Harry pulled the trigger. Bang or click?
What happens if you AK someone keyed to the horcrux 2.0 network?
Prediction: If Hermione is AK’d, her soul will be shunted to the network. There will be no death burst and Voldemort’s horcruxing attempt fails. Then things get interesting.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but there seem to be two separate challenges on the Potions room parchment: a simple one consistent with canon and the skills and abilities of the target audience, and a complex one requiring an hour or so of careful and precise work. Looks like Harry and Quirrelmort focus exclusively on the long formula, ignoring the puzzle.
On rereading the relevant part of Ch. 107, it appears that Harry has an idea he doesn’t want to share shortly after the broomstick conversation. On a close reading, it appears that he manages to avoid the topic, first evading a request to answer a question in parseltongue by talking about Snape, then veering further off topic with dementors.
So did Harry manage to pull a fast one? Are the Effulgence instructions forged? If so, by whom? Is the duration of one hour significant for time-turning? What did I miss?
Hmm. How about having someone else die in Hermione’s place?
I don’t recall offhand if the death burst was recognizable as Hermione, but otherwise it seems doable. Dumbledore said he felt a student die and only realized it was Hermione once he saw her.
You’d need polyjuice for the visual appearance, and either Hermione’s presence or a fake Patronus for past-Harry to follow. Hermione is unlikely to go along with the plan willingly sho she’d need to be tricked or incapacitated. Hard to tell which would be easier.
Given the last words, Hermione’s doppelganger might need to be complicit with the plan. Easy to accomplish if it was Harry, but I think he’s too utilitarian for that. He’d need someone loyal but expendable. Lesath would seem to fit the bill, but I wonder if he’d agree to literally die on Harry’s command.
Lesswrongers are surprised by this? It appears figuring out metabolism and nutrition is harder than I thought.
I believe that obesity is a problem of metabolic regulation, not overeating, and this result seems to support my belief. Restricting calories to regulate your weight is akin to opening the fridge door to regulate its temperature. It might work for a while but in the long run you’ll end up breaking both your fridge and your budget. Far better to figure out how to adjust the termostat.
Some of the things that upregulate your fat set point are a history of starvation (that’s why calorie restriction is bad in the long run), toxins in your food, sugars (especially fructose—that stuff is toxic) and grains. Wheat is particularly bad—it can serioysly screw with your gut and is addictive to boot.
I’m pretty sure “trying to eat less” is exactly the wrong thing to do. Calorie restriction just triggers the starvation response which makes things worse in the long run.
Change what you eat, not how much.
You have it backwards. The bet you need to look at is the risk you’re insuring against, not the insurance transaction.
Every day you’re betting that your house won’t burn down today. You’re very likely to win but you’re not making much of a profit when you do. What fraction of your bankroll is your house worth, how likely is it to survive the day and how much will you make when it does? That’s what you need to apply the Kelly criterion to.
Have you checked the house for mold? The night terrors seem pretty well-explained by mycotoxins and the odds of the other weirdness also go up if something is screwing with your biochemistry.
Imagine that two exact replicas of a person exist in different locations, exactly the same except for an antagonism in one of their values. Both could not be correct at the same time about that value.
The two can’t be perfectly identical if they disagree. You have to additionally assume that the discrepancy is in the parts that reason about their values instead of the values themselves for the conclusion to hold.
Want to be like or appear to be like? I’m not convinced people can be relied on to make the distinction, much less choose the “correct” one.
Spoilers matter less than you think.
How would this encourage them to actually value logic and evidence instead of just appearing to do so?
Do you think continuous spatial + temporal dimensions have problems continuous spatial dimensions lack? If so, what and why?
Wouldn’t the failure to acknowledge all the excitement nuclear war would cause be an example of the horns effect?
I immediately answered no and rated everyone who said yes as completely undateable
I can understand answering no for emotional or political reasons, but rating the epistemically correct answer as undateable? That’s… a good reason for me to answer such questions honestly, actually.
Given you have enemies you hate deeply enough? Yes.
Having such enemies in the first place? Definitely not.
I think that you are underestimating the efficiency of intersystem communication in a world where a lot of organizational communication is handled through information technology.
Speech and reading seem to be at most 60 bits per second. A single neuron is faster than that.
Compare to the human brain. The optic nerve transmits 10 million bits per second and I’d expect interconnections between brain areas to generally fall within a few orders of magnitude.
I’d call five orders of magnitude a serious bottleneck and don’t really see how it could be significantly improved without cutting humans out of the loop. That’s what your data mining example does, but it’s only as good as the algorithms behind it. And when those approach human level we get AI.
I don’t understand your point about specialization. Can you elaborate?
Individual humans have ridiculous amounts of overlap in skills and abilities. Basic levels of housekeeping, social skills etc. are pretty much assumed. A lot of that is necessary given our social instincts and organizational structures: a savant may outperform anyone in a specific field, but good luck integrating them in an organization.
I’m not sure how much specialization can be improved with baseline humans, but relaxing the constraint that everyone should be able to function independently in the wider society might help. Also, focused training from a young age could be useful in creating genius-level specialists, but that takes time.
Also, I don’t understand what the difference between a ‘superintelligence’ and a ‘sped-up human’ would be that would be pertinent to the argument.
Given a large enough speedup and indefinite lifespan, pretty much none. The analogy may have been poorly chosen.
Do humans have goals in this sense? Our subsystems seem to conflict often enough.
An organization could be viewed as a type of mind with extremely redundant modular structure. Human minds contain a large number of interconnected specialized subsystems, in an organization humans would be the subsystems. Comparing the two seems illuminating.
Individual subsystems of organizations are much more powerful and independent, making them very effective at scaling and multitasking. This is of limited value, though: it mostly just means organizations can complete parallelizable tasks faster.
Intersystem communication is horrendously inefficient in organizations: bandwidth is limited to speech/typing and latency can be hours. There are tradeoffs here: military and emergency response organizations cut the latency down to seconds, but that limits the types of tasks the subsystems can effectively perform. Humans suck at multitasking and handling interruptions. Communication patters and quality are more malleable, though. Organizations like Apple and Google have had some success in creating environments that leverage human social tendencies to improve on-task communication.
Specialization seems like a big one. Most humans are to some degree interchangeable: what one can do, most others can do less effectively, or at least learn given time. There are ways to improve individual specialization, but barring radical cultural or technological change, we’re pretty much stuck on that front.
Mostly organizations seem limited by the competence of their individual members. They do more, not better. Specialization and communication seem to be the limiting factors and I’m not sure if they can make enough of a difference even in theory to qualify as a superintelligence, except in the sense a sped-up human would.
Thoughts?
I haven’t seen one example of a precise definition of what constitutes an “observation” that’s supposed to collapse the wavefunction in Copenhagen interpretation. Decoherence, OTOH, seems to perfecty describe the observed effects, including the consistency of macro-scale history.
This in my opinion proves that memory sticks with the branch my consciousness is in.
Actually it just proves that memory sticks with the branch it’s consistent with. For all we know, our consciousnesses are flitting from branch to branch all the time and we just don’t remember because the memories stay put.
We may say we want to predict “what will happen,” but I believe by this we mean “what I will see happen.”
Yeah, settling these kinds of questions would be much easier if we weren’t limited to the data that manages to reach our senses.
In MWI the definition of “I” is not quite straightforward: the constant branching of the wavefunction creates multiple versions of everyone inside, creating indexical uncertainty which we experience as randomness.
Of course, this has its own moral dilemmas as well—such as the fact that you’re as good as dead for your loved ones in the timeline that you just left—but generally smaller than erasing a universe entirely.
You could get around this by forking the time traveler with the universe: in the source universe it would simply appear that the attempted time travel didn’t work.
That would create a new problem, though: you’d never see anyone leave a timeline but every attempt would result in the creation of a new one with a copy of the traveler added at the destination time. A persistent traveler could generate any number of timelines differing only by the number of failed time travel attempts made before the succesful one.
You worry about that all-important status when you fear losing it.
Want to win? Then focus on winning, not on not-losing. You need to if you want to be seen as high-status, anyway. Fear of loss is low-status, so is worrying about what others think.
Navigate the minefield, sure. But do it from a position of strength, not of weakness.