Note that this poll only samples people who care about these threads enough to read them. People who avoid these threads and don't like them cluttering /discussion will not see it.

Well, there are definitely forms that are irrational, but there's also the perfectly rational factor of having to account for feedback loops.

We don't have to consider that shifting resources from lightning death prevention to terrorism prevention will increase the base rate of lightning strikes; we do have to consider that a shift in the other direction can increase (or perhaps decrease) the base rate of terrorist activity. It is thus inherently hard to compare the expected effect of a dollar of lightning strike prevention against a dollar of terrorism prevention, over and above the uncertainties involved in comparing the expected effect of (say) a dollar of lightning strike prevention against a dollar of large asteroid collision protection.

Further, of course, we know that lightning strikes are not controlled by intelligent beings, while terrorist strikes are.

If there's a major multi-fatality lightning strike, it's unlikely to encourage weather phenomena to engage in copycat attacks. Nor will all sorts of counter-lightning measures dissuade clouds from generating static electricity and instead dumping more rain or something.

The contention that "'computer games', as defined by Wikipedia" is "PC games" is, of course, true.

However, did you deliberately intend that people who knew with high confidence Tetris was (by far) the best-selling game played on computers (as computers are defined by Wikipedia) would get caught by not knowing that Wikipedia redirects "computer game" to "PC game" rather than to "video game"?

Constructing an ethics that demands that a chicken act as a moral agent is obviously nonsense; chickens can't and won't act that way. Similarly, constructing an ethics that demands humans value chickens as much as they value their own children is nonsense; humans can't and won't act that way. If you're constructing an ethics for humans follow, you have to start by figuring out humans.

It's not until after you've figured out how much humans should value the interests of chickens that you can determine how much to weigh the interests of chickens in how humans should act. And how much humans should weigh the value of chickens is by necessity determined by what humans are.

All humans as they currently exist, no. But is there a system of ethics as a whole that humans, even currently disagreeing with some parts of it, would recognize as superior at doing what they really want from an ethical system that they would switch to it? Even in the main? Maybe, indeed, human ethics are so dependent on alleles that vary within the population and chance environmental factors that CEV is impossible. But there's no solid evidence to require assuming that a priori, either.

By analogy, consider the person who in 1900 wanted to put together the ideal human diet. Obviously, the diets in different parts of the world differed from each other extensively, and merely averaging all of them that existed in 1900 would not be particularly conducive to finding an actual ideal diet. The person would have to do all the sorts of research that discovered the roles of various nutrients and micronutrients, et cetera. Indeed, he'd have to learn more than we currently do about them. And he'd have to work out the variations to react to various medical conditions, and he'd have to consider flavor (both innate response pathways and learned ones), et cetera. And then there's the limit of what foods can be grown where, what shipping technologies exist, how to approximate the ideal diet in differing circumstances.

It would be difficult, but eventually you probably could put together a dietary program (including understood variations) that would, indeed, suit humans better than any of the existing diets in 1900, both in nutrition and pleasure. It wouldn't suit sharks at all; it would not be a universal nutrition. But it would be an objectively determined diet just the same.

Objective? Sure, without being universal.

Human beings are physically/genetically/mentally similar within certain tolerances; this implies there is one system of ethics (within certain tolerances) that is best suited all of us, which could be objectively determined by a thorough and competent enough analysis of humans. The edges of the bell curve on various factors might have certain variances. There might be a multi-modal distribution of fit (bimodal on men and women, for example), too. But, basically, one objective ethics for humans.

This ethics would clearly be unsuited for cats, sharks, bees, or trees. It seems vanishingly unlikely that sapient minds from other evolutions would also be suited for such an ethics, either. So it's not universal, it's not a code God wrote into everything. It's just the best way to be a human . . . as humans exposed to it would in fact judge, because it's fitted to us better than any of our current fumbling attempts.

Harry didn't learn, no. But is that an advantage or a disadvantage? To go back to Chapter 76:

"It's strange," Snape said quietly. "I have had two mentors, over the course of my days. Both were extraordinarily perceptive, and neither one ever told me the things I wasn't seeing. It's clear enough why the first said nothing, but the second..." Snape's face tightened. "I suppose I would have to be naive, to ask why he stayed silent."

Now, yes, this separates Snape from Dumbledore. But Dumbledore is not the protagonist. Harry is the protagonist. And what Snape can learn from Harry's actions are:

Harry Potter will tell him the truth; Snape can trust Harry Potter. -or- Harry Potter is a brilliant plotter; so good that even at age eleven he outclasses both Voldemort and Dumbledore with his ability to fake being honest and trustworthy.

If the first is true, Snape can put his trust in Harry, where he cannot trust Voldemort or Dumbledore. In a world where the prophecy clearly declares Harry Potter a power that ranks with Voldemort, isn't the obvious power to align oneself with the one who you can trust? When looking at the future, do you want it dominated by someone who let you wallow in foolishness and pain for their own advantage, or someone who treated you as you would wish to be treated? (Well, it might just mean the boy doesn't have enough guile to win, of course, but that suggests merely not burning your bridges. You're already in the other camp, after all . . .)

If the second is true, the only sensible course is to make oneself as useful to Harry as possible, because Harry is unstoppable.