Has there been any serious discussion of the implications of portraits? I couldn't find any with some cursory googling, but I'll be really surprised if it hasn't been discussed here yet. I can't entirely remember which of these things are canon and which are various bits of fanfiction, but:

• You can take someone's portrait without them explicitly helping, as evidenced in canon by at least one photograph of someone being arrested, whose picture in the newspaper is continually struggling and screaming at the viewer. I don't remember which book this was or any of the particulars unfortunately, but I'm pretty certain it's a thing that was in one of them. Or maybe one of the movies. Moving on.
• They can perform simple tasks of short-term memory and carry on a coherent conversation.
• They can walk from picture to picture to communicate with each other.
• They can operate simple mechanisms in some way. In canon, the door to Gryffindor Tower is a portrait, which requires a password before opening.

As far as I can tell, portraits in the Harry Potter universe would be a gigantic game-breaker if it weren't for all the other game-breakers overshadowing them. I suppose it's possible to mitigate this (maybe a picture carries less of the "person" compared to a portrait for which they have to sit for hours) but if that's not the case, portraits appear to be essentially a way of involuntarily uploading a copy of someone and enslaving them for all eternity, and all you need is knowledge of what they look like and a modicum of artistic ability.

edit: Oh crap, in MoR they ask portraits questions about knowledge they would have had before being painted, like "what spells did they teach you as a first year" and "did you know a married squib couple". So you're not just getting a basic "human" imprint, you're getting that specific person.

And on the flip side of that, not all the portraits in Hogwarts are necessarily real people. What moral weight does a newly-created personality in a portrait have?

Just jumping into the Seq Rerun right now, so I missedall the stuff that came before. It might just reflect badly on my intelligence, but it usually takes me more than five minutes for an original thought. Maybe I have different standards about what constitutes originality.

I also think there's enough scarcity in science. The people who work in academia find plenty of open questions, and try to answer them. I don't deny that peer review, grant seeking etc. play a certain role, but most of the people working in academia that I met genuinely care about their research more than about status.

What ideas or knowledge do you have for optimizing your social network and sqeezing it for all it's worth?

Is this really the best attitude to take? I tend to think that friends you can tell anything to, and who can tell anything to you, are the most valuable contacts.

The problem is that your examples already go overboard. You describe a good upper bound of how nice to be, but you can usually get away with less, and not have to constantly be constructing bullshit in your brain. This is what I think causes people to object.

For example, is this comment really going to upset you? I seriously doubt it. There would be no reason for me to write, say, "You have made a really good point, but I wonder if you perhaps went a tiny bit overboard in your examples, and thus this decreased your effectiveness."

The basic message, and the one I agree with, is to not be quite so combative when you criticize, and to make sure your criticism would cause more good than harm.

Also, you didn't need to spend so much time explaining, either. That probably also led to the idea that your methodology has a low signal-to-noise ratio. I mean, I personally skipped most of the middle, as you were just repeating yourself. I think you'd be more convincing if you learned about brevity.

linking me to a decoder, while nice in theory, isn't very helpful because if I click it I will lose the nice highlighting of new posts

Does your phone browser allow you to open links in new tabs? (If you're not sure, try doing a long press on a link.) If not, you should switch browsers. I use Dolphin on Android. Opera Mini also has this feature and is available for virtually all phones, I think.

Now if someone could tell me how to avoid accidentally voting someone up or down on my phone (or worse, accidentally banning a comment) when I'm trying to scroll...

I often read LW on my phone and for that use case rot13 is the best spoiler method by far. It prevents immediately seeing words that would give away spoilers, but I can generally decode a given phrase in my head given the word lengths, punctuation, topic of conversation, and position of common words like 'gur', 'na', 'bs', 'vf', or 'gb'.

Using reddit-style CSS spoiler tags means that I can't access the spoilered content at all AFAICT, and linking me to a decoder, while nice in theory, isn't very helpful because if I click it I will lose the nice highlighting of new posts. This is a Big Deal on long-running threads like the HPMoR discussions.

I know I don't. What are you referring to?

Quite right, I completely overlooked that.

However, this does raise an interesting and completely tangential question about the Map. How does it know everybody's name? What 'database' does it---or rather the enchantment that it is an interface for---make reference to?

An obvious answer would be birth certificates. It is not (too) unreasonable to suppose that wizards have them too, and that the Map is clever enough to map people to their birth certificates. I have no idea how it would do this, but in any case I don't think this can be how the Map works.

First, what if my birth certificate is destroyed? Of course I can get a replacement, but there will be a period in which there is nothing the Map can refer to in order to determine my name. It could 'cache' my information, I suppose. But what if a baby is born in Hogwarts? What does the Map say before the baby is named?

This leads into the second, larger, problem. The enchantment that the Map is an interface for is supposed to be part of the Hogwarts security system. I've gotten the impression that Hogwarts was raised all at once by the Founders; the enchantment in question would have been cast then. 'Then' is the 9th or 10th century, according to canon. "Civil registration" of births didn't begin in the United Kingdom until 1837. Prior to that I think births were often registered with churches, but surely there were many whose names had no official status; they had 'common-law' designations (this still must occur often).

So how does the Map work?

This might be the most blatant misuse of "rational" in a post title I've ever seen.

If you wanted to ask about devices to enhance instrumental rationality in your life, a better title would have been "Tech gear to improve rationality?" As it is, it looks like you want to discuss general strategies for purchasing tech gear.