All of irrational_crank's Comments + Replies

I'm not sure whether I would want the level of belief in the just world to increase. According to the same ever-so-reliable wikipedia article, belief in it is associated with belief in "blaming the victim" (e.g people blaming rape victims, or stigmatizing those with diseases, especially AIDS) which is clearly wrong most of the time. It's a comforting idea, and might in theory provoke more moral behavior if people apply it to themselves, but equality of opportunity must be achieved first otherwise it will just result in more irrational and unfair judgement about others.

Also the correlation itself may be caused by perception biases directly, e.g teachers unaware of the halo effect rank the intelligence and agreeableness of the beautiful students greater than they should and such are more unlikely to expel the students or report behavioral problems.

Even if the atheist was a moral nihilist (of course he is conflating atheism and nihilism), it still would not be rational to carry out the action because we would hope that society's condemnation from people with moral systems and appropriate deterrents (e.g the risk of getting caught and getting a life prison sentence) so even saying that moral nihilism will lead to mass murder is wrong, so long as a sufficiently large percentage of the population believe in consistent and sensible moral systems. The moral nihilist would also have to overcome his brain's... (read more)

Upvoted for including counter-evidence in your post and changing your mind.

I was about to comment that adjusting the body's natural response might be dangerous if you ever did - after all presumably this system evolved to face pop-evo-psych cliches like the savannah lion and perhaps fleeing irrationally without thinking is probably the best thing to do in most of these cases. However, modern dangerous are different. For example, if you have fallen off a plane, you are more likely to survive while drunk or attempting suicide because your muscles are more re... (read more)

With 1): This may be an obvious problem, but if the singularity for instance occurs thousands of years in the future, then whatever language you write your "do not revive" order in, the future civilization may not be able to understand it and therefore might not necessarily respect your wishes.

With 3) Perhaps if future civilizations who were not interested in revival for its own sake (why would we want another person from so-many-years ago?) would only revive when there is a substantial depopulation crisis (e.g after nuclear war, asteroid strike... (read more)

Possible stupid question:If Quirrell was so frustrated with with the idiocy of the students, then why did he kill Hermione (the next smartest student) in an unnecessary subplot (Quirrell admitted it did not matter in the long run whether the plan succeeded or not) and cause the next smartest one after that to be withdrawn from the school?