Thanks.
That pulls a bit of the rug out from under that unsteady pile of pattern-matching.
This got downvoted to -2. If anyone would like to see fewer postings like the above, they can improve the odds that they'll see the change they'd like by explaining what it is about the above post that was disliked.
Thank you, in advance for your help with this.
11 year olds if I have that right
By this point in the year most if not all of them are probably 12.
The difference between 11 and 12 might only matter to an 11- or 12-year-old, but you probably didn't have that right, for whatever that's worth.
Thanks.
That pulls a bit of the rug out from under that unsteady pile of pattern-matching.
Is Theodore Nott wearing his scary face because he learned it was a good idea to do so in Chaos, or because there is also a conspiracy of Green Slytherin: those who can cast Avada Kedavra, the green spell?
Harry courted the company of both Draco and Hermione. He adjusted his presentation to meet their expectations, as he understood them. Draco could be doing the same because why have one secret power base when you could have two?
I don't consider this terribly likely. It came up in that pattern-matching way, but feels like it's needlessly complicated.
Hopefully someone else can undermine it more decisively or support it better.
Even ignoring the rest of the post, the idea of a Green Slytherin based off of Avada Kedavra is interesting for many reasons.
Let's look at some of the implications:
Avada Kedavra and the Patronus Charm (2.0) are basically mutually exclusive. In order to cast the first, you must want someone dead for the sake of being dead, and in order to cast the latter you must value all life to the point of denying death altogether.
Avada Kedavra and the Patronus Charm (2.0) cancel each other out. We saw this in Azkaban, and at the time we probably assumed it was jus
ye shall also know that any events occurring there were also of my own impulse and not a halfhearted sop to feminists
Why would we think that? We would think that if he unfridged Hermione.
That is pretty strong evidence that Hermione will be resurrected sooner, rather than later. So I guess the ending where Harry resurrects everyone ever maybe won't seem more likely when this arc is complete.
Unless this is the end.
Alternatively, McGonagall will become a PC.
So we know, for egotistical example, that he did not add "Dumbledore had looked down over the side of the terrace and made a gesture before returning" in response to my post that included risking transfiguration sickness on the list of things for which Harry could get in trouble.
Or, at least, we know that is what the author wishes us to believe. dun dun daaaaaaaah
As someone suggested earlier, it's possible that Sirius Black is hiding out as the Weasley owl (the "measured and courteous hoot"). That would fit with Peter Pettigrew being the unfortunate in Azkaban chanting, "I'm not serious."
It's also possible that Pettigrew is hiding out somewhere, I suppose, but that doesn't seem smart.
This also raises the possibility that someone or multiple someones who weren't ever Marauders using small animagus forms to get around the castle, which could show up funny on the map.
I'm pretty sure that what he said was that nothing was intended as an allegory -- or maybe a metaphor or something of the sort -- to an artificial super-intelligence.
Somebody has the link, I expect.
That post was about deleting people who refuse to engage in rational argument, not deleting posts that use rational argument in ways that are "unmarketable" as you put it.
Let's put it this way, would you also suggest we delete all the posts critical of religion because it also puts of a lot of people?
the utility of censorship is not exclusive to the situations described in that post.
But in the end, no. This conversation didn't start when I issued a call to action, but when I expressed a difficult decision I had made for myself. I didn't know...
Maybe it really was his father's rock.
Maybe James Potter carried around that specific huge rock, transfigured into something portable, for all the right reasons.
Maybe James even told Dumbledore that if anything every happened to him, Dumbledore should give Harry his cloak, his snitch, and his rock. Dumbles knows that Harry hates Quiddich and the Snitch most of all, so he's holding that one back until he thinks he can present it without it being rejected. The cloak was easy. And he's managed to make Harry carry the rock, so that's got to me making Dead J...
Harry doesn't trust Quirrell anymore, hasn't trusted him since the Azkaban arc. That was made pretty clear inthe conversation in the dark warehouse immediately after the raid.
I don't want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control.
Someone please tell Shinji Ikari about this radical notion.
Vg jnf arprffnel sbe gur Puvyqera gb or qlfshapgvbany. Gur yrff gurl jrer noyr gb pbaarpg jvgu bgure crbcyr gur zber gurl jrer qevira gb pbaarpg jvgu gurve Rinf. Hagvy gur raq, nyzbfg rirelguvat sbyybjrq gur Fpranevb.
When feasible, do the things that relieve your stress.
Thanks!
So 1, 2, and 5 are the only chapters where the phrase doesn't appear in the chapter itself. Do those numbers mean anything recognizable?
EDIT: Yeah. 4. 1, 2, 4, and 5. Upvoting for correcting me.
Good point. I'm sticking to B, Quirrell was telling Harry he'd pass it to him on the downlow. Note that he didn't say that the book would be labeled "Memory Charms," just that it would be filed under M.
Frigideiro was mentioned, though - when he tests his "dark side," his dark side isn't any more powerful with magic.
Yeah, but not precision. That's why it's just feel like a bit of an ass pull -- a "butt snag"? -- and why is the way it's so specific is kind of what sets the alarm off for me.
Harry can ask anyone else what the status of memory charms is in the Hogwarts curriculum.
I would guess that either
A) He doesn't need to ask a professor, he can just ask a seventh-year.
That... sort of makes sense except that the loop seems overly complex and Harry would try to prevent more misery or something?
I don't know what "just complex enough" would look like, so I'm not sure what you mean by overly complex. But I promise I will listen.
It has been established that the past cannot be changed because the universe steps through time once, with all time travel included. Harry cannot change the misery that occurred.
On the other hand, the author has said something to the effect that even if there is an afterlife in HP&t...
"Of course," the witch snarked amiably. "I have a dozen of them in my trunk."
(This revision is meant more as a suggested direction than a suggested destination.)
It'd been one of the spells he and Hermione had experimented on, a lifetime ago, so he was able to control it precisely, though it had taken a lot of power to affect that much mass. Hermione's body should now be at almost exactly five degrees Celsius.
I feel like this comes off as a bit of an ass pull. It's the suspicious specificity that does it, I think.
It would be easy to prevent that feeling, if you care to and if it's not just me, with a throwaway line in an earlier chapter.
I'd say mention in five previous chapters demonstrates that Harry is pretty comfortable with this spell. (I'm highly confident this was intentional on Eliezer's part.)
... But second, what the heck are Memory Charms doing outside the--
Right. Hogwarts. Crazies. Nevermind.
Or Quirrell, who has declared his intention to visit the restricted section, is planning to plant the book for Harry's 'benefit.'
Doubtful. That's not a lie Quirrell can sustain: Harry can ask anyone else what the status of memory charms is in the Hogwarts curriculum.
Wizards in general need memory charms to deal with muggles, so that's a plausible reason they aren't seen as Dark by the wizarding community. There are probably strong cultural taboos against using them on other wizards (as opposed to muggles), in the same way there are strong cultural taboos against using cars to run over pedestrians even though that's a power that many teenagers acquire here in the real world.
When you checked, did you record the chapter with the epigraph and the chapter where the line appeared in the text?
And if you did, would you share it?
here. Format is ugly, but simple.
Number of chapter with epigraph - "epigraph" number of chapter with line in text - "original quote"
All are copy pastes.
1 - "Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line... (black robes, falling) ...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word." Not yet appeard
2 - ""Of course it was my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything."" - 90 -""Of course it's my fault. There's no one else here who could ...
I used to have this problem a lot more than I do now.
It's possible the change is just the result of the aging chemistry of my body, but I like to think that the thing that turned it around was literally telling myself, "I want to be the kind of person who is cool with having done that." I had to accept the thing that had happened and had to become the kind of person that would accept it.
Or maybe I just had to age. It's possible that's why I don't do a lot of the things I used to find myself unable to stop doing.
No, what "stirred up so much hostility" was you're suggestion that we censor people for being "unmarketable".
Thanks. It's rather obvious once you point it out. Not the first time my self-centeredness has blinded me to the real reason people were cross with me, won't be the last.
Censorship is necessary. The poison that kills your garden and undermines your movement won't always be the new blood or the outsider. Sometimes it will be someone you respect who steps out of bounds.
If there was a time turner involved, why do the issues with Harry's sleep schedule persist even after he gets to Hogwarts and gains a time-turner of his own?
For the same reason his response persist even when the abuse no longer does: he's been conditioned.
If someone spent a two-hour period of time abusing Harry and then time-turnering it away every day, wouldn't he get tired two hours early nstead of two hours late? That is to say, wouldn't his sleep cycle appear to be 22 hours instead of 26?
It goes the other way. See, while he was being abused for...
I can't imagine that Harry, after having been through this event, gives even one iota of a shit about any of those things. When you declare war on the underlying fabric of reality, petty things like dark wizards, magical castles, and star systems really just aren't relevant in the grand scheme of things.
If you can read things like, "He may have damaged His Father's Rock." and not realize that it's not to be taken seriously--
Actually, that's an unfair assumption. You might be ignoring the humor intentionally. I don't know to what end you woul...
He only stepped in it because its a hot-button political topic, much like abortion.
When someone is controversial for the sake of being controversial, it would be foolish for them to not anticipate consequences like no longer being accepted in mainstream company. Or ever company one or two standard deviations of 'daring' away from the mainstream in some cases.
I get that it take bravery to do this kind of thing. (Or it could take foolishness. I'm not saying that's what happened here, but I wouldn't tell someone who believed to to be so that I had stron...
His inability to influence Harry through the link does not reflect an inability to influence him at all. His influencing the everloving fuck out of Harry in Defense Class.
The part where he can't use magic on Harry is more of a poked hole in this theory, though. I can answer it, of course, but not without raising more questions. I'll think about that one.
On the contrary, I'm already here. The decision I shared, that stirred up so much hostility, wasn't that I was leaving. It's that I wasn't going to tell other people about Less Wrong.
Only one of the dozen or so people I call friends in meatspace identifies as 'evil.' None of the scores of friendly acquaintances I have do. It's pretty uncommon.
No, but enough people do that it's an important consideration.
I don't mean that a "little guilt by association with anyone saying politically incorrect things" is enough to immediately roll back whatever one was doing. But it's enough to reevaluate. And, on reevaluation, it added more weight to a damning line of thought that already existed.
So I've weighed both sides and found yours wanting. Your hostile reaction isn't doing you any favors. In fact, it convinces me all the more that the path I'm turning away from, the one where I introduce friends to Less Wrong, was not a worthwhile path.
Thank you for the sympathetic perspective. But I do what to clarify that am not the crusader. I am one who sees the crusade coming and gets out of the way.
I have been defending a decision I made, here. It hasn't been my convictions about good and evil or right and wrong, but rather about prudence and discretion.
I will admit that I let it get personal, but all I've been defending is myself.
I predict that Harry will save many or all people who ever died from oblivion with magic that reaches backward through time to capture the mind of each person at the point of their death.
I further predict that this magic will create the mechanism of magic, possibly incidentally, and be responsible for the sort of Atlantis that magical Britons believe in.
I speculate that magic and ghosts are unintended byproducts of Harry's Afterlife Immortality Project.
Harry is an anti-death hero. Whatever villains he may encounter, his enemy is death and his heroic victo...
What she gets from book sales will be a pittance compared to what her little business empire brought in over the past few years.
Yes, she has a fall back position. And that's fine. But it doesn't mean she didn't lose greater things than those book sales will ever make up for.
I suppose there might be success to be had, here. There might be network opportunities. There might be opportunities for friendship and other things I value.
But the bar to entry is too high. I don't have a strong academic background. I was once close to math. I'd hold up two cross fingers and say, "Like this." But years, decades have come between us. My only education in philosophy is by proxy.
I don't mean to paint a picture without hope, I'm a bright guy. I could maybe catch up if I applied myself, if I worked at it, if I let some other ...
You guys really fail on the outreach.
Um, LW is growing very well, thank you. In fact at this point I'm more worried about the 'unwilling to consider controversial ideas due to signaling' failure mode than the 'stop growing due to being too controversial' failure mode.
Everyone fails at rationality due to signaling games.
Why dither when you can have both? The indiscreet have no monopoly on either intelligence or rationality.
But you're talking about bringing in people known to fail at rationality due to signaling games. Do you think they can be eventually brought around, or?
This is an intriguing hypothesis, but are you aware that Eliezer also has this condition? I was under the impression that he was working off of his own experiences here and nothing more.
I probably heard that at some point; it's been years since this started, now. But I expect better of him than "I get ingrown toenails and ingrown toenails don't get enough attention from the public so I'm going to give my protagonist that problem, too."
Also, cannon Harry didn't have the sleep cycle problem. For the most part, there are in-universe reasons for departures from cannon other than, "That was dumb and I'm not writing a story with dumb in it."
She was saying, "No, but it doesn't matter. Please go on."
That path will lead you and any you influence to isolation and obscurity.
If you seek only to better yourself then that monastic sort of approach might actually help you out. But if you want to change the world you need to first change your attitude toward social status signaling.
I predict that it will be revealed that Quirrell or a closely related entity has been abusing Harry on and off throughout his life, to try and make him into a Dark Lord.
He can go to Harry's house like the time he played Father Christmas.
Obliviated memories leave residue, which is how in Chapter 88 the twins remembered that they could find people, in the castle, but couldn't remember how.
In the first chapter, Harry noticed that he believed in magic.
some part of Harry was utterly convinced that magic was real
In chapter 16, Harry is almost reminded of s...
Edit: I just realized that Harry was probably abused almost every night (or day) for some significant period. There was a time turner involved, and that's why his sleep cycle is off.
I don't know about this, for a couple of reasons.
1) If there was a time turner involved, why do the issues with Harry's sleep schedule persist even after he gets to Hogwarts and gains a time-turner of his own?
2) If someone spent a two-hour period of time abusing Harry and then time-turnering it away every day, wouldn't he get tired two hours early nstead of two hours late? That is to say, wouldn't his sleep cycle appear to be 22 hours instead of 26?
My interpretation is that all of these are symptoms of Harry's dark side (which is the backup copy / horcrux of Voldemort somewhere in him).
There was a time turner involved, and that's why his sleep cycle is off.
This is an intriguing hypothesis, but are you aware that Eliezer also has this condition? I was under the impression that he was working off of his own experiences here and nothing more.
-Downvoted for poor formatting.-
-Please use carriage returns to separate your thoughts.-
Edit: Thanks! (Upvoted for responding.)
I'd heard of him, of course. I'd never followed up. Naïvely, I didn't think I needed to.
I'm basing my opinion of the penalty for being thought to associate with him based on a number of posts he made that were linked in that thread. The one about rape is the one that is likely to stick with me,
The creepy face he makes in the picture doesn't help.
To the sort of people with whom I aspire to keep company, insensitivity on certain topics signals lack of status, a lack of class.
In coarser terms, he stepped in it. Then he went back to step in it again. When his steps were criticized he defended the quality of his shoes.
I don't want to walk on the carpets he wiped it on.
Disliking Hanson is not about....
Thanks.
My infatuation with Quirrell might have faded a bit due to inactivity, but that thread has mortally wounded it. This Hanson guy is so deeply unmarketable that he made me stop liking a fictional character that might have been based on him.
The part where he marginalizes the suffering of rape victims and that fact that this site still associates with him solidifies the "Less Wrong is not a place I can bring people" feeling I've kind of struggled with for a couple years now.
That's two cringe-inducing passages of text in one day. Honestly, I liked the one where Hermione died better.
Driving away people who are going to care more about social status signaling than about rationality is a feature, not a bug.
If you don't take some time to explore Robin Hanson's ideas in good faith you will miss out on a lot. What you see as a weakness is in fact his great strength as a rationalist. "Curiosity about humans and unconstrained by social norms." You may object, saying that you don't mind this, but any such response basically boils down to "I like X when it isn't too X."
The red flags aren't there because he is unaware of their existence. Indeed I bet Hanson can win quite well at social games. They are there because he systematically relies on his explicit/theoretical rather than implicit knowledge to expose where the gaps of the former are and then tries hard to fill them.
Robin often displays unusual confusions. I think that stems from a reliance on his explicit memory over implicit memory. If he doesn't have a theory to account for why society fails to distinguish songs by whether their lyrics are fictional, as we do with literature, then he considers that a puzzle to solve, even if he's never wanted society to draw that category to aid him in selecting songs.
So when Robin asks, "Why do we appear to value X more than Y", he's not making any claim about how he feels about X and Y. He disregards his feelings and i...
Had you not heard of Robin Hanson before, and are you now basing your opinion of him largely on that thread? I think this is a bad way to get an accurate impression of a person.
What happened to Hermione was shocking and has nearly monopolized the posts in this thread so far.
There's aftermath coming, though, and I'd like to talk about that. Harry is probably in a lot of trouble. Here's a short list of rules violations:
Or has Dumbledore found it so useful to carry a large rock around that "get a big rock, keep it with you at all times" is in the top five things he'd tell his younger self if he ever got the chance? Seriously -- the fuck?
The obvious interpretation of this is that spellcasting is a skill like any other, and practice develops it. By giving Harry an implausibly large object to carry, and then having him interact with the Transfiguration professor, Dumbledore can be fairly confident that Harry will try to transfigure the rock into something more r...
He threw the troll's head over the wall, so its well away from anyone who could breathe in the gases, and a simple bubble-head charm should solve the problem. Given that the alternative was being eaten, he won't be punished for it (also, the most important thing is keeping partial transfiguration secret - other students would be told that Dumbledore killed the troll).
The twins were going to try to rescue Hermione anyway.
The twins will probably agree to keep the patronus secret.
While Harry and the twins did break a rule which was said to result in expulsion...
He revealed his super-secret patronus that Dumbledore told him to keep secret, a super secret.
Not that it were very important, but actually Harry told Dumbledore to keep the patronus secret, not the other way around.
I actually expected Harry to cast the Killing Curse as a last ditch desperation/rage effort. He knew what it does, has seen the wand movements and pronounciation (in the Dementor dream), knew and had the required state of mind. That should be enough to cast it, as per Ch26 ("He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.").
Is there more to be said about Quirrell being a Robin Hanson stand-in? Was this covered in another thread? Does anyone have handy links to the relevant posts?
It sounds like you might be mistaking Eliezer's role in this, and mistaking your desires for desires we can reasonably assign to Eliezer.
This isn't something that happened to the HP&tMoR version of Hermione Granger, this is something that Eliezer, the author did to the HP&tMoR version of Hermione Granger.
He did it for a reason. He's almost certainly been planning it all along. If it made him sad then it first made him sad quite some time ago. He's not feeling the surprised dismay you have today.
He wanted this.
I haven't visited these threads for nearly a year; please forgive me if someone else has shared a similar prediction in the meantime.
I predict that Quirrell's goal is to start a war between magical people and non-magical people.
The student armies have been taught combat skills, organization, and discipline but they have not been indoctrinated. The text does not show that the student armies have been guided toward one faction or another within Magical Britain. Quite the opposite, they have been taught to work together across the 'house' lines that may hav...
I think Quirrell wants the leader of the magical side to be Harry rather than himself. Quirrell doesn't seem to recognize that Harry would side with the non-magical side instead. (Harry has noted some peculiarities in Quirrell's model of the world on several occasions, and based on Quirrell being both a Robin Hanson stand-in and Voldemort I suspect those peculiarities can be summarized as Quirrell failing to account for, for lack of a better word, "love.")
the less money the idiots have, the more just the world is
I believe that I would enjoy living in a world where more assholes were as honest about their priorities as you, sir or ma'am. I think the rest of us would get a lot more done.
(Of course the real problem here is your ill-gotten hope that justice exists outside either literature or state-subsidized vengeance. But it's easier to convince someone they've been honest in a socially inappropriate fashion than it is to convince them their worldview is flawed and naîve.)
Less worried about downvotes I've received, more interested in the things that lead to me getting them.
Thanks, though.