Television and Movies Thread

My first reaction: Checking whether you are from USA.

Yeah, I know this is not an argument, but the cultural difference is huge here.

I would like to know if there is a scientific research about whether separating 2 months old children from their mothers for half of day has an impact on the child, and what is the impact specifically.

You can't completely exclude the biological part, at least if the couple wants to have children. There will be at least a year per every child, when the woman can't go to work, and this can't be avoided for many people (in some cases the woman can work from home, but that's not an option for everyone). So there is some real assymetry, although it may be less important than it seems.

Tradition, prejudice, etc... that's like advertising. It may be completely irrational, but it is still a force that exists and moves the market balance. You can model the past and the culture as an enormous advertising budget, and the advertisement says that men who don't have a decent income are losers, and indirectly the women with such partners are also losers (because they had to choose losers as their partners). We can disagree with this, but there is this huge advertising budget against us, and it skews the relationship market balance.

Fuck every cause that ends in murder and children crying.

-- Iain M. Banks

I have never liked music. Why do people like it?

Another interesting question is to ask current vegetarians how much they would pay to stay vegetarian.

On the other hand, I'd forgotten how disappointed I was in HermioneMOR compared to canon Hermione.

I think this is because canon!Hermione plays the voice of reason and maturity to the childish Harry and Ron, whereas HPMOR!Hermione in some ways serves the opposite role, being a real (and thus immature and limited) eleven-year old girl next to super prodigy Harry and trained-to-perfection Draco. Seen in that light, the extent to which she does manage to keep up is actually pretty amazing.

"HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE >WORLD."

What exactly does this mean? Both Quirrel and Harry Potter are already here. Sirius no longer seems feasible for this.

Possibly it refers to the new personality-state of Harry which Quirrel just sensed? I suspect that Harry has just succeeded what he failed to do in Azkaban: to fuse his normal self with the grim and ardently indomitable dark side.

Prediction 1: Soon, Harrry will do something somewhat clearly allegorical to FOOMed super AI. Alternatively, Prediction 2: Instead, Harry will be incredibly badass (I.e, Quirrel's equal) more conventionally. Prediction 3: Harry will be able to get some real resources finally. He might somehow get enough mana to pull off Quirrelesque blasting, or find a creative/technological-seeming way to provide it. Prediction 4: Harry's involvement in

The version starting with "HE IS COMING" was given the same chapter and same day that Harry and Draco formed the Bayesian Conspiracy.

Horrible half-prophecies occurred when Harry pondered the distinction between ruthless war and the superhero's quest to save everyone. This would lead to him deciding to be ruthless if he failed to save anyone (in Ch 85), and the closest possible person just did. At this time a phoenix came to Harry, and then left.

Trelawney suffered a horrible half-prophecy when Harry decided that he would break Azkaban even if it meant going to absurd lengths.

I thought earlier about the first prophecy, that 'the power to vanquish the dark lord' might refer to the ability to destroy Death rather than Voldemort.

FWIW, one of my takeaways from taking subjective measurements of my happiness, motivation, etc. everyday was that by far the biggest correlation was that I was happiest when I exercised more. But again, that's not really establishing causation.

I initially thought I would really like this article on consiousness after death. I did not. The guy comes off as a complete crackpot, given my understanding of neurobiology. (Although I won't dispute his overall point, nor would many here, I think, that we continue to exist for a bit after we are legally dead.) I would appreciate anyone who is so motivated to look up some things on why a lot of the things he says are completely bogus. I replied to the person who sent me this article with a fairly superficial analysis, but if anyone knows of some solid studies on this, I would like to know. I will paste what I've written below:

The guy sounds progressively more insane as the article goes on. And progressively more like he doesn't know things that I learned in my intro to neurobiology class, which makes me question his credentials a bit.

That being said, he's definitely correct in that the vast majority of evidence does not suggest that consciousness stops at the moment of death, and, in fact, suggests the opposite. I'm glad someone is doing the research into this stuff, but I do wish it weren't this guy.

For some specifics:

"All the evidence we have shows an association between certain parts of the brain and certain mental processes. But it’s a chicken and egg question: Does cellular activity produce the mind, or does the mind produce cellular activity?"

This has been pretty conclusively proven. They've stuck electrodes in peoples brains and turned them on and forced them to raise their arms against their "will". I don't think this leaves much room for doubt in this instance.

"Scientists have come to believe that the self is brain cell processes, but there’s never been an experiment to show how cells in the brain could possibly lead to human thought. If you look at a brain cell under a microscope, and I tell you, “this brain cell thinks I’m hungry,” that’s impossible."

Things like this makes it sound like he's confused about the entire subject of neurobiology... That is impossible because no single cell is ever responsible for signalling that. Or anything close to that complex. Thoughts are interactions of whole complexes of cells. To take an analogy to the visual cortex, that would be like saying a single rod "thinks" that a laptop is in front of me right now, when that's the combined activity of millions of rods (and cones) and the cells that are connected to them, and the layers and layers of abstraction and processing of that input that goes on beyond that. And the pruning of these branches makes a huge difference in all of this. The way you actually learn what a face is is that your face learns that neurons 5a, 5c, 5d, and 5e need to be firing while neurons 5b, 5f, and 5g aren't means it's likely a face pattern. (In turn, 5a is turned on or off by the combination of 4a, 4b, and 4c, and so on, etc.)

In a wild generalization, the way neurological development works, you start out with the neurological connections to pattern match anything you're exposed to effectively anything (Say you're exposed to things that look like Picasso paintings very very often, you'd get good at recognizing them and seeing them as normal). Those pathways that aren't commonly used die, and you're only left with the pathways that recognize the patterns that you're exposed to a lot. Which is why you're really good at recognizing faces (absurdly absurdly good, when you think about it) but don't instantly analyze the same subtle details of, say, a couch.

"It could be that, like electromagnetism, the human psyche and consciousness are a very subtle type of force that interacts with the brain, but are not necessarily produced by the brain. The jury is still out."

I honestly just think he's pattern matching with the category "scientific sounding phrases". Electromagnetism is the least subtle physical force (ie. the strongest), when you throw out the strong and weak nuclear forces. Gravity is actually the weakest force we know of, (it's like 10 times weaker than magnetism I think?) but he sounds like an idiot if you replace "electromagnetism" with "gravity". And rightly so. But he does it because, to the lay reader "electromagnetism" sounds mysterious and scientific, and "gravity" sounds dull and obvious.

And he never goes on to explain why we haven't detected this "force" with any instrumentation, even though it would be wildly easier to detect than to fully explain the interactions of all of the neurons in our brain. "It could be" that deep inside the atoms and quarks of every cell in our brains there is a tiny midget who is controlling what they do with puppet strings. But the sheer insanity of that being the way the world actually works makes me believe that it is a priori so absurdly unlikely as to not be worth considering without some really conclusive evidence.