What are /r/HPMOR's favorite Products & Services?

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I'm not absolutely certain if Eliezer Yudkowsky is reading every comment, but from what I know of him, I suspect he is. Thank you very much for your writing, Mr. Yudkowsky. I have been following this fic for years. It's always fascinated me on a philosophical as well as a fictional level and, over the course of the final arc, it has become my favorite Harry Potter (or any) fanfiction. (My previous favorite was the truly excellent Sisyphus, by esama, a profound oneshot that's archived here: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1113651)

The first chapter of my continuation fic, Ginny Weasley and the Sealed Intelligence, goes up Monday; I currently anticipate posting it at noon, Pacific time (and simultaneously posting a thread for it here). That chapter is already complete at the current moment; I broke down and began writing before HPMOR was complete, gambling that there would be no surprises in the last couple of chapters so huge as to require major revisions to my outline. I was correct. I intend to make a career as an original novelist, and this is just a little informal side project. I certainly don't have EY's reputation in the fanfic community, but I hope I'll be able to find an audience in this subreddit.

> it's effectively the McDonald's double cheeseburger of literature

That’s a recurring sentiment but I think it’s fundamentally wrong. While the story of Harry Potter has many faults (and her concept of magic is annoyingly flawed), the writing is actually excellent. Not from a “classical literature” point of view. But, to be frank, that’s elitist bull crap.

Where HP excels is in taking a complex story and making it simple. The writing in HP is (for the most part) brilliant in its sheer simplicity. People systematically underestimate how hard it is to make writing simple. In fact, it’s easily the hardest thing about writing, as many guides (e.g. On Writing Well) will tell you. JKR has shown an absolute mastery in writing simple prose, which is almost unparalleled in contemporary literature.

The fact that people think of HP as a children’s story kind of reinforces the point. Neither the themes nor the vocabulary used in Harry Potter are normally readily accessible for children. Yet JKR makes it work. And JKR could probably have written this explanation in a single tweet.

/u/alexanderwales could write a spinoff better than the original. He did a sad, thinky oneshot already. He's pretty busy, though.

Just the other day, someone posted a link to a fic named Brutal Harry. Brutal!Harry is almost as logical as Rational!Harry, but it's a darker story. Much shorter, and the end is a bit fan-ficy, but not bad. http://www.fanfiction.net/s/7093738/1/Brutal_Harry

Really annoying. It's like a precis of an outline of an elevator pitch for a script ripped off from a random bit of Charlie Stross backstory. Padded out with a bunch of '90s newsreel voice-over and graphical effects to make it seem like there's "there" there.

Literally. This is basically the Curious Yellow worm from Glasshouse, without enough worldbuilding to make it worth watching.

I suggest you read <u>Glasshouse</u> instead.

Brutal Harry is pretty good. Tries to account for the emotional damage being raised by the dursleys would have caused Harry, though the abuse received by Harry is a lot worse.

Back of Quirrell's head shown to be uninteresting (Chapter 12):

>Harry caught a glimpse of the back of his head, and it looked like Professor Quirrell might already be going bald, despite his seeming youth.

The Omake (Chapter 11):

> OMAKE FILES #1: 72 Hours to Victory

> (A.k.a. "What Happens If You Change Harry But Leave All Other Characters Constant")

> Dumbledore peered over his desk at young Harry, twinkling in a kindly sort of way. The boy had come to him with a terribly intense look on his childish face - Dumbledore hoped that whatever this matter was, it wasn't too serious. Harry was far too young for his life trials to be starting already. "What was it you wished to speak to me about, Harry?"

> Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres leaned forward in his chair, smiling grimly. "Headmaster, I got a sharp pain in my scar during the Sorting Feast. Considering how and where I got this scar, it didn't seem like the sort of thing I should just ignore. I thought at first it was because of Professor Snape, but I followed the Baconian experimental method which is to find the conditions for both the presence and the absence of the phenomenon, and I've determined that my scar hurts if and only if I'm facing the back of Professor Quirrell's head, whatever's under his turban. While it could be something more innocuous, I think we should provisionally assume the worst, that it's You-Know-Who - wait, don't look so horrified, this is actually a priceless opportunity -"

&gt;/u/recursiveAI

I refuse to interact causally with this user on grounds that his Friendliness is unproven.

Unfortunately, thing is, there's been no advancement in regenerative medicine that can out-do the antiaging effects of calorie restriction and/or exercise. So really, Harry should be focusing on ways to magically induce the health effects of exercise, healthy diet, and a natural, unpoisoned environment (clean air, lack of lead paint, that sort of thing). That's the best he can do with today's science.

However, what with a bunch of '70s and '80s-era scifi nerds growing up and making shit-tons of money in Silicon Valley that they've decided to pour into Eliezer-level dreams of immortality and "the Singularity", I predict we will soon be seeing a bunch more scientific advancement in anti-aging and life extension. What with OP existing, they've apparently already had dangerous levels of success in artificial intelligence.

After all, from the sound of things, it's not that this kind of science/bioengineering is impossible, but that up until recently nobody really believed in funding rigorous investigations into it.

I haven't read Rationality: From AI to Zombies, but I did read the Sequences (the blog posts on which the book was based) and it took forever. If you're interested in rationality, "Thinking, Fast and Slow" is probably a much better book to pick up.

I really enjoyed Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time, though I'm not as big of a fan of its sequel, Harry Potter and the Heartlands of Time.

You reminded me of this: >All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when able to attack, we must seem unable; when using our forces, we must seem inactive; when far away, we must make him believe we are near. Hold out baits to entice the enemy. Feign disorder, and crush him. If he is secure at all points, be prepared for him. If he is in superior strength, evade him. If your opponent is of choleric temper, seek to irritate him. Pretend to be weak, that way he may grow arrogant. If he is taking his ease, give him no rest. If his forces are united, separate them. Attack him where he is unprepared, appear where you are not expected. —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

Dumbledore seems to be away -> Dumbledore is actually waiting in ambush.

Yes. I can not find it either using CMD+F tricks, now i must switch to Google-jitsu. Will update if found.

Update #1 found this simulation on Scratch, though it's not exactly what we were looking for.

UPDATE #2: FOUND IT! Wait for a bit when the page loads, it might take a while to jump to the comment.

Depending on what qualifies as "short", Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahnman is ridiculously good. Directly in the first chapter he discusses cognitive biases and pitfalls that are interesting and actionable.

http://git-scm.com/

There's a web tutorial that walks you through basic usage, documentation to explain more about what git's all about and how to download/install it, and links for those downloads. I recommend a combination of reading through the documentation and playing with the tutorial (and in general, application of google-fu to any questions of the form "How do I do X in git?" - whatever it is, someone's had that problem before, and if they haven't you should probably reconsider whether it's actually a sensible thing to try to do).

Github will give you some space for an online repository, but you'll still need to setup git on your own computer to run the commands locally and talk to their server. You don't strictly speaking need github involved; either way you'll end up with a local repository on your own machine. The remote repo is optional (but potentially useful as a backup, or if you want to work from multiple machines or with collaborators)

Thinking, Fast and Slow, also by Kahneman, covers the same topics, and, if I'm not misunderstanding, contains Judgement Under Uncertainty as an appendix; it seems to be cheaper on Amazon than Judgement Under Uncertainty on it's own.

Good question.

So. History is big. It's both very large in scale, and it is very granular. Historians, people who get a degree and spend their lives doing this stuff, generally learn the overall, zoomed-out scope for a lot of things, and then spend the rest of their lives digging around in a tiny portion of it trying to expand our total knowledge. Here's a good graphical representation. In its totality, it's more than a human being can ever learn in their lifetime.

And it's easy to come away with the wrong lessons by not looking closely, or by coming from false assumptions in another context. For example, the folks of the British Empire looked at the history of their own imperialism, and came away with the conclusion that they were inherently racially superior to the rest of the planet. Not too surprising - it was in keeping with the 'science' of the time, and they didn't have much motivation to look any harder once they collectively saw what they wanted. It was a very long time, and probably a Gandhi later, before the British started to consider the possibility that maybe they were being bad guys by subjugating foreign nations economically and politically.

And even after all that, you're at the risk of losing all that progress once you change a few of the words. Rename 'racial superiority' to 'exceptionalism', rename 'empire' to 'defending our interests', and change the name of the country, and you'll get the same things happening all over again.

So to bring it back, I'd first ask, when you look to history, what do you want to try to learn about? What do you want to look at closely enough to be able to draw more than superficial conclusions?

<em>Cenotaph</em> and its sequel - highly recommended. Worm, except Taylor hesitates for a millisecond in her first chat with Armsmaster ...

I think it might actually be a better story. Taylor does a lot more thinking and plotting, and is more independent all-in-all. It seems much more rational than the original, and it features some very clever worldbuilding for parahuman!Earth – things that made me go, "Of course things would be like that," but weren't mentioned in original Worm. Slightly deconstructionist, in this way, if that's even possible.

> would a paperclip maximizer sacrifice its ability to make paperclips if it believed that by doing so more paperclips could be made?

Yes (if it was programmed correctly).

> If preventing death for current humans does not in fact optimize life in general, but only our life in specific, is it then still such a good goal?

You're right, sacrificing your life for others is very much allowed as a rationalist. If your society of rationalists is attacked by barbarians, then of course you need soldiers who are willing to die to save the others. Harry contemplated risking near certain death when the phoenix came to him, but decided that he could do even more good if he remained alive for the moment (which turned out to be correct).

But I don't see how this is relevant for our modern society. There are still enough resources on our planet and if not, we just go somewhere else.

At least you didn't post publically recently which group it was in; if he had just said "Usenet" (which would have made the same point) I might not have been able to find it.

Unless he was secretly hoping some of his loyal followers would look it up and worship it. Someone should make all his posts into an ebook. You can find more here.

In chapter 86, we get the reveal that the name Quirrel is masquerading under is David Monroe. In the excellent HP fanfic by Nonjon A Black Comedy, there is also a David Monroe character. The fanfic link is here: http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3401052/1/A-Black-Comedy if you want to read it yourself before entering the realm of massive spoilers for it. The rest of this post is spoilers for that fanfic, so stop reading now if you want to read it first - it's a great story so I recommend going to go read it now if you haven't already.

. . .

[spoiler](/s "In that fic, David Monroe is the alias by which Voldemort's possessing spirit that controls Neville Longbottom's body goes by ('Riddlebottom'). The guy uses the very public defeat of a dark lord Voldemort to essentially take over Wizarding Britain and become the Next Albus Dumbledore, and coincidentally start world optimization. He is also a very intelligent savvy Voldemort. HUGE PARALLELS TO QUIRREL HERE, IT LOOKS LIKE! Also, another piece of meta-evidence towards the Quirrel=Voldemort theory.")

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3885086/1/Almost_a_Squib is nice one - finished parody - "silly AU story of a nonpowerful, but cunning, Harry". Includes certain amount of canon bashing but it is also similar to HPMOR.

Speaking of the mirror, if /u/EliezerYudkowsky would like to have some fun on hpmor.com, this CSS would be a treat:

"The runes say, <em style="display: inline-block; transform: scaleX(-1); filter: FlipH;">- ish ow not yourfaceb ut your coh erent extrap olated volition</em> " Harry stopped, feeling more prickles at his spine.

The letters would be displayed mirrored. Works as universally as anything does in browsers.

My software and resources shall be at his disposal, my minions (mindless self-interested users) will be his to command. It's not so much a 'minion' role for him as an 'ally.' He'll be able to use my tools to his own ends, and my benefit will be that those same tools will be demonstrably the 'best' and 'most useful' ones available (though probably not publicly). Add some mutual co-ownership to ensure we both benefit from each others' works, and the deal sshall be sstruck.

cough ormaybethat'sjustthehook cough

You bring up a good point though, should one really seek out rationalist deep-fans of HPMOR to entrust as partners to one's designs? Hmm.

(Man, in this day and age it's probably not even a safe bet the hired goons haven't had 'The Art of War' on their reading lists.) shudder

The PDF also doesn't have every chapter and will not have any of the edits made by the author to earlier chapters since the PDF was uploaded.

The up-to-date version is at fanfiction.net but as far as I know http://hpmor.com/ is also current.

The Ghostbusters scene is inserted as a non-canon extra sometime just after the sorting chapter, with an explanation as to why it was removed.

Here it is, under the heading OMAKE FILES #2: I Ain't Afraid of Dark Lords.

Not entirely related, but the first HP fanfiction I read (and really liked!) was a Peggy Sue (TVTROPES) fic called Harry Potter and the Nightmares of Futures Past. Harry goes back in time and relives the events of the saga. While his character and the world is much closer to the canon than MOR, Harry does try to optimize. Reminds me of a player doing a speedrun. The fic breaks EY's "rule of rationalist fanfiction" (Harry is more powerful and everyone else stays the same), but it feels very satisfying.

Yes. This.

I tend to think of Canon Harry Potter similarly to how I think of the standard story of The Three Little Pigs (this version), while I mentally place HPMOR in a similar mental category as Jon Scieszka's The True Story of the Three Little Pigs (Amazon link for reference, where the free preview pages give a good sense of the tone of the story). I remember greatly preferring The True Story of the Three Little Pigs as a child. Or, to put it another way, I tend to think of Canon HP as the modern sanitized version of certain fairy tales or nursery rhymes that are provided to children, while I tend to think of HPMOR as closer to the darker original versions of those tales, in which (I assume) characters often died horribly.

This graphic-novel biography of Feynman isn't bad, though from everything I've heard it doesn't really compare to the two prose books from which it principally draws, 'Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!' and its sequel 'What Do You Care What Other People Think?'.

Can you elaborate on your second and third theories a little more?

>GITS:SAC, Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Full Metal Alchemist, Death Note, Gurren Lagann, Ranma 1/2, etc

From all of these I’ve only seen GitS and Death Note. I’ll probably be re-watching the first GitS by tomorrow, but did I get it right that you’re implanting an element of a cyber fiction?

Actually, when you think about it, I’d like to ask you guys a question that I’ve forgot about before. When Harry first freaks out on the time turners, he says something like this:

>You know right up until this moment I had this awful suppressed thought somewhere in the back of my mind that the only remaining answer was that my whole universe was a computer simulation like in the book Simulacron 3 but now even that is ruled out because this little toy isn’t Turing computable! A Turing machine could simulate going back into a defined moment of the past and computing a different future from there, an oracle machine could rely on the halting behavior of lower-order machines, but what you’re saying is that reality somehow self-consistently computes in one sweep using information that hasn’t... happened... yet...”

So my question was if it could be a simulation if Harry himself was a part of it as well? Not like a player who stays a part of the game as long as he plays it, but rather a pretty smart NPC who thinks he actually is a PC. Something like this (~3300 words), but with Harry as a protagonist.

I think that much more likely is that DoM is equivalent of CIA, and studying magic is also happening - but it is not the main goal. (idea from http://www.fanfiction.net/s/6473434/1/Unspeakable-Things - fic is complete, really good except completely failed ending).

I must tell that A Black Comedy by NonJon is really great and if you like this than you should try also Oh God Not Again! (this one is even better and includes way less of nudity related jokes).

Reclamation is a short (~5k words) meditation on a very obvious but underutilized AU.

(copperbadge writes a lot of great stuff, or did ten years ago when I was actively reading him)

>I'm pretty sure that was meant seriously.

By EY? Definitely. But everyone should have laughed at him. Some people didn't.

>he wrote that in an author's note and considered the matter settled.

He set up an auction online

>the premise of a day of somebody's time being worth $4000 to you, even just in monetary expected value, isn't obviously implausible.

Sure, if someone needs legal services, or something. But EY wasn't selling a specific service at market rates, he was just selling himself, and fully expected people to value his time/intelligence/whatever - because it's him - enough to be interested. And some people claimed to be.

>I don't know if he's diagnosed with anything

If I had to bet, I'd put my money on him either having been diagnosed with NPD, or not yet tested for it. That's not an insult or anything, I have it. Takes one to know one I suppose. Or I'm projecting.

Well, Dungeon Keeper 2 is still the last official game (if you ignore horrible abominations that should never have been born). On the other hand, War for the Overworld is getting close to feature completion and is a sequel in all but name. Might want to check that out if you already know the series. If not, give DK2 a try. It's about $2-3 on GoG!

I don't think I ever said or implied that he is so your argument serves no purpose.

Here and here are the ones I'm aware of.

Ooh, I'll have to look up Influence.

I mentioned Thinking, Fast and Slow because the time of the book is super conversational and each chapter, while not quite self contained, discusses a different topic. One can easily read it a chapter at a time with no negative results, and still seriously improve their internal model of how human minds work.

Good question! It's a super-long answer that has a lot to do with why I classify myself as "Christian" at all, so watch out.

First off, I'm a huge reader.

That means Plato's complete works, Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics", Kirkegaard's "Fear and Trembling", most of Descartes, Nietzche's "Geneology of Morals", and basically most of whatever philosophical and theological works are involved in the issue. One thing I've noticed in debates about religion is that Christians tend to be classed as ... let's say, not quite as well-read or intellectual as their counterparts. And I'm embarrassed to say that in a good eight out of ten times, that tends to be the case. :P

Now, as I'm sure you know, in theology there tends to be a separation between what's called "general revelation" and "special revelation", "general revelation" being evidence for theism found in the world and logic. The Watchmaker argument would be categorized as general revelation.

So-called "special revelation" is Word of God, pardon the troping. The Bible in Christianity, the Torah in Judaism, the Quran in Islam, you get me. Using special revelation in a debate generally requires a different debate on whether it should be allowed at all, which draws in discussions on historical accuracy, comparisons to work of contemporary historians, et cetera.

As I don't particularly want this to become a religious debate thread, I'll end this by saying that I'm open for conversation if anyone really wants to message me, and what would make me change my mind is categorically disproving what evidence there is in the general (logic/extrapolation) and special (discussions of history and in-text agreement) topics.

Apologies once more for the super-long reply, but I didn't want to brush you off. :)

48 Laws of Power and Influence: The Science of Persuasion are already on there.. so perhaps A Game of Thrones? Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking by Christopher Hadnagy is decent, along with Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely.

It most definitely wasn't published in Harry's time, but I'm almost positive Eliezer is referencing the book "The Four Hour Work Week".

> "Bear with me. What is the opposite of happiness? Sadness? No. Just as love and hate are two sides of the same coin, so are happiness and sadness. Crying out of happiness is a perfect illustration of this. The opposite of love is indifference, and the opposite of happiness is--here's the clincher--boredom."

-"The Four Hour Work Week", Page 51

Incidentally, while 4HWW is good, it seems to be a rather specialized version of the concepts taught in "The Lean Startup". If you have to choose only one, I'd go with "The Lean Startup".

People will recommend The Sequences, but I've found that Daniel Kahneman's book, 'Thinking, Fast and Slow' to be a better source for most of the same "rationality" material. It's consistently written, conversational, scientific, laid out in an obvious and natural way, and includes many references to likewise books and cover similar ground. It's also written by one of the founding researchers into bias and modern rationality, who write Judgement Under Uncertainty, a work EY learned from.

New York, NY

Whether you came to the Wrap Party or not, you're welcome to join the mailing list for the NYC Rationality community, where we have weekly meetups, occasional parties and other discussions.

https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=en_US#!forum/overcomingbiasnyc

True, though I think the implication comes from choosing to say 'reversibly' instead of 'temporarily', which is a much more common word.

Edit: Also, the fact that reversible spells are given as a counterexample to Transfiguration's chief danger ('Transfiguration is not permanent!').

I'm curious about the title. Who is referencing?

>Horn Effect-If for example your in a job Interview, the first thing you say is "the weather is crap and I hate long days" to your next possible employer, the person who is interviewing you will automatically assume that you are generaly a negative person, and will probably assume all other traits about you are bound to be negative, and will therfore probably not consider hiring you.

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_halo_and_horn_effect

Oh, and some of Eliezer's recommended stories are really, really good. Check the author's faves (at the bottom, click on "favorite stories"). Something to fill the time.

Slightly off topic, but here's a Harry-goes-back-in-time-to-fix-it-all story that I enjoyed. A bit on the wish-fulfillment side (shocking of the FF genre, I know!) but pleasant enough for light reading.

> While it's a recursive fanfiction of hpmor, it's not particularly rational itself. Actually, Luna seems like an irrational protagonist.

Why is that? Her mindset and goals are bizarre, yes, but she pursues (or tries to) them in a reasonable manner, and the story's mysteries could be solved. Even if the ending prevents from giving the reader all information, it's an explict subversion, not true irrationality — and there's nothing wrong with being an explict irrationalfic.

This is "intuitive sense for how the English language is used" speaking rather than "grammarian backed by rigorous knowledge", but "the maths were" struck me as wrong.

I would expect "the maths" in that context to function as a singular, so "the maths was".

Edit: whether mathematics is singular or plural appears to be the subject of some debate but the majority there looks to be behind the singular.

Edit continued: An uncountable singular would seem right to me - you can't put a number to how many maths were tricky, it's just a bulk quantity of maths, all of which was tricky (like "the milk was sour", or "the rice was dry"). Also did I mention I enjoyed the chapter; that takes precedence over singular/plural nouns.

For convenience. This zip contains csv files, each row in the csv is a review (like the scrape in the OP, it's not perfect as guest reviews are missing). "all.csv" contains all the reviews I scraped, the others are named after the filter I used (review CONTAINS [searchTerm]):
* "horcrux"
* "lose"
* "nanotube"
* "patron" (will contain all instances of "patronus" and "patronum")
* "quirrell" AND "broom" (so all instances of "command Quirrell's broom bones")
* "transfig" (so all instances of "transfiguration" and similar)
* "vold" AND "broom" (so all instances of "command Voldemorts broom rods)

Not sure how helpful this is, but thought it summarised some common themes.

Edit: Did also do a bunch of reviews via the spreadsheet, just thought this might also be a useful tool.

Prophecies can exist in a predetermined world, but I don't see why they should appear and be made at roughly the same time that a decision is made. In a predetermined world a prophecy or vision would be felt at any random time, since it can be predicted at any moment in the past. In a world where somebody's decisions have a real impact on the future prophecies could be made only on the right timeline, because before that they would not be "true" visions.

See this diagram: http://postimage.org/image/m3l1fy67h/

In the first scenario, with a 100% pre-determined timeline, a vision or prophecy can be made at any time, since everything is already known.

In the second scenario, where a decision splits the timeline, the vision can happen only at the moment of the branching or after that. Otherwise the vision might not come true, since the decisions that create the branch have not been made yet, and things might go either way.

>Deprecating non-https? I'll be required to pay for a cert if I want to host my own server?

There's https://letsencrypt.org/, which will launch by the time Mozilla implements this. Why don't you read the FAQ, which should address many of your complaints?

I came here hoping for an explanation of how it worked, so I'm linking the code with description if that's okay with you. (Let me know if we need to edit this out to avoid vandalism etc.)

As far as I can tell, the current version counts solutions that have at least 10% of the words from the idea description each appearing for at least 1% of the solution summary, where both of these figures are subject to further tweaking.

In practice, all the solution summaries seem to be well under 100 words, and the idea descriptions are typically around 10-20, so a solution summary containing only one or two words from the idea description would count. I think this means that anything containing "with" would count as a match for idea 1, "Block AK with patronus charm"? Leaving out small/common words, maybe by checking each word against a blacklist, would be an easy improvement.

Easy! I'm about to develop my own broadcasting server for stuff like this, because I'm utterly dissatisfied with the way YouTube, Ustream, and other public broadcasting services work, but that's gonna take a lot of time, so for now we're sticking to the existing solutions.

> Sun Tzu's The Art of War

The Art of War is fairly well known in the West. Go for something even more obscure—a text of ruthlessness and treachery—the very darkest of the rhetorical arts. A text that remains banned in mainland China to this very day for its subversive Sith-like teachings, remaining untranslated outside its native tongue. I am of course talking about getting yourself a modern reinterpretation of Lee Zhong Chang's book, Thick Black Theory. I suggest acquiring Thick Face, Black Heart: The Warrior Philosophy for Conquering the Challenges of Business and Life, by Chin-Ning Chu. This book is the perfect bridging tool to this lost sorcery.

Now you too can become a goddamned master of reading the man across the table and deciding if he knows his shit over one drunken interaction. Know people, remember people, and then bluff like the god of lies! Get your copy in paperback for the one off easy payment of $ xx.xx USD on xxxxxx.com!

Okay, but seriously, it’s a fun read. This thing is entertaining for the every-bloke, from boffin to businessman, from barrister to builder! Go, go now! Pick up your copy today!

>"Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas R. Hofstadter is the most awesome book that I have ever read. If there is one book that emphasizes the tragedy of Death, it is this book, because it's terrible that so many people have died without reading it."

Apparently I never got remotely far-enough into the book for this statement to make sense.

(I got tired of carrying that huge paperback around in my backpack.)

Lemme go get a Kindle copy.

I've heard good things about <em>Good and Real</em>.

>Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach[2] , also recommended by Yudkowsky, is the most comprehensive, state of the art introduction to the theory and practice of artificial intelligence for modern applications. It's the leading textbook in the field of artificial intelligence, used in over 1100 universities worldwide. I think it's obvious why a community read-through of this would be beneficial.

Russel and Norvig is the standard textbook for "Good Old-Fashioned AI", ie: the kind that's not at all worthy of being called "AI". It's used as a textbook in the first course in GOFAI for undergrads. It teaches fairly little programming, very little mathematics, and covers nothing of the kind of modern machine-learning techniques that actually get results these days, let alone the increasingly elegant and advanced learning techniques that are yielding good models of what cognition is.

On the textbook front, though, I can recommend that anyone with basic Calc 1+2 under their belt can go ahead and read <em>Introduction to Bayesian Statistics</em> to get a first taste of how "Bayesianism" actually works, and also why it hasn't taken over the world already (hint: computational concerns).

Given that the last such experiment resulted in both outcomes being published, and given that there's thousands of readers, you have less of a reason to worry.

But failure is ok! Hell, it's expected! It's ok to fail at something, you're still alive and kicking after you've failed and the thing that worried you comes to an end! I had a shitty experience in more than one class for instance, but hey, it's all behind me and I don't think about that anymore (not devaluing others' experiences, though!). You basically return to a neutral emotional setpoint ('hedonic treadmill' idea) anyway, even if you've been through unimaginably terrible shit like becoming a paraplegic. And if your neutral setpoint is not optimal, there's definitely definitely ways to improve your situation, of course there are.

I have dealt with depression too and reaching out for help actually helps, especially this thing called cognitive behavior therapy. (I'll just describe this even if you already know about it, because someone might not know about it and might not have spoken up). It does work. Consider the book Learned Optimism, for one, if nothing else. Whatever your priors about likelihood of finding a solution, know that there's strong strong evidence of people finding just that kind of a solution!

I fairly recently listened to the Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson) audiobook read by Jonathan Davis. It's a great sci-fi book that helped to invent the cyberpunk genre and popularized the use of the word "avatar" for a person's virtual reality representation. It has a great plot with a bunch of interesting ideas. The delivery of the book was great to listen to - the reader's voice was perfectly suited for the role, it was wonderful.

There's not a whole lot terribly 'rational' per se, other than the idea of human minds as purely biochemical machinery. But it's a really good sci-fi classic if you haven't read it before.

Edit: In non-fiction explicitly probably read by Harry, I would consider something like Predictably Irrational by Ariely - I haven't listened to the audiobook, so I have no clue how good the reading and delivery is, but it's got a lot of ideas about human cognition and the like that might interest you.

1. Teaching him how to lose is important; you need to learn to deal with blind spots. If you cannot accept a possible loss, you will fail to make contingencies, and take unacceptable risks. It may work a lot of times, but eventually, it will cause you to lose; something unacceptable in war.
2. Beyond his role as a teacher, which he is doing well, he is making Harry a leader, teaching him to improvise in combat conditions. He is learning how to read a battlefield, combine preparation with improvisation, and dealing with an opponent that has learned you.
3. Breaking into Azkaban is what spies call a "wet op". That's better training than he'd get in a controlled environment. A taste of real combat gives you more than any amount of training. Doing that after you have already started training is crucial. He's giving him the tools to run covert operations, which may include assassination.
4. His choice to make him fight with a smaller army is pushing Harry beyond his own perceived limits. This is necessary in the training of a good soldier.
5. He's tutoring him according to The Art of War and The Prince, two books about defeating enemies with all possible means at your disposal (and IMO, must-reads, with hidden depths in every bit).
6. He is giving him no unsound advice.

I never said he was benevolent. On the contrary, he's teaching Harry to become the next Dark Lord (including the "if you follow all the guidelines, what is the point" bit). And he's doing a great job. Now, I'm not saying he's not Voldemort, but that there is the possibility that he is an independent agent in this war, playing his own game... and he wants the strongest piece on the board to be his, which includes Dumbledore and if applicable, Voldemort.

It is still likely that the Quirrellmort theory is correct, but there are other (interesting) options.

edit: English, now fixed.

All my, somewhat random, archived versions, in case anyone else is also interested for some reason. Pretty plainly labelled, I hope.

Came here to post this.

Impressive, they collected $13000 in 24 hours, and it has an exclusive foreword written by EY! ^source

A previous print endorsed by translators by another, smaller publishing company from Ukraine sold 10k copies for $30.

Probably, most important result of this is a huge exposure effect.

Basically [spoiler](/s "alien Satan")

From the anime Puella Magi Madoka Magica

He [spoiler](/s "grants girls a wish in exchange for their soul and giving them magical powers but the wishes go bad. This is part of some process to reduce the amount of entropy in the universe")

Sleeping with the Girls is a really excellent mega-crossover self-insert fic, somewhat along the same veins as Hybrid Theory (which is one of EY's favorites), but it has a dramatically different take on the self-insert himself. And no, the title doesn't mean what you think it means, but it is intended to evoke that misunderstanding.

It's currently incomplete, but there's almost 50 long chapters, so there's plenty to enjoy. The author is currently dealing with a very busy life, but is still actively working on the fic. You can check out the spacebattles thread for the fic, here. Warning : LONG. Warning^2 : SPOILERS for existing chapters and chapters that haven't been written yet.

Just click on the category title at the top of the page to go here: http://www.fanfiction.net/Harry-Potter_and_Dungeons-and-Dragons_Crossovers/224/1116/

Ranger Harry was weird, but not terrible. It was a NANOWRIMO attempt, which makes it more tolerable (eg, it was written quickly and barely edited, and you know that going in). It is also unfinished and seemingly abandoned.

I haven't had the bravery to try any of the others on that list. They all seem kind of bad.

Sisyphus is still, many years later, my favorite take on the time-loop concept in fanfiction - and it manages to do it all in a short-story format, which is really all it needs. Very depressing, though.

I'm not sure I would do a good job at selling it. Would the following work? (With [C] and [FF] tags in the title, too.)

On the Continuity of Consciousness by u/vi_fi.

>Summary: First-year Luna Lovegood is sure there is something deeply wrong with Hogwarts.

A [](#s "ir")rational [](#s "not")-HPMoR recursive recursive fanfiction centered on Luna. Describing it further would spoil it in one way or another it; suffice to say that it is self-aware, rational-ish, rather original and otherworldly.

Not sold on it? [Conceptual spoiler](#s "It's a meta-fanfiction — that is, a fanfiction which discusses the nature of fanfiction.")

I posted this a while back, it basically describes how I think we can do this commentary/annotation on genius.com

Eliezer apparently already has a page on the site, all that needs to be done is get the other chapters on the site.

One chapter is up on his page but no one added anything: http://genius.com/Eliezer-yudkowsky-hpmor-harry-potter-and-the-methods-of-rationality-partial-annotated

As the other user said, The seventh Horcrux. The author actually made it into a pdf and posted it, so I don't think I am breaking rules by posting it. It's an "epub" Basically I just drag and drop it into a firefox window and it opens up in a nice chapter by chapter format.

I had to read it twice the week I found it, pure gold.

http://www.filedropper.com/seventhhorcrux

Firstly: :D it looks awesome! I saw the previews before you got it printed, but just seeing it as an actual book is even more awesome than I'd imagined.

Secondly: some thoughts on your second edition. The cover image still seems a bit suboptimal - why not use the same font as the cover image on the hpmor homepage does, or the cover image from the PDF book version? this, credited to "Noelle Curry", so maybe permission-getting would be necessary?

I'm happy to put together cover images in the right format/size/whatever, or to look into getting permission or whatever's necessary. :)

Another thought: the paragraphing almost looks too squished together in this version? Maybe it's just the section that the preview shows, or maybe I've just been reading too many fanfictions rather than physical books.

edit: also, happy to create a completely different cover or whatever if you'd like that, too. :)

[I've been thinking about getting these printed for a while now; just hadn't found a successful solution to the PDF version not being the right side, and generating it just from an epub to pdf looking horrific]

Well, if you want a DIY approach you could get it printed onto sheets and then bind them together in some fashion to create a book. Searching for 'how to book binding' on your preferred search engine should get you some useful information.

I'm sure there are guides on how to make it look pretty as well, if you're into that sort of thing.

Progress has been made! Two versions of the first chapter, read in spanish, are now in my possession, and I have paid the narrator. We plan to keep going for a few more chapters. :) Math here: https://gist.github.com/compwron/5c4c84385990e375d6ec

Temporary link to the files (I have not figured out how to post them permanently yet) https://www.wetransfer.com/downloads/5b75302d3aca434314f2b4efa751131a20151119190931/a93c4b67b11bb27f10b2b4f04926347d20151119190931/a50586

Ok that's a fair tldr. I think it's completely solvable with a post scarcity society. There are probably dozens of solutions I'm too dumb to think up but could be found and implemented eventually. But that's beside the point.

If you told me my choices were tyranny that will almost certainly never end, or death that can never ever be reversed under any circumstances, it's not even close. Give me life and a chance. And that's the point, life gives chances. Death removes chances.

Biochemistry sounds awesome! Good luck with that. And with QM I loved Sean Carroll's book Something Deeply Hidden . He has an audio format if you prefer that. He's a big proponent of Everett's MWI.

I'm currently trying to improve my understanding of string theory. As I understand it most physicists pretty much agree now that string theory isn't correct, but oddly enough the math gives pretty accurate predictions that line up with what we see.

> Neville Chamberlain's answer, and it was the wrong answer in 1938. If Chamberlain had done what Churchill advocated and declared war

History was written by the victors, for an alternative view you might consider 1939 - The War That Had Many Fathers

Steven mentioned the Rationally Speaking podcast with Julia Galef - it just came back after a hiatus http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/

I wish the episodes were more often long and in-depth, but they are really great stuff. It's an interview podcast with

I share Brian's general agreement with a 'rationalist' worldview but skepticism for a lot of the conclusions and attitudes in the LessWrong/etc. community. I think Galef strikes a great balance, adopting the basic principles and taking serious some of the odder insights, but not being over-zealous.

In fact, I like Galef's work so much that I want to plug her book (the reason for her hiatus was to finish writing it). Pre-order it.

> &quot;Two mounds of promise&quot;

Oh duh, I forgot about that particular sex scene. I also fail at Google, though thank you for not using lmgtfy. I fucking hate that site.

I see where you're coming from in your dislike of Wastelands' style, but we'll just have to agree to disagree. I really liked the style, possibly for the same reason that I really enjoy stuff like Max Payne.

It's also ironic that you say that Wastelands is several steps removed from actually being publishable, since he basically did publish it. Distant Star is probably about 65% the same book as Wastelands (the major plot elements revolving around Atlantis, as well as several action scenes, are lifted directly from the fic), and it's apparently been very successful on Amazon.

I bought it, and enjoyed it (the new elements that he added for the novel were intriguing), though I don't think I'll be buying the sequel.

That's sounds likely - the appendix in does seem rather short to have been published as it's own volume.

I've only read Thinking, Fast and Slow; if anyone here has read both it and the book of Judgement Under Uncertainty, would you advise me to seek out the latter, or do they cover enough of the same ground that it's unnecessary?

Aphorism collections are often very densely-packed collections of purported insights, although it is very important to think about each one (is this insight universalized? is it saying something new, or saying something old in a new way? etc). Historical and philosophical context is vital, though. I would recommend:

Analects by Confucius.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

Books that are embarrassingly bad at insightfulness are also something I find useful. Looking at something that you know is massively wrong-headed, and thinking about how the ideas are problematic or fallacious can be really rewarding. The most reliable and brief example of this practice uses The Alchemist by Paulo Coehlo.

Also, these have already been mentioned but I need to further urge them on you as being pretty amazing:

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Kahneman and Tversky.

Influence by Cialdini.

I don't do it. Maybe I should start doing it, but so far I'm proficient enough in retrieving information. Even if I forget what was actually said I can remember stuff like "Thinking, Fast and Slow has a chapter on that," and then finding the appropriate piece.

I'm afraid it might broke my flow of reading. I'm already very easily distracted and stopping to write things down probably won't help with that.

"Parenting books" for the general public are pretty much hearsay and generally not worth much. Don't take what someone else observed about the process of parenting their child as what you need to do when their sample size was identical to yours.

But there are some valuable tools with half-decent science backing in early childhood education programs. Many of these programs have amazing preschool laboratories where students study how the kids learn and develop; my wife worked in one for a number of years. In this context, usable science can be and has been done. And her education has been an INCREDIBLE resource in raising our kid. You could, of course, take entire degree programs in the study of child development and parenting. But it sounds like it's a little late for that. If you want a start, look up &quot;Child Development&quot; by Santrock (the latest edition cites the most recent studies, but you can also buy an older used copy that won't resell at the bookstore of your local college). There are many, many other resources that you can find after that, but I'd recommend starting there.

Of course, every kid is different, but those tools will at least give you a framework for understanding what's happening and a language with which to discuss the process.

If you want a good book that explores sociopathy, try the psychopath test.

Another way is a sort of riff off EY's "Minds are made of parts." After creating a decently complex character, imagine that all the people who get in his way are just simple programs and ask yourself: how he would respond to those few lines of code? After all, code has no feelings...

> So You Want To Be a Wizard by Diane Duane. It's kid-friendly stuff, surprisingly serious, and really amazingly cool. There are digital editions of the 9 book set around for relatively cheap. These books are great.

There's also a tenth book now, as well as a book of three novellas that take place between the ninth and tenth books.

Please replace the amzn.to link (under John Scalzi's Redshirts) with the full original URL (minus the referral tag). URL-shortened links aren't necessary on reddit, and they'll always get spamfiltered - especially if they contain an Amazon referral tag.

Not so much a scholarly paper or review as an anthropological collection of myths, but The Origin of Life and Death by Ulli Beler is an old book on African myths I originally found in my Uncle's library. The foreword mentions the connections to a lot of contemporary Christian myth and the difficulties distinguishing between mythological sources.

It's been years since I read it, but I remember a few Babel-like stories, flood myths (including one where the world was destroyed in a wave of flame instead of water) and many other interesting myths. There was one on Glooscap, the Miqmaw native american folk hero/god, as well which I remember included creation mythos but I can't remember the name at the moment.

Your comment was automatically spamfiltered, presumably because of the Amazon link with the referrer tag. If you edit the comment to use the plain referrer-free Amazon link, I can reapprove it.

The one I got is http://www.amazon.com/Thrones-Targaryen-Dragon-Emblem-Sticker/dp/B008ZG0R6S in white, all the little fiddly bits went a bit off after a few months and the dragon started falling apart.

However, I don't really think it would make that much of a difference with the broom as long as you don't have too many corners?

Relevant book recommendation: Wizard's Bane and following series, by Rick Cook. Synopsis: basically like the programmer's physics in Friendship is Optimal, but a little bit more fleshed-out and with some neat ideas. For example, in order to prevent undefined behavior, the magic-programmer builds and formally verifies magical "assembly" instructions, and then builds several no-common-ground compilers and only allows a build to go forward if the compilers produce identical assembly.

These are kid's books but well and humorously written: The quartet of fantasy novels that begins with "Dealing with Dragons" by Patricia C. Wrede.

The protagonist is a smart, strong-willed princess living in a very traditional magic kingdom, who comes to the conclusion that the only way to avoid having her parents, sister & fairy godmother marry her off to a dimwit knight from the next kingdom over is to escape and become a dragon's princess. Whereupon she finds herself in a world of magic, new friendships, political intrigue and housecleaning.

The first book is a kid's fantasy classic, the last book was actually written first and has a different tone and protagonist than the other 3 and the middle 2 feel a little interstitial ... but it's all a fun read for a couple of afternoons, if you can find them stocked at your local library.

EDIT: First chapter of "Dealing with Dragons" is previewable on amazon. Includes a great proto-rational conversation between the princess and a talking frog.

Magic produces enormous amounts of EM radiation. You can use a cell phone to detect magic - when you don't have signal you are probably in a magic-rich area.

Furthermore, if magic produces EM radiation, then it stands to reason that EM radiation should have an effect on magic. Therefore you could conceivably create anti-magic shields by setting up large electromagnets. Or possibly series of electromagnets with different polarity. Maybe even just a Faraday cage with alternating current would be sufficient. It's hard to say - it would require some experimentation.

Easy-peasy. But for more detail on something similar, I suggest reading the The Atrocity Archives - the book asks a similar question in a world with rational magic.

Huh. I've always just used ff.net, and never tried to look for many other repositories because of this app I use to read offline.