This sounds a lot like the objections CDT people were giving to Newcombs problem.
BlindIdiotPoster
Karma: 125
What leads people to even suspect that unicorns are sentient?
There aren’t any clues that unicorns are sentient, so there’s no reason why Harry should find QM killing a unicorn more thought provoking than eating pork.
Painfully murdering nonsentients to preserve one’s own life is considered fine in almost all human cultures. In fact, painfully killing animals for fun is considered acceptable by most people, so long as the killing is done in a non-sadistic manner.
iirc, that spell wasn’t homing, it just turned to the side at the end.
In GoF they had to set up an apparition-is-allowed-zone at the end of the maze in order for the portkey to work, which is why Crouch had to wait until Harry had won the cup instead of just turning a piece of silverware into a portkey or something.
I used to think like this, but recently I’ve updated into seeing everything as potential foreshadowing.
I have no idea how I managed to miss that.
Prediction: Harry will have to make an unbreakable vow not to use the elixir of life himself in order to get the Philosopher’s stone from the Mirror or Erisid
I concede, my original post was poorly thought out and sort of meaningless.
If you make your opinion more prominent by expressing it in a post instead of an upvote, you encourage others to do the same, thus lesswrong has more non-content posts and nothing much is accomplished by anyone. Since so far this thread has two posts of the type I describe, I guess the score is 1-1.
Be aware you’re playing a zero-sum game at best here.
What sort of professional do you see if you want to do some minor self-help thing like improve social skills?
I mildly disapprove of posts with no purpose other than to state the posters unqualified opinion. Public yea/nea voting is imo not needed or desirable, especially on a forum with a karma system.
Richard Kennaway’s post below yours is just as bad for exactly the same reason, of course.
I find it interesting that you think there is no reason to believe that a financial incentive would change your behavior.
He didn’t actually mention the Flynn effect in the above post.
Last I checked it was something like 10.
The username contains more than 13 bits of information (being 14 characters long) so this might not be too unreasonable.
I think It’s a bad thing to the extent that it could lead to opinions propagating without debate.
In the wider world, even things like atheism are “extremely controversial,” but I don’t think we need to make dramatic shows of uncertainty and humility every time someone brings it up; most all of us here are atheists and we need to move on and discuss the more difficult questions. What I worry about is that a community norm of being vocal about our opinions but not discussing them rationally or even at all most of the time then we may wind up deciding what to think via memetic exposure and perhaps evaporative cooling instead of rationality. This sort of effect would also be a danger if we had a norm of being verbally abusive to anyone with an unpopular opinion, of course.
Note that I can’t offer evidence that this is a real risk or a phenomenon that actually happens in online communities, but it worries me.
This is one of the only lesswrong posts I’ve ever read where I basically agree with nothing you wrote. You really should read the “rationality bible” though. Definitely before you keep posting here.