wgd

Karma: 181

wgd May 15, 2012, 4:49 AM
8 points
on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85
Has there been any serious discussion of the implications of portraits? I couldn’t find any with some cursory googling, but I’ll be really surprised if it hasn’t been discussed here yet. I can’t entirely remember which of these things are canon and which are various bits of fanfiction, but:
- You can take someone’s portrait without them explicitly helping, as evidenced in canon by at least one photograph of someone being arrested, whose picture in the newspaper is continually struggling and screaming at the viewer. I don’t remember which book this was or any of the particulars unfortunately, but I’m pretty certain it’s a thing that was in one of them. Or maybe one of the movies. Moving on.
- They can perform simple tasks of short-term memory and carry on a coherent conversation.
- They can walk from picture to picture to communicate with each other.
- They can operate simple mechanisms in some way. In canon, the door to Gryffindor Tower is a portrait, which requires a password before opening.
As far as I can tell, portraits in the Harry Potter universe would be a gigantic game-breaker if it weren’t for all the other game-breakers overshadowing them. I suppose it’s possible to mitigate this (maybe a picture carries less of the “person” compared to a portrait for which they have to sit for hours) but if that’s not the case, portraits appear to be essentially a way of involuntarily uploading a copy of someone and enslaving them for all eternity, and all you need is knowledge of what they look like and a modicum of artistic ability.

edit: Oh crap, in MoR they ask portraits questions about knowledge they would have had before being painted, like “what spells did they teach you as a first year” and “did you know a married squib couple”. So you’re not just getting a basic “human” imprint, you’re getting that specific person.

And on the flip side of that, not all the portraits in Hogwarts are necessarily real people. What moral weight does a newly-created personality in a portrait have?

wgd May 4, 2012, 1:15 AM
4 points
in reply to: Aharon’s comment on: [SEQ RERUN] The Failures of Eld Science
I think you may be misinterpreting what he means by “takes five whole minutes to think an original thought”. You may well have to sit thinking for considerably longer than five minutes before you have an original thought, but are you truly spending that whole interval having the thought, or are you retracing the same patterns of thought over and over again in different permutations?

I think the implication is that, since the new thought itself only takes a few minutes, training for and expecting better performance could cut down the amount of “waiting for a new thought” time.

wgd Apr 26, 2012, 9:09 PM
3 points
in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: Optimizing your Social Network
All that means is that you have a different definition of value for your friendships. It’s important to focus on what exactly you want from your friends, but I see no reason that definition of value would be incompatible with trying to consciously cultivate stronger and better relationships.

So let’s run with that. What can one do to intentionally try and grow those sorts of strong bonds with people? I’m reminded of a quote from HPMoR:

“One of my tutors once said that people form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don’t make close friends is because they’re too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves.”

wgd Apr 25, 2012, 2:22 AM
6 points
in reply to: trlkly’s comment on: Defecting by Accident—A Flaw Common to Analytical People
Since the topic of this post is on sub-optimal communication, I thought I’d point out that

I think you’d be more convincing if you learned about brevity.

reads as rather more condescending than I think you intended from the tone of the rest of your comment. Specifically, it implies not just that he needs to practice revising for brevity, but that he doesn’t even know what it is.

wgd Apr 20, 2012, 10:11 PM
0 points
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: [META] Alternatives to rot13 and karma sinks
I’m using the stock browser that comes with Cyanogenmod 9, so in principle I can open links in a new window but in practice the interface is annoying enough that I rarely use it. I’ve tried Firefox mobile but the white-and-grey “not yet rendered” texture makes the browser feel much slower due to its obviousness. Dolphin looks interesting, I’m surprised I haven’t heard of it before.

I guess my complaint isn’t that I can’t open a link separately, it’s just that it’s annoying enough to do so that I find myself running into the question of “do I care enough about learning what this spoilered text is saying to bother following the link?” and repeatedly running into that question during a longish discussion causes enough decision fatigue that I stop bothering.

wgd Apr 20, 2012, 6:47 PM
0 points
on: [META] Alternatives to rot13 and karma sinks
I often read LW on my phone and for that use case rot13 is the best spoiler method by far. It prevents immediately seeing words that would give away spoilers, but I can generally decode a given phrase in my head given the word lengths, punctuation, topic of conversation, and position of common words like ‘gur’, ‘na’, ‘bs’, ‘vf’, or ‘gb’.

Using reddit-style CSS spoiler tags means that I can’t access the spoilered content at all AFAICT, and linking me to a decoder, while nice in theory, isn’t very helpful because if I click it I will lose the nice highlighting of new posts. This is a Big Deal on long-running threads like the HPMoR discussions.

wgd Apr 19, 2012, 5:19 AM
1 point
in reply to: linkhyrule5’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85
As far as I can tell from my limited research, it appears to be a combination of the SCP Foundation’s “Object Classes” with a hypothetical new object class “Roko” which I believe to be named for an LW user who appears to no longer exist, but made a post at some point (the best I can establish is that it had to be prior to December 2010), presenting some idea which later came to be called a “basilisk”, because the very knowledge of it was judged by some to be potentially harmful and unsettling. The post was deleted, although it appears to be possible to find copies of it or at least the basic idea if one cares enough.

So presumably the containment protocol for Object Class: Roko is simply to destroy the offending information and maybe take steps to prevent a recurrence? I’m mostly guessing, anyone who actually knows this context firsthand want to comment on whether my guess is close?

wgd Mar 26, 2012, 7:22 AM
3 points
in reply to: glumph’s comment on: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 12
Other than the “external database” option, the only other sources of name information I can think of are:
- The mind of the person being mapped
- The mind of the person reading the map
- A sort of consensus of how everyone in Hogwarts knows someone
I feel that picking someone’s name from their own mind seems the most elegant and consistent. It doesn’t handle babies (Before the parents choose a name, can a baby even be said to have one? Babies would have to be special-cased regardless), but it does allow arbitrary people to be mapped (multiple strangers being indistinguishable from each other seems like a serious flaw in a security system) and requires no external registry. On the one hand, it seems like interrogating the mind of every human is vastly more complicated than just looking up the name in a database, but to the kind of epistemology which would seem obvious to a 9th-century witch or wizard I can see it being “obvious”.

(And to respond to your question about Pettigrew in the great-grandparent, I would assume that the map skips over animals entirely, which would probably include animagi. This would tend to lend a slight amount of weight to my “the map displays your name as you know it” theory, as if the names came from how everyone else around you knew you there would be no reason not to include pets.)

If my theory is true, it raises an additional interesting question: Is it possible to obliviate yourself selectively so that you lose all knowledge of your own name? (Possibly storing the memories in a pensieve first so you can recover them later) And if so, is the map the only piece of the Hogwarts security system which might be impeded by this?

A further idea: Professor Quirrel is shown to take a very loose approach to identity and names (“Identity does not mean, to such as us, what it means to other people.”) Possibly Quirrelmort is the constant error, not because his name is wrong, but because he doesn’t have a name attached to his marker at all.

wgd Mar 19, 2012, 4:33 AM
6 points
in reply to: atorm’s comment on: Suggestions on tech device/gear purchasing?
I don’t remember what post it was in response to, but at one point someone suggested “optimal” as a much better substitute for “rational” in this type of post, partly to reduce the use of “rational” as an applause light, and partly because it better describes what these posts are generally asking.