Edit: TL;DR I made equivalent problem. It is sufficient and necessary. Prove: p(H causes destruction | H is Alive) < p(H causes destruction | H is Dead)

I have exams so I don't have enough time to do the whole process, as it should be done. I wanted to donate my thoughts and hope for someone else to do the job.

If you remember, we are not supposed to give solutions at once, we should talk about problem first. This includes gathering fair knowledge about all the mechanisms mentioned.

I see some people listed available objects, which could be used in open combat. Which is exactly what we should do, given that the problem is how to fight them. The problem is, however, not how to win the fight.

Now, I have to admit i haven't thought about the whole problem (I am not facing 37 Deathe-Eaters, true, but I am facing 3 exams next week), I focused on two things: Harry's mind, and Voldy's mind. I will deduce if Harry will actually try to defend himself.

These are my thoughts:

• Voldy (V) wants to stop the prophesy. Prophesy says Harry will cause great destruction.
• Harry (H) cannot change V's utility function.
• V's utility function has high preference for this world not being destroyed.
• V tried to maximize this function. (He showed he is quite "rational" up until now)

This is part where I imagined myself being V.

"H will cause great destruction. There is greater probability of him causing destruction, than his death causing destruction. Therefore i have to kill him. I just resurrected Hermione, so, someone can resurrect H. I have to stop that, so i will destroy his remnants."

• H did the whole Unbreakable Vow thing => he is now practically the only human who has no options when it comes to destroying the world.

• H's utility function is practically the same as V's utility function now. (Both V and H prefer world over H)

• "There is a prophesy i will destroy the world. I don't want to cause destruction. Is probability ("i cause destruction" if "I am alive") greater than ("I cause destruction" if "I am dead")? Whatever probability is lower, i will do that. "* (He can't chose anymore, he sacrificed it

  H would not try to live if that would lead to greater probability of mass destruction. He would prefer himself dead over alive. (If he is rational he would do that, because his utility function is such.)

Now, let's see compare pA = p(H causes destruction | H is Alive) and pD = pp(H causes destruction | H is Dead)

Vow ensures that if there is even a minor risk of H's next step creating destruction, he would have to interrogate that risk, and avoid it if there really is such a possibility. With regard to this and H's cleverness, he could cause something destructive much easier while absent than while present. =>
pD>pA

Since I don't see EY killing Harry or being inconsistent, pD is probably indeed greater, whether or not my deduction has flaws.

On this deduction depends whether or not H will actually do something to defend himself. If he will defend himself, he might as well communicate all this to V and he will let him go, because V prefers no destruction over destruction.

Edit: formatting.

When I was young, I went to psychologist because I was afraid of the dark. She made me find the origin of my fear, so i enlisted something like: recent burglary in our apartment, war, my imagination, some TV series, and said that all those mixed together can make you be afraid of the dark at night (10 years old kid can do that, yes, though I am not sure if I repeated what i heard from others). So, not after seeing that there is nothing in my backyard, but after seeing the origin of my fear, I stopped.

That is why I think that finding the origin of some behavior is important when trying to stop it. For example, you can find out that your self-respect is causing your immunity to being insulted. So, if you want to be offended by something, you might want to undermine your self-respect first. You can as well imitate, and try to get really angry when someone offends you, but you will possibly feel fake, and eventually, you will go back to your pre-change-attempt behavior.

Your behavior can be learned, as well. If your father was a person-type that always steps aside, you can be like him. In this case, you will have to learn the other behavior, by observing other people doing it, and trying to imitate them (just like you learned from your parents?). These are my personal experiences, though, and I would like to hear some expert's opinion on this topic.

The last thing I want to point out is, be aware that you can make mistakes. You want to fix something in yourself, but you can make a mistake and try to fix something that you don't really want to fix. Like, you see that people who are devious have more success than you do, but this does not mean that you should become devious, for example, it can make you unhappy. (I am not stating anything about being devious, it's example).

There is a difference between infatuation and love. (Similar to the difference between "Hollywood rationality" and rationality.) Affective death spiral is infatuation. A person who overcomes this bias will not say things like: "Oh, if this amazing person I met five minutes ago will not friend me on facebook then my life has no meaning and I have to slash my wrists."

Now I will never get those 20 minutes of my life back, and if I happen to die exactly 20 minutes before Omega invents immortality, it is all my own stupid fault.

Not wasting the 20 minutes wouldn't have helped you survive till Omega invented immortality. (You didn't shorten your life in an absolute temporal sense, you just wasted some of the middle.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stamina_therapy

Read and weep.

There is something which is very hard to estimate about drug regulation.

It's relatively easy to estimate how much the regulation costs in added delay, and the amount of lives that could be saved if the (finally found to be efficient) drug was available earlier.

It's a bit harder, but still possible, to estimate how much the regulation protects by looking at the drugs that were finally found to be dangerous, and estimating how much people they would have killed or damaged if they would have been released.

But it's almost impossible to estimate how much the existing regulation will make the drug corporations to change their own internal practice. That's the most efficient kind of regulations : regulation that, most of the time, aren't enforced by cops and courts, but by people directly. Drug companies taking more care about preventing side-effects in the drugs in the whole process, just because they know that at the end the FDA will veto a drug that's too dangerous.

Like with traffic regulation : the real effect of speed limits and red light is not measured by the number of people who end up being without a drivers' license because they got caught too many times, and can't endanger others anymore. But about the people who respect the red light and speed limits because of the law, but wouldn't without it. And it's very hard to estimate those.

The topic is interesting, but I hope you will write something non-trivial. Sorry for unspecific advice, but this is how it is. I guess I could be more specific about what I consider trivial. Something like this:

"There is uncertainty, therefore $100 one year later is only worth r × $100 now, where r is the discount rate, a number between 0 and 1. Two years later, it's r^2 × $100, etc. Similarly, a cake one year later is worth r cakes now. If we make an infinite sum 1 + r + r^2 + ..., the result is finite, therefore immortality doesn't have infinite value." -- This alone probably wouldn't provide any value to most readers.

If you can say more than this, I'd like to hear it. Also, please don't split it to multiple articles; and if you really have to, then please put something interesting in the first article already, don't make it merely a teaser.

Hello and welcome to LessWrong!

Glad to hear you've already started digging in to some of the literature and found it to your liking. Yes, it's easy, when you have no community that encourages improvement, to fall into passwords, caches, and generally "not thinking." We can even forget to hope that we can make things better, as you've discovered. I'm sure you'll find plenty of people who can relate here and who are glad to help each other not fall back into those habits.

Since you seem to have such a focus on self-improvement and applying rationality to personal habits, don't hesitate to write about your experiences using rationality or your own personal improvements. Personal anecdotes are, of course, not verifiable experiments, but they are still experiences. The Group Rationality Diary may interest you in that regard. You can share your own experiences, see what others have done, discuss personal habits and experiments.

If you'd like a bit more discussion, you can go to the Open Thread or make a new Discussion post, though you might want to save that latter option for a more developed, researched topic. Starting in the Open Thread will not only help give you a chance to experience LW conversation and habits, but it can also help develop an idea you have before you present it as a full post.

Applied rationality, or, as some refer to it around here, "the martial art of rationality," is one of our big projects of interest. It's right there in the title of the blog itself after all. We want to improve our abilities to improve the world. So we sharpen each other, and we develop new methods, find new discoveries, perform new experiments on using our tool kit in the larger world. We certainly welcome a new voice and new perspective to the conversation. Given your wide background, your voice will be a wonderful addition.

I hope to read some of your ideas very soon!

I would speculate that there's some physiological component involved in spellcasting ability that grows with age, in much the same way that older children are often more coordinated and stronger than younger children. I have no evidence to back this up other than the repeated mentions of 'age matters with spells', however.