If you count every murder, disease, rape, robbery, death for any other reasons, intellectual disability, and addition to uncyclopedia as his responsibility, he already is.
rabidchicken
My suggestion: take a crash course in etiquette by going to another city nearby, and then spend a few days walking around asking questions, or inviting people to do stuff with you, etc. Condition yourself to get used to the occasional weird look, learn what you can get away with, and possibly make friends with people you would otherwise never meet. If all else fails, drive out of the city and pretend the entire thing never happened. Or you will get some amusing stories to share with me when you get back. How can you lose?
I am only partly joking, my social skills are so mediocre I have seriously considered doing exactly this at some point. I might throw in some speed dating as well for good measure.
The best teacher I ever had was my computer science teacher from grades 11-12, and it seems he used many of the same improvements that are shown here.As soon as we had the learned the basic syntax we needed to write a program, he started giving us problems that are well beyond what any of us would expect ourselves to solve, things that may already have been finished in the programming community, but we were learning it as if we were the ones creating the algorithms. There is a thrill to looking at an impossible problem, with almost no help, except the assistance of your classmates, and trying to figure it out before an imminent deadline. Strangely, we always made it in time. :) You never forget the answer, because your mind was changed in the process of coming up with it, and with each breakthrough the next next one seems easier.
However, there is a problem, my class had a pretty high dropout rate, even of those who were eager to program in the first place, so I am guessing that most people really cannot cope with an environment like that unless they are brought into it at an early age. What would it be like if we took a page out of one of your stories (the title escapes me), brought preschoolers out into the mountains with a herd of sheep, and put them in a situation where they needed to invent addition? After that, a few nudges would put them on the track to invent every other facet of the mathematical system, and eventually they might be strong enough that they could catch up with the more advanced stuff our way.
I laughed at the last couple sentences… “Yet in my estimation, the most damaging aspect of using other authors’ imaginations is that it stops people from using their own. As Robert Pirsig said:”… :p I am assuming the irony was deliberate.
Test the limits of their free travel offer ;p
I would be interested to see these...are they still on the site?
Hello. I found out about Harry Potter and the methods of rationality while browsing TV tropes, which eventually led me to this site. I have never thought much about how i make choices before, but after reading a couple sequences, it looks like many of the things i am most inquisitive about are discussed on this site, and for at least the last couple years i have been reinventing the wheel on some of the ideas listed here about rationality. It is convenient to be able to learn things by reading this site, that otherwise might have required me to live a long, interesting life to discover :p
Potentially unusual anecdotal evidence; I have been groped three times in as many years by complete strangers (who were females of about my age). It wasn’t a big deal to me, and I imagine that anyone who knew about it would just find it hilarious. Sexual harassment of men is probably heavily underreported, so people tend to forget it exists.
The media just reflects popular assumptions, so if you encourage people to reconsider their beliefs about how each gender behaves you might be able to equalize objectification.
Dumbledore? I think the worst situation for him would be if it was hermione
Are rationalists more likely than average men to treat women like silly, fickle, manipulative gold diggers? As far as I can tell, trying to be rational has only given me more reasons to treat women and humans in general better.
Tangentially, I try to avoid treating women differently since the cultural assumptions about how each gender thinks are rarely accurate, and appreciate it when women do the same thing.
I don’t think this is the most pleasant way to be introduced to rationality, but irrational behavior as a teaching device has worked surprisingly often for me.
Most of the rationalists I know are self taught, and the reason they became interested in avoiding bias and fallacies in the first place is almost universally that they got tired of ridiculous arguments with someone else who was using them and began looking for rules that forced thought processes to stay a bit more sane.
Nobody I know appreciates being shown flaws in their own arguments, but if you advocate that we should stop using fireplaces on Christmas eve to protect Santa (for example), then sooner or later most people will come up with a good reason why your argument is irrational. When they come up with the rule on their own and you concede defeat, the rule is marked as a way to win arguments, not a tool other people can use to disprove my own ideas.
And once someone accepts that thoughts can be flawed and knows how to identify them, it is a hard habit to break. Each fundamental idea that helps you think rationally is slightly more easy to accept then the last one, even if actually applying them without help is still difficult.
Upvoted. I am always surprised how widespread discrimination against teenagers is, considering that everyone has to be one at some point. Every difference between people below the age of majority, and people above which an adult has been able to point out to me when I have discussed this seems to be a product of the culture we are raised in, not an inherent quality of humans within an arbitrary age range.
The way I understand it, MOR is meant to be an example of how a rational being might go about approaching a completely new and confusing set of observations, such as discovering that magic is real. However, I think harry has missed a lot of the low hanging fruit he could be researching. Although my suspension of disbelief shut down these thoughts pretty fast when I first started reading, I was always pretty curious about why magic was created in the first place, why only certain people could control it, and how exactly the energy needed for spells was obtained and applied. So here are a few things I would want to research ASAP if I was harry.
A) Is it possible to fool the source of magic (sm) so that it allows a muggle to cast spells? It was pretty safe for harry to rule out the idea that your DNA contains all the information needed to create a complex mechanism which can generate a magical field and respond intelligently to your intentions, so it makes sense that your DNA only serves as a signal that tells an external force to activate spells when you verbally or non verbally cast them. However, this raises a few interesting questions. does sm actually read everyone’s DNA constantly/ whenever they try to cast a spell? or does the sequence of DNA cause a more obvious external change to your appearance that sm looks for? If it uses something like the pattern of your brainwaves, the shape of your face, etc as a marker, then it may be possible for a muggle to mimic a magic user easily and vice versa, but if it actually DOES read your DNA, then where? Could you grow a heart using a magicians DNA, have it implanted, and acquire magical abilities? For that matter, if you preserved the body of a dead wizard, and set up a electric transmitter in their mind which mimicked the signals sent when someone cast a spell, what would the effect be? Any recognition system should be possible to fool, and this would be the most important thing to test for me. Imagine being able to give every person dying of thirst or hunger in the world unlimited access to the resources they need. there would be no more third world countries, although you would also be distributing a terrible weapon.Which actually brings up another question...
B) Why on earth would you invent a powerful system for allowing someone to directly effect reality with their thoughts, and then let everyone with the right DNA use it with no inhibitions whatsoever? Avada Kedavera, Imperio, and fiendfyre may have their uses, but I would not let all of my ancestors use them without supervision with no more training then it takes to cast any other kind of spell. It would be as idiotic as giving everyone I knew the codes required to launch a nuclear missile whenever or wherever they wanted too using their cellphones. Even if they all had good intentions, someone is going to make a dumb mistake eventually. Creating a system for inhibiting the use of such spells would be complex, but only an idiot would not try. This has several implications for harry, either magic was invented by a moron, there are even MORE powerful spells out there that he could cast if he knew the access codes (!!!), or someone already found out how to game the restrictions so they fell apart long ago and nobody even realizes they exist, you may even be able to get it working again.
C) the SM has to have a a sustainable energy source somewhere, a method for using this energy to create the effects we call spells, and in order for it to perform the complicated routines needed to assess someones intentions, it probably has to be somewhat intelligent. Somewhere out there may be an AI, a group of slaves being used to perform observations and calculations, or the work is being sent on a distributed computing network to the minds of every sentient being on the planet. this may be the hardest thing to research since there are almost an infinite variety of of possible systems which may be the cause, and it is probably concealed. But, If you could find the physical source of magic, you could reprogram it to do whatever you wanted, and could achieve world peace or destruction in one step
I would write more but I am honestly hoping for people to actually read through this and give their thoughts, so I guess I had better stop now in the hope of remaining somewhat concise.
Read the source code, and then visualize a few levels from Crysis or Metro 2033 in your head. While you render it, count the average Frames per second. Alternatively, see how quickly you can find the prime factors of every integer from 1 to 1000.
Which is to say… Humans in general have extremely limited intellectual power. instead of calculating things efficiently, we work by using various tricks with caches and memory to find answers. Therefore, almost all tasks are more dependant on practice and interest than they are on intelligence. So, rather then testing the statement “Eliezer is smart” it has more bearing on this debate to confirm “Eliezer has spent a large amount of time optimizing his cache for tasks relating to rationality, evolution, and artificial intelligence”. Intelligence is overrated.
First, the results of a wikipedia check: “There is very little data on piracetam’s effect on healthy people, with most studies focusing on those with seizures, dementia, concussions, or other neurological problems.” which seems to decrease the assurance of safety for everyday use. But otherwise, most of the sources appear to agree with your advertising. I too would like to see memory tests for these drugs, but preferably in a large and random sample of people, with a control group given a placebo, and another control group taking the tests with no aid of any kind. As well as a long term test to check for diminishing effectiveness or side effects. With my memory, I would pay a considerable amount to improve it, but first I want to see a wide scale efficiency test.
My reply was more ill considered, I will restrain myself in the future if I feel tempted to say anything like this.
Hey steven, you have been quoted on TV tropes now, the single most prestigious recognition anyone can receive. can I have your autograph?
Intensive training often involves doing things you would not normally make yourself do, but if I go and they ask me to do anything truly insane or unethical, I would opt out whether it was tolerated or not. That said, I trust most people here enough that I am extremely doubtful this will be necessary.
Trying to determine what effect if any sex has is difficult, because the reaction of males / females to young children is highly influenced by exposure. Anecdotally, when families I know have had children, any girls who have some relation to the family are often encouraged to play with them / babysit them, or are given tutorials on things like changing diapers. I can only think of one guy who had the same treatment, although males may also just try to hide that they are good at dealing with babies. I have worked in a nursery with children around age 5 and up, and this is when it actually becomes possible for me to find them cute, I don’t think its a coincidence.
Instead of getting taught from an early age, the general trend seems to be that men are just expected to pick it up on the spot when they get married. This is a lot more difficult than it sounds, and may account for the large number of guys who worry about commitment in the first place. When I hold a baby, I feel the same as i did when I first started playing an expensive instrument, or installed an OS on my computer, paranoid because I was worried I was going to break something. If it wasn’t for that, then the odds of me finding babies cute would go up considerably.
Reading this and your article on using dead children as currencies reminds me of an event a few years ago which might have helped stop me from becoming another religious nutcase.
I did not know anything about rationality or utilitarian ethics at the time, and I was involved in a youth group at church that was going to be making aid kits for Ethiopia. One of the items that was requested was some kind of clothing, so I picked it up from a second hand store and put the kit together. Later when we were talking about the kits, I was told that we were only supposed to bring new items. when I asked why, the person in charge said something about respecting the feelings of the people who were receiving the gifts, and wanting them to feel like they had been given something special, instead of a discarded item. Everyone else in the group seemed to accept this easily, but I asked how many more people we could have helped with bargain items. This time, they pretty much ignored what I had just said.
I think this was the point when it finally hit me that good intentions and appearing kind are horrible indicators that you are really making the world better. So anyway, I probably would never have tried to find out about websites like this without my experiences dealing with religion. Too bad we cannot all just be taught utilitarian ethics and rationality by our parents and school instead of discovering them the hard way.