This is one of the only lesswrong posts I've ever read where I basically agree with nothing you wrote. You really should read the "rationality bible" though. Definitely before you keep posting here.

Eliezer talked about this in his TDT paper. It is possible to hypothesize scenarios where agents get punished or rewarded for arbitrary reasons. For instance an AI could punish agents who made decisions based on the idea of their choices determining the results of abstract computations (as in TDT). This wouldn't show that TDT is a bad decision theory or even that it's no better than any other theory.

If we restrict ourselves to action-determined and decision-determined problems (see Eliezer's TDT paper) we can say that TDT is better than CDT, because it gets everything right that CDT gets right, plus it gets right some things that CDT gets wrong.

Can you think of any way that a situation could be set up that punishes an NDT agent, that doesn't reduce to an AI just not liking NDT agents and arbitrarily trying to hurt them?

I know Harry is just a kid, but his reaction towards unicorns don't seem very rational to me. Remember, Harry became vegetarian for a while when he was afraid animals could be sentient. And now, he speaks about massively killing unicorns, magical creatures whose sentient status isn't very clear (like with phoenix), for a "temporary" stop of death at a cost of "permanent side-effects", without inquiring how temporary temporary is, what are those side-effects, and how sentient unicorns are. Without measuring those three parameters, there is no way to know if utility(killing unicorns in St Mungo) is positive or negative.

Harry's blindness to Quirrel being pretty obviously bad news at this point is definitely something I'd like to see explained. I know that as the reader I get to see things more clearly than Harry does, but when you start thinking painfully murdering magical creatures to preserve your life for a short amount of time is fine if the person doing it is someone you like, something is going wrong there! I am fully expecting at this point to understand that Harry's thinking on Quirrel is being deliberately suppressed. After all, Harry's meant to be fundamentally curious about magic... why has he not investigated what could cause the anti-magic effect?

A nausea was in his stomach, a churning sensation that, looking back in memory, seemed both like and unlike a sense of guilt, as though it had the sensations but not quite all of the emotion.

Heh, so Quirrell doesn't know what guilt feels like.

Centaur spears can block many spells, but no one tries to block if they see that the spell is a certain shade of green. For this purpose it is useful to know some green stunning hexes.

This reminds me, if you can make a homing version of the stunning spell, can you make a homing version of the killing curse? Sounds like that would be useful.

The chapter endings for 100 and 101 are a little odd. They stop very abruptly, specially 101. Usually you would get an extra sentence or paragraph to give the chapter a sense of closure.

The reason Quirell and Harry cannot interact magically is supposed to be so Quirrell cannot read harry's mind, memory charm him, confound him, or outright imperio him. But this feels a little weak to me. What's stopping Quirrell from threatening, bribing, tricking, imperiousing, etc... a third party to do it on his behalf?

There's no need to do that. The portkey is already blocked by the Hogwarts wards prohibiting Apparition.

Just like Harry was not portkeyed out of Hogwarts in Goblet of Fire?

It is hard for me to tell if this is that there is a big secret plan or more lampshading of problems with the original source material.

OK you've got me freaked out. I'm staring at army1987's comment that I replied to and it says "...contraceptives, the Flynn effect, etc."

What am I missing?

Prediction: Harry will have to make an unbreakable vow not to use the elixir of life himself in order to get the Philosopher's stone from the Mirror or Erisid

I'm really glad this was the first comment. While reading the post I kept thinking, 'OK, extreme commitment contracts are interesting, but why did peirce pick such a bad example? I'm pretty sure social anxiety doesn't work like that for most people.' Then I got to the conclusion.

Really, it doesn't even have to be disrupting your daily life. When someone says "I want to be less anxious," seeing a professional is way above merciless commitment to exposure therapy on the list of obvious things to try. Commit to doing that, if you want. (And if you're still really into the exposure therapy, start with making eye contact with strangers in public and maybe smiling. Build up small successes first, and it'll be easier to avoid the paralysis of feeling bad about bad feelings.)