[Survey Taken Thread]

By ancient tradition, if you take the survey you may comment saying you have done so here, and people will upvote you and you will get karma.

Let's make these comments a reply to this post. That way we continue the tradition, but keep the discussion a bit cleaner.

It could be, but I think theoretical physicists actually are very intelligent. Do you disagree?

edit: But let's leave them aside, and talk about me, since I am actually here. I am not in the same league as Ed Witten, not even close. Do you (generic sense) have something sensible to communicate to me about how I go about my business?

That seems extremely dangerous.

LOL. Word inflation strikes again with a force of a million atomic bombs! X-)

Are you really arguing for keeping ideologically incorrect people barefoot and pregnant, lest they harm themselves with any tools they might acquire?

Whenever the conjunction fallacy is brought up, it always irks me, because it doesn't seem like a real fallacy. In the example given by Rationality A to Z, "[...] found that experimental subjects consdiered it less likely that a strong tennis player would lose the first set than he would lose the first set but win the match."

There's two valid interpretations of this statement here:

1) The fallacious interpretation: P(Lose First Set) < P(Lose First Set and Win Match)

2) P(Lose First Set) < P(Win Match | Lose First Set), which is a valid and not necessarily fallacious reasoning, given the context that the tennis player is considered strong. Another possible phrasing of "he would lose the first set but win the match" is "given that he lost his first set, what's the chance of him winning the match?"

Has this been addressed before?

Instinct != stupidity. This is a different thing here. Leaning towards an idea comes both from finding it true and liking it. If you equally lean towards two ideas, but like one more, that suggests you subconsciously find that less true. So if you go for the one you dislike, you probably go for an idea you find subconsciously more true.Leaning towards an idea you dislike suggests you found so much truth in it, subconsciously, that it even overcame the ugh-field that came from disliking it. And that is a remarkably lot of truth.

Reversed stupidity is a different thing. That is a lot like "Since there is no such thing as Adam and Eve's original sin, human nature cannot have any factory bugs and must be infinitely perfectible." (Age of Enlightenment philosophy.) That is reversed stupidity.

It is a different thing. It is reversed affect.

I've had several experiences similar to what Scott describes, of being trapped between two debaters who both had a convincingness that exceeded my ability to discern truth.

I always feel so.

I see a lot of rational sounding arguments from red-pillers, manosphericals, conservatives, reactionaries, libertarians, the ilk. And then I see the counter-arguments from liberals, feminists, leftists and the ilk that pretty much boil down to the other side just being uncompassionate assholes and desperately rationalizing it with arguments. Well, rationalizing is a very universal feature and they sometimes do seem like really selfish people indeed... so I really don't know who to believe.

Or climate change. What little I know about the scientific method says this is NOT how you do science. You don't just make a computer simulation in 1980 or so that would predict oceans boiling away by 2000 and when it fails to happen just tweak it and say this second time now you surely got it right. Yet, pretty much every prestigious scientist supports the "alarmist" side and on the other side I see only marginal, low-status "cranks" - and they are curiously politically motivated. So who do I support?

In such dilemmas, I think the best thing is to figure out what is it your "corrupted hardware" wants to do and do the opposite - do the opposite what your instincts i.e. evolved biases suggest.

Well, no luck. On one side, I see people who are high-status, intellectual, and look really nice and empathic and compassionate. Of course my instincts like that. On the other side, I see people who look brave, tough, critical-minded and creative, plus they seem to be far more historically literate, so basically NRx and libertarians and similar folks give me that kind of "inventor" vibe, which incidentally is also something my instincts like.

I like both sides - and yet, to decide rationally, I should probably choose something I instinctively dislike.

Voldemort is lying in parseltongue. He's not going to kill Harry because he can't. He can't because the curse or unbreakable vow he took to not harm himself didn't have release conditions. There was no purpose in putting them in. You don't set up "I can't kill myself unless I try to kill myself", because the 2nd part is useless if the first part works.

"But you tried to end my true life jusst then, sstupid child. Now cursse iss lifted, and I may kill you any time I wissh."

You sir, are a lying liar who lies in parseltongue. Or Harry would be dead right now. Indeed, he would have been dead long ago.

Voldemort is not allowed to kill a version of himself, period. This is how he intended to get around the prisoner's dilemma with his eternal chess buddy. There were to be no clever "Baba Yaga draws Perverelle's blood" outs that would allow someone to murder the foresworn, you were just. not. allowed. Ever. This is the lesson Tom Riddle drew from the story of Baba Yaga; don't leave that loophole. This is what he did with the Goblet of Fire, perhaps?

We would play the game against each other forever, keeping our lives interesting amid a world of fools. I knew a dramatist would predict that the two of us would end by destroying each other; but I pondered long upon it, and decided that both of us would simply decline to play out the drama. That was my decision and I was confident that it would remain so; both Tom Riddles, I thought, would be too intelligent to truly go down that road.

Voldemort would defect in a heartbeat, and he knows it. He has precluded this possiblity, precluded it so strongly that killing Harry or even willing him killed is either impossible to him or would mean his own death.

Note the instructions he gave to his Death Eaters are non-lethal, and varied, and multiplied by dozens of them. He is taking extraordinary non-lethal precautions. He is taking extraordinary measures to resurrect Hermione to prevent a living Harry from destroying the stars. Voldemort is doing this because he wants desperately to not die, and the more obvious option of just killing the idiot-child of foretold destruction is not available to him.

Perfect mathematical reflection, free of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

My interpretation of that was extremely different: that Harry got riddled when he was a baby, in Godric's Hollow.

In canon, Ginny reads the diary a lot and this enables Riddle to take her over when he wants to. When he does, she's basically a puppet: it's (fully aware) Riddle scrawling on walls and summoning basilisks, and Ginny's completely unaware of it; afterwards, Ginny is basically her normal self again, with no memory of what Riddle did while operating her body.

There's no sign in HPMOR of anything like that happening to Harry. The Harry whom QQ addresses as "Tom Riddle" has (so far as we can tell) psychological continuity with the Harry we've been following through the previous hundred-plus chapters. There's no sign of "absences" like Ginny had. After being addressed as "Tom Riddle" (and, again, with no indication of any personality changes or anything) Harry resolves explicitly that he is going to do whatever he can to stop QQ. So if we are supposed to understand that the diary had some major effect on Harry, it has to have done it in a way that doesn't "mirror canon" much at all.

What I think is being described here is something more like a personality-upload from Voldemort to baby-Harry, so that what remained in Godric's Hollow that day was (at least according to Voldemort's plans) Tom Riddle implanted in baby-Harry.

(What I can't work out is whether we're supposed to understand that it went wrong, with the Riddle personality getting kinda isolated, like grit in a pearl, as Harry's "dark side", or that it worked exactly as planned and the Harry we see now is what you get when Tom Riddle's mind grows up in baby-Harry's brain, raised by his adoptive parents. I'm not even sure what the latter means exactly. Perhaps the idea is something like this: after the upload, what we get is more or less the same as what we'd have got if baby-Riddle had been raised in Harry's place, but Riddle's adult memories are also stashed away for later use and the latter are the "dark side".)

[EDITED several hours after posting to fix an embarrassing word-omission. I don't think the sense was ever unclear.]

How is this different from a QALY point of view?