Humman was actually my favourite part of the story. The depth of his denial and his weird, obnoxious personality were hilarious and intriguing to me. The story started going downhill for me when it dropped all pretense at analogy and started addressing the real issue explicitly. Partly because it felt clumsy. Partly because it felt like the story had suddenly gotten bored of its own framing device halfway through and unceremoniously dropped it. But mainly because from that point forward, Humman's denial about his chess skills and his weird personality became quite irrelevant, such that all the time spent establishing them had in fact been a complete waste; the dialogue that ensued could have occurred between characters who only had a few lines or maybe a couple paragraphs of setup. (Or no setup at all; Eliezer has done dialogues where the characters' preconceptions are established almost entirely through the dialogue.)
I wish the story had just been what it initially seemed to be on the surface: A character study where ultimately Humman's defense mechanisms would either break down or bring him to ruin. I don't know how it would go; I sort of imagine that over time Humman has enough interactions with people like Assi — not all of whom are as kind or as resigned — that the house of cards starts to wobble and eventually falls down. I was genuinely invested in where it was all going — and then it turned out that for all intents and purposes it wasn't going anywhere. It stopped in its tracks, to make way for a dialogue that didn't need that setup and also didn't pay off that setup.
If you try to have conversations about things that actually matter, many humans immediately become exactly that unlikeable.
Not sure how that's relevant to Bostock's comment. A fictional character does not need to be as unlikable as the real person/people they're standing in for.
On basic Bayesian statistics, jsalvatier recommends Skilling & Sivia's Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial
That link doesn't work anymore. This one does.
Oh neat! Thanks!
I assume this is the Hunter's Log? Do you happen to have the other two datasets as well? Or is this all three datasets combined?
Honestly, I'm just proud of myself for managing to figure out that Cockatrice Eyes seemed to have a negative tax rate 😅
To me, it's hard to ignore how this post skates over why some vegans are pushy, and how that makes statements like "There's a big difference between you making choices according to your values, and you telling other people to make choices according to your values" and "If you tell other people they should make choices according to your values instead of their values, then other people won't like you" difficult for them to swallow. If a vegan is "radical" or pushy, it's probably because they think killing animals is wrong; possibly to a similar, identical, or perhaps even greater degree than killing humans is wrong. And I don't think anyone trying to convince a serial killer to stop murdering people would appreciate being told "There's a big difference between you making choices according to your values, and you telling other people to make choices according to your values", or "If you tell other people they should make choices according to your values instead of their values, then other people won't like you." That isn't necessarily less true about serial killers than it is about a meat-eaters, but I'm sure it's intuitive to you that if you said that to an anti-serial-killer (i.e. most normal people), the response would be something like "Excuse me?" I get the sense that your argument is meant to be a purely pragmatic one — "You're not going to get anywhere with this, and it's wasting resources you could use on more tractable problems, so you should change your approach or just stop entirely" — but I think that the people who most need to hear that argument (on any subject where it obtains, not just veganism) wouldn't even realize that's your argument. They view their bugbear as an extremely important moral problem; insofar as your argument fails to address that perspective, and instead treats the bugbear as a mere cultural difference that they're "weird" for objecting to, I think it isn't going to sound like a pragmatic argument that their approach simply isn't working. At worst, it will sound like you're saying "Why are you so worked up about murder? Don't you know that murder is acceptable in some cultures? Why are you so intolerant?" At best, it will sound like you're missing the point, because it will sound like you're just saying they would have more friends if they got less worked up about murder. I'm sure you can see why they would not even find that argument relevant, let alone persuasive. They wouldn't be so pushy in the first place if they cared more about having friends than about people doing less murder.
2Canon already acknowledges that it might be detrimental. "Sometimes I think we Sort too early."
Not to mention, why would Harry continue to wear the ring on his person where anyone could Finite the Transfiguration away? He would either keep it somewhere else, or (as you say) he'd put a metric ton of protections on it so that a simple Finite wouldn't bring back Voldemort.
In that case "wokking" would be less confusing.
I got that far, but that was because I found Humman entertaining, and because I was expecting the story to be an interesting character study where his defense mechanisms face repeated challenges and eventually either break down or bring him to ruin. (In retrospect I don't know why in the world I ever thought that in this day and age Eliezer might be writing a story that wasn't about AI.)