The same chapter has another instance of trademark bad Yud writing: "gom jabbar" is a torture spell that Draco applies to Hariezer's hand. Few things kill tension faster and yeet the reader out of the story with greater force than a superfluous Nerd Culture(TM) reference. And the very next chapter has the smegheaded Death Note bit. It's Ready Player One for cult inductees.

It was observed ages ago that Yud completely whiffed Mendelian genetics. Here's the explanation in the su3su2u1 review, to refresh:

The other model Hariezer lays out is that magic lies on a single recessive gene. He reasons squibs have one dominant, non-magical version, and one recessive magical version of the gene. So of kids born to squibs, 1/4 will be wizards. In this version, you either have magic or you don’t, so if wizards married the non-magical, wizards themselves could become more rare, but the power of wizards won’t be diluted. [...] Squibs are, by definition, the non-wizard children of wizard parents. Hariezer’s model 2 predicts that squibs cannot exist. It is already empirically disproven.

Hariezer, of course, does not notice this massive problem with his favored model, and Draco’s collected genealogy suggests about 6 out of 28 squib born children were wizards, so he declares model 2 wins the test.

Which goes to show that you shouldn't try to learn science from HPMOR: the facts are bad, and the reasoning is bad. It doesn't matter pedagogically whether it's the author's mistake or the character's. And, really, having an 11-year-old boy who has done nothing but read books be the conduit for explanations of science is just a bad structural choice, for the same reason that you don't see textbooks with unreliable narrators.

Yud is still throwing words at this:

the genetically literate mind informed by canon will now inquire how two Wizard phenotypes ever yield a Squib phenotype when Wizards are Magical-Magical homozygous.

Ooh, do tell.

The answer is not fully given in HPMOR proper

Ooh, do fuck off. You don't get points for the story you didn't write. And adding lore after the fact doesn't change that your characters made the wrong decision from the information they had available at the time.

There is not a Magical gene complex that creates magic, but a Mundanity gene complex that suppresses it. After all, from pure physics we can never get to magic, but in an innately magical universe somebody could cast a spell to create the local appearance of mostly physics.

This is weird and arbitrary. Plenty of science-fiction stories have magic (or that which is effectively magic) operating by unknown-to-us physics. For example, the Laundry Files books are full of sigils and geases and summonings, and they explicitly say that the physicists are right, in the domain they've studied.

Similarly if all beings start out mundane then no gene complex can possibly create magic in them, but if all beings start out magical some gene complex could suppress their magic. Squibs and ultimately Muggleborns then arise naturally from a population of Muggle phenotypes as mutations damage the Mundanity gene complex, and in turn Wizard phenotypes sometimes yield Squibs as the Mundanity gene complex sometimes repairs itself by chromosomal crossover, with the phenomenon being more commonly observed in wizarding families with recent Muggle ancestry, to the alarm of genetics-illiterate purebloods.

From the Mendelian pattern implying the Mundanity gene complex is all on one chromosome, the gene complex can be inferred to be artificial in nature.

For Yudkowsky, operons must be evidence of Intelligent Design.

their ancestors were optimized in the shtetl

And now there are 59 comments, too.

I ain't reading all that.png

Mnemonic tits... on the blockchain!

The last time it came up, we had pretty good indications that lintamande was Piper and no reasons to think otherwise, but we didn't have a newspaper saying so like we did for Cremieux being Jordan Lasker.

Is she his erotica co-author? Last I heard, the best guess for his collaborator on Project Lawful was Kelsey Piper.

Horny slop text fed into a second machine to make horny slop pictures. Surely this will solve the problem of learning molecular biology.

What stuck with me was Anima. My goodness, how variable it is, and how much it changes the linework and composition just based on which artist names you add to the prompt. Beautiful. Does it generate an extra finger here and there? Perhaps. Does it mess up character color or prop shape? Yes, it happens. But it's a fair price for just how much effortless variability you get on a style level with a single pipeline. All of the gene images you see in this post were produced by a local anima-preview on my laptop without any style prompt changes except for the artist names.

The images: interchangeable, forgettable. All of them so crammed full of shit that every ostensibly noteworthy particular is drowned out.

From what appears to be the guy's Substack:

East Asian people are on average more intelligent than Black people. Which is factual based on the vast majority of tests we have developed and observed over the decades.

And:

I am an advocate for ending mass migration and initiating mass deportations for illegal migrants in western countries. Not because I am a white supremacist (I am not white) or because I believe there is necessarily anything innately special about being white. I believe these things for three reasons. First, nations have the right to preserve their ethnic identity, and second low skill immigration saturates the job markets of these countries making jobs which could once earn a living wage become unlivable, increasing the amount of value draining people in society by both importing them and undercutting low skill natives. lastly, generally, whiteness in these countries is a decent correlative to some of the things I value.

And:

It is true that many of the features which white supremacist value have little to do with the genetic predisposition to European ancestry and instead have to do with higher IQ; which is relatively more common among whites than most other groups.

So, a common-or-garden guy who is not left-wing or right-wing but a secret third thing that is also right-wing.

The New York Times treats him as an expert: "Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and an author of a forthcoming book". He's an Internet rando who has yammered about decision theory, not an actual theorist! He wrote fanfic that claimed to teach rational thinking while getting high-school biology wrong. His attempt to propose a new decision theory was, last I checked, never published in a peer-reviewed journal, and in trying to check again I discovered that it's so obscure it was deleted from Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Functional_Decision_Theory

To recapitulate my sneer from an earlier thread, the New York Times respects actual decision theorists so little, it's like the whole academic discipline is trans people or something.

Some of Kurzweil's predictions in 1999 about 2009:

• “Unused computes on the Internet are harvested, creating … human brain hardware capacity.”
• “The online chat rooms of the late 1990s have been replaced with virtual environments…with full visual realism.”
• “Interactive brain-generated music … is another popular genre.”
• “the underclass is politically neutralized through public assistance and the generally high level of affluence”
• “Diagnosis almost always involves collaboration between a human physician and a … expert system.”
• “Humans are generally far removed from the scene of battle.”
• “Despite occasional corrections, the ten years leading up to 2009 have seen continuous economic expansion”
• “Cables are disappearing.”
• “grammar checkers are now actually useful”
• “Intelligent roads are in use, primarily for long-distance travel.”
• “The majority of text is created using continuous speech recognition (CSR) software”
• “Autonomous nanoengineered machines … have been demonstrated and include their own computational controls.”