Does anyone else find the terminology for this discussion strange? I know LW likes to use words with more emotional-colouring when describing concepts and motivations, but now it's being used to describe people, in a semi-official way.

Just to be clear, do these multiple-universes have the same qualities as the universe that we inhabit?

What if Quirrell is so good at dissociation that he can lie through parseltongue by convincing himself that what he's saying is true?

Do you know of it?

He might do it less for the "danger" and more for "bad discussion". The threads I see on /sci/ raising questions about high IQ come to mind.

Well, most threads I see on /sci/ come to mind.

I experienced what wikipedia calls 'ego death'. That is I felt my 'self' splitting into the individual sub-components that formed consciousness. Acid is well-known for causing synaesthesia and as I fell deeper into meditation I felt like I could actually see the way sensory experiences interacted with cognitive heuristics and rose to the level of conscious perception.

I've recently come into a deep spiritual terror after such an experience I had while sober (albeit in a slightly manic state from sleep deprivation and some caffeine). Afterward, I refused ... (read more)

Yes.

I take it you've rarely fallen victim to wiki walks and random googling?

I've decided not to have more than 3 tabs open on my internet browser at any given point, as a way of increasing my attention span.

Before a discussion on corporeal punishment is started, I want to caution against this happening. It might be that children of people who find corporeal punishment effective are similar enough to their parents to respond well to it, and vice-versa.

Read literature with an old writing style, especially if you dislike said writing style. The more opaque and complicated, the better.

I find that I'm a very fidgety reader, unconsciously skipping words, or even whole sentences, skimming over words I don't actually know the meaning of, and failing to connect the context of words that I do know the meaning of with the rest of the narrative or lecture. This I do with both literature and more importantly, when reading science. I've decided to read At The Mountains of Madness and penalize myself for every time... (read more)

Spoilers!

I think I figured out Quirrel's ultimate scheme.

Va pnaba, Ibyqrzbeg cbffrffrf Uneel, gnxvat pbageby bs uvf obql.

Va ZbE, gur ernfba Dhveeryzbeg jnagf Uneel nyvir, fgebat naq vasyhragvny vf fb ur pna znxr uvz vagb uvf arkg ubfg, guhf nyybjvat Zntvpny Oevgnva gb tebj haqre n fgebat yrnqre. Gur Qrzragngvba ng gur ortvaavat bs gur lrne jnf fb gung Uneel'f zragny qrsrafrf jbhyq or jrnxrarq sbe shgher nohfr. Dhveery'f fngvfsnpgvba ng Urezvbar'f qrngu (orsber urnevat gur hcqngrq cebcurpl) jnf va nagvpvcngvba ng shegure ihyarenovyvgl.

The trick is that gratitude and weariness are contradictory, which falls under the umbrella of what sarcasm provides; a way of expressing gratitude in such a way that weariness shows. The reaction of annoyance/unpleasant surprise this causes on part of the receiver of sarcasm is anticipated by the speaker, and is considered a way of wounding them, which is why sarcasm can be used in arguments.

While both your intention and the conventional intention are both valid, the conventional intention is triggered, as the basic structure of expressing the spirit of one emotion with the letter of another is more commonly used, and thus more frequently recognized as such.

In every word structure, there are points where its intent is decided; the longer the sentence is, the more such points there are. This was close to utilizing almost every such point for sarcasm, I'm not even sure if I could make that more sarcastic without taking it to parody levels.

To clarify, the two ideas (correlation with nerdiness and correlation with social skills) are both equally poor, there's no reason to use one and not the other.

This is unlikely; if we're going for the idea of autism being correlated with nerdiness, we must also go with the idea of autism being correlated with poor social skills, and polyamoury is a whole other kind of social network. Also, very few nerdy people I've met were autism spectrum.

Trying to avoid personal vices by not acting or thinking like the people who had the vices I wanted to avoid. For example, wanting to be a great scientist, and suppressing this desire without realizing that it wasn't actually possible for me to aspire for one thing, dislike m motivation for it (fame and accomplishment), and try to come up with a better one- the actions conflict with each other, yet I really did think that the only reason I wasn't pursuing that path already was due to a disruptive home life. This is probably true, but to this day I can't te... (read more)

Dunning Kreuger effect?

Why autism spectrum?

Another prediction is that there is no difference between a clone of myself and another person.

Touche

Jokes's on Harry, by the time he revives Hermione, the difference in maturity level will make a continued friendship impossible.

This also bothered me- no matter what reasoning I read here, I'll still regard this scene in the same light as the now removed scene where Harry Potter walks up to the Sorting Ceremony while the Weasley Twins play the freaking Ghost Busters theme.

Jugson refused to support Malfoy, if I recall.

Not in this one. In the earlier chapters it's narrated that the twins have been selling prank goods at 0% mark-up, unknown to their supplier.

It may also help to consider that my interpretation of OI seems to imply that murder is not wrong, which is quite an odd result.

I find Boltzmann Brains to be more of an unconvincing thought experiment than an actual possibility.

Since I also believe most potential conscious moments are bizarre and painful, that worries me.

Is this concern altruistic/compassionate?

Moral in this case is the adjective that labels the set of all actions that could be Right or Wrong. In turn, Right is the set of all actions that cause warmth, benign camaraderie and relief of negative emotions, and Wrong is the set of all actions that cause alienation and other suffering, as well as the extinguishment of warmth and benign camaraderie.

The reason fusion would have no such Right or Wrong consequence is that since there is only one person in the universe, there is no one who would be destroyed in such a process. Indeed, since no one has dis... (read more)

Your definition is good, and I'm having a hard time tabooing the word person, so what if I tried making a prediction?

If Open Individualism is true, then there is no moral consequence of fission or fusion, and nothing remarkable about such a process.

Currently learning Java by-the-book from "Starting Out With Java: From Control Structures Through Data Structures" second edition. It's a remarkable book, unlike any of the ones I tried reading before. It explains every minutiae of the example code and leaves very little to the imagination, except for when it has the courtesy to explicitly tell the reader to ignore it for the time being, something that a lot of guides fail to do. This somewhat pads the book out when it explains when a method-call has occurred two chapters after method-calls were ... (read more)

Did you perhaps blend them?

No, I ate them totally raw of processing or additives.

Think I'll wash that down with a hot steaming cup of gallium.

It took me 3 months to realize that I completely failed to inquire about your second friend. I must have seen him as having the lesser problem and dismissed it out of hand, without realizing that acknowledging the perceived ease of a problem isn't the same as actually solving it, like putting off easy homework.

How is your second friend turning out?

I think small donors should also state their donations amounts of 50-100 dollars. Having counted the medium and large donations in this thread to a rough total of 11,000 dollars, it seems unlikely that the goal is being reached with just those, and I have a feeling there will be some sort of "breaking the ice" effect if small donors chirped up about their chip ins, so to speak. Right now the number of medium and large donors represented in this thread eclipses the smalls.

Touche

I found this to be slightly unsettling when I realized it, though we may be talking about different things.

Paycheck came in, donated the 700!

...without any milk.

I grinned at how the two at the bottom seem to have donated just enough to be mentioned.

Quixey hasn't been able to pump in as much as I expected though.

I wonder, if this community has the allegiance of at least 100 rationalists in the 80th percentile for rationality, how much money could be raised if all of them tried to form separate start-ups as feeder companies for MIRI?

After reading that article, I feel as though A Fable of Science and Politics should be a prerequisite, for all the times it was hyper linked.

What do Christians do with the idea of "you're not spreading His Word fast enough"? It would be the same kind of scenario if there's nothing restraining Christian evangelical obligation.

Which blogposts are these?

I watched 2 Girls 1 Cup, then had to watch it again after I realized my speakers were off.

I can't imagine that anyone is advocating taking them seriously.

It could, if we say that consciousness (I'm still not sure how that word is thought of here) is thought to be a physical object. However, (and I am saying this tentatively), I've heard of instances where particles can be made to have no distinction, where action on one particle has effect on a particle at a distance, so there is a prior example of two physical objects being the same entity despite spatial and numerical difference.

Subject: a word which is synonymous with person.

Everyone: All persons that exist, have existed or will exist.

Though I have a feeling these definitions aren't rigorous. I'm also stumped on "numerically identical".

This will require careful thinking on my part- I'll get back to you in a few days. For that purpose, what are the other tests of meaningfulness?

I'm not convinced that it's false- I'm hoping someone could help me with that.