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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread
Update: Please post new comments in the latest HPMOR discussion thread, now in the discussion section, since this thread and its first few successors have grown unwieldy (direct links: two, three, four, five, six, seven).
As many of you already know, Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing a Harry Potter fanfic, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, starring a rationalist Harry Potter with ambitions to transform the world by bringing the rationalist/scientific method to magic. But of course a more powerful Potter requires a more challenging wizarding world, and ... well, you can see for yourself how that plays out.
This thread is for discussion of anything related to the story, including insights, confusions, questions, speculation, jokes, discussion of rationality issues raised in the story, attempts at fanfic spinoffs, comments about related fanfictions, and meta-discussion about the fact that Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing Harry Potter fan-fiction (presumably as a means of raising the sanity waterline).
I'm making this a top-level post to create a centralized location for that discussion, since I'm guessing people have things to say (I know I do) and there isn't a great place to put them. fanfiction.net has a different set of users (plus no threading or karma), the main discussion here has been in an old open thread which has petered out and is already near the unwieldy size that would call for a top-level post, and we've had discussions come up in a few other places. So let's have that discussion here.
Comments here will obviously be full of spoilers, and I don't think it makes sense to rot13 the whole thread, so consider this a spoiler warning: this thread contains unrot13'd spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality up to the current chapter and for the original Harry Potter series. Please continue to use rot13 for spoilers to other works of fiction, or if you have insider knowledge of future chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
A suggestion: mention at the top of your comment which chapter you're commenting on, or what chapter you're up to, so that people can understand the context of your comment even after more chapters have been posted. This can also help people avoid reading spoilers for a new chapter before they realize that there is a new chapter.
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Comments (866)
Chapter 34:
I totally think the "completely wrong ship" alluded to in the author's notes is Hermione/Griphook. It makes sense!
Chapter 33:
I'd come up, before, with the hypothesis that HPMoR Voldemort was actually Necessarily Evil after the fashion of Eliezer's proposed supervillain gambit, but I dismissed it by assuming that Voldemort had crossed the Moral Event Horizon already. This chapter, though, makes it very plausible again via an explicit motivation (and a Shout Out to Foundation, as well). On the other hand, Quirrell could just be playing one level above that explanation.
One thing, though: is it public knowledge that Lucius Malfoy had been a Death Eater? Because it seemed to be a very dangerous thing to say out loud (not that Quirrell need fear Lucius, but that it seems foolhardy to so easily signal that he need not fear him).
I believe canon states that Lucius was tried in the post-Voldemort purges & Lucius's defense was that he had been under the Imperius curse.
EDIT: The Harry Potter wikia, which ought to know, seems to agree: http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/Lucius_Malfoy#First_Wizarding_War
Here's what I think will happen:
Zabini stuns himself in the name of Sunshine to create a tie. And here's why:
1) The rest of the school is very partisan about their favorite army, so it's not likely that many are betting on a tie. Zabini (through a proxy or otherwise) put all of his chips on "tie." So he will return to Hell a much richer Prince of Darkness.
1a) "Aftermath" scene: Hogsmeade. Zabini meets his broker. Hogwarts is basically a closed economy, and Zabini has now walked off with the lion's share of the student body's disposable income. He plunks his Bag of Holding on the table. "Take this and convert it to Muggle money. Then go buy unmarked silver bullion..."
2) The three Generals are tied for Quirrell points. Given what we've seen of him in this chapter, Zabini is probably in fourth place, and not too far behind. How many Quirrell points will he get for getting all three generals to play according to his plan? We see Harry and Hermione accepting, and per the Prisoner's Dilemma thing, Harry and Draco had to synchronize their moves ("cooperate") to have a chance against Hermione. This would mean that Draco is also more or less following Zabini's plan. Zabini was able to steer the battle to his personal chosen outcome, so he (as an individual) wins the battle. The betrayal rules+scoring are set up to favor individual objectives rather than army loyalty/collective goals/unity. Zabini has realized this, and acted accordingly.
3) After collecting Quirrell's wish from his come-from-behind victory (which provides a "practical" demonstration of the 2-4-6 Test, since no one, Generals included, expected Zabini to have his own victory conditions), Zabini goes to Dumbledore's office. "Well done, Blaise!" Dumbledore says. "I suppose you're here for your wish..." That is, Dumbledore has offered Zabini a wish if he could steer the battle to a tie, since that would stop a Hogwarts equivalent of a football (soccer) riot, which would be likely if one of the armies won.
4) At the Christmas feast, Dumbledore rises to announce that the three armies are being merged into a Hogwarts Army, and starting at the end of January, the HA will compete in three-way battles with Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. Per the experiment mentioned earlier with the "Eagles" and "Rattlers," the Hogwarts students are united against external foes. He and Quirrell allowed the Headmasters of the other schools to watch the battles using Quirrell screens, and their staffs liked the idea. The mock battles use more magical skills and incorporate more students than Quidditch, and are thus a better encouragement to learning. New rules could be applied to future battles. "You may use any magic item you can make (under teacher or senior-student supervision) in your battles, providing it's not dangerous." "You can use any Potion you can make," etc.
Predictions?
Regarding the note of confusion Harry feels in Chapter 3: the Killing Curse "strikes directly at the soul", but in Voldemort's case it burned his body. More likely he never cast it at Harry Potter, and the burnt hulk they found wasn't him. He learned about the prophecy and, being smart, changed his plans rather than risk fulfilling it.
And the Source of Magic is a UFAI that optimizes the world into stories.
I hope all my predictions turn out wrong. What I want most from this story is to go on being surprised.
Is there an annotated version of this anywhere? I know that the sequences cover most/all the stuff and am reading and have read a lot of the sequences but it seems like it might be fun to read this with descriptions of the maths/science/concepts alongside it as well as all the literary allusion noted.
Is Harry learning how to lose?
Chp 19 is when Harry went through the ordeal with Quirrell to learn how to lose.
Chp 21 he lost the textbook reading contest with Hermione and acted like a whiny sore loser, suggesting that he hadn't really learned much. He acted like such a brat that I had to assume that he'd failed to learn some basic social skills in his solitary homeschooled childhood (e.g., you should at least act like you've lost gracefully, by congratulating the winner and not complaining).
Chp 32 Harry seems to be trying to goad Draco and Hermione into cooperating with each against him in the battle, suggesting that he hopes that they work together to defeat him in the game, for the greater good (of Draco's character and their relationships). It can't happen, because the state of the game demands that Draco cooperate with Harry rather than Hermione in order to have a chance to win, but if Harry was considering it and hoping for it then that's a good sign for his learning.
Chp 33 provides more support for this take on chp 32. Draco & Hermione threaten to cooperate against Harry if he accepts traitors, Harry openly proclaims that he'll accept traitors and challenges them to cooperate, and Quirrell is surprised by Harry's response. This makes the most sense if Harry is thinking outside the game and seeing his tactic as win-win: either he gets Draco & Hermione to cooperate (win in life), or they fail to cooperate and he has an advantage in the battle (win in the game).
You know, as I was reading chapter 32, I started thinking about how the three generals had their various weaknesses. Draco is savvy but weak against complexity, Hermione is bright but not exactly street smart, and Harry is clearly brilliant yet arrogant. It was only after I'd read it all that I realised each had fallen prey to their own specific weakness. Hermione was surprised by the combined 'For Sunshine!' Gambit against her, Draco didn't realise he was with the wrong Patil, and Harry encouraged earlier betrayal amongst his crew in order to protect him in the final battle, only to be surprised at the end. I figure this was probably a deliberate bit of writing on Eliezer's account, in which case I just want to say-Good job!
Draco -> Terran
Hermione -> Zerg
Harry -> Protoss
?
Are you mad? You are assigning the happiness & sunshine army general to the Zerg, and the general of chaos to the Protoss?
I'm starting to think you aren't actually a Starcraft player.
I went by frozenchicken's words rather than by my (single-player and replay-watching only) knowledge of Starcraft. "Clearly brilliant yet arrogant" is a lock for Protoss, and "bright but not exactly street smart" cannot be Terran.
Now, chaotic fighting indeed doesn't fit with the Protoss at all. But Hermione's strategy is by far the one that most parallels a hive-mind, and for all we know the semi-sentient Zerg really are all happy-go-lucky on the inside.
I'm guessing that Blaise will shoot himself in the name of Sunshine, tying all the scores. That seems like the kind of thing Dumbledore would plot. It makes the most sense from Eliezer's point of view too, in terms of leading the story in a more interesting direction.
And I think that would make Blaise the quadruple agent, with Dumbledore as the fourth faction, and Quirrell aware of the entire thing, masterminding his own little stanford prison experiment in order to achieve whatever ends he's ultimately aiming for.
It was interesting to see how deeply Harry got into his "General Chaos" role in this light. (Also, I think Ch. 32 was the first time I've laughed out loud over the story in a while. It was getting pretty serious and this was way more fun. The "vader/emperor voices"... I was busting up! I think this kind of hilarity at the beginning is part of why the story took off the way it did.)
Plotwise, I've been wondering lately if Eliezer might be laying the groundwork for Voldemort to turn out to actually be the good guy and maybe Harry's true challenge as a protagonist will be to recognize that rationalist!Voldemort will actually turn out to be good for the world, and deserves to be supported. I could image the army lessons turning out to have a positive global outcome if they ended in the right way, which would add a bit of support to this theory.
This is how one of Eliezer's early stories turned out: "The Sword of Good".
(There are some traces of that story in MoR - Harry early on not engaging in moral relativism is similar to the hero's final understanding of the evil of the status quo of the fantasy world. But ultimately I think Quirrelmort will be evil. Voldemort killing the entire dojo and sparing only his friend is a mortal sin and Quirrel does not exhibit the kind of heroic remorse necessary to make up for mass & serial murder. Which reminds me, we don't know who Voldemort killed to get the Horcrux on Pioneer. A security guard, probably.)
Ch. 32. I don't know what Eliezer will have Blaise do, but if I were in that position I'd flip a coin between Harry and Draco, get rewarded by the winner and counterfactually mug the loser. (Hoping, of course, that that Draco wins, since Harry is clearly more likely to pay off a counterfactual mugger.)
ETA: That is, of course, assuming that Blaise isn't working for Dumbledore (which his chapter-ending line would seem to point to).
Assume that Draco and Harry both value victory at $1000. Now if you demand $800 from the winner, the loser "would have" gained only $200 in the counterfactual case, so he will pay you $200 at most. So you could have just demanded $1000 minus epsilon from the winner. We could probably prove a theorem that says counterfactual mugging can't help you extract more of the surplus economic value that you create.
Excellent point! This is what I get for posting in haste.
ETA: However you can extract more than $1000 if you assume that at least one of Harry and Draco would rather the other of them win than Hermione. No counterfactuals needed.
Judging by the Author's Notes, my guess is that the final result is a three-way tie caused by Blaise self-terminating in the name of Sunshine.
Another point in chapter 32 that could use some explaining: Why are Harry, Draco, Hermione the only ones in the running for the Christmas wish? Do Quirrell points from battles tend heavily towards the generals? (Though I guess they were all doing especially well in the class anyway...) That, and there's only one Christmas wish, for all seven years; obviously the other years are a bit outside the scope of the story, but with no explanation it still seems a bit strange that noone from those years would even come close.
Yes, that was stated in a previous chapter.
Hm, inconsistency: I just noticed that Quirrell says in chapter 16 that Quirrell points will determine generalship of armies. That seems to have been abandoned at some point?
Regarding the author's notes for chapter 32: I assume the complexity class you're looking for at the end there would be something like PromiseNP? Also, the trick really is more general than that, seeing as you can actually use it to do anything in PSPACE.
Chapter one, when Petunia is talking about how she wanted Lily to use magic to make her prettier:
Just excuses? Or...? Dun dun dun...
Maybe I was just really unobservant reading the first time around, but rereading is really fun.
Ch 29
Pffhahahaha!
Up to chapter 31 now. I don't understand how Eliezer is going to paint the central conflict. Granted, Quirrell is awesome and has had several successes already. But the main motivation of the Death Eaters is blood purism (as in canon), and Harry has already proved it to be false, and our Quirrell is rational enough to agree with the proof if he hears it. So to make the central conflict happen Eliezer has to invent something else, something secret, that makes Quirrell tick.
It appears that a very large number of wizards are blood purists; Quirrel might just want power, and think that the best way to achieve that is by stirring up hatred for mudbloods.
I think he may have already done so, by way of Quirrelmort's reaction to Harry's statement that he wanted to use science.
Voldemort is scared of muggles. Quite reasonably so; despite Harry, there are enough of them that they'd very likely overtake the magic-users in a matter of decades on all useful fronts, and even now a conflict between muggles could squash the wizards like a bug.
Basically, I think he wants to
(a) Strengthen magical society to the point where they can stand up to the muggles. Harry might be helpful here, but there's a good chance their plans would conflict. Failing that..
(b) Get the hell off this rock.
For "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality", I'd like to make predictions that can be eventually verified publicly in time, but won't tempt the author to change things to prevent it from coming true (as is the usual way of serial writers on the Internet). I'm therefore encrypting my prediction with the md5 hash function, so that afterwards it can be verified. (One difficulty is that I have the power to edit this comment; is there a way to make it obvious if I've done so, or store it in a less editable space?) Anyway, here goes:
July 16 (after Chapter 31): 28f9e3b2165344763c35514b473cb347
July 25 (after Chapter 32, prediction for Chapter 33):
SHA-1: f5721b3c6010973ee195dc160d0679477401a3df
Translation:
End of 32 only listed 3 options for Zabini. The fourth creates a 3-way tie. Zabini shoots himself as traitor.
Try echo -n.
Copying here to verify lack of editing in future.
If you edit the comment a little asterisk will appear by the time stamp. Just make sure you don't do that.
MD5 is utterly utterly broken and recommended against for any purpose. Use SHA-1.
EDIT: I should mention that SHA-1 is also theoretically broken and may see a demonstrated break soon, but nothing like as problematic as MD5. Until SHA-3 is agreed, the SHA-2 functions are a good stopgap where you need better security.
Did you include your own name in the text? If not, someone else can present the same hash and there's no way to tell who came up with it.
orthonormal predicts:
There, that's less editable for you.
You can have a third party create a cryptographically signed timestamp for you. For example, secure-timestamp.org will do this. This can only be falsified by getting the timestamping server's private key or breaking its crypto algorithm. For things more important than Harry Potter predictions, you can have multiple third parties timestamp them for you, in which case falsification requires stealing all of their private keys.
If you edit the comment, an asterisk will appear after the time. Compare jimrandomh's reply to the others.
Ah, clever.
EDIT: Let me see this for myself.
EDIT 2: Hey, it's not working yet!
EDIT 3: Duh, I had to reload the page.
Can you say anything (without giving away the prediction) about when you would know if it is correct or not?
It's my guess at (some features of) the ending.
You could use Prediction Book.
See, I'm even refusing to edit my badly written intro.
620 comments is very unwieldy, especially when threaded. A new post per chapter would be less likely to cause brains like mine (that is, unlike Eliezer and Harry's, who seem to have brains built like the TARDIS) to go into terminal explosive overload.
The hate that the Dark Lord Potter forum has on MoR is getting more than a bit amusing.
As Louie commented upon hearing this: "I just love the fountains of money that have been bursting through [SIAI]'s doors ever since the beginning of this fic". Not.
That thread is an interesting read. Fun to see people taking this so seriously.
Personally I just like that it is educational material presented in a fun to read fashion that pokes fun at a rather silly story / fictional universe that has been forced upon us all by the engines of cultural osmosis. I have no problem with HP used as a cheap mnemonic device to memorize and illustrate a set of concepts that everyone should know but most people don't. I also don't have a problem with using it as a cheap advertising gimmick to get people to pay attention to matters that they should be paying attention to but don't. The annoyance of DLP folks at this is understandable, but somewhat hilarious from a perspective that thinks of there as being more important nerdy things to obsess over in life.
Yes, it seems to work great for that. I find myself saying things like, "As Lucius Malfoy would say, that sounds like the sort of plot that would work in a story but not in reality." or "That's like the time Harry Potter..."
Chapter 30-31: Was there a more sophisticated basic idea than appearing to be incompetent, then playing possum? I'd have expected one of the other two armies to expend a second (double tap) sleep spell on the downed, given that Neville came up with the same tactic later on.
Also, nice touch writing Neville as Bean without using a sledgehammer on the parallel.
ETA: It took me a bit to understand Draco's particular revelation: that Quirrell made sure to place all the other smartest students (and the other candidate generals mentioned in Ch. 29) on Sunshine.
Well, Hermione wasn't just appearing to be incompetent in the sense of "too stupid to calculate the correct solution;" she was appearing to be irrational in the sense of "too self-righteous to want to calculate the correct solution."
Also, note that Hermione actually did stay true to her goals: her possum tactic allowed her to avoid "unfairly" choosing who to attack first. By waiting until most other players had been sleepified, she was able to attack only the strongest or luckiest survivors, rather than the soldiers controlled by someone that she personally disliked. She was able to both win the game and stay true to her values because she (somehow) was much better at working in groups than Draco or Harry. One wonders how a girl who had no social skills in Chapter 3 suddenly became so socially adept -- has she been reading books on how to get along with people?
It's more that both Harry and Draco were mentally handicapped here. Draco has the glamorous dream of being the dark overlord who controls everything from the top, his orders unquestioned and his name spoken in hushed tones. Harry has the habit of trying to think up an ingenious plan by himself, and it just didn't occur to him to get other people in his army to do strategy planning. Tactics, sure, but not strategy.
Hermione, in contrast, is perfectly used to learning from others, and doesn't have particularly grandiose ambitions. And maybe Quirrell casually hinted that some of the people in her army were good at planning things. It seems the sort of thing he'd do, to make his plan less brittle.
As I argue in the reviews for chapter 31, Hermione herself was surely not playing possum, and likely neither were her 6 soldiers. That was not their idea. (Whether Nevile is smart enough to tell Harry, or whether one of the other armies will think of it in time for battle 2, is a question for the future.)
There were 24 people per army, and 11 of Sunshine came at Harry and 12 at Draco. And Harry & Draco had their realization of what happened when they remembered that Sunshine's soldiers went down immediately at the first shot. They were playing possum (all but Hermione, who didn't want to risk it).
The 6 soldiers left is after the battle of Sunshine's return, after they've already taken Potter hostage.
I increased the number of soldiers Hermione had left to help make this clearer.
Harry has been learning an Evil Overlord List (warning: tv tropes), but apparently he had to figure out #13 the hard way.
Coincidentally enough, today's Overcoming Bias post is about the same thing.
I wonder what Arithmancy is in this universe (or in the original Potterverse, for that matter).
I believe it was a method of predicting the future using math (such as adding values of letters of people's names).
Wait -- then why doesn't Hermione ever explicitly predict the future in canon?
That's what it's supposed to be in reality, but as a subject at Hogwart's, that's far from clear.
ETA: Maybe my use of the phrase "this universe" was ambiguous? I meant the fic universe, not the universe I'm currently existing in.
In an interview, JKR confirmed that arithmancy at Hogwarts is as it is in real life. Only I would imagine that it actually works - otherwise there would be no basis to Hermione's claim that it's more robust and trustworthy than divination.
Awesome. Thanks!
Eric Raymond (this guy) recommends Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
By the way, everyone, an anon on Wikipedia is disputing mention of MoR in the Eliezer Yudkowsky article, so if you see any further reviews/discussions/mentions/links of MoR by prominent people* besides ESR & Brin, please be sure to mention them here (and maybe message me about it). You may not like Wikipedia, but people go to it for information - EY's article gets a solid 1000 hits per month.
* where I define prominent as 'has a Wikipedia article'
Chapter 28: I wonder what happens if Harry realizes he's living in fiction, and everything he's dealing with is made of concepts rather than atoms.
Which leads me to think about the people who say that if they found they were living in a simulation, they'd try to get out. Unless the simulation is very similar to the substrate, would it be possible to get out while remaining yourself in any sense?
Back to the story: This might be an argument for checklists: Harry and Hermione should review precautions before they try anything new, should they be doing it without adult supervision. It's possible that the adults should be doing it, too.
However, the story is a good reminder that it can be hard to remember the relevant thing, even if you're very smart.
I don't think Hermione is over-reacting-- remember that they're doing stuff which is not just more potentially dangerous than children that age are permitted to do in our culture, it's more dangerous than what most adults do.
It will be weak move on Eliezer's part. As it will effectively make him the god of Harry's universe, which mean that Harry's universe cannot exist without him, that it is not self-sufficient and self-contained.
Sure. Escape into another simulation.
More seriously, obviously it's not guaranteed that an organism in a simulation can just create a copy in the outside world. How would a Game of Life organism, made out of glider guns and flashers and whatnot, made an atom-based form of itself?
What it could do is create something isomorphic. Whether this is possible is pretty much the same question as whether humans can make uploads. (Which is the inverse, actually - going from 'reality' to 'simulation'.)
Alternatively, you keep living in your simulation, but you get enough of a handle on the substrate that you can make changes in your simulation, protect it, or duplicate it.
Absolutely. It'll just take a superintelligence and some nano-tech.
And this seems to be exactly what Dumbledore himself does. That is a lesson I hope we see Harry take on board for future experiments.
An interesting thought... I think Harry should actually be pleased with that discovery. Given everything he knows about fictional realities and his observations thus far about the HP universe he should be more confident in his ability to achieve godhood. DND is a system that has gone through versions, with a strong motivation for making it ungamable, but there are still loopholes.
Since around Chapter 20 this is actually my guess for the entire basis of magic that Eliezer is working from. That is... there's a jumble of ideas and tropes that are invented and sequentially stolen by one author after another. Someone tells stories of Vlad Tepis, Bram Stoker comes along... and N iterations later you've got Twilight with vampires having extra chromosomes and clairvoyance.
To understand a magical universe at the deepest level is to see the hands of previous authors influencing your physics and history (and possibly your future if you are in a prequel) plus a "current author" who has a measure of finer grained control over things like plotting and characterization - limited by the audience's willingness to play along.
If this theory of magic is right, rationality in a magical universe should lead you to to become genre-aware, and then the next obvious(?) thing is to go meta genre-aware and start trying to "genre hack" your universe and see if you can "tunnel" into the derivative works (or maybe just get the author to fall in love with you or something).
My current working theory is that Dumbledore as figured out a rough outline of these "magical physics" and has been actively manipulating his reality for decades, with the goal of setting up pre-conditions that could create "authorial change" and/or to make a certain story easy to tell given the facts. The more pointed goal is to cause his universe would branch at a "point of interest" in a direction that, according to fictional tropes, is more likely to be to his own liking.
Based on his revelation about pranking Harry's mother, I've got a (totally unnecessarily detailed) hypothesis about what he may have done to create initial conditions for Harry Potter something like 20 or 30 years before the present story (including setting up an abusive adoptive environment) that got Rowling to pick up the canon universe and give him a victory there.
In the meantime, if the theory is true, the deeper question is whether Voldemort has the same insight, and if he (in keeping with the "bad guys are better leaders" trope) he actually told some of his henchmen about his plan for the world. I think Snape might be genre aware? And the Malfoy's are even better candidates because they could be trying to hack the universe such that Draco is the main character in a fairly standard "magical prince from fallen but ancient family, rising to up to a historically and morally appropriate place in the world". Setting Harry up as Draco's evil arch-nemesis would be a good move in this vein... Harry falls into the Lex Luthor trope and eventually loses because "that's how those stories work".
The only trick is that they are actually in a fanfic about rationality!! I'm not sure if anyone realizes that yet. Maybe Dumbledore does now? Eliezer was more obvious about the story with this bit:
Which confirmed my hypothesis some. But my plotting hypothesis will not be supported if Dumbledore doesn't start seriously updating on the "science is starting to apply to magic" facts. I'm kind of curious why he didn't notice that Transfiguration was retconned in the first place. In the face of so much else magical chaos that Eliezer left in place that adjustment is sort of glaring. Noticing possible retcons is one of the nearly necessary skills you'd want to cultivate if you were going to genre hack.
I really hope my hypothesis bears out. I'm aware of no previous work of fiction that jootzed all the way to being genre-aware of its genre-awareness and I think it would be it would be hilarious to read one :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Number_of_the_Beast_%28novel%29
Heinlein's concept of "fictons" does exactly this.
Yes, well, you may have to write yourself the work you always wanted to read.
Cryptic, with a dash of sass :-)
Is that a denial plus an exhortation to write it myself? Or is it a smug admission that you're writing what you wanted to read which is something in the ballpark of my guess?
I'm also curious if you have plans to bootstrap out of our present situation? I've run some minor "metaphysical experiments" in the past to see if the world is as strictly "object level" as it seems to be, and I've recently tried a couple micro tests inspired by your HP story to see if "this world's story has started yet" with me as a character who can break the fourth wall and get feedback, and so far they've all come back with boring results.
You'd probably enjoy "Sophie's World" and "Godel, Escher, Bach" if you haven't already read them. (One of the dialogues in GEB features pushing-potion and popping-tonic; pushing-potion moves you down a level into a work of fiction or art, and popping-tonic takes you back up a level.)
I like your explanation, because it seems that the logical endpoint of your hypothesis would be my prediction that rationalist!Harry becomes Harry in the universe of the The Finale of the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover .
If you have not read The Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover, you probably should, because it is genre-aware of its genre awareness, maybe a few more levels of meta-ness, or that kind of infinitely recursive meta-ness of this kind of selfawareness taken to the insane logical conclusions.
The spoilers for Permutation City are total -- Meta Mega Crossover contains an explanation of the ending of Permutation City. The Fire Upon the Deep spoilers aren't nearly as complete.
A link to a link to download Permutation City: http://www.imminst.org/forum/index.php?act=ST&f=13&t=15223&s=.
I should really have mentioned this back in the appropriate chapter, but..
Remember how Harry complains that adding (consistent) time-travel makes the universe uncomputable? Leaving aside how I'm not exactly convinced of that myself, I thought I should point out that such consistent time-travel has recently been experimentally demonstrated.
Have a look at http://arxiv4.library.cornell.edu/abs/1005.2219 . It was published way too late for Harry to read it, unfortunately. :P
If I'm reading this right, this isn't an experimental demonstration of time travel, rather, it's a theory of time travel, the predictions of which can be determined experimentally, and an example of such an experiment, to determine what would happen in a grandfather paradox case if the theory is correct.
I interpreted it as stating that they had actually performed the experiment, and gotten a positive result. Am I misinterpreting something?
As I understand it, their theory is that time travel is like postselection. Hence, to determine what would happen in the case of the grandfather paradox, they set up an equivalent postselection experiment. So if their theory is correct, the results of an actual grandfather paradox experiment would match the results of this simulated-via-postselection one.
Wow. I liked 28! Well, I liked all but 1 of the previous 27 too but this one was brilliant. Just the right balance of overconfident recklessness combined with not being a stubborn fool when realizing his mistake. By right balance I mean for realism given the character. Harry being such an emotionally unstable prick was a little irritating until he started showing clear signs of being aware of his emotional foibles and the rather important ability to take care of important relationships despite his weakness.
The cold feeling should have given him an idea! He has a spell for lowering temperature. Unless it is, for example, helium a gas with sufficiently low temperature tends to prefer to go by the name 'solid' (Depending on cooling speed probably isolating one specific component of air). That gives him a two step process for transfiguring gas into paperclips.
Mind you, Harry most likely doesn't have the magical ability right now to lower temperature that effectively. Perhaps that's where Hermione's idea to actually practice magic comes into play!
Instant godhood by inventing nano-tech? That doesn't seem to leave much scope for names for all the levels of power that are far ahead of mere non-replicating nano. Perhaps demi-god? Even that seems to be overstating things. It seems to be on a par with the potential of the most advanced magic applied intelligently but without Harry's munchkin mentality.
A thought regarding Alzheimer's cures: If you are playing around with creating an Alzheimer''s cure with transfiguration and find yourself thinking more clearly all of a sudden be very afraid. You have probably absorbed some of the transfigured substance. Most chemical cures for Alzheimer's will also improve abstract and creative thought in healthy humans.
Chapter 28: IMO, worst chapter yet. Harry is overpowered, and Hermione's reaction is overdone.
I'd dispute your claim about Hermione - I get that way about breaking rules sometimes, particularly when I am tired.
I don't think Harry is too powerful, but Hermione's reaction is definitely overdone. Eliezer's taken her weakness from the books and actually magnified it, when it's my understanding that the characters in this story are supposed to be better, more competent versions of their canon selves. Hermione has a lot of potential, so I hope he gives her some character development soon.
Seriously? Did you miss the part about "I think that the second degree of caution will suffice."?
When Harry did the experiment under the supervision of an experienced, adult wizard, he had all sorts of safety precautions in place, that he did not have when he tried it on his own.
Hermione was right, Harry could have gotten them killed by trying novel tricks without any sort of precautions. And having seen the standard precautions, Harry understood this, which is why:
My problem wasn't that Hermione advocated more caution, but that she seemed to be doing so only because they were going "against the rules" (without really understanding why the rule existed). But I reread the scene with her confrontation of Harry just now and I think I didn't give her enough credit/ was confusing her with the canon version. Go Hermione ;)
Interesting-- I think this chapter has the least unsatisfactory presentation of Hermione so far.
It's at least plausible that she'd be less self-assured than the canon version-- she's in a much weirder situation.
That was my experience too. She was much more likable as well!
I also liked some emphasis on Harry's cooperation with Hermione instead of more Harry-Draco stuff. Relying purely on trying to out-game a Malfoy for the purpose of developing godlike powers is a rather poor strategy.
Really? Because he can transfigure parts of objects? I took that as the rest of the wizarding world being incompetent.
This ability is at least as dangerous as the killing curse, if not more so. People are objects. Harry can now transfigure, say, a chunk of someone else's brain into steel, or glass, or water. Turning someone else into a ferret is scary, yes, but they'll turn back little the worse for wear.
This makes Harry very, very dangerous, especially because he hasn't realized it yet.
I always thought the killing curse was overrated. Many of the spells that first years use in pranks on each other will get you a kill if you are carrying a knife in your pocket.
In 1 vs 1 combat stupefy beats avada kedavra. By about 3 syllables.
Don't forget that Avada Kedavra has the advantage that it can't be blocked/mitigated/etc, whereas spells like stupefy presumably can (or that advantage of AK wouldn't be worth noting).
More specifically, most spells can be blocked by the "protego" charm. AK cannot be blocked in this matter although AK can be dodged or can have a large physical object block it.
It was already described in detail, when Transfiguration was introduced, that transfiguring a living thing kills it...
Presumably that at least allows him to break through any locks. Mastering this wandlessly will make it impossible to effectively restrain him while leaving conscious. The choice to make it possible is still on the author, because the Magic could make it impossible regardless, as it holds lots of conceptual knowledge already and can impose map distinctions of its own, however the wizard conceptualizes the situation.
If you can prevent apparition by powerful wizards you can quite likely prevent transfiguration via a similar mechanism.
Unless the restraints are protected against transfiguration.
If the ability to transform just portions of objects is completely novel, those protections might or might not extend to it.
Shouldn't Slughorn be trying to get Harry into his social circle very soon after Harry's substantial victory over Snape?
Sure, but how many days have passed? Not very many. And Slughorn is retired. Harry's exploits in books 1-5 are even more impressive than this Harry's maneuvering, and yet look how late on Slughorn is first introduced.
Definitely, especially since Harry should be looking him up and courting him early on!
"I'm the boy who lived! Let's have a tea party. We'll invite Draco (not in disrepute yet) and Hermione."
I wonder if Harry will start making that sort of move soon. It seems to be the kind of lesson that HP:MoR may like to impart.
It's been a while since I've read the book. I don't know whether Slughorn would be amenable to such a direct approach, or would prefer to make the first move. If the latter, Harry would need to be more subtle.
Much of Slughorn's reticence was the result of the return of Voldemort and the resurrected Death Eater public face. But you are right nontheless. Perhaps it would be better to work his way in via other members of the slug club for example.
Chapter 27
A lot of folks seem to make a big deal out of Harry not understanding Snape's "racist" comment. Which is very strange to me, as I had no idea it had that sort of implication (though it's obvious in retrospect), and (while I'm no expert) I'm much more familiar with the HP canon than Harry is. "Mudblood" always sounded more to me like making fun of someone for being poor.
"Mudblood" is supposed to be the equivalent of "nigger".
It doesn't seem at all clear to me that this is realistic. The victims of the insult are, just about by definition, the ones who weren't raised in wizarding culture, and no earlier than age eleven do they hear this particular insult. Even though the components of the word "mudblood" are certainly impolite, I don't think it could cut as deep as a slur that floats around one's childhood environment and that one's parents are familiar with reacting to and so on.
No, it's not a direct equivalent, because the societies are somewhat different, but the racial analogue is clear, and comparing "mudblood" to "nigger" (or maybe "fag") is probably the closest analogy we have.
Also, the term can be used as an insult even to non-Muggleborns, who presumably have grown up with it. In fact, that seems to be how it's usually used to greatest effect. And the Muggleborns are transplanted from everyone and everything they know when they come to Hogwarts, so in some sense they have a new childhood environment with brand-new associations to be learned.
It seems like a class rather than race thing to me. Maybe this is partly because class divisions are more salient to me than race divisions with my British upbringing but given Harry Potter is a British creation I think class is likely to be the the closest analogy. It's the kind of treatment that a scholarship kid from a working class background would get in a public school. The fact that Hogwarts is modeled after public schools lends weight to this theory.
I don't buy the class analogue.
Aside from the racial (magical) view being perfectly consistent with everything in canon (magical/non-magical seems to override even xenophobia, witness the foreign schools' reception in Goblet of Fire), we also have a perfect example of one group of people who suffers from both class and racial discrimination: the Weasleys.
The Weasleys are presented as being mocked (particularly by the Malfoys) both for being poor - lower class, note also that their red hair suggests Irish roots - and for linking themselves with Muggles and eventually intermarrying with Mudbloods. If the 2 were one and the same, we would not see any difference.
There are (at least) two aspects to an insult-- likelihood of emotional pain, and amount of implied threat.
The word doesn't have the same meaning now that it had 50 or 75 years ago. Which do you have in mind?
Yes, it's apparent that in-universe folks and fans react that way sometimes, but I didn't get that at all from the first few movies or first book.
I'll suggest that the Wiemar republic may be a better analogy than any period in American history.
The anti-Mudblood campaign is revving up in Lily's time, and it's reasonable to see a serious threat there.
However, it's conceivable that Harry simply doesn't know much about wizarding world history. He's certainly been busy enough with other things.
That's how J.K. Rowling has described it in interviews and such.
Mudblood can only be used to refer to muggle-born witches and wizards, making it a strictly racial and not socioeconomic term; many muggleborns, including Hermione, are actually quite well off. And it is definitely a big deal. Did you miss the gigantic brawl that ensued after Malfoy first called Hermione a Mudblood? I believe Ron was vomiting slugs for a day afterwards.
What happened to the Harry from Chapter 6?
A time turner is a superior to a healer's kit in very nearly every way and by a huge margin. Yet all Harry does when he loses free access to his time turner he sulks a little and that's all. He doesn't plan at all! I don't even recall one line of introspection on the subject! It takes very little ingenuity to to react:
"Harry, give me your time t..."
shit. shit. shit. Activate time turner. Escape. Then, he can spend five minutes and think up a dozen ways to retain time travel capability. Let me see...
Really... the best Harry can come up with is to say "that's not fair"? WTF?
First, Harry discovered a gag beverage that he thought could be a key to power, although he quickly realized the Comed-Tea wasn't as powerful as it seemed. A few days later he fell in love with a device that is sometimes given to students who want to take extra classes, although he has since discovered some limits to its powers. If he goes rogue over his Time-Turner's crippleware, then who knows how much other cool and useful magical stuff he will miss out on, and how much trouble he'll be in.
Plus, McGonagall had him cornered when she confronted him about returning the Time-Turner - whatever he tried to do, she'd see it. Also, McGonagall had earned some degree of trust & respect from Harry, she's correct about Harry repeatedly misusing the Time-Turner, and she'd already warned him that they'd take it away. So it's not unreasonable to go along with the punishment, and try to earn her trust back so that his Time-Turner can be restored later on.
...don't take this the wrong way, but even Harry knows better than that.
If you genuinely think this is a smart thing to do in real life, it makes me seriously worry about your safety and the safety of people around you.
There is NO DOWN SIDE!
It may be best to hand over the time turner but you do so after having a chance to think it through. Time turner. Plan. Decide that it is better to hand over the device for now. Write your analysis down. Give it to yourself at the appropriate time. (And give it to yourself again to make the loop stable.)
I have offended you by questioning the rationality of your fictional persona. My own safety is not in any danger. Every other exceptional use that Harry put the device to is risky and I would not do any of them. But giving himself a chance to think through his options in a way that would not be detected by anyone else is the trivially correct strategic option.
My own safety is secure in the short term, and medium term (human life span) but for the long term the threats to my life are human mortality and existential risk. And that's kind of what I've been counting on you to take care of (with any contribution that I could hope to make purely financial). That being the case, this conversation is quite literally scaring me. I'm not quite there yet, but the key quote from Snape is at least springing to my mind: "And I no longer trust your cunning."
Examples of stupid things to do with a Time Turner:
Now, all the above mistakes are credible for Harry to make. At least, they fit the needs of the story. But using the turner to give yourself time to think at a critical moment... not on the list. And make no mistake, giving up one of the most powerful super-powers (even in the weakened 6h form) is an extremely critical moment.
But now another lesson from Harry Potter: MOR occurs to me: Always be sure you know exactly what you are both talking about. I may well be missing Eliezer's real message.
What are we really talking about here? Being as EY may be several levels ahead of me the intended 'this' could be "implying that a respected authority is obviously wrong without a clear benefit to yourself". That would make for extremely good advice, and a valid concern. Fortunately I for most part avoid that in real life. It does cost me and I do limit my options such that my environment doesn't put me in that situation too often. One way to ensure my safety is to not put myself in situations that prompt risk taking. It isn't optimal, except in the bounded sense, but it does work.
Time travel in this universe has a consistent single line; once McGonagall sees Harry disappear, he can't undo it.
Sounds like UDT might be applicable here. Here's a time-traveling version of Counterfactual Mugging:
Harry appears to McGonagall and tells her, "If you give me 1 Galleon now, I'll go back in time and hand you 100 Galleons an hour ago." Suppose McGonagall does not recall being handed 100 Galleons an hour ago. What should she do?
Here's my analysis. Suppose McGonagall decides not to give Harry 1 Galleon, then there are two possible consistent timelines for this universe. One where McGonagall gets 100 Galleons, and one where she doesn't. How does the universe "choose" which one becomes reality? I don't know but let's say that the two possibilities have equal chance of being true, or get equal amount of "reality juice".
Given the above it seems clear that McGonagall would prefer to have pre-committed to "give 1 Galleon even if not handed 100 Galleons an hour ago" since that would make the "not get 100 Galleons" timeline inconsistent. I think that's also UDT's output (although I haven't written down the math to make sure).
ETA: I didn't follow the previous discussion closely, so this might not apply at all to it. Hopefully, in that case the above is of interest in its own right. :)
Seems straightforward to me. McGonagall knows that she does not recall being handed 100 Galleons an hour ago, so the three states of the world with high probability are: 1) She is not in a universe where she will hand Harry 1 Galleon, 2) She is in a universe where she hands Harry 1 Galleon and Harry breaks the agreement, or 3) She is in a universe where she hands Harry 1 Galleon and Harry keeps the agreement in a way that leaves her unable to recall this happening. By not handing Harry a Galleon, she will ensure that she is in universe 1. By handing Harry a Galleon, she will find herself in universe 2 or 3. She should therefore give Harry a Galleon if she judges it less than 99 times more likely that Harry will break the agreement than fulfil it in a way consistent with her experience.
As Harry has access to a time machine, he doesn't need to decide to give her 100 Galleons before he gets the 1 Galleon, so the situation is quite different to one based on predicting her actions, as Omega does in the Counterfactual Mugging. Rather it has most of the properties of the forward-time version of the gambit: "If you give me 1 Galleon now, I'll hand you 100 Galleons in one hour", except that McGonagall has a big piece of evidence that the promise will be broken, namely that she doesn't remember it being kept.
Only because you termed that event "real", but the characters can't know that it is.
You seem to misunderstand how the time-turner works (or at least, how it's been suggested it works). You don't get to overwrite anything; the universe doesn't "end up in" a stable state that results from using it; there isn't any meta-time (or at least, we've seen nothing to suggest such). If he were going to use the time turner to give himself advice, he would have already gotten the advice. And having used the time-turner right there and visibly, he couldn't use it "later not use it there" and have his going back in time undetectable.
A possible way he could use the time turner to help himself in this case would be to ask to go to the bathroom or somesuch, use the time turner, use the extra time to think, and then return to the room shortly after he left having thought about things.
(Edit: But this would be pretty obvious, and McGonagall probably wouldn't let him leave the room with the time turner in any case.)
My interpretation of the "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME" incident was that you can try setting things up so that temporal consistency implies the result you want, but actually ruling out every other possibility whatever, including vast classes of outcomes you never even imagined, is next to impossible, at least for an 11-year-old boy, however smart. It hadn't even occurred to him that there was a problem in his reasoning when he tried the experiment that gave him "the scariest result ever in the history of science". Temporal consistency in the presence of time loops is another blind idiot god, far more swift and powerful than evolution.
Anyway, he still has the Time-Turner. All that stands between him and it is a magical lock. How difficult can that be for him to get around? No, actually what stands between him and it is the author's necessity not to unbalance the plot by giving him a get-out-of-jail-free card.
Harry's error in the experiment was responding to "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME" with the same. If he didn't have the property of responding to that message with the same, that message wouldn't appear.
Actually, this whole consistency-based time travel seems to be an extremely expressive thought experiment infrastructure for thinking about Newcomb-like problems and decision theories able to deal with them. Maybe I should do a top-level post on that (I don't have a sufficiently clear picture of the setting, so I might be wrong about its potential)... Though I consider that happening unlikely, so other people who understand UDT are welcome to try.
I was thinking exactly the same thing. After getting my head around the implications it seems to be an extremely intuitive way of handling such problems. I didn't write a post myself since I have yet to look close enough at UDT to be able to explain the difference between UDT and TDT.
I think you summed that up perfectly. I would have liked to see a little more of that explanation in the Fan Fic. It would make the story feel more natural and also be a perfect excuse to include the 'blind idiot god' kind of message.
Without Hermione backing him up? I think he'd struggle. Harry just isn't that smart! He really should be spending more time sweet talking her. Well intentioned genius with ambition that doesn't involve gaining power... just the kind of ally Harry needs.
Uh huh. It's even worse than if Harry had actually gone and made himself rich on day 1!
He has been rich since day 1, it just that all his money is tied up in a variety of non-liquid "investments."
McGonagall went a fair way towards earning Harry's respect, with her behavior about the med kit among other things; he is inclined to tolerate (with however much whining) her authority, particularly on school grounds.
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.
That's a good answer.
Just because I never read the original material - in Chapter 27:
...is the name he doesn't say Remus Lupin?
I think it's supposed to be his mother, Lily.
That was a hard swat at "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas".
As for why Harry has such an exaggerated sense of responsibility, it might be that growing up on science fiction thing. A lot of science fiction is set up so that the hero can have a huge effect in a satisfying way. Perhaps Harry should have balanced it with reading history. On the other hand, he's living in fiction, so maybe he's right for his situation.
Lois McMaster Bujold has described sf as fantasy of political agency [1], and I think she's on to something.
I assume that shutting down Azkaban has a political solution rather than a magical or violent solution. This will be interesting to watch.
Why would Snape ask Harry for his take on Snape's past? One of the underlying premises of the story is that the smarter characters (possibly with the exception of Hermione) always have a deeper plan. Did Snape actually expect to get good advice? To be told that all his choices were correct? To have a reason to be angry at Harry? None of these make huge amounts of sense (to me, at least-- I have trouble keeping track of all the scheming), even though the scene was very emotionally effective.
This is basically my review posted to fanfiction.net-- let me know if there's a problem with reposting such here.
[1] The link goes to quite an interesting speech
Quite the opposite. I was tempted to respond to the review but had been left without an appropriate forum.
I had to go back and figure out where you thought the Omelas reference was. Harry's observation just seemed obvious to me.
Personally, I don't even see anything to explain. Billions of people are suffering, and at least billions are going to die, and most people are observably doing nothing about it. Harry seems to have good reason to think he's the only one that can do anything, if only because he's the only one (or one of just a few) who noticed and/or cares.
Harry is right to take responsibility for the universe's troubles, as we all should.
I think Harry was just using Azkaban as an example, and there will turn out to be more of a general solution to the world's problems unless Harry finds himself dealing directly with Azkaban.
Thanks for that link. To rephrase: unlike romance or detective stories, many SF/fantasy stories are carefully rigged to give the "underdog" protagonists huge power over the world. It's scary how much this pattern fits.
I think he was testing the differences between Harry and his dad, and was surprised enough at the contrast to keep asking questions.
I also wonder why Snape got offended. Harry's answers were extremely supportive of Snape's situation back then: which makes me think Snape wasn't really offended, just pretending to be. Maybe the whole point was just for Snape to tell Harry the unpleasant truth about his parents in an emotionally powerful way, as a way of getting back at Harry because of his parents.
What is most interesting to me is how Snape handles being offended. Snape has been portrayed in this FanFic as being extremely shrewd and self controlled. Harry even made observations along those lines himself, upgrading his respect for Snape considerably.
Snape (quite rightly) downgraded his trust in Harry's cunning. I wonder if Harry downgrades his respect similarly. If Severus had the cunning of even the 11 year old Malfoy he would not 'never talk to Harry again". Any benefit that he could hope to extract from Harry is still there and Severus is enough of a political agent to work past some offence when given a few months to cool down.
Snape still loves Lily and was upset about hearing her insulted, was my interpretation.
Awww... but that puts Harry in an impossible position. There's nothing he could have said that would have worked. If he had said Lily made a good choice, that would have directly insulted Snape. And Snape must have known that Harry would be in an impossible position, so he must have wanted to trap Harry into thinking he had done something wrong.
It's not quite impossible. He could have roundly blamed everything on James, casting Lily as a pure, victimized, agency-less casualty of his manipulations. That seems to be what Snape does.
It is possible to respond in a less direct way. Competent social skills would suggest putting very little actual content into his answer. I am less cunning than Harry and not known to be particularly conservative in my expression of potentially provocative positions but even so I do not think I would have all that much trouble responding with tact. Snape would still make a hostile reply but he does that to answers to potions problems anyway. He probably wouldn't be tempted to kill me.
I don't know about you, but having someone tell me I should give up something I've been overfocused on for a long time can be quite painful.
Assuming Snape was genuinely hurt by Harry's interpretation of Lily, I would expect to see a fraying between Snape and the Dumbledore faction as Snape questions why he is so faithful to Lily.
Yes, I suspect that was the point of that scene - to make things harder for Harry by taking away a (secret) ally. That would align with Eliezer's stated philosophy of fanfiction.
Furthermore, the major event in Aftermath 2 is that Snape reads students' minds again-something he agreed not to do under his agreement with Dumbledore. Which is further evidence that he has "gone rogue."
Ch. 18
In Aftermath 2 it seems reasonable that safety of Alissa requires reading her mind.
Edit: Thus, the change is that he directly addressed cause of her distraction.
I just read Chapter 27. My thoughts:
"Mr. Bester" - great reference.
Harry is firmly on the 'get absolute power' path. Probably he still thinks he's being cute or knowing when he talks about becoming God. His resolution not to become the next Dark Lord doesn't look too healthy now, though.
Harry seems incapable of seeing the flaws in a moral system he apparently acquired by reading science fiction and fantasy, barring almost being Sectumsemprad by a very angry wizard. Why does he think that having read books with monomyth plots is sufficient reason to try to act like the heroes of such books - what is he, eleven years old? At the same time, he understands and can nervelessly put to use Quirrell's very subtle lesson in levels of deception. Very odd, that.
Is one of the reasons Quirrell set up those Occlumency lessons that Harry would discover for himself "how reproducible human thoughts were when you reset people back to the same initial conditions and exposed them to the same stimuli" - and thereby come to treat humans as simple machines that one can use like puppets? As a strategy to bring someone over to the Dark Side, that's brilliant.
Then we get to Harry being placed in the same conditions as Lily Potter, and reacting differently - more humanely. Because he reads science fiction! That's outrageous. Surely this kind of narrative based morality, where you imagine what the good protagonist would do and then do that, is going to be a piece of cake for Quirrell to subvert.
Indeterminate at this point. (By which I mean, even if Eliezer didn't intend Quirrel to have those reasons, he could easily make Quirrel have had those reasons.)
The reasons given earlier are quite enough to justify the lessons: Quirrel doesn't want Harry to be easily scanned by either Snape or Dumbledore for obvious reasons, and once he threw his hat in the ring, a neutral third party was the only viable option - and such a neutral third party can only remain neutral by being Obliviated since anyone in the know about Voldemort is, eo ipso, a member of one faction or another.
I feel almost certain that Harry is living in a computer simulation. I know he ruled it out because he decided the existence of the Time Turner renders the universe non-computable, but how can he be sure that he's actually going backwards in time instead of the universe "simulating going back to the past and computing a different future?"
Time-travel doesn't make the universe uncomputable, is the thing.
Time-travel makes certain laws of physics uncomputable, but there are any number of equivalent, far more complex sets of laws that would look the same to humans but remain computable - Eliezer's mind is running one, for starters. When writing a simulation, you would use one of those.
David Brin is apparently now a fan of MoR.
Read up to Chapter 26, commenting on same.
I don't quite see how this takedown of Skeeter is so brilliant. Ok, she's been convinced of something that's not true, but what of it? She's written untrue things before without getting into trouble. And the nature of the story doesn't seem particularly damaging to Lucius's interests either. Harry Potter engaged to Ginny Weasley, well, so what? It seems to me that Harry and Quirrell are both being very impressed with the technical difficulty of what's been done, without particularly considering the more relevant aspect of how damaging it is. They both just assume that Lucius will retaliate against Skeeter, but why should he?
Also, and related, I was rather disappointed at Skeeter dying like that. We don't get to see the effects of the brilliant takedown, they are merely asserted! Boring! Admittedly it's clearly the result of Quirrell's plans overlapping with Harry's, but narratively it's rather inefficient. It's one thing to have the hero suffer from two enemies both plotting against him, and show how he gets into even worse trouble because of how they interact, but a villain should not be defeated this way.
That's what I was wondering about the most. Perhaps the main difference is that her usual dishonest stories are written to be difficult to falsify — so it's technically her word against her victims' — whereas in this case she believes the story to be true, and perhaps the Weasley twins will have left specific proof that the story is false, or perhaps even made it appear that she had actively forged the evidence; this could compel the Daily Prophet to fire her (even if they don't really want to). It probably wouldn't do much to her reputation (sounds like everyone already hates her), but if it interferes with her career, her ability to disseminate information to wide audiences, that could indeed reduce her usefulness to Lucius.
Come to think of it, how do real tabloids get away with reporting week after week that every celebrity is having an affair with every other celebrity or is in drug rehab or whatever? Do the celebrities in question just not consider it worth the time or money to go after them for libel?
Chapters 25 & 26
Quirrell is cold. It looks like he gave Rita Skeeter a tip that something would be happening in Mary's Room so that she'd go there as a beetle and he could (literally) crush her. Is Harry going to start to figure him out (like he did with Draco after his reaction to that other newspaper headline)?
Also, does anyone know if Q/V's habit of whistling/humming a tune (appearing in both chp. 25 & 26) is based on something in canon? It sounds like a tell, when his plotting against Skeeter/Potter is going according to plan, but I'm wondering if there's anything more to it.
I don't know about the canon, but the narrator calls it a 'small tune' or 'little tune', so I'd guess it's the Little Fugue in G Minor which Eliezer's mentioned several times here.
...I am not sure if Professor Quirrell whistles Bach. I shall have to think about it.
The idea appealed to me because it meant you were protesting that the villain was not an author mouthpiece at the same time as he was whistling your favourite piece of music while contemplating murder. As an act of contrariness, it would've been of a kind with writing "colder than zero Kelvin" when you were still arguing with the reviewers who didn't get the "divided by zero" joke.
You don't think it's a canon?
Perhaps it's Pachelbel's canon in D. ;-)
In fanfiction? Not likely.
Chapter 25: Couldn't magical genes evolve if magic (call it matter being susceptible to intent) exists? Vision is a complex thing, but from one angle vision evolves because light exists.
If magic is artificial and magic genes can't evolve, this implies that all the magical species were invented.
The question is, how could a complex adaptation have evolved without rising to fixation in the species?
There was some discussion of genetics in the FF.net comments for Chapter 23; I'd like to continue that here.
Going purely by canon evidence, disregarding Harry and Draco's results, I would have inferred that magic was dominant, not recessive.
I assume that the magical population of Britain is much smaller than its nonmagical population, that the vast majority of magical children in Britain attend Hogwarts, and that the vast majority of Hogwarts students are British.
There are roughly a million 11-year-old Muggles in Britain. The number of Muggle-born witches and wizards in any given year at Hogwarts is counted in the dozens, at most. This puts the probability of any given child of nonmagical parents being magical at somewhere around 10^-8, which is plausible for a simple random mutation.
Wizard-born Muggles, on the other hand, are common enough that the word "Squib" was created to describe them. The level of understanding of genetics that Harry displays -- the level that Draco could have if he was paying attention, even -- is sufficient to realize that the frequency of Wizard-born Muggles falsifies the model they settled on.
What simple model describes both the canon evidence and the MOR!canon evidence (Harry and Draco's results)? The best I've come up with so far is "Eliezer falsified data to suit his preconceptions", which is distinctly unsatisfying. (This model will be verified if Chapter 23 is edited to make the percentage of Squib-born Wizards 75% rather than 25%, and it will be falsified if Harry and Draco eventually realize that their theory doesn't work.)
According to Eliezer, the "muggle-born" are in fact the children of people who have one copy of the magical gene (and thus are descendants of Squibs who were cast into muggle society.). That only one in ten thousand people in Britain (who are not wizards themselves) have a copy of the gene for magic is not that improbable.
Are you sure that's actually from Eliezer directly? I thought that was just the theory that Eliezer had Harry and Draco settle on.
ETA: Also, it's more like one in one hundred thousand.
Does MOR explicitly mention there being wizard-born squibs? Because it seems to me that it's impossible for there to be muggle/squib-born wizards, there to be wizard-born squibs, and for magic being a single gene trait all at the same time.
That is, unless that gene behaves in a way that ordinary genes do not. For example, there could be a spell which de-magicks gametes - either as a curse, or as an unnoticed side effect. That would explain both the existence of wizard-born squibs and the shrinking population of magic users, without affecting the fraction of squib-born wizards.
I don't think MOR explicitly mentions wizard-born squibs, but the original HP canon defines "squib" as a nonmagical child of magical parents. The existence of the word implies a certain minimum frequency of the phenomenon. I assume anything true in canon is true in MOR unless explicitly contradicted.
I, too, originally thought that it couldn't be a single gene trait, for exactly the reason you mention, until I realized just how rare muggle-born wizards were.
Other models have been proposed in the fanfiction.net comment thread. For example, there could be two gene traits, one controlling witch/wizard/squib vs. muggle with muggle dominant, and one controlling squib/muggle vs. witch/wizard with squib/muggle recessive. The parents of Muggle-borns would be carriers of the recessive not-a-muggle gene, and the parents of Squibs would be carriers of the recessive squib gene. (Note, though, that this still doesn't explain Harry and Draco's results.)
Because magic can have arbitrary effects, I prefer to assume nonmagical explanations wherever possible. Admitting magic essentially removes the possibility of being surprised by any observations.
I don't suppose anyone has been archiving the author's notes? I missed those from Chapter 24.
You didn't miss much:
While we're on the subject, I don't have any of the notes before chapter 18, and am also missing chapter 19. If anyone has those, I'd like to complete my set.
It was only one sentence, something like "If you keep telling me that I should relabel this as a Harry/Draco fic, then I'm going to ship Draco and McGonagall."
Chapter 23: I wonder when Harry will realize that the reason he's an idiot isn't that he doesn't have a perfect emergency kit (though that's important), it's that he doesn't have a gut level understanding that the wizarding world is very dangerous, especially the Malfoys.
The fic now has a hate blog dedicated to it.
Congrats Eliezer! Now you've really made it.
The writing style seems to go for similar overkill as in XKCDSucks-blog, that is, every tiny detail is taken out of context and twisted until it is made look bad. Plain honest deconstruction and critique would be fun, as there are many things I think are quite awful with MoR, mostly I dislike the unnatural feeling every single human relationship has and how many speeches about science seem to be a bit unrelated and be there just for lecturing the reader without justification from story, and how Harry seems to be Mary Sue so very much it's actually annoying. MoRSucks however seems to go drowning real bad points into a sea of motivated cognition. It seems bad. Weird and untruthful, strawman-like, as far as I can tell, portrayal of MoR fans doesn't help.
That's a really good analysis of the problems with MORSucks. Unfortunately, people who only slightly dislike a work, or acknowledge that has some flaws but enjoy it anyway, seldom form blogs devoted to deconstructing it. In general, you have to choose between overwhelming praise and overwhelming hate.
So maybe it's just me but my reaction to the fanfic was something like "Eliezer is writing rationalist Harry Potter fanfiction. That's pretty awesome. And educational!" I check it every so often to see if there is a new chapter and I've shared it with a couple people. That's pretty far from:
It seemed like most people had similar reactions to mine, but maybe Less Wrongers have been making a bigger deal out of it elsewhere? We didn't even have this thread until a couple of chapters ago.
Similarly:
My sense was that we had almost nothing to do with the popularity. It didn't get linked to from LW until like chapter 12 or so, if I remember correctly. I know a couple people here made image macros but Eliezer's following isn't nearly large enough to generate this kind of popularity by itself, right?
As for the rest of it: it reads like my mother critiquing MTV, the author doesn't understand where the author is coming from or who he is writing for and as a result totally misses his target. For example, the fact that Harry has three last names clearly isn't Eliezer making sloppy feminist statement. If anything, he's laughing at himself and the subculture he's a part of. I laughed out loud when I read it because obviously rationalist-Harry would have a compounded name. It's exactly the right amount of PC-vanity for the family of an Oxford professor with a kid too smart for his own good.
I was referred to initially to it by two people who are not LW readers.
The individual writing the blog may be suffering from a bit belief overkill (one of my favorite cognitive biases. Someone should do a top-level post about it at some point. Many different cognitive biases can be thought of in a belief overkill framework).
Is belief overkill different from confirmation bias (which is what comes up when I google)?
They're related. Some argue that confirmation bias is an example of belief overkill. Belief overkill is basically the tendency for people to accept all arguments that support their opinion even if it is only in a peripheral fashion. Thus, for example, people who think that using fetal stem cells for medical purposes are moral are much more likely to think that stem cells will be really medically helpful than people who think that such use is bad. Essentially, people compile arguments for why X is Good/Bad rather than dividing questions properly. There are some posts that touch on this issue (such as those discussing why politics is a mind-killer) but I'm not aware of any post discussing this issue in detail (although given how extensive the archives are I estimate a high probability that I've simply missed the relevant ones).
Sounds a lot like the halo effect.
Policy Debates Should Not Appear One-Sided is related to belief overkill, I'd say.
Motivated cognition would also be a special case of belief overkill-- it's being too ready to develop and accept arguments what you want to believe. Belief overkill is the same process applied to arguments from both yourself and other people.
Well, so far I'm not impressed by the criticism of chapter 1. I've been meaning at some point to write something about where I think Eliezer's gone wrong, but now I think it might be more interesting to wait and see if this individual produces anything interesting. Given that the individual is a fan of the xkcdsucks blog, I'm a bit skeptical that I'm going to see much of interest. Judging from the chapter 1 review it looks like the writer is having some of the same problems as those people (One major one is assuming that setups or characters are necessarily ideals just because they are sympathetic or protagonists)
The Chris Christie joke was excellent, however.
That site does seem like a bad case of motivated cognition, but I'm going to read a little more of it to see whether the author comes up with something interesting.
One thing that's mildly interesting is a criticism of MoR as being humanities-deficient. It would be interesting to see someone (possibly not Harry Potter-- he's too young) coming into the wizarding world with a strong humanities background.
I read a fanfic a while ago involving a journey to afterlife (set after 5 and written before book 6 had come out) involving a journey to the underworld to try to get Sirius back. Hermione had apparently read enough mythology and other works to become genre savvy about what to expect. The end involved dealing with a creature that had been promised a pound of flesh from Harry and she then used the standard trick from The Merchant of Venice to deal with it. When the others are impressed she explicitly stated where it was from and gave a brief rant about how wizards should read more Muggle writing.
I would think using magic you actually could extract a pound of just flesh...
Yes, in the story it went slightly differently than it occurs in Merchant of Venice. Hermione waited until after the flesh had been torn from Harry to tell the underworld spirit that it had violated the deal and then negotiated back the restoration of everything as an appropriate penalty for it violating the deal.