PeterS

Karma: 371

PeterS Oct 26, 2010, 6:03 PM
−2 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4
The business with Snake-Quirrell whispering instructions to Harry might suggest the Imperius Curse. In Rowling’s book #4, Moody casts the curse on students and that’s just what it’s like—verbal commands that are followed without question (unless you’re trained in resisting the curse). Bellatrix doesn’t seem to notice that Harrymort is talking to his snake. Perhaps Voldemort was known to do this all the time, but it could be because the instructions were being issued directly to Harry’s brain.

But the fact that they can’t cast magic on each other is a big obstacle for this theory. Of course, a key point in these chapters is that it’s possible to control somebody without ever Imperiusing them.

PeterS Oct 25, 2010, 8:51 PM
27 points
in reply to: Unnamed’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4
I think there’s two things going on here. The first is that Harry is psychologically in fantasy-mode during these chapters, and the second is Harry’s self-esteem issues regarding his own intelligence.

“You are about to invite me to join a secret organization full of interesting people like yourself,” said Harry, “one of whose goals is to reform or overthrow the government of magical Britain, and yes, I’m in.”

Fantasy-mode: Harry is being recruited by a secret group of highly interesting rebels. They fight against the stupid, evil, corrupt government of Magical Britain. Their cause and methods are righteous beyond question (otherwise Harry would ask a few, instead of immediately inducting himself).

Quirrell believes Magical Britain must be ruled under the dictatorship of a powerful leader, as we learned in chapters 34-35 (whereas Harry believes in democracy). So what kind of secret rebel organization is he likely to be a member of? It doesn’t matter. Harry is in fantasy-mode—he could be in a secret organization of interesting people whose goal it is to change the world!

Fantasy-mode is completely obvious throughout these chapters, especially at the start of 52.

Self-esteem issues: This thing with Quirrell being able to make “amazing deductions from scanty evidence” has been brought up before. Quirrell has also told him things like “You should have figured this out”, “you’re childish”, and sometimes it even seems like Quirrell is testing Harry’s intelligence. This is making Harry insecure, and even desperate now. He’s thinking a week in advance of how he’ll answer Quirrell’s questions, rather than suffer the humility of having not already deduced and fully understood the secret plan by the time he was asked.

Quirrell is playing Harry on at least these levels: “save the world” fantasy, and “you are not as intelligent as I” subtle cues. These weaknesses of Harry are apparent in a lot of previous chapters. Since these are established vulnerabilities, it’s plausible that Quirrell can successfully exploit them without Harry knowing.

PeterS Oct 25, 2010, 3:11 AM
2 points
in reply to: alethiophile’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4
/shrug if so then there goes that theory. I had thought Parseltongue was just rare. Didn’t realize you needed to be one of Slytherin’s heirs (or get in through a loophole like HP).

PeterS Oct 17, 2010, 5:05 AM
0 points
in reply to: blogospheroid’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4
In canon you can look at it indirectly (e.g. through a camera lens, or a reflection). You get injured, but not dead. Maybe if you look at it through your Snake Animagus eyes, you’ll be okay.

It seems to be required that the Heir be a Parseltongue. It’s not a stretch to require that the Heir also be a Snake Animagus—after all, there are many more people who can speak snake than become snake. In canon, Harry wasn’t the Heir but could still access the chamber—apparently any Parseltongue could have. In MoR, that would mean any Parseltongue could have accessed all of Slytherin’s secrets. But only the Heir of Slytherin can access the chamber (according to legend?). Therefore Parseltongue is not sufficient to gain access (if the legend is true).

“Sslytherin not sstupid. Ssnake Animaguss not ssame as Parsselmouth. Would be huge flaw in sscheme.”

-- Chapter 49

I venture that the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets responds to Snake Animagus Parseltongue but not Common Parseltongue.

PeterS Oct 4, 2010, 1:09 AM
29 points
in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: The Irrationality Game
That emoticon isn’t fooling anyone.

PeterS Sep 26, 2010, 9:52 PM
2 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Less Wrong Should Confront Wrongness Wherever it Appears
How many, over the decades, have fallen under “likely to succeed”? e.g. according to scientists/”experts”, investors, project leaders, etc. Whose estimate gets used, anyway?

PeterS Sep 6, 2010, 10:10 PM
4 points
in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3
True, I didn’t look at it that way. It seems more likely that that’s correct—“Why those exact five?”—but why would Quirrell find it so amusing?

edit: Maybe Voldemort has already hidden his Horcruxes in just those manners—we already suspect that he launched one into space. In that case the riddle may be—given that Harry and Voldemort think in precisely the same way, how can Voldemort think of a hiding place that Harry wouldn’t think of himself?

edit2: It’s out of character for them to come naturally to Harry, but not to Voldemort. Voldemort is into that kind of superstitious ambiance—e.g. he wanted precisely 7 Horcruxes, because it’s a lucky number. Harry is part Voldemort, so that’s why they slipped into his subconscious.

*shrug* maybe I’m grasping at straws.

PeterS Sep 6, 2010, 9:56 PM
3 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3
Anyone have any guesses as to what Quirrell’s game is?

Quirrell is operating on a level that I surely don’t understand. The only theory I can think of that’s neither preposterous nor disappointing is that Quirrell is protecting Horcrux!Harry.

In light of the recent exchange where Quirrell asks Harry how he would hide something:

Tell me, Mr. Potter, if you wanted to lose something where no one would ever find it again, where would you put it?”

… “Well,” said Harry, “besides trying to get it into the molten core of the planet, you could bury it in solid rock a kilometer underground in a randomly selected location—maybe teleport it in, if there’s some way to do that blindly, or drill a hole and repair the hole afterward; the important thing would be not to leave any traces leading there, so it’s just an anonymous cubic meter somewhere in the Earth’s crust. You could drop it into the Mariana Trench, that’s the deepest depth of ocean on the planet—or just pick some random other ocean trench, to make it less obvious. If you could make it bouyant and invisible, then you could throw it into the stratosphere. Or ideally you would launch it into space, with a cloak against detection, and a randomly fluctuating acceleration factor that would take it out of the Solar System. And afterward, of course, you’d Obliviate yourself, so even you didn’t know exactly where it was.”

The Defense Professor was laughing, and it sounded even odder than his smile.

… “All excellent suggestions,” said Professor Quirrell. “But tell me, Mr. Potter, why those exact five?”

“Huh?” said Harry. “They just seemed like the obvious sorts of ideas.”

“Oh?” said Professor Quirrell. “But there is an interesting pattern to them, you see. One might say it sounds like something of a riddle.”

Assume that Quirrell was asking where he could hide a Horcrux. It’s funny because all those options leave Horcrux!Harry dead. The riddle is thus:
- Voldemort must hide his Horcruxes in a place where his mortal enemy, Harry Potter, will never be able to find them.
- Harry Potter is one of Voldemort’s Horcruxes.
Any takers?

PeterS Sep 6, 2010, 8:42 PM
4 points
in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3
I drew the analogy that it’s like the term “deadly weapon”. Fists can be deadly, but they are not called deadly weapons. Hitting someone in the head with your fist is not guaranteed to kill them. Likewise you can drop a shipping container on someone—and I’m sure this would earn you a life sentence—but Winguardium Leviosa is not itself a deadly (Unforgivable) spell, as an arbitrary cast of the spell is not guaranteed to kill.

It’s still a bit arbitrary. To my knowledge, using a love potion is not Unforgivable—though it’s clearly magical coercion and serves only such a purpose as that.

PeterS Aug 29, 2010, 3:57 AM
0 points
in reply to: jimrandomh’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010
I agree that those rates are hard to determine. I am also weary of “AI FOOM is a certainty” type statements, and appeals to the nebulous “powers that all computers inherently have”.

PeterS Aug 26, 2010, 8:30 PM
1 point
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010
Your last point was persuasive… though I still have some uneasiness about accepting that k pulls of the trigger, for arbitrary k, still gives the player nothing.

Would it be within the first AGI’s capabilities to immediately effect my destruction before I am able to update on its existence—provided that (a) it is developed by the private sector and not e.g. some special access DoD program, and (b) ETAs up to “sometime this century” are accurate? I think not, though I admit to being fairly uncertain.

I acknowledge that this line of reasoning presented in my original comment was not of high caliber—though I still dispute Tiiba’s claim regarding an AI advanced enough to scrape by in conversation with a 5 year old, as well as that distributive capabilities are the greatest power at play here.

PeterS Aug 26, 2010, 9:37 AM
2 points
in reply to: RHollerith’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010
The fact that it hasn’t happened yet is not evidence against its happening if you cannot survive its happening. If you cannot survive its happening, then the fact that it has not happened in the last 50 years is not just weaker evidence than it would otherwise be—it is not evidence at all, and your probability that it will happen now, after 50 years, should be the same as your probability would have been at 0 years.

Do you take the Fermi paradox seriously, or is the probability of your being destroyed by a galactic civilization, assuming that one exists, low enough? The evidential gap w.r.t. ET civilization spans billions of years—but this is not evidence at all according to the above.

Neither do I believe in the coming of an imminent nuclear winter, though (a) it would leave me dead and (b) I nevertheless take the absence of such a disaster over the preceeding decades to be nontrivial evidence that its not on its way.

Say you’re playing Russian Roulette with a 6-round revolver which either has 1 or 0 live rounds in it. Pull the trigger 4 times—every time you end up still alive. According to what you have said, your probability estimates for either
- there being a single round in the revolver or
- the revolver being unloaded
should be the same as before you had played any rounds at all. Imagine pulling the trigger 5 times and still being alive—is there a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ chance that the gun is loaded?

I find the technique you’re suggesting interesting, but I don’t employ it.

(Drawing an analogy with protein folding does not count as “looking inside”.)

Tiiba suggested that distributive capability is the most important of the “powers inherent to all computers”. Protein folding simulation was an illustrative example of a cutting edge distributed computing endeavor, which is still greatly underpowered in terms of what AGI needs to milk out of it to live up to FOOMy claims. He wants to catch all the fish in the sea with a large net, and I am telling him that we only have a net big enough for a few hundred fish.

edit: It occurred to me that I have written with a somewhat interrogative tone and many examples. My apologies.

PeterS Aug 26, 2010, 8:02 AM
0 points
in reply to: Tiiba’s comment on: Open Thread, August 2010
For one—it hasn’t already happened. And there is no public research suggesting that it is much closer to happening now than it has ever been. The first claims of impending human-level AGI were made ~50 years ago. Much money and research has been exhausted since then, but it hasn’t happened yet. AGI researchers have lost a lot of credibility because of this. Basically, extraordinary claims have been made many times. None have panned out to the generality with which they are made.

You yourself just made an extraordinary claim! Do you have a 5 year old at hand? Because there are some pretty “clever” conversation bots out there nowadays...

With regards to:

the most important such inherent power is the one that makes Folding@home work so well—the ability to simply copy the algorithm into more hardware, if all else fails, and have the copies cooperate on a problem.

Games abound on LessWrong involving AIs which can simulate entire people—and even AIs which can simulate a billion billion billion …. billion billion people simultaneously! Folding@home is the most powerful cluster on this planet at the moment, and it can simulate protein folding over an interval of about 1.5 milliseconds (according to wikipedia). So, as I said, very big claims are casually made by AGI folk, even in passing and in the face of all reason and appreciation for the short-term ETAs with which they make these claims (~20-70 years… and note that it was ~20-70 years ETA about 50 years ago as well).

I believe AGI is probably possible to construct, but not that it will be as easy and FOOMy as enthusiasts have always been wont to suggest.

PeterS Aug 25, 2010, 1:00 AM
10 points
in reply to: CronoDAS’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2

Harry learns things that only Dumbledore would have known.

Does he? It certainly seems possible that Harry is just filling in the blanks himself. I just went back and re-read it. Consider:

“Explain,” said Harry.
”But you already know,” said Dumbledore. . …
.
”But if Voldemort used the Killing Curse,” Harry started again, “and nobody died for me this time—how can I be alive?”
″I think you know,” said Dumbledore. “Think back. . .”

The information that Dumbledore actually does provide to Harry is either inconclusive or insubstantial—e.g. Harry asks about the peculiar behavior of his wand, and Dumbledore says he cannot but guess. Harry asks where they are, Dumbledore cannot answer and says that they are where ever Harry thinks they are. Harry asks about the Deathly Hallows:

“Real, and dangerous, and a lure for fools,” said Dumbledore. “And I was such a fool But you know, don’t you? I have no secrets from you anymore. You know.”
. . .
So you’d given up looking for the Hallows when you saw the Cloak?”
″Oh yes,” said Dumbledore faintly. . . “You know what happened. You know.”

Dumbledore tells Harry of his stint with Grindelwald, but Harry might be piecing together the narrative from what he has learned (Dumbledore again seems to indicate at some times that Harry already knows what happened).

The chapter’s ending could go either way:

“Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”
...
”Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”

This all leads me to consider that chapter very shaky evidence. I’d still say the strongest evidence is the ghosts. Eliezer’s explanation is lacking, since in Book 4 a group of travelling ghosts visits Hogwarts from elsewhere beyond the castle (the gang of headless ghosts, entry into which Nearly-Headless-Nick is sadly not quite eligible). Myrtle once left the castle to haunt a wedding. So, in canon, ghosts must be more than just after-images bound to the castle stone. Though there are, of course, other similar explanations. . .

PeterS Jun 6, 2010, 11:52 PM
1 point
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists
I’m reminded of why I left the discipline—it’s a historico-linguistic claptrap.

All I advocated for was the term’s speciation—which, I’ll add again, is already present in the dictionary as well as in common usage. I reject the notion that, in order to suggest this, I first need to be a philosopher by trade.

PeterS Jun 6, 2010, 7:09 PM
1 point
in reply to: Jack’s comment on: Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists
Regardless of the terms’ usages in academia, there is often a distinction in common speech. I disagree that this distinction is irrelevant. Also, having gotten to know several professional philosophers before leaving the field for mathematics, I know that they are not as confused by this distinction (or the public’s employment of it) as you suggest, even if they choose not to draw it themselves.

But it’s all moot, as

Professional usage, not common usage, is what matters when we’re thinking about issues in an academic field.

implies that any usage of ethics in opposition to the study of Aristotle’s eudaimonia was at one time as irrelevant/improper as the common usage is now. I think, while that statement might be correct for a technical field’s vocabulary, it is not alright to restrict a layman’s usage of certain philosophical terms, like ethics, in the same manner.

PeterS Jun 4, 2010, 10:37 PM
5 points
in reply to: Blueberry’s comment on: Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists

I’m extremely skeptical that meditation or prayer can influence the mind to that extent, but I’m very curious.

I am too. On the other hand, monks have immolated themselves, withstood torture etc., over the ages without appearing to suffer anywhere near on the order of what such an experience seems to entail. This man for instance even maintained the lotus position for the duration of the event, and also allegedly remained silent and motionless as well. Counter-examples exist in which self-immolators either clearly died horribly or immediately sought to extinguish themselves, but still...

PeterS Jun 4, 2010, 10:19 PM
4 points
in reply to: timtyler’s comment on: Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists
I haven’t grossly stretched or distorted the everyday usage of these words, so I’m not sure why I deserve to have their dictionary definitions shoved at me (especially since ethics #2 agrees with my usage). In fact I provided examples wherein the use of these words actually differs in common speech. I’ve tried to convey why I think this subtle difference is interesting. I wouldn’t say that I was arguing with the dictionary (although there is a time to do so).

PeterS Jun 4, 2010, 9:41 PM
0 points
in reply to: mattnewport’s comment on: Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists
Wow… hadn’t read the original, interesting. Still, that is the Oath as it was 2k years ago, and as such it is no longer part of established medical ethics. I think it’s plausible that in fact the abandonment of that section might have been necessary to preserve the profession’s legitimacy! As well as nixing the part where the Oath is consecrated by Apollo, etc.

PeterS Jun 4, 2010, 9:31 PM
0 points
in reply to: Blueberry’s comment on: Virtue Ethics for Consequentialists

Oh, sorry, I wasn’t clear.

Maybe I wasn’t either… are we actually disagreeing here? Heh.

it would be ethical (in the sense of being a rule of professional conduct) and unethical (in a different sense of the word ‘ethical’) at the same time. . . [link to some definitions]

I know the word is used in the sense of definitions 1 and 3. What I’m saying is that I think it’s more interesting to forget the moral usage altogether, and just stick with saying that ethics is #2, because when you think about it they are very distinct concepts.