Let's Read: "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality"

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my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Huh, another Let's Read by JWKS, I wonder what this one is abou... :stonklol:

I don't think I'll be doing dramatic readings this time. :stare:

# ¿ Mar 9, 2015 14:21

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 04:52

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Killstick posted:

Wait, what's 50 shades of grey a ripoff of?

It started off as Twilight fan-fiction.

# ¿ Mar 10, 2015 22:49

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Added Space posted:

So, Big Yud decided to give Terry Pratchett one of the creepiest tributes I've ever read:

Well, this is a lovely way to find out Terry Pratchett died.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2015 08:26

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

LowellDND posted:

Was going to say 'I bet he'd love Enders Game' and then I remembered that whole drat arc.

Ender's Game - the book that is good, but not for the reason most of its fans think.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2015 09:02

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Money doesn't stink. As despicable as some of the people trying to clear their conscience through charity are, the money they give has a tangible effect. I wish more rich assholes gave money to charities in critical need of it.

# ¿ Aug 15, 2015 19:54

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Hate Fibration posted:

This is not at all surprising, since as has been remarked before, Yudkowsky basically treats science as a gnostic religion. Something with revealed truths that are only passed on to initiates.

To be fair, a shitton of people treat science that way.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 07:49

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Tunicate posted:

Doublecheck that - antimatter detonations lose half the energy to neutrinos.

Huh. Didn't know that. Cool.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 21:19

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Nessus posted:

It's funny isn't it how all these people's visions of society tend to put themselves or people in their fields in charge?

A proud philosophical tradition, with roots stretching all the way back to Plato. :v:

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 22:32

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Karia posted:

Y'know, I actually thoroughly enjoyed reading this for a while. Never finished since other stuff came up in life. So it's something of a shock to me to encounter this thread and realize "Holy gently caress, the author was serious." It seemed like such a perfect mockery of... I'm not totally sure, but it never actually occurred to me that it wasn't satire.

Battlefield Earth felt the same way to me. It wasn't until I first heard about Scientologists that I realized the writer was being serious.

You know, there's quite a bit of similarity between Yud and Ron Hubbard. Or, I guess, any other cult of the writer egomaniac.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 23:29

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Mikl posted:

Has Yud even read the books?

No, actually.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 14:08

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Since this is basically a version of Pascal's Wager, up to and including future eternal hell, here's a good post about Pascal's Wager:

Numerical Anxiety posted:

Okay, a couple of things. The Wager was intended for a work that was never published, an apology for Christianity to be written in French and presumably circulated in France and maybe later translated into other languages. It's intended to persuade 17th French Christians who have fallen away from the Church; this context is really important, because understanding it as a general argument introduces all of the problems that you're bringing up. This context is very important because:

1) Pascal, like Montaigne before him, believes in the radical contingency of human knowledge and behaviors. We are the products of our environment entirely and fully, and were we born in Damascus rather than Clermont, we'd be Muslims, not Christians. The environment isn't just physical but cultural as well, we might diverge from general opinions, but our beliefs, habits, gestures, everything that we think and do occurs within a framework that was not of our own choosing; it just happened that way, and we live with it, all the while thinking that these things are "natural" and necessary.

2) Universal valid truths are available in God, but in good Jansenist form, we're so radically fallen that they are almost totally inaccessible to us. We know them only from our own desire for them, and convince ourselves that the contingent mindset that we have consists of necessary truths, but this is self-deception. Fallen humanity is ruled only by our passions and by their accomplice, the imagination. Lacking true knowledge in god, there is only deception, and the most important deception is this: that we do not deceive ourselves. We believe what we believe because it's useful to us, because it's comfortable, because it makes us feel like we are masters of what we survey; in short, because it pleases us in one way or another.

3) Mathematics appears to provide us with universal and valid truths, and indeed it does, but this is because it is a pure logical order and its objects are conventional and imaginary. This goes back to a problem that preoccupied Descartes and much of the 17th century, one which our own has relatively little problem with although I'm not sure why: how can we be certain that all of the messiness of the world as we experience it can be accurately described through mathematics? Descartes' answer is a handwavy "god did it," Pascal is not so sure. Like anything, the logical order of mathematics can be used to deceive us when it is applied to an object that is not is own (and for Pascal, the proper objects of math are the logically pure objects of geometry). But a mathematical "proof" like the Wager can still be useful, because it is persuasive - because we're inclined to think that math implies necessity, even when it's applied to things that aren't quite necessary.

4) The Wager is a ruse - the "best outcome" is logical and necessary because it has been crafted according to terms that make it so, and has been set out in a historical and regional context where it can appear to be so. It is a ruse, because for Pascal there is nothing but ruse. At least for for fallen humanity, we cannot argue logical truths, we can only persuade, in the slimiest ways that "persuasion" has been denigrated against reason. The problem is that persuasion can take on the appearance of reason, and that reason itself might be just another means of persuasion, because there is no certain knowledge. The Wager sets that out and, in a sense, puts it on display - the terms of the Wager are themselves customary or established, but you have to deal with them anyway. What Pascal is gesturing to is an outside of the system of human deception, which is found in god, but the system of deception is clever enough that it can even dissemble this outside.

5) The Wager is bullshit, and it knows it is bullshit. But given the impossibility of a product of human reasoning being anything but bullshit, why not this one? It's at least consistent according to its own terms. And those terms will be familiar to the intended audience, which is who the Wager aims to seduce. Yes, it's unconvincing for us, but it's not for us. But it's an odd exercise - given that there is only deception, can deception deceive itself so badly that it lands on the truth?

That won't make the thing "logical" for you, but it's as decent a summary of Pascal's epistemology as I can give at the moment. In short, Pascal thinks that humanity is party to a mise-en-abime of lies, that is only redeemed by its unfulfilled desire for truth. You might tell me that this is all nonsense, but the Pascalian line of thinking can always respond that that's because you're deceiving yourself. And, ironically, Pascal is also deceiving himself, and he knows it. But there is no universally valid truth, except that which is understood - hypothetically - in god.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2015 23:37

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

I genuinely had an issue with my sleep rhytm at one point, it was constantly moving an hour forward every night, for a period of about two months. Really lovely thing to deal with. My best guess is that it had something to do with stress. It's not hard for me to believe that something similar can happen to someone else.

# ¿ Nov 21, 2015 23:18

my dad: Oct 17, 2012; this shall be humorous

Trin Tragula posted:

If only Gay Black Yudhitler had just stuck to doing this sort of thing, this'd all be a nice, fun, (short!), good-spirited, readable exercise. C'est l'internet.

Yeah. Could have been something along the lines of The Last Ringbearer. Alas.

# ¿ Nov 26, 2015 05:00