Well it doesn't seem to be inconsistent with reality.

I'm definitely having more trouble than I expected. Unicorns have 5 legs... does that count? You're making me doubt myself.

I think this includes too much. It would includes meaningless beliefs. "Zork is Pork." True or false? Consistency seems to me to be, at best, a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.

I think this includes too much. It would includes meaningless beliefs. "Zork is Pork." True or false? Consistency seems to me to be, at best, a necessary condition, but not a sufficient one.

I think there were fewer Google references back when I first made up the word... I will happily accept nominations for either an equally portentous-sounding but unused term, or a portentous-sounding real literary term that is known not to mean anything.

A belief is true if it is consistent with reality.

I was rereading Three Worlds Collide tonight, and a passage caught my eye:

On screen was the majesty that was the star Huygens, of the inhabited planet Huygens IV. Overlaid in false color was the recirculating loop of Alderson forces which the Impossible had steadily fed.

Fusion was now increasing in the star, as the Alderson forces encouraged nuclear barriers to break down; and the more fusions occurred, the more Alderson force was generated. Round and round it went. All the work of the Impossible, the full frantic output of their stardrive, had only served to subtly steer the vast forces being generated; nudge a fraction into a circle rather than a line. But now -

Emphasis added. The bold part sounds familiar, right?

Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...

(black robes, falling)

...blood spills out in liters, and someone screams a word.

Frankly, I don't understand either phrase, and I can't tell by the context if their meanings are at all related. What does "nudge a fraction into a circle instead of a line" mean? In context, it seems to mean to change something but very slightly, yet still to great effect. But I don't see why the words "nudge a fraction into a circle instead of a line" mean that at all.

Is it a math thing I don't get? What does it mean? And can it help us understand the MoR prologue, or is it totally unrelated?

This should cause you to update down your view of Aumann's Agreement theorem.

(I am reminded of many professional scientists tricked by charlatans when magicians were not fooled- because the scientists knew where to look for truth, and the magicians knew where to look for lies.)

HPMOR is making me rethink human nature -- because of how people react to it. This is a story full of cunning disguises, and readers seem reluctant to see past those disguises. RL rkcerffrq chmmyrzrag ng ubj many readers took forever to decide Quirrell = Voldemort; I think I now know why.

I suggest that humans are instinctive "observation consequentialists." That is, we think someone is competent and good if the observed results of their actions are benign. We weigh what we observe much more strongly than what we merely deduce. If we personally see their actions work out well, we'll put aside a great deal of indirect evidence for their incompetence or vileness.

In HPMOR, Quirrell's directly observed actions are mostly associated with Harry getting to be more of what he thinks he wants. Even rescuing Bellatrix amounts to Harry getting to save a broken lovelorn creature in terms of what we directly observe. To believe Quirrell evil we have to bring in all kinds of expected consequences to weigh against those immediate positive observations.

Does the resistance to saying Quirrell=Voldemort maybe reflect a broader unwillingness to overlook what we directly witness in favor of abstract deduction? If it does, this implies some interesting predictions about human behavior:

• if you can be kind and moderate in your personal behavior, you can get away with incredible amounts of institutionally-mediated violence and extremism, especially to anyone who feels like they "know" you. Hypothesis: the most dangerous people are those who can give us the illusion of "knowing" them while they command an institution whose internal operations we don't see.

• More generally, an institution "wired" to do us harm can get away with it much longer than an individual doing it personally and directly. Faceless corporate evil, faceless societal evil, and faceless government evil are much more deadly than our emotional impulses realize. Hypothesis: we are biased to confuse the institutions with our attitude toward their leaders, or to refuse to act against the institutions because of the outward manners of their leaders.

• if this 'observation consequentialism' bias is heuristic, then maybe it evolved as an anti-gossip function. In that case we should expect that people are too quick to believe outrageous things about people they can't observe. Hypothesis: the further away someone is from your understanding, the less likely you are to think of them as mostly a typical human being, and the quicker you are to believe them a saint, a monster, or something similarly exciting.

• And, alas for EY, hypothesis: telling a story about cunning disguises, in which the protagonist of the story does not see through those disguises, is almost always going to lead to lots of readers also not seeing through those disguises.

Hasn't Harry basically signed up to be a Dark Lord in 85, at least by the Sorting Hat's standards?

then the gloves come off and the villains die as fast as possible; and I won't pretend that real people in real life can go through a war without sacrificing anyone...

Compare the talk with the Sorting Hat:

I am not Dark Lord material!

“Yes, you are. You really, really are.”

Why! Just because I once thought it would be cool to have a legion of brainwashed followers chanting ‘Hail the Dark Lord Harry’?

“Amusing, but that was not your first fleeting thought before you substituted something safer, less damaging. No, what you remembered was how you considered lining up all the blood purists and guillotining them.