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Part of the problem, I guess, is that they're trying to substitute math for philosophy and ideology- hence they still feel compelled to wave flags and crusade for something against something else, even if mathematics isn't really structured along those lines.
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# ? Jul 19, 2014 22:51 |
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# ? May 4, 2024 11:34 |
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Maxwell Lord posted:Part of the problem, I guess, is that they're trying to substitute math for philosophy and ideology- hence they still feel compelled to wave flags and crusade for something against something else, even if mathematics isn't really structured along those lines. But they don't do the math properly. The concept of confidence intervals isn't difficult to grasp.
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# ? Jul 19, 2014 22:56 |
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AlbieQuirky posted:But they don't do the math properly. The concept of confidence intervals isn't difficult to grasp. I said they were using math, not that they were any good at it.
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# ? Jul 19, 2014 23:42 |
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Don't you generally use frequentism and Bayesianism for different applications anyway? Frequentist tools like T-test, Wilcoxon rank scoring and ANOVA testing are for things like modelling how closely related two or more sets of data are to each other, like for monitoring change over time or testing the probability that a hypothesis is correct versus the null hypothesis. Like in medical testing, you can use frequency analysis to see how the control group's results differ from the testing group's. I haven't seen anything like that on Less Wrong, except in the autism/vaccines post where they haven't really understood it properly.
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# ? Jul 19, 2014 23:52 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Well, okay, the author doesn't actually seem to think vaccines cause autism (although he does make end with an odd comment that even 3/43 studies showing vaccines cause autism would be surprisingly low, when in fact it would be surprisingly high since that's over 5%). He just thinks that the evidence vaccines don't cause autism is too great, and that some evidence that vaccines cause autism should have randomly appeared on its own. This logic is just so sublimely incorrect and wrong-headed that I can't even be particularly angry at it. The entire concept of "there's a non-zero chance that Option A could be correct, so obviously sometimes it should be correct, ergo if studies continue to establish that Option A is wrong and Option B is correct, then obviously DATA SUPPRESSION!!" just opens so many wondrous possibilities. Someone should tell him there's a non-zero chance that the government implanted tracking microchips in his fillings, just to see how many dentists will have to deny it before he decides the conspiracy must go deeper.
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# ? Jul 19, 2014 23:54 |
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I wonder if Yudkowsky thinks he'll get the same kind of name recognition as Bertrand Russel and Kant in a few decades. Internet famous science-philosopher will forever be doomed to cultural obscurity as bronies and swatting once his time passes.
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 00:11 |
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pentyne posted:I wonder if Yudkowsky thinks he'll get the same kind of name recognition as Bertrand Russel and Kant in a few decades. He thinks that future civilisations will be raring to defrost his body because he's just that famous for
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 01:25 |
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Antivehicular posted:This logic is just so sublimely incorrect and wrong-headed that I can't even be particularly angry at it. The entire concept of "there's a non-zero chance that Option A could be correct, so obviously sometimes it should be correct, ergo if studies continue to establish that Option A is wrong and Option B is correct, then obviously DATA SUPPRESSION!!" just opens so many wondrous possibilities. Someone should tell him there's a non-zero chance that the government implanted tracking microchips in his fillings, just to see how many dentists will have to deny it before he decides the conspiracy must go deeper. LWites are very, very, very vulnerable to the idea that there's a DARK TRUTH the MAN is hiding. This is why they take internet nerd fascists seriously.
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 01:36 |
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Stottie Kyek posted:Don't you generally use frequentism and Bayesianism for different applications anyway? Frequentist tools like T-test, Wilcoxon rank scoring and ANOVA testing are for things like modelling how closely related two or more sets of data are to each other, like for monitoring change over time or testing the probability that a hypothesis is correct versus the null hypothesis. Like in medical testing, you can use frequency analysis to see how the control group's results differ from the testing group's. I haven't seen anything like that on Less Wrong, except in the autism/vaccines post where they haven't really understood it properly. For all their professed love of bayesianism, lesswrong doesn't actually like updating their beliefs in response to evidence. They consider that grunt work for lesser intellects who need to rely on their mere senses - senses that could easily be deceived by the Dark Lords of the Matrix. Instead, lesswrong believes that the thing to do is to deduce the correct priors through pure reason, then stick with those priors for ever because your logicks are very smart so obviously those priors are correct. Antivehicular posted:This logic is just so sublimely incorrect and wrong-headed that I can't even be particularly angry at it. The entire concept of "there's a non-zero chance that Option A could be correct, so obviously sometimes it should be correct, ergo if studies continue to establish that Option A is wrong and Option B is correct, then obviously DATA SUPPRESSION!!" just opens so many wondrous possibilities. Someone should tell him there's a non-zero chance that the government implanted tracking microchips in his fillings, just to see how many dentists will have to deny it before he decides the conspiracy must go deeper. He's not saying sometimes vaccines should cause autism. He's saying that even in situations where no correlation exists (i.e. vaccines really don't cause autism), an experiment using a 95% confidence interval has a 5% chance of returning a false positive by "finding" a link due to random variance. Which is actually true - making Type I errors 5% of the time when the null hypothesis is true is the definition of 95% confidence. That part is okay. The problem is using this to argue that 39 consecutive studies finding no link proves a conspiracy because no type I errors appeared. For one thing, there's about a 14% chance of that happening randomly, which is much too high to dismiss as an explanation. For another, it assumes everything just uses 95% confidence intervals, which is absurd for an issue like this where even one false positive could cause severe damage. The studies are large enough to have high power even with better significance levels - a recent study published two months ago had a sample size of 1.5 million - and it would be recklessly irresponsible to conclude Vaccines Cause Autism!!!! with a p-value of .04. The evidence that some studies found a link but weren't published is a basic correlation/causation fallacy; rather than being suppressed for finding a link, it's more likely that a flaw in the study's design caused both the appearance of a link and the study's rejection for being flawed.
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 03:20 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:He's not saying sometimes vaccines should cause autism. He's saying that even in situations where no correlation exists (i.e. vaccines really don't cause autism), an experiment using a 95% confidence interval has a 5% chance of returning a false positive by "finding" a link due to random variance. Which is actually true - making Type I errors 5% of the time when the null hypothesis is true is the definition of 95% confidence. That part is okay. Oh, okay -- that makes substantially more sense, although it's still hugely wrong-headed. Does he assume that, in an ideal world, studies would be published without being screened for obvious procedural errors or statistical insignificance, and that such screening represents a censorship effect? I'm flashing back to the page of Dresden Codak where Aaron Diaz reveals that he thinks the peer-review process in scientific publishing is evil and corrupt for, uh, not publishing every drat thing, I guess.
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 03:49 |
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The Vosgian Beast posted:LWites are very, very, very vulnerable to the idea that there's a DARK TRUTH the MAN is hiding. They have been redpilled by Moldbug?
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 04:01 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:For all their professed love of bayesianism, lesswrong doesn't actually like updating their beliefs in response to evidence. They consider that Fixed.
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 08:56 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:For all their professed love of bayesianism, lesswrong doesn't actually like updating their beliefs in response to evidence. They consider that grunt work for lesser intellects who need to rely on their mere senses - senses that could easily be deceived by the Dark Lords of the Matrix. Instead, lesswrong believes that the thing to do is to deduce the correct priors through pure reason, then stick with those priors for ever because your logicks are very smart so obviously those priors are correct. So, PhilGoetz is ignoring half of that .05 error rate - the half that leads to the erroneous conclusion that vaccines prevent autism. Instead of .05, he should use .025 in his calculations, which leads to a probability of .37 - or 37% - that we would see a pattern of literature like this in the absence of publication bias. Not even a LWer could twist that into a statistically significant result. What is significant, though, is that he didn't do a Bayesian calculation given the LessWrong hard-on for Bayes. I wonder why? It would be pretty straightforward: to calculate the probability of a publication bias given these results. You would just need the prior probability of finding these results (done), the probability of these results given a publication bias (easy, it's probably pretty high), and the prior probability of a publication bias (...........). Coming up with priors is easy, guys!
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 10:03 |
The Time Dissolver posted:Fixed. Pretty much. To them, updating their priors in response to evidence means their initial reasoning wasn't accurate, which they can't accept.
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 10:03 |
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Oh this just gets better and better. From the comments:quote:Excess significance and publication bias in general are so common as to be the default; p=0.13 is pretty bad looking (with a single-tailed test, that'd be below the 0.10 threshold Ioannides suggest for publication bias tests due to their low power to detect bias). Wait. This is even already a one-tailed test - you can't go dividing it in half again. God drat cargo cult statistics. Luigi's Discount Porn Bin fucked around with this message at 10:58 on Jul 20, 2014 |
# ? Jul 20, 2014 10:20 |
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Swan Oat posted:They have been redpilled by Moldbug? Pretty much.
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 15:32 |
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So to take this in a different direction, lets talk molecular nanotechnology (this is probably going to be long, I apologize). Its Less Wrong's version of magic and their scientific trump card. Lots of Less Wrong conversations go like this: "Cryonics can't work because of..." "BUT NANO! GO AWAY LUDDITE!" (Here is one example of Yudkowsky pulling "molecular probe" out to argue about cryonics: http://lesswrong.com/lw/do9/welcome_to_less_wrong_july_2012/8n54 ) Even AI is dangerous because it might solve molecular nanotech. Here is a hilarious example of how powerful the magic nanotech is in the LessWrong world view- a former Singularity Institute employee, Anissimov argues that nanotech is so powerful the only solution is to bring back the monarchy: http://www.moreright.net/reconciling-transhumanismand-neoreaction/ So what is this magic? Quite simply, Drexler's idea is that we can take the mechanical engineering manufacturing paradigm and scale it down to the very tiny. Imagine using molecular sized gears and grippers in order to position individual atoms and make new molecules. Imagine, if you will (as Anissimov says) a 3d printer capable of rearranging the atoms in material to build basically anything. After all, proponents tell us, biological systems exist and we are full of biological nanomachines. WHO CAN ARGUE WITH THAT? The important point I want to make is that things are very different at small scale, but first I have to take a tiny digression into temperature. Consider an everyday-sized object, like a simple pendulum (a small weight tied to a rope, swinging back and forth). As it swings back and forth, it'll slow down and eventually stop. So what happened? Where did the energy go? We can think of the rope as lots of individual particles held together by springs (the spring represent atomic bonds). When the pendulum is swinging, all the springs have to move in unison. Over time, little nudges build up and the different springs start to move against each other, and as the individual springs jostle around more and more, it takes energy from the swinging motion, so that slows down. So it reaches equilibrium when all the vibrational and rotational modes are sharing roughly equal amounts of energy. A really important formula in thermodynamics tells us that, once the system is in equilibrium the probability a given mode has an energy E is proportional to exp(-E/(kT)). k is Boltzmann's constant, and T is the temperature of the system. kT for a system at room temperature is on the order 10^(-21) joules, which is super small compared to every day expectation. The probability the pendulum starts to swing randomly is proportional (therefore) to -10^(21), which is basically 0. However, for very small objects, this becomes very different from everyday experience. Something as simply as a ratchet can't work in equilibrium (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet ). For rotational modes of molecules, the typical energy is something like 10^-4 eV, so kT is substantially larger, and the probability of randomly starting to rotate is quite high (tens of percents). The same is true for random straight-line motion. Typical molecular spring energies are a few tenths of an eV, so the probability of randomly vibrating, while small, is non-trivial. Similarly, at an atomic level, Brownian motion is pretty important. Essentially, everything is constantly buffeted by the atoms in the air. The mean-free-path in air at room temperature (at atmospheric pressure) is about 70 nm. An atom is about 1 nm. This means that when an atom is traveling in a random direction, it'll manage to travel about 70x its length before it slams into something and changes direction. There are also Van der Waals forces. At small distances, the fact that molecules aren't actually neutral, but are made of electrons and protons causes a strong attractive force. What happens is that the electrons in a molecule will try to move far away from the electrons in the other. This turn each neutral molecule into something like a dipole, and you get a configuration between two molecules of the form +-/+- . This gives an attractive force that grows quickly as the objects get near 1/r^6. Now, imagine what manufacturing would look like if your gears rotated randomly,if the distances between teeth of gears fluctuates with non-trivial probability, if the materials you put down while working randomly would start jumping around randomly, rotating randomly. If everything (your gears, your grippers, your working materials) are coated in incredibly sticky glue. My point here isn't that its totally impossible- my point is that the paradigm is pretty obviously wrong. The small world is different enough that it doesn't make sense to try to impose the way we manufacture goods to manipulating the small scale. BUT, the LessWrongian might ask- what about biology? Good question- biology operates completely differently. Everything is wet, and the unique properties of water are an integral part of how everything works. Systems of membranes create and maintain different molecules in different concentrations and those concentration gradients are used to power machines. The degree of specialization is very high, with lots of proteins doing lots of different things. "Real" nano-tech will look more like the chemistry of enzymes in water. None of this is to disparage the very real nano-materials people are building today (for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_(atoms) ). But these are materials that are being designed either through normal means or by manipulating individual atoms with (relatively) huge devices like atomic force microscopes. Its low temperature, ultra vacuum work, nothing like the transhumanist vision. But haven't degrees been awarded for Drexler's stuff? Aren't there active researchers? Basically none of the active researchers have actual phds in a relevant subject. Drexler does have a phd but its from MITs Architecure and Planning college (specifically, the media lab. Anything crackpotty that comes out of MIT comes out of the medialab). Like all things transhumanist, the entire field is basically a (perhaps unintentional) con game.
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# ? Jul 20, 2014 22:42 |
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Uh, what the gently caress. http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10016013-harry-potter-and-the-methods-of-rationality THIS IS NOT A BOOK. His magnum opus has also been updated with this delightful note quote:Welcome back, dear readers! The big news is that HPMOR is on track to finish in 2014, thanks to a very generous reader who sponsored me to spend Aug 26-Sep 25 in a remote house in North Carolina doing nothing but writing the first draft of the final arc. Thanks also to the Machine Intelligence Research Institute which is allowing me to take a month to do that. After that comes revising, which will take time, but not the same amount of concentrated effort. Again, though I can make no promise upon the future, I think we are currently on track to finish in 2014 with greater than 50% probability So, he literally needs to be fostered in a cabin in order to finish his Harry Potter fanfiction, and someone out there offered up their remote house? I am really hoping this is just a set up for a Misery type situation. On an unrelated note, what weird feature of FF.net doesn't allow you to select the text and copy/paste?
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 05:09 |
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pentyne posted:On an unrelated note, what weird feature of FF.net doesn't allow you to select the text and copy/paste? A basic copy-paste protection in the CSS. Use this for Firefox or this (in the first replies) (ironically from the Harry Potter fanfic Reddit) to bypass it.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 05:31 |
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What are the laws around publishing and selling Big Yud's Harry Potter fanfiction? My university's CS club has an actual bound and vaguelly professional looking copy of it (), which means presumeably it cost money and is thus on sale somewhere. Doesn't that constitute some kind of copywrite infringement?
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 06:07 |
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MinistryofLard posted:What are the laws around publishing and selling Big Yud's Harry Potter fanfiction? My university's CS club has an actual bound and vaguelly professional looking copy of it (), which means presumeably it cost money and is thus on sale somewhere. It would probably pass muster as a parody, given the precedent of The Wind Done Gone.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 06:46 |
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I think Goodreads and wikipedia have a problem dealing with groups that have high internet presence, but are of little actual importance. Yudkowsky can unleash his tiny army of LessWrongians to review on Goodreads, edit on TV Tropes, and make sure he maintains a page on wikipedia (a page that remains completely free of criticism). The handful of people who stumbled upon MPMOR and hated it get drowned out by his built in audience (you can tell their reviews, as they refer to Yudkowsky as an AI researcher or a decision theorist).
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 07:23 |
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pentyne posted:Uh, what the gently caress.
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# ? Jul 26, 2014 08:37 |
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Another chapter of HPMOR, another 20 minutes of reading. Professor Quirrell is dying. Harry has smuggled in a unicorn transfigured into a pebble so the good Prof can untransfigure and kill it, thus sparing Harry the curse of killing a unicorn. Quirrell laughs off the suggestion that he create a horcrux, arguing that it'd cause continuity issues (despite horcruxes canonically existing in Harry Potter and not causing loving continuity issues, Voldemort remembers dying quite well). Quirrell instead directs Harry to discover the secrets of the Philosopher's Stone, which Harry had written off, and to bring it to him. Harry Potter-Evans-Verres is incredibly dumb for someone who thinks he's a genius.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 04:44 |
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Patter Song posted:Harry Potter-Evans-Verres is incredibly dumb for someone who thinks he's a genius. The limitations of the author self-insert are revealed.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 04:56 |
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How the gently caress would something cause continuity issues in a new continuity?
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 05:08 |
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Anticheese posted:How the gently caress would something cause continuity issues in a new continuity? What am I missing here, because this seems like two steps beyond "why the gently caress does immortality/resurrection count as a continuity error in the first place?" EDIT: Like, I'm not a HPMOR connoisseur. Have horcruxes turned into time travel/dimension doors somehow?
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 05:15 |
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Well, apparently he hasn't actually read the books soooo
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 05:18 |
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Anticheese posted:How the gently caress would something cause continuity issues in a new continuity? It uses continuity to mean continuity of self. Basically, if you make a horcrux and you die, the version of you in the horcrux doesn't have the memories you formed after making the horcrux, so it isn't really the same you as the you who died. (That's not how it works in the books.) Also, the soul in the horcrux isn't really your soul, it's actually the ghost of someone else you killed forced to manifest, locked in the object, and imprinted with your memories. (That's not how it works in the books.) Also also, Merlin's Interdict prevents your most powerful spells from being passed through a horcrux, so if resurrected you would be without your strongest spells and would be killed again easily. (That's not how anything works in the books.) Basically he's doing his usual thing of "criticizing" the books' plots by not reading them, making bullshit up, and then complaining that the bullshit he made up doesn't make sense.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 05:23 |
Patter Song posted:Another chapter of HPMOR, another 20 minutes of reading.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 05:27 |
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Nessus posted:Are unicorns intelligent in the ol' Potterverse? Because I'd think it'd be rather 'deathist' to say that an intelligent being should die so YOU should live - perhaps some kind of utilitarianism if it could save more than one(but wouldn't that be accepting death and Giving Up?) They're never confirmed to be intelligent or unintelligent (which is dangerous by itself), but they are treated as sacred and killing one is supposed to bring a mighty curse upon someone. Yudkowsky's Harry, though, doesn't truck with curses even in a world where they are clearly a thing, which makes him incredibly reckless.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 05:46 |
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A world where books are sold to kids explaining how to curse your peers.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 07:15 |
Anticheese posted:A world where books are sold to kids explaining how to curse your peers.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 07:53 |
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Let's be fair, Harry doesn't deny that curses exist or that killing a unicorn might carry one. He denies that any curse is even worthy of consideration when the alternative is death, and that no curse could possibly be so bad that it should deter you from a life-saving unicorn murder. That would be shaky logic on its own (fates worse than death are pretty easy to imagine, like an I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream scenario; unicorns might be sentient, which kills the utilitarian argument), but then he insists that it's practically mass murder for St. Mungo's to not have a captive stable of unicorns it keeps and breeds for the purpose of killing whenever someone badly injured comes in.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 08:13 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Let's be fair, Harry doesn't deny that curses exist or that killing a unicorn might carry one. He denies that any curse is even worthy of consideration when the alternative is death, and that no curse could possibly be so bad that it should deter you from a life-saving unicorn murder. It's been years since I read the books, but wasn't Voldemort's big thing that he thought that there was no fate worse than death and did everything in his power to stave death off, up to doing the unthinkable and splitting his soul into 7 parts? I remember he angrily denies that there is anything worse than death at the end of Order of the Phoenix. So I know he didn't actually read the books his magnum opus is based off of, but that just raises another question: Why write a massive fanfic rivalling the source material when for just a bit more effort you could write original fiction and be done with it? Don't get me wrong, it would still be loving terrible but at least he would be able to sell it. It's like watching loving write fiction, the fanfic is so far removed from the source no one knows why they're even bothering calling it fanfic.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 08:37 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:It uses continuity to mean continuity of self. Basically, if you make a horcrux and you die, the version of you in the horcrux doesn't have the memories you formed after making the horcrux, so it isn't really the same you as the you who died. (That's not how it works in the books.) Yodkowsky's had Quir"Literally Voldemort With No Part Of Quirrell Left"rell call out canon-Harry for using an untested spell marked 'for enemies' on an enemy. A "hohohoh aren't i so smart" type self wankery. Meanwhile his pet self insert with a "how do I get Harry a time turner I know he has a nonexistant sleeping disease" break loving Bellatrix Lestrange out of prison, work literally for Voldemort and think that's all fine, and some other poo poo he's probably shoved into that shitpile of a fanfic from the last time I bothered to read it.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 08:56 |
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Don Gato posted:I know he didn't actually read the books his magnum opus is based off of, but that just raises another question: Why write a massive fanfic rivalling the source material when for just a bit more effort you could write original fiction and be done with it? Don't get me wrong, it would still be loving terrible but at least he would be able to sell it. It's like watching loving write fiction, the fanfic is so far removed from the source no one knows why they're even bothering calling it fanfic. I can think of two reasons: 1) By writing a fanfic and not original fiction, Yudkowsky can produce a "brilliant" "parody" of a known source, which will help get his point across. This is probably the reason he'd claim, although the truth is... 2) Fanfiction has a built-in audience. Harry Potter fandom isn't as huge as it was at its height, but there are still a crapton of people who are willing to read hideous garbage just because it's Potter, and that's a built-in audience that he'd have to work for if he marketed it as original fiction. Nobody can ever accuse Yudkowsky of doing any work that he doesn't have to, and it's way easier to staple on the name of an existing, well-liked property than to try and get readers to invest in your original universe of Pseudoscience Masturbation Wizards.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 09:13 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:It uses continuity to mean continuity of self. Basically, if you make a horcrux and you die, the version of you in the horcrux doesn't have the memories you formed after making the horcrux, so it isn't really the same you as the you who died. (That's not how it works in the books.) I really don't know how his fans can still buy his bullshit. He's writing fan-fiction about the most popular children's book series of the last 20 years and he's constantly introducing his own concepts and ideas to the series and yet using it all as a "Look at how smart I am because I point out that this doesn't make sense". When he started it seemed to be really tongue in cheek and had an amusing bit where he had Harry explain how someone could brutally exploit the Wizard economy, but it seemed like it went to his head and suddenly Yudkowsky thought he was Pynchon and this was his Gravity's Rainbow. I have no idea wtf the point of Merlin's Interdict is. Like, your brain is wiped of your most "powerful" spells, but if you could transfigure matter into anti-matter and have a instant nuke instead you'll lose the dreaded "killing curse" yet even knowing the words and what the spell does you can't do it? Holy gently caress someone actually took Harry Potter's magic system and turned it into something that makes even less sense by trying to seriously quantify it and set limits. Yudkowsky is basically one of those crazy cult leaders in the 1900s who managed to convince thousands of people the world would end in a few years, and when it didn't, managed to convince them that the world really really was going to end in a another few years. He's the atheist tech equivalent of William Miller. Lottery of Babylon posted:Let's be fair, Harry doesn't deny that curses exist or that killing a unicorn might carry one. He denies that any curse is even worthy of consideration when the alternative is death, and that no curse could possibly be so bad that it should deter you from a life-saving unicorn murder. In the books, written for a YA audience, Unicorns are pure creatures, and killing them is so heinous only the most vile of people who consider it. This is like if they discovered that people could be killed/harvested for a universal anti-viral Yudkosky would be leading the charge for the homeless, mentally ill, disenfranchised etc. to be corralled and kept as a source of the "cure" because saving a few lives of productive citizens is more worthly then letting them live as drains on society.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 09:27 |
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pentyne posted:Holy gently caress someone actually took Harry Potter's magic system and turned it into something that makes even less sense by trying to seriously quantify it and set limits. I'll be honest: I actually like his magic setting better than the original. I think the Merlin's Interdict (can only learn more powerful spells from others or make them yourselves, not learn them from books) or the mechanics behind the killing curse or the horcrux are pretty neat. e. Except the Dementors and the Patronus. Yudkowsky really missed the mark (and point) on those. quote:You already calculated the expected utilities, if it works, if it goes wrong. You assigned probabilities, you multiplied, and then you threw out the answer and went with your new gut feeling, which was the same. So say it. In most books, this would be a part of the character development signalling a shift in worldviews for the protagonist. I doubt this will be the case though. Namarrgon fucked around with this message at 11:03 on Jul 27, 2014 |
# ? Jul 27, 2014 10:43 |
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# ? May 4, 2024 11:34 |
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According to , the unicorns are named after characters from My Little Pony. Because of course they are.
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# ? Jul 27, 2014 16:14 |