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wedrifid comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong
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Respect is all well and good... sure, maybe he will do some detention some time. But this is a matter of survival and something that can help him in a broad manner to achieve just about all his goals.
This is compared to Snape who.... said some things that might hurt Harry's feelings.
Harry isn't acting like a rationalist. He's acting like a nerdy ape.
He's eleven years old.
He is a week older than he was a week ago. So again I wonder what happened to the Harry from chapter 6?
I think he doesn't want to become a criminal by stealing the Time Turner.
This doesn't warrant one sentence worth of inner dialog? Seriously not buying it. It's a different Harry hacked together for a different parable and as a plot hack to get rid of the Get Out Of Jail Free Card of Awesomeness +4.
He can't have inner dialogue during that section, it's in Minerva's point of view!
That's a good reason. So are you saying that Harry actually did do a thorough analysis of his optimal strategy for securing the benefits of time travel for "actually 5 minutes" at some stage but we just don't hear about it? This would make the situation credible.
No, Harry's experimental result scared the hell out of him and he decided not to do any more clever experiments until he was fifteen.
This is actually more rational than what you are advocating.
Are you sure you understand what I'm advocating? Your claim here suggests to me that you do not.
The most probable outcome of the thought process I outlined, and I say most probable because this is what my reasoning concluded but Harry is smarter than me, is that he will go and earn enough enough money to buy a time turner just in case. I aren't advocating the use of the time turner to make reckless experiments or any of the non-authorized uses that Harry had previously used the device for. I actually made it quite clear what I thought of clever experimentation when explaining the note I would send myself. "Arrogant git" was the key phrase if I recall.
What kind of usage is sane? Emergency usage. For example, I would advocate the use of a time turner when locked in a room being tortured and at a high risk of suicide if I do not prevent it. (I liked the touch with the destroying all sharp objects too.) I would also advocate the use for saving lives (including his own depending on circumstances) with minimalist interventions, many of which would be not at all experimental given what he has already safely gotten away with. It would also be extremely valuable in the reduction of risk to have an extra 36 hours available for emergency use. Many threats to Harry's world optimisation plans will come with some warning. Impending attack of some sort, etc. Having a turner on hand means that he would be able to take more time to make preparations or give th device to McGonnagal in the emergency situation and allow her to prepare. As far as either myself or Harry know she isn't wise enough to have one on hand herself.
A time turner is a device that is massively useful and it is massively useful even if you use it conservatively and take no risks with it. Having one on hand does not make bad things happen unless you know you will be unable to control your foolish impulses. This is not Harry's reasoning.
If Harry does not spend at least five minutes thinking through his priorities (let me emphasise that again, spend five minutes) and considering how to acquire (ie. buy) a time turner then both he and the author are making a big mistake. That is *not more rational. It is a rationalization of a decision that was originally made for the purposes of plot balance.
The reasonable solution is clearly for Harry to do is to put "buy time turner" down on his to do list right next to "become ridiculously rich in a week". It is an obvious smart thing to do but the reader understands why Harry can't really follow through with these plans for story purposes. Having them judged "not a pressing priority" is a credible explanation.
That's a good answer.
Timeturner awesomeness for jail escape is pretty much discounted, when jailers know that one has it. And Harry risks being put under constant supervision because of his apparent disability of infancy.
It never occurred to me to consider it a literal way to escape from jails. That's nearly useless. Instead, I consider it, among other things, as a nearly universally more effective med. kit. If someone just fell off the roof would you rather be able to bandage them up a bit or go back and tell them to watch their step?
... a good reason to not do things that are infantile... and when you do slip up you go back and give yourself a scolding so that you never do the infantile thing in the first place (but still give your past self the scolding note).
Good heavens, Mr. Wedrifid, you can't change time! Do you think students would be allowed Time-Turners if that was possible? What if someone tried to change their test scores?
Good heavens Mr. Yudkowsky, I thought the inventor of Timeless Decision Theory would have a better grasp on how being the kind of person who would make a certain decision can determine what happens, even when that decision never needs to get made, whether that be with Omega and his boxes or in the stable resolution of time loops.
In all the previous time related events, things worked out how they did because the situation in which Harry did not use the time turner was not stable. If Harry was different (for example, by being Hermione or by not having a Time Turner) then the stable, 'final version' given by the universe-time-loop-processor would be the simple one where he doesn't go mess with stuff. But it wasn't.
But lets say that for some bizarre reason Harry never found a note warning him about a stumbling risk and he didn't think to send one back later. At the very least we should find out a few seconds later that the friend fell off the building and landed on a great big padded mat.
I do indeed.
I've written unpublished fiction about it.
From before TDT was invented, actually.
Harry has not worked all that stuff out yet.
He did work out one important principle so far.
It is called DO NOT MESS WITH TIME.
And considering that he got that result, you seem to have missed some of the implications for how time travel works in that universe which would make it potentially dangerous to try and blackmail reality.
Time travel was the first optimization process I considered which was truly alien enough to deanthropomorphize my thinking; evolutionary biology didn't do the job, but the unpublished story I was writing about time travel did.
What you're suggesting is a bit more potentially incredibly dangerous than you seem to think.
Exactly. To make certain situations impossible, you have to be the sort of person that makes the correct actions in the impossible situations, the actions making those situations impossible. (This is also at the core of bargaining.) You are not to take the money from two boxes in the Open Box Newcomb's problem, even if you clearly see that money is there in both of them (and if you have that property, then the situation will never arise).
Harry tried "being the kind of person who would make a certain decision" when using the Time Turner. The result was DO NOT MESS WITH TIME.
As Eliezer said already, timeturner can't change the past. One generally can't even calculate probability of desired outcome of timeturning... Ouch. This is discussed already.
If anyone wants some sf on the subject, I recommend Leiber's The Big Time and "Try and Change the Past".
They're both based on the same premise. The timeline is changeable but highly resistant. Humans can't change it (that's the short story) but there are two superhuman sides (called Snakes and Spiders, but never seen onstage) which recruit humans who are willing to be cut out of their timelines just before they die.
Probability is in the mind. It is the thing that is being calculated.
And the thing is "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME".
I disagree with this statement. See earlier discussion of 'idiot god' by Richard.
Those closed time loops are weird. I considered timeturing before outcome, but, yes, even in that case one can be told by one's timeturned twin, that all is set up for good outcome. And timeturing after desired outcome... should be done unconditionally, as you can't know it is not you who caused this outcome. Weird.
I guess you could argue that it wasn't criminal to do so, but he had no qualms about stealing gold from his bank vault.
I mean that he doesn't want to deal with the consequences of being known to have stolen a valuable artifact; in other words, he doesn't to be a fugitive from the wizard police.