trentmkelly/LessWrong-43k huggingface dataset:
Chapter 121: Something to Protect: Severus Snape
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2015-03-14T19:00:13.233Z

A somber mood pervaded the Headmistress's office. Minerva had returned after dropping off Draco and Narcissa/Nancy at St. Mungo's, where the Lady Malfoy was being examined to see if a decade living as a Muggle had done any damage to her health; and Harry had come up to the Headmistress's office again and then... not been able to think of priorities. There was so much to do, so many things, that even Headmistress McGonagall didn't seem to know where to start, and certainly not Harry. Right now Minerva was repeatedly writing words on parchment and then erasing them with a handwave, and Harry had closed his eyes for clarity. Was there any next first thing that needed to happen...

There came a knock upon the great oaken door that had been Dumbledore's, and the Headmistress opened it with a word.

The man who entered the Headmistress's office appeared worn, he had discarded his wheelchair but still walked with a limp. He wore black robes that were simple, yet clean and unstained. Over his left shoulder was slung a knapsack, of sturdy gray leather set with silver filigree that held four green pearl-like stones. It looked like a thoroughly enchanted knapsack, one that could contain the contents of a Muggle house.

One look at him, and Harry knew.

Headmistress McGonagall sat frozen behind her new desk.

Severus Snape inclined his head to her.

"What is the meaning of this?" said the Headmistress, sounding... heart-sick, like she'd known, upon a glance, just like Harry had.

"I resign my position as the Potions Master of Hogwarts," the man said simply. "I will not stay to draw my last month's salary. If there are students who have been particularly harmed by me, you may use the money for their benefit."

He knows. The thought came to Harry, and he couldn't have said in words just what the Potions Master now knew; except that it was clear that Severus knew it.

"Severus..." Headmistress McGonagall began. Her voice sounded hollow. "Professor Severus Snape, you may not realize how difficult it is to find Potions Masters who can safely teach Muggleborns, or Professors sharp enough to keep Slytherin House in any semblance of order..."

Again the man inclined his head. "I think it need not be said to you, Headmistress, but I recommend in the strongest possible terms that the next Head of Slytherin be nothing like me."

"Severus, you only did as Albus told you to do! You could stay on and act

...
Chapter 91: Roles, Pt 2
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2015-03-14T19:00:13.206Z

A/N: This chapter does not contain a spoiler for any particular Orson Scott Card novel. It's a metaphor.

Shortly after, there was another knock upon the storeroom door.

"If you actually care about my mental health," the boy said without looking up, "you will go away, leave me alone, and wait for me to come down to dinner. This isn't helping."

The door opened, and the one who had waited outside stepped in.

"Seriously?" the boy said flatly.

The door closed and clicked behind Severus Snape.

The Potions Master of Hogwarts wore none of his customary arrogance, or even the dispassionate guise that he ordinarily took in the Headmaster's office; his gaze was strange, as he looked down upon the boy guarding that door; his thoughts unfathomable.

"I also cannot imagine what the Deputy Headmistress is thinking," said the Potions Master of Hogwarts. "Unless I am meant to serve as a warning of where it will lead you, if you decide to take the blame for her death upon yourself."

The boy's lips pressed together. "Fine. Let's just skip ahead to the end of this conversation. You win, Professor Snape. I concede that you were more responsible for Lily Potter's death than I was responsible for Hermione Granger's death, and that my guilt can't stack up to your guilt. And then I ask you to go, and you tell them that it would probably be best to let me alone for a while. Are we done?"

"Almost," the Potions Master said. "I am the one who put the notes under Miss Granger's pillow, telling her where to find the fights in which she intervened."

The boy did not react to this at all. Finally he spoke. "Because you dislike bullying."

"Not that alone." There was a note of pain in the Potions Master's voice that sounded alien to it; it was hard to imagine it being the same acid voice that instructed children not to stir one more time or they'd blow off their wrists. "I should have realized it... very much earlier, I suppose, and yet I did not see it at all, being entirely absorbed in myself. For me to be placed as Head of Slytherin... it means that Albus Dumbledore has entirely lost hope that Slytherin House can be helped. I am certain that Dumbledore must have tried, I cannot imagine that he did not try, when he first took trust of Hogwarts. It must have been a severe blow to him, when after that so much of Slytherin answered to the Dark Lord's call... he would not have placed me in authority over th

...
Chapter 60: The Stanford Prison Experiment, Pt 10
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2015-03-14T19:00:12.747Z

"Wake."

Harry's eyes flew open as he came awake with a choking gasp, a jerking start of his prone body. He couldn't remember any dreams, maybe his brain had been too exhausted to dream, it seemed like he'd only closed his eyes and then heard that word spoken a moment after.

"You must awaken," said the voice of Quirinus Quirrell. "I gave you as much time as I could, but it would be wise to reserve at least one use of your Time-Turner. Soon we must go backward four hours to Mary's Place, appearing in every way as though we have done nothing interesting this day. I wished to speak to you before then."

Harry slowly sat up in the midst of darkness. His body ached, and not only in the places where it had laid on the hard concrete. Images tumbled over each other in his memory, everything his unconscious brain had been too tired to discharge into a proper nightmare.

Twelve terrible voids floating down a metal corridor, tarnishing the metal around them, light dimmed and temperature falling as the emptiness tried to suck all life out of the world -

Chalk-white skin, stretched just above the bone that had remained after fat and muscle faded -

A metal door -

A woman's voice -

No, I didn't mean it, please don't die -

I can't remember my children's names any more -

Don't go, don't take it away, don't don't don't -

"What was that place?" Harry said hoarsely, in a voice pushed out of his throat like water forced through a too-thin pipe, in the darkness it sounded almost as shattered as Bellatrix Black's voice had been. "What was that place? That wasn't a prison, that was HELL!"

"Hell?" said the calm voice of the Defense Professor. "You mean the Christian punishment fantasy? I suppose there is a similarity."

"How -" Harry's voice was blocking, there was something huge lodged in his throat. "How - how could they -" People had built that place, someone had made Azkaban, they'd made it on purpose, they'd done it deliberately, that woman, she'd had children, children she wouldn't remember, some judge had decided for that to happen to her, someone had needed to drag her into that cell and lock its door while she screamed, someone fed her every day and walked away without letting her out -

"HOW COULD PEOPLE DO THAT?"

"Why shouldn't they?" said the Defense Professor. A pale blue light lit the warehouse, then, showing a high, cavernous concrete ceiling, and a dusty concrete floor; and Professor Qu

...
Chapter 111: Failure, Pt 1
by Eliezer Yudkowsky — 2015-03-14T19:00:11.873Z

The Dark Lord was laughing.

From the empty air came the voice of the Defense Professor laughing wildly, so high and terrible his laughter; it was Voldemort's laughter now, the Dark Lord's laughter beyond all hiding or restraint.

Harry's mind was disarrayed. His eyes kept staring at where Albus Dumbledore had been. There was a horror in him that was too huge for understanding or reflection. His mind kept trying to fall back through time and undo reality, but that wasn't a sort of magic that existed, and reality stayed the same.

He had lost, he had lost Dumbledore, there were no take-backs, and that meant he had lost the war.

And the Dark Lord went on laughing.

"Ah, ah hah, ah hah hah ha! Professor Dumbledore, ah, Professor Dumbledore, such a fitting end to our game!" Another burst of wild laughter. "The wrong sacrifice even at the finish, for the piece you gave up everything to save was already in my possession! The wrong trap even from the beginning, for I could have abandoned this body at any time! Ah, hahahahaha, aha! You never did learn cunning, you poor old fool."

"You -" A voice was coming from Harry's throat. "You -"

"Ahahahaha! Why, yes, little child, you were always along on this adventure as my hostage, it was your whole purpose in being here. Ha, hahahaha! You are decades too young to play this game against the real Tom Riddle, child." The Dark Lord drew back the hood of the Cloak, his head becoming visible, and began to remove the rest of the Cloak. "And now, boy, you have helped me, yess indeed, and so it iss time to ressurrect your girl-child friend. To keep promisse." The Dark Lord's smile was cold, cold indeed. "I suppose you have doubts? Mark well, I could kill you this instant, for there is no longer a Headmaster of Hogwarts to be informed of it. Doubt me all you wish, but remember that." The hand was once more holding the gun. "Now come along, foolish child."

And they left.

They went back out through the door into the Potions room, the Dark Lord banishing the returned purple fire with a stroke of his wand. They went through the chamber where the boggart had been, and the chamber of ruined chess statues, and through the burned door of the chamber of keys. The Dark Lord floated up through the trapdoor, and Harry struggled up afterward through the spiral staircase of leaves, the tendrils of the Devil's Snare twitching and then moving back as though afr

...
Meetup : Meetup Announcement: IRAD II and Future Events
by AvivaLasVegas — 2015-03-14T01:45:59.967Z

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup Announcement: IRAD II and Future Events

WHEN:
18 March 2015 07:00:00PM (-0700)

WHERE:
11066 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90025

How to Find Us: Go into this Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

Parking is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

Discussion: We will be discussing and reviewing the first IRAD (Incorrectness Reduction Activity Day), as well as beginning the planning for the next IRAD and potentially Rat Camp (Rationality Camp) which will be a similar type of event in a camp-like setting.

Recommended Reading:
If you were a presenter, please review and bring any materials from your talk, to re-familiarize yourself with it and to participate in a discussion as to what kinds of things we want to do next time, what kinds of topics might be cool to do again or to update, that sort of thing.

No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required; this will be generally accessible.

Discussion article for the meetup : Meetup Announcement: IRAD II and Future Events
LA Meetup Announcement - IRAD II, RAT Camp, and other Activities Discussion
by AvivaLasVegas — 2015-03-14T01:37:40.821Z

**How to Find Us**: Go into [this](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Del+Taco/@34.047464,-118.443286,974m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m2!3m1!1s0x80c2bb777277de93:0x99f58a53b04bb89c?hl=en) Del Taco. We will be in the back room if possible.

**Parking** is free in the lot out front or on the street nearby.

**Discussion**: We will be reviewing the good (and bad!) of the first IRAD, as well as start to put together some of the plans for the next conference. We will also be discussing other potential rationality- and group-based activities, including potentially bringing back the idea of RAT Camp (Rationality discussions in a camp-like setting).

**Recommended Reading**:

There is no recommended reading for this meetup, however, if you were a presenter, you are encouraged to re-assess and bring with you (if applicable) your topic materials, including a written version of the talk. This will be useful for us to figure out what would be best for the next one.

*No prior exposure to Less Wrong is required*; this will be generally accessible.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 121
by Gondolinian — 2015-03-13T19:01:40.952Z

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 121.

Plans for next chapter release:

The last chapter will post on March 14th, 2015, at 9AM Pacific (4PM UTC).
Thank you all for reading.

There is a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
A map of LWers - find members of the community living near you.
by acchan — 2015-03-13T17:58:20.023Z

There seems to be a lot of enthusiasm around LessWrong meetups, so I thought something like this might be interesting too. There is no need to register - just add your marker and keep an eye out for someone living near you.

Here's the link: https://www.zeemaps.com/map?group=1323143

I posted this on an Open Thread first. Below are some observations based on the previous discussion:

When creating a new marker you will be given a special URL you can use to edit it later. If you lose it, you can create a new one and ask me to delete the old marker. Try not to lose it though.

If someone you tried to contact is unreachable, notify me and I'll delete the marker in order to keep the map tidy. Also, try to keep your own marker updated.

It was suggested that it would be a good idea to circulate the map around survey time. I'll try to remind everyone to update their markers around that time. Any major changes (e.g. changing admin, switching services, remaking the map to eliminate dead markers) will also happen then.

The map data can be exported by anyone, so there's no need to start over if I disappear or whatever.

Edit: Please, you have to make it possible to contact you. If you choose to use a name that doesn't match your LW account, you have to add an email address or equivalent. If you don't do that, it is assumed that the name on the marker is your username here, but if it isn't you are essentially unreachable and will be removed.
Pratchett, Rationality, and Winning
by NancyLebovitz — 2015-03-13T15:38:50.916Z

Pratchett's lecture at Trinity

For a long time, I've been dubious about "rationality is winning". While it protects against one dangerous line of thought (I was right! It's just that the universe didn't cooperate), it fails to mention a time scale-- sometimes you lose before you win. And sometimes you wander around for a while with no apparent purpose, and then you find something unlikely and valuable.

Pratchett's lecture includes a description of his early life, and I don't think any rational person or any rational parent would have seen his early life as any sort of sensible goal-seeking, or likely to lead to winning in any sense.
Pratchett was a fairly bad student, though he did better when he had less competition. He read all the bound volumes of Punch (the major British satirical magazine), and learned from that classic.
He became a reporter for a local newspaper, a job with modest status and low salary. (In one of his novels, he mentions the voracious appetite of a newspaper-- it's got to have news every day. Somehow, this seemed more intensely true than the large number of other sensible things he said in his books. Looks like I was on to something.)
It seems to me that LW-style rationality would have had him working on being a better student and looking for ways to make more money early on, and he probably wouldn't have written Discworld.
On the other hand, Eliezer is doing quite well, and on yet another and possibly gripping hand, I doubt that going for increasing the probability of success would have started with "think really hard about existential risks".
New LW Meetup: Basel
by FrankAdamek — 2015-03-13T15:23:33.639Z

This summary was posted to LW Main on March 6th. The following week's summary is here.

New meetups (or meetups with a hiatus of more than a year) are happening in:

[Basel] Effective Altruism Meetup Switzerland: 21 March 2015 06:00PM

Irregularly scheduled Less Wrong meetups are taking place in:

European Community Weekend 2015: 12 June 2015 12:00PM
[Glasgow] LessWrong Scotland: 15 March 2015 03:00PM
Frankfurt Pub Social: 18 March 2015 07:00PM
Israel: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Pi Day Wrap Party: 14 March 2015 08:30PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Effective Altruism for the masses: 15 March 2015 02:00PM
[Netherlands] Effective Altruism Netherlands: Small concrete actions you could take: 29 March 2015 01:00PM
Prague - setting up: 23 March 2015 07:30PM
[Tempe AZ] App Academy Discussion: 08 March 2015 02:00PM
Umbc meetup : 24 March 2015 04:56PM

The remaining meetups take place in cities with regular scheduling, but involve a change in time or location, special meeting content, or simply a helpful reminder about the meetup:

Austin, TX - Stoicism - Caffe Medici: 07 March 2026 01:30PM
[Sydney] HPMOR Wrap Party! - Sydney Edition: 15 March 2015 06:00PM
Sydney Rationality Dojo - Skill Training Part 2: 12 April 2015 05:00PM
[Tel Aviv] Less Wrong Israel Meetup: social and board games: 10 March 2015 07:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 14 March 2015 03:00PM
[Vienna] Effective Altruism Meetup Vienna: 19 March 2015 07:00PM
[Vienna] Rationality Meetup Vienna: 18 April 2015 02:00PM
Washington, D.C.: Fun & Games (with Nomic): 08 March 2015 02:00PM

Locations with regularly scheduled meetups: Austin, Berkeley, Berlin, Boston, Brussels, Buffalo, Cambridge UK, Canberra, Columbus, London, Madison WI, Melbourne, Moscow, Mountain View, New York, Philadelphia, Research Triangle NC, Seattle, Sydney, Tel Aviv, Toronto, Vienna, Washington DC, and West Los Angeles. There's also a 24/7 online study hall for coworking LWers.

If you'd like to talk with other LW-ers face to face, and there is no meetup in your area, consider starting your own meetup; it's easy (more resources here). Check one out, stretch your rationality skills, build community, and have fun!

In addition to the handy sidebar of upcoming meetups, a meetup overview is posted on the front page every Friday. Th...
Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Rob Bensinger — 2015-03-13T15:11:20.920Z

Eliezer Yudkowsky's original Sequences have been edited, reordered, and converted into an ebook!

Rationality: From AI to Zombies is now available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI versions on intelligence.org (link). You can choose your own price to pay for it (minimum $0.00), or buy it for $4.99 from Amazon (link). The contents are:

333 essays from Eliezer's 2006-2009 writings on Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong, including 58 posts that were not originally included in a named sequence.

5 supplemental essays from yudkowsky.net, written between 2003 and 2008.

6 new introductions by me, spaced throughout the book, plus a short preface by Eliezer.

The ebook's release has been timed to coincide with the end of Eliezer's other well-known introduction to rationality, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. The two share many similar themes, and although Rationality: From AI to Zombies is (mostly) nonfiction, it is decidedly unconventional nonfiction, freely drifting in style from cryptic allegory to personal vignette to impassioned manifesto.

The 333 posts have been reorganized into twenty-six sequences, lettered A through Z. In order, these are titled:

A — Predictably Wrong

B — Fake Beliefs

C — Noticing Confusion

D — Mysterious Answers

E — Overly Convenient Excuses

F — Politics and Rationality

G — Against Rationalization

H — Against Doublethink

I — Seeing with Fresh Eyes

J — Death Spirals

K — Letting Go

L — The Simple Math of Evolution

M — Fragile Purposes

N — A Human's Guide to Words

O — Lawful Truth

P — Reductionism 101

Q — Joy in the Merely Real

R — Physicalism 201

S — Quantum Physics and Many Worlds

T — Science and Rationality

U — Fake Preferences

V — Value Theory

W — Quantified Humanism

X — Yudkowsky's Coming of Age

Y — Challenging the Difficult

Z — The Craft and the Community

Several sequences and posts have been renamed, so you'll need to consult the ebook's table of contents to spot all the correspondences. Four of these sequences (marked in bold) are almost completely new. They were written at the same time as Eliezer's other Overcoming Bias posts, but were never ordered or grouped together. Some of the others (A, C, L, S, V, Y, Z) have been substantially expanded, shrunk, or rearranged, but are still based...
Homepathy: One down, infinity to go
by passive_fist — 2015-03-13T08:51:10.612Z

A few days ago the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NMHRC) released a report that reviewed 1800 papers on homeopathic treatments. In what should be a surprise to no one on LW, it was concluded that they were no more effective than placebo.

Even though this particular failure mode of human reasoning (belief in homeopathy) was never that hard to refute, there are other, closely related errors in reasoning that often go by undetected, and I think it's useful to talk about them and discuss them. I always found homeopathy interesting because it is probably one of the purest manifestations of magical thinking - the belief (knowingly or unknowingly) in the existence of a supernatural essence that exists in objects, animals, and people (or more abstract things, such as events). All of us are guilty of thinking magically once in a while. Some common forms of magical thinking include believing in karma, believing in souls, valuing handcrafted objects over factory-produced ones (without pointing to specific functional reasons why the factory-built objects are inferior), and believing that no machine could ever be as intelligent or moral or conscious as a human could.

Is it possible to identify when magical thinking is taking place? I feel that this is harder than it sounds, and is something that could be of great use in the rationalist toolbox.