I dunno, I feel like judgments of awesomeness are heavily path-dependent and vary a lot from person to person. I don't hold out a lot of hope for the project of Coherent Extrapolated Volition, but I hold out even less for Coherent Extrapolated Awesomeness. So the vision of the future is people pushing back and forth, the chuunibyous trying to fill the world with dark magic rituals and the postmodernists wincing at their unawesome sincerity and trying to paint everything with as many layers of awesome irony as they can.

Also, from a personal perspective, I rather like quiet comfort, although I cannot really say it's "awesome". You can say, it doesn't matter what I like, it only matters what's awesome, but to hell with your fascist notions.

The Curry Fallacy.

Censorship is particularly harmful to the project of rationality, because it encourages hypocrisy and the thinking of thoughts for reasons other than that they are true. You must do what you feel is right, of course, and I don't know what the post you're referring to was about, but I don't trust you to be responding to some actual problematic post instead of self-righteously overreacting. Which is a problem in and of itself.

Alphabeta: Also, why is Harry using Snape as his example of guys he might end up attracted to instead of Quirrelmort?

Given the Quibbler article and everything, I'd actually expect it to be Draco that he uses as his example.

It can be blocked, yes, but this appears to be a fairly major jinx, the equivalent of a lot of capital equipment. Hogwarts is known to be anti-Apparation jinxed, as is Azkaban, but I don't recall any other places where it's mentioned. (Ministry of Magic, perhaps; implied by the workers there commuting in a fairly standard fashion instead of just Apparating from their homes.) It's not clear that it can be installed on an average wizard's home. Anyway, you'd think it would prevent inward, but not outward, Apparation by default; you don't want to be suddenly attacked but you might want to make a quick escape.

Dumbledore captures (in that fanfic by Rowling, that is, not the canon) some Death Eaters by preventing their Apparation, but he has to duel them first, so he might as well have cast AK.

All that aside, she's an experienced combat wizard with a few seconds to spare. If she can't Apparate, she still has the option og grabbing Harry, blowing a hole in the wall, and running. "Accio Broomstick", anyone? Or whatever flight spell Voldemort uses to go up the stairs without footsteps.

Come to think of it, why were they hiding in an apparently average home without special defenses, and relying on mere secrecy? Put them in Hogwarts, with its layers upon layers of magical fortifications. Draco states that Hogwarts is an impregnable fortress, and presumably Voldemort thinks so too since he doesn't attack Dumbledore there and end the war at a stroke.

I'm bothered by Harry's "recovered memory" of Voldemort killing his mother. Firstly we are told, at the time of its first narration, that Harry almost-notices that something is wrong with it. Secondly, the recover-memories-from-before-you-were-verbal thing seems, I don't know, kind of off. It's the sort of thing that would be possible if popular conceptions of how memory is stored were true. And thirdly, while I can see James trying to hold off Voldemort - and incidentally, he can't even dodge the very first AK that Voldemort casts? Isn't he an experienced combat wizard?- why doesn't Lily use the moments thus bought to snatch Harry and Apparate out of there? Really, it should be very hard to kill an adult wizard who knows you're there. The scene seems engineered for maximum emotional impact rather than combat realism.

On the other hand, it's hard to see how a false memory would be useful. If it is false, who benefits thereby, and who had the chance to implant it?

I'm a little surprised that HJPEV didn't immediately update his probabilities regarding Quirrell's motives in Azkaban with the new knowledge from Moody that "You've got to mean it. You've got to want someone dead, and not for the greater good, either.", which would seem to discredit the Defense Professor's excuse that "a curse which cannot be blocked and must be dodged is an indispensable tactic."

Thanks to Emile for suggesting I come here write something. I hope to get to the New York meetup on Sunday; I'm not ready for "rituals" and futuristic music just yet.

I just ran across LW by trying google terms along the lines of memetics "belief systems", etc., which led me to some books from late 90s like "Virus of the Mind", and in the last 2-3 years some just "OK" books on religions as virus-like meme systems. This kind of search to see what people may have said about some odd combination of thoughts that I suspect might be fruitful has brought me interesting results in the past. E.g. by googling ontological comedian, I discovered Ricky Gervais which has brightened my life (his movie "The Invention of Lying" out to be of interest to LW-ers). I'm interested in practical social epistemology -- trying to come up with creative responses to what looks like major chunks of the population (those pesky folks who elect presidents) being less and less moored in reality and going off into diverse fantasy lands -- or to put it another way, a massive breakdown in common sense about what sources are reliable.

I asked someone how she makes such decisions and she answered that she trusts people who are saying things consistent with what she already knows. Unfortunately, much of what she already knows isn't true.

I wonder why people have such a tin ear for bullshit. Someone kept sending me the latest "proof" that global warming is a big hoax, and as far as I'm concerned their own arguments are the best case against them. I.e. if this is the best they can do, they must not have a case. This sort of reasoning isn't part of classic epistemology, but I can hardly think of anything more important getting a quick read on a source as to its trustworthiness - esp. whether those contributing to it are truth seekers or propagandists. I think Alvin Goldman's Social Epistemology (which is far from the "social construction of reality" folks) can help with some of my concerns. I'd like to see an "economics of ideas" concerned with what makes ideas fly, whether they're true or not -- pretty close to memetics and from a different perspective, "media ecology", analogous to the set of topological T3 space and then find embedded within that [Social] Epistemology analogous to the more constrained T4 spaces.

I'm not so much interested in Philosophy 401 syllabi, but more interested in finding ways to teach truth seeking and bullshit avoidance in elementary schools. Also how to push back against the propagandists and liars with some viral techniques of our own - browsers that facilitate fact checking, maybe make it fun in some way; walling off purely factual data and building consensus that on one side of the wall the data really is factual; and building tools for synthesizing answers to particular questions based on that data.

I hope to learn something from the "black arts" threads on LW.

This would mean, of course, that humans can be money-pumped. In other words, if this is really true, there is a lot of money out there "on the table" for anyone to grab by simply money-pumping arbitrary humans. But in real life, if you went and tried to money-pump people, you would not get very far. But I accept a weaker form of what you are saying, that in the normal course of events when people are not consciously thinking about it we can exhibit circular reasoning. But in a situation where we actually are sitting down and thinking and calculating about it, we are capable of “resolving” those apparently circular preferences.