Incidentally that thing I just linked where Yudkowsky talks about the way his brain works is honestly really interesting, just as a personal account of brain weirdness
(This is stuff from way back when that he doesn’t like it when people link these days, which I can understand – many people are embarrassed by things they wrote when young – although I don’t think it’s actually all that unflattering relative to his current output, and provides a different perspective on the guy)
I guess it is interesting to wonder whether some people would be more sympathetic to EY if he still talked about how he was constantly filled with a despair-like emotion associated with “a burning sensation at the back of the throat – as if you tilted your head back and tried to scream at the pitch bats use”
And that kind of thing
I think you may be right about the first paragraph (for others, see EY’s old autobiography written in 2000).
I tend to point out people’s errors in proportion to how highly they seem of themselves. This makes sense in my head because someone who thinks highly of themselves is likely to act as though they should make few errors, and so pointing out errors is like taking them at their word and trying to fit the pieces together – “if you say you’re good at this, why are you making this mistake?” (Compare: “well, of course you’re not really as good at this as you say, but I’ll be nice and play along with your inaccurate self-presentation.” Which is fairer, more humane?)
EY presents his understanding of quantum physics as one of his strengths (cf. Quantum Physics Sequence). That’s fine, but it means that when he makes QM mistakes, it seems relevant to point them out.
Yeah this all seems correct and fair to me.
Yudkowsky is aware of Noether’s Theorem and its relevance in its context (see here), but he doesn’t explain there why Harry mentioned unitarity, which is not really relevant here, rather than time-translation invariance, which is the important thing.
If you haven’t heard this before, something that may help you (a tiny bit) on this descent into your personal hell is that EY has said he’s writing Harry as an adolescent version of himself, not as his current self. So, according to him, he’s writing a kid who’s read the Feynman Lectures and is really impressed with himself for doing so — perhaps realistically in this case.
(Of course, one doesn’t have to take him on faith about this. Also, EY being EY, he’s also claimed that if Harry knew all the ~advanced rationality techniques~ that EY currently knows, his life would be too easy and it’d break the story — that’s on the same page I linked above.)
So I kind of think the whole “Harry is an immature kid” thing allows EY to have it both ways. Anytime something comes off as twerpish, it can be waved away as Hariezer’s immaturity, but we aren’t supposed to doubt the received wisdom from Hariezer sprinkled throughout the chapters, even though it comes from the same immature source. Readers impressed with the Feynman reference and the jargon dumps can pat Yud on the back, and readers who realize it widely misses the mark can chalk it up to youthful arrogance and say how well-realized the character is (and pat Yud on the back).
It reminds me of Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which is a book loaded with imprecise metaphors and allusions (that often contradict the actual scene being described). It feels like the author wants us to say ‘what a clever bit of writing’ when it works, and to say ‘what a pretentious narrating character’ when it fails.
That’s pretty much what I think about it, too.
Also GOD I HATED SPECIAL TOPICS IN CALAMITY PHYSICS. One of the worst novels I’ve ever read. But that’s a topic for another day.
(Also I added something to that post since you reblogged it – I’m confused about why Harry things conservation of energy is being violated when there are forms of energy that aren’t necessary perceptible?)
This chapter had me rolling my eyes so hard that I now I have quite the headache. In this chapter, Professor McGonagall shows up and does some magic, first levitating Harry’s father, and then turning into a cat. Upon seeing the first, Harry drops some Bayes, saying how anticlimatic it was ‘to update on an event of infinitesimal probability,’ upon seeing the second, Hariezer Yudotter greets us with this jargon dump:
“You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That’s not just an arbitrary rule, it’s implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling!”
First, this is obviously atrocious writing. Most readers will get nothing out of this horrific sentence. He even abbreviated faster-than-light as FTL, to keep the density of understandable words to a minimum.
Second, this is horrible physics for the following reasons:
- the levitation already violated conservation of energy,which you found anticlimactic fuck you Hariezer
- the deep area of physics concerned with conservation of energy is not quantum mechanics, its thermodynamics. Hariezer should have had a jargon dump about perpetual motion machines. To see how levitation violates conservation of energy, imagine taking a generator like the Hoover dam and casting a spell to levitate all the water from the bottom of the dam back up to the top to close the loop. As long as you have wizard to move the water, you can generate power forever.
Exercise for the reader- devise a perpetual motion machine powered by shape changers (hint:imagine an elevator system of two carts hanging over a pully. On one side, an elephant, on the other a man. Elephant goes down, man goes up. At the bottom, the elephant turns into a man and at the top the man turns into an elephant. What happens to the pulley over time?)
-the deeper area related to conservation of energy is not unitarity, as is implied in the quote. There is a really deep theorem in physics, due to Emmy Noether, that tells us that conservation of energy really means that physics is time translationaly invariant. This means there aren’t special places in time, the laws tomorrow are basically the same as yesterday and today. (tangential aside- this is why we shouldn’t worry about a lack of energy conservation at the big bang, if the beginning of time was a special point, no one would expect energy to be conserved there).
Unitarity in quantum mechanics is basically a fancy way of saying probability is conserved. You CAN have unitarity without conservation of energy. Technical aside- its easy to show that if the unitary operator is time-translation invariant, there is an operator that commutes with the unitary operator, usually called the hamiltonian. Without that assumption, we lose the hamiltonian but maintain unitarity.
-None of this has much to do at all with faster than light signalling, which would be the least of our concern if we had just discovered a source of infinite energy.
I used to teach undergraduates, and I would often have some enterprising college freshman (who coincidentally was not doing well in basic mechanics) approach me to talk about why string theory was wrong. It always felt like talking to a physics madlibs book. This chapter let me relive those awkward moments.
Sorry to belabor this point so much, but I think it sums up an issue that crops up from time to time in Yudkowsky’s writing, when dabbling in a subject he doesn’t have much grounding in, he ends up giving actual subject matter experts a headache.
Summary of the chapter- McGonagall visits and does some magic, Harry is convinced magic is real, and they are off to go shop for Harry’s books.
Yeah this all seems correct and fair to me.
Yudkowsky is aware of Noether’s Theorem and its relevance in its context (see here), but he doesn’t explain there why Harry mentioned unitarity, which is not really relevant here, rather than time-translation invariance, which is the important thing.
(Also, I’m not really sure why Harry thinks either case violates conservation of energy, instead of just involving some type of energy that’s not immediately visible. After all, we can make [some] things "levitate” in the real world, using electrostatics or magnetism!)
If you haven’t heard this before, something that may help you (a tiny bit) on this descent into your personal hell is that EY has said he’s writing Harry as an adolescent version of himself, not as his current self. So, according to him, he’s writing a kid who’s read the Feynman Lectures and is really impressed with himself for doing so – perhaps realistically in this case.
(Of course, one doesn’t have to take him on faith about this. Also, EY being EY, he’s also claimed that if Harry knew all the ~advanced rationality techniques~ that EY currently knows, his life would be too easy and it’d break the story – that’s on the same page I linked above.)
Ever since a former roommate introduced me to the baffling world of LessWrong/SIAI (I guess MIRI/CFAR now?), I’ve been obsessed. Admittedly, much of my amusement feels a bit mean spirited, the same enjoyment I got from the King of Kong documentary. ”Whoa- these people ACTUALLY EXIST? I shall spy on them for my own amusement.”
I’ve been told by many people that the Yudkowsky fanfiction Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is either 1. an amazing work of literature that everyone must read 2. the purest form of the amusement I get from Less Wrong, i.e. if reading Less Wrong is caffeine, reading HPMOR is mainlining meth. Unfortunately, I’ve never been able to read more than a few chapters, having found it off-putting and generally hard to read.
I attempted to solve my problem the old fashioned way- a friend owed me some money, and I offered to take my payment in kind, he could read, summarize (and mock if appropriate) chapters of HPMOR, for which I would excuse his debt. After initial enthusiasm, he read one chapter, and then cut me a check the next day.
So now, dear (non-existent) readers, I fear the task has fallen to myself. I’ll try and record observations and insights here as I read. Soon begins my self-inflicted nightmare.
As someone with complicated feelings about the LWsphere whose feelings toward HPMOR are just uncomplicated distaste, I am eagerly looking forward to this :)
(For reference, I always found it offputting and made it to I think Ch. 17 before it was too much to take. At the moment there are 102 chapters.)
Haven’t finished it yet but this seems like a good article arguing against FAI/MIRI
I’m a lot more skeptical than I let on, and if I were really honest all the time, I’d be constantly doubtful of everything, constantly asking “how do you know that?” and “where’s the evidence?”, always wanting to hear the other side of the story, to reserve judgment until I understand the context, the biases involved, the social roles of the participants …
I’d probably be insufferable.
Instead I pretend to be less skeptical than I am and then end up worrying that the annoying skeptic is my “real personality” and I’m just tricking people into not finding me insufferable.
But in any case the skeptic really is my real personality. I’m perpetually confused about how people get to have so many opinions and to be so confident about them. This is why I always end up being oddly fond of people who claim some special source (divine revelation, “Bayesian rationality”) for their confident opinions – everyone seems wildly overconfident, but at least the prophet types know it’s something that needs to be explained.
Apparently Yudkowsky is now thinking about moving to Uruguay and creating a “rationalist startup hub and/or mathematical monastery” there
You know I think a lot of the talk about “status” I hear on LW/SSC/etc. really is onto something important. It would be nice if we could just keep that set of ideas and rebrand it with new terminology, because talking about “status games” and the like is … too low-status.
You probably though the previous sentence sounded silly, obnoxious, or something else along those lines. See, that’s what I mean!
Popular people don’t need to acknowledge that popularity contests exist. In fact it is in their interest to pretend they are not winning a game, they are just attracting people with their innate and obvious awesomeness which only obnoxious losers object to.
I am not sure changing words is gonna help.
The kind of thing I’m thinking about here is the way that even people who are making good points will often mix together good, substantial criticism with “so-and-so is a loser” criticisms. And this can be surprisingly hard to notice unless you’re looking for it (so if you agree with the person already it can be very hard to notice).
I don’t necessarily want this behavior to stop or even get acknowledged by those doing it, I just want other people to be aware of it and to be able to separate out “this person is wrong” from “this person is a loser” when the two are said in the same breath, as they often are.
It would be nice to have a neutral-sounding term for this problem. "Status" just doesn’t work. It’s way too loaded in various ways. Again, I’m not trying to reach the people calling other people losers, I want to reach bystanders/listeners and get them to realize how weird this is and how they don’t have to buy someone’s “status” statements just because they buy their other statements.