No, I was serious, sorry. But, seeing as I believe that Eliezer is human like the rest of us, I think it’s entirely plausible that he ran out of ideas (or, at least, out of good ideas) -- kind of analogous to writing a program so clever that the author cannot debug it...
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I only read 3WC after the fact, so I can’t comment on that one. But I don’t recall him saying ”...solve this problem or you get the bad ending” in he previous HPMoR chapters...
Disappointing. It appears as though Eliezer wrote himself into a corner, and is now looking for help from the readers...
They couldn’t easily check every possibility and see if it’s consistent.
Why not ? It’s not like the laws of our space-time apply to them or anything.
I don’t know if he put it into exactly those terms, but a). Harry points out a lot of things that aren’t true, like “you can’t turn into a cat”, and b). if the laws of reality are simulated, then they don’t have to make sense; they could just be a giant “switch” statement somewhere in the Atlantean VM code.
Product placement at its finest...
Either that, or the world where HPMOR takes place is just one among many realms within the Mirror; i.e., the Simulation Argument is true, and the Atlanteans are the Matrix Lords. This explain the weird and inconsistent magic rules: they are just artificial constructs that the Atlanteans came up with on a lark.
Also, nice Duane shout-out.
As well as the Mass Effect shout-out. ASSUMING DIRECT CONTROL.
Yeah, and I am kind of surprised that neither Quirrellmort nor Harry thought of reversing the letters. I mean, we are dealing with a magical mirror here. How is this not the first thing they’ve tried ?
Killing him would be a grave mistake.
As far as I understand, Quirrell believes (or claims to believe) that killing Harry will put him one step closer to fulfilling his CEV. Thus, any amusement Harry could provide is to Quirrel kind of like as ice cream is to us mortals: a minor, fleeting, and ultimately inconsequential pleasure.
Maybe Quirrel and Harry are just individual vectors in a massively parallel multiverse-spanning genetic algorithm, designed to produce the ultimate Tom Riddle.
Oddly enough I really like LOTR as well as The Silmarillion… So maybe I should give this Gormenghast thing another shot, I don’t know.
I think the difference between LOTR/Simlarillion and Gormenghast is that Tolkien’s books contain well-crafted language and descriptions of scenery that are punctuated by moments of sheer epic overload; whereas Gormenghast contains the former but not the latter.
But again, I haven’t made it that far into it, so I could be wrong.
I started reading the first book, but stopped about 20% of the way in (may have been less, it’s been a while since then), because I found it stupefyingly boring. Does that trilogy get any better later on ?
Also there are great number of possibilities that even the smartest persons could not even imagine, but powerful Superintelligence could.
I think that, if you want to discuss the notion of the Superintelligent in any kind of a rational way, it is useful to make a distinction between “the Superintelligent can do things we can’t”, and “the Superintelligence is literally omnipotent”. If the latter is true, then any meaningful discussion of it is impossible—for the same set of reasons that meaningful discussion of the omni-everything Christian god is impossible.
I would say it’s a combination of being at the wrong company, and our education system being inadequate to the task.
There are many skills that are required in order to write complex software. You need to know how to organize your code in a maintainable and comprehensible way (Design Patterns, build/package systems, abstraction layers, even simple stuff like UML). You need to know how to find bugs in one’s own code as well as in code written by other people (using debuggers, reading stack traces, writing logs, applying basic deductive reasoning). When you get stuck, you need to know how to get help efficiently (reading documentation, understanding the jargon, knowing exactly which questions to ask, knowing whom to ask them to).
None of these skills are considered “sexy”; and, in fact, most scientists and mathematicians that I’ve worked with in the past don’t even recognize them as skills at all. Their attitude usually is, “don’t bother me with your bureaucratic design pattern bullshit, I wrote a 3000-line method that calculates an MDS plot and it works, what more do you want”. But the problem is that, without such skills, you will never be able to create anything more than a quick one-off script that performs one specific calculation and then quits.
My advice would be as follows.
Firstly, figure out what you actually want to do. Do you want to invent algorithms for other people to implement, or do you want to write software yourself ? There’s nothing wrong with either choice, but you need to consciously make the choice to begin with.
Secondly, if you do want to learn software engineering, find some people at your company who are already experienced software engineers. Ask them for a list of books or online tutorials to read (most likely, they’ll recommend the Design Patterns book, so you might as well start with that). After reading (or, let’s be realistic here, skimming) the books, ask them to sit down with you for a couple of hours in order to review your code—even, and especially, the code that actually works. Listen to their input, and refactor your code according to their recommendations. When you have a bug, make sure you’ve tried everything you could think of, and then ask them to sit down with you and walk you through the steps of diagnosing it.
Thirdly, if there are no such people at your current company, or if they flat-out refuse to help you… then find a better company :-(
If you join a cult, then even your physical survival will suddenly become a lot more perilous. You will likely have to conform, or die. Keep that in mind.
I was wondering that too; personally, I have no idea how to even begin answering the question. It would seem that at least some protests do work, as evidenced by the civil rights movement during the Martin Luther King era; but I don’t know if this is true in general.
Ok, in the spirit of rationality and openness, I have to admit: I’d love to get most of the audiobook volumes, but $50 is too rich for my blood. Is there a way you guys could introduce a cheaper option ? Something like, “All of the Sequences except for the Quantum Physics ones” for something like $25..$30 ?
That doesn’t cover artillery, unlike the word “gun”.
I’m not sure what “having the entire plot planned out from the beginning” really means, though. Eliezer ends up retconning things relatively frequently, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he had a plot point like “Voldemort captures Harry” followed by “Harry escapes”, but with too few details in between to make the logic ironclad.
If HPMoR was a conventional book, then Eliezer would have a lot of time to edit it and make all the retcons behind the scenes—even fairly major ones—but it isn’t, so he can’t.