Something that helps me understand reductionism is defining "hands" not as a set of quarks in some state, but as a range of possible sets of quarks in a range of possible states. Replace quarks by whatever fundamental thing reality is made of.

Could the second law of thermodynamics also be understood as "the function between successive states as described by the laws of physics is bijective"?

But what if this resolve to always be stronger gets one to be overstrained, and end up in depression? Is there not an upper limit to motivation? Or is depression just manifested by doing it the wrong way?

But consider the following problem: Find and display all comments by me that are children of this post, and only those comments, using only browser UI elements, i.e. not the LW-specific page widgets. You cannot -- and I'd be pretty surprised if you could make a browser extension that could do it without resorting to the API, skipping the previous elements in the chain above. For that matter, if you can do it with the existing page widgets, I'd love to know how.

This is actually trivial (but it breaks readily if LW changes it's stylesheet):

from lxml import html
root = html.open("<http://lesswrong.com/lw/njn/the_web_browser_is_not_your_client_but_you_dont/>").getroot()
for div in root.cssselect(".comment-meta"):
if div.cssselect("span.author")[0].text_content() == "Error":
print div.text_content()

This doesn't work, because people here say controversial things. By definition, controversial means that many people think they are wrong, but they do not think they are wrong themselves. Anyone who finds a mistake might have found one of the intentional mistakes, or might happen to disagree on a controversial issue and believes the community member made a mistake where the community member thinks otherwise.

Unless you think that community members are perfectly correct 100% of the time on controversial issues or at least always recognize their own mistakes when pointed out to them (and no human being is like that), the idea will become unworkable. Everyone will have to think "is this an intentional misake, or is an unintentional mistake that the community member won't recognize as such, earning me demerits for pointing it out?"

Koan answers here for:

What rule could restrict our beliefs to just propositions that can be meaningful, without excluding a priori anything that could in principle be true?