Took it.
ygert
Professor McGonagall looked like she was in pain. “Alastor—but—will you teach the classes, if—” “Ha!” said Moody. “If I ever say yes to that question, check me for Polyjuice, because it’s not me.”
Did anyone else laugh out loud at that line? :-)
I would refrain from discussing it in a public forum like this one.
“Whatever you can rightly say about India, the opposite is false.”
I just went and watched (half of) the video you just linked to. As someone who has heard of My Little Pony but never actually watched any of it, I can say that while I knew that this was not real, and knowing that I could see how it was not real, I see how without that I would not have been able to tell. While I am sure you can tell the differences at a glance, it is not obvious to someone who has not watched it. In other words, the Illusion of Transparency is kicking in.
With all that said, I think this post just got me to try watching My Little Pony. I have heard nothing but good about it in the past, and this post gives me just that little push that might get me to actually watch it. When I do watch it, if I like it, (which I most likely will, given the fanbase it has here on Less Wrong), please accept my thanks for finally pushing me to watch this (presumably) great show.
I was rereading HP Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu lately, and the quote from the Necronomicon jumped out at me as a very good explanation of exactly why cryonics is such a good idea.
(Full disclosure: I myself have not signed up for cryonics. But I intend to sign up as soon as I can arrange to move to a place where it is available.)
The quote is simply this:
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.
The premise that the reason we do not kill people is because they have desires seems deeply flawed. I don’t kill people because they are people, and I have a term in my utility function that cares about people. Thinking about it, this term doesn’t care about arbitrary desire, but rather about people specifically. (Not necessarily humans, of course. For the same reason, I would not want to kill a sentient alien or AI.) If it were desires that matter, that would mean a bunch of extremely unintuitive things, far beyond what you cover here.
For example: This premise implies that if someone is easygoing and carefree, it is a lot less bad than if you kill your normal average person. To me, at lest, this conclusion seems rather repugnant. Do carefree people have a lesser moral standing? That is far from obvious.
(Or what about animals? from what we can observe, animals have plenty of desires, almost as much or as much as humans. If we really were using desire as our metric of moral worth, we would have to value animal lives at a very high rate. While I do believe that humanity should treat animals better then they are treated now, I don’t think anyone seriously believes that they should be given the same (or very similar) moral weight as humans.)
That’s a good rationalist success story. You remind me of my own story with the tooth fairy: I will not relate it in detail here, as it is similar to yours, just less dramatic. At a certain point, I doubted the existence of the tooth fairy, so the next time a tooth fell out I put it under my pillow without telling anyone, and it was still there the next day. I confronted my parents, and they readily admitted the non-existence of the tooth fairy.
In fact, it went off as a perfect experiment, which kind of ruins its value as a story, at least when compared with yours. I did an experiment, got a result, and that was that. The one thing I’m still kind of bitter about is my parents’ first reaction to my confrontation of them: Rather than praising me on my discovery and correct use of the scientific method, their reaction was along the lines of “If you suspected, why didn’t you just tell us? We would have just admitted it. There was no need for that test to find proof to confront us with.”
“if Harry is so smart, why hasn’t he figured out the solution to the problem that most of the audience has figured out by now?”
Please remember that the audience has a lot more information on the subject than Harry himself, for not only do we get to see whats happening in the scenes of the story without Harry in them, we also have the huge advantage of having read the canon Harry Potter books. As Quirrell worked for Voldemort in canon, our prior probability that Quirrell is working for Voldemort is high, even before we read HPMOR. Harry on the other hand, hasn’t even had a reason to consider that this is a possibility, let alone to assign a high probability to it.
You know, a feature it would be nice to have on LessWrong is a namechange feature. I too have had thought about moving over to my real name, but that is painful, you know? I’d have to start over from complete scratch. I guess it wouldn’t be so bad, I’ve only been posting here for a year, and the pain will only get worse the more I put it off, but it would be much nicer if there were a button I could click to just change my username. Yes, put on it some safeguards, like have it say on my userpage what my username used to be, and maybe even have it cost karma or something, to prevent it from being overused.
Of course the real problem is that someone needs to actually go and make the changes in the code, and that takes work. There likely are higher priority changes just waiting vainly for someone to implement them, as TrikeApps does not have the manpower or resources to work on LessWrong save once in a blue moon. So it’s unlikely this will happen in the foreseeable future. But if someone sees this, and wants to implement it, go ahead! I’m sure quite a few people would appreciate it.
I don’t think he would just give up on Hermione’s body like that. There are many intermediate levels of power he could achieve quicker and easier then straight out becoming a god, and he would hardly want to make it harder on himself to resurrect Hermione.
Here is a predictionbook link.
Calling it now: Harry pulled off a double bluff. The rock is just his father’s rock, and the ring is Hermione’s transfigured remains. The ring (with inset diamond) registered as magical, so Dumbledore checked that the diamond was still his father’s rock and not secretly Hermione’s remains. But he didn’t check the ring itself. This is a perfect, classic, trick. Harry is playing at just that one level higher...
- 8 Jul 2013 15:53 UTC; 10 points) 's comment on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94 by (
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.
To me at least, the large font size is really really annoying. If anybody knows how to fix it, please speak up.
This is a well known one, but I only recently got around to actually doing it, so I suspect that there are others that also haven’t done it yet.
Learn to touch type. The kind of person you probably are if you are reading Less Wrong spends a remarkable fraction of the day typing at a computer. As such, even a small increase in typing speed and skill can save you huge amount of time and effort. And it is not at all hard to learn. This investment of a small amount of time and energy to learn to touch type pays back huge dividends in time saved.
One other point: If you are going to learn to touch type, there is no point whatsoever to doing so in the Qwerty keyboard layout. It is just as easy or easier to learn a better layout (like Dvorak or Colemak), which also will give you a bigger boost to your typing speed and efficiency.
Please note that often a rephrasing and reformulation of existing knowledge can be a very good thing, almost as good as original research. If someone writes a post explaining some points in clear language, people can read it and gain a deeper understanding of those points. For that reason, posts like this one are most certainly a Good Thing, and definitely praiseworthy.
Yup. Very true. That was my thought too when reading the chapter. But on Facebook EY claimed that Quirrell’s arguments this chapter where also inspired by Michael Vassar, who, as he puts it, “is basically Professor Quirrell with a phoenix”. (Although he admits in the comments that “Robin Hanson is Professor Quirrell as an economist instead of a wizard.”)
Updating on my mental model of Michael Vassar to be a bit closer to Robin Hanson, I guess.
I think the main thing that can be said to defend keeping the Constitution is simply that it is a Schelling point. We need some way to base our system of laws. What system do you choose? There are arguments for many options, and I’m not saying the Constitution is necessarily the best. But due to what you may perhaps call a historical accident, the Constitution is where we are now. This makes it a Schelling point for all the different options for a system to base our laws on.
So, what did Harry do in that minute and a half he had with Hermione’s body?
My best guess is that he transfigured her body into something, then transfigured something else into a copy of her body. Either that or he just used partial transfiguration on her brain and left the rest of the body behind as unimportant.
It’s just not like Harry to just abandon his efforts to preserve her body, especially after he took care to keep it cold. If he has her brain transfigured into a coin or something, that should suffice as a preservation method.
Took the survey.