Eliezer Yudkowsky

"If I lied the first time, I'm not going to tell you the truth just because you ask twice."

Draco's eyes were wide again. "Did you really

One of my tutors once said that people form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don't make close friends is because they're too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves

The same could be said of Draco's clever use of reciprocation pressure for an unsolicited gift, a technique which Harry had read about in his social psychology books

A pause to reflect could go a long way in defusing the power of a lot of compliance techniques, once you learned to recognize them for what they were

My father takes all of his allies seriously," Draco said. "That's why he has a lot of allies. Maybe you should meet him

outright panic was the sign of a truly important scientific problem

When the conversation can't go forward and can't go back, zig it sideways

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