Rationality Quotes August 2012

Alejandro1

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Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules:

Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be voted up/down separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
Do not quote yourself
Do not quote comments/posts on LW/OB
No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.

However, I deliberately included logical impossibilities into HPMOR, such as tiling a corridor in pentagons and having the objects in Dumbledore's room change number without any being added or subtracted, to avoid the story being real anywhere.

Could you explain why you did that?

As regards the pentagons, I kinda assumed the pentagons weren't regular, equiangular pentagons - you could tile a floor in tiles that were shaped like a square with a triangle on top! Or the pentagons could be different sizes and shapes.

Could you explain why you did that?

Because he doesn't want to create Azkaban.

Also, possibly because there's not a happy ending.

0A1987dM14y

I seem to recall that he terminally cares about all mathematically possible universes, not just his own, to the point that he won't bother having children because there's some other universe where they exist anyway. I think that violates the crap out of Egan's Law (such an argument could potentially apply to lots of other things), but given that he seems to be otherwise relatively sane, I conclude that he just hasn't fully thought it through (“decompartimentalized” in LW lingo) (probability 5%), that's not his true rejection to the idea of having kids (30%), or I am missing something (65%).