Every time I see anything related to Less Wrong all I can think of is Roko's Basilisk and I can't stop laughing.
But now that we know it exists, you've doomed us all! You fiend!
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
71–80 of 173 posts
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#72Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#73For those who start reading and wonder when Harry stops being an insufferable little jerk... I'm on chapter 57, now, and he's getting better.
One important thing, for those who find the main character insufferable at times: this is not a simple mary sue story. When you notice Harry doing something dumb, oblivious, overconfident, condescending, etc. do not assume that this is the author's personality leaking through. It may be the intended reading.
Not all bad characters are mary sues.
Some are, in fact, bad and insufferable on their own merits--much as HP is in this.
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#74Every time I see anything related to Less Wrong all I can think of is Roko's Basilisk and I can't stop laughing.
Isn't there a name for the fallacy when one hastily generalizes over entire online communities?
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#75I'm wondering if this will be published as a physical book. I prefer reading more than a few pages on normal paper.
The Author's Notes recently:
"I decided long ago that once HPMOR was fully written and published, I would try to get in touch with J. K. Rowling to see if HPMOR could be published in book form, maybe as HJPEV and the Methods of Rationality, with all profits accruing to a UK charity. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I do have a rule telling me to try rather than automatically giving up and assuming something can’t be done. If any reader thinks they can put me in touch with J. K. Rowling, or for that matter Daniel Radcliffe, regarding this matter, I do hereby ask them to contact me at yudkowsky@gmail.com."
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#76Every time I see anything related to Less Wrong all I can think of is Roko's Basilisk and I can't stop laughing.
Every time I see your nickname all I can think of is that time you got drunk and puked on the floor.
I'm joking of course, but that and your comment are equally smart ways of evaluating other people's deeds and ideas.
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
Kuhn never denies that there are facts about the universe that we can observe. And I agree with you about this general class of example: no number of scientific discoveries or paradigm shifts will ever make the photoelectric effect cease occurring. Kuhn's argument is that science occasionally undergoes what he calls "paradigm shifts" -- a low-level shift in assumptions about a certain realm of scientific thought that…
That doesn't invalidate the scientific method, nor does it preclude having a best-known model that matches all the currently available experimental data. New data that invalidates a model will necessitate a new model, or a new model may come along with better predictive power. And to use current rationalist terminology: any given scientific model has an associated probability estimate for being true, which is very cl…
That doesn't invalidate the scientific method
First, the new candidate must seem to resolve some outstanding and generally recognized problem that can be met in no other way. Second, the new paradigm must promise to preserve a relatively large part of the concrete problem solving activity that has accrued to science through its predecessors.
It wasn't so long ago that Einstein declared that God doesn't play dice with the universe. Kuhn doesn't deny the existence of scientific facts or the utility of the scientific method -- he only hopes to illustrate that the notion of scientific truth is contingent on certain assumptions and that these assumptions often get in the way of future progress.
It's also important to remember that Kuhn wrote "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" back in 1962. At that time, he was largely responding to the logical positivists. While I think a lot of the contemporary rationalist movement is caught up in old logical positivist modes of thought, your own willingness to invalidate models based on evidence wasn't fully developed before Kuhn and Popper brought such thinking into the mainstream.
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#78Every time I see anything related to Less Wrong all I can think of is Roko's Basilisk and I can't stop laughing.
Every time I see your nickname all I can think of is that time you got drunk and puked on the floor. I'm joking of course, but that and your comment are equally smart ways of evaluating other people's deeds and ideas.
We have no way to know if homulilly got drunk and puked on the floor in public, but we do know that Yudkowsky and assorted Lesswrong visitors had a reaction to the Roko's basilisk concept that most relatively "normal" people would judge as embarrassing or humorous.
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thing the parent didn't bring up was there was a philosophical movement called "rationalism" that preceded the contemporary movement that refers itself by the same name. These so-called "Continental Rationalists" included philosophers like Descartes and Leibniz. The British Empiricist movement, featuring Locke, Berkeley and Hume, arose in response to the Continental Rationalists. One of the key points of contenti…
> Thomas Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" calls into question the very idea of there being a "scientific truth" that is independent of historical assumptions. OK, let's do this. We have a scientific theory. From it, we derive some engineering discipline, which uses the theory to, essentially, make predictions about what will happen if we do this to that , with the property that, if the predictions hol…
I think this is a very naive refutation of what the point was about Kuhn.
First off, the notion that engineering "validates" science. What do you mean by validate? Do you mean successful engineering informed by a set of scientific principles, somehow, in a scientifically rigorous way, renders those principles true? As in, end of story true?
Because most of mechanical engineering is done on the assumption that force equals mass times acceleration. The industrial revolution yielded countless engineering marvels on the back of Newton--cars, trains, breathtaking buildings and bridges. But the theory isn't "true," because Albert Einstein did some thinking and realized that all of the physics change as you go really fast--something "engineering" missed, despite the fact that the stuff "worked."
But somehow it feels wrong to say that Newton was wrong, right? Because in his world, with the kind of thinking and set of scientific instruments available to him, and the battled hardened inverse square phenomena [1] that could be painstakingly measured and applied in engineering, it was infallible. It was true. But only in historical context.
1) Actually not quite so. The strange orbit of Mercury was out of line with Newton's equations, so much so that the planet Vulcan, placed out of Earth's visible observation, was invented to explain it. And so the theory was saved, until General Relativity explained it away, too. So much for "truth."
Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality finished today
#80I'm wondering if this will be published as a physical book. I prefer reading more than a few pages on normal paper.
Fan fiction at best is a grey area and at worst is blatant copyright infringement. The community seems more than happy to leave it in that place rather than put it to the test by publishing something like that or attempting to make money from that. As soon as someone tries to make money from it, even if just to recoup self-publishing costs there will be a lawsuit and it'll be decided concretely, probably not in the c…
Yudkowsky has already made money off it by gating chapters behind receiving a certain amount in donations, which is part of why I find it really strange that he's apparently now trying to explicitly get Rowling's attention.