(And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry's art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.)

Why does the wizarding world believe Voldemort used the Killing Curse on Harry? Whether or not the Love Shield exists in MoR, I doubt most wizards had an >epsilon prior for the Killing Curse resulting in a scarred but otherwise unharmed target, a dead and burned spellcaster, and a destroyed building. There were no surviving witnesses except Baby Harry. Where did that version of events come from?

If I was Joe Random Wizard and heard that evidence without names attached, I would naively hypothesize: Dark Wizard shows up at house, encounters mother + father + their allies. Battle ensues. Parents and Dark Wizard are slain. House is destroyed and baby is hit by debris. There is one obvious question - why the allies didn't take the baby with them - but any answer to that is more plausible than "There were no allies; the most reliable curse in the world backfired on its most experienced practitioner."

Not that the "reflected curse" story was hard to sell. People are great at not asking the next question when they want to believe.

We have some additional information about the events of that evening:

• Harry's memory under Dementation (Ch43). This may or may not be a true memory.
• Snape relayed the complete prophecy to Voldemort without understanding it (Ch77). McGonagall was the propechy's witness (Ch28), but Snape has also heard the original audio (Ch77).
• McGonagall knows that Voldemort is still around (Ch6).
• Quirrellmort does not want to kill Harry. If he ever did, he changed his mind while offscreen.

What really happened at Godric's Hollow?

PS. If the Love Shield does exist in MoR, do you suppose Bellatrix could cast it?

The media, most recently The Economist and Scientific American, have been publicizing a surprising statistical finding: in the current economic climate, when more Americans than ever are poor, support for policies that redistribute wealth to the poor are at their lowest levels ever. This new-found antipathy towards aid to the poor concentrates in people who are near but not yet on the lowest rung of the social ladder. The Economist adds some related statistics: those who earn slightly more than the minimum wage are most against raising the minimum wage, and support for welfare in an area decreases as the percentage of welfare recipients in the area rises.

Both articles explain the paradoxical findings by appealing to something called "last place aversion", an observed tendency for people to overvalue not being in last place. For example, in laboratory experiments where everyone gets randomly determined amounts of money, most people are willing to help those with less money than themselves gain cash - except the person with the second to lowest amount of money, who tends to try to thwart the person in last place even if it means enriching those who already have the most.

"Last place aversion" is interesting, and certainly deserves at least a footnote in the catalogue of cognitive biases and heuristics, but I find it an unsatisfying explanation for the observations about US attitudes toward wealth redistribution. For one thing, the entire point of last place aversion is that it only affects those in last place, but in a massive country like the United States, everyone can find someone worse off than themselves (with one exception). For another, redistributive policies usually stop short of making those who need government handouts wealthier than those who do not; subsidizing more homeless shelters doesn't risk giving the homeless a nicer house than your own. Finally, many of the policies people oppose, like taxing the rich, don't directly translate to helping those in last place.

I propose a different mechanism, one based on ... wait for it ... signaling.

In a previous post, I discussed multi-level signaling and counter-signaling, where each level tries to differentiate itself from the level beneath it. For example, the nouveau riche differentiate themselves from the middle class by buying ostentatious bling, and the nobility (who are at no risk of being mistaken for the middle class) differentiate themselves from the nouveau riche by not buying ostentatious bling.

The very poor have one strong incentive to support redistribution of wealth: they need the money. They also have a second, subtler incentive: most redistributive policies come packaged with a philosophy that the poor are not personally responsible for the poverty, but are at least partially the victims of the rest of society. Therefore, these policies inflate both their pocketbook and their ego.

The lower middle class gain what status they have by not being the very poor; effective status signaling for a lower middle class person is that which proves that she is certainly not poor. One effective method is to hold opinions contrary to those of the poor: that redistribution of wealth is evil and that the poor deserve their poverty. This ideology celebrates the superiority of the lower middle class over the poor by emphasizing the biggest difference between the lower middle class and the very poor: self-reliance. By asserting this ideology, a lower middle class person can prove her lower middle class status.

The upper middle class gain what status they have by not being the lower middle class; effective status signaling for an upper middle class person is that which proves that she is certainly not lower middle class. One effective way is to hold opinions contrary to those of the lower middle class: that really the poor and lower middle class are the same sort of people, but some of them got lucky and some of them got unlucky. The only people who can comfortably say "Deep down there's really no difference between myself and a poor person" are people confident that no one will actually mistake them for a poor person after they say this.

As a thought experiment, imagine your reactions to the following figures:

1. A bearded grizzled man in ripped jeans, smelling slightly of alcohol, ranting about how the government needs to give more free benefits to the poor.

2. A bearded grizzled man in ripped jeans, smelling slightly of alcohol, ranting about how the poor are lazy and he worked hard to get where he is today.

3. A well-dressed, stylish man in a business suit, ranting about how the government needs to give more free benefits to the poor.

4. A well-dressed, stylish man in a business suit, ranting about how the poor are lazy and he worked hard to get where he is today.

My gut reactions are (1, lazy guy who wants free money) (2, honorable working class salt-of-the-earth) (3, compassionate guy with good intentions) (4, insensitive guy who doesn't realize his privilege). If these are relatively common reactions, these would suffice to explain the signaling patterns in these demographics.

If this were true, it would explain the unusual trends cited in the first paragraph. An area where welfare became more common would see support for welfare drop, as it became more and more necessary for people to signal that they themselves were not welfare recipients. Support for minimum wage would be lowest among people who earn just slightly more than minimum wage, and who need to signal that they are not minimum wage earners. And since upper middle class people tend to favor redistribution as a status signal and lower middle class people tend to oppose it, a recession that drives more people into the lower middle class would cause a drop in support for redistributive policies.

From Quora:

"Now Mr. Jobs always was a free thinker, a strong believer in spirituality, a vegetarian and a known skeptic of conventional medicine. He chose to reject conventional medicine altogether. He's not alone in that. We come across many people like this and we all know someone in our midst that uses homeopathy or has this known fear of anything "chemical" (to those I always say that everything is chemical, if you think dihydrogen oxide sounds scary you should stop drinking water). Individual freedom of thought and choice is a cornerstone of our modern society and the medical world makes no exception."

I remember the moment when I became an atheist.

I was reading Religion's Claim to Be Non-Disprovable, an uneasy feeling growing in my head, and then I reached the bottom of the article, stared at the screen for a couple of seconds, and got it.

"There is no God," I whispered. (Then I braced myself to be hit by a thunderbolt from the sky, so the belief was still paying rent, right to the very end).

No thunderbolt came. I tried again, a little louder. "There is no God."

It was...

kinda obvious, actually. I mostly felt disappointed in myself for needing someone to explain it to me, like I'd failed a test and hadn't even realized it was a test until it was too late. Friendly AI? Never would have figured that one out myself. But it shouldn't have taken Eliezer-level intelligence to point out that there's no one sensible in charge of the universe. And so - without a crisis of faith, without worry, without further drama - I changed my mind.

Over the last 6 months, I've changed my beliefs about a lot of things. I get the impression that's pretty standard, for a first read-through of the sequences. The interesting part is that it wasn't hard. After reading everything on How to Actually Change Your Mind, I'd expected letting go of beliefs I'd held my entire life to be a bit of an ordeal. It really wasn't. I didn't agree with the LessWrong consensus on every issue (I still don't), but whenever I came to agree (or to modify my position in that direction) I said so, and reevaluated the appropriate assumptions, and adjusted my model of the world, and then went on to the next article. 

When I started the Sequences, I was 16. I don't think I'm generalizing from one example in terms of my ease of accepting new ideas; when I've explained these concepts to other smart teenagers, they usually also get the implications immediately and change their mind without apparent difficulty. It may be that most people rarely change their mind, but teenagers - at least the teenagers I know - change their mind a lot. I've watched my friends change their mind on life-changing decisions - colleges, careers, religion - every couple of weeks. Eliezer writes in "We Change our Mind Less Often Than We Think":

once I could guess what my answer would be - once I could assign a higher probability to deciding one way than other - then I had, in all probability, already decided. 

I haven't asked my friends to specify the probability they'll make a given decision (typical people find this annoying for some reason), but I've routinely heard them express high levels of confidence in a choice, only to have made a totally different decision the next day.

There are both advantages and disadvantages to changing your mind easily, but I think it's worth looking at the reasons it's easier for younger people to change their mind, and whether they have any implications for changing your mind in general. I've identified a couple reasons why it seems to be easier for teenagers to change their mind:

• There is less social pressure to be consistent when you're younger.  Most adults I know remember switching their major four times in college, and switching which college they wanted to go to more often than that. Adults who change their career 4 times in 4 years are undesirable employees, indecisive, and probably untrustworthy; kids who do the same are taking advantage of all the opportunities available to them. 

Lessons for Rationalists: Social pressure to be consistent is one of the big reasons why people don't change their minds. Don't state opinions publicly if you'll later feel pressured to stick by them; ask yourself how much of your attachment to a belief is related to what other people will think of you; foster a community where changing your mind is expected and encouraged. I think LessWrong does really well at all of these.

• Kids have less invested in their beliefs. If you're married to a theist and raising your kids in the tradition of a particular religion, it's a lot harder to suddenly change your mind about the foundations of your life. Similarly, people who've already experienced the loss of people close to them seem to have a lot more invested in the idea that death is the natural cycle of life.

Lessons for Rationalists: It's been suggested before (as a way of avoiding the sunk cost fallacy) that you imagine you've been teleported into this life, and have to decide what paths to take (independent of what the person-who-used-to-be-here was doing with their life). Ask yourself what you have invested in your current beliefs and what you would give up if you changed your mind. Try to find a third alternative between rejecting everything you once believed and clinging stubbornly to a lie; those are rarely really the only options.

• The fewer Fully General Counterarguments you know, the harder it is to maintain a belief in the face of opposing evidence. It's easier to convince a regular religious person of atheism than a theistic philosopher; if you haven't heard all the arguments for atheism before, they seem pretty devastating; if you have already heard them, and built up an elaborate mental defense system, it's easier to ignore them. Knowing about biases can hurt people; knowing more in general seems to also hurt people, unless they first learn how to avoid motivated skepticism.

Lessons for Rationalists: We really should start teaching this stuff in elementary schools. The more people learn about rationality before they get good at clever arguments, the better the odds they'll internalize it. LessWrong has discussed this a fair bit, but not done a ton about it. If people agree this is important, I'm planning a couple more posts on outreach to teenagers.

What other explanations are there?

tl/dr: Changing your mind is easier when you're younger. When you want to change your mind, try thinking like a teenager; if you want to be involved in rationality outreach, teach kids.

Empathy is a huge life skill, useful in almost every interaction with other people.  But, many people aren't able to empathize with others as effectively as they might want to.  The standard technique is "put yourself in their shoes," which works for me.  However, this doesn't always work with people completely different from myself, because I can't imagine reacting the way they are.

Does anyone have suggestions for how to "practice" empathizing, tips on how to do it better, or different techniques entirely?

Many users may have noticed that Less Wrong experienced about 6 hours of downtime on 16/7/2011.

CAUSE: The server was put under an unusual amount of load and started up a new instance to load-balance the traffic.  Unfortunately, there was a bug in the script that starts the new instance that caused it to use an inconsistent mix of old and new code.  The symptom seen by users was that any post with comments was inaccessible.

RESPONSE: A hotfix was deployed as soon as the problem was detected, unfortunately it was a Saturday so this reponse time was slower than we would like.  We have since implemented a proper fix for the particular bug that caused this problem.  We are also creating some extra monitoring probes so we'll be notified promptly of any similar problems in the future.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

My purpose in writing this is twofold.

First (chronologically: I thought of this earlier than the other), I want to discuss some of the pragmatic points in how I got myself to do it.

The most important thing is that I didn't try to force the decision through with willpower. Instead, I slipped it through with doublethink. I knew perfectly well - and have known for months - that giving money to SIAI was the right thing to do. But I didn't do it. I spent money on things like Minecraft instead.

But somehow I found myself at the donation page, and I didn't think about it. Or, rather, I didn't let myself think about the fact that I was thinking about it. I made a series of expected-value guesstimates aimed at working around my own cognitive limitations.

I chose monthly donation over one-time because $20 monthly sounds like about the same amount of money as $20; past experience with recurring donations suggests that I tend to leave automatic recurring donations in place for about a year or two, so that probably gained me about a factor of 20. Similarly, I chose $20 as the largest amount that wouldn't put me in serious risk of chickening out and not donating anything.

In order to pull this off, I had to avoid thinking certain true thoughts. Numbers like "$240 per year" only drifted through my consciousness just long enough to make the expected-value judgment, and were then discarded quickly so as to avoid setting off my rotten-meat hypervisor.

This was not the first time I decided that I should give money to SIAI. It was the first time I actually did give them money. (Except for that one time with the $1 charity-a-day thing, which actually might have helped with dissolving psychological barriers to the general idea.)

I think this is important.

The second fold of my purpose is to reinforce the behavior using the glowy feeling that comes from having other people know what an awesome person I am.¹ Anyone else who's done anything worthwhile should feel free to post in this thread too.

1. It's true. Statistically speaking, I probably saved like a jillion people's lives per dollar. And more-than-doubled quality of life for a zillion more. Let me also note that you can get in on this action.

I know that sounds advertisementy, but... well, that's kind of the point. Practice Dark Arts on yourself for fun and profit.

Related to: Robin Hanson on Freakonomics

DISCLAIMER: This is an exploration of a theoretical economics problem. This is not advice. I have not made up my mind. Please do not cite this post as support for your plans to indulge in mayhem or selfishness.

The surveys from my [first post](http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/5rz/lesswrongers_from_the_germanspeaking_world_unite/) indicate that

1. the favorite city is Munich,

2. around 3-10 people would attend, (?)

3. the favorite month is August.

Ok, ignoring [the usual advice](http://lesswrong.com/lw/ka/hold_off_on_proposing_solutions/), to get the ball rolling, here is my proposal:

(Let's meet in Munich in August 5th, maybe at a restaurant or a pub.)

ETA: Um, I changed my mind: Munich is still the place to be, but let's meet some time in September!

But if you disagree, please voice your opinion! I'm open to suggestions.

I will add surveys in the comment-section.

Oh, and everyone, including ultimate newbies, is welcome. Yes, *YOU* too!

ETA: [Here you can tell us your favorite date.](http://www.doodle.com/u49xxi6z4zqbihqa)