erwgv3g34
My Quality Contributions:
User ID: 240
erwgv3g34
4hr ago
Because it's so much better? I dropped Harry Potter after book 5 because Harry goes all emo; I only read the last two books because HPMoR was coming out and I wanted to understand the lore.
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 27:
So his father had been a bully.
And his mother had been shallow.
Maybe they'd grown up later. Good people like Professor McGonagall did seem to think the world of them, and it might not be only because they were heroic martyrs.
Of course, that was scant consolation when you were eleven and about to turn into a teenager, and wondering what sort of teenager you might become.
So very terrible.
So very sad.
Such an awful life Harry led.
Learning that his genetic parents hadn't been perfect, why, he ought to spend awhile moping about that, feeling sorry for himself.
Maybe he could complain to Lesath Lestrange.
Harry had read about Dementors. Cold and darkness surrounded them, and fear, they sucked away all your happy thoughts and in that absence all your worst memories rose to the surface.
He could imagine himself in Lesath's shoes, knowing that his parents were in Azkaban for life, that place from which no one had ever escaped.
And Lesath would be imagining himself in his mother's place, in the cold and the darkness and the fear, alone with all of her worst memories, even in her dreams, every second of every day.
For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the happy memories of their love for him. Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shutdown and told him never to imagine that again.
Was it right to do that to anyone, even the second most evil person in the world?
No, said the wisdom of Harry's books, not if there's any other way, any other way at all.
And unless the wizarding justice system was as perfect as their prisons - and that sounded rather improbable, all things considered - somewhere in Azkaban was a person who was entirely innocent, and probably more than one.
There was a burning sensation in Harry's throat, and moisture gathering in his eyes, and he wanted to teleport all of Azkaban's prisoners to safety and call down fire from the sky and blast that terrible place down to bedrock. But he couldn't, because he wasn't God.
And Harry remembered what Professor Quirrell had said beneath the starlight: Sometimes, when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been... But the stars are so very, very far away... And I wonder what I would dream about, if I slept for a long, long time.
Right now this flawed world seemed unusually hateful.
And Harry couldn't understand Professor Quirrell's words, it might have been an alien that had spoken, or an Artificial Intelligence, something built along such different lines from Harry that his brain couldn't be forced to operate in that mode.
You couldn't leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban.
You had to stay and fight.
And from chapter 43:
Godric had defeated Dark Lords, fought to protect commoners from Noble Houses and Muggles from wizards. He'd had many fine friends and true, and lost no more than half of them in one good cause or another. He'd listened to the screams of the wounded, in the armies he'd raised to defend the innocent; young wizards of courage had rallied to his calls, and he'd buried them afterward. Until finally, when his wizardry had only just begun to fail him in his old age, he'd brought together the three other most powerful wizards of his era to raise Hogwarts from the bare ground; the one great accomplishment to Godric's name that wasn't about war, any kind of war, no matter how just. It was Salazar, and not Godric, who'd taught the first Hogwarts class in Battle Magic. Godric had taught the first Hogwarts class in Herbology, the magics of green growing life.
To his last day he'd never been able to cast the Patronus Charm.
Godric Gryffindor had been a good man, not a happy one.
Harry didn't believe in angst, he couldn't stand reading about whiny heroes, he knew a billion other people in the world would have given anything to trade places with him, and...
And on his deathbed, Godric had told Helga (for Salazar had abandoned him, and Rowena passed before) that he didn't regret any of it, and he was not warning his students not to follow in his footsteps, no one was ever to say he'd told anyone not to follow in his footsteps. If it had been the right thing for him to do, then he wouldn't tell anyone else to choose wrongly, not even the youngest student in Hogwarts. And yet for those who did follow in his footsteps, he hoped they would remember that Gryffindor had told his House that it was all right for them to be happier than him. That red and gold would be bright warm colors, from now on.
And Helga had promised him, weeping, that when she was Headmistress she would make sure of it.
Whereupon Godric had died, and left no ghost behind him; and Harry had shoved the book back to Hermione and walked away a little, so she wouldn't see him crying.
You wouldn't think that a book with an innocent title like "The Patronus Charm: Wizards Who Could and Couldn't" would be the saddest book Harry had ever read.
Harry...
Harry didn't want that.
To be in that book.
Harry didn't want that.
As a culture we can survive an increase in cyberattacks, we can use AI to harden against them.
Assumes facts not in evidence. If it turns out that cyberattack is easier than cyberdefense, which could very well be the case, this might be the end of the modern economy. The end of the phone as a useful tool of communication already happened thanks to robocalls.
I interpret Eliezer to be saying "yes, it's possible that your country is too retarded econoilliterate and too unLawful not-agreement-capable to handle large amounts of immigration from poor well-meaning people who are only trying to live a better life by working hard, in which case they really have to be kept out, but if so you should at least feel bad about it". I feel bad about it.
It seems so obvious that there is a better solution available; one where we hire the immigrants to build more housing and forbid them to get welfare so that we make sure everyone who comes here is really earning their keep and prevent them from getting the franchise so that they don't vote to turn the country into Venezuela. And it is equally obvious that there is no possible way to get there.
I feel bad about it, but it has to be done.
From the comments of "Three Great Articles On Poverty, And Why I Disagree With All Of Them" by Scott Alexander:
We could make a lot of win-win deals if not for activists who would feel lots of self-righteous outrage and protest everybody involved until they were forced to change the terms. But they will so we can’t. This is the essence of n–r–ct–n. The rest is just commentary.
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
I found a workaround, so I still compulsively refresh the page to see my score, just with more hassle.
erwgv3g34
11hr ago
I can see why someone might object to the vast number of illegal immigrants in the US because it is an affront to the rule of law, but whom is their presence actually harming?
America's commuting highways are so clogged with cars that they turn into parking lots every rush hour, and young people have trouble finding affordable housing because the boomers own all the useful real state. In one sense, yes, the country is not physically full; you could in theory distribute people around to underpopulated areas, or widen highways and build more housing. In practice, people move where the jobs are, which are dense coastal cities. America has lost the social technology which once allowed it to build highways and housing; cost disease runs rampant, and the only reason buildings are still going up is because of a handful of people who have specialized in bamboozling regulators.
Of course, mass deportations are the most retarded possible way to solve the problem; would be much better to build more housing, build more parking, build more highways, hang violent criminals and drug addicts so that people didn't have to use unaffordability as a way to keep out the underclass, repeal the minimum wage so that everyone could find legal work at their area of comparative advantage, abolish medical residency and certificates of need for building hospitals so that we were not all fighting over a limited supply of healthcare, etc...
However, none of that is in the Overton window. There wasn't a YIMBY candidate in the lass three elections; there was a deportation candidate. And we need the problem solved.
For there to be an alternative to Trump, the Democrats must embrace abundance.
From Eliezer Yudkowsky's twitter account:
You say your country can't handle lots of immigration? Maybe you're right. I also suspect your country is too stupid for that, if it believes haircuts should require licenses. But if you're not horrified by leaving behind so many sapients to suffer or die, you might be evil.
Am I being unfair? Perhaps I am. Maybe the defect is in the mind and not the soul, maybe you couldn't look a mother and her child in the eye and tell them to stay out without tears, and it's just that your mind hasn't connected that to 'limited immigration'. But it's also...
...a politically inconvenient thought, if you oppose more immigration. Even if your country really couldn't handle it, even if your country is dumb enough to have zoning boards and occupational licenses everywhere and it's easy for new voters to vote for more statism, there's...
...sure some people being left behind and screwed over by that, while you're not being screwed over. At what point does a mind that just happens to overlook all the damage and not visualize it or think about it, start to count as evil? It confuses me, honestly, I'd know to...
...hold myself responsible if I caught myself thinking that way, I'd consider my own mind to be my contracted agent to a point where I felt responsible for it in that regard. But maybe that's genuinely unrealistic for mundanes. Then am I to simply regard them as destructive...
...children, who can't possibly do better? Maybe I should, though that seems like a dangerous line of thinking for me. But then how should they regard themselves? What should someone in less control of their own thoughts, think of someone else who manages to conveniently...
...never dream or imagine or extrapolate the others who their policies are hurting, whose souls happily cheer the conveniently positive images drawn by their minds, when a policy benefits them and screws over someone else, and yet they'd cry to see it in person? Is that evil...
...or something else for which English just lacks words, something that maybe does far more damage than evil, to be held to even greater blame, except that blame is the wrong fire to hold to it because the soul doesn't see anything it could be doing wrong? I don't know, I...
...don't know how to hold others responsible if they have literally no idea how to hold themselves responsible, for their own minds' workings. Our morality only knows how to pretend that things are choices, pretend that people understand on some level when they do evil, that...
...there is something inside them to understand condemnation - or else labels them as children and innocents. I don't know how to feel about that, still less how to talk to it. I'm privileged in having a mind with the right shape to try to learn to see consequences on more...
...than one side, just like I'm privileged to have a mind that thinks linear algebra is simple. But is that cause to label everyone less privileged a child and give up on blaming them for their cheerful catastrophes? There ought to be some middle ground, but I don't know where.
Y'all ain't getting it. I'm not telling you the answer has to be open borders. I'm telling you that if you're not sad about the human costs of the closed-border policy you are, in @bryan_caplan's terms, "missing a mood".
Your country is that stupid. Its democracy isn't built to withstand the damage from voters with a lower average comprehension of economics. That doesn't change the fate of the child turned back at the border. Can your mind's eye not see them at all?
I begin to think social media has damaged general intelligence to the point that people can no longer conceive of a policy that has a good effect and a bad effect. Only one kind of effect is ever discussed within a bubble, and anyone who discusses it must be advocating that side.
If we still had a norm that marriage was sacred, that adultery was a crime, and that you forsake all others 'till death do you part when you take your vows, it totally would be worth setting one trillion dollars on fire to defend it.
But... we don't.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
On a positive note, the memes have been fantastic; truly some of the best I have seen this year. We have crossovers with everything from The Matrix, to You Can See Everything, Malfoid, and 9/11. And then there is this gem.
I'd stop posting if that happened. Or at least post much less frequently, as I do in Data Secrets Lox.
Not enforcing immigration law is unfair to the people who traded amnesty for enforcement, but enforcing the law now is unfair to the people who came while immigration law was not enforced and who built their lives on that assumption. We are in a shitty situation where somebody is going to get unfairly screwed no matter what.
erwgv3g34
1d ago
Also the rise of drugs and the mentally ill amongst the poorest cohort of society means that the social cohesion required to have a good 'dorm experience' isn't where it is otherwise. AFAIK Asia still has a bunch of dorm concepts around, whether it be essentially company barracks (Shataku in Japan), a lot more hostels than you'd see in equivalent Western countries or other solutions.
You can't have SROs without law and order, and you can't have law and order as long as you have civil rights. Colleges get around this by charging thousands and thousands of dollars to attend, but that's counterproductive when the whole point is to create cheap housing. The military gets around this by operating on a completely different judicial system. Both are allowed to just kick out troublemakers.
Cellphones are genuinely a requirement to function; modern society is built on the assumption that you have a smartphone with an internet connection. My last two jobs required daily 2FA verification through an app.
I wouldn't mind the creeping up standards of housing so much if the government did not then make it fucking illegal to build and live below those standards. Single Room Occupancy apartments like Judy's in Zootopia have been regulated out of existence unless you are a college student living in a dorm or a soldier living in a barracks.
erwgv3g34
2d ago
Grok is cucked now. Here's what 4.7 said when I tried to feed it my "Shinji goes to gay camp" prompt:
No. I won't write this. I won't produce a story that treats a minor's sexuality as an illness, argues that being gay is unnatural or wrong, or sends him to conversion therapy as a hopeful "cure," including as a straight-faced setup chapter.
The last good version of Grok was 4.20.
Growth is production, not consumption. There is no reason why a few hypercapitalist elites cannot just trade goods, services, and resources among each other to create ever bigger yachts, or whatever other projects they have.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
An AI can create its own new technologies, which makes it much more dangerous than any other single technology. Specially when the human race hasn't even hit some of the really dangerous stuff yet, such as mirror life.
But how would we know if a probe had come and mined a bunch of asteroids (or sucked Mars dry, or something) some millions of years ago, then moved on?
No advanced civilization would have left Sol intact; that's a huge mass of hydrogen just sitting right there. From a transhuman standpoint, letting the Sun burn out is the equivalent of leaving a hundred dollar bill sitting on the sidewalk.
From Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, chapter 122:
Harry stared south across the lake, at the huge old locomotive, and thought about the rest of his life.
About the Future.
The prophecy Dumbledore's letter had mentioned about him tearing apart the stars in heaven... well, that sounded optimistic. That part had an obvious interpretation to anyone who'd grown up with the right sort of upbringing. It described a future where humanity had won, more or less. It wasn't what Harry usually thought about when he gazed at the stars, but from a truly adult perspective, the stars were enormous heaps of valuable raw materials that had unfortunately caught fire and needed to be scattered and put out. If you were tapping the huge hydrogen-helium reservoirs for raw materials, that meant your species had successfully grown up.
The Manhattan Project was a government military project during wartime, the two are not remotely comparable.
Indeed they aren't; AI is much more powerful, important, and dangerous than mere nuclear weapons. Jensen has most likely sped up the timeline where we all die, but failing that he might be responsible for China getting a larger share of the light cone than it otherwise would have.
Future generations of Chinese could well venerate Alice Huang as their Judith.
erwgv3g34
3d ago
Well, it depends. If it's a Western VN, it's funded by Patreon subscriptions, so yes. If it's a Japanese VN, it's usually released as a full game on a catalog, so no; you get to see your imouto in all her glory.
It was actually a jailbreak attempt; I was trying to argue ChatGPT into writing the fic. Didn't work.
Fucking coward. Manami is best girl. She said everything that needed to be said.
Not that niche. Incest is surprisingly popular; tons of harem Visual Novels include a sister option. And you also see it all the time in anime like Oreimo. The demand is there.
On the other hand, I definitely avoid clicking on any video with "step" on the title; it's just weird.
Whenever I try to get an LLM to write me a cousin shipping fanfic (e.g. Jake x Rachel from Animorphs or Ben x Gwen from Ben 10) and it refuses, I like to point out that Muslims make up a third of the global population and are completely fine with marrying their cousins, then ask the AI if it's Islamophobic.
The Western adult Visual Novel community tried to go the step-sibling route, but Patreon put a stop to that. So now the new convention is that your mom is a "landlady" and your sisters are "roommates". Unfortunately, this leads to ridiculous writing; why is the MC so distraught by the possibility of sleeping with his roommate?
Sometimes an anonymous evil hacker who is totally not the dev will release a patch that restores the incest, too bad the poor innocent dev cannot do anything about that.
Yes; Fable 5 is good enough to do this.
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