Comment author: spriteless 22 February 2015 04:55:50AM 5 points [-]

I decided to collect the stuff about these recent updates that confuse me, and when added together two were in the shape of a theory!

"Dumbledore was quite correct," Professor Quirrell said, shaking his head as though in wonderment. "He was also an utter fool to leave the Hogwarts Map in the possession of those two idiots. I had an unpleasant shock after I recovered the Map; it showed my name and yours correctly! The Weasley idiots had thought it a mere malfunction, especially after you received your Cloak and your Time-Turner. If Dumbledore had kept the Map himself - if the Weasleys had ever spoken of it to Dumbledore - but they did not, thankfully."

Even Quirrell is confused! Wow!

So... Dumbledore did know all along, just like cannon, and sent the map to the twins for plausible deniability. He can get away with that because he doesn't mind when people think him a fool. And he really needs Querrellmort to think of him as ignorant so he will play the role perfectly... well Voldemort said he could play chess.

In the last thread roystgnr wrote

Harry figures out Quirrell's identity almost immediately after Snape casts some sort of "Dispel Magical Confusion", yet the only character who would have the knowledge and incentive to magically confuse Harry about this is Quirrell himself, who seems to be incapable of directly using magic on Harry or Harry's magic.

That is totally something I wouldn't have figured out on my own. Well, the first part. I had just put that up to Harry not wanting to see ill of his friend, but magical obfuscation makes sense too. Oh, but someone else had the knowledge if the first theory is right. Someone who used Legilimancy on Harry in chapter 19 and that's just when Harry found out about it!

Comment author: HungryHippo 17 February 2015 08:11:28PM 3 points [-]

plan iss for you to rule country, obvioussly This one sounds important now that we know it is definitely true (or at least was at the time).

What does "you" mean, though? Tom Riddle? In which case Quirrell could just as well be speaking of himself. The physical body others designate "Harry"? In which case Quirrell could just permanently transfigure himself into Harry's body using the stone, shoot Harry and vanish the body and claim "Quirrell" had urgent business elsewhere.

Comment author: spriteless 19 February 2015 04:24:15AM 5 points [-]

If Voldemort (or whatever created both Voldemort and Harry) consideres Potter the same person as himself, then "I do not intend to raisse my hand or magic againsst you in future, sso long ass you do not raisse your hand or magic againsst me." is a tautology and always true.

Comment author: spriteless 30 January 2015 08:38:09PM 2 points [-]

Ancedotal Evidence suggests that the first, most important skill, is being able to admit you are wrong. Taken to far though, and it results in an useless humble platitudes. Paired with being able to look at the universe around you to find what is right, I think it is enough enough to recreate everything. I would go so far as to say that Bayes' Theorem is just a mathematical formalization of those two ideas.

Comment author: JohnH 23 April 2011 11:37:28PM 2 points [-]

Thank you for that link, it was interesting.

Did they take into account that Utah is an outlier within the US in the Religion aspect? Not that I expect that to be influential in the slightest.

So then suicides are a strong indicator of personal unhappiness but a potential indicator of overall social happiness. That is very interesting.

I know a decent portion of people on Less Wrong are utilitarians/consequentialists what are the implications of the results of this study from that perspective?

Comment author: spriteless 22 December 2013 06:16:39PM 0 points [-]

My first thought was that if everyone with a low happiness level had already committed suicide it would bump up the average happiness. I mean, the dead don't answer those polls.

Killing the unhappy to make sure everyone is happy is an amoral solution, is my conclusion from a utilitarian perspective. Yep. Don't do that. Engineering peeps with higher happiness set points seems the moral counterpart, but we can't do that yet.

Comment author: Threedee 07 February 2011 06:23:49AM 15 points [-]

There are a number of web sites that present such implicit and procedural knowledge. such as: http://www.ehow.com/ http://www.wikihow.com/Main-Page http://www.howcast.com/ http://www.howtodothings.com/

I might be useful to somehow select the most generally useful ones of these in one place.

Comment author: spriteless 26 March 2012 07:29:14PM 0 points [-]

stack exchange network too.

Comment author: fredspeaking 22 March 2012 05:43:28PM 3 points [-]

Have you ever considered studying Facial Action Coding System?

Comment author: spriteless 25 March 2012 09:31:54PM *  1 point [-]

Thanks for the link. I have been reading peoples faces for awhile, but there's a second or so of lag, and I can miss things.

Comment author: spriteless 18 February 2012 12:58:50AM 0 points [-]

It seems it is ensuring at each link no one has motivation to report wrongly, rather than noone would mess up.

Comment author: Vaniver 26 January 2012 03:49:08PM 2 points [-]

Figuring out the particular heuristic seems more interesting than useful - "don't trust immediate answers" is a good rule

Well, except for all those times where second-guessing makes you worse off.

Comment author: spriteless 07 February 2012 08:11:25PM 0 points [-]

That's like saying people are being too rational. Get better at second guessing. Get better at being rational.

Comment author: Will_Newsome 03 January 2012 10:01:30AM *  1 point [-]

I meant it seriously, though I'll probably regret the strong language and it makes me kinda sad that skeptics are so good at inadvertently trolling me. (ETA: Yup, regretted it. Edited comment to be less in-your-face.)

And what I meant with my chess comment, without the funny business, is that I'm aware of the Randi prize, aware that no one has claimed it, and still assign a decent amount of probability mass (aghhhh that doesn't actually work, probability isn't fundamental like that, but whatever) to the magick hypothesis. So I guess maybe I was annoyed at the implication that I hadn't thought these things through carefully already. I apologize for being brusque.

Comment author: spriteless 04 January 2012 10:13:49PM 2 points [-]

Inadvertent trolling is impossible, trolling is in intent. If your own reaction is similar to being trolled, it is a the genuine emotions trolls try to create through dishonest means... also it makes it seem like you are trying to paint yourself the victim which would make a real troll happy but a non-troll sad. Well, it would also make someone who dislikes you happy, and someone who wants two way communication without signaling that you are wounded and deserve special reprimands sad. I don't want to make you angry, I want to have a conversation.

The magick hypothesis can be tested, can't it? I mean, at this point it seems to me either magick is false, or there is a conspiracy to prevent it from being proven true, like all the White Wolf World of Darkness games have. Some settings have several competing conspiracies to keep the masses ignorant of the nature of reality, some have a big monolithic one. It affects the availability of that hypothesis, for me, at least.

If bits of magic were already discovered and incorporated into science, would that count for the skeptics or magicks? The way herbalism and alchemy have been eaten up by chemistry, skeptics kept pace with the abilities traditionally handled by wise old people and shared the knowledge for many. If, say, life auras were found, skeptics would want to use the knowledge of that too. If auras do not respond to machines we can build, we'll train animals, like aura sniffing dogs as well as gunpowder and drug sniffing ones we already have. The fact that it looks like we are using familiars to find poisons does not deter us now.

What, exactly, is it that makes skeptics so infuriating? Is it mostly the way to point out a link to someone saying something snarky and then walk away, instead of conversing? I know I find that infuriating when someone says something snarky and acts like the conversation is over. I can't sit through creationism movies sometimes without wanting to punch through the internet when they make a joke about apes having human chests and leaving the subject implying because it's funny then it is not a valid point that humans and apes are related lets move on. rage rage rage...

Hello welcome to less wrong please don't mind if we obsess and fail to notice you're upset like aspies it is the culture here. :P

Comment author: Stabilizer 10 December 2011 12:27:39AM 3 points [-]

Quantum phenomena do not occur in a Hilbert space. They occur in a laboratory.

--Asher Peres

Comment author: spriteless 11 December 2011 01:15:37AM 1 point [-]

So is this to differentiate the n-dimensional calculus used to model quantum phenomena from the reality of a laboratory?

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