Spoilers for HPMoR (though I guess that’s a given at this point):
c) how does she miss the fact that the map shows two Tom Riddle’s walking down the passage way to the graveyard? That should not be easy to miss. It says “it was tangled and confused”, but it would still show the name twice, and if she can read the one, it stands to reason she could read the other. Especially since we have precedent from HPMoR of both being in the same room without the map being confused.
Actually the poor are lazy and animal rights seem to fit to me. Animal rights were a hard sell for me, but thinking about it I had to come to the conclusion, that the bottom line “we should treat animals well” was probably either motivated by “I don’t want to eat sick food” or “Awww, cuute!”. Not by “I believe that animals in general need rights, because...” What? They react faster to stimuli than plants? They show complex behaviour? In that case, do you not kill mosquitos? Do you want rights for some fungi as well? How about programs that show complex behaviour? It seems like this was written after the bottom line.
Similarly, since we do not live in an equal world, simply saying that the poor were lazy makes sense if your motivation is to not feel guilty about not trying to help them.
Alternative energies however… I think time proved our dear OP wrong on that front. We may not need to use any one of these specifically, but we need to get away from fossil fuels and until we have fusion or solar farms in orbit, alternative energies are the longest term option. Even nuclear runs out of fuel in a relatively short amount of time.
It’s part of the worship option, I would say. As he would otherwise be contradicting himself when he outlines the actual Explain option.
Edit: Whoops, the next comment is by Eliezer addressing this question but I’m going to leave this here for ease of reading.
It seems to me that some reasons may be: a lot of interesting comments have been made, which may intimidate; the posts are often very concise; and since the posts are so old, one may expect the page to be dead.
Personally I don’t think I have read any “new” articles so far^^
If so, then as you study the skills of rationality and train yourself not to deny facts, your feelings will become stronger.
How does one go about this?
I have begun reading everything I can find by you on this page—I will probably also read other things, but it seems a foundation by (one of) the founder would be useful.
Still, while I see the ideas presented as very useful, I find myself wondering how do actually go about implementing them. Take any one thing as an example here, such as “Making Beliefs Pay Rent”. (I hope you are not annoyed by this Outside The Box-Box^^)
One way of doing this seems to be to simply read or think about this over and over until I have the thought ingrained into my minds commonly used pathways, so as to enable me to have more opportunities to actually work on my beliefs/implement these ideas into my day.
This seems inefficient, even though I don’t know if it simply is inefficient to start doing something like that.
Another way would probably be do sit down somewhere and try to let your beliefs flow through you while watching for inconsistencies.
This however appears to me to be unlikely to actually work / in my experience I start to either drift and/or probably) miss most things.
So, how does one study the skills of rationality and train oneself (not to deny facts/X/Y/..)?
If I missed something obvious and this annoys you, I hope I get an answer before you delete this and want to know that I would be feeling sad about having annoyed you without offering you my submission.
I don’t think that these quotes imply that Occlumency is a perfect shield of the mind. IIRC it specifically counters any attempt to divine whether or not someone believes they are telling the truth.
To completely Obliviate someone, you don’t need to read their mind first, you are just setting all the 1 to 0. (Apparently somehow only hitting memory and not vital processes.)
I don’t see a problem then. If you want to find out specific information, you can not use Legilimency, unless you first somehow break the person. And you will never know if you actually did, if they are a perfect Occlumense, so this doesn’t work.
It would have to be tested, what exactly happens if you try to delete something from memory, that isn’t there in the first place. And also what actually happens, when you try to delete a part of the Occlumency Barrier. If I had to guess, though, you would literally just cut a hole in a pretend personality. So if the Occlumense has f.e. 2 layers active plus their “base”, they could have each hold/pretend to hold the knowledge of how to do Occlumency. If you now delete it from the top layer, you will just be let in into the next one, which is being adapted to represent the changes. Also, I would expect the Occlumense to create another layer.
This also assumes that you actually see the whole personality the Occlumense pretends to be, which is not actually correct, IIRC. You only see surface thoughts. Which would probably muddle this even further.… Still, I don’t see a problem there.
Did I miss something obvious?