With a billion dollars one can save thousands of lives, which seems like a bigger deal than one person being tortured for a day. I can certainly see reasons for not taking that offer, but taking it doesn't seem very babyeaterish to me if the taker's intention is to use much of the money to do a lot more good than the donor does harm.

I teleport a hostage about to be executed to a capsule in lunar orbit. I then offer you three options: you pay me 1,000,000,000$, and I give him whatever pleasures are possible given the surroundings for a day, and then painlessly kill him; I simply kill him painlessly; I torture him for a day, and then painlessly kill him, and then pay you 1,000,000,000$.

Do you still take the money?

This strikes me as a pretty stark decision, such that I'd have a really hard time treating those who would take the money any different than I'd treat the babyeaters. It's almost exactly the same moral equation.

Where did you obtain the game pieces?

I never understood that... I remember when I was in elementary school there was a sign in the library that said something like "Don't dog-ear your books... you wouldn't like it if someone folded your ear over, so don't do it to your book." What?

How... what...

People on the internet aren't from Saskatoon, that's my city!

But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.

It enjoys the mind/body distinction, for sure, but not necessarily strongly (not more strongly than a physicalist who wants to be neuropreserved). Random proposed mechanisms for animagi:

• the human mind is very compressible, so it's not hard to build a cat-sized brain that runs a human
• the brain actually gets teleported to another dimension and operates the cat via telepresence
• the cat is animated through magic and most of its mass is actually used to run computation (slightly less plausible for a beetle)

[...] Often I find that the best way to come up with new results is to find someone who's saying something that seems clearly, manifestly wrong to me, and then try to think of counterarguments. Wrong people provide a fertile source of research ideas.

-- Scott Aaronson, Quantum Computing Since Democritus (http://www.scottaaronson.com/democritus/lec14.html)

I am fairly sure it does not.

I think you're leaving out another possibility: that they actually think they're right. This obviously doesn't apply to all cases, but I do think it's more common than you would think.

There's also a (related?) strong desire for consistency, which is explored in "Influence - Science and Practice" (Cialdini), which I found sheds some new light on the material in "How to win friends and influence people".

[Also, welcome to lesswrong]

It might be useful to spend some time thinking about how we and others use the word "stupid".

Creationism is stupid. Believing creationism is stupid. Teaching it, or advocating for teaching it, is stupid. Why would anyone ever be so stupid? Well ... I'm not sure, but I think it has a lot to do with: ① inferential distance: evolution is a bit of a counterintuitive idea, like recursion or quantum theory; and ② loyalty: many people are systematically taught that evolution is an idea of the Enemy, so they have a presumption against it.

But here's the thing. "Inferential distance" is an exterior view on a cognitive process. From the inside, an idea that's too far away from your knowledge looks a lot like a nonsense idea, an unproven idea, a wild conjecture, a "how could you ever know that‽" idea. Evolution must look to creationists the way claims of paranormal abilities look to me: "How could that ever work? You don't have any good evidence of that. That's not the way I was taught the world works! Your experiments can't be trusted; it's more likely you're playing some sort of tricks with the data. Besides, my fellow skeptics have thought of a bunch of challenges you need to meet to prove you're not just making it all up."

Creationists think I am stupid because I believe in evolution. They think I have fallen for a hoax put together by atheistic scientists under the influence of the Devil. I think that they are stupid. I think they have fallen for a hoax put together by preachers under the influence of the memetic evolution of religious beliefs.

It seems likely that someone has been fooled. If human intelligence arose from protohumans' differences in ability to fool one another about life-critical subjects ... or if human doubt arose from protohumans' inability to distinguish between the promises of God and those of the Devil ... then whether you are being fooled is pretty much the most important thing to know.