Better would be to predict that the comment will have, say, between -10 and 0 karma. Would the audience who dislike this type of comments downvote to hurt the author's karma, or upvote to frustrate his prediction?

(I am not going to do the experiment myself - the first time it is slightly amusing, the second time it would be annoying. But if somebody doesn't mind being annoying...)

It strikes me that, in addition to the face-value interpretations given by the researchers, the subjects of some of these experiments could also be seen as rationally responding to incentives not to reveal their desires. The face attractiveness subjects might be afraid of embarrassing an authority figure or "messing up" the experiment. The split-brain patient might (rightly) think a truthful "I don't know" would be interpreted as evasive or hostile. The children might reason that being seen doing a rewarded activity "for free" would remove the basis for any future rewards.

The priming results don't seem to fit this pattern, though.

The objective of rationality is to achieve your goals as well as possible.

Too general, and maybe false. Many people, rational and not, are interested in and successful at achieving their goals well. And: less wrong is sometimes a seminar on how to achieve your goals, but it is not always and only that (I hope!).

Since so many poker opponents often decide at whim, we need to do more than just strategically analyze their actions relative to what they should be doing. We need to watch and listen and determine what they are doing.

--Mike Caro, Caro's Book of Tells

Could the "something wrong" have to do with the concept of the soul?

"What's been going on?" she said. "There's all sorts of rumors. There were people saying you'd run off to fight Bellatrix Black, there were people saying you'd run off to join Bellatrix Black -" and those rumors had said that Hermione had just made up the thing about the phoenix, and she'd yelled that the whole Ravenclaw common room had seen it, so then the next rumor had claimed she'd made up that part too, which was stupidity of such an inconceivable level that it left her completely flabbergasted.

"I can't talk about it," Harry said in a bare whisper. "Can't talk about a lot of it. I wish I could tell you everything," his voice wavered, "but I can't... I guess, if it helps or anything, I'm not going to lunch with Professor Quirrell any more..."

Yes, he is. A promise to lie can be broken or kept with equal loss of honor.

MoR is now the seventh Google autocomplete result for "methods" and the first for "harry potter and the m".

Edit: And, per JoshuaZ, "harry james p" brings up "harry james potter evans-verres" as the fifth option. (That was the post that originally led me to post this.)

Eliezer mentioned an RSS feed in the author notes. Can you actually get one? I was under the impression that you could not.

OK, I think that is it. H.P. thinks its why witches are no longer as powerful as they used to be. The idea was to prevent dangerous fools from having powerful magic, but it also means a lot of ancient magic was lost as some spells were never orally transferred, and there was no written copy to be discovered later.

What about bugs that arise not from a fundamental misunderstanding of the sort you're referring to, but from some sort of typo or language-specific error that you'd never think of as correct if only you'd noticed? These are more frequent, more annoying because they can come up even in simple tasks, and take just about as long to debug.

I realize that this sort of bug isn't interesting to write about, but you ignore this case completely when stating your 'fundamental law of software'.