Spurlock

• Spurlock 21 Feb 2015 1:10 UTC

  18 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, Fe­bru­ary 2015, chap­ter 108

  I wanted it to be an anagram of my name, but that would only have worked if I’d conveniently been given the middle name of ‘Marvolo’, and then it would have been a stretch. Our actual middle name is Morfin, if you’re curious.

  Morfin is a Riddle family name, so we can probably rule out Eliezer choosing it for its anagrams. Nevertheless, might as well have some fun:

  Tom Morfin Riddle

  • Mini from toddler

  • Firm doom tendril

  • Mind meld for riot

  • Mind for time lord

  • Dirt mod of Merlin

  • MOR died from lint

  • Mr. Flirted in Doom

  What else?

• Spurlock 27 Jul 2013 0:21 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Kindly’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 25, chap­ter 96

  Ah, I missed this, I think you’re correct (upvoting you and maltrhin). I suppose that my interpretation is the one EY is trying to trick unobservant readers such as myself into making.

  I do still think there’s still some wiggle room for that interpretation though: Harry’s whole outburst about Trelawney’s “He’s coming!” prophecy, where he said it couldn’t possibly be about him because he’s already arrived, would seem to indicate that EY is willing to use prophecies whose proper interpretation is not-quite-literal.

• Spurlock 25 Jul 2013 23:12 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: malthrin’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 25, chap­ter 96

  Agreed, but this prediction could be older than the Hallows and their creators.

• Spurlock 25 Jul 2013 17:05 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: Raiden’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 25, chap­ter 96

  I interpreted this to mean that long ago, there were 3 Peverell brothers, each of which created one of the Hallows. Harry is descended from this family. Note that it doesn’t say that “Pevererll’s sons” will necessarily be the ones to use their devices to defeat Death, only that the devices are theirs.

• Spurlock 25 Jul 2013 5:00 UTC

  17 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 25, chap­ter 96

  There had been only one thing Remus Lupin had thought of that might help, after he’d received the owls from Professor McGonagall and that strange man Quirinus Quirrell.

  Harry was morally certain that Dumbledore, or both Dumbledore and Mad-Eye Moody, were following them invisibly to see if anyone tried for the bait.

  It’s seems that McGonagall and Quirrell are responsible for Harry spending the day with Lupin, and that Dumbledore knows exactly what they’re doing. It’s not entirely clear whether McGonagall and Quirrell knew that Lupin would decide to take Harry to Godric’s Hollow, but Quirrell at least could probably guess.

  All three of these people knew what Harry would find on his parents’ grave. I don’t recall McGonagall ever encountering Harry’s transhumanist ideas, but Quirrell and Dumbledore would certainly know how Harry would choose to interpret the inscription.

  Which makes it look as though one or more of these people might be indirectly trying to encourage Harry’s efforts to resurrect Hermione.

• Spurlock 7 Jul 2013 2:29 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: ChrisHallquist’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 22, chap­ter 93

  I believe Snape’s “Sunk Costs” hangup is also alluded to in Ch 91:

  “Do you intend to declare that your life is now a ruin and that there is nothing left for you but vengeance?”

  “No. I still have—” The boy cut himself off.

  “Then there is very little advice that I can give you,” said Severus Snape.

• Spurlock 7 Jul 2013 2:14 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: solipsist’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 21, chap­ters 91 & 92

  I like this theory. But it’s worth noting that Moody claimed that Voldemort could legilimens without making eye contact. EY seems pretty big on Conservation of Detail, so there’s a good chance that this will turn out to be important. Of course, Conservation of Detail also weighs in favor of this eye-locking episode being important, so I suppose it could go either way.

  Or both: perhaps sightless legilimency is handicap-inducing like wandless magic, so eye contact might be required to read a witch as powerful as Minerva.

• Spurlock 21 Feb 2013 2:58 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Desrtopa’s comment on: LW Women: LW Online

  Yeah you’re right. I think part of what I was wondering was whether it does make sense to group those 2 things under one heading, or just how strongly they’re correlated.

  Now that you mention it, I seem to recall reading on Yvain’s blog that he’s also hyper-sensitive to negative criticism, so there’s another data point for it not being tied all that strongly to gender.

  Edit: Aforementioned Yvain blogpost

• Spurlock 19 Feb 2013 4:57 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: LW Women: LW Online

  Well, if nothing else comes out of this exchange, at least I can now relate to the OP that much better.

• Spurlock 18 Feb 2013 17:22 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Eugine_Nier’s comment on: LW Women: LW Online

  The important question is whether this interpretation is true.

  Fair point. I think I was using this as a proxy for truth, the same way you might ask “do economists believe X?” instead of “is X true about the economy?”. But also I was up late.

  Why? All you’ve shown is that this correlation doesn’t fully screen off gender.

  True. It is possible that empathic ability is affected by both gender and analytical disposition directly, rather than gender by-way-of analytical disposition. Or more realistically, that empathic ability is affected by analytical-ness as well as other, orthogonal personality traits, and that these might be gender-correlated as well. This interpretation seems messy from a complexity standpoint, but such is the subject matter.

  I wonder what other personality traits we’d have to account for before we could explain the gender difference. Also, there’s the question of just how much of the difference is left over once we’ve screened off however much analytical disposition screens off. Again, I’m just hashing out confusion here, not claiming to have solutions.

• Spurlock 18 Feb 2013 6:18 UTC

  19 points

  on: LW Women: LW Online

  Can we discuss how LW’s lack-of-niceness relates to the topic of men-and-women? I feel a little confused, and this insanely long comment is my attempt to ferret out that confusion.

  I expect that most people who come to LW for the first time probably find the community somewhat threatening. The karma system does make you feel like you’re being judged, everyone seems extremely smart and meticulous about being right, and there’s a whole lot of background knowledge to absorb before you even feel qualified to open your mouth. This is exactly what I experienced when I first came here, so I agree with the OP entirely. But I’m a male, and nothing about this seems to have anything to do with sex or gender. My response to this feeling was to read the sequences, read comments, and become knowledgeable enough (about both rationality and community norms) to participate. The OP doesn’t seem to complain that the community is only cold towards women, so if there’s a difference here it would seem to be at the level of how this coldness is perceived or reacted to (no, I’m not about to conclude that women are at fault for being overly sensitive).

  The sort of obvious, stereotype-driven interpretation here is that women are more emotional than men, or more emotionally sensitive, and will be therefore find LW’s coldness to be more off-putting than men will. I dunno if we’re doing women a service or disservice by accepting this viewpoint… is it an interpretation that many feminists would approve? It seems to paint a relatively “frail and helpless, need to be protected” picture of women, which makes me think we can do better.

  If we try to get more specific than just saying “emotional”, Submitter B seems to be implying that women will in general need more positive feedback and “warmth” in order to feel welcome or encouraged when posting online. Or that women tend to be calibrated differently in determining what level of warmth/​coldness should be interpreted as hostility. For instance, a comment that the average man would interpret as neutral, the average woman would interpret as slightly aggressive or unwelcoming. This seems at least like a less condescending interpretation than the previous one.

  And shouldn’t we expect self-selection effects to largely eclipse gender differences here? Reddit seems to be a predominantly male community (probably less so as time goes on and the site grows, but typical-male-bullshit still gets catapulted to the front page of the popular subs constantly). But Reddit doesn’t strike me as cold at all. There’s a strong sense of community identity, the comment threads are mostly just riffing off of the jokes of other commenters, and lots of warm-fuzzy “thanks for posting this!” and “you sir are a gentleman!” gets posted and upvoted all over. That last example is obviously ironic in this context, but at the same time it does demonstrate that coldness doesn’t seem to be much related to maleness, which is the point I’m making

  So I’m inclined to attribute LW’s coldness not to it’s embarrassingly male dominated demographic, but instead to some kind of apparent correlation with interest in x-rationality. To sketch another stereotype, analytical/​smart/​nerdy people will tend to be more cold and robotic, treating more as machines than as people, and having poor empathic skills.

  It doesn’t seem like a stretch to say that it will be predominantly “analytical” people who will find LW’s subject matter and style of investigation interesting. So the question is how much truth there is to the stereotype that lack-of-warmth will tend to be part of the package.

  I’m not sure how much to trust this stereotype. At best it’s true as a rule-of-thumb with plenty of exceptions (people with great analytical minds and seemingly natural “people skills” certainly do exist). But if we run with it for a moment, doesn’t it seem to screen off gender differences? That is, even if women do tend to lie further towards the “emotional” end of the emotional-analytic spectrum (again, I’m not arguing that this is even a real spectrum, just trying to hash out my confusion), this doesn’t matter much because it’s only the more analytical women who will give a damn about LW to begin with. The majority of men wouldn’t find LW interesting for the same reason (if you think they would, I suspect you’ve spent too much time in this tiny corner of interest-space).

  So one might naively expect that even women are more emotional than men, this difference will mostly have vanished when we shift to the groups “Men Who Like LW Stuff” and “Women Who Like LW Stuff”. But apparently this isn’t the case, since OP finds (and some commenters agree) that women who are on LW still tend to be more put off by the hostility. So I suppose we should conclude that the correlation between analytical-ness and empathic-shortcoming is bunk. Or possibly that the correlation between “finding LW interesting” and analytical-ness is bunk. But the Reddit example seems to show that the correlation between male-dominated-population and empathic-shortcoming is also bunk. So here I am confused how all this relates.

• Spurlock 25 Dec 2012 5:23 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: undermind’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  Hat & Cloak turning out to be McGonagall would be the most mind-bending and awesome plot twist ever. Unfortunately Hat & Cloak isn’t a canon character (right? I didn’t read the books), so this wouldn’t fit EY’s hint.

• Spurlock 6 Nov 2012 3:29 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: orthonormal’s comment on: Does My Vote Mat­ter?

  The irrational meme is the one that says it’s worth voting in Erewhon but not in the real world.

  This isn’t totally clear to me.

  Suppose we throw away the business of supporting third parties so that they’ll do better next time (which we might as well since it doesn’t appear to be part of the Erewhon scenario). I would argue that voting for one of the major parties has roughly the same expected utility both in America and Erewhon, but voting for third parties has a much lower EU in America than in Erewhon.

  Suppose polls predict with their typical (pretty good) confidence that 3rd Party Person will get 4% of the votes, while the 1st Party Person and 2nd Party Person will get the remaining 96%. In Erewhon, there is a 4% chance that the 3rd party candidate gets elected. In America… still pretty much zero.

  Of course that’s just aggregate effect, the voting dilemma is about marginal effect. To make it easier to picture though, let’s zoom out and talk adding not 1 more voter, but enough to give Party 3 another 1% of the populace.

  In Erewhon, the odds of Party 3 winning have simply increased from 4% to 5%. In America… Party 3 is still looking at pretty much zero chance of winning. The marginal effect is negligible up until at least 20%, and that’s assuming that the psychological effects mentioned in the article can be relied on to keep bumping the numbers up. So it seems that we can conclude that voting for a far-trailing 3rd party has a much greater EU in Erewhon than in America.

  Please correct me if my math is wrong though, I’m only just now inventing this argument.

• Spurlock 9 Oct 2012 20:12 UTC

  5 points

  on: Fire­wal­ling the Op­ti­mal from the Rational

  This post should really be (also) a part of the Craft and the Community sequence. The insight in conveys seems very relevant and very valuable, and I don’t recall it being stated anywhere near as explicitly.

• Spurlock 13 Aug 2012 12:37 UTC

  3 points

  on: Bayes for Schizophren­ics: Rea­son­ing in Delu­sional Disorders

  but it’s also impossible to convince him he’s Alexander the Great (at least I think so; I don’t know if it’s ever been tried).

  At the very least (pretending that there are no ethical concerns), it seems that you ought to be able to exaggerate a patient’s delusions. “We ran some tests, and it turns out that you’re Jesus, John Lennon, and George Washington!”.

  To this same question, I can’t help but notice that the brain damage being discussed is right-side brain aka “revolutionary” brain damage. So if it turns out that it isn’t possible to get a paranoid patient to switch from FBI to KGB, it might simply be a case of inability to discard hypotheses (it seems like the original delusion, the CIA, wouldn’t count because for most of us “the CIA isn’t following me” isn’t an explicit belief). But then, I am not a neurologist or psychologist, so the pool of data I’m working with is 100% limited to that which has been written about by Yvain on LW :-)

• Spurlock 24 Jul 2012 20:33 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Scott Alexander’s comment on: Game The­ory As A Dark Art

  AFAICT, this is an unfortunately strong argument… Thanks.

  I see two solutions to the paradox:

  1) Note that auctions are usually played by more than 2 bidders. Even if the first bidder would let you have the pot for $2, the odds that you’ll be allowed to have it by everyone decrease sharply as the number of participants increases. So in a real auction (say at least 5 participants), 9% probably is overconfident.

  2) If we have a small number of bidders, one would have to find statistics about the distribution of winners on these auctions (10% won by first bid, 12% won on second bid, and so on...). Of course, this strategy only works if your opponents don’t know (and won’t catch on) that you never bid more than once. But it should work at least for a one-shot auction where you don’t publish your strategy in advance.

  Out of curiosity, since you argue that joining these auctions as player #2 could very well have positive EU, would you endorse the statement “it is rational to join dollar auctions as the second bidder”? If not, why not?

• Spurlock 24 Jul 2012 15:42 UTC

  3 points

  on: Game The­ory As A Dark Art

  Is it rational (even straw-man rational) to enter the dollar auction after one person has already entered it? It should be obvious that you’ll both happily keep bidding at least up to $20, that you have at best a 50% chance of getting the $20, and that even if you do get it you will almost certainly make a negligible amount of money even if the bidding stays under $20. So after one person has already bid, it seems like the action “enter this auction” has a clearly negative expected utility.

• Spurlock 13 Jul 2012 6:14 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: Re­ply to Holden on The Sin­gu­lar­ity Institute

  Just for the sake of feedback, that photo immediately made me laugh. It just seemed so obviously staged. I agree that it’s better than “hunched over laptops” though.

• Spurlock 31 May 2012 16:09 UTC

  16 points

  on: When None Dare Urge Res­traint, pt. 2

  I’m reminded of how people tried to call the 9/​11 victims “heroes,” apparently because they had the great courage to work in buildings that were targeted in a terrorist attack.

  Let’s be fair: Almost no one actually said this. It’s a large nation and you can generally find at least one example of just about any dumb statement, but this seems like 99% strawman.

  I remember a lot of talk about how the rescue workers were heroes, and some discussion about the heroics of specific attack victims (people who e.g. tried to help others escape the building), but labeling the victims as “heroes”, while certainly something one could have gotten away with, I don’t recall at all.

  A quick and dirty google search for “9/​11 victims were heroes” without quotes returns a page full of results referring to ‘victims’ and ‘heroes’ as separate groups. If you add the quotes you mostly just get people attacking the sentiment, rather than the sentiment itself.

• Spurlock 23 Apr 2012 20:27 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: thelittledoctor’s comment on: To like each other, sing and dance in synchrony

  It is.

  The tune was what a Muggle would have identified as John Williams’s Imperial March, also known as “Darth Vader’s Theme”

  Chapter 30