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big scary monsters posted:It's sort of interesting to consider what might be needed in a language/architecture to be robust not only to bad variables and inputs but also on the fly random changes to the code in memory, where behaviour that would usually result in segmentation faults and buffer overflows is allowed by design.
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# ? Sep 8, 2014 14:22 |
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# ? May 4, 2024 12:34 |
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Well sure, that's the whole idea. e: To be clear, it's not one that I'm suggesting as a sensible approach towards self-improving AI. big scary monsters fucked around with this message at 15:00 on Sep 8, 2014 |
# ? Sep 8, 2014 14:58 |
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Night10194 posted:I'm really tempted to talk to one of my professors about writing a religious studies paper on this particular cult and if he thinks it'd be viable/publishable. It's just fascinating to me, to see the denial of any religious thought in a faith community and yet see their eschaton is so close to the classic one formed by the dominant religion in their home region. Religious thinking arising from a professed complete lack of religion. effin go for it, dude! It can't hurt to ask.
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# ? Sep 8, 2014 15:41 |
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Apologies for the quote salad. I kinda picked those up as I was finishing reading through the thread.Antivehicular posted:Never mind that it's explicitly stated that you have no privacy even in your own digitized head, since the AI will constantly monitor your thoughts and feelings to ensure "optimization." I'm reasonably open to techno-immortality, but I'm pretty sure if it came with the rider "and also the God AI will be constantly reading your mind," I would resign myself to living out my threescore and ten. Having no privacy kind of comes with the territory. Certainly in most of the cases LWers postulate since you are running on a system controlled by the AI. The thing that just came to mind is that if you were running on your own system which you were monitoring yourself in some way then you'd either have to care for an monitor a whole set of needs and demands of your new "body" that would be vastly different from your biological one. Considering how much the needs of your body dictate how you behave moment to moment that would likely have a huge impact on the way you think and behave and hence, I would certainly argue, make you a very different person. If you set up an autonomous system to obfuscate that to ensure a continuity in outlook then you're back to a system you cannot really control manipulating your every perception. The other thing to mention though is that the conscious self in our biological bodies is in charge of surprisingly little when it comes to maintaining basic functions. Most of it gets relegated to inborn or learned autonomous systems. Djeser posted:Many nerds have thought, "man, if only I made a new language, then no one would lie/everything would be unambiguous/everyone could communicate with each other." How many of these languages have caught on and become useful? That's also been the white whale of many philosophers. Night10194 posted:It's just fascinating to me, to see the denial of any religious thought in a faith community and yet see their eschaton is so close to the classic one formed by the dominant religion in their home region. Religious thinking arising from a professed complete lack of religion. To me it is very much like "There is no god but God" and other exhortations from many religions and cults that theirs is the only way to truth and that the other ways are false. It is just another way in which they are hewing close to "the classic one formed by the dominant religion in their home region". Joshlemagne posted:It's a bit like if I said I was going to revolutionize the field of architecture and allow buildings to be constructed using non-euclidean geometries. And I was going to do this by inventing a new kind of screwdriver. I'm sure if your building has domes you could make some great use of geometry that is not euclidean.
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# ? Sep 10, 2014 04:57 |
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I usually find Slatestar Codex to be not too bad, but his latest is really a piece of work.http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/12/what-the-hell-hegel/ posted:I know pretty much nothing about Hegel and am not nearly qualified to have an opinion on the debate about whether his inscrutability conceals deep wisdom or total nonsense. But there are a few points I draw from his rise and fall without being able to judge it philosophically. We have a very long article in which the author tells us he has not read the works of a difficult philosopher, does not understand him, cites a number of more prominent philosophers who dismiss him, but is still going to write an article anyways. The circle jerk continues in the comments over whether or not something which is difficult if it can't be understood completely by reading a basic introduction to the subject. Complicated ideas like "Progress is made by confronting the problems in your existing ideas and revising the theory to accommodate the new data" and "history is teleological" are apparently outside their wheelhouse. Points for this, at least: quote:Part of this is because on the rare occasions I do understand something difficult, I am acutely aware of all the people accusing it of being a confusing mass of jargon disguising a lack of real insight – and of how wrong these people are. “Ha ha, look at all these smart erudite domain experts who believe a stupid thing, that just proves smart domain experts lack common sense” now seems like a huge failure mode to me. There’s also a certain intellectual version of Chesterton’s Fence which looks kind of like “Don’t dismiss an idea until you can see why it would be so tempting for other people to believe”. Right now I don’t see the temptation in Hegel or for that matter any of Continental philosophy. That half of the philosophical universe, including many people who display objective signs of brilliance – has decided to just wallow in pointless obscurantism seems to beggar belief.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 16:59 |
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Spoilers Below posted:I usually find Slatestar Codex to be not too bad, but his latest is really a piece of work. I'm just gonna copy paste some tweets I made on this subject. I guess even if SSC guy didn't occasionally write horrible blogposts that make me seriously question his intentions he would just be okay. I guess he would be a decent entry-level in this hypothetical world if there was anywhere else to go. But there isn't, there's just Big Yud and the neo-reactionaries. He is maybe the pinnacle of LW writing and he still just writes blogposts I would have found mildly engaging as a teenager. It's a stepping stool to a deep pit.
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# ? Sep 16, 2014 18:56 |
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BlueDude posted:** Unfortunately, you can only maintain a stable, social relationship with around 150 of them at a given time. This is known as Dunbar's Number. Crossposting from the TV Tropes thread because I'm sure rationalists wrote those two lines.
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# ? Sep 21, 2014 00:29 |
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quote:Rational _Atlas Shrugged_ plot outline: Eliezer Yudkowsky, on reparing Atlas Shrugged. Courtesy of his facebook page, coz I know too many Yudkowskites.
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# ? Sep 23, 2014 23:18 |
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MinistryofLard posted:Eliezer Yudkowsky, on reparing Atlas Shrugged. I did about 3 double takes (sextuple take?) to see if this was parody. That's some impressive levels of hilarious fanfic bullshit buried in that word salad.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 00:52 |
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The idea of "math monasteries" is just so funny to me. I mean, I love math, but knowing mathematicians the way I do, the idea of them dressing up in frocks and being all comtemplative is just funny. I can't imagine a bunch of people who are less monk-y. And oh hey, there's that IQ obsession again.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 00:55 |
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MinistryofLard posted:Eliezer Yudkowsky, on reparing Atlas Shrugged. What's that exclamation mark in the last paragraph supposed to indicate? Where does it come from and how's it used?
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 01:41 |
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quote:Promising rationality theorist Hugh Akston now seems to mainly be writing fanfiction, though nobody knows where he's uploading the stories from. Because when I think of promising theorists, I think fan fiction. Oh wait sorry that was very neurotypical of me. Fanfic is like anime: only the true ubermensch can appreciate its subtleties.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 01:48 |
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The Time Dissolver posted:What's that exclamation mark in the last paragraph supposed to indicate? Where does it come from and how's it used? It's a fanfic thing.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 01:48 |
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Why are the "heroes" deliberately sabotaging medicine?
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 02:04 |
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The Time Dissolver posted:What's that exclamation mark in the last paragraph supposed to indicate? Where does it come from and how's it used? The exclamation mark is used as such in differentiating between different versions of the same character, as would be useful when discussing fanfics, but also useful in fiction that involves time travel or alternate universes. What you're seeing in the final paragraph is the result of a fanfic-battered mind, warping this shorthand for use on a concept instead of a character, even though it doesn't save any space or make it easier to read. Soon his brain will succumb, and all will be as fanfics to him. Hopefully we can look forward to seeing "Bayesian!" scattered increasingly densely through Yud's future
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 02:13 |
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The Time Dissolver posted:What's that exclamation mark in the last paragraph supposed to indicate? Where does it come from and how's it used? It ultimately comes from UUCP mail routing. UUCP mail addresses were broad-first - basically the inverse of current email addresses. A user at foo@bar.baz.bim.com might have been bim.com!baz!bar!foo under UUCP bang-path notation. Shorthand was box!user, so bar!foo. Ultimately, that evolved into fandom's use of the bang: media!character, such as Sherlock!Watson (the portrayal of John Watson in the TV show Sherlock, as opposed to, for example, Doyle!Watson, AC Doyle's original portrayal). In this case Yud's broadening the use a bit; "Objectivist!heroic" means "heroic as seen by objectivists", as opposed to, say, GreekMyth!heroic or Arthurian!heroic.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 02:13 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Why are the "heroes" deliberately sabotaging medicine? Besesoth posted:It ultimately comes from UUCP mail routing. UUCP mail addresses were broad-first - basically the inverse of current email addresses. A user at foo@bar.baz.bim.com might have been bim.com!baz!bar!foo under UUCP bang-path notation. Shorthand was box!user, so bar!foo.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 02:39 |
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I like how a guy who views himself as some sort of philosopher-king can't express himself without fanfiction shorthand.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 03:04 |
Lottery of Babylon posted:Why are the "heroes" deliberately sabotaging medicine?
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 06:51 |
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MinistryofLard posted:Eliezer Yudkowsky, on reparing Atlas Shrugged. loving lol, there is no other response.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 07:59 |
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Lottery of Babylon posted:Why are the "heroes" deliberately sabotaging medicine? Because if medicine/science advances too far, we might create existential risks without the ability to stop them. We could learn too much. It's as if they're living in the Cthulu mythos and they're the ones who are dedicating their lives to preventing the world at large from learning about the Elder Gods, or something.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 10:43 |
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The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and revelling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 10:52 |
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So we might become the eldar and create a new chaos god, got it.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 18:15 |
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Yudkowsky literally believes we should cease all scientific progress because we might go too far. In the same paragraph, Yudkowsky wonders why the NSF won't give him any grants.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 18:28 |
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Don Gato posted:So we might become the eldar and create a new chaos god, got it. I suppose you'd have to be a little bit twisted too to appreciate it.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 18:58 |
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Cardiovorax posted:The idea of "math monasteries" is just so funny to me. I mean, I love math, but knowing mathematicians the way I do, the idea of them dressing up in frocks and being all comtemplative is just funny. I can't imagine a bunch of people who are less monk-y. Yudkowsky must have read Anathem and thought that the Cartesian Discipline was a good idea.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 19:35 |
Cardiovorax posted:It's my favourite Lovecraft quote, straight out of The Call of Cthulhu. It's an oddly beautiful and almost hopeful vision, in a bit of a twisted way. It's pretty much unique in his work. Lovecraft is all about helpless nihilism, humanity being buffeted about in an uncaring cosmos by forces too great to even notice our presence. Humanity rising up to become like the Great Old Ones, learning and sharing in their knowledge as equals is very... unlike that. It probably wasn't really a pleasant thought to him.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 19:36 |
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Nessus posted:You could debate whether or not humanity would really be 'humanity' at that point. Also, shouting and revelling and killing all sound like dreadfully jock pursuits, don't you know.
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 20:05 |
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MinistryofLard posted:Mathematicians who can't make it through the insane funding situations of academia have been coming to Galt's Gulch's math monasteries, led by Hugh Akston. Other monasteries have the real social scientists who use Bayesian statistics, except for their plants in academia that publish frequentist articles to slow down the field. They have the real schools that rapid-test teaching units, which is how they produce their operatives that keep the Great Stagnation in place. They don't have any political power in the mainstream, all they have is a conspiracy. Their goal is not to cause a collapse but to just cause things to keep ticking along with slower economic growth, and to sabotage academic science that produces x-risks, though they've had more success sabotaging biology and medicine than computer science. And in the lazy afterglow, as he drifts off to hedonic-utility-maximizing catgirl dreams, he repeats, prayerlike, "All roads lead to the Bay Area, and that is where all startups end."
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# ? Sep 24, 2014 20:29 |
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Okay, so I posted earlier in here about how I didn't understand the hate for this guy, and now I understand even less. Everyone here told me that HPMOR goes completely bonkers or whatever and that Harry summons Carl Sagan as a patronus, but... Well, I'm at Chapter 46, and Harry's patronus is a human in general, not Carl Sagan. I still haven't seen anything offensive yet, and I'm just overall feeling kind of disappointed that this thread is working so hard to hate a perfectly fine, somewhat eye-opening story. Call me an idiot if you want, but some of the concepts that are discussed in the story were mindblowing to me, and my basic research afterwards essentially confirmed the ideas I was most interested in. I mean, I guess my point is that you guys are picking at the stupidest crap which then turns out to not even be true. I was telling myself that I'd stop reading once Carl Sagan popped up, because that really would be idiotic, but instead the patronus was an awesome metaphor that essentially summed up Harry's ideals in the story. So I have to wonder how much of the stuff you people are complaining about is not even something he wrote. Now, maybe his forums are crazy (although with the track record of this thread I'd be less inclined to believe it than before) but I really don't see any problems with his work other than that it's a fanfiction, in which case I can kind of see that he may have been looking for a friendlier medium to communicate his basic ideas. ...Or, maybe he just wants to have fun.
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 06:38 |
The Unholy Ghost posted:Okay, so I posted earlier in here about how I didn't understand the hate for this guy, and now I understand even less. Everyone here told me that HPMOR goes completely bonkers or whatever and that Harry summons Carl Sagan as a patronus, but... quote:Draco snarled. "She has some sort of perverse obsession about the Malfoys, too, and her father is politically opposed to us so he prints every word. As soon as I'm old enough I'm going to rape her."
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 07:06 |
that was edited out
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 07:09 |
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No, he specifically decided not to edit that out. It's still on the live site: http://hpmor.com/chapter/7
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 07:11 |
Morkyz posted:that was edited out The hero also opts to share more information with the rape-planner, regarding his own cultural supremacy: quote:"You're telling the truth," Draco said slowly. "You wouldn't fake a whole book just for this - and I can hear it in your voice. But... but..." Nessus fucked around with this message at 07:18 on Sep 26, 2014 |
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 07:13 |
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It's an easy mistake to make. What actually got toned down in that section was Harry's "how barbaric, wizards are basically magic Arabs" response.
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 07:19 |
chrisoya posted:It's an easy mistake to make. What actually got toned down in that section was Harry's "how barbaric, wizards are basically magic Arabs" response.
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 07:21 |
My mistake, I just heard he edited it and lol if i'm reading that thing twice.
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 07:23 |
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The Unholy Ghost posted:So I have to wonder how much of the stuff you people are complaining about is not even something he wrote. I have to wonder if you're reading more than just the pithy "what a dumbass" posts in this thread, since the actual effortposts that detail why he's wrong and insane have multiple quotes of and direct links to what he wrote. And whoever said Harry's patronus was Carl Sagan was making a metaphor, hth.
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 07:31 |
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The Unholy Ghost posted:I mean, I guess my point is that you guys are picking at the stupidest crap which then turns out to not even be true. I was telling myself that I'd stop reading once Carl Sagan popped up, because that really would be idiotic, but instead the patronus was an awesome metaphor that essentially summed up Harry's ideals in the story.
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 08:20 |
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# ? May 4, 2024 12:34 |
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Tiggum posted:It kind of works if you accept Yudkowsky's explanation that the dementors represent death, but they clearly don't. They don't even kill people. But Yudkowsky wants the concept of death to be the ultimate bad guy, so he just says "dementors = death" and that's it. Then you've got his explanation for why patronuses are animals — because animals don't understand death. But that doesn't make sense. Why would not understanding death make it go away? Animals die. And it's all forced into this mould so that he can have his ultimate patronus be a human so he can have humans defeat death. Guys he said he had his mind blown by HPMOR. He's either a troll or a really immature Wikipedia skimming "polymath" with no useful knowledge. Don't validate him by trying to argue as of he's just misunderstanding you.
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# ? Sep 26, 2014 08:23 |