HonoreDB
[META] Alternatives to rot13 and karma sinks
That’s right, Emotion. Go ahead, put Reason out of the way! That’s great! Fine! …for Hitler.
I think Quirrell is working with an unconventional definition of Dark. Something like “in violent opposition to you.”
Or you cast the spell after doing the deed, and that one time they were too busy fleeing/claiming this wasn’t what it looked like/getting castigated/getting dressed.
...just how many pregnancies has McGonagall caused, anyway?
Most of the stuff I was hoping for hasn’t panned out thus far. The ebook gets a few downloads each week, mostly as referrals from the HPMoR fan art page.
Yeah, it was a total cheat. That’s why I put my anagram in the Dramatis Personae.
I’d walk through the roulette box (sounds like fun!) but not the torture box.
Oh, thanks!
Argh. I’m reminding myself that Retroactive Rewards Rage is a cognitive fallacy. Is there a formal name for it? I bet you could induce it in chimps.
Anyway,
Abstraction Telephone
Divide into at least 4 groups, of minimum size 1 and maximum size maybe 5. Each group gets a different short passage. They collaborate to translate the passage their choice of either “one rung up,” making it all more abstract, or “one rung down,” making it all more specific. Group N then passes their translated passage only, not the original, to Group N+1 modulo the number of groups. Then each group performs the same operation, then passes it to the next group in line. I think two iterations will be enough to get something entertainingly mangled, so then each group in turn performs the passage they’ve been handed for the audience. The remaining people may try to guess what the original passage was.
Example (2/3rds stolen from George Orwell):
Group 1 gets:
“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”
They note that everything but the last clause is pretty specific, so they decide to move it up the ladder. They write
Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.
Group 2 gets this. They note that it’s extremely abstract, so they decide to make it more specific. They write
Any competent Magic: the Gathering player will beat the best one in the world at least 10% of the time. Statistical models of baseball games show that a significant amount of variance cannot be attributed to any stable ability of players and teams. Even the most carefully hedged investment strategy can be wiped out by a black swan.
Group 3 does a dramatic reading of this passage, and maybe Group 4 tries to guess what the original passage was.
Example:
Group 2′s first passage was this, from Poor Richard’s Almanac:
The Family of Fools is ancient.
Necessity never made a good bargain.
If Pride leads the Van, Beggary brings up the Rear.
There’s many witty men whose brains can’t fill their bellies.
Weighty Questions ask for deliberate Answers.
They decide to add specificity. Each group member picks a proverb to translate, and they get:
The man who is amazed that whenever he looks at his clock, it reads “11:11,” would in prehistory be the man who thinks he can control the weather with a ritual.
A thirstier person will pay more for water.
If you won’t accept handouts from your relatives now, you might be begging from strangers later.
The market value for a degree in English is pretty damn low.
When given a difficult question, wait 5 minutes, by an actual clock, before proposing solutions.
Group 3 gets this, and decides to take it even further down the ladder into specificity, giving real-life examples of these situations, or empirical economic formulae.
Example:
Group 3 gets a printout of The eHow page on selecting a digital camera. They take it up the ladder, and write
“Higher resolution and zoom capability should be priorities. Be sure to use a good quality lens. Look for cameras with more and better features. Don’t pay more than you can afford!”
Group 4 gets this. They note that they can’t reverse this process, since too much information has been destroyed, but they can further abstract it to
“Figure out what you want in a camera, and how much you’re willing to pay.”
Required px for a tweet is about .3.
A human corpse poofing into existence from nowhere wouldn’t be in itself a bad outcome. So we need to specify that the human was once alive.
An alternate phrasing might be “Because this would cause the person to die.” But the word “die” is historically imprecise. Open-heart surgery stops a beating heart. Destructive uploading would cause brain death.
1) is patchable by specifying that the leftovers are non-perishable, so eating them is equivalent to buying a meal.
2) Either the judge is told that the variable meal is repeatable if it’s good, or we specify in the group problem that you’re not going back there no matter what.
In a group, with a leader who knows the exercise:
Get a volunteer to act as a judge (or a few to act as a jury, in a large group). Have her leave the room. The leader presents the rest with a short set of Contrived Hypothetical Situations, each with finite options and either clearly-defined outcomes for each option, or a probabilistic distribution of outcomes for each option. The leader says, “Please write down your choice for each problem, sign your paper, and turn it in to me. Then I’ll call in the judge, and have her decide on each problem. You get a point wherever her decision agrees with yours. The winner is the one with the most points.” When the judge is called in, however, the leader doesn’t tell them the actual problems. Rather, the leader just reports the outcomes (or distributions), and asks them to choose which outcome or distribution is best. The winners are announced based on that.
Example: One of the situations given is some variant of the trolley problem. When the judge comes in, she is just asked whether she’d prefer one person to get hit by a trolley, or five. Everybody laughs as she replies ”...one?”
Example: The problem given to the group is “You drive 45 minutes away from home to go to a new restaurant for dinner. When you get there, you discover that you dislike the ambience and the selection is poor. You remember that you have decent leftovers at home. You’re mildly hungry. Do you try the restaurant anyway (25-minute wait, 10% very enjoyable meal, 10% decent meal, 80% unenjoyable meal) or just head back home (5-minute-prep once you get home, 100% chance decent meal)?” The problem given to the judge is “You’re mildly hungry. In 25 minutes, you can have a meal that is (10% very enjoyable, 10% decent, 80% unenjoyable). Or, in 50 minutes, you can have a guaranteed decent meal.”
If the world were going to end right after I took an action, which action would I choose? (Alt: If everybody saw what choice I was about to make, but then circumstances changed and my decision turned out not to matter, what choice would I want to have made?)
Did answering that question feel the same as answering the actual question? If so, I’m not really thinking about consequences.
It seems fair to estimate that the people eating these locusts would have known how many legs they really had
Any large text that makes scientific claims makes errors. A modern science textbook averages about 14 errors. Ancient Greek texts are full of erroneous factual claims that they could have easily checked. Aristotle claimed that men had more teeth than women. Had such a claim been in the Torah, there would be later commentary explaining that in women, certain teeth don’t count as teeth.
Or just embed a poll.