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NancyLebovitz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Gondolinian 10 March 2015 06:10PM

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Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 March 2015 02:29:29PM 4 points [-]

How mindkilled are you?

That is a delightfully awful question. The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that there's no hope of an accurate answer if you include the presupposition that the person being asked is actually somewhat mindkilled.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 14 March 2015 02:33:58PM *  -1 points [-]

I'm not sure. At least twice before I've gotten that question or a variant of it thrown to me and it helped strongly reevaluate my attitude on the issue in question. Possibly I'm generalizing from one example too much?

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 14 March 2015 04:56:19PM 0 points [-]

Actually, I was probably being too literal about the question because the logical paradox struck me as funny.

I will blame an ambiguity which I think is built into English. "How mindkilled are you?" can imply that you're mindkilled in some sense which is stable over a period of time, or it can imply that you were mindkilled recently but have a capacity to come out of it.