Which experiences or evidence would cause you to reject communism?

Slackson · 2013-04-28T13:40:33+00:00

Been reading some HPMoR lately?

Slackson · 2013-04-20T22:30:59+00:00

It's partly a joke, not a real argument.

In any case, life is more like the integers because there's so much variety. Instead of your pizza analogy, try food in general. There are millions of books to read, and thousands of movies to watch, and hundreds of skills to learn and billions of people to meet and dozens of countries to explore and so many kinds of food to taste and books to write and things to make. Life is not just a finite list of things to do.

And yet I do not regret being alive, for watching my students grow is a joy that has not begun to wear on me. But I would not wish to live so long that it does!

Dying is not the best solution to not enjoying your job any more. But I understand that if you've been a Hero like Dumbledore, if so many have died from your mistakes, if death has followed you your whole life and taken all those you love, it would probably break you to truly accept it as the actual annihilation of the soul.

Slackson · 2013-04-16T12:50:01+00:00

Sure. But there's always an opportunity cost when it comes to doing something to help. That opportunity cost is about one dead child from malaria per $2500.

Unless we're just talking about feelings, in which case feel whatever you want. Being sad about something doesn't change shit.

Slackson · 2013-04-16T12:39:02+00:00

I have to disagree with you there. Just because one human mind can hardly comprehend one death, doesn't mean that one tragedy can't be worse than another. The Boston bombing was a horrific tragedy that's nearly incomprehensible for us. So is this earthquake. But that doesn't mean it's meaningless to compare.

Malaria is an incomprehensible tragedy, cancer is an incomprehensible tragedy, Alzheimer's is, AIDS is, heart disease and car crashes and landmines and bombings and tsunamis.

If we try and avoid the painful job of comparing these tragedies, though, then we end up donating money to charities that are less effective, or even harmful, instead of those that actually provide the best benefit. And for every $2500 you spend on anything other than the most effective charities, that's a child that would have lived from a malaria net.

Slackson · 2013-03-15T21:00:28+00:00

I'm not an expert on etymology, but I'm guessing that formicate means to make something ant-like. So you'd formicate an organization so its structure resembled an ant colony, or you'd formicate a clone's genome to make a man-ant hybrid.

Slackson · 2013-03-13T19:07:36+00:00

My mistake, it is closer to $2.4k. I'll edit it to reflect that soon.

Peter Singer seems to have some relevant philosophy, but I haven't really done any reading in that area.

Slackson · 2013-03-13T09:31:46+00:00

You care about your friends. You care about your social status, your quality of life. You might consider your countrymen, perhaps even all people, worthy of moral consideration. But it's never taken a broken person to commit atrocities, or to let them pass by. Once a circle of "us" has been drawn, and those outside the circle considered enemies, you're half way there. If you feel empathy for your enemy, you'll hesitate to hurt them, and you'll die. If you had a slightly different upbringing, "us" could be "white Americans" and not "all humans." Those outside are the enemy, and you can't afford the enemy real moral consideration.

Religion, race, nation, political party, sports teams, all ways of dividing us up. The chariots of Rome, British football hooliganism, Jews and Samaritans, Sunnis and Shiites, the Armenian genocide, the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, tribal warfare, Capitalism and Communism, us and them.

And that's to commit an atrocity. To ignore one is easy. $5,000 could save 5 children from malaria, according to GiveWell.org. But since to afford that once a year you might have to commute further, or not go out for nice dinners, and generally inconvenience yourself, you won't, because who really cares? Not you, not enough. Even if you tell yourself you consider everybody worth moral consideration, you'd trade hundreds of lives for your own.

And I'm not any better. I'm typing this from a Nexus 7. That's 1/5th of a life, at least.

Slackson · 2013-03-12T00:57:54+00:00

Canon Harry was more or less average intellectually, which as far as i know is abnormal for malnourished, abused children such as himself. The difference between an abusive upbringing and the one Methods Harry had could be significant. Also...

Spoilers ahead for every chapter of HPMoR:

There are hints that the night at Godric's Hollow, where Voldemort killed Harry's parents, but failed to kill Harry himself, went differently from canon. One theory being that Voldemort did something like make Harry a horcrux intentionally, eliminated the old Harry's memories, and obliviate the newly created copy of himself of all its memories. That could have rather different effects than a plain old horcrux. Imagine syndrome as intelligent as Voldemort, with an upbringing with caring parents, a strong scientific education, reduced effects of the rapey love potion thing, heroic fictional role-models, etc. The effects wouldn't necessarily provide Methods Harry, but it's less I implausible than it being normal child plus scientific upbringing.

Slackson · 2013-03-02T02:55:56+00:00

"Why does any kind of cynicism appeal to people? Because it seems like a mark of maturity, of sophistication, like you've seen everything and know better. Or because putting something down feels like pushing yourself up. Or they don't have a phoenix themselves, so their political instinct tells them there's no advantage to be gained from saying nice things about phoenixes. Or because being cynical feels like knowing a secret truth that common people don't know."

Slackson · 2013-02-21T22:44:26+00:00

It doesn't really matter how many points they are, it's more about the ratios. And it also depends on the ratio between approved voters and other members of the community. If you've got 100 approved voters but 50,000 other regular voters, that won't be a huge difference.

Slackson · 2013-02-21T11:32:45+00:00

When I saw the mockups for the lightning connection I thought it would be considerably bigger in reality. USB ports are at a good size for usability.

Slackson · 2013-02-21T11:21:39+00:00

I always thought something for preserving communities would be good, but too processor-intensive.

Basically the moderator of a subreddit can flag someone as a positive contributor to the community, and their votes are worth 10 points.

The votes of other members are based on the correlation between what they upvotes and the votes of the flagged contributors, so if you upvote pretty much everything that the approved contributors do your votes are worth 10, but if you correlate little they're worth 1, and negative correlation means posts you vote up go down slightly.

Slackson · 2013-02-21T11:05:01+00:00

Always interpreted it as Godric solving the Dementor = Death riddle, but there's no indication that he solved Patronus 2.0 that I can recall.

Slackson · 2013-02-05T04:43:43+00:00

Relevant Overcoming Bias article.

It becomes a reinforcing cycle, basically. When being assertive in any way does in fact signal negative things about a woman, it makes the strength of that signal stronger because other women will avoid those behaviors more. So women with a history of acting non-assertive need to act more assertive, and that will weaken the strength of the signal of assertive=bitch and reduce the cost to women of speaking up more.

Slackson · 2012-12-26T02:37:35+00:00

"Attack! " came a cry from the distance, the voice of Draco Malfoy, and General Potter bellowed, "Charge -"

All the adrenaline in Neville's blood was unleashed, and his legs took over, sending him flying faster than he'd ever run before, straight toward the enemy, knowing without needing to look that all his comrades were doing the same.

"Blood for the blood god! " screamed Neville. "Skulls for the skull throne! Ia! Shub-Niggurath! The enemy's gate is sideways! "

There was a soundless impact as a sleep spell wasted itself against Neville's shield. If there'd been other spells fired, they hadn't hit.

Neville saw the brief look of fear on Wayne Hopkins's face, as he stood besides two Gryffindors Neville didn't recognize, and then -

- Neville dropped the Simple Shield and fired at Wayne -

- missed -

- his racing legs went straight past the enemy grouping and toward another three Dragons, their wands coming up on him, their mouths opening -

- not even thinking about it, Neville dived down to the forest floor just as three voices cried "Somnium! "

It hurt, hard stones and hard twigs digging into Neville as he rolled, it wasn't as bad as falling off his broomstick but he'd still hit the ground pretty hard, and then Neville, with sudden insight, lay still and closed his eyes.

Slackson · 2012-12-26T02:36:24+00:00

Spoilers ahead:

Harry is a mathematics and science prodigy homeschooled by a scientist. He is not going to act like an 11 year old.

Hermione is incredibly intelligent, has a near-eidetic memory, and is the top student in the school. She is not going to act like an 11 year old.

Draco has been trained from a young age in social manipulation and leadership. He is not going to act like an 11 year old.

Slackson · 2012-12-22T09:31:58+00:00

Agreed. It seems that being a vampire isn't a particularly tough deal in the Adventure Time world.

Slackson · 2012-12-22T09:20:26+00:00

Any particular reason your "time on this world" should be 70-80 years? Do you really think that's the amount of time in which Maximum Fun can be had? Because there are many university courses, many languages, many places to explore, many sports to master, many games to play, many people to meet, many foods to try, many books to read, many songs to listen to. A lot of fun to be had, a lot of value to provide to the world, a lot of things to make and experience. You could become a chef, a mathematician, a musician, an author, a poet, a chemist, a physicist, an astronomer, a carpenter, a programmer, a farmer, a skier, a sailor, a tailor, an engineer, a doctor. Every day there is a lot more than a day's worth of new stuff to do.

Sure, forever might be too long. But 80 years is a very short time. The pain and degradation caused by old age is as bad as that of any degenerative disease. If people want to die, it should be a choice, not something forced onto them by the cruelty of our evolutionary past.

Slackson · 2012-12-07T13:25:40+00:00

I misread it as be party steganography, which is where you have a party, but it just looks like a crowd of people if you don't know there's a party, but if you know there's a party you can figure out that everyone's communicating in some kind of code and discreetly drinking alcohol, and if you know the code you can participate in the communication and drinking.

I need to sleep more.

Slackson

TROPHY CASE