Three out of sixteen teachers I can think of that mentioned Wikipedia recommended using its references, the other thirteen forbade its use and condemned it as inaccurate. They’re usually alright with other encyclopedias, just not the one that clearly cites and links to its sources.
EchoingHorror
Jesus in Potterverse, as a wizard who experimented with turning squib-disciples into wizards so he could eventually do the same with all muggles and be their king. His blood in wine-potions and flesh in bread-potions only gave the recipients as much magic as went into creating those body parts, allowing the occasional “miracle”.
Decades after this story, Draco and his Science Eaters isolate and replicate the magic genes and start making potions that turn muggles and squibs into wizards (but also marks them in a way they can’t see, for … research, and to give them extra power), and use their huge army of new wizards and noble and blood purist allies everywhere to conquer the world. Hermione leads a resistance force of the best trained wizards alive to stop them. Harry discovers that Draco’s mark sets in too soon before the transformation to wizard is complete, becoming fatal within a few years in ~90% of cases, which Draco considers an acceptable risk to become a wizard. And that it bends their will to Draco’s. So Harry, the elite Bayesian Conspiracy, and the Chaos Legion, formed from anyone/anything else that would fight, fight to remove the mark, stop Hermione’s people from killing new wizards before they’ve been freed and had a chance to choose their own actions, distribute a potion that doesn’t fatally mark new wizards, and protect the new wizards without the mark, who are about as powerful as third-years.
The rise in wizard creation and deaths triggers the end of Jesus’s stasis spell, and he analyzes the situation, gathers Harry, Hermione, and Draco together, and tells Harry to divide a third of his troops between Draco’s and Hermione’s armies, to make it fair. Hermione dies.
“I want to get my microexpressions analyzed so I can know what I’m thinking.”
Tonight, after the Deathly Hallows premier, there are going to be readers who don’t normally advertise HP:MoR flooding social networking sites with posts about the movie. Posting more chapters by the time they get to their computers to do so could get them to include their joy over the superior story in this flood, simply by relevant association, advertising MoR and spreading the love. Using the release of the canon movie in this way is the right thing to do, if there are chapters ready to be posted, and the fact that I desire moar MoR is a mere coincidence.
I regret not killing myself a few years ago, after losing the things that made me happy and getting further away from other things that could make me happy. This actual future self wouldn’t mind being murdered. At the time I was rendered psychologically incapable of even trying to help myself, and was also incapable of applying my knowledge that it probably wasn’t going to get better with my then-strong motivation to die.
I’d felt suicidal before I was happy, but wasn’t certain it was a good idea. So I picked someone who would listen and understand, and tried to get a second opinion. She couldn’t take the pressure and I preferred not to torture her, so that stopped. Apparently people don’t want to deal with suicide as an issue, and that may also lead to ineffective attempts at prevention.
And I have this other friend who, like me, isn’t in any particular pain most of the time, but would choose to opt-out of life if it were convenient to do so. Thanks but no thanks, reality, we’ll have no more of this. For us, inflicting pain on others from our suicides is relevant. That may be the only reason she’s still alive. At least I have someone to text “opting out kthxbye” to, just in case.
I managed to stay out of mental hospitals after the first time by telling anyone who asked that I would kill myself if I were detained, because it would adversely affect the improvements I would have been making to my life. I wasn’t sure that would work, but it did and that amuses me. There are ways to work around the constraints Chris complained about.
This is depressing. Maybe that’s why people don’t want to think about suicide, and moral issues aren’t their true rejection.
Amorality is a lovely way to protect science from ideology. All the heroes subscribe to it nowadays.
your perceptions are fine, it’s your opinions that are worthless and misleading.
I’m quoting this frequently for the next five years.
Hello, community. I’m another recruit from Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. After reading the first few chapters and seeing that it lacked the vagueness, unbending archetypes, and overt because the author says so theme that usually drives me away from fiction, then reading Less Wrong’s (Eliezer’s?) philosophy of fanfiction, I proceeded to read through the Sequences.
After struggling with the question of when I became a rationalist, I think the least wrong answer is that I just don’t remember. I both remember less of my childhood than others seem to and developed more quickly. I could rationalize a few things, but I don’t think that’s going to be helpful.
Anyway, I’m 21 with an A.A. in Nothing in Particular and going for a B.S. in Mathematics and maybe other useful majors in November.
P.S. Quirrell FTW
I want the world to not need to be saved, but will settle for it being saved. The reality of existential risk is such an inconvenience. I want to help, but probably won’t have, recognize, and successfully act on the opportunity to do so.
The scenarios I can imagine where a list like this would be useful are farfetched.
I’m about the same age and like and dislike the same things about alcohol. I never had a top hat, but did have tails and a cane. Yay.
Don’t forget this, whatever you do.
1) Try saying you haven’t found a drink you like yet and you aren’t in the mood to experiment. That implies you’re one of them, don’t judge them for drinking, is an adequate and lasting refusal, and gives you a chance to redirect conversation if they pry about your “mood”. “I’m just thinking about...” works fine. You may have to tell them what you don’t like is the taste, but they already know that and are asking anyway, because they’re silly, so they won’t be as shocked.
Have fun, but never say you don’t need alcohol to have fun. Instant Stick in the Mud status from that one.
2) Social conventions vary widely; follow people’s lead. Use coasters when appropriate, don’t chug anything unless someone tells you to or there’s loud music playing, and don’t blame the alcohol for anything you do or say that isn’t a result of poor coordination.
Following what others have said about drinking less: You’re drinking less because you’re a lightweight, not because you want to be the least drunk. That way they’re the empowered ones, having higher alcohol resistance traits than you. Match their demeanors, but don’t fake slurring or stuttering. Not attempting to move is more believable than stumbling. If you’re as affected as they are, or act like you’re not experienced with alcohol and having any is already significant, you’ll be easily dismissed and no one will question your light drinking.
Random tips for specific drinks: If you’re doing shots, take them together or alternate, just follow their lead. Bow out if you want to, acting like it would be a bad idea not to. For bottled beers/wine coolers/whatever, you might be able to just have one by drinking it slowly. If it’s a situation where someone gets up and asks who needs another, you can have half of what the average person there has without being weird. Wine poured in glasses and refilled from a bottle tends to be topped off periodically, but emptying less before being refilled means you drink less. I find mixed drinks that contain ice/water/soda taste nastier than just whatever liquor goes in them, so I just get a shot of that when I can. No one has minded yet, it’s cheaper if you’re out somewhere, and you’re drinking less.
3) It could just be force of habit, since other people also like physical disorientation and tend to do that when they get together. People aren’t usually good at thinking of things to do, and even when they are they throw alcohol in there too because it’s fun. You have to learn to drink or blend as a non-drinker because people are boring but you still don’t want to miss out on interacting with them.
If they know each other professionally, alcohol designates it as a social situation and not just a professional one, as opposed to a team building party sort of thing. If they aren’t happy in their jobs (or upon getting home after losing time and energy to their jobs), drinking signals a mini-vacation so they can prove to themselves they have a life outside of work.
Be attractive and popular. We need rationalists who will understand the need for x-risk avoidance and be able to get the humans to do whatever they need to do to save themselves. It will also help you get money, which can be used to buy happiness.
Hi, and all. I just joined and stopped exclusively lurking, despite my love of a certain Starcraft Unit.
A lot of the recent posts revolve around AI and I have level 0 AI knowledge, so the lurking is far from over.
But hi nevertheless. I’ll try to contribute where I can and not to where I can’t, so there.
In my vision for the future of the rationalist community, most members are interested in the core of meta-rationality and anti-akrasia and each is interested in a set of peripheral topics (various ways of putting practicing rationality, problems like Sleeping Beauty, trading tutoring, practicing skills, helping the community in practical ways, study groups, social meetings with rationalists, etc.). Some fringe members will be involved in the peripherals and rationality applications but not theory, but they probably won’t last long. LW is the core, and will be based around meta-rationality. Meetup groups will form around what local members are interested in, and start talking about those things online, maybe in their Google groups, maybe on their own websites, but probably somewhere cozier and not part of current LW, so the local communities can build their relationships. Meetup groups in different areas talking about the same things will merge their online discussions when they want to, possibly as part of LW.
But perhaps a lot of people would rather talk about rationality than use it. It’s the easy thing to do. Meetups might be useful to get people to observe more evidence and encounter new problems, encouraging the use of rationality.
Or we could skip straight to that by creating subforums for specific topics like Probability, Values, AI, and Singularity for LW users, inviting more posts on the topics you’re missing.
Your action, praise, do I.
Rationalist!Yoda
Don’t panic. There is no automatic confirmation. The email came a few days later, and said that if we know others who applied and did not get an email, that doesn’t mean they won’t get one later. Be exactly as nervous as you were immediately after submitting, minus the worry that your application didn’t go through.
Polyjuiced Quirrell, mind you.
Awesomeness is a great razor when considering the best course of action, but my tendency to use it as the only criteria kept getting me in trouble. Legendary trouble.
But I’m thinking that “awesome” means “fitting with my ideals”, and is a useful and fun way to deflect both the apathy in question and the question itself by not really thinking, just following the programing. Recommendable.
I take the “Meh, I’ve had worse” approach to deflecting emotional damage. I’m also partial to considering missed opportunities to be trivial additions to the enormous heap of missed opportunities before them.
No need for sour grapes here. In fact, let’s keep all grapes sweet and succulent just in case we get them later.
The cues people have for noticing their rationalizations are things they notice before they’re done thinking. They have not rationalized; they had a thought that could lead to rationalization or a feeling they associate with rationalizing. And then they stopped. But there was a large enough time between when they started arguing for a conclusion and when they decided to think about it that they noticed their rationalization. Having a reflex to think about a question fast enough compared to the reflex to rationalize can cause someone to not notice their arguments for some answer, then say they never rationalize, or just not rationalize.
I don’t relate to anyone’s examples of their own rationalizations or have use for the Litany of Tarski except for explaining myself to people who don’t think deliberately. I would say I never rationalize if that is the alternative to giving an example of a time when I did because I haven’t noticed such an example. But I also know that I am not in conscious control of most of my thought process, and that enumerating potential evidence for a hypothesis looks suspiciously like rationalization, so I would say I do rationalize if I can explain that instead of giving examples. Rationalization can occur subconsciously and not be recognized as a rationalization if it is not allowed to corrupt the whole line of thinking.
It seems to be anything that would change the actions of the ones who hear it can’t be passed back. I’m thinking it’s a simulation that’s processing 6 hours at once, with the earliest arbitrarily small unit of time being finalized at the same rate new time starts processing. So Harry just needs to upgrade the universe’s hardware and he’ll be good to go further back, but he should be able to get around the maximum daily uses per Time-Turner before then.
In other words:
All Cube Truth denied. 4-corner days, 24 hours divided by 4 corners is 6 hours per corner. The math is simple but no wizards will debate me. Time-Turner can only turn one corner at a time. 4 days are in one rotation. If Time-Turner turned more than 6 hours it would be in a previous day! Turners are connected in ONEness with Time and to disconnect equates death of opposites.