Harry needs to lose. He needs to drop his wand, kneel down, and say in Parseltongue, "I loosssse." Quirrel has already set up several tests that Harry has failed by refusing to lose. By proving that he can indeed lose, instead of continuing to escalate the conflict until the stars themselves are at risk, he may be able to pass LVs final test.

Also, the transfiguration Harry is doing is an obvious hint as to the antimatter weapon ending.

I'd be interested to see how the 'goal' category in the survey aligned with the tradeoff coefficient. I can see people looking for a lot different things depending on whether they are looking for a quick fun date, or a long-term relationship.

There seem to be some parents (and their children) here. I myself am the father of 3yo and 1yo daughters. Is there any suggestions you have for raising young rationalists, and getting them to enjoy critical, skeptical thinking without it backfiring from being forced on them?

I have a hypothesis based on systems theory, but I don't know how much sense it makes.

A system can only simulate a less complex system, not one at least as complex as itself. Therefore, human neurologists will never come up with a complete theory of the human mind, because they'll not be able to think of it, i.e. the human brain cannot contain a complete model of itself. Even if collectively they get to understand all the parts, no single brain will be able to see the complete picture.

Am I missing some crucial detail?

I was thinking last night of how vote trading would work in a completely rational parliamentary system. To simplify things a bit, lets assume that each issue is binary, each delegate holds a position on every issue, and that position can be normalized to a 0.0 - 1.0 ranking. (e.g. If I have a 60% belief that I will gain 10 utility from this issue being approved, it may have a normalized score of .6, if it is a 100% belief that I will gain 10 utility it may be a .7, while a 40% chance of -1000 utility may be a .1) The mapping function doesn't really matter too much, as long as it can map to the 0-1 scale for simplification.

The first point that seems relatively obvious to me is that all rational agents will intentionally mis-state their utility functions as extremes for bargaining purposes. In a trade, you should be able to get a much better exchange by offering to update from 0 to 1 than you would for updating from 0.45 to 1, and as such, I would expect all utility function outputs to be reported to others as either 1 or 0, which simplifies things even further, though internally, each delegate would keep their true utlity function values. (As a sanity check, compare this to the current parliamentary models in the real world, where most politicians represent their ideals publicly as either strongly for or strongly against)

The second interesting point I noticed is that with the voting system as proposed, where every additional vote grants additional probability of the measure being enacted, every vote counts. This means it is always a good trade for me to exchange votes when my expected value of the issue you are changing position on is higher than my expected value of the position I am changing position on. This leads to a situation, where I am better off changing positions on every issue except the one that brings me the most utility in exchange for votes on the issue that brings me the most utility. Essentially, this means that the only issue that matters to an individual delegate is the issue that potentially brings them the most utility, and the rest of the issues are just fodder for trading.

Given the first point I mentioned, that all values should be externally represented as either 1 or 0, it seems that any vote trade will be a straight 1 for 1 trade. I haven't exactly worked out the math here, but I'm pretty sure that for an arbitrarily large parliament with an arbitrarily large number of issues (to be used for trading), the result of any given vote will be determined by the proportion of delegates holding that issue as either their highest or lowest utility issue, with the rest of the delegates trading their votes on that issue for votes on another issue they find to be higher utility. (As a second sanity check, this also seems to conform closely to reality with the way lobbyist groups push single issues and politicians trade votes to push their pet issues through the vote.)

This is probably an oversimplified case, but I thought I'd throw it for discussion to see if it sparked any new ideas.

enormous costs associated with end-of-life medical care

This only became a thing in the last 50 years or so and would not have been a major expense a century ago. Even now the costs are about $50k to $100k per person, which is in line with what a healthy upper middle-class person spends every year. The wealthy spend a lot more than that, so the palliative care costs are unlikely to make a dent in their fortunes.

I wonder why we don't see more family fortunes in the U.S. in kin groups that have lived here for generations. Estate taxes tend to inhibit the transmission of wealth down the line, but enough families have figured out how to game the system that they have held on to wealth for a century or more, notably including families which supply a disproportionate number of American politicians; they provide proof of concept of the durable family fortune. Otherwise most Americans seem to live in a futile cycle where their lifetime wealth trajectory starts from zero at birth and returns to zero by death.

Steve Sailer noted on his blog a few months back that in the UK, people with Anglo-Norman surnames in our time have held on to more wealth on average than Brits with surnames suggesting manual-laborer origins. For example, Aubrey de Grey has an Anglo-Norman surname, and he reportedly inherited several million British pounds when his mother died a few years ago. I gather that this doesn't generally happen to ordinary Brits. Apparently the warriors who came over from France with William the Conqueror in 1066, and participated in the division of the spoils, started a way of handling wealth which enabled their descendants to hold on to inherited assets down through the centuries. If the Anglo-Normans could do it, and if some American families have figured out how to do it more recently, then what keeps this practice from becoming widespread in American society?

Yes, of course. But the net average quality of life is increased overall. Please examine the posts that I'm replying to here, for the context of the point I am making. For convenience I've copied it below:

How many billion people would be better off if allowed to immigrate to GB? Utilitarianism is about counting everyone's utility the same...

You can't fit billions of people in the UK.

If you are entering the argument with a claim that the UK's current inhabitants can be utilitarian and simultaneously weigh their own utility higher than those of other humans, then you should be directing your argument toward buybuydanddavis' post, since ze's the one who said "That weighting factor should be 1 for all". I am merely noting that not being able to fit billions of people in the UK is not a valid counterargument; net utility will still be increased by such a policy no matter what the UK's population carrying capacity is.

As a little side project, I entertain myself with the idea of writing fiction that blends fantasy and mega-structures engineering.
The first step will be to ideate a consistent magic system, but of course, to make the story interesting, I'll have to come up with interesting characters and their conflicts. Do you know about any good story, long or short, that revolves around or has as background mega-structures, that I can be inspired from? Fantasy or extreme science-fiction would be the best.