Not to mention, why would Harry continue to wear the ring on his person where anyone could Finite the Transfiguration away? He would either keep it somewhere else, or (as you say) he’d put a metric ton of protections on it so that a simple Finite wouldn’t bring back Voldemort.
NoriMori1992
Karma: 66
In that case “wokking” would be less confusing.
For what it’s worth, I still prefer the original title, even after seeing the rationale for changing it. Oh well.
How did you even discover that you have aphantasia without discovering that “picture something in your mind” isn’t metaphorical?
You’re using “analogy” to describe what I was always taught is a “simile”.
if people are as astonishingly bad at the task as the paper says, that just reflects on their memory, not the acuity of their mind’s eye.
What makes you think that? And what makes you think it has to be one or the other, rather than a combination?
I mostly miss people retroactively. When I see someone again after a long separation, I might get emotional. And I get really emotional at the moment of re-separation. But I don’t usually feel the pain of their absence during their absence. Apparently (according to adhd-alien) this can be a symptom of ADHD, which I was diagnosed with before I noticed this fact about myself.
I’m not sure how the “loud sounds” one corresponds to a phrase that people commonly use, metaphorically or otherwise.
I confess that the ending is lost on me.
I think if you’re describing planecrash as “the single work of fiction for which I most want to avoid spoilers”, you probably just shouldn’t read any reviews of it or anything about it until after you’ve read it.
If you do read this review beforehand, you should avoid the paragraph that begins with “By far the best …” (The paragraph right before the heading called “The competence”.) That mentions something that I definitely would have considered a spoiler if I’d read it before I read planecrash.
Aside from that, it’s hard to answer without knowing what kinds of things you consider spoilers and what you already know about planecrash.
Neither there nor in Cheliax’s world are there really any lumbering bureaucracies that do insane things for inscrutable bureaucratic reasons; all the organisations depicted are all remarkably sane. Important positions are almost always filled by the smart, skilled, and hardworking. Decisions aren’t made because of emotional outbursts. Instead, lots of agents go around optimising for their goals by thinking hard about them.
(I’m spoiler tagging my entire response to this because I don’t know what kinds of spoilers are acceptable in this context and I’d rather err on the side of caution.)
While this paragraph is technically true at its most literal (most of the clauses aren’t strictly false), I don’t think the overall picture it’s painting is quite as applicable to Cheliax as you make it out to be. Most of what we see of Cheliax is how it functions when it has so much to gain from a project that its two most powerful people spend a ridiculous amount of their time personally overseeing or intervening in it, and when the project’s success depends on obliging and learning from someone who demands competence and coordination and can’t be forced to help them. In other words, we’re seeing (a tiny piece of) Cheliax when someone with unprecedented leverage is forcing it to be on its best behaviour. This is not their natural mode. Recall that almost the moment that Keltham and Carissa are both gone, the enterprise essentially falls apart, because the remaining overseers actually aren’t all that competent when they don’t have Keltham and Carissa around forcing them to restrain their worst foibles or care more about results than method. Indeed, one of Cheliax’s major weaknesses is that it actually tends to optimize against people thinking very hard or being honest with themselves, unless they’re either so psychopathic or so thoroughly brainwashed that they can think very hard without having any unAsmodean thoughts (or so powerful that no one can punish them for heresy, e.g. Abrogail Thrune).
Don’t get me wrong, baseline Cheliax still gets a remarkable amount accomplished for a dystopian hellscape, especially compared to its nearest cultural and geographic peers, which does indeed suggest an unusual amount of competence. But Asmodeanism inherently shoots itself in the foot so much that the text itself devotes a decent word count to Carissa realizing this fact and trying to figure out why. I wouldn’t call them “remarkably sane”, just more sane than their neighbours, who aren’t exactly a high bar.
I’ve always thought Smullyan missed the mark with this story. I think the epistemologist would have been right (or at least, could have been right, in a very meaningless Technically Correct sort of way) if Frank had started out saying “I think the book is red”, because as a matter of fact he didn’t truly wholeheartedly think the book was red. But what Frank actually said was “The book seems red to me”, which is an entirely different statement and which, no matter how I think about it, seems to me like it ought to cover the state of mind “the book looks for all the world like it’s red, but I still have some nagging doubts about whether my perception is accurate, such that I’m not sure I actually believe it’s red.” I don’t know what it could possibly mean for a person to say that something “seems” red to them, if it doesn’t cover that situation. (Honestly, the first time I read this story I thought Smullyan himself was very cleverly working up to that point, but I ended up disappointed.)
What was the title before?
The linked PDF has a number of typos (OCR errors, perhaps?). Might be better to link to an Internet Archive version, such as this one (from New Dimensions 3; I can’t find The Wind’s Twelve Quarters on IA to link to that one).
Why would we stretch the definition of lawyer in such a way? That’s not what the word “lawyer” means, either in the dictionary sense or in the sense of how people use the word. And even if you can come up with a reason to stretch it to include all those professions, what makes you think that’s what Eliezer was doing?
Dang, I missed seeing this before the solution was posted. And oh dear, it’s high-complexity. Oh well, I’ll give it a shot anyway!
Edit: Hah, I spent an hour checking one thing (which went nowhere), and then ran out of steam, and now I can no longer resist checking the answer. So much for that 😅 Next time I’ll try to check my notifications more often so I see the next one before the answer is up, maybe that’ll give me more drive to keep at it.
I normally just read these for fun and make no effort to solve them (I know nothing about data science or data analysis). This time I fooled around with the dataset for about half an hour, and managed to get a small inkling that the Phantom Pummelers disliked Sliminess and maybe liked Corporeality. I feel inordinately proud of myself for that minor achievement. (Full disclosure, I also got some inklings that were wrong, like thinking PP also disliked Hostility.)
Feels weird to be at the end. Looking forward to the next one. Might actually try to solve it, even though I will have absolutely no idea what I’m doing.
A shame that the dataset links don’t work anymore :(
Vaarsuvius’ Law (“every trip between plot-relevant locations will have exactly one random encounter”)
I appreciate the Order of the Stick reference!
Canon already acknowledges that it might be detrimental. “Sometimes I think we Sort too early.”