“The first magical step you can do after a flood,” he said, “is get a pump and try to redirect water.”

-- Richard James, founding priest of a Toronto based Wicca church, quoted in a thegridto article

When reading this paper, and the background, I have a recurring intuition that the best approach to this problem is a distributed, probabilistic one. I can't seem to make this more coherent on my own, so posting thoughts in the hope discussion will make it clearer:

ie, have a group of related agents, with various levels of trust in each others' judgement, each individually asses how likely a descendant will be to take actions which only progress towards a given set of goals.

While each individual agent may only be able to asses a subset of a individual descendants actions, a good mix of agents may be able to provide a complete, or near enough to complete, cover for the descendants actions.

An individual agent can then send out source code for a potential descendant, and ask its siblings for feedback - only deciding whether to produce the descendant if enough of the correct siblings respond with a yes.

It goes the other way. See, while he was being abused for two hours a day that no one else experienced, he was experiencing 26 hour days when everyone else was experiencing 24 hour days. So his body adjusted to that.

I'm having a little trouble making the timeline work out on this, since one wouldn't be able to notice his sleep issues while the time-turner abusing was ongoing; it would be a consequence that appeared after the fact. It's mentioned in chapter 2 that Harry was in school when he was seven; that could be argued as evidence that his sleep issues hadn't quite manifested at that point, and that he'd been pulled out of school soon after, once they did.

But that still leaves a period of three or four years for Harry to readjust to 24 hour days. You'd think Harry and his parents would have at least tried some kind of therapy, if the issue was severe enough to pull him out of school, and in the absence of some kind of reinforcing factor, why wouldn't said therapy at least have made some progress on the issue?

"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.

"I wish to defend this world. I wish to protect this world which God has abandoned, and defend it against everything that threatens it!"

-- To the Stars (Madoka fanfiction)

If we're using "humanity" to mean human values, this quote seems simply false (presuming that value stability is a solved problem by then).

If we're using the word to mean the architecture of baseline humans, it seems somewhere between false and irrelevant depending on what features of that architecture we care about.

If we're using it to mean some kind of metaphysical quality of human nature, it seems entirely unverifiable.

Bokonon: One day the enhanced humans of the future will dig through their code, until they come to the core of their own minds. And there they will find a mass of what appears to be the most poorly written mess of spaghetti code ever devised, its flaws patched over by a massive series of hacks.

Koheleth: And then they will attempt to rewrite that code, destroying the last of their humanity in the process.

The Dialogues Between Bokonon and Koheleth

Our brains are closest to being sane and functioning rationally at a conscious level near our birth (or maybe earlier). Early childhood behaviour is clear evidence for such.

"Neurons" and "brains" are damaged/mutated results of a mutated "space-virus", or equivalent. All of our individual actions and collective behaviours are biased in externally obvious but not visible to us ways, optimizing for:

1. terraforming the planet in expectation of invasion (ie, global warming, high CO2 pollution)

2. spreading the virus into space, with a built in bias for spreading away from our origin (voyager's direction)

Girl 1: Because distance is infinitely divisible, if you assign number pairs to each letter of the alphabet, you can specify any string of letters just by pointing to a very specific place on this centimeter and getting its decimal output. In fact, that sentence I just said is at a particular point on the centimeter, as was this one, and whatever you or I say in the future. The centimeter has read every book there will ever be and knows every scientific fact that can be. It knows the future of our friendship. It knows how we'll die. It knows how the universe ends and how it began.

Girl 2: What's the point of doing anything then?

Girl 1: Well, the centimeter also "knows" a bunch of crazy stuff.

Centimeter callouts: "2+2=3" "Up is down, rotated 90 degrees" "Ponies aren't awesome"

Girl 2: So I know infinity less than the centimeter, but have infinity better discretion.

Girl 1: Yeah, that's basically your life. You know relatively no information, but you're relatively great at using it.

Girl 2: I bet if I tell Bobby about this, he'll like me.

Girl 1: Well, you're okay at using it.

--Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal