mare-of-night
I took the survey.
Did anyone else fall on the borderline for some of these questions? I was in a weird space for the one about whether you ever had a relationship with someone else from LW (they introduced me to LW).
I’d been wondering if Harry might have left Hermione’s transfigured body with someone else. Probably not Neville or Quirrel, because the professors are already paying attention to them lately and Harry doesn’t completely trust Quirrel’s intentions. But he could safely leave it with Lesath, as long as no one saw Harry give Lesath the body and reclaim it later. Harry considers Lesath’s loyalty a resource now, and no one else thinks Lesath is relevant. It’s not typical of Harry to rely on others for help, though, so I’m not confident that he actually did this.
Alternately, he might want people to believe he has transfigured his father’s rock again, but not be actually planning to keep it transfigured, because he wants to carry the Hermione diamond and let people think it is the rock.
I wonder if resurrection via transfiguration is possible? It’s probably too simple a solution narrative-wise, but it seems like something a reductionist should at least try.
Harry and Hermione’s failed attempt to transfigure a lost book is evidence against this working, since that also involved transfiguring something specific that contains information. But magic has enough strange rules that there are plausible reasons why that could fail but transfiguring a specific person could succeed—maybe you can’t transfigure a specific thing while the original still exists, or something like that.
Harry would probably want to start with some less ethically risky experiments, to avoid making a doomed conscious that doesn’t want to die. He could check whether transfiguring a copy of a brain works by having someone else train an animal to do something unusual, and then trying to transfigure an object into that animal. He’d know it worked if the trainer observed the animal doing the thing it was trained to do. (The person doing the transfiguration shouldn’t know what knowledge the animal has that makes it unusual, so that they have to transfigure that specific animal, not just an animal with the same appearance that knows the same trick.) For good measure, he should try doing this after killing the original.
If that worked, he’d have to find someone extremely good at sustaining transfigurations to transfigure Hermione, since he wouldn’t want her to keep re-dying each time the transfiguration wore off. For it to be a permanent solution, Hermione would have to learn how to transfigure herself like a troll, which could take a while.
Now that I think about it, it should at least be possible to transfigure an inanimate object into a non-specific muggle, if it’s possible to transfigure an object into a non-specific animal. If anyone ever did that, it’s a really, really good thing they kept it a secret. (No one sees a problem with killing a pig by turning it back into a desk, or burning a transfigured chicken inside a bubblehead charm, and muggles already have less-than-human legal status. Someone might transfigure very short-lived servants, or worse.)
Where I’ve heard the term used, it’d be unprocessed. As someone who can’t eat the usual meat preservatives at all for health reasons, I can tell you for sure that typical plastic wrapped hamburger meat isn’t preserved with anything (which, based on the examples, would probably be the reason why processed meat is bad for you).
You know what it’s called when you hear voices giving you “advice”? Paranoid schizophrenia. Outright visual hallucinations?
Sounds like the noncentral fallacy. That you are somewhat in control, and that the tulpa will leave you alone (at least temporarily) if asked, seem like relevant differences from the more central cases of mental illness.
This sounds like the system that France had before the first French Revolution. That is, up until 1789; I’m not sure when it started. I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar system existed in other European countries at around the same time, but I’m not sure which. (I’ve only been reading history for a couple years, and most of it has been research for fiction I wanted to write, so my knowledge is pretty specifically focused.)
Under this system, the way property is inherited depends on the type of property. Noble propes is dealt with in the way you describe—it can’t be sold or given away, and when the owner dies, it has to be given to heirs, and it can’t be split among them very much. My notes say the amount that goes to the main heir is the piece of land that includes the main family residence plus 1⁄2 − 4⁄5 of everything else, which I think means there’s a legal minimum within that range that varies by province, but I’m not completely sure. Propes* includes lands and rights over land (land ownership is kind of weird at this time—you can own the tithe on a piece of land but not the land itself, for example) that one has inherited. Noble propes is propes that belongs to a nobleperson or is considered a noble fief.
Commoner inheritance varies a lot by region. Sometimes it’s pretty similar to noble inheritance (all or most of propes must go to the first living heir), sometimes the family can choose one heir to inherit more than the others, sometimes an equal split is required. There’s no law against selling or giving away common (non-noble) propes, but some of the provinces that require an equal split have laws to prevent parents from using gifts during their lifetime to give one child more than the others.
I’m not sure what effect noble property law had on agricultural development. I know France’s agriculture was lagging far behind England’s during the 18th century, but I never saw it attributed to this, at least not directly. (The reasons I can remember seeing are tenant farming with short tenures, and farmers having insufficient capital to buy newer tools.) The commoner inheritance system did fragment the land holdings, as you said. The main problems I remember hearing about with that were farms becoming too small to support a person (so the farmers would also work part-time as tenant farmers or day laborers, or abandon the farm and leave), and limiting social mobility by requiring wealthy commoners to divide their wealth with each new generation.
Most of this is coming from notes I took on the book Marriage and the Family in 18th Century France by Traer. I’m not sure how much you wanted to know, so ask if there’s anything you’re curious about that I didn’t include, and I’ll see if I can dig it up. If you want to research this, my impression is that finding good history books about a specific place is much easier if you can read the language spoken there, so it might be worth checking what the property laws were in places that speak the languages you know. If you need sources in English, having access to a university library helps a lot. When looking for information on France during this time period, “Ancien Regime” and “early modern” are useful keywords.
Lease-like arrangements that are practically selling are allowed, though. The only one I can think of at the moment is called alienation—basically you sell it except the new “owner’s” (or their heirs or whoever they sell the land to) pay your family rent for the land, forever. Something similar can be done with money, as a sort of loan that is never paid off. (These are called rentes fonciérs and rentes constituées, respectively—in case you ever want to look up more information.) They’re technically movable property, but they’re legally counted as propes, and treated the same way as noble land.
I heard about a study once that found lower rates of autism diagnosis in England than in most other places, and postulated that it was because English culture considers eccentricity more normal. (I can’t vouch for this being true, since I never saw the actual paper, but it would be interesting if it was.) I wonder if New England would show the same pattern.
Taking this was an interesting feeling. In particular, being asked (even anonymously) about donations and other concrete actions in a context where donating a lot is the norm. The scene in HP:MOR where the phoenix asks Hermione who she’s saved comes to mind. That is, being asked just made it very obvious that I believe I should be an effective altruist, but from my actions it doesn’t look like I am one. I have reasons for that, but it’s still worrying, since I don’t have much evidence that I won’t just change my mind once I do have money.
For what it’s worth, I just set up a bunch of email reminders throughout my last semester to make sure I put some kind of donation plan in place by the time I start working (even if it’s “nevermind, I was wrong about my values”).
I’d bought some apples from a store on campus and was carrying them in a plastic bag while waiting in line to pay at a different store. I heard a thud, and looked down, and there was an apple on the ground. I picked it up, and then felt the bag for holes. I didn’t find any. I also counted the number of apples in the bag, and the number of apples I remembered buying were still in there. I knew that it was very, very unlikely that the apple had just appeared there, but I did assign a very small probability that I’d just seen something that didn’t fit with known physics. A couple minutes later, the same thing happened again—another thud, another apple appearing on the floor. It only happened twice, though. Orpnhfr nsgre gung, n olfgnaqre cbvagrq bhg gb zr gung gurer jnf n grne va gur fvqr bs gur ont gung jnf arkg gb zl obql, juvpu unq znqr vg uneq gb qrgrpg ol whfg srryvat gur bhgfvqr naq obggbz bs gur ont.
People who want to eat fewer animal products usually have a set of foods that are always okay and a set of foods that are always not (which sometimes still includes some animal products, such as dairy or fish), rather than trying to eat animal products less often without completely prohibiting anything. I’ve heard that this is because people who try to eat fewer animal products usually end up with about the same diet they had when they were not trying.
I wonder whether trying to eat more of something that tends to fill the same role as animal products would be an effective way to eat fewer animal products.
I currently have a fridge full of soaking dried beans that I have to use up, and the only way I know how to serve beans is the same as the way I usually eat fish, so I predict I’ll be eating much less fish this week than I usually do (because if I get tired of rice and beans, rice and fish won’t be much of a change). I’m not sure whether my result would generalize to people who use more than five different dinner recipes, though. I should also add that my main goal is learning how to make cheap food taste good by getting more practice cooking beans—eating fewer animal products would just be a side effect.
Now that I write this, I’m wishing I’d thought to record what food I ate before filling my fridge with beans. (I did write down what I could remember.)
Yes, but the operative question here isn’t whether it’s mental illness, it’s whether it’s beneficial. Similarity to harmful mental illnesses is a reason to be really careful (having a very low prior probability of anything that fits the “mental illness” category being a good thing), but it’s not a knockdown argument.
If we accept psychology’s rule that a mental trait is only an illness if it interferes with your life (meaning moderate to large negative effect on a person’s life, as I understand it), then something being a mental illness is a knockdown argument that it is not beneficial. But in that case, you have to prove that the thing has a negative affect on the person’s life before you can know that is a mental illness. (See also http://lesswrong.com/lw/nf/the_parable_of_hemlock/.)
Seconded. This feels somehow similar to purchasing fuzzies and utilions separately? Basically figuring out what value you’re getting out of what you already do in your down-time (relaxation, making social connections, etc) and try to get more of it. A possible failure mode for productive downtime would be doing things that are to-do-list productive but don’t leave you feeling like you’ve had downtime.
After coming close to being unable to pay at a restaurant once, I do this with money, and it works well. It’s not cheap in the same way, so I do have to only put it in places where I’ll remember to retrieve it later (usually just in an inner pocket of each of my frequently-used bags). But, having extra money with me that doesn’t go into my “do I have enough for this outing” calculation has saved me some worrying.
Actually, I guess this is a general strategy for stuff you might unexpectedly need, or might loose the first copy of. I’ve also done it with travel documents, (non-perishable) snacks, medicine, and a few other things. Usually I just put a couple copies in each purse or backpack, though; I haven’t tried many creative hiding places.
Outside of LesssWrong, the (Five Geek Social Fallacies)[http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html] comes to mind.
I remember seeing another LW member comment that over-the-counter drugs tend to get sold in too-high dosages because people who don’t know how to dose (most customers) assume the strongest is best, and the stores stock the versions that are selling best, leading to doses that are too high for the typical user being the most commonly sold ones. I don’t remember where the original comment was, unfortunately.
I just resisted bystander apathy. But probably all I did was call the cops on some cops.
I was driving home from work, and I saw some people getting pulled over, but the people pulling them over didn’t look like police. It didn’t look any different than what I would see if some plain-clothes police officers had seen someone speeding, but I had a really bad feeling about it for some reason, so it didn’t seem like a good idea to do nothing. My phone wasn’t charged, though, and my destination didn’t have phone reception, so I let my phone charge for a few minutes when I got to my destination (which was nearby). I also asked a friend what they thought I should do (it seemed like a good idea to a basic “am I being stupid?” check), looked up the local non-emergency police number, and wrote down everything I could remember about what I’d seen. After charging the phone, I had to drive back to somewhere where I could get reception, so I didn’t make the call until half an hour after the fact.
I think the main thing that would’ve helped me handle this better is having thought out in advance what to do in common emergency-like situations. Something really general, like “if there are IDs of any sort, consider writing them down”, could have been useful here. Also, “borrowing things from other people is possible” (like charged phones), and “consider safety before entering a situation” (having nowhere to pull over was the first reason I decided not to—there’s some chance I could have acted too quickly if there were a convenient driveway). Putting phone numbers for police into my phone would also be a good thing to do in the future.
I’d like to point out that romantic and/or sexual relationships do tend to work better if the people are attracted to each other. Appearance plays a role in many peoples’ attractiveness functions. It’s difficult or perhaps impossible to intentionally change one’s attractiveness function, so this doesn’t indicate a personality flaw or moral failure. Optimizing for attractive appearance at the expense of other things might be a mistake*, but most people would do best if they at least satisfice for it.
I’m sure some people do weight appearance for signaling value when choosing a partner, but I don’t think it could be the only reason. Most people I have talked to about this say that appearances influence how attractive they find someone, and they don’t all agree on what they find attractive, even within the same social circles.
*I know that the chemical things that happen in the brain when a person is in love can make them like things about the other person that they would ordinarily be bothered by. I remember several times when I started finding a person much more visually attractive than I had when I’d first met them when other things changed (getting to know them better, etc.), and also finding strangers who looked like them slightly attractive. My attraction function is really weird, though, so this isn’t very strong evidence unless I see other people reporting the same experience.
You could for example apply your argument to say “well, is the voice threatening to kill you only if you don’t study for your test? If so, isn’t the net effect beneficial, and as such it’s not really a mental illness? If you like being motivated by your voices, you don’t suffer from schizophrenia, that’s only for people who dislike their voices.”
If you’re going to define schizophrenia as voices that are bad for the person, then that would mean that it’s only for people who dislike their voices (and are not deluded about whether the voices are a net benefit).
Voices threatening to kill you if you don’t achieve your goals also doesn’t seem like a good example of a net benefit—that would cause a lot of stress, so it might not actually be beneficial. It’s also not typical behavior for tulpas, based on the conversations in the tulpa subreddit. Voices that annoy you when you don’t work or try to influence your behavior with (simulated?) social pressure would probably be more typical.
Anyway… I’m trying to figure out where exactly we disagree. After thinking about it, I think I “downvote” mental disorders for being in the “bad for you” category rather than the “abnormal mental things” category, and the “mental disorder” category is more like a big warning sign to check how bad it is for people. Tulpas look like something to be really, really careful about because they’re in the “abnormal mental things” category (and also the “not well understood yet” category), but the people on the tulpa subreddit don’t seem unhappy or frustrated, so I haven’t added many “bad for you” downvotes.
I’ve also got some evidence indicating that they’re at least not horrible:
People who have tulpas say they think it’s a good thing
People who have tulpas aren’t saying really worrying things (like suggesting they’re a good replacement for having friends)
The process is somewhat under the control of the “host”—progressing from knowing what the tulpa would say to auditory hallucinations to visual ones seems to take a lot of effort for most people
No one is reporting having trouble telling the tulpa apart from a real person or non-mental voices (one of the problematic features of schizophrenia is that the hallucinations can’t be differentiated from reality)
I’ve already experienced some phenomena similar to this, and they haven’t really affected my wellbeing either way. (You know how writes talk about characters “taking off a life of their own”, so writing dialog feels more like taking dictation and the characters might refuse to go along with a pre-planned plot? I’ve had some of this. I’ve also (very rarely) had characters spontaneously “comment” on what I’m doing or reading.)
This doesn’t add up to enough to make me anywhere near certain—I’m still very suspicious about this being safe, and it seems like it would have to be taking up some of your cognitive resources. But it might be worth investigating (mainly the non-hallucination parts—being able to see the tulpa doesn’t seem that useful), since human brains are better at thinking about people than most other things.