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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Unreasonable_Effectiveness_of_Mathematics_in_the_Natural_Sciences

He adds that the observation “the laws of nature are written in the language of mathematics,” properly made by Galileo three hundred years ago, “is now truer than ever before.”

If cognition is one of the laws of nature, it seems to be written in the language of mathematics.

Your argument is either that maths can’t think (in which case you can’t think because you’re maths) or that maths we understand can’t think, which is, like, a really dumb argument. Obviously one day we’re going to find the mathematical formula for consciousness, and we probably won’t know it when we see it, because consciousness doesn’t appear on a microscope.

Should we hold the same standard for humans? That a human has no rights until it becomes smart enough to argue for its rights? Without being prompted?

Bold words coming from a statistical model.

Intelligence is not a boolean.

You have to make a new account in order to move instances. But I think you can export your subscriptions.

Anyone can put Lemmy on their website

All the Lemmy websites talk to each other

You went to the website lemm.ee, so you’re a lemm.ee user

It’s good for the network if people don’t all use the same website

Good. Fuck off.

A magic cloak that can hide from Death can probably hide from Accio, too.

Magic is that hard, but being a genius doesn’t make you good at it. Rote memorisation makes you good at it. Hermione isn’t a genius, she enjoys rote learning. Harry and Ron crave stimulation, and there’s none to be found in Rowling’s magic system. Rowling might have intended magic to be easy, but she made a mistake. Rowling enjoys rote memorisation, so it’s easy for her and her self insert, but not for normal people who want to be intellectually stimulated. Rowling accidentally made magic hard, and the story makes more sense with her mistake in it.

Harry Potter’s magic system isn’t simple.

Rincewind isn’t useless at most things, he’s only useless at magic.

Esk is actually able to use magic to solve problems, because she’s a precocious child and also female.

Well, the needs of a fiction reader and the needs of a character in the world are different. Harry actually needed to learn magic. And there’s no logic to it, so all he could do was rote memorisation. He would have been happier with a magic system that makes sense.

Hermione is supposed to be a genius nerd, and yet she does far less in 7 books to actually study her magic system, than Vin has done by the start of the second book. Vin isn’t a nerd or a genius, she’s just a capable hero living in a world where magic makes sense, so she’s better at studying than Hermione. Hermione gets 8 hours to do it a day for 6 years and still can’t compete with Vin.

You know what? Rowling did actually follow Sanderson’s laws with one specific bit of magic. The time turner. The time turner has a very simple limitation: you cannot change the past. But, you can do things in the past that don’t change what you experienced the first time. We understand how the time turner works, and Rowling comes up with a clever way to make it work, which makes sense to us. That’s the second and first law! The time turner is well written!

And then she broke the third rule. She didn’t expand on it, she added something new in book 4 instead. So people asked “what about the time turner”, and in the next book she got mad and destroyed them all so she’d never be asked “what about the time turner” again.

Rowling wrote something really interesting that actually makes sense. And then decided she didn’t want it in her story anymore. Because Rowling doesn’t actually like writing interesting magic. And that’s why Harry and Ron aren’t very interested in magic. Rowling was never able to write a scene where a character actually geeks out about how magic works, because she doesn’t care how it works. She’s not interested.

In Sanderson’s super school book, there are 10 kids and only one of them is uninterested in piloting spacefighters. But he is interested in engineering, so he’s still able to be a big nerd about the book’s subject matter. Everyone else is either a great pilot who likes piloting, or fucking dies in a tragic scheme emphasising the brutality and pointlessness of war.

Sanderson doesn’t write characters who just drift along without an interest in anything, because Sanderson writes books about topics that he makes interesting.

Rowling is only able to create characters who think Divination or History of Magic are boring, because she makes them boring. Sometimes on purpose!

• No limits on how often you can cast spells
• No explanation of how magic actually works
• No explanation of how magic objects are created
• No explanation of how spells are invented
• No explanation of how different species’ magic differs
• All the spell names are silly words in English and poorly understood Latin
• Never explained why incantations or gestures are needed
• Never explained what makes spells other than Patronus hard or easy
• Never explained what makes a wizard powerful other than “they learned a lot of spells”
• Few/no limitations on spells, or limitations aren’t explained
• No contextually dependent spells
• It’s impossible to predict what will happen in the books based on understanding the magic system
• There are just. no. rules.

Brandon Sanderson is the best magic system writer in the world, and these are his “laws of magic” for creating an interesting magic system:

The First Law

Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic.

The Second Law

Sanderson’s Second Law can be written very simply. It goes like this: Limitations > Powers
(Or, if you want to write it in clever electrical notation, you could say it this way: Ω > | though that would probably drive a scientist crazy.)

The Third Law

The third law is as follows: Expand what you already have before you add something new.

Rowling never follows these principles. The reader doesn’t understand the magic, magic is rarely given sensical limitations we understand, and Rowling always adds new stuff instead of explaining what we already have.

I posit that the answers to all these questions I listed just don’t exist. There is no explanation. Hermione does well in school because she rote memorises. Harry and Ron can’t engage with the material in their homework because they don’t understand it because nobody does.

What Harry Potter’s magic system, insofar as it exists, does do well, is vibes. It feels like a wondrous magic system. That’s what sold books. Harry likes all the vibes stuff in the books, like the spooky castle, fighting evil, being a strong wizard. He doesn’t understand any of the magical theory, because it doesn’t exist.

Does that mean I actually only need one tablet a week or a month? My doctor said I should have one every day.

Many parts of society encourage men to complain about their wives, and many parts mock men for being unappealing for women. Either way, it’s funny.

Many parts of society look down on women for complaining, and many parts discourage mocking a woman for being unappealing to men. Either way, it’s uncomfortable.