fezziwig

I'm not sure what to make of this quote. It is better to be ignorant than to believe the wrong thing; ignorance is much easier to identify and fix.

Or maybe he's saying that the fear of contamination is unjustified? That doesn't seem accurate either.

EDIT: My bad, it's Steve Sailer, I read the article and of course he was talking about racial bias, not biases generally.

To be great at anything creative, you must have both skill and taste. Painting, music, programming -- every art I've ever studied, or even heard of, has worked this way. You need the technical skill to create, and the eye that decides what's worth trying, and worth keeping.

You've made a good case that math, like music, requires taste for true greatness. And you've persuaded me that Scott Alexander has it. But you also seem to be saying that math doesn't have a skill component, in the sense I mean here, and I do not find that part of your argument persuasive.

I'm a professional programmer and I know Haskell, but I've only ever written one real Haskell program (an AI for double-move chess). Nevertheless I recommend it. All I can tell you is that if you master it -- I mean really master it, not learn to write Python in Haskell -- then your Python programming will reach a new level as well. You will be able to solve problems that once seemed intractable, which you'd persuade your product manager to scope out.

It used to be that you could get this effect by learning Lisp, but I don't think that works anymore; too many of Lisp's good ideas have since been taken up by more ordinary languages.

The problems you're describing don't sound like "failure to make plans for after the villain is defeated" so much as "failure to accurately assess whether your target is a villain or not". I think Zubon's point is that even after you've found a real live villain and come up with a workable plan to defeat him, you're still not done.

Yes, I agree. That's why I like the analogy to composition: most of the songs you might write, if you were sampling at random from song-space, are terrible. So we don't sample randomly: our search through song-space is guided by our own reactions and a great body of accumulated theory and lore. But despite that, the consensus on which songs are the best, and on how to write them, is very loose.

(Actually it's worse, I think composition is somewhat anti-inductive, but that's outside the scope of this thread)

My experience is that naming is similar. There ... (read more)

Code Complete has a section on this. But we don't have a precise understanding of what a "good name" is, for the same reason that we don't have a precise understanding of what a "good song" is: the goodness of a name is measured by its effect on its reader.

So I think the high-level principle, if you want to do a good job naming things in your program, is to model your intended reader as precisely as you can. What do they know about the problem domain? What programming conventions are they familiar with? Why are they reading your pro... (read more)

I suspect that the point was that the typical Muslim, insofar as there is such a thing, is not an arab. The founder was an arab, the Muslims on American TV are almost all arabs, but in the modern world the two concepts are less related than one might think.

I read that the quiverfull movement has around a 20% retention rate. Of course, given exponential growth that doesn't buy all that more time.

Typo? If each pair of Quiverfull parents produces 8 children, and 8/5 = 1.6 of those grow up to become Quiverfull themselves, then the movement needs to proselytize aggressively just to hit replacement.

Also, anecdotally, my friends who are true-believer evangelicals don't think the demographic strategy is going to work; they think they're losing too many to the world.

Almost nobody has heard of Less Wrong or Eliezer. There's a mean article on RationalWiki (though honestly it doesn't look that mean anymore), there's a hostile thread on DarkLordPotter, but almost nobody has heard of those, either. This was even more true two years ago.

I'm not wedrifid. But I suspect his point is that, outside of a few incredibly narrow sub-sub-cultures, nobody knows anything about Less Wrong and no one who knows you personally will judge you by your connection to it, no matter how public or overt.

Oh, sorry, my mistake.

How do we know the crisis was war, and not (for example) people gradually reinventing the arts with which the Atlanteans destroyed themselves?

http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-quick-informal-post-on-yudkowskys.html

I think "stupid" is a little strong, personally. But I like the canon ending better.

Conditional on it being nominated at all, I think it would definitely beat No Award. Have a look at the raw stats from 2013 and 2014; for Best Novel, No Award gets crushed by everything. In 2014, for example, No Award got 88 votes out of 3587 ballots. In a world where MOR made it into the top 5 for Best Novel, it can definitely do better than that.

(Okay, yes, it happened to Vox Day, but that was for Novella, or maybe Novellette, whichever).

EDIT: On re-reading, I think this is a little misleading. The Hugo uses preference voting, so it's possible for No... (read more)

Man, that's beautiful. What does Bellatrix Black want most, that Harry can offer?

She wants Tom Riddle to love her.

Are you interested in making more bets of this type?

Resonance. He doesn't dare involve himself with Harry's magic in any way.

I think you have the right idea, but it's a mistake to conflate "needs a big corpus of data" and "needs lots of hardware". Hardware helps, the faster the training goes the more experiments you can do, but a lot of the time the gating factor is the corpus itself.

For example, if you're trying to train a neural net to solve the "does this photo contain a bird?" problem, you need a bunch of photos which vary at random on the bird/not-bird axis, and you need human raters to go through and tag each photo as bird/not-bird. There ar... (read more)

I thought so too, after the troll. I've changed my mind.

Or, did you mean that we knew that it was for practice at keeping things transfigured thirty chapters ago? If so, I just missed it.

And now we really know why Harry had to carry around his father's rock. For practice:

And meanwhile, just like magic hadn't defined a Transfigured unicorn as dead for purposes of setting off wards, Voldemort's horcruxes wouldn't define a Transfigured Voldemort as dead and try to bring him back.

That was the hope, anyway.

Harry's scar twinged one last time when the steel ring went on his pinky finger, holding the tiny green emerald in contact with his skin. Then his scar subsided, and did not hurt again.

Is it really that much better than being the hero who defeated Voldemort once, though? Putting on Hermione does seem pretty mean, but I think it's a very in-character sort of mistake, especially after the kind of day he's had.