But early on I suspected what Yudkowsky was up to. An early clue was a conversation in chapter 7 about Quidditch:

“So let me get this straight,” Harry said as it seemed that Ron’s explanation (with associated hand gestures) was winding down. “Catching the Snitch is worth one hundred and fifty points?”

“Yeah -”

“How many ten-point goals does one side usually score not counting the Snitch?”

“Um, maybe fifteen or twenty in professional games -”

“That’s just wrong. That violates every possible rule of game design. Look, the rest of this game sounds like it might make sense, sort of, for a sport I mean, but you’re basically saying that catching the Snitch overwhelms almost any ordinary point spread. The two Seekers are up there flying around looking for the Snitch and usually not interacting with anyone else, spotting the Snitch first is going to be mostly luck -”

“It’s not luck!” protested Ron. “You’ve got to keep your eyes moving in the right pattern -”

“That’s not interactive, there’s no back-and-forth with the other player and how much fun is it to watch someone incredibly good at moving their eyes? And then whichever Seeker gets lucky swoops in and grabs the Snitch and makes everyone else’s work moot. It’s like someone took a real game and grafted on this pointless extra position just so that you could be the Most Important Player without needing to really get involved or learn the rest of it. Who was the first Seeker, the King’s idiot son who wanted to play Quidditch but couldn’t understand the rules?” Actually, now that Harry thought about it, that seemed like a surprisingly good hypothesis. Put him on a broomstick and tell him to catch the shiny thing…

Ron’s face pulled into a scowl. “If you don’t like Quidditch, you don’t have to make fun of it!”

“If you can’t criticize, you can’t optimize. I’m suggesting how to improve the game. And it’s very simple. Get rid of the Snitch.”

In other words, Rowling’s game design is iffy, and Yudkowsky is calling her on it, via his Harry.

The same thing was blatantly going on in chapter 18, when Harry meets Snape. So much so , that I had to compare that scene with the equivalent in the original. Here’s the original Rowling scene, emphasis mine:

‘You are here to learn the subtle science and exact art of potion-making,’ he began. He spoke in barely more than a whisper, but they caught every word — like Professor McGonagall, Snape had the gift of keeping a class silent without effort. ‘As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins, bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses … I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death — if you aren’t as big a bunch of dunderheads as I usually have to teach.’

More silence followed this little speech. Harry and Ron exchanged looks with raised eyebrows. Hermione Granger was on the edge of her seat and looked desperate to start proving she wasn’t a dunderhead.

‘Potter!’ said Snape suddenly. ‘What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?’

Powdered root of what to an infusion of what? Harry glanced at Ron, who looked as stumped as he was; Hermione’s hand had shot into the air.

‘I don’t know, sir,’ said Harry.

Snape’s lips curled into a sneer.

‘Tut, tut — fame clearly isn’t everything.’

The scene continues with Snape asking Harry more such questions, and him not knowing the answer. Now, here is Yudkowsky’s version of the same scene, into which I will interject:

“You are here,” Severus said in a quiet voice which the students at back strained to hear, “to learn the subtle science and exact art of potionmaking. As there is little foolish wand-waving here, many of you will hardly believe this is magic. I don’t expect you will really understand the beauty of the softly simmering cauldron with its shimmering fumes, the delicate power of liquids that creep through human veins,” this in a rather caressing, gloating tone, “bewitching the mind, ensnaring the senses,” this was just getting creepier and creepier. “I can teach you how to bottle fame, brew glory, even stopper death – if you aren’t as great a pack of fools as I usually have to teach.”

This is almost word for word, except that Yudkowsky is more realistic about the loudness of a whisper and points out how creepy Snape is, and thus hints at his unsuitability as a teacher, which later becomes the point.

Severus somehow seemed to notice the look of skepticism on Harry’s face, or at least his eyes suddenly jumped to where Harry was sitting.

“Potter!” snapped the Potions professor. “What would I get if I added powdered root of asphodel to an infusion of wormwood?”

Harry blinked. “Was that in Magical Drafts and Potions?” he said. “I just finished reading it, and I don’t remember anything which used wormwood -”

Hermione’s hand went up and Harry shot her a glare which caused her to raise her hand even higher.

“Tut, tut,” Severus said silkily. “Fame clearly isn’t everything.”

“Really?” Harry said. “But you just told us you’d teach us how to bottle fame. Say, how does that work, exactly? You drink it and turn into a celebrity?”

This is a very good point! Rowling lazily has Snape talking about bottling fame without thinking about what that might mean, then has him belittle the concept of fame just a few lines later. It’s sloppy, and Yudkowsky calls her on it via his Harry. It’s beautiful. And it continues:

“Let’s try again,” said Severus. “Potter, where would you look if I told you to find me a bezoar?”

“That’s not in the textbook either,” Harry said, “but in one Muggle book I read that a trichinobezoar is a mass of solidified hair found in a human stomach, and Muggles used to believe it would cure any poison -”

“Wrong,” Severus said. “A bezoar is found in the stomach of a goat, it is not made of hair, and it will cure most poisons but not all.”

“I didn’t say it would, I said that was what I read in one Muggle book -”

“No one here is interested in your pathetic Muggle books. Final try. What is the difference, Potter, between monksblood and wolfsbane?”

That did it.

“You know,” Harry said icily, “in one of my quite fascinating Muggle books, they describe a study in which people managed to make themselves look very smart by asking questions about random facts that only they knew. Apparently the onlookers only noticed that the askers knew and the answerers didn’t, and failed to adjust for the unfairness of the underlying game. So, Professor, can you tell me how many electrons are in the outermost orbital of a carbon atom?”

Which is awesome. Rowling’s Harry is a bit of a dunderhead. He just doesn’t know the answers. Yudkowsky’s Harry sees through Snape’s bullying.

In the Rowling version, Snape deducts points from Harry for being cheeky when he suggests that Hermione might know the answer. In the Yudkowsky version, he deducts ten points for Harry’s attempts at reasoning with him, and the situation escalates, with Harry ultimately threatening to leave the school unless Snape is fired for his bullying and abuse of students.

Without reading the rest of Rowling’s book I can’t be sure, but I have the feeling that Rowling has written Snape, at least in the first book, as an unsympathetic bully, and that her Harry just puts up with it. Perhaps her Snape is just a cartoon bad guy, and she hasn’t thought through the consequences. Whereas Yudkowsky knows exactly what the consequences of Snape’s actions should be and has his Harry explicitly treat him as he deserves to be treated.

In any case, Methods of Rationality is full of the right kinds of questions. Where Rowling briefly describes transfiguration, Yudkowsky thinks through the consequences: which are that if you turn a rock into a liquid and then drink it, it will kill you when it turns back into a rock.

And I’m not even half way through it, yet…

Incidentally, there’s a lot of stuff in Methods of Rationality about equality between adults and children. Yudkowsky’s Harry does not stand for situations in which children are treated as subordinates or children have to abide by different rules than adults. Again, I don’t know whether this is a dig at the way Rowling has written her story, or just a separate point Yudkowsky wants to make. There’s probably a more serious post I (or an education blogger) could make about that under the education category. Here’s a sample:

“This is not a request, Mr. Potter,” the Headmaster said. The full, entire force of the wizard’s gaze was turned on the boy. “This is your punishme-”

[...]

Harry’s visage grew even colder. “You mistake me, Headmaster, if you think that this is a joke. This is not a request. This is your punishment.”

“Mr. Potter -” Minerva said. She didn’t even know what she was going to say. She simply couldn’t let that go by.

Harry made a shushing gesture at her and continued to speak to Dumbledore. “And if that seems impolite to you,” Harry said, his voice now a little less hard, “it seemed no less impolite when you said it to me. You would not say such a thing to anyone who you considered a real human being instead of a subordinate child, and I will treat you with just the same courtesy as you treat me -”

OFFICIAL WARNING THIS PROPERTY IS UNDER INVESTIGATION

One guess who it is from. It continues to complain that I have not replied to any of their previous letters (I moved in yesterday!), warns that an enforcement division has been authorised to visit my home (go on, make my day), that I might be interviewed under caution, prosecuted and fined £1000.

Way to welcome new customers. Can you imagine the gas company behaving like that?

Update: The music is from a band called Billie The Vision and The Dancers. The song is called Summercat from the album I Was So Unpopular In School and Now They’re Giving Me This Beautiful Bicycle. All the band’s music is free to download, but if you like it you can donate. You get more of what you reward, after all. The songs are available in the excellent FLAC format, too. This is a business model I really hope can be successful. Perhaps doing the beer advert will bring the band lots of trade. I hope so.

I keep meaning to write dialogues — imaginary debates in which I rehearse my arguments. This is a start, .

The thing about economics is most people think it’s about money supply and inflation and defecits and that there are formulae that relate these things and that the whole thing works like that computer with the pipes. This stuff is impossible to debate. The nice thing about Austrian economics is you can talk about it.

So where to start? Let me try this:

A: The government is cutting jobs in the public sector. This will ruin the economy and cause a double-dip recession.

B: You can’t spend the same money twice.

A: Yes you can, money just goes round and around.

B: What I mean is, *you* can’t spend the same money twice. Let’s say I run a cake shop. I am forced at gunpoint to give you £100. You spend that £100 on buying my cakes. How has this helped the economy?

A: There are more cakes in existence than there otherwise would be. The world is richer.

B: The number of cakes I can make is fixed. I would have sold them to someone else and I would be £100 better off. Or, I would learn that nobody wants my cakes and I would find something to make that people *do* want.

A: But if I don’t get your £100, I will be unemployed and not doing any useful work.

B: The work you do can not be very useful if you can’t get people to pay for it voluntarily.

A: The work I do in the public sector will improve the quality of the transport infrastructure, thereby enabling you to get ingredients for your cakes more cheaply.

B: Yes, but if you were unemployed, I would still have my £100. I might use it to buy a better cake-making machine that will help me make cakes more cheaply. Or I might invest it in a transport infrastructure company.

A: How is that different?

B: Well, apart from the irrelevant (for the purposes of this discussion) fact that there is less violence involved, perhaps I might be better placed to decide how to spend my £100 than you. I might be better able to cut the cost of cake-making because I understand the business of making cakes.

[At this point the discussion veers off into the question of why distributed decision making is better than centralised control. Also, the parenthesis above is why I don't think of myself as a *consequentialist* libertarian. I would be opposed to the violence even if centralised control was more efficient.]

This morning I caught an interview on BBC Breakfast between a BBC journalist and a trawlerman. The item was about the high number of trawlermen who die at sea each year.

Looking down at the boat our Journalist says, “There are a lot of ropes and machinery down there, it must be easy to slip up.”

Replies the trawlerman, and I’m paraphrasing from memory: “Slipping up on deck is the least of our worries. Most men can keep their feet at sea. What’s worse is if the net snags on rocks. If the cable doesn’t break it can have the whole boat over.”

“What can be done to improve safety?”

“Very little. The job is dangerous by nature. However, as just one example, they brought out this ridiculous regulation that set stricter quotas on boats over ten meters in length than on smaller boats. So now there are a lot more small boats than there used to be, and these are more dangerous.”

I’m also rather fond of his rant about getting your hair cut, which I also hate.

Amish: World's Squarest Teenagers: Season 1 Episode 2

This episode opens with a conversation between Amish and British teenagers about drinking. The Amish girl is interested to hear that the British teenagers, who play music not in honour of god in a band, then get drunk after their gig. In fact they’ve been drinking to get drunk since they were 14, which is normal for teenagers in Britain.

“Have you ever thought of starting a band that doesn’t get drunk, and delivering the message that it’s not cool to get drunk and abuse the healthy body that God gave you?” she asks.

Replied the British teenager: “No. Because getting drunk regularly is fun. It makes socialising easier and helps us relax. It’s a good laugh and there are nearly no bad consequences. I mean, you can feel quite ill the next day, but you soon get over it. And if you only do it for a few years while you’re young and enjoy yourself there are almost no long term bad effects. I drink regularly and I am still healthy and I feel fine. The chances of becoming addicted to alcohol are small and problems like these can be overcome. Almost certainly the benefits of drinking outweigh the costs.”

Except, no, of course he didn’t. What he actually said was, “that’s a pretty cool idea.”

So here we have a teenager who is holding two conflicting ideas in his head. He knows from personal experience that drinking is fun and mostly harmless. And yet when asked he will parrot the government and BBC line that drinking is unequivocally bad.

We are creating a nation of pathetic, guilt-ridden sheep who are unable to experience unadulterated the wonders of western capitalist decadence because they think they are being naughty and should apologise for it. Instead, these teenagers should be proudly proclaiming that their way is better.

Mrs Rob just caught me putting Rob Junior’s milk in the microwave to warm it a bit out of the fridge. Apparently you’re not supposed to do that because of “hot spots” and because it adversely affects anti-infection ingredients in the milk. Sure enough, this stuff is all over the internet.

Well the hot spot stuff set off my bullshit detector. I can see how a microwave will heat things unevenly because of interference patterns in the radio waves, but between thermodynamics and convection the temperature in the milk will even out pretty quickly.

And microwaves don’t heat things especially differently to any other method of heating. I can’t see the chemical composition being affected much. Perhaps a few molecules get super-heated and chemically changed, but on average they will be heated to, er, the average temperature of the milk, which if I get my timings right is about body temperature.

Anyway, I heated some cow’s milk in a glass in the microwave, taking out the turntable which is there to even out the heating effect, a feature which not all microwave ovens have. Then I immediately drank the milk and it was uniformly warm. Hot spots must have been invented by someone unable to think or do experiments.

So put your baby’s milk in the microwave to warm it, enjoy the convenience, and don’t let anyone make you feel guilty about it. Just don’t be an idiot about it and heat it too much.

It doesn’t matter if it makes sense, as long as the numbers work out over a large number of people. You don’t need to know anything about the specific circumstances of a red car driver to offer him the same discount as all the other red car drivers. The more you know about your customer, the closer his premium will match your actual risk. But presumably there’s a limit to the information that it’s worthwhile to gather, because insurance companies don’t ask for all the information. At some point the cost of doing the admin and the calculations must outweigh the advantage of better knowing the risk. So people get lumped into vague boxes.

But the consequences can still seem mad.

The other day my motorcycle renewal quote came in at nearly £400. It was time to shop around, and I found that GoCompare.com would compare motorcycle insurance quotes. Worth a try. And a huge advantage of this is that you only have to fill in all the details once, on one uniform, fairly well designed web site, instead of having to do it multiple times on lots of different insurance companies’ badly designed sites.

And you can tweak the details and try to optimise the quotes. Is fully comprehensive much more expensive than third party, fire and theft? If I limit myself to 5000 miles does that make it cheaper? Does using the bike to commute make it much more expensive?

I noticed that there was a box to fill in if you stored the bike overnight at another address. I have the option of storing my bike at work in a secure underground car park, so I put in these details and the price plummeted. Great! I picked the best quote which was BikeSure, and handed over the money.

The next day BikeSure emailed me asking me to call them urgently about the details I had provided. It turns out that the underwriter refuses to insure my bike if it is kept more than a certain number of miles from where I live, so they could not offer me insurance after all. I asked how much it would cost to keep my bike at home, but no, they would not insure it to be kept at my home address either because being in London is too risky for them.

So the safe, secure car park is no good because it is too far from my home address which is also no good because it is too risky here.

I get the impression they did not believe that I would really be storing my bike where I said I was. Even the insurance company lady was somewhat incredulous. How can you commute if you store your bike at work? How do you get to work if not on your bike?

The thing is, if the insurance company and the underwriters knew more about me, they’d offer me a far better deal. I hardly use my bike — only in good weather and when the mood takes me. I nearly always commute by train, but quite enjoy the occasional ride home at night, and ride back to work in the morning. The bike really can be kept in the secure, underground car park with the CCTV and the 24 hour security guard.

But to verify all this would be far too expensive. I don’t fit into a neat box that they understand, so I don’t get the deal.

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

In which Eliezer Yudkowsky “re-invents Harry Potter as a skeptic genius who sets himself the task of figuring out just how all this “magic” stuff works”.

It’s quite a learning experience, especially if you look up the bits you don’t understand. For example, I now know what arbitrage is.

Here’s a snippet from chapter one:

“Then you don’t have to fight over this,” Harry said firmly. Hoping against hope that this time, just this once, they would listen to him. “If it’s true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it’s true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it’s false. That’s what the experimental method is for, so that we don’t have to resolve things just by arguing.”

The Professor turned and looked down at him, dismissive as usual. “Oh, come now, Harry. Really, magic? When you say that rationality is your favorite thing ever and read so much about it? I thought you’d know better than to take this seriously, son, even if you’re only ten. Magic is just about the most unscientific thing there is!”

[...]

“Mum,” Harry said. “If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There’s a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation – that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um… I can’t think offhand of where to find something about how it’s an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of violence or violent arguments -”

The author uses the pen name Less Wrong, which comes from a “community wiki devoted to refining the art of human rationality” called Less Wrong.

It’s the sort of site within which I imagine I could spend hours following the cross references. I haven’t yet, but one article about absence of evidence not being evidence of absence ends on this paragraph:

Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality; if you are equally good at explaining any outcome you have zero knowledge. The strength of a model is not what it can explain, but what it can’t, for only prohibitions constrain anticipation. If you don’t notice when your model makes the evidence unlikely, you might as well have no model, and also you might as well have no evidence; no brain and no eyes.

Which immediately made me think of global warmists who seem to always strive to fit the evidence to their hypotheses.

That site also contains lots of arguments about how to change your mind. One of these is titled Politics is the Mindkiller. Perhaps this will be a good site to go to to challenge my beliefs.

BBC – Newsbeat – New airships to protect British troops.

It’s a surveillance blimp. It can take a “small amount of small arms fire”. I’m sort of surprised blimps aren’t already used for a lot of the things satellites are used for. Presumably the practicalities don’t work out. Perhaps these military blimps are a sign that civilian blimps are about to be feasible.

I’m now planning to go to the Farnborough air show. Maybe I’ll see this blimp there.

New regulations mean the 23-year-old Jamaican could lose more money than he would earn from competing at the Crystal Palace Diamond League event.

“I am definitely not going to run [in London],” Bolt told a news conference.

Crystal Palace organisers had hoped to stage a three-way showdown between Bolt and his sprint rivals Asafa Powell and Tyson Gay.

Athletes competing in the UK are liable for a 50% tax rate on their appearance fee as well as a proportion of their total worldwide earnings – which for Bolt, who earns millions from endorsements, could be hugely costly.

More of this, please. The more high-profile people complaining about tax, the better. However:

The Government has since agreed to waive the rule so London can host the 2011 final, and competitors in the 2012 Olympics are also exempt.

What scoundrels. They’ll steal your money unless it suits them for you to appear in their showboating extravaganza, at which they’ll boast about how *they* made it all possible. When will people realise that governments do not make things possible, they only get in the way? Athletes of the world, unite! Boycott the UK Olympics! Have some principles! It’ll never happen…