...do note that Hermione at one point reacts in a genre-savvy fashion by saying that it's fine for Harry to have a dark side.

Please keep in mind that a lot of this apparent problem is generated by the unalterable fact that Harry, who has Stuff Going On and has been through hell as the title character and has to grow fast enough to be competitive with people like Dumbledore and Professor Quirrell (all genders chosen by Rowling) happens to be male, whereas Hermione, who like many other characters is going to have difficulty competing with Harry at this point in the story, happens to be female. I mean, suppose Rowling had made her professionally paranoid Auror a woman. It's not unthinkable that someone might complain about how Harry, a male, managed to land a stun on Madam Moody. Symmetrically, if Draco had discovered Harry doing science with Hermione some chapters earlier, he wouldn't have had the same reaction but he would've had an equally difficult reaction for Harry to deal with, and yes I would've figured out some way to make the adultery joke there too.

The main lesson I'm learning is that there are potential Problems when you arrange the plot so that you have the main character interacting with two different tiers of powered characters (Harry-Draco-Hermione and Harry-Dumbledore-Quirrell) and you haven't arranged the plot to have the main character's companions go through everything the main character does... but that problem is far too late to correct now.

P.S: In retrospect there's exactly one important canon character in this story whose gender I could freely choose, and I did happen to make her female, but that's not going to be apparent until later.

That sounds even more formal than "person" to me, actually.

Edit: how about "someone who acts"?

That's a good point, and you're right. I wish "person" didn't feel so formal though. I'm having trouble thinking of a gender-neutral word that conveys the same casualness of "guy."

Consider me to be among those who would establish an Indianapolis meetup.

Before you get your hopes up, keep in mind: be warned research in mice has a very poor track record for generalizing to humans.

Premise: Quirrell plays the game one level higher than Harry Potter.

Observation: This entire incident is uncharacteristically sloppy. Why were the unicorn corpses found? Why was Quirrell discovered?

Observation: Harry Potter is now really pissed off that herds of unicorns to slay aren't standard procedure for stable-izing people with life threatening injuries. He has just been given another "if only" to fixate on. It has been brought to his attention in ways that wouldn't trip his "why am I being told this" sense.

Father had told Draco that to fathom a strange plot, one technique was to look at what ended up happening, assume it was the intended result, and ask who benefited.

Hypothesis: Reminding Harry that there were ways the wizarding world could have saved Hermione was the primary effect. Possible secondary effects may include impressing on Harry just how ridiculously powerful he is. Perhaps implanting the desire to save Quirrell into Harry's mind? Quirrell may not actually need the blood right now, though I suspect it doesn't hurt.

Harry's blindness to Quirrel being pretty obviously bad news at this point is definitely something I'd like to see explained. I know that as the reader I get to see things more clearly than Harry does, but when you start thinking painfully murdering magical creatures to preserve your life for a short amount of time is fine if the person doing it is someone you like, something is going wrong there! I am fully expecting at this point to understand that Harry's thinking on Quirrel is being deliberately suppressed. After all, Harry's meant to be fundamentally curious about magic... why has he not investigated what could cause the anti-magic effect?

What's the point of having feelings or emotions at all? Are they not all "pointless"?

I disagree with the article for the following reason: if I have two hypotheses that both explain an "absence of evidence" occurrence equally well, then that occurrence does not give me reason to favor either hypothesis and is not "evidence of absence."

Example: Vibrams are a brand of toe-shoes that recently settled a big suit because they couldn't justify their claims of health benefits. We have two hypotheses (1) Vibrams work, (2) Vibrams don't work. Now, if a well-executed experiment had been done and failed to show an effect, that would be evidence against a significant benefit from Vibrams. However, if the effect were small or nobody had completed a well-executed experiment, I see no reason that (2) would fit the evidence better than (1), so we are justified in saying this absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Although the original saying, I think, was meant in the absolute sense (evidence meaning proof), it is still fitting in the probabilistic sense. Absence of evidence is only evidence of absence when combined with one hypothesis explaining an occurrence better than the other, so the saying holds.

We simply don't have the time and computing power to use full rigor on our individual decisions, so we need an alternative strategy. As I understand it, the human brain operates largely on caching. X-rationality allows us to clean and maintain our caches more thoroughly than does traditional rationality. At first, it seems reasonable to expect this to yield higher success rates.

However, our intuition vastly underestimates the size of our personal caches. Furthermore, traditional rationality is simply faster at cleaning, even if it leaves a lot of junk behind. So it would appear that we should do most of the work with traditional rationality, then apply the slower x-rationality process for subtle refinement. But since x-rationality is so much slower and more difficult to run, it takes a whole giant heap of time and effort to get through a significant portion of the cache, and along the way many potential corrections will have already been achieved in the traditional rationality first pass.

But if we leave out the more rigorous methods entirely, deeming them too expensive, we're doomed to hit a pitfall where traditional rationality will not save us from thirty years of pursuing a bad idea. If we can notice these pitfalls quickly, we can apply the slow x-rationality process to that part of the cache right away, and we might only pursue the bad idea for thirty minutes instead.

We need to be able to reason clearly, to identify opportunities for clearer reasoning, and to identify our own terminal goals. A flaw in any of these pieces can limit our effectiveness, in addition to the limits of just being human. What other limiting factors might there be? What methods can we use to improve them? I keep coming back to Less Wrong because I imagine this is the most likely site to provide me with discourse on the matter.