Yes, but it is pissing against the wind of a huge part of human biology where status withing the tribe is all-important. Don't expect this to be easy.

Harry pulled the trigger. Bang or click?

What happens if you AK someone keyed to the horcrux 2.0 network?

Prediction: If Hermione is AK'd, her soul will be shunted to the network. There will be no death burst and Voldemort's horcruxing attempt fails. Then things get interesting.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there seem to be two separate challenges on the Potions room parchment: a simple one consistent with canon and the skills and abilities of the target audience, and a complex one requiring an hour or so of careful and precise work. Looks like Harry and Quirrelmort focus exclusively on the long formula, ignoring the puzzle.

On rereading the relevant part of Ch. 107, it appears that Harry has an idea he doesn't want to share shortly after the broomstick conversation. On a close reading, it appears that he manages to avoid the topic, first evading a request to answer a question in parseltongue by talking about Snape, then veering further off topic with dementors.

So did Harry manage to pull a fast one? Are the Effulgence instructions forged? If so, by whom? Is the duration of one hour significant for time-turning? What did I miss?

Time turners cannot alter anything the user knows about (for some value of `know'), so it would require reenacting this exact scene. So someone would have to simulate Harry's experiences, including the magical event, confuse Harry's patronus as to location of Hermione (or cause Hermione to actually be on scene, albeit invisible), and control the troll, so that it behaved exactly in the way Harry remembers it to have behaved. Also, Dumbledore would need not to tell Harry anything that he couldn't have lied when he said he was responding to the death of a student.

Genes take charge and diets fall by the wayside.

You need a New York Times account to read it, but setting one up only takes a couple of minutes. Here are some exerpts in any case.

Obese people almost always regain weight after weight loss:

So Dr. Hirsch and his colleagues, including Dr. Rudolph L. Leibel, who is now at Columbia University, repeated the experiment and repeated it again. Every time the result was the same. The weight, so painstakingly lost, came right back. But since this was a research study, the investigators were also measuring metabolic changes, psychiatric conditions, body temperature and pulse. And that led them to a surprising conclusion: fat people who lost large amounts of weight might look like someone who was never fat, but they were very different. In fact, by every metabolic measurement, they seemed like people who were starving.

Before the diet began, the fat subjects’ metabolism was normal — the number of calories burned per square meter of body surface was no different from that of people who had never been fat. But when they lost weight, they were burning as much as 24 percent fewer calories per square meter of their surface area than the calories consumed by those who were naturally thin.

Thin people who are forced to gain weight find it easy to lose it again:

...His subjects were prisoners at a nearby state prison who volunteered to gain weight. With great difficulty, they succeeded, increasing their weight by 20 percent to 25 percent. But it took them four to six months, eating as much as they could every day. Some consumed 10,000 calories a day, an amount so incredible that it would be hard to believe, were it not for the fact that there were attendants present at each meal who dutifully recorded everything the men ate.

Once the men were fat, their metabolisms increased by 50 percent. They needed more than 2,700 calories per square meter of their body surface to stay fat but needed just 1,800 calories per square meter to maintain their normal weight.

When the study ended, the prisoners had no trouble losing weight. Within months, they were back to normal and effortlessly stayed there.

The body's metabolism changes with weight loss and weight gain:

The implications were clear. There is a reason that fat people cannot stay thin after they diet and that thin people cannot stay fat when they force themselves to gain weight. The body’s metabolism speeds up or slows down to keep weight within a narrow range. Gain weight and the metabolism can as much as double; lose weight and it can slow to half its original speed.

Genes and weight:

.A few years later, in 1990, Dr. Stunkard published another study in The New England Journal of Medicine, using another classic method of geneticists: investigating twins. This time, he used the Swedish Twin Registry, studying its 93 pairs of identical twins who were reared apart, 154 pairs of identical twins who were reared together, 218 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared apart, and 208 pairs of fraternal twins who were reared together.

The identical twins had nearly identical body mass indexes, whether they had been reared apart or together. There was more variation in the body mass indexes of the fraternal twins, who, like any siblings, share some, but not all, genes.

The researchers concluded that 70 percent of the variation in peoples’ weights may be accounted for by inheritance, a figure that means that weight is more strongly inherited than nearly any other condition, including mental illness, breast cancer or heart disease.

Whether or not this result is correct, society is definitely shaming the wrong people: some perfectly healthy people (e.g. young women) are shamed for not being as skinny as the models on TV, and not much is being done to prevent morbid obesity in certain people (esp. middle-aged and older) who don't even try to lose weight.

(Edited to replace “adult men” with “middle-aged and older” and “eat less” with “lose weight”.)

The Kelly criterion returns a fraction of your bankroll; it follows that for any (positive-expected-value) bet whatsoever, it will advise you to increase your bet linearly in your income. Could this be the problem, or have you already taken that into account?

Well that is exactly the point. It confuses me that the richer I am the more insurance I should buy, though the richer I am the more I am able to compensate the risk in not buying any insurance.

That aside, I'm slightly confused about how you can use the Kelly criterion in this case. Insurance must necessarily have negative expected value for the buyer, or the insurer makes no profit.

Yes and no. The insurer makes only a profit if the total cost of insurance is lower than the expected value of the case with no insurance. What you pay the insurer for is that the insurer takes on a risk you yourself are not able to survive (financially), that is catastrophically high costs of medical procedures, liabilities or similar. It is easily possible for the average Joe to foot the bill if he breaks a $5 mug but it would be catastrophic for him if he runs into an oil tank and has to foot the $10,000,000 bill to clean up the environment. (This example is not made up but actually happened around here.)

It is here where my intuition says that the richer you are, the less insurance you need. I could also argue that if it was the other way around, that you should insure more the richer you are, insurance couldn't exist, seeing as the insurer is the one who should buy insurance from the poor!

You can use the Kelly criterion in any case, either negative or positive expected value. In the case of negative value it just tells you to take the other side of the bet or to pay to avoid the bet. The latter is exactly what insurance is.

So Kelly should be advising you not to buy any. How are you setting up the problem?

I model insurance from the point of view of the buyer. In any given time frame, I can avoid the insurance case with probability q, saving the cost of insurance b. Or I could lose and have to pay a with the probability p = 1-q. This is the case of not buying insurance, though it is available. So if f = p/a - q/a is negative I should insure, if f is positive, I should take the risk. This follows my intuition insofar that catastrophic but improbable risk (very high a, very low p) should be insured but not probable and cheap liabilities (high p, low a).

The trick is now that f is actually the fraction of my bankroll I have to invest. So the richer I am the more I should insure absolutely but my intuition says I should by less insurance. I know I have ignored something fundamental in my model. Is it the cost of insurance? Is it some hidden assumption in the formulation of the Kelly criterion as applied to bets? Did I accidentally assume that someone knows something the other party doesn't? Did I ignore fixed costs? This eats me up.

Edit: Maybe the results have to be interpreted differently? Of course if I don't pay the insurance, Kelly still says to invest the money somehow, maybe in having a small amount always at hand as a form of personally organized insurance. Intuition again says that this pool should grow with my wealth, effectively increasing the amount of insurance I buy, though not from an insurer but in opportunity cost.

Have you checked the house for mold? The night terrors seem pretty well-explained by mycotoxins and the odds of the other weirdness also go up if something is screwing with your biochemistry.

Where do you include environmental and cultural influences?

While these vary, I don't see legitimate values that could be affected by them. Could you provide examples of such values?

This does not follow. Maybe you need to give some examples. What do you mean by "correct" and "error" here?

Imagine that two exact replicas of a person exist in different locations, exactly the same except for an antagonism in one of their values. Both could not be correct at the same time about that value. I mean error in the sense, for example, that Eliezer employs in Coherent Extrapolated Volition: that error that comes from insufficient intelligence in thinking about our values.

This is a contentious attempt to convert everything to hedons. People have multiple contradictory impulses, desires and motives which shape their actions, often not by "maximizing good feelings".

Except in the aforementioned sense or error, could you provide examples of legitimate values that don't reduce to good and bad feelings?

Really? Been to the Youtube and other video sites lately?

I think that literature about masochism is of more evidence than youtube videos, that could be isolated incidents of people who are not regularly masochist. If you have evidence from those sites, I'd like to see it.

This is wrong in so many ways, unless you define reality as "conscious experiences in themselves", which is rather non-standard. In any case, unless you are a dualist, you can probably agree that your conscious experiences can be virtual as much as anything else.

Even being virtual, or illusive, they would still be real occurrences, and real illusions, being directly felt. I mean that in the sense of Nick Bostrom's simulation argument.

Uhh, that post sucked as well.

Perhaps it was not sufficiently explained, but check this introduction on Less Wrong, then, or the comment I made below about it:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/19d/the_anthropic_trilemma/

I read many sequences, understand them well, and assure you that, if this post seems not to make sense, then it is because it was not explained in sufficient length.

It's not a question of encouragement. Humans tends to want to be like the high status folk that they look up to.