EniScien's Bio thread

Sort of question: I have read once about some drafts of "Not your usual Riddle fic" or something like that which iirc EY had written and was going to publish as well as epilogue. When I heard about it I became really interested about those, what it was exactly about, are they finished, can we see finished of those, can we see just drafts? I just hope to ever read them (as well as epilogues) before we all will die.

And also I am interested about other works, esp Well Bound Demons. What is with them? Is there some central page with info on such questions?

I am one of those people who are really interested in hpmor epilogue, but not in planecrash's. That's because I liked hpmor much, much more than planecrash. I am actually more interested about continuation of... I never can recall the name, the story about Oliver Greenfield, than in planecrash.

I suspect I have lots of questions about hpmor, but now can only recall that:

Were Harry's... I don't know how to say, let it be... Quirks. Like his stories about being afraid of mugging, biting a teacher, hitting for a ball, his strong privacy feeling etc. Were they somehow aimed? Do I at all see any real pattern here or just faces in the clouds or maybe it's a part of some bigger pattern, including eg later explained story with scientific project? Actually, what at all was part of Secret Plans in hpmor writing and what was just things of moment (like want to make Hermione be eaten by a troll)?

In one interview I have heard that EY was going to write something completely goofy and was somewhat surprised by reaction. And I hadn't understood at all what that means at the moment. I don't quiet understand how something as rational as hpmor and goofyness may be in one sentence. After all this time, I have some ideas, like trolls suddenly having transfiguration ability from nowhere just for funny plot. Or that Harry both mentions Raistlin Majere as story characters and somebody Dulak as real spell. And yet.

I am also interested what exactly didn't fit, wasn't assembling to close the brackets? I can't quite imagine an example.

Also, what happened in SPHEW Arc? Even I considered it boring despite how much I liked approximately everything else about hpmor not from first chapter, not even from first lines, but I may say, from negative lines, because I really liked it already because of all the meta. Which i am actually also interested about, was that intended from the beginning? Because I never saw something like that before, and even after I have seen something resembling only once, in Thinking Physics. (I actually really regret that just because there were no similar warnings before planecrash, I assumed that there will be no riddles, foreshadowing etc, so I wasn't trying to solve any riddles, I'd really wanted all this meta to be here, including eg "I know you often seen disclaimers before things just because they mention death of something, but it's not one of those, and also the author is incredibly smart and creative, so, really, be careful")

One of the things I most liked in hpmor is... I am not quite sure how to describe it, but I ever got some close feeling only from Oliver Greenfild's story. I am interested to know is there actually some cluster of traits or is that something that only aligns with my personal distribution of preferences.

I was in interesting in reading the first time to think and also haven't thought that all the chaos is only my own stupidity. But on further rereads it seems very strange that Quirrell says "My immortal existence must depend on discovering what trap you have set, and finding a way to escape from it, as soon as possible. But let us pointlessly delay to talk of other matters first." and Dumbledore just... goes along with that. Shouldn't it be incredibly suspicious? Pointing out that Voldemort is completely sure that it's safe for him.

As I guess, Voldemort is indeed just much smarter than Dumbledore. Just as Voldemort said. And Dumbledore himself said. And everyone said. Harry just didn't believe that because why then Voldemort didn't win in 3 days? And in previous chapters we had found the answer: Voldemort was just a role, Riddle just liked played into all that war more than wanted to win.

So I suspect that Riddle said that knowing that Dumbledore isn't actually cunning, he pointed attention to Weasley twins etc. So Riddle sure he will not notice.

So Dumbledore is being stupid, but very predictably stupid, not suddenly stupid. So I think that is how it can be not an Idiot Ball. Though I don't dare to actually claim that because I didn't actually predict that in advance (in my first read, I mean).

P.S. Oh, also he should (falsely) thought that trap will work before strange Quirrell phrase because he doesn't know that Harry leaked Resurrection Stone to Voldemort. About cloak not sure, maybe Dumbledore didn't think about it, maybe didn't expect that Voldemort will be able to get it, or maybe the cloak will not be able to save Voldemort and Dumbledore just didn't want to lose Harry.

I can remember that long ago when I have read Science vs Bayes I wasn't actually convinced. Because... Yudkowsky didn't prove that Bayesianism can actually do better. MWI already was mainstream QM in science. So I wasn't convinced that I actually should choose Bayes for the sake of my sanity.

I changed my mind after reading about P-values vs Bayesian-likelihoods, sure, I need to choose Bayes instead of Science for the sake of my sanity.

I think post about likelihoods will be really useful if linked to Science vs Bayes. And... It wasn't in my experience, but EDT vs CDT vs TDT probably also will be good example.

I am increasingly more concerned about how my current beliefs may be defined by the fact that I eg watched "Little Soldiers" and was impressed as a kid. And other examples of fictional evidence which probably formed my priors. I now interested how to know which is the degree of influence, and how to correct for that.

Sure, there are some things that don't change. But how to ensure that it isn't just survival bias? And if I will try for example to look into my traits which I considered important at a time, then it looks like most of them changed in my case.

It looks for me that preferences (even as they feel on emotional level, not just appear in behaviour) are vastly influenced my your capabilities. Eg I really hated reading and really liked computers when I was 9, and now it changed because I read better and easier and because I now can use my mind instead of computer. So I strongly suspect that if you will drop on somebody +50 iq points he will suddenly start to like math (previously I was skeptical about EY's claims that increasing intelligence will lead to sudden changes in preferences, but now I totally believe it). Or eg I didn't like emotional and interpersonal moments in fiction, but now I suddenly like them because I understand them so much better. And the question "do I prefer to know awful truth or be happy" doesn't even make sense to me now since I can disentangle those mentally.

In some sense it looks obvious, but yet I totally wouldn't expect these things to change, they didn't look like having these concrete slots for circumstances variation or even more, things that changed felt like internal for those mental preferences. And even more again, they changed because of change in cognitive circumstances, not environmental.

And maybe I had more malleable personality than usual. I never had a unified place for storing my personality info and was extremely prone to decoupling, so different behaviour modes inside of my brain totally could just check consistency against themselves.

And maybe I spent much more time than usual person to introspect and notice behavioral differences.

And maybe I was affected here by the fact that I looked through my memory to find my forming childhood events and reflect on them and update with all my current cognitive skills.

Anyway, personality now looks for me much less stable. It looks like you can shift personality to almost any state by changing capabilities. Just people usually have mild preferences to not do that, to improve eg their first best math and not second best languages. Or if to put it another way, personality usually looks not changed because it's traits tend to on average have the same average as previously, not because traits are stable.

I still don't get what are you talking about. Religious belief isn't discussed because it is something that can be be destroyed by truth? And meditation isn't? There could be said something about power of "всенощное бдение" from Christianity, but sleep deprivation seems to much, much more likely to have huge harmful effects than meditation?

(I am afraid that it will turn into people just saying what they have in mind instead of replying... Even more than now. But I can't write down all of inference, so...)

I more thought that "no self" should be about something literal like "your personality in years changes so much that you 5 years later are more like some other human than you 5 years ago". But if people on lw (not just some LLM) continue to point out only to Buddhism than... Maybe I forgot how often people like to say something in way of "shocking news! There is no time, time is just an illusion, Barbur proved it" while the same would say "shock! There are no protons, they were illusion of quarks prestidigitation". Though I am still puzzled why people at all tend to think that if something is not ontologically basic that it's just illusion, I don't think I had this problem even before sequences.

Idea that agency of a person is combined from lesser agencies of parts of mind instead of eg booting up after adding one final component to general system looks very plausible to me. Though I am not even sure that it is what was meant by people, not just something I project into.

And also I don't see where are you coming from with your views on Buddhism & LW. I don't know what should mean "clearly atheistic", wasn't EY in the beginning talking about his Taoism inspirations? What is different now? People started to believe supernatural? For me it's clear what were skeptical about those people who say "meditation works" (short metaphor would be "expected LSD, found modafinil/nicotine/meth").

I don't know what is communication problem, but it certainly doesn't go right. Or probably, multiple problems. Because... Complaining to Grok is like complaining to a parrot... And after not getting clear answer from it I guess that it's just too niche/original topic to be Grok being able to process it at all. And that are not complaints, it's a list of what I don't think could be plausible meanings of what I have seen on lesswrong. In a historical context. With explanation of why I don't consider those plausible for LW. And you didn't say initially that it's what you think, not what eg you have seen. And I not at all fond of the fact that you are commanding me what I "should" do.

Before posting on LW I asked Grok that question and it suggested variants like that behaviour is situation based or that personality is measured externals instead of some fundamental internals or that personality is reductionist emergent phenomena of neural activity or that eg Big Five are correlations instead of causal mechanism or "no self" that there are just transient mental states instead of permanent self.

After reading that I concluded that Grok has no idea what lesswrong memetics is and went here to write a post. Because all of that seemed blatantly obvious not from bayesian but just from scientific or even common sense perspective.

The closest sensible idea I think may be referred as "self is not real" is that if you try get coherent agencies from humans they will not tend to neatly cluster as 1 brain -> 1 agency, 1 agency -> 1 brain.

But it feels like other people didn't referred to that.

Also maybe they meant that you can have multiple selves like HJPEV with no central one and generate new on a whim. Or even that most of people actually do that, just subconsciously, while communicating with different people (which will actually align with eg morphology of Russian translate of "personality" - "личность" which has same root as face/mask/appearance)

And yet all that feels like not a clear explanation. Also people said about it like about some giant insight and in difference with Sorting Pebbles it feels like I am not getting it fully instead of not getting it at all, so probably I indeed don't get something instead of just getting it fully in advance.

This whole post looks very strange to me in comparison with other posts.

If I am not misunderstanding it, I really disagree. I have very much parts of my brain which can generate sensible output for some input and very limited amount of attention to actually do that. So it seems to me like a very sensible ask to say something mathematical or say something as rationalist. Somebody who doesn't know math can easily just never think that he needs to think in some direction.

For example, I can say "oh, well, it's projection of 3d on 2d and it follows such math" or "one of the main reasons why brain thinks something is beautiful is symmetry" or "as rationalist I for a long time thought that we need make pictures more useful, for example not put them into museams, but draw on wall everywhere, because currently walls are either plain or have ornaments of very low artistic quality" etc. Well, it may be harder to say as rationalist something that relates to some picture and only to that picture. Though "it's beautiful" is also can be said about very much pictures, not about one presented.

It's really strange to hear that there is something wrong in ask to say something special as rationalist from the same person who said about not wanting to do anything in his fanfic same way as it was done in other fanfics because then it would be too cliche/unoriginal and will fail to transmit any Shennon information.

Though I think it's indeed very suspicious when somebody "calls artists to participate" instead of hiring artists.

P.S./Edited: I am not sure that it's the same idea as in g's comment. And I don't think that stereotypical idea of artist view will be correct in comparison with actual artist view any more than will be correct a stereotypical idea of "mathematician view" that you should do everything only with logic with no intuition.

Also, I may compare ask for N's view instead of "your view as human" to ask for your 20th thought on topic instead of 1st thought. It may have sense to say that picture is beautiful if you are the first who says something, but if not, you probably better in advance say something different than your natural reaction.