A mistake is not a thing, in and of itself, it's just the entire space of possible games outside the very narrow subset that lead to victory.

Minor nitpick, surely you mean possible moves, rather than possible games? The set of games that lead to defeat is necessarily symmetrical with the set that lead to victory, aside from the differences between black and white.

Is the Prisoners' Dilemma really the right metaphor here? I don't really get what the defector gains. Sure, I like them better for being so accommodating, but meanwhile they're paying the costs of giving me what I want, and if they try to invoke some kind of quid pro quo than all the positive feelings go out the window when I find out they were misleading me.

Silver's model already at least attempts to account for fundamentals and reversion to the mean, though. You could argue that the model still puts too much weight on polls over fundamentals, but I don't see a strong reason to prefer that over the first interpretation of just taking it at face value.

Nate Silver's model also moved toward Obama, so it's probably reflecting something real to some extent.

Decius is right that there aren't really spoilers, but I would argue that your time would be better spent reading HP:MOR than the discussion.

Something tells me that the note would be more likely to say something like "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME".

At least for myself , I first heard of Eliezer via the HPMOR TV Tropes page. There's a good chance I would have read the sequences sooner or later even if I hadn't (my brother found them independently and recommended them), but it definitely helped.

And I wouldn't say I was an idiot before, but twenty minutes of conversation with myself from a couple years ago might change my mind. And of course it's hard to tell how much of the difference is LW's influence and how much is just a matter of being older and wiser.

I would say that he was making at least the argument that "this level of responsibility is something you should adopt if you want to be a hero", and probably the more general argument that "people should adopt this attitude toward responsibility.

"We need to switch to alternative energies such as wind, solar, and tidal. The poor are lazy ... Animal rights"

I don't think these fit. Regardless of whether you agree with them, they are specific assertions, not general claims about reasoning with consistently anti-epistemological effects.

At what point will you check the Karma value? The end of the year?