Okay, can someone answer in what way it would look different if Quirrel did try to get Hermione away and just honestly failed? As opposed to this supposedly not-real attempt?

Because I think too many people in this thread suffer from thinking that Quirrel is literally infallible in regards to anything he tries.

It loses much of the impact when you intentionally seek it out, I think. The lullaby loop midi I found to be more annoying than the errors.

Still, thanks for posting that - it's certainly interesting.

Related to the discussion about the Defense Professor's talk with Hermione, but more generalized:

We've had Word of God (can't find the specific comment quickly) to the effect that parts of the text that are "too obvious" to readers are in fact meant to be that obvious, not meant as red herrings. Have we had any pronouncement about the truthfulness of things that the characters find "too obvious"? (As, for example, Hermione's realisation that Quirrell was apparently trying to get her to leave.)

This creates tension. I'm about .6 confident that tension is intentional.

You're suggesting a strategy of tension?

To be honest, I've always assumed that there exist a variety of more LW-spinoff private forums where the folks who have more specialized/advanced groundings get to interact without being bothered by the rest of us.

Aw. And they didn't invite nyan_sandwich. That's so sad.

He or she should get together with other people who haven't been invited to Even Less Wrong and form their own. Then one day they can get together with Even Less Wrong like some NFL/AFL merger, only with more power to save the world.

There would have to be a semaphore or something, somewhere. So these secret groups can let each other know they exist without tipping off the newbs.

I think the freemasons have this one solved for us: instead of a passwords, we use interview systems, where people of the level above have to agree that you are ready before you are invited to the next level. Likewise, we make it known that helpful input on the lower levels is one of the prerequisites to gaining a higher level- we incentivise constructive input on the lower tiers, and effectively gate access to the higher tiers.

My $0.02 (apologies if it's already been said; I haven't read all the comments): wanting to do Internet-based outreach and get new people participating is kind of at odds with wanting to create an specialized advanced-topics forum where we're not constantly rehashing introductory topics. They're both fine goals, but trying to do both at once doesn't work well.

LW as it is currently set up seems better optimized for outreach than for being an advanced-topics forum. At the same time, LW doesn't want to devolve to the least common denominator of the Internet. This creates tension. I'm about .6 confident that tension is intentional.

Of course, nothing stops any of us from creating invitation-only fora to which only the folks whose contributions we enjoy are invited. To be honest, I've always assumed that there exist a variety of more LW-spinoff private forums where the folks who have more specialized/advanced groundings get to interact without being bothered by the rest of us.

Somewhat relatedly, one feature I miss from the bad old usenet days is kill files. I suspect that I would value LW more if I had the ability to conceal-by-default comments by certain users here. Concealing sufficiently downvoted comments is similar in principle, but not reliable in practice.

You are discourteous

Well, that certainly wasn't my intention. Please go ahead and downvote me if you feel that way.

He don't wanna kick you out...

I wasn't taking anything he said personally; as far as I can tell, there's nothing he can do to actually kick me out, and I don't think he even wants to do that in the first place. I do believe he's arguing in good faith.

That said, I do believe strongly that, in order for communities to grow and continue being useful and productive, they need to welcome new members now and then; and I think that nyan_sandwich's original solution sets the barrier to entry way too high.

I've lurked here for over a year and just started posting in the fan fic threads a month ago. I have read a handful of posts from the sequences and I believe that some of those are changing my life. Sometimes when I start a sequence post I find it uninteresting and I stop. Posts early in the recommended order do this, and that gets in the way every time I try to go through in order. I just can't be bothered because I'm here for leisure and reading uninteresting things isn't leisurely.

I am noise and I am part of the doom of your community. You have my sympathy, and also my unsolicited commentary:

Presently your community is doomed because you don't filter.

Noise will keep increasing until the community you value splinters, scatters, or relocates itself as a whole. A different community will replace it, resembling the community you value just enough to mock you.

If you intentionally segregate based on qualifications your community is doomed anyway.

The qualified will stop contributing to the unqualified sectors, will stop commending potential qualifiers as they approach qualification, and will stop driving out never qualifiers with disapproval. Noise will win as soon as something drives a surge of new interest and the freshest of the freshmen overwhelm the unqualified but initiated.

Within the fortress of qualification things will be okay. They might never feel as good as you think you remember, but when you look through that same lens from further ahead you might recognize a second Golden Age of Whatever. Over time less new blood will be introduced, especially after the shanty town outside the fortress burns to the ground a couple times. People will leave for the reasons people leave. The people left will become more insular and self referential. That will further drive down new blood intake.

Doomed.

What are you going to do about it?

The best steps to take to sustain the community you value in this instance may be different than the best steps to take to build a better instance of the community.

What is the difference between knowledge and opinion? Are the points in the sequences true or not?

Some proportion of them (between 0 and 100%) are true, others are false or neither. Not being omniscient, I can't tell you which ones are which; I can only tell you which ones I believe are likely to be true with some probability. The proportion of those is far smaller than 100%, IMO.

Read map and territory, and understand the way of Bayes.

See, it's exactly this kind of ponderous verbiage that leads to the necessity for rot13-ing certain words.

...without getting bogged down by having to explain that there's no qualitative difference between opinion and fact.

I believe that there is a significant difference between opinion and fact, though arguably not a qualitative one. For example, "rocks tend to fall down" is a fact, but "the Singularity is imminent" is an opinion -- in my opinion -- and so is "we should kick out anyone who hadn't read the entirety of the Sequences".

Identifying a problem and identifying myself among people who don't want a particular type of solution (relaxing LW's phygish standards), doesn't mean I support any particular straw-solution.

When you said "we should make LW more exclusive", what did you mean, then ?

In any case, I do have a solution for you: why don't you just code up a Greasemonkey scriptlet (or something similar) to hide the comments of anyone with less than, say, 5000 karma ? This way you can browse the site in peace, without getting distracted by our pedestrian mutterings. Better yet, you could have your scriptlet simply blacklist everyone by default, except for certain specific usernames whom you personally approve of. Then you can create your own "phyg" and make it as exclusive as you want.

Who doesn't have plots in this book? I hardly think that's a test for evil in this book - more like a test for intelligence.

And we don't know that he tried to get Hermione fed to the Dementors. When I try to read his mind on that point, I think his main goal was to get Harry to turn against the government of magical Britain - and it seemed like a fine success in those terms, at least in the moment.

See previous comment http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfo/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/68tv

Assuming that it was all a Quirrell plot - which I do at this point - he could also have redeemed Hermione at the last minute with some evidence after she was condemned, and his point with magical Britain had been made. And he could get some Good Guy points with Harry for saving Hermione. Maybe not too, but it's hardly certain he would have allowed her to die.