitted something. Maybe you bring in a ton of gold and they just laugh at it for not having a special magical signature. Unlikely but possible.

  • Gold isn’t available to purchase with muggle money: Wizards could own the gold exchanges and gold mines. They do nominal trading for electronics and jewelry, but the vast share of gold goes to the wizarding world. Possible, but it would drastically change the face of the real world (eg World Reserves would be a lie, and Ron Paul is a wizard).

  • The Department of Magical Law Enforcement is way more effective than I imagine: They can find and intervene in not only all cases of magic misuse (eg imperius or bank robberies), but check other means like love potions. Seems unlikely, considering the current crime investigation and how the last war went. Result—Arbitrage and stock/​lottery manipulation work.

  • The wizarding world is full of complete inverse-omega class idiots: Always a good theory. But it doesn’t sound right for the entirety of the wizarding world (including a ton of muggle-born) to act so completely stupid.

  • The financial tycoons on Wizengamot actually do this: Maybe most of the Wizengamot fortunes exist due to questionable sources. That would explain the majority of evil people doing the voting. Still, that doesn’t explain the reaction to the 100,000 galleons.

  • The people who would do this are not on the Wizengamot: Maybe this does happen. Perhaps all the muggle-born realize how easy it is to live a life of luxury in the muggle world and do exactly that, and only venture into the magical world when the want to go shopping. They have the best conveniences of both worlds and none of the dangers of either. This… actually sounds kinda plausible. Plus, there isn’t a great job market for muggle-born.

  Something doesn’t add up. The Wizengamot is full of bright, ambitious people, most of whom have dedicated their lives to finance (makes 4 unlikely). If they’re arguing over lucrative ink importation rights it means they’ve already figured out arbitrage. They wouldn’t worry about importing ink, if they weren’t leveraging different prices between the market where they’re purchasing ink and the market where they’re selling ink. Something as simple as triangle arbitrage should be figured out immediately. If wizards already discovered arbitrage, but they don’t try and arbitrage in the muggle markets directly, it would be evidence that 1 or 2 is in play. 3 and 5 are already unlikely, so I guess 1&2 or 6 make sense.

  I’d be interested to see if Harry actually manages to make infinite money, and if so what it means about the world.

• Xachariah 31 Oct 2011 13:51 UTC

  48 points

  in reply to: Rubix’s comment on: Less Wrong Couch­sur­fing Network

  Well, maybe I can try to take a crack at it.

  1) Less Wrong is already incredibly male slanted. According to the most recent survey I know of, Less Wrong members report themselves 96.4% male. Thus, whatever effort is put into a ‘dating thing’ will certainly end up wasted.

  1a) Addendum: Actually, we’re an incredibly narrow group demographically speaking. We could probably make a decent run at a ‘Gay White 18-30 Athiest high-IQ dating site’. I’m not personally interested in that, but I’m sure someone could run with it.

  2) It’s been noted before that we have a gender imbalance, and that such an imbalance harms the art of rationality as a whole. Such behavior on a Less Wrong partnered endeavor could easily push away women here and prevent new women from joining. ”...my goal [are to] create rationalists not create female rationalists. But if half of the audience is being filtered for some silly avoidable reason, then I want to fix that.” And this qualifies as a silly, avoidable reason.

  3) Part of Less Wrong’s draw is that the members generally appear high status and rational; those who join can become high status and rational too. Advertising our singles (all loaded on one gender) will bring down our status as a group. Advertising that our members are trying to catch fish in the desert (96.4% male!) will harm the perception of rationality even further.

  4) By allowing such an option into hypothesis space we’d push people away from Couchsurfing. A potentially usefully tool would lie underutilized because people would have to worry about being sexually assaulted by strangers on the internet.

  5) Even if everything went exactly as ‘hoped’ and an attractive girl actually took you up on the offer, it still comes out squicky. You have a girl, isolated in a stranger’s house in a strange city, with nowhere to go and (since they’re already couchsurfing) no money, who has already consented to sex as payment for shelter. That’s not exactly rape, but it doesn’t offer very much in the way of withdrawing consent. It could easily go bad; hell it sounds like a recipe for making badness.

  In summation:

  1) Won’t happen, 2) lets not push away women more, 3) makes us look bad, 4) stops people from couchsurfing, 5) WTF?

  What links here?

  • 2011 Less Wrong Cen­sus /​ Survey by Scott Alexander (1 Nov 2011 18:28 UTC; 101 points)

Ex­ploit­ing the Typ­i­cal Mind Fal­lacy for more ac­cu­rate ques­tion­ing?

• Xachariah 16 Jun 2013 21:55 UTC

  43 points

  on: On ma­nipu­lat­ing others

  Bullshit.

  Never use “I’m too good at something to win” or “I only lose because other people are so bad”. Those sort of explanations are never true. Not ever.

  I don’t know if there’s some kind of word for this fallacy (maybe a relative of the Dunning-Kruger effect), but if your mind ever uses it in the future then you need to give your logic center a curbstomp in the balls. This sort of logic is ego protection bullshit. Hearing this explanation is the number one indicator that a person will never improve in a skillset.

  How could they possibly get better if they think they already have the answer and it doesn’t involve any work on their part?

  Here’s my alternate hypothesis. Manipulating people is hard and takes tons of practice. You haven’t put in your 10,000 hours.

  Edit: Also, you aren’t getting downvoted because this belongs in the Open Thread. The downvotes are because you’re wrapped in one of the most dangerous self-delusions that exists. It’s even more insidious than religion in some ways because it can snake it’s way into any thought about any skillset. The good news is that you’ve given it voice and you can fight it. And I hope you do.

• Xachariah 18 Apr 2012 17:23 UTC

  43 points

  in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 16, chap­ter 85

  You could just strip their magic.

  If there exists any ritual that happens to permanently remove a portion of somebody’s magic (Unbreakable Vow), then you could just repeat that ritual meaninglessly until that person was completely stripped of magic permanently. Or you could use other rituals which require similar permanent sacrifices until you achieve the same effect. Keeping a permanently magicless wizard imprisoned is a trivial task, and obviates the need for dementors.

  Side Note: That’s actually my pet theory on why Dementors as prison guards are acceptable to the public. It could be that governments used to use rituals to permanently strip prisoners of magic before imprisoning them. This would make them a revenue center instead of a funds sink. This would naturally encourage the magical government to find more and more excuses to imprison people, similar to how the ‘tough on crime’ cycle is accelerated by the for-profit prison systems in some places. A police state would be soon to follow. Then, after a cultural revolution, Dementors were adopted as the less evil option to house criminals. It also helps explain why so many rituals are banned. It’s unlikely to be true in HPMoR, but it’d be a nice thought for another fanfic.

• Xachariah 26 Aug 2011 0:19 UTC

  43 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 8

  I just realized how Wizard negotiations are so far ahead of their muggle counterparts. They accidentally stumbled upon the best possible decision theory.

  Take the prisoner’s dilemma, except this time add in time tuners. Defection will immediately be punished by defection. The only stable time-loops that can exist are cooperate-cooperate or defect-defect. Actors with mutual access to time tuners will literally have to choose as though controlling the logical output of the abstract computation they implement, includes the output of all other instantiations and simulations of that computation. You don’t need to be able to perfectly predict the other person’s actions when you can actually observe them and change your own answers to match before negotiations happen.

  Two nations going into negotiations will have the Prime Minister wake up, read a note saying “cooperate—agree to concession and gain concession ” then go into negotiations and finish in ten minutes. This seems well within the purview of normal time travel and not too far into calculating prime factors with a time-tuner. Although, I’m not sure if Robin Hanson’s pie problem would result in “Everybody cooperates” or “Do not mess with time.” Intuitively I think time tuners would still do a lot of the heavy lifting, or wizards would intentionally setup the negotiations to be time-tuner-solvable. Then again I’m no expert on time traveling wizard decision theory.

  Regardless, this explains how wizards were able to come up with so many agreements. The International Warlock Convention of 1289, the International Statute of Wizarding Secrecy in 1692, the Warlocks Convention of 1702, etc. These all occurred hundreds of years before the concept of nations in muggle lands, let alone international diplomacy as we know it today. With easy and painless negotiations, and perfect decision theory such things would be trivial. No wonder wizards have been pulling off international cooperation since the dark ages!

• Xachariah 21 Mar 2012 21:50 UTC

  42 points

  in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 11

  We observe that Petunia says took a potion that made her sick for weeks then she became beautiful. (Chapter 1)

  “Anyway,” Petunia said, her voice small, “she gave in. She told me it was dangerous, and I said I didn’t care any more, and I drank this potion and I was sick for weeks, but when I got better my skin cleared up and I finally filled out and… I was beautiful, people were nice to me,” her voice broke, “and after that I couldn’t hate my sister any more, especially when I learned what her magic brought her in the end—”

  We observed that it Harry thinks her beauty is a sign of magic and deduced that it was extremely rare and dangerous. (Chapter 36)

  “Harry?” called a thin, blonde woman whose perfectly smooth and unblemished skin made her look a good deal younger than thirty-three; and Harry realized with a start that it was magic, he hadn’t known the signs before but he could see them now. And whatever sort of potion lasted that long, it must have been terribly dangerous, because most witches didn’t do that to themselves, they weren’t that desperate...

  We observe that Dumbledore admits to writing into Lily’s potion notes. Specifically he claims he wrote notes regarding a potion of Eagle’s Splendor that includes a modification where you get sick for weeks and is very dangerous. (Chapter 17)

  “Do you see these notes,” Dumbledore said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper, “written in the margins of the book?”

  Harry squinted slightly. The yellowing pages seemed to be describing something called a potion of eagle’s splendor, many of the ingredients being items that Harry didn’t recognize at all and whose names didn’t appear to derive from English. Scrawled in the margin was a handwritten annotation saying, I wonder what would happen if you used Thestral blood here instead of blueberries? and immediately beneath was a reply in different handwriting, You’d get sick for weeks and maybe die.

  “I see them,” said Harry. “What about them?”

  Dumbledore pointed to the second scrawl. “The ones in this handwriting,” he said, still in that low voice, “were written by your mother. And the ones in this handwriting,” moving his finger to indicate the first scrawl, “were written by me. I would turn myself invisible and sneak into her dorm room while she was sleeping. Lily thought one of her friends was writing them and they had the most amazing fights.”

  We observe that Harry and Eliezer are familiar with Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (chapter 3); although Harry may not be familiar with this particular potion (D&D 3.0 came out in 2000). Eliezer uses the words “Eagle’s Splendor” when that already is a well defined term in D&D. (From the D&D SRD)

  Eagle’s Splendor

  The transmuted creature becomes more poised, articulate, and personally forceful. The spell grants a +4 enhancement bonus to Charisma, adding the usual benefits to Charisma-based skill checks and other uses of the Charisma modifier. Sorcerers and bards (and other spellcasters who rely on Charisma) affected by this spell do not gain any additional bonus spells for the increased Charisma, but the save DCs for spells they cast while under this spell’s effect do increase.

  Now, it is possible that Petunia and/​or Dumbledore are both lying and/​or false memory charmed. We do only observe them saying things and not the actions themselves. It could also be coincidence that Eliezer used “Eagle’s Splendor” as a borrowed keyword or he may be trying to mislead us. But these all require an unnecessary addition to our theory.

  I suspect we’re supposed to go with the obvious answer. The answer that these people are not lying or memory charmed: Lily gave an unusual beauty potion to Petunia; Dumbledore wrote in the margins about a modification to a beauty potion; the side effects for both unusual potions were the same. Ergo Dumbledore, as Lily’s potion confidants, helped her come up with the components of Lily’s unusual beauty potion.

  If you have other observations or come to a different conclusion, feel free to share it. But absent of further evidence, I consider it obvious that Dumbledore helped Lily devise the potion and that Eliezer waned this to be obvious to us, rather than a mysterious secret. Do you come to a different, less wild hypothesis, given these observations?

• Xachariah 12 Nov 2011 6:01 UTC

  42 points

  in reply to: scientism’s comment on: The Mys­tery of the Haunted Rationalist

  My own story of rationality overcoming fear involves, ironically, belief in ghosts. Long after I was a devoted rationalist, I still had a lingering fear of hauntings and ghosts. You see, I’d been constantly told as a child that I had lived in a haunted house when I was too young too remember.

  There was documented proof. Every time we had occasion to pass by the house, it would constantly have a ‘for sale’ or ‘for rent’ sign on it over the course of years, changing hands every time. Two suicides and a number of deaths occurred there (including one double suicide/​homicide) and my mom had newspaper clippings. Surely, even I couldn’t contest that.

  More salient were the personal stories. Everyone in the family would see apparitions in the night, like nightmares made real. Other times the whole family would all be overcome by fear simultaneously. They would sense spirits but feel paralyzed to move. They’d see other people in the corner of their eye, but they’d disappear before they could talk to them. Sometimes they would lose time as if possessed in a trance. Othertimes the spirits would possess members of the family and make them do odd things or unable to move well or at all.

  So while I had grown up a rationalist, I still had a phobia of spirits and haunted houses. It took finally doing research on that house to understand what really happened. You see, carbon monoxide poisoning has all of those effects. It was mysterious in magical back then, but looking back it’s just sad. Several lives lost, other lives ruined, and massive negative utility all because somebody probably messed up the gas piping and nobody thought to install a CO detector. And part of that was because idiots (my family included) thought the place was haunted instead of trying to solve an unexplained problem with science.

• Xachariah 29 May 2012 6:18 UTC

  40 points

  on: When None Dare Urge Res­traint, pt. 2

  hero: he-ro [heer-oh]

  1. a person who, in the opinion of others, has heroic qualities or has performed a heroic act and is regarded as a model or ideal

  It’s not just about ignoring death. These men and women in the armed forces are heroes… if you abandon the definition above and use a more useful definition. “A person who has qualities or performed acts which are useful to the community, who can serve as models for others, so that more people will act like them.” It’s a Hansonian status signal.

  To allow a little anthropomorphizing, a society wants to reinforce that which makes it stronger. If you were to design a civilization from scratch which is involved in wars, the first thing you’d do is grant +200 status points to everybody who died in the service of their country, regardless of if they were effective or not effective. That will get you more recruits; that will make wars easier. It doesn’t matter if the words are true or the definitions are consistent, granting those bonus status points would help you achieve your goals. It makes sense for a society to do that, and it makes sense that a society would punish people who point out it’s reinforcement systems.

  This is how being a cell in an organism feels from the outside.

• Xachariah 11 Apr 2012 11:05 UTC

  37 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 15, chap­ter 84

  Eliezer, in an edit, just reminded me that Tom Riddle is 65 years old. And from there I got to looking that other ages. Dumbledore is 110. Bahry One-Hand and Mad Eye Moody are each at least ~120. From chapter 39, I got the impression that 150 years old is uncomfortably old (maybe 90 in muggle years) and 200 is unthinkably old (110+ for muggles). So now I’m confused again.

  Where are all the old people? What would family trees look like if people really lived to be 120+ regularly? If you’re a child you’ve got two parents, and 4 grandparents, but what about the 8 great grandparents...and the 16 great^2 grandparents...32 great^3 grandparents...64 great^4 grandparents… 128 great^5 grandparents...256 …512 etc? Plus, imagine the number of children each couple would have if people jumped from 40 fertile years to 80. I could buy that with older ages, people would wait longer to have kids (In canon they mention that it was slightly unusual for people to be having children at 20 years old). That would explain why there aren’t 7-10 generations of family at the reunions, but on the other hand, I wouldn’t expect Wizards to be big fans of birth control or abortion. Plus, that doesn’t explain where all the grandparents are.

  So many things don’t match up. In retrospect, it seems odd for Lucius Malfoy to be alone in front of the Wizengamot when he ought to have four grandparents roughly Dumbledore’s age and two parents at around Voldemort’s age (though canonically his father dies of an old age disease prior to 1996...what?). That hearing doesn’t seem like the kind of event his family would skip out on. The bureaucracy and government structures don’t make sense either. When I first read the story, I thought the Ministry and other power structures were dominated by old fogies, but now I realize that they’re damn near children! Plus, education for 7 years makes no sense if you expect to live another hundred; muggles spend 1/​5-1/​6th of their life in education, but wizards only 1/​15th. And heck, how does Harry go to his muggle relatives when he ought to have dozens of still surviving wizard relatives up higher in the family tree?

  I suppose the real answers to these questions is that JK Rowling didn’t think through the societal implications of living 150+ years old and HPMoR adopted it rather than having to overhaul the entire canon. But that’s not quite a satisfying answer. So, can anyone think of any thoughts or theories on how the magical world looks the way it does with regard to age? I’d rather save my suspension of disbelief for birds of fire and talking hats, not have to spend it on census statistics.

• Xachariah 30 Oct 2012 11:23 UTC

  36 points

  on: [LINK] How ra­tio­nal is the US fed­eral state

  When you encounter something that is surprising, you should actually be surprised. Surprise means that either your model of the world is wrong or you’re getting lied to. I think Fake Explanations has a relevant parable.

  A common tactic in ‘unbelievable statistics’ is that they attempt to substitute one number for another number in a comparison and hope nobody notices. To delve further into defending against the dark arts, they use this particular statement to gloss over the slight of hand they perform…

  To be clear, not all households living below the poverty line receive $61,194 worth of assistance per year. After all, many above the poverty line also receive benefits from social welfare programs (e.g. pell grants).

  When you read it, your mental radar should go off like a banshee. They’re trying to get your mind to accept that it’ll “be doing a little rounding” and turn off hard checks on the numbers. A useful 5-second level skill to counteract this is to ask yourself exactly how many people are receiving these “pell grants and stuff” that takes up a (seemingly) negligible proportion of people[*]. A quick googling says over 100 million, aka more than twice the number of Americans living in poverty.

  This pushes our numbers to 150 million recipients rather than 17 million. That’s an order of magnitude of difference and brings us to a roughly expected ~$6900 spent per recipient. It strikes me as a little high, but not really shocking. It turns out that my model was, in fact, basically correct and it was just the article doing creative things with words and statistics.

  [*]Alternatively, you can try to calculate the money spent on “pell grants and stuff” which comes to ~$700 billion. Apparently the US gives out over 126 million scholarships each year. Who’d have thunk it?

  Edit: That’s not to say I agree or disagree with moving to direct cash payments. I just felt a need to point out how the article was being such a tricksy little hobbitses.

• Xachariah 23 Oct 2011 11:08 UTC

  36 points

  in reply to: DanielLC’s comment on: HPMoR: What do you think you know?

  That spell is canon. In the fourth book, HP & the Goblet of Fire, they use the Priori Icantato spell to try and determine who cast the Dark Mark. There’s also legilimens, the spell used to look into another’s mind. Using just these two spells, you can set up a reasonable course of events.

  Presumably, forensics arrives on the scene and sees the destruction. There’s a set of Voldemort’s robes on the ground along with his wand (NB: you never ever part with your wand). There’s a dead Lily and James Potter, along with a baby with an odd looking scar. First thing’s first, they examine the wand, confirm it’s Voldemort’s and reveal that the last spells were 3x Killing Curse. Next they look at the baby and extract it’s memories, showing what just happened. Then they check any recording devices in the house, and look at the state of footprints, wards, etc. showing who came and went. Finally, Snape talks to Dumbledore and with that information they put together the pieces of why the Dark Lord went there that night.

  People cheer and declare that Harry Potter Day! The upper echelons aren’t convinced. To use a chess metaphor, perhaps the Dark Lord merely pretended to open up his queen to bait a checkmait. But then the Dark Lord still never returns. His inner circle is taken down, captured death eaters are in disarray. His artifacts and strongholds are taken. Clearly, they reason, he must be dead. There’s no reason for his absence except for his destruction. One does not sacrifice every piece on the board for any gambit, no matter how clever.

  A few people still hold onto the alternate hypothesis that the Dark Lord faked his death, but that is considered a crackpot theory. Why would the Dark Lord disappear and let his fledgling empire crumble into ruin? Why would the Dark Lord leave his wand? Why would the Dark Lord go through an elaborate hoax on what is seemingly a routine hit mission? What possible plot would involve him disappearing from the face of the earth for ten years? The ‘Dark Lord still lives!’ crackpots would be the equivalent of 9/​11 Truthers of the magical world. Those who believe in his death are the rational ones.

  It’s merely confirmation bias that makes it seem so obvious to us.

  In Summation, the strongest evidence for that night isn’t the magic. That is quite costly but easily faked. The best evidence for his death is in his absence for over a decade.

  What links here?

  • Desrtopa's comment on HPMoR: What do you think you know? by malthrin (23 Oct 2011 15:17 UTC; 7 points)

• Xachariah 20 Dec 2012 13:43 UTC

  34 points

  in reply to: Tenek’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 17, chap­ter 86

  FakeSpoiler: Mad Eye actually wears a decoy. The real Eye of Vance is a suppository.

• Xachariah 8 Oct 2011 12:43 UTC

  33 points

  in reply to: pedanterrific’s comment on: Mike Dar­win on Steve Jobs’s hyp­o­crit­i­cal stance to­wards death

  When people ask, “What’s the harm in believing in Astrology/​Homeopathy/​Alternative Medicine/​etc” or “What good is rationality”, remember this as an example. Steve Jobs died because he did not make rational choices and because he trusted in sham science.

  It’s easy for people to brush off numbers from some websites by saying they’re inaccurate. But a single example can stick in their minds. I hope that his death can serve to ward others away from such dangerous practices. I hope that the next time someone thinks about abandoning rational decisionmaking, especially in the health field, they remember this lesson paid for in blood: One of the richest and most beloved CEOs in the world died because of alternative medicine. The same thing can easily happen to you if you do the same.

  I hope his memory can still contribute to the world by sparing others of the same fate.