Yeah, I feel like in real world situations, hypothesizing time travel when things don't make sense is not likely to be epistemically successful.

Wasn't there a proverb about generalizing from fictional evidence? Especially from fiction that intentionally doesn't make sense?

That seems like a failure of noticing confusion; some clear things are actually false.

This post is a good example of why LW is dying. Specifically, that it was posted as a comment to a garbage-collector thread in the second-class area. Something is horribly wrong with the selection mechanism for what gets on the front page.

[citation needed]

Does that actually work better than just setting a higher bar for significance? My gut says that data is data and chopping it up cleverly can't work magic.

If I have no value as a human, I desire to believe I have no value as a human.

Are you planning to do any analysis on what traits are associated with defection? That could get ugly fast.

(I took the survey)

Probably the only two things the True Patronus can look like are humans and snakes. Possibly flying squirrels?