LESSWRONG
LW

thomblake
118481542242
Message
Dialogue
Subscribe

Posts

Sorted by New

Wikitag Contributions

Comments

Sorted by
Newest
Politics is the Mind-Killer
thomblake10y00

Indeed, understanding the particular error in reasoning that the person is making is not merely sufficient but necessary for fully understanding a mistaken position. However, if your entire understanding is "because bias somehow" then you don't actually understand.

And you should be careful about accepting the uncharitable explanation preemptively, as it's rather tempting to explain away other people's beliefs and arguments that way.

Reply
Open thread, September 9-15, 2013
thomblake12y40

Does anyone know how to programmatically generate large video files (presumably made of noise) for testing purposes?

Reply
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 25, chapter 96
thomblake12y40

You're surely mistaken. The bible translators often brought in popular sayings and turns of phrase that seemed to fit. If there was a wizard motto with some currency that sounded like an appropriate translation when KJV was written, then I could totally see it being used in the bible, assuming there was any cross-pollination between wizards and christians at the time.

I don't see why the christians using a wizard motto would be particularly blasphemous, let alone maximally so.

Reply
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
thomblake12y40

Alternately: The wizards already mined all the real gold too.

Reply
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
thomblake12y40

It's like bitcoin mining - whoever steals Muggle gold first gets to keep it. Of course that's the Americans.

Reply
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
thomblake12y160

Hypothesis: The muggles don't possess much gold. Most of the huge stacks of gold in places like Fort Knox are clever magical replicas, and have been for a very long time. Any wizard can easily see through the ruse, but the muggles are clueless.

How do we have gold that we use as a conductor? Perhaps when a muggle handles fake gold, it gets magically swapped with real gold from a small supply elsewhere. Or else, maybe fake magic gold is a really good conductor.

Reply
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
thomblake12y40

The problem was Moody not having read the paper when Harry brought it into the meeting.

Reply
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 26, chapter 97
thomblake12y120

Theoretically, indemnity implies compensation which makes the person indemnified as well-off as they would have been before the harm occurred. At the least, this change could have later been construed as a debt owed to Malfoy from Potter.

Reply
Politics is the Mind-Killer
thomblake12y00

In logic, most examples are from politics because the most salient examples of logical fallacies are from politics. So that's probably why the Nixon example was about politics, even though it wasn't necessary.

Reply
[Link] AI advances: computers can be almost as funny as people
thomblake12y160

No, the completely random baseline generated funny jokes 3.7% of the time.

Reply
Load More
Pascal's Mugging
13y
(+29/-31)
Politics Is The Mind-Killer
14y
(+21)
-2Fictional Bias
13y
48
58"Politics is the mind-killer" is the mind-killer
13y
99
11[POLL] Year survey
14y
53
1Off-topic: Russian machine translation
14y
5
7H+ Summit Meetup Harvard 6/12
15y
8
44The role of neodeconstructive rationalism in the works of Less Wrong
15y
23
5LW/OB Quotes - Fall 2009
16y
50
4Rationality Quotes - September 2009
16y
105
23Zwicky's Trifecta of Illusions
16y
27
4Don't Count Your Chickens...
16y
9
Load More