I'm fairly sure gwern was being glib

Both operations seem vitally necessary, but he's probably right that you should start with the latter.

Author used to post here as SarahC, but I think her account's been deleted.

Wondering how Dumbledore knew Harry was planning on reformulated Quidditch. Seems possible that he was just on the platform.

On a related note, it occurs to me that we should just assume there's two Dumbledores running around any time anything important happens. No immediate consequences leap out at me, though =/

pnrjulius: he answered this a little later: http://lesswrong.com/lw/x7/cant_unbirth_a_child/

At Anna and Carl's wedding, I advanced a MoR prediction, which Eliezer offered to confirm/deny iff I first made bets with all present, and I won something like $50 =)

i've never heard of a carnivore who thought meat eating was morally better.

Katja Grace claimed to me that being a total utilitarian led her to prefer eating meat, since eating animals creates a reason for the animals to exist in the first place, and she imagines they'd prefer to exist for a while, and then be slaughtered, than not exist at all.

I tend to hang out in the average utilitarian camp, so that one didn't move me much. On the other hand:

Oh, you want utilitarian logic? One serving of utilitarian logic coming up: Even in the unlikely chance that some moron did manage to confer sentience on chickens, it's your research that stands the best chance of discovering the fact and doing something about it. If you can complete your work even slightly faster by not messing around with your diet, then, counterintuitive as it may seem, the best thing you can do to save the greatest number of possibly-sentient who-knows-whats is not wasting time on wild guesses about what might be intelligent. It's not like the house elves haven't prepared the food already, regardless of what you take onto your plate.

Harry considered this for a moment. It was a rather seductive line of reasoning -

Good! said Slytherin. I'm glad you see now that the most moral thing to do is to sacrifice the lives of sentient beings for your own convenience, to feed your dreadful appetites, for the sick pleasure of ripping them apart with your teeth -

What? Harry thought indignantly. Which side are you on here?

His inner Slytherin's mental voice was grim. You too will someday embrace the doctrine... that the end justifies the meats. This was followed by some mental snickering.

I'm pretty sure that the maximally healthy diet for me contains meat, that I can be maximally effective in my chosen goals when maximally healthy, and that my likely moral impact on the world makes sacrifices on the order of a cow per year (note that cows are big and hamburgers are small) look like a rounding error.

I reject that entirely. The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something which works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, ‘Yes, but he or she simply wouldn’t do that.’

-- Dirk Gently

This is excellent advice which reaches far beyond traffic safety -- even if your survival is guaranteed, you're still making yourself miserable every single day.

Alicorn: Mike, you're being summoned

Me: But I did that -- the water didn't do anything.

If this seems really important to anyone I can do it again with cameras -- I don't have much sense of privacy, but I do have one of moderate inconvenience.