Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

"World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimization."

I knew that not thinking about something doesn’t stop it from happening

I know that I'd just make myself unhappy by comparing that reality to... something perfect that I built up in my imagination

That's what the experimental method is for, so that we don't have to resolve things just by arguing.

If you can learn to think of yourself as a human instead of a wizard then you can train and refine your powers as a human.

Always questioning yourself, always taking another look at things you've always taken for granted," like having a Snitch in Quidditch, "and every time you change your mind, you change yourself.

Science can keep you alive if magic fails

World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimization.

Litany of Gendlin: What's true is already so, owning up to it doesn't make it worse.

"What you've just discovered is called 'positive bias'," said the boy. "You had a rule in your mind, and you kept on thinking of triplets that should make the rule say 'Yes'. But you didn't try to test as many triplets as possible that should make the rule say 'No'. In fact you didn't get a single 'No', so 'any three numbers' could have just as easily been the rule. It's sort of like how people imagine experiments that could confirm their hypotheses instead of trying to imagine experiments that could falsify them - that's not quite exactly the same mistake but it's close. You have to learn to look on the negative side of things, stare into the darkness. When this experiment is performed, only 20% of grownups get the answer right. And many of the others invent fantastically complicated hypotheses and put great confidence in their wrong answers since they've done so many experiments and everything came out like they expected."