I and some of my friends have gotten emails from scammers who say they want to buy several paintings from my artist website, but are moving and want to use a bank check- or something similar. What I have done is reply that I will only accept payments through PayPal. Then I never hear from them again. Bitcoins would also work. The problem with testing it out by accepting a check or Bank order and depositing it in case it is for real is that you will get hit by a hefty fee from the bank if it bounces.

I have never liked music. Why do people like it?

Along the lines of James_Miller's question: Why do people like poetry?

How do I get myself to like poetry? (Reading poetry seems like a cheap and respectable way to spend leisure time, if only it were pleasurable for me!)

I always thought American universities were better than British.

I think that studying math and becoming a math professor would put you in an excellent position to work toward preventing an unfriendly AI. First of all, you could, if you chose to, study computer science and artificial intelligence at the same time. Second of all, you will be in a position to influence others who may some day be working in the field. You can start a LessWrong chapter at the university you attend and the one you teach at. You can lecture/talk to your students at the importance of caution and safe guards in what ever they work on in the future.

This is probably not the solution Harry's going to use in Chapter 81 (I'm writing this before it was posted), but a friend and I were discussing it and came up with a possible solution. I decided it would be much more fun as a piece of fanfanfiction rather than an abstract description, so here it is. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing.

Chapter 81b: Alternate Solution

Beyond all panic and despair his mind began to search through every fact in its possession, recall everything it knew about Lucius Malfoy, about the Wizengamot, about the laws of magical Britain; his eyes looked at the rows of chairs, at every person and every thing within range of his vision, searching for any opportunity it could grasp -

And the start of an idea formed - not a plan, but a tiny fragment of one. He spelled out N-O-T-E on his fingers, and, as discretely as he could, drew a piece of paper out from his bag that he did not remember putting there. It read:

"Mess with time if you want!"

And then he heard a loud bang, and another while he was stuffing the note back in his bag, and he looked up to see that a circular piece had pushed out from the wall, (that wall that could've withstood a nuclear explosion), far in the back where no one had been looking. Heads turned in unison to look as four glowing, silver human shapes emerged from the three-foot diameter hole, and began walking down the aisle towards Hermione. No one in the room but Harry and Dumbledore suspected they were Patronuses.

Prime Minister Fudge should have been angry, that magical creatures would dare barge in; but for some reason he couldn't quite place, he was calm. Auror Gawain was too busy casting shield spells to acknowledge how scared he was. Harry had a pretty good idea where this was going, but decided that "confused" was the best expression to wear. Professor McGonagall nearly had a stroke. Lucius Malfoy's angry expression had vanished, leaving his face perfectly blank. His entire row had stood up, and drawn their wands. To his left, five wizards Harry didn't recognize were pointing at the human Patronuses; to his right, seven wizards pointed their wands at Dumbledore.

Lucius himself had his wand, and his gaze, fixed firmly on Harry. For a brief and accidental moment, the boy who thought he was a rock looked back.

Wands too numerous to count followed those glowing figures, as they walked down the aisle towards Hermione. Harry noticed that Fawkes had perched silently on her shoulder, and she was taking slow, deep breaths.

Behind each wand, a wizard thought that someone else ought to do something. A rare upside to the bystander effect, Harry would later note. For the time being, his mind was busy choreographing the movements of four invisible figures, who were definitely not bumping into each other. When the Patronuses had reached the bottom-most platform, where Hermione sat, they stopped, and looked up at Dumbledore's platform.

"Who dares interrupt these proceedings?" Dumbledore's voice boomed out. In fact, he was glad that they had been interrupted, and knew exactly who he was talking to; but as Chief Warlock, he had to express indignance, or else someone else would have gone and done it for him.

This better be good, Harry thought, because I won't be able to think of anything else once I've been anchored.

"We are the Guardians of Merlin", said the first Patronus, in Harry's best impression of a Scottish accent.

"In that case, I yield the floor to the Guardians of Merlin", said Dumbledore. "May I ask why you are here?"

"We were a safeguard created by Merlin, to protect the purity of the Wizengamot. In his wisdom, Merlin set down a list of especially vile deeds; should this assembly should decide to perform one, we awaken. And so we are here."

Lucius turned away from Harry, and towards the front. "Ridiculous. This is no different than the many other times we have punished murderers, and no ghosts or apparitions appeared then." He put a slight emphasis on "ghosts or apparitions". He had no idea what they really were, but there was ample precedent saying ghosts and apparitions weren't allowed to do things.

Harry wondered what lie his future self would tell. Then the second patronus spoke, in exactly the same voice as the first. "It is different, because sending this girl to Azkaban would satisfy the first requirement for a ritual!"

The murmurs stopped. Several members of the audience suddenly noticed the dementor in the room, on a level where they had not noticed it before. Professor McGonagall actually did have a stroke, but it was a small one, of a kind that could be fully repaired by magic later. For a moment, Dumbledore lost himself in his role and forgot that he was speaking to four copies of Harry Potter.

Five seconds passed before Dumbledore broke the silence. "Are you saying that this trial is part of a dark ritual?"

"Yes", said all four patronuses simultaneously, convincing several members of the assembly to abandon the idea that they were all controlled by one person. The figures were new, important, and mysterious. Hermione was no longer salient.

"Do you know who could be behind this?" Dumbledore asked.

Heads turned towards Lucius, who looked around and noted exactly whose heads they were, handling the sudden deluge of important information by recording only the ways in which it differed from what he would have expected. Lucius knew then, that he had to lose; not only was he facing four new and completely unknown pieces, pieces which had been powerful enough to carve a hole in the indestructible wall of the Wizengamot, his own role was looking altogether too suspicious. He looked left, met the eyes of his servant, August Stoessel, and sent a thought.

Two seats left, August stood up and shouted, "It must be Lord Voldemort!" The audience's attention shifted slightly. Lucius decided that four days later, Stoessel - Imperiused and falsely rumored to be a perfect occlumens - would confess to the whole thing, claiming (though no one would believe the last part) to have been Imperiused by Lord Voldemort himself.

Dumbledore looked very disturbed. Onlookers did not find this surprising, but they would have been surprised by the reason, if they knew. Dumbledore had just put the pieces together - Harry had performed an advanced plot, and time turned in spite of his time turner's locked shell, just as he must have done on the day Bellatrix Black broke out of Azkaban.

"Talk of dark rituals is unfit for discussion here", Dumbledore said, a little shakily. "If there are no objections, I believe we can suspend the previous vote and reconvene tomorrow morning, after the Ministry has had a chance to speak with these Guardians. We will vote whether to release or punish Hermione then, with fuller information."

Lucius did not object. He would have a whole day to plan his next move. Harry did not object. He would have a whole day to plan his next move.

The Guardians of Merlins left first, through the strange hole from which they had come. Then the Aurors left, taking Hermione, their patronuses, and the dementor, slightly smaller but still intact. Then the audience left, Harry among them, and he excused himself to go to the bathroom, where he anchored his time turner inside its shell like Quirrell had shown him, and spun the shell twice. Finally Dumbledore left; but he was only two steps out the door when he disillusioned himself, spun his time turner twice, and reentered.

Two hours earlier, an invisible Harry Potter was wandering around the Wizengamot building, first looking for his earlier self so he could place the "Mess with time if you want" note, then looking for the other side of the wall he had seen cut open. He found it in a secluded storeroom, with ten minutes to spare, set down a piece of paper and marked it with a single tally. Soon he was joined by another Harry, who had used his time turner only once, and another, and another. Rather than take off their invisibility cloaks, they announced their arrival by marking the paper with a second, third, and fourth tally.

Dumbledore watched invisibly from inside the Wizengamot chamber as four invisible Harry Potters used partial transfiguration to cut a hole in the wall. He watched invisibly as four Human Patronuses entered the room. And then an invisible Harry Potter bumped into the invisible Dumbledore, changing events from how they were meant to go; and the entire twisted tangle of time loops collapsed into a paradox and never was. Reality would take a different path, one in which Harry chose a simpler solution, one that did not require three things to all happen.

The only thing I've done recently is send money to the Singularity Institute. I did, however, give birth to and raise a son who is dedicated to saving the world. I'm contemplating changing my user name to Sarah Connor. :)

If psychology worked, I would expect marketing firms to use it to make millions of people buy tons of shit that they don't need and that won't make them happy.

Orthogonal to the risk issue, but still important when donating, is that nonprofits are exempt from capital gains taxes. This means that if you happen to end up with stock that has appreciated since you got it, you should give stock before you give dollars; and if you have stock that has depreciated, you should keep that before you keep dollars, since selling it will offset other taxes. I believe Fidelity has a special fund that lets you transfer ownership of stock, sell it without capital gains, and give the charity dollars with no extra overhead for them. Other brokers probably do too.

There is a certain cliche of a young child asking "why?", getting an answer, asking "why?" to that, and so on until the adult finally dismisses them out of frustration.

Simple miscommunication. Kids figure out that saying "why?" causes people to tell them interesting, related things. So they keep doing that. The adults who hear this, however, are applying an additional constraint - the things have to be related in a particular way - which the child probably doesn't care much about. Unfortunately, that constraint sometimes leads to dead ends; there are many concepts where all the answers to "why" are either unknown, or uninteresting, or built on prerequisite knowledge not available to small children. The graceless way to handle this is to get frustrated and dismiss them. The right way is to segue the conversation to something that isn't related by an is-cause-of or is-purpose-of relation, but which is interesting and worth talking about.