Or Harry transfigured Hermione’s body into a rock and then the rock into a brown diamond. Unless the story explicitly disallows double transfigurations and I missed it.
pangel
Karma: 133
I’ll be there as well.
Sounds right, but the present-day situation is the same: orbs may float to you if and only if you enter the Hall. So Dumbledore should know whether he is involved in the prophecy or not. Unless I missed something?
… a great room of shelves filled with glowing orbs, one after another appearing over the years. (...) Those mentioned within a prophecy would have an glowing orb float to their hand, and then hear the prophet’s true voice speaking.
I interpret it as: Anyone who enters this room sees a glowing orb float to their hand for every prophecy that mentions them. How do you interpret it?
“Those who are spoken of in a prophecy, may listen to that prophecy there. Do you see the implication, Harry?”
Shouldn’t Minerva see another implication, that Dumbledore has no reason to wonder whether he is the dark lord of the prophecy?
Same here.
Thank you for the link! Note that the .pdf version of the article (which is also referenced in dbaupp’s link) has a record of the “hostile-wife” cases over a span of 8 years.
Women don’t like cryonics.
What made you believe this? Is there a pattern to the declared reasons?
The fictional college of the article only selects incoming students on price.
I had the exact same argument with my girlfriend (a bad idea) a while ago and asked for references to point her to on the IRC channel. I was given The Simple Truth and The Relativity of Wrong.
So I was about to write a very supportive response when I saw Mitchell Porter’s comment. And this
(...) the children of post-Christian agnostics grow up to be ideologically aggressive posthuman rationalists.
aptly describes recent interactions I’ve had with my father¹. The accusation of narrowmindedness was present.
So, recurring conflicts with friends and family because of a newfound perspective on, well, everything? Values quickly changing as a consequence of new beliefs on what is true and what is not? Assuming we are in the they-were-right-this-time subgroup of this cliché, there must be smarter ways of dealing with it than making ourselves look crazy in front of the people who care about us.
¹ Except he’s a raging atheist but has never propagated the consequences of this belief to his philosophy.
I see your point. As an author I would think I’m misdirecting my readers by doing that though; “Voldemort has the same deformity as in canon? He’s been playing with Horcruxes!” is the reasoning I would expect from them. Which is why I would, say, remove Quirrell’s turban as soon as my plot had Voldemort not on the back of Quirrell’s head.
The soul-mangling is what causes Voldemort’s snake-like appearance, IIRC, and MoR!McGonagall remembers a snake-like Voldemort from her battles. So either MoR!Voldemort has been doing some serious damage to his soul, or he decided to look freakish just for effect and stumbled by chance upon the exact same look which canon!Voldemort got from making Horcruxes.
As an anecdote, I had an opposite slight tendency to go for what seemed like the worst answer and I had to switch answers twice because of this.
I understood the introductory question as “Frodo Baggins from the Lord of the Rings is buying pants. Which of these is he most likely to buy?”, and correctly answered (c). I suggest rephrasing your question to ensure that it actually tests the reader’s fictional bias. Also, Szalinski in Journal of Cognitive Minification is a nice one.
Unless its utility function has a maximum, we are at risk. Observing Mandelbrot fractals is probably enhanced by having all the atoms of a galaxy playing the role of pixels.
Would you agree that unless the utility function of a random AI has a (rather low) maximum, and barring the discovery of infinite matter/energy sources, its immediate neighbourhood is likely to get repurposed?
I must say that at least I finally understand why you think botched FAIs are more risky than others.
But consider, as Ben Goertzel mentioned, that nobody is trying to build a random AI. Whatever achieves AGI-level is likely to have a built-in representation for humans and to have a tendency to interact with them. Check to see if I actually understood you correctly: does the previous sentence make it more probable that any future AGI is likely to be destructive?
I am too.
So MoR might be a meta-fantasy of the wizarding world as The Sword of Good is a meta-fantasy of the muggle world. Or at least, MoR!Harry might make the same impression to a wizard reading one fic as Hirou does to a muggle reading the other.
Although my instinct is still that Harry fails at the end.