Why not to use explanations for magic that actual "thaumaturgical" traditions used? Basically that reality is a projection of our minds, and sufficiently concentrated and focused minds can change reality in ways that is perceptible for others too, and thus magical rituals and chanting and spells are ways to concentrate and focus the mind. You can also give it a neat theistic angle, such as when god made man in his own likeness it meant also giving him some of his creative power, to make things ex nihilo just with his mind.

How did Harry move the wires through the air with partial transfiguration alone? He doesn't have bugs to carry it like Skitter does. How does he prevent air currents from messing it up?

As a Nietzsche-lover, why is this one here?

You could also listen to ebooks via a text-to-speech app. While the inflection isn't lively, you get the advantages of being able to listen to almost any book and speeding it up so it doesn't take much more time than actual reading. I've found my brain is learning to process speech faster and faster as time goes by. Of course you can speed up a normal audiobook too, but inflection and varying voices will make it more difficult.

ETA: Repligo Reader lets you tts pdf files on Android. Universal Book Reader lets you tts other formats. Google Play Books allows tts for their ebooks.

Ah, I've already read HPMOR but might think about the spoken version. Might help clarify some of the examples I never quite understood to hear someone else speaking them. It's kind of odd how different the same work can feel when you read it the first time compare to when you read it again or hear it read by someone else.

Speaking of re-reading I really must re-read Worm one of these days, that was great, and maybe try Wildbow's new Pact story.

It seems like Qualia the Purple is a manga where after a certain point, the author introduced magic and started giving philosophic explanations for how the main character can do magic, turn into other people, go back in time, and generally do whatever the fuck she wants except save one person. What does "actually try" mean?

I smiled when I realized why the answer isn't trivially "press sim", but that slight obfuscation is causing a lot of confused people to get downvoted.

Either I'm missing something or it isn't interesting. If you aren't a Sim, you get 1 for Sim and .9 for not Sim. So your best play is Sim. If you are a Sim, you get .2 for Sim and .1 for not Sim, so your best play is Sim. Regardless of the piece of information you lack, your best play is Sim.

Mobile game programming

This proposal seems like taking advantage of something like the conjunction fallacy. The conjunction fallacy is where you assign a higher probability to more specific conditions than you do to more general conditions. I think that happens because people are more easily able to construct a story with more specific facts. Here, I think the fallacy is placing greater value on a future benefit that is specific than one does on the entire class of future benefits that includes the specific one. "I want to be alive in 2114 so that I can read that great Atwood book" is logically less valuable than "I want to be alive in 2114 so that I can experience all of the valuable things that I chose to experience then." But it is a whole lot easier to anticipate and set a value on reading that one book. Or, put another way, it is harder to get lost before coming to a conclusion when looking at the specific.

But maybe I am wrong about the basis of the conjunction fallacy. I couldn't find a name for the specific cognitive bias I think I see here. Nor could I find a name for the more general class that would include both the conjunction fallacy and this thing. I assign a high probability to me missing relevant information simply because I'm ignorant of where to look.

To net all of that out, I am thinking that it would be an effective tactic to market surviving into the distant future by promising very specific benefits.

Max L.