s stupid moral oversimplification necessary in a mass-market bestseller? E.g., Tolkien
I would say The Silmarillion is not very morally simplistic. Specifically I would call it Black and Gray morality [TVTropes], because I can’t think of a single non-God major character who’s totally good. (Maybe Luthien?)
I put the link in; thanks for the reminder.
And comments on my top-level posts don’t appear in my inbox, only (direct) replies to my comments. Is that different for you?
Ha, I was just waiting for a new chapter to go up to post one.
Haha, I was just going to post the “Harry is Rand al’Thor” theory myself. Clearly the best explanation.
In fact, even in real life, I suspect many one-boxers would two box in the end when they are standing there
My intuition says the opposite: I think many people who claimed they would two-box would one-box in the event. $1000 is so small compared to $1000000, after all; why take the chance that Omega will be wrong?
Aha. I read book 7 when it came out, but had forgotten that. Eminently plausible, then.
To wit: find that stone which I saw earlier and which I now recognise from the design that you showed me!
Ha, great theory. On the other hand, I find it hard to believe that the symbol was so obscure that even Voldemort never found it out. (Unless Rowling specifically mentioned it?)
Ch. 40:
Interesting that Harry said “besides Avada Kedavra” rather than “besides Imperius”. (I suppose it’s that “intent to kill” acting up again.) But I wonder how easy it would be to Imperius someone into being more rational.
What immediately occurred to me (similar to the infamous scene in The Princess Bride), is that if your opponent believes you will have a distraction and a real attack, simply lauch two real attacks, with the expectation that whichever one the opponent takes to be the distraction will succeed. Obviously this requires a greater sacrifice of materiel, but Quirrelmort doesn’t exactly seem short in that department.
I’m sure that’s the case, I’m just saying it looks bad. Presumably you’d like to be Caesar’s wife?
No, I never got around to actually doing it I’m afraid.
Eliezer, while you’re defending yourself from charges of self-aggrandizement, it troubles me a little bit that AI Box page states that your record is 2 for 2, and not 3 for 5.
To be sure. I was only pointing out that her “giving up immortality” was not nearly as crazy as the words “giving up immortality” might suggest in other contexts.
Veering wildly off-topic:
Arwen was crazy enough to give up the immortality she already had
Come on now. Humans are immortal in Tolkien, they just sit in a different waiting room. (And technically can’t come back until the End of Days™, but who cares about that.)
Given that everyone needs to eat something, we all need to decide whether we believe Taubes or whether we believe Change 4 Life.
Not true at all. There are a thousand factors besides nutrition on which one could base one’s dietary choices: taste, convenience, culture, ethics...
Personally I think the Taubes/paleo picture is probably more right than the conventional picture (based mainly on the smart people I know who have studied the issue), but I’m far from convinced that optimizing my diet for paleo-nutrition would produce a net benefit for my life. (I suppose I could explain what evidence would convince me if anyone cared.)
Also you haven’t mentioned the idea that when you eat could matter as much as what you eat. Thoughts on intermittent fasting (IF)?
A.k.a., ontology with some bells and whistles.
I think it does, since you’ll probably want to buy weapons, hire an assassin, hire a lawyer, etc. But you can change the example to “Send money to al-Qaeda” if you prefer.
Even less than signing up for cryonics do most people want to murder their children. Do expect that telling them “Instead of murdering your children, send aid to Africa (or SIAI)” will increase the amount they send to Africa/SIAI?
That’s not exactly true
Indeed, and while we’re on the subject of idiolects: my preference is for the spelling to follow the pronunciation. Hence either “Charles’s tie” or “Charles’ tie” is correct, depending on how you want it to be pronounced (in this case I usually prefer the latter option, but the meter of the sentence may sometimes make the other a better choice).
Actually, since the Universe is accelerating, the past light cone effectively gets smaller over time. Billions of years from now there will be significantly less cosmological data available.