I'd liken it to a chemical reaction. Many of them are multistep, and as a general statement chemical processes take place over an extremely wide range of orders of magnitude of rate (ranging from less than a billionth of a second to years). So, in an overall reaction, there are usually several steps, and the slowest one is usually orders of magnitude slower than any of the others, and that one's called the rate determining step, for obvious reasons: it's so much slower than the others that speeding up or slow down the others even by a couple of orders of magnitude is negligible to the overall rate of reaction. it's pretty rare that more than one of them happen to be at nearly the same rate, since the range of orders of magnitude is so large.

I think that the evolution of intelligence is a stochastic process that's pretty similar to molecular kinetics in a lot of ways, particularly that all of the above applies to it as well, thus, it's more likely that there's one rate determining step, one Great Filter, for the same reasons.

However (and I made another post about this here too), I do think that the filters are interdependent (there are multiple pathways and it's not a linear process, but progress along a multidimensional surface.) that's not really all that different than molecular kinetics either though.

I don't think anyone really assumes that.

Yes you are missing a few things.

1) Saying you can't tell after the fact whether something occured is not the same as saying it never occured. The fact that we can't experimentally determine if two carbon atoms have distinct identity is not, repeat not the same as saying that they don't have separate identity. Maybe they do. You just can't tell.

2) That has nothing to do with continuity of consciousness. Assume the existence of a perfect matter replicator. What do you expect to happen when you make a copy of yourself? Do you expect to suddenly find yourself inside of the copy? Let's say that regardless of what you expect at that point, you end up in your same body as before, the old one not the new one. What do you expect to experience then, if you killed yourself? This has nothing, nothing to do with statements about quantum identity and equivalence of configuration spaces. It is about separating the concept of a representation of me, from an instance of that representation which is me. I expect to experience only what the instance of the representation which is currently typing this words will experience as it evolves into the future. If an exact copy of me was made at any time, that'd be pretty awesome. It'd be like having a truly identical twin. But it wouldn't me me, and if this instance died, I wouldn't expect to live on experiencing what the copy of me experiences.

3) Sleeping is a total non-sequiter. Do you expect that your brain is 100% shut off and disarticulated into individual neurons when you are in a sleeping state? No? That's right -- just because you don't have memories, doesn't mean you didn't exist while sleep. You just didn't form memories at the time.

Did you not read that section at all? If you lose all knowledge of powerful spellcasting, a) you lose your ability to continue to be immortal after this iteration, b) you lose your ability to defend yourself against enemies who haven't lost their ability to cast interdicted spells. The second one is really important when the process for immortality is one that inherently makes a lot of enemies! He specifically mentioned that dark wizards that tried use that technique to come back were easily defeated afterward.

The continuity of consciousness is one thing but the horcrux doesn't even give continuity of KNOWLEDGE thanks to merlin

The patronus gets a boost by moving from 0 to +1. The killing curse gets a boost by moving from -1 to 0. That makes no sense. Why would the killing curse, which is powered by the exact opposite of the patronus, receive a boost in power by moving in the same direct as the Patronus which values life over death?

I parsed it as follows: the Killing Curse isn't powered by death in the same way that the Patronus draws power from life, but it does require the caster not to value the life of an opponent. Hatred enables this, but it's limited: it has to be intense, sustained hatred, and probably only hatred of a certain kind, since it takes some doing for neurologically typical humans to hate someone enough to literally want them dead. Indifference to life works just as well and lacks the limitations, but that's probably an option generally available only to, shall we say, a certain unusual personality type.

Ideology might interact with this in interesting ways, though. I don't know whether Death Eaters would count as being motivated by hate or indifference by the standards of the spell; my model of J.K. Rowling says "hate", while my model of Eliezer says "indifference".

burden of proof

In principle I agree with you.

In practice I think "X has the burden of proof" generally means something similar to "The position X is advancing has a rather low prior probability, so substantial evidence would be needed to make it credible, and in particular if X wants us to believe it then s/he would be well advised to offer substantial evidence." Which, yes, involves confusion between an idea and the people who hold it, and might encourage an argument-as-conflict view of things that can work out really badly -- but it's still a convenient short phrase, reasonably well understood by many people, that (fuzzily) denotes something it's often useful to say.

So, yeah, issuing such challenges in such terms is a sign of imperfect enlightenment and certainly doesn't make the one who does it a rationalist in any useful sense. But I don't see it as such a bad sign as I think you do.

I see someone try to answer a question by coming up with an explanation and then defending it

The appropriateness of that probably depends on what kind of question it is...

I think my hackles got raised by the claim that your perception is "what it actually is" -- and that's a remarkably strong claim. It probably works better phrased like something along the lines of "trying to take your ego and preconceived notions out of the picture".

but I think you do this a lot

Any links to egregious examples? :-)

The truth will always sound less truthful than the most truthful sounding falsehood.

This needs to be on posters and T-shirts if it isn't already. Is it a well-known principle?

Thank you for the explanation. This overall idea (of the relationship between belief and reality, and the fact that it only goes one way) is in itself not new to me, but your perspective on it is, and I hope it will help me develop my ability to think objectively.

Also thanks for the music video. Shame I can't upvote you multiple times.