Fulmenius

“Я не "люблю" Германию, как не "люблю" самого себя. Если я и люблю какую-то страну, то - Францию. Впрочем, и любую другую страну я мог бы полюбить скорее, чем свою собственную, даже и без нацистов. У моей страны роль совсем другая - единственная в своем роде: быть моей страной - у "любимой" страны этой роли нет. Потеряв свою страну, ты уже не вправе любить какую-либо другую. Потому что ты теряешь все условия, необходимые для прекрасной игры гостеприимства народов, а это и взаимный обмен, и приглашение друг друга в гости, и взаимопонимание, и возможность щегольнуть, покрасоваться, демонстрируя друг другу свои достижения. Потеряв свою страну, ты становишься sans-patrie, человеком без тени, без почвы под ногами; в лучшем случае, тебя терпят - или, если уж ты добровольно или вынужденно отказался от фактической эмиграции и ограничиваешься внутренней, ты становишься бесприютным изгнанником в собственной стране.”
― Себастьян Хафнер, Defying Hitler

“I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organised.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Something, somewhere, somewhen, must have happened differently...

PETUNIA EVANS married Michael Verres, a Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford.

HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. He once bit a math teacher who didn't know what a logarithm was. He's read Godel, Escher, Bach and Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases and volume one of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. And despite what everyone who's met him seems to fear, he doesn't want to become the next Dark Lord. He was raised better than that. He wants to discover the laws of magic and become a god.

HERMIONE GRANGER is doing better than him in every class except broomstick riding.

DRACO MALFOY is exactly what you would expect an eleven-year-old boy to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father.

PROFESSOR QUIRRELL is living his lifelong dream of teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, or as he prefers to call his class, Battle Magic. His students are all wondering what's going to go wrong with the Defense Professor this time.

DUMBLEDORE is either insane, or playing some vastly deeper game which involved setting fire to a chicken.

DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS MINERVA MCGONAGALL needs to go off somewhere private and scream for a while.

Presenting:

HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY

You ain't guessin' where this one's going.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Lies propagate, that's what I'm saying. You've got to tell more lies to cover them up, lie about every fact that's connected to the first lie. And if you kept on lying, and you kept on trying to cover it up, sooner or later you'd even have to start lying about the general laws of thought. Like, someone is selling you some kind of alternative medicine that doesn't work, and any double-blind experimental study will confirm that it doesn't work. So if someone wants to go on defending the lie, they've got to get you to disbelieve in the experimental method. Like, the experimental method is just for merely scientific kinds of medicine, not amazing alternative medicine like theirs. Or a good and virtuous person should believe as strongly as they can, no matter what the evidence says. Or truth doesn't exist and there's no such thing as objective reality. A lot of common wisdom like that isn't just mistaken, it's anti-epistemology, it's systematically wrong. Every rule of rationality that tells you how to find the truth, there's someone out there who needs you to believe the opposite. If you once tell a lie, the truth is ever after your enemy; and there's a lot of people out there telling lies.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality