Note that Harry secretly buried 100 Galleons in the backyard of his parents’ house back in chapter 36, so having seed money is not an issue.
ygert
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Has anyone ever tried to figure out why Quirrel (who is possessed by Voldermort) does not have Voldermort’s face sticking out the back of his head? In this story, He is not wearing a turban, but is instead described as “slightly balding”. Why this change from canon? The law of conservation of detail says that this means something. But what?
Another strange point is that Quirrelmort stopped an anti-polyjuice spell that was directed at him in chapter 79, for no apparent reason. Why? Is he for some reason using polyjuice? But I am pretty sure that he is possessing Quirrel, so what need is there to polyjuce into him?
My proposed answer is this: Voldermort is possessing Quirrel, and to avoid the possibility of being discovered on the back of Quirrel’s head, he is using polyjuce to turn his Quirrel/Voldermort composite body back into a only Quirrel body, without a face on the back of the head. This allows him to throw off a certain amount of suspicion from people like Dumbledore who probably know that when a disembodied spirit posseses someone the possesee gets another face on the back of his head. Quirrel not having anyone on the back of his head is therfore proof to Dumbledore that he is not being possesed by Voldermort.
This is the only way I can think of to reconcile the fact that Quirrel is being possessed by Voldermort with the fact that Quirrelmort did not want to be hit with an anti-polyjuice spell, plus it also explains the departure from cannon about the back of Quirrel’s head, and in addition it shows the high level of intelligence Voldermort has in this story.
There’s also Draco, Tonks, and Andromeda. (Andromeda is Tonks’ mother, Bellatrix’s and Narcissa’s sister.) This is all assuming that the female line counts, which it more or less has to.
Vg frrzf yvxr vg vf. Ryvrmre unf vapyhqrq bgure ersreraprf gb bgure snasvpf va gur cnfg, naq guvf svgf irel jryy jvgu gur gurbel gung Evqqyr jnf onfvpyl gelvat gb chyy n “Qnivq Zbaebr” naq chg uvzfrys (be na nygreangr vqragvgl bs uvzfrys) nf gur ureb svtugvat Ibyqrezbeg. (Gur qvssrerapr jbhyq or bs pbhefr, gung va N Oynpx Pbzrql ur vf abg va pbageby bs obgu cnegf (“Qnivq Zbaebr” naq Ibyqrzbeg), ohg engure gur gb cnegf bs uvz ernyyl ner svtugvat. Vg vf cbffvoyr gung gung vf jung vf unccravat urer nf jryy, ohg V svaq gung engure hayvxryl.)
Hmm… that makes sense. Rot13′d.
Locking criminals up for years, away from everyone else, seems like a horrible way of scaring others into not committing crimes.
Following this train of thought, ideally prisons should be replaced with a more public/visible type of punishment. Maybe caning?
This is a good, basic, well written introduction to what signaling is. Signaling is a quite vital concept that is often not easy to explain, and so it’s nice to have a well written article that explains it well. I definitely will be directing people to this article in the future.
Seconded. In particular, this sort of approach to this kind of subject is very fulfilling, giving the message in clear understandable bits. I feel like I got a lot from reading this, and that always is something I appreciate.
Took it.
Hmm… The calculations work, but somehow it seems against our intuitions. Thinking about it, it seems that the problem is one of scope insensitivity. $100 billion, $700 billion, $7 trillion. They all feel more or less the same, which of course, is absolutely insane. When I look at the numbers, it just feels like “a lot”. Ultimately, what this post is saying is to simply shut up and multiply, which is a very good and and very relevant point.
Yeah, of course, I understand about the problem of scope insensitivity and how to try to avoid it. My point was that before reading this article, I did not think of it like that, but rather just looked at that number and thought “a lot”. Reading this article made me understand that I was being scope insensitive, and that let me put everything into perspective, in a similar manner to the method you stated. The big problem with biases like this isn’t compensating for them once you identify them, but rather identifying them in the first place.
In a worldstate whitch involves the reviving of cryonicly stored people, I would expect a weapon would be one of the last things on my list of things I would need. That is to say, a world which has sufficiently advanced technology, sufficient resorces, and so on to revive cryonicly stored people would not be a wolrd were civilisation has colapsed, not be a world were order has broken down, and in other words would be a world in which a weapon would be about as useful as a weapon is in a first world country today, which is to say, it would be not all that esential.
My idea for this is that Voldemort is on the back of Quirrell’s head, but then the Quirrellmort composite polyjuiced himself back into Quirrell, so that he doesn’t have the huge vulnerability of having a face on the back of his head. (This explains the mystery of why he blocked the polyjuice detection spell that was cast at him at the ministry.)
I think the point is not to think of questions as philosophical or not, but rather look at the people trying to solve these questions. This post is talking about how the people called “philosophers” are not effective at solving these problems, and as such that they should change their approach. In fact, a large part of the Sequences are attempting to solve questions which you might think of as “philosophical” and have in the past been worked on by philosophers. But what this post says is that the correct way to look at these (or any other) problems is to look at them in a rational way (like EY did in writing the Sequences) and not in the way most people (specifically the class of people known as “philosophers”) have tried to solve them in the past.
This lookes like it could be very good. I know some people who have started reading the sequences, were moderately interested, but then stopped as they did not have the time. I am definitely going to recomend this to them. In general, I am a big fan of audiobooks and podcasts for listening to in your spare time, and this combines the greatness of that with the super greatness of the sequences. A big thumbs up from me.
This would mean, of course, that humans can be money-pumped. In other words, if this is really true, there is a lot of money out there “on the table” for anyone to grab by simply money-pumping arbitrary humans. But in real life, if you went and tried to money-pump people, you would not get very far. But I accept a weaker form of what you are saying, that in the normal course of events when people are not consciously thinking about it we can exhibit circular reasoning. But in a situation where we actually are sitting down and thinking and calculating about it, we are capable of “resolving” those apparently circular preferences.
Luckily, there are magical methods. Confundus charm, say, or the Imperius curse. (Yes, that does have the downside of being unethical, so Harry probably would not do it.)
I think you are taking my point as something stronger than what I said. As you pointed out, with humans you can often money pump them once, but not more than that. So it can not truly be said that that preference is fully circular. It is something weaker, and perhaps you could call it a semi-circular preference. My point was that the thing that humans exhibit is not a “circular preference” in the fullest technical sense of the term.
By the way, we were discussing this in the last comment thread based on a much smaller reference. (The whole “erfphvat gur zvavfgre’f qnhtugre” thing). With this new, massive reference of Quirrell to David Monroe, it suddenly seems a lot more likely that EY is specifically trying to point out to us the similarity.
This system dosen’t seem to have a way of taking into acount varying levels of skill in diffrent fields. For instance, if someone is an expert in a paticular field, and is right about questions that field a very large percentage of the time, and most of the time votes only on questions in that field, that person’s votes will have a very large weight on all questions, even if he only is average in subjects other than in his own field. In this system, his votes will have a very high weight, as he is almost always right on the questions he votes on, as he nearly only votes on the ones he knows a lot about. Then he goes and votes on some things he knows nothing about, yet he still gets high weights on his votes. If he votes on many decisions in his field for each one he votes on in fields he knows nothing about, he will keep his high vote weight, and so will keep influencing some decisions (that is, the ones not in his field) far more than he “should”.