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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)
Is someone who has never read any of the Harry Potter books and is not a fan of the movies likely to appreciate this work? I'm somewhat curious to read it but suspect I'd have trouble following the references.
Yes, you would have trouble although if you are passingly familiar with the first two movies that would be enough.
Note that Eliezer also includes references to a lot of other fictional work, although generally in passing. So if one hasn't read a lot of fantasy one might simply either not get the joke or not even noticing them.
TV Tropes claims that I have "a few" Shout Outs. You'd think TV Tropes would do better than this.
We just don't want to list them all. ;)
I never read any of the original Harry Potter books but found the fanfic quite enjoyable overall. At least one big plot point utterly confused me until I looked up "Quirrell" and "horcrux". Also Eliezer chose to make Harry a badass a la Ender Wiggin, which I thought was in very poor taste, but I guess most people can just ignore this.
Don't worry, he's made up for it by making his villain much more badass than in the books.
I'm not complaining about story balance. I just don't enjoy this particular brand of wish fulfillment - fantasizing about a nerd that could stare down five big bullies and still stay a nerd.
But hey, it's not primarily nerd wish fulfillment, it's a rationalist's glowing aura of awesome. It's winning in general, not winning despite being a nerd.
Harry's aura of awesome is not only due to his being a rationalist. He also survived Voldemort's attack, has a prophecy about him, and possesses "the killing spirit" - neither of which were caused by his rationality. Why not make him exceptionally strong and irresistibly handsome as well? Or something.
The "killing spirit" thing is being depicted as ambiguous at best rather than necessarily a good thing. Recall also that when Harry goes back and watches himself defend Nevile, he concludes that there's something "very wrong with Harry Potter"
Oh, that's a necessary part of the dream. Every badass nerd must feel a little romantic remorse after gruesomely defeating the enemies. Once again, see Ender's Game, the perfect archetype of such fantasies.
Fair enough, except in the rememberall incident, it was made clear that alternate solutions were available. Harry screwed up, tried to solve the problem the wrong way, went for the spectacular spectacle rather than being willing to lose as a delaying tactic, as a way to stop the situation from going kablewey.
Perhaps the lesson here is that an attitude of winning at all costs is something that can lead someone to seek out real rationality, (as in 'something to protect') but is a bias and a handicap when you apply it to subproblems without keeping your sub-solutions within the proper scope.
In Magical Britain, the halo effect actually works.
That sounds like it would work much better as a series of "In Magical Britain" jokes.
In Normal Britain, fundamental attribution is an error. In Magical Britain, all error can be attributed to someone's fundament!!
A lot of cognitive bias has tie-ins with "magical thinking". If you're living in a world where sympathetic magic works, why not the halo effect or gambler's fallacy?
I wonder if Eliezer has or should read this review of Ender's Game (a book I never read myself, but the reviewer seems to provide a useful warning to authors).
Yeah, I was wondering when this link would come up. Not sure about Eliezer, but I read this review sometime ago and it matched my impressions of the book perfectly.
Me too, though I had many of those same misgivings while reading the book. The difference between me and everybody else in my peer group -- who loved Ender's Game -- is that I first read it as an adult, and they all read it first as teenagers or before.
To gather some actual data, I'm curious how many people there are here who first read it as a young teenager and didn't love it, or first read it as an adult and did love it.
I read it as a teenager and didn't love it. Many things annoyed me, but most of all the insanity of training Ender and company exclusively in skills other than the ones they would actually use (people floating in space with hand-held lasers) rather than the skills they needed. Also the absence of anything that looked AT ALL like a bell curve distribution of ability. The battle school kids are all supposed to be massively well selected and trained, yet only Ender, Bean, Valentine and Peter really matter. The battle school kids in general are all an absurd backdrop just to train "the one" who has been identified ahead of time. Finally, overly complex plans working annoyed me a bit and extreme military/governmental competence annoyed me more.
True Names and other Dangers is a weird case of an anarcho-libertarian writing a story showing extreme military/governmental competence.
"Also the absence of anything that looked AT ALL like a bell curve distribution of ability. The battle school kids are all supposed to be massively well selected and trained, yet only Ender, Bean, Valentine and Peter really matter. "
If you select out the right end of the bell curve from the general population, then you won't have a bell curve anymore, but rather a fat lower end.
Also, the training was supposed to be a sort of abstract sport to select for leadership skill, coolness under pressure, etc - it wasn't supposed to be actually training them to fight in space. They did training of the actual spaceshippy stuff later. You could certainly argue they should have started that earlier though.
And to give them experience thinking about tactics three-dimensionally.
"The playing fields of Eton."
But since the final application was video games, why not train under that form of pressure? There is plausibly something to be said for physical activity and proximity to teammates and opponents for building teamwork and leadership.
You should have something that looks like the right end of a bell curve, e.g. very little variation, especially with feedback loops from ability shaping environment shaping ability cut short by the tight external control on environment.
Probably a stored rant here, but the thing that put me off most from Ender's Game (which I'd read as an adult) was that the adults con a child into pushing the button which wipes out an alien race, and with the intent of absolving themselves from responsibility. IIRC, Ender actually does accept (partial?) responsibility in a later book.
Even though I've become more cynical since I read that book, I still think the adult behavior was well outside the human range. The normal thing is to blame the aliens for humans thinking it made sense to wipe them out.
Read it as an adult (sometime in the second half of my 20s) and loved it. (Still do.)
Ouch! I -- I actually really enjoyed Ender's Game. But I have to admit there's a lot of truth in that review.
Now I feel vaguely guilty...
There's a pretty obvious defense; even if it is just pornography that appeals to a different emotion, it's still damn good pornography!
I loved Ender's Game, and think that that review is far more "pornographic" than the book. I pretty much disagree with every sentence of the review. That reviewer took one theme of a complex story, a theme he apparently didn't like, and vulgarized it and ridiculed it to the point of absurdity.
I'm not sure what the relevance is here.
I do enjoy this particular brand of wish fulfillment :-)
I suspect that's the primary determinant of whether you like this story or not: whether you identify with the protagonist, or find him annoying. I wonder if non-geeks are more likely to fall into the latter camp?
Me, I'm in the former camp. Write a story about a geek kicking enough ass with enough style, and you'll have me for a satisfied reader; and this one definitely qualifies.
May I recommend The Brothers' War by Jeff Grubb? It's one of those things that is better than it has any right to be. (You don't have to play Magic to understand the story, but recognizing the references to some of the cards is part of the fun.)
Oh yeah, I read that, back when I was getting into Magic. Definitely good, plus having more back story to the game is also fun.
Another recommendation that I think a lot of people here would enjoy: the Wiz series by Rick Cook.
I haven't read the original books (I think I did see the first film once, but don't remember much from it), and so far have had no trouble following the story and appreciating its considerable wit and charm. I furthermore hope Eliezer takes note of this, because I fear he may have unnecessarily introduced spoilers into some of the author's notes.
The original Harry Potter was really just a clever re-imagining of standard fantasy tropes, so as long as you've had some sort of passing familiarity with fantasy you'll have no trouble following along. There are all kinds of geeky references thrown in that you might even be better off than someone who has read the books but never passed a science course.
You'll probably manage, but there's a lot of stuff that won't be as interesting/amusing/"ooooh hey there" if you don't know the original.
I probably need to write up a "For those who have never seen the books" summary page of years 1-7, containing all the information that will be needed mixed with enough other information that it looks like a summary instead of "here is exactly and only what you will need to know".
That sounds helpful, even to those who've read the books but many of them long ago. Just don't let it stop you from writing chapters.
ETA: Outsource?
Outsource would be desirable.
Wikipedia probably has some decent plot summaries of the novels.
The idea of promoting Less Wrong (and rationality in general) via Harry Potter fanfiction is so outside the box that I really shouldn't be surprised that it exists! What a great way to tap into a particular group of people that may not have necessarily found their way here otherwise. I wonder if we'll get any users to come out of the woodwork and say they've found LW through the fanfic?
I hope we see more projects like this (from anybody here) in the future!
It's already happened - I don't have a link, but I've seen at least one comment to that effect.
I can also report that I have at least two friends who started reading the sequences after encountering HPMR.
wave Hello! Brand new, just discovered the site through the fanfic, and still in the looking-around stage... but yes, it does work.
It definitely helps that it is totally frelling awesome fanfic. Admittedly, I'm biased; I'm writing a Potter live-action role-playing game one of whose goals is to figure out how the heck that tacked-together universe could possibly make sense, and what would explain the observed evidence... ;)
Welcome! Please feel free to join in the discussion. There's been a concerted effort here to make this place much less intimidating. Of course, once you spend some time reading Less Wrong, you're going to find your other hangouts woefully inadequate. ;-)
I found this series much harder to enjoy than Eliezer's other works -- for example the Super Happy People story, the Brennan stories, or the Sword of Good story.
I think the issue was that Harry was constantly, perpetually, invariably reacting to everything with shock and outrage. It got... tiresome.
At first, before I knew who the author was, I put this down to simple bad writing. Comments in Chapter 6 suggest that maybe Harry has some severe psychological issues, and that he's deliberately being written as obnoxious and hyperactive in order to meet plot criteria later.
But it's still sort of annoying to read.
I did enjoy the exchange with Draco in Chapter 5, mind.
(I encountered the series several weeks ago, without an attribution for the author. I read through Chapter 6 and stopped. Now that I know it was by Eliezer, I may go back and read a few more chapters.)
I think some of Harry's annoyingness is due to the fact that he's modeled after young Eliezer. He's a mix of wish-fulfillment for young Eliezer and an opportunity for older Eliezer to criticize his younger self. This is really apparent with the chapters involving the Sorting Hat.
A lot of kids are obnoxious and hyperactive. Shock and outrage are IC too. (Not that I think Harry is obnoxious or hyperactive or too shocked and outraged.)
Culture shock can be tiresome for the people not suffering it. I've been reading blogs and forum postings by expats in South Korea lately, and that constant perpetual shock & outrage? Par for the course for some people.
I suspect that a main inspiration for writing the story was Eliezer's constant shock and outrage over the fact that Rowling's characters show absolutely no interest in the inner workings of their weird Universe. I vividly remember how outrageous this was for me when I read the originals. Actually, I have only read the first two books, so when I read Eliezer's time-turner scene, I first believed that he invented the artifact and the situation as an over-the-top satire of this phenomenon. Giving young children time-machines so they could attend more classes, yeah right. When I figured out that the whole scene is almost literally copied from the original books, I screamed in shock and outrage just like rationalist Harry did.
Literally laughing out loud, here.
But just to be clear, this story represents my outrage at all scientifically uncurious characters everywhere, and even more than that, my unfilled need to read a story where for just once the alleged "genius" characters are actual geniuses.
I was not picking on J. K. Rowling in particular in any way.
It is a work of Harry Potter fanfiction for the following simple reason:
I knew I needed a rapid feedback loop to motivate my brain to write. That was why I was bogging down on the rationality book.
And to the best of my knowledge of the entire world of online fiction, if you were posting an incomplete story chapter-by-chapter, it would get the most reviews if...
...it were a work of Harry Potter fanfiction posted on fanfiction.net.
QED.
I think I know a place on the internet where you can post books on rationality chapter-by-chapter, and get much instant feedback.
Have you ever read any of L.E. Modesitt's fiction?
Ch. 21
Where is the tentacle rape exactly? The only thing I found in the ballpark was the burbling fountain of ooze, which suggests a Shoggoth, hence tentacles and tentacle rape, but that seems really weak.
I've talked to multiple people about this. Consensus is that it is just a joke. (And feel very happy that I'm not using this as an opportunity to link to the most disturbing Harry Potter fanfic every written).
...Giant SquidxHogwarts?
Yes, that one.
Search on "tentacle".
Ah. That clears that up.
For the lazy:
...
Unpack "unspeakable".
You're welcome.
I've played "Unspeakable Words"... Sadly the rules of the game more or less require the words to be speakable in the first place. :P (That is, that they be standard english words pretty much. Even though the theme of the game is Lovecraftian.)
Ah. I wasn't looking for metaphorical tentacle rape, silly me. Thank you.
Several speculations/thoughts/questions:
First, did baby!Harry actually in fact survive the killing curse? ie, perhaps the curse successfully detached baby-Harry's-soul (presuming that something like "souls" exist in MoR... given the presence of Horcruxes, I'll tentatively assume yes), but the body was immediately made into a Horcrux... so Voldemort-soul-shard effectively inhabited that body. Essentially Rationalist!Harry is actually more like what Voldemort would have been like if raised in a loving and sci-fi and science loving family.
The Hat did say that if there was bits of the Dark Lord's mind there in addition to Harry, it would have noticed the extra "passenger"... But in this case there really is only one mind/soul/whatever. The catch is that mini-mort is all that's there.
This brings up the possibility of if this was an accident or deliberate. Perhaps Voldemort actually deliberately planned/faked his apparent "death"?
(Possible related, well, possibility: How do "we"/they actually know Voldemort even used the Killing Curse that night, as opposed to doing some other thing? ie, how is it known that he is the Boy Who Survived the Killing Curse in the first place?)
Further speculation: When Quirrellmort was lecturing in class about how he used to want to be a Dark Lord, but now finds that he really just wants to teach how to fight and such... perhaps that's a literal statement of fact? ie, does he even desire to "rise again as the Dark Lord Voldemort", or is this what he actually wants now?
Further further thoughts: Does Dumbledore know that Quirrell is really Voldemort under-the-hood? Not just knowing "there's something odd here", but actually really knowing that as fact?
That's a good point... though if I recall, he is just known as The-Boy-Who-Lived. In canon, it's not revealed until book 4 that he is the only one to have ever survived the killing curse, in particular, and it's Znq-Rlr Zbbql who says this (though, in truth, it was Onegl Pebhpu We.). Onegl Pebhpu is a highly loyal Death Eater who had been in contact with Lord Voldemort, so maybe the dark lord just told him? Though it's probably more likely that everyone just assumed Voldemort had used his favorite curse.
What bugs me is how they know that Harry is the first and only person to have ever survived that curse. I mean surely, sometime in the entire history of wizards and witches, somebody has sacrificed themself for a loved one who was then Abracadabra'd (i.e. did just what Lily did). /shrug
edit: Redacted a name.
Oh yeah, forgot that it's not revealed until then. But given that he has the title of "The Boy Who Lived", that suggests that it's known or widely believed in the wizarding world. ie, It's not "They Boy Who Lived Through a Mild Flu", right?
Wizards are far less numerous than Muggles - in world like that it's easy to be the first at something.
This is awesome. Probably not where the story's actually headed, but it would create a cool Vader-Skywalker kind of relationship and explain what Voldemort is trying to accomplish with Harry. If he wants his Harry-shard to finish the job of becoming Dark Lord, then it makes sense to come to Hogwarts to be Harry's mentor (and to be disgusted by Harry's ambition to be a scientist).
In canon, before he became Lord Voldemort, Tom Riddle demanded that Dumbledore give him the Defense Against the Dark Arts position, and the "jinx" on the position came about when Dumbledore refused. So teaching at Hogwarts is, indeed, something Voldemort has always wanted to do.
Slightly edited the original post to avoid giving away what my readers have finally convinced me is, in fact, an undesirable spoiler. I also hope you didn't mind my removing the mention of FAI, because I feel fairly strongly about not mixing that into the fic. "A fanatic is someone who can't change their mind and won't change the subject"; if we can't shut up about FAI while talking about Harry Potter, we may have a problem.
That's fine. I'm actually not that into AI, so I wasn't thinking about that problem, but you're probably right. I also made a slight edit to your slight edit so that it still sounds like me.
Speaking as someone who everyone rightfully believes about everything, MoR is awesome (at least up to chapter 21) and everyone should read it. It also might serve as the best introduction to the power of rationality, but we've yet to see that it really makes awesomeness happen in the real world, rather than just for those of us who are cheering on Harry's thoughts.
Here's my take on what actually happened in the dojo incident described in chp 19.
Voldemort went there in disguise to learn the valuable martial art. He reacted badly to losing so they put him through the ordeal he described. He went along with it because he wanted to learn the martial art. The ordeal did teach him valuable lessons about losing, and he vowed to learn to control his temper and master tactics of ingratiation and supplication to better manipulate others. But he felt angry and humiliated by it (as he expected Harry to be), and also vowed to return and fulfill his revenge fantasies. So after he mastered the martial art and left the dojo, he came back openly as the Dark Lord and killed them to live out his revenge fantasies and to prevent others from learning the skills (keep science secret). He spared one student who had befriended him (and who probably stood up for him during the ordeal, like Draco to Harry), and he had that student spread the version of the tale that he wanted told (to maximize fear while hiding some of his true powers, and to deflect attention away from the value of that martial art).
Agreed, except there's no particular reason for a Dark Lord to actually leave a survivor when he can just have his minions disseminate it. (Or do so himself as Quirrell; we have no knowledge of how long this story has been around.)
ETA: Actually I should say my first thought was that Voldemort destroyed the dojo not out of anger, but simply to make sure that no rival wizard ever got the awesome martial arts training that he did. This seems strongly implied when he says: "You are wondering where this marvelous dojo is, and whether you can study there. You cannot."
As pointed out in the recent Dr. Who series, you occasionally let one go so you can live with yourself.
For me the most natural explanation of the dojo incident is that Quirrell/Voldemort pulled a Verbal Kint. The setup is just too similar to be accidental. If you haven't seen The Usual Suspects (you should), that means ur vzcebivfrq gur fgbel ba gur fcbg gb znxr rirelbar srne uvz naq gb uhzvyvngr Uneel. I'll be quite disappointed if Eliezer's eventual explanation isn't as good as this one.
That's certainly possible, but we know Q/V does have elite martial arts skills, which he had to have learned somewhere, and studying at the world's best dojo, followed by destroying it to make sure no one else ever got training as good, seems like an entirely plausible thing for a Dark Lord to do.
My understanding was that the story was true as stated: Voldemort showed up, destroyed the place, then calmed down and realized Quirrell now had the only remaining copy of the information he was looking for, so he set up some contingency to eventually put himself in Quirrell's body with the martial-arts skills intact.
Ch. 21
Has Draco been intentionally trying to drive a wedge between Harry and Hermione because he sees that Hermione is the top peer rival for Harry's friendship, or does he just really hate Hermione and expect Harry to hate her too?
Given that his attitude was more or less the same in canon, I'm pretty sure he just hates the idea of a successful mudblood.
I really enjoyed the series and hope it continues. I have a few comments.
Eliezer had already stated that one intention of his was to make writing fun again, while writing his rationality book. Hence, I guess once that boost is achieved, this litlle jewel will probably lie around unattended for a while.
If the other, more important, purpose was to raise the sanity waterline, then regular updates might be expected as this would be a serious attempt at reaching people through other means.
Doing a quick drake equation analysis of this strategy
P(Positive outcome of singularity) = P(someone reading fanfiction) * P(ve reading harry potter fanfiction|person reads fanfiction) * P(ve liking it|all of above) * P(ve grokking the concepts behind it|all of the above) * P(increasing knowledge of rationality| all of the above)* P(ve becoming awesome|all of above) * P(ve remaining good|all of above) * P(person actually contributing in new ways to a positive singularity)
The first probabilities are high. Harry Potter is the best selling series. Also, it leaves many readers hungering for more. So, more than usual number of readers would seek to read fanfiction stories. So, we're good there.
Twilight has a lot of fanfiction. Googling it puts it slightly lower than harry potter. But the other factors following possibly dominate.
Harry Potter is a bildungsroman, a growing up tale. In HP&MOR, the rationality of Harry is at a high level, while his emotional maturity is, hopefully, slowly increased. On the other hand, Hermione and Drako will be having their rationality updated. Harry is also probably much easier for Eliezer to write compared to a twlight fic. Harry potter is a school story and it is easier to bring in lectures in that format.
I guess somebody could take on the twilight torch also. Once, that is done, <evil voice> The Bayesian conspiracy shall have total domination ! Boys and Girls ! </evil voice>
Among those who read the fiction, the probability of people liking it is quite high. I've recommended it to a couple of friends and they have liked it. But the inherent concept of teaching a lesson is quite visible.
Among those liking it, how many grok the concepts? That is the biggie and here again, the link to the sequences helps. I scanned the reviews and every 30 or so reviews, I read one that mentions the sequences. 3% is not a bad number to have here. I just hope it would be more.
After they grok the concepts and read the sequences, and later the rationality book that comes out, then ofcourse, they are in the real league an it is upto the lesswrong community to make sure they stay interested and contribute to better outcomes in the future.
One concern is strongly rational people going bad, which might be dealt with in the story itself. I hope that Draco is turned to the light and many people who began their rationality journey with this story, remember that when they become CEO, Prime Minister or King.
I think any big contributions are likely to come from HPMoR readers who are attracted to LW, become a part of this community, and then go on to do good stuff. HPMoR is just the gateway drug.
Then there's the more diffuse sanity waterline effect of lots of HPMoR readers becoming somewhat more rational, and more receptive to big important ideas wherever they encounter them. Sci-fi has had that kind of effect on the development of a lot of people here, and this story can extend that kind of influence to a new audience via Harry Potter. Plus, in this case Eliezer got to fill the story with the ideas and themes that he considers most important.
Chapter 21
Draco's choice of subject. Expected, but unfortunate. It would be fun to know the physics of the magical universe. The biology is not completely exempt from the physics, of course. Also, there can be many fun incidents introduced when they are trying to sample people. Imagine trying to get a skin sample from albus dumbledore, the most powerful wizard around or trying to figure out why Aberforth wasn't that great.
The Dark Mark - They would have thought about it. My guess is the dark mark came around only after a certain power threshold was already crossed and the death eaters were able to ahem... signal freely.
Speculations on Santa Claus
Sirius - Most probable. Sounds like him, sounds like Pettigrew is dead from information in the train station chapter. Sirius is out of azkaban or is remote controlling someone (kreacher?) really well.
Nicholas Flamel - Well, his name is Nicholas :-) and he is knowledgeable enough to create a philosopher's stone and is brave enough to cross over to the threshold of death without worrying much. (In the HP universe, death is not final. It is kind of a change of state, like uploading. ) So, he could have been curious enough to examine the cloak, while having a reputation strong enough that james would give it to him. He also knows Dumbledore's weakness as a holy grail seeker, sorry, seeker of the deathly hallows.
Albus Dumbledore - Also very probable. And giving away partial information is also a good tactic to give the impression that it is someone else.
Lupin - For all the reasons similar to sirius, but not rich enough to give away money.
What? Doesn't that flatly contradict what some character in Goblet of Fire said once?
Well, yes, death is irreversible in the HP universe, but there's definitely an afterlife of some kind or another.
What evidence exists for an afterlife in the HP universe? I haven't actually read the novels beyond 1-3, just fanfiction, and movies 4-6.
EDIT: Since people have asked why:
I read books 1-3 while I was still living in Chicago, and the whole family read them together. Then I moved out in 2000, and didn't get around to trying to read book 4 until it was time to write the fic... and found that I couldn't seem to read it. Maybe it was a change in the literary quality (I've heard others say that) or it was the fact that I'd already watched the movie and that got rid of the plot tension. Or (my personal suspicion) the fact that I'd read a lot of fanfiction aimed at a more grownup audience meant that the children's-book version of the Potterverse just didn't feel right to me any more.
I feel guilty about not reading the later books, obviously, but my brain doesn't want to do it and one of the major points of this whole endeavor is that it's fun, not something I have to make myself do. So I've been getting along on movies 4-6, other fanfiction, and above all the Harry Potter Wikia.
Mentioning this because TV Tropes is now giving me a "Did Not Do The Research" trope, which is supposed to be for people who didn't care enough to find out something they could've gotten in 10 minutes, and that stings a bit. I tried, I really did, and now I read the Wikia and try my best to get things right, but I'm just not enjoying the original Potter novels. Not every children's book, even ones that have taught millions of children to enjoy reading, ends up being enjoyable to every adult.
"Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" is in the Potterverse because I was attracted to the universe of Harry Potter fanfiction.
Book 7 spoilers ROT13'd, though I tried to be nonspecific.
Gurer vf n cerpyvznk rkpunatr va obbx 7 gung vf onfvpnyyl pbzzhavpngvba orgjrra bar bs gur yvivat punenpgref naq bar bs gur punenpgref va gur UC havirefr nsgreyvsr.
It wasn't clear from the text whether that particular conversation actually occurred, or was just in Harry's head.
In the last book one of the Deathly Hallows is used to communicate with the dead. You should read 7 (among other things it helps one appreciate how utterly incoherent JK Rowling's notions of morality and heroism are).
Can you please elaborate on this? Do you know the interpretation where Harry dies in the duel and everything after that is in his head as he's dying?
I'm aware that people have tried to interpret it that way. I'm also very sure that that's not at all what Rowling intended. It simply doesn't fit with her general approach in the books.
The heroism objection is that there's such a large deal made about Harry's willingness to sacrifice himself. But he's just found out that there's a happy afterlife where he'll get to be with his parents and everyone else who died in the books. Given that, the sacrifice is much less impressive.
It's been a while since I've read the books, so forgive me if I'm missing something. But I thought Harry wasn't sure if there was an afterlife. He even expresses doubt whether the "afterlife" conversation is something he's just imagining in his head.
Also, I think that argument proves too much: it would apply to every soldier, terrorist, freedom fighter, activist, and martyr who believes in an afterlife. Even if you intellectually believe there's an afterlife (or even if you intellectually believe your sacrifice is right) it's still difficult to overcome the instinct to stay alive.
I'm rereading that section now. ROT13ed:
Uneel guvaxf gung gur nsgreyvsr pbairefngvba jvgu Qhzoyrqber zvtug or va uvf urnq. Ohg ur qbrfa'g guvax gung gur pbairefngvba cevbe gb gung jvgu gur Erfheerpgvba Fgbar jurer ur gnyxf gb Wnzrf, Yvyl, Fvevhf, Yhcva vf va uvf urnq. Vg frrzf gb or gnxra sbe tenagrq nf erny. Gura, Uneel znxrf uvf fnpevsvpr naq gura orpnhfr bs gung fnpevsvpr vf noyr gb pbzr onpx.
True, but Harry's certainty in an afterlife is much higher than that of any of those people, and his certainty about the nature of the afterlife is also much higher. Moreover, he's been specifically told that death isn't a big deal. Fvevhf says that it is a smooth transition.
If someone is that certain about the afterlife and the nature of the afterlife, then it does substantially reduce the heroism of such sacrifices.
"Found out that there's a happy afterlife"? You're reading a lot more into that scene than I did. My interpretation of it was that he had a near death experience, and like lots of other people having such experiences, he hallucinated something about an afterlife, with no reason to believe it was anything more than a hallucination; fortunately he was sane enough not to take it too seriously. He certainly did not subsequently behave like he had suddenly started placing much less value on life.
Are we talking about the same scenes? Harry gets a hold of the Resurrection Stone and talks to his dead friends and relatives before the encounter with Volemort where he lets Voldemort kill him. That's not a near death experience, that's Harry walking along and talking to their forms. Then he has his confrontation with Voldemort. The only near death experience is after that, where Harry has his conversation with Dumbledore.
Oops! indeed we weren't talking about the same scenes, I thought you were talking about the conversation with Dumbledore. My memory of the resurrection stone scene is fuzzier, I thought it was understood to be just an illusion, but now I can't be certain whether Harry thought of it that way, or just me.
Curious - how come you haven't read the remaining books?
4 was the best book. You're missing out.
You're doing a good job of fanfic for someone who hasn't even read all the books! I'd recommend reading book 7 though just so you know what's up.
edit: you obviously have some idea of what happens in book 7 from whatever other fanfics/spoilers, but still, it's another thing to read the original source.
You said it correctly here, CronoDAS. That is the exact meaning I wanted to convey - the transition is irreversible, but there is some sort of existence. Though according to the story of the second brother in deathly hallows, it does seem to be some kind of a diminished existence, unlike in Star Wars where Obi Wan states, "more powerful than you could possibly imagine."
To be fair, in SW, the Force ghosts never do anything particularly powerful. (Even in the EU, the most powerful Force ghosts, like Exar Kun, usually must act through agents.) If Obi-Wan's statement is anything more than rhetoric (and it's never safe to just rule out 'it's rhetorical/symbolic'), it's a reference to Luke, who at least in the EU is basically the most powerful Force-user ever.
Further reading: Wookieepedia
It's too bad fanfiction.net doesn't provide a Google Reader friendly RSS feed for new story chapters. The author feed doesn't show up as updated when there are new chapters, and Google Reader's page scraping trick for generating a feed doesn't seem to be allowed on the domain.
You can get email notification of new chapters.
To get email notification, register at fanfiction.net with that email address. Then go to your account page, to the Alerts tab, to Story Alerts, and put in the story ID (5782108).
To add to the other suggestions, if you add the story to your favorites, you'll get an email when a new chapter is published.
Read up to Chapter 21, commenting on chapter 2. Prediction about the physics of HP:MR.
Harry is mistaken about McGonagall's transformation into a cat breaking conservation of energy; indeed, it seems to me that he is not really putting a lot of effort into finding an alternative explanation, but jumping straight to "Everything I thought I knew was wrong". (Perhaps Lord Kelvin's not the only one who gets a charge out of not knowing something; after all Harry has been wanting to do Something Big, and the more laws of physics are broken, the better!) A simple hypothesis which does not break conservation of energy: Rather than McGonagall's human body literally turning into a cat, it is replaced by a cat-body from elsewhere in the universe. McGonagall's human brain continues to operate in its usual fashion (while being physically elsewhere), and this is turned into cat-brain commands by an AI somewhere in the interface. No mass (hence no energy) appears or disappears, there's just an exchange of objects.
Still FTL, but that's a violation that's turned up explicitly many times already.
It doesn't have to be FTL. You could store the cat body in Magical Britain and run the communications link at lightspeed. It would look instant to a human - the speed of neuron processing would still be the bottleneck.
You're right - and the speed-of-light delay in a straight line even through the diameter of the earth is only 42.55 milliseconds. That might be small enough not to be noticed.
Though through the diameter of the earth is not an easy way to transmit messages.
Taking a great circle route increases lightspeed time to approximately 66.8 milliseconds. That might still be small enough to miss if you're teleoperating from Britain a body in New Zealand, but it's pushing the boundary. Wikipedia suggests 50 milliseconds.
Getting light to follow the curvature of the Earth without a fiber-optic cable or some other specialized medium seems difficult. Probably better to go straight through and just use a wavelength to which the Earth is transparent.
Of course the Muggle solution is a network of satellites...
Neutrinos! However by the time you're postulating teleportation and time travel and so forth, I don't think it's necessary to insist on (obvious) conservation of energy in the first place.
Although, given that there's already stuff like time turners, it's kinda a bit late in the game to be worried about FTL.
In fact, come to think of it, wasn't there an experiment recently with remote-controlled rats, using plain Muggle science and electrodes in their brains? Extrapolate that forward fifty years and add those direct-to-brain conputer interfaces, and we could do something rather similar, given lots of training to get the feedback right. "When I think like this the rat goes that way..." An Animagus might learn this almost as a child learns to control its body.
Switching the material still violates conservation of energy. You could make a perpetual motion machine by creating a heat engine and switching hot water with cold water located elsewhere on the planet, for instance.
Without external input such a machine would eventually make the entire planet lukewarm, and run out of steam. No violation there.
You're also assuming that the switching doesn't require energy.
Yeah, you're right, that that would just increase entropy faster. But what about using gravity to get the hot air or water to rise?
Hmm. If the switching requires no energy, it still seems like something is violated, but I'm not sure I know enough physics to determine what. What about conservation of momentum? Do the switched objects keep their current acceleration and speed?
The concept of switching in itself violates all kinds of fundamental assumptions in physics, so trying to think about it mostly results in nonsense. That's if the switch doesn't actually involve moving A to B and B to A by some path, though; if it does, you naturally pay the relevant costs to maintain conservation laws while switching.
I think the "it's bigger on the inside" phenomenon is a better foundation to build such a spell on.
Ah yes! You can store the whole human body in a cavity of the cat's body, and vice-versa; lightspeed is no issue - indeed you could run the whole thing at ordinary neural speed. This might even solve the problem of how to order a cat's body around; the Animagus in effect has a cat as an ordinary part of her body, and has learned to operate it the same way she learned to operate her human body.
One problem is the carrying-over of wounds from the animal to the human body, and vice-versa; this does not seem implied by the model, and requires additional explanation. Psycho-somatic damage? Since there a requirement for conscious control of which shape one is in, the opportunities for unconscious failure seem strong.
One more thought, this time money related stuff:
On the one hand, the magical and muggle economies are sufficiently separated that Gringots seems to not even notice the possibility of arbitrage...
But on the other hand, we're told that anyone who transfigures stuff to look like money, even muggle currency, is legally at war with the goblins. If the goblins are tracking muggle money enough to at least notice this sort of thing and care about it, that seems at odds with them being sufficiently ignorant of the muggle economy to not notice the arbitrage possibilities.
The goblins may only use that to check for Muggle currency that wizards try to turn in to the goblins. They may also have methods that just track objects transfigured to look like Muggle money. If goblins have similar cognitive flaws as humans, then they might be able to keep track of the economy for this one very specific purpose and not even realize that arbitrage was really a useful practice.
That seems plausible.
There might also be some laws restricting trade between the wizarding economy and the Muggle economy. In other words, if you take a bunch of Galleons and try to sell them to Muggles, you'll probably end up arrested or something. Part of the whole "Muggles can't be allowed to know about wizards, unless they're close relatives of wizards" thing.
You could avoid selling Galleons per se by melting them into bullion first. Maybe Galleons are unmeltable? Or the gold turns into leaves and gorse blossoms when handled extensively by Muggles? It seems like with magic at one's disposal one doesn't have to rely on mere law to prevent wizard/Muggle arbitrage.
No, that wouldn't work. In MoR, the routineness of coining Sickles implies that it's routine to coin ordinary gold into Galleons; if the coinage were irreversible, then you would see Gresham's law start to operate.
Ordinary gold would be more valuable then an equivalent weight of Galleons because you could at any time turn the gold into Galleons but with ordinary gold you have all the other decorative and magical uses of gold available. As Galleons are created and not destroyed, ever more inflation of Galleons and deflation of gold would happen.
(Have you ever bought funny money, like the Mickey Mouse money at Disney World? The Galleons would be like the Mickey Mouse money, and gold like regular dollars. Except worse.)
I am edified and grateful for it.
(Magical) code is law, but the laws of economics are more akin to laws of logic than legal laws - try to bend them, and you'll either accomplish nothing or it'll bite you somehow. You need subtler tactics than just unmeltable coins or disappearing specie.
Hrm... that's a possibility. Though when Harry asked Griphook, I think it was, about interaction between the two economies, he didn't say "no, that's illegal", but simply no. That's not proof, but I'd have thought it would come up if that was the issue. But other than that, maybe you're right.
You shouldn't neglect the possibility that it's a law written because it seemed like a good idea, without any real way of enforcing it in general.
There are certainly plenty of those around.
Professor McGonagall more or less explicitly said though that they have ways of finding out, that this matter isn't an abstract law but is very very enforced.
Yes, but wouldn't it be reasonable to think they only have ways of finding out when presented with the money in question?
It seems like the spells in the HP universe are complicated and abstract enough that they must have been designed (programmed?) by wizards long ago, who added them to the laws of the universe and left them there.
Now, if I were designing a spell like the Killing Curse, I would include a little easter egg/safety mechanism: after a thousand castings, it backfires. Choose a number large enough that only a major dark wizard like Voldemort will encounter it, so it doesn't hit some minor villain and spoil the surprise. (Alternatively, rather than counting kills, count evilness, with killing a baby counting for more evilness points than an adult. That would explain why it backfired on Harry Potter, rather than some other victim.)
This is the most sensible explanation I can come up with. Or it could be that it backfired because the third through fifteenth places of the decimal expansion of the local humidity were a prime number, or something similarly arbitrary. But I would be disappointed if it was something like that. (I would also be disappointed if his parents came up with a spell that reflected it, because everyone seems convinced that no such spell is possible.)
You'd think that, but in the series there are references to people inventing spells of their own. The series implies that the "science" behind spells does exist, but Rowling never explains any of it.
Not to mention, the ancient wizards made the levitation spell be called "Wingardium Leviosa"?
'Inventing' might mean 'discovering'.
I haven't thought about this idea completely, but a karma system can actually be maintained in a magical society. I mean actual karma, the way Hindus and Buddhists think about. What goes around, comes around. Violate it badly enough and the universe will make an exception just to get you out of the way. As another commentor put it, somebody would have tried to protect another while they were being avara-kedavra'ed, earlier than lily protecting Harry. But voldemort's karma credit really ran out. So, whoopsie, there goes the body. But of course, he had his horcruxes.
But if making people realize that we have to wake up in this hostile universe is one of the goals of this fic, the above wouldn't be true in HP&MOR.
Another speculation, maybe true prophecies only come when there are serious thresholds crossed.
It's really good. I'm on chapter 8, and so far it reads like a picaresque. I never thought anyone would turn Harry Potter into such a badass.
From Ch. 7:
Is this a reference to some poorly-written slash fanfic? I'm assuming Eliezer knows that boys of any age can get erections, so it must be making fun of something, but I'm missing a reference.
Similarly with:
(Ch. 5)
Is this just making fun of Harry/Draco slash in general, or is there a specific reference?
The newspaper headlines are, I assure you, making fun in general (at the very least).
Eliezer previously considered the idea of a cabal of physicists keeping nuclear weapons a secret in this post. The idea turns up again in this chapter of Three Worlds Collide. Any thoughts? Would you feel safer if only super-rich physicists had access to nuclear weapons?
Not particularly. Apart from uncertainty of whether that would actually reduce threats in general, in the particular case of nuclear weapons it's relatively easy to argue that their existence has reduced suffering, overall.
I'm not sure the temporary peace they bring is worth it considering how they up the ante. Sure, they probably prevented the Cold War getting hot. On the other hand, one nutcase or terrorist can erase all that utility pretty goddam fast. Hallelujah.
Right, it's easy to argue the other side too. :-)
That is just awesome. Made my day! While reading the story i hat to laugh out loudly on almost every third sentence, much to the annoyance of my neighbors. Thats a feat no other story has accomplished so far, not even discworld - which would be the close contender.
I was also happy to learn that i figured out the solution to Harry's sleeping problem right about when it introduced. But i didn't solve the confusing morning riddle.
Please observe your grammar.
I think that, in the first few chapters, Harry did not give enough credence to the hypothesis that he was simply insane and hallucinating. I think, given the observations he had at the time (his mom claimed her sister was a witch; he got a letter implying the same; a woman levitated his dad and turned into a cat), he should have at least seriously considered it. Certainly those pieces of information are some evidence for magic, but considering what that hypothesis entails — existing scientific knowledge about physics (even at the level of abstraction that we experience directly) is so completely wrong that it's actually possible to make the universe understand human words or intentions, or there's this incredibly advanced technology that looks like it's violating the laws of physics, and it's existed for thousands of years and apparently everyone has forgotten how it works — I think an honest rationalist would have to look into the "I'm cuckoo" hypothesis.
Addenda:
From the reader's perspective, it doesn't appear that that's what we are supposed to believe (though I'm still wondering...), so I'm tentatively guessing that the mechanism of magic is some kind of technology, and that the in-story universe has the same laws as this one. It does seem implausible that an ancient civilization could have invented technology advanced enough to be indistinguishable from this kind of magic, but that could be different in an alternate history, and it still seems less implausible than any set of physical laws that would actually make this kind of magic a normal, natural thing that a non-industrial civilization could invent/discover.
We are supposed to be wondering why magic works at all, right? It doesn't seem like Eliezer to expect us to be satisfied with an Inherently Mysterious phenomenon at the center of the story, even if it's a story based on someone else's fictional world that already had that feature... but I don't know, maybe it's a demonstration that, no matter how ridiculous the rules are, rationality will still allow you to win.
But I'm still hoping that magic will be explained at some point, and I'm still looking for clues about it.
I think magic will be explained as an addition onto physics: a new "force" is involved, but still behaves in an intelligible way. I can't imagine how the MoR series would explain the magic exhibited thus far as coming from current physical understanding.
Unless the magicians control quantum wavefunctions directly, or something like that. Or Harry is a brain in a vat.
I think something like "brain in a vat" is the best inference from observing magic. [EDITED to add: of course I mean after getting very good evidence against deception, insanity, etc.]
More precisely: if you find evidence that something deeply embedded in the universe is best understood at something like the level of human concepts -- it matters what words you say, whether you really hate someone else as you say them, etc. -- then you should assign more probability to the hypothesis that the-universe-as-it-now-is was made, or at least heavily influenced, by someone or something with a mind (or minds) somewhat like ours. That could be a god, a graduate student in another universe with a big computer, superintelligent aliens or AIs who've messed with the fabric of reality in our part of the world, or any number of other things.
In a manner of speaking this is obviously correct for the Potterverse (either Rowling's or Yudkowsky's): in that universe, magic works; and indeed that universe was designed by an intelligent being or beings, namely Rowling or Rowling+Yudkowsky. It probably doesn't work "internally" for the original Potterverse -- I've no idea whether Rowling has any particular position on whether within the stories the world should be thought of as created by intelligent beings -- but I'm guessing that it does for Eliezer's.
I'm not convinced that concluding one is in a simulation is really the best bet here. A simulation would have a terrible amount of trouble specifying these effects. If for example, I have a simulation for say just our local system, how the heck are the people running the simulation easily going to be able to specify emotional states or the like? The only possible explanation I can have for this is that the simulation was originally started with humans having certain (simulated) brain structure and that structure is the type of structure that wizards have. Other humans can't do it because their structure isn't of the type the simulation recognizes to trigger magic.
Or if Harry figures out that he's in a story.
What kind of evidence would convince you that you were in a story?
If I started hearing the narrator's voice
The events in a story fit into a narrative. If I were in a story, I might be able to make especially accurate predictions by privileging hypotheses that make narrative sense. Dumbledore did this on an intuitive level, and it is the reason for his success.
I'm not sure, considering the number of different kinds of story there are even in our world, and especially considering that entities which could create our world will probably have sorts of fiction we haven't thought of, and may have sorts of fiction we can't think of.
However, Eliezer may come up with something which would plausibly convince Harry.
I'm not sure what one is supposed to do upon concluding that one is quite that cuckoo. Upon getting that far gone, what can you do? Can you even assume that your actions and words will leave your brain and impact reality in roughly the way you intend? If you are that crazy, and you try to walk across the room, will you get there? Are you in a room? Do you have legs? It might be that being as insane as all that is so game over that, whatever one's epistemic position is, one has to operate as though the observations were correct.
True. Even if upon witnessing such absurdities he had immediately assumed he was seeing things and demanded to be checked into a mental hospital, he couldn't even be sure that there was really anyone around him to hear, or that he was really saying what he thought he was saying, etc.
But then, if he's that far removed from reality, whatever he's really doing must appear crazy enough to draw the attention of those around him. Maybe he's already in a mental institution... which he imagines to be a school of wizardry! From the inside, he already sort of feels (and acts) as though he's the only sane person in a madhouse... while in reality, he's just another patient.
It would be a good idea to consider the hypothesis that one is crazy in a conventional way, such as schizophrenia. One can try to test that hypothesis. But the "anything goes"-crazy hypothesis isn't really useful.
Oh, you're right - and what's more, it doesn't take much to make the "anything goes"-crazy hypothesis more ridiculous than magic. We know that human brains have limited processing power and storage capacity, so if you can produce sensations which the brain should be unable to fake, you can reduce the probability mass of the hypothesis significantly.
Oh, and you're forgetting the bit where Mrs. Figg just randomly knows magic exists. That would be pretty jarring.
I think David Hume said something more or less like this when discussing the likelihood of miracles; that if you witnessed a miracle, you ought to conclude you were insane.
I am not sure I buy into this. For one thing, I see a problem with falsifiability. If there is nothing that I could see to convince me that magic might work, I am not objecting to the reality of magic on rational grounds, but as a sort of knee-jerk. It's like the doubleplus loony creationist types who think the devil planted archaeopteryx.
There are reasons I think magic in the Harry Potter sense is not true, reasons that could be argued against (e.g., show me a plausible medium for magic to be carried in). I don't think it would be very rational to make it sort of... axiomatic that magic is false. That seems to in fact be the attitude Eliezer is criticizing in the character of Harry's father.
So yeah, some probability mass goes to the "hallucination/insane" hypothesis, but not very much. Most goes to the "I don't know what's going on here at all, but she did just apparently turn into a cat" hypothesis.
Miracles are one-time events, whereas magic spells are repeatable (in every fictional universe I've seen, anyway).
True; but where does that factor come in? I mean, hallucinations can presumably be repeatable too. "I tested Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday - and I am still Napoleon!"
I previously criticized Eliezer's 'Ultimate Mega Crossover' fic on basically the grounds that it makes him/SIAI look bad, and didn't help out the cause much.
Reading through MoR, I made a point of reading the reviews and seeing what non-LW people were saying. I'm pleased that aside from AngryParsley's site stats, many of the reviews expressed interest in LW writings and Eliezer's ideas, and very few any disgust or general opinions of low status. Good job, Eliezer!
Have you updated any of your underlying premises?
I suggest that for a lot of the people you want to attract at this stage, consuming a lot of sf is proof of normalcy. As for fanfic, I suspect that the type of fanfic matters a lot-- if it had been slash of comparable quality to the existing work, there would have been a substantial yuck factor to surmount as well as people who were enthusiastic.
I don't know what the result of HPMOR is going to be if SIAI ever wants to get bank loans-- there are a lot of steep weirdness hills to climb at that point.
I don't especially think I have; suggestions welcome.
I had one in my comment-- that respectability varies more between mainstream culture and the people who are likely to read HPMOR than you realized.
Harry Potter fanfiction and its readers is way closer to mainstream culture than the sort of people who could read that crossover fic; keep in mind, Harry Potter fanfiction novels have been published as have entire books just predicting what would happen in book 7 or comprising dictionaries of Harry Potter-ania (you may remember the lawsuit over the latter).
Reply to this comment if you found LW through Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality!
A survey for anyone who cares to respond (edit: specifically for people who did find LW through HPMoR):
I don't exactly fit your set since I had seen LW before, but there's some good reason that I should be included in your sample. Explanation follows: I had read most of the sequences before (and frankly didn't learn that much from them. A handful of cogsci and psych classes along with a fair bit of phil sci gives one a lot of the same material) and had previously read some of Eliezer's fiction. I hadn't really taken that detailed a look at LW as a whole, until HPMR. That was partially due to a conversation with a friend that went something like
Friend: So who is the author of this stuff? JZ: He's Eliezer Yudkowsky who is an all around very bright guy. He has some a bit off ideas about the Singularity. Friend: What evidence do you have of that he's bright and not just a good fiction writer? The one thing you've mentioned is something you disagree with. JZ: Um, let me get back to you.
Then when reading I felt a need to register an account to make a comment, and then it has been downhill from there (I just linked an LW post to a friend who said that she refused to read it because "I'm not sure I'm willing to let myself -oh god oh god- be sucked into Less Wrong. I have heard it wastes time like tvtropes on crack." I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing).
I've linked HPMR to a fair number of people, and it seems to be having some impact on some of them. Indeed, it seems that it is quite effective at getting through defense mechanisms that some people have against being more rational, because the arguments aren't being coached in an obvious way of trying to just present what is wrong with their thinking processes. I'm running into concerns about whether linking HPMR to people without telling them about that is ethical or not.
I'm reading MOR with considerable interest and enjoyment-- and recommending it-- but.....
There's a big emotional difference between HP and MOR. In the original, Harry has no friends or allies at the Dursley's. In MOR, his family life isn't great and he doesn't seem to have any friends or anyone he's expecting to miss, but he isn't under constant attack.
Part of the emotional hook in HP is that Harry is almost immediately in a circle of friends and acquires a family in the Weasleys.
In MOR, his best emotional connection is to McGonagle, but it's complicated by his intellectual dominance. None of his close friends from HP are worth being close to (or did I miss someone?). His nearest approach to a friend his own age is Draco, and that's very much complicated by Draco having been raised to be a sociopath, and by Harry's need to manage Draco.
Part of the charm of HP was that Hermione's memory, intelligence, and conscientiousness are presented as more valuable than annoying, though the annoyance for the other characters is still there. This is a rationalist feature of HP which seems to be lost in MOR-- Hermione is interested in getting things right for the sake of status.
Her delight at being in a Romance completely eclipsing the question of whether she likes Harry is depressing, but within the human range, I think.
QuirrelMort setting up the Harry's structured humiliation no doubt has plot reasons, but I can also model it as organizational hysteresis-- after Harry made such a strong power grab in re Snape, it's plausible that great efforts will be made to remind him that he's just a student.
I have a notion that it wasn't just his mother's sacrifice that saved Harry, it was also something he did, and his reflexive rage and need to win is hooked to what he did to survive when he was a baby.
is the training that Draco is getting from Lucius based in anything from the novels? The Dracos never impressed me. They just seemed to be rich and mean, and the Pure Blood campaign is weirdly abstract and idealistic compared to their temperaments. (Is there a reverse halo effect where all bad qualities accrete something which is considered to be bad? The Dracos are bullies, so of course it's reasonable to turn them into Nazis.) To my mind Slughorn is part of the real range of Slytherin possibilities.
Hermione?
I should reread, but the most recent chapter with Hermione presents her as a person who's at least much less worth spending time with than the HP Hermione.
Really? It seemed that she's just a bit genre savvy. She's an 11 year old who's main understanding of how the world works is from distilling tropes.
In Chapter 6, when Harry was buying the trunk: his whole speech about planning fallacies and collaborators ... wasn't really necessary, was it? Even had he not stolen his own money, I doubt that the proprietor would have refused a down payment accompanied by a request to hold the trunk overnight, pending the remainder of the sum to be payed in the morning.
That said: what if he had simply withdrawn the eleven Galleons and presented them as a fait accompli, without preface?
I don't believe the true reason for the speech was to get McGonagall to agree with his actions - It was to assert his dominance over her.
Well, yes. I'm wondering what McGonagall's reactions would have been in the counterfactual where he wasn't working to establish authority over her.
I just finished reading the Russian novel "Lena Squatter and the Paragon of Vengeance" by SF author Leonid Kaganov. It's not exactly a Harry Potter fanfic, but it's very similar to MOR in that it tries to present an explicitly rationalist hero, and IMO Kaganov has handled the task better than Eliezer.
The protagonist is an unattractive and immoral woman whose only strength is extra rationality, which she applies to the sordid and corrupt world of Moscow corporate politics. Using the familiar LW intellectual ammunition - from Pascal's Wager to evolutionary psychology - she gets people fired for talking back to her, gives and takes bribes, blatantly manipulates men (driving one to attempted suicide), and then in the end when she's found the perfect boyfriend her plans neatly backfire, forcing her to kill him and then herself. Lena's exploits are shown with a lot of detail and believability, and overall the book has punched me harder than anything Eliezer wrote. Unfortunately it's unlikely that it will ever be translated into English.
Given that one of the catchphrases around here is "rationalists should win", i'm curious why the main character of this story loses in the end. Why would her plans "neatly backfire" in the end, or is it enough for us to admire her rationality that she almost achieved her goals, despite her lack of obvious assets?
She makes a poorly considered wish to an unfriendly genie AI. As a result, she has to kill herself and her boyfriend to save the world. No kidding.
Would you be willing to translate it?
No, it's too big. Would take me weeks of full-time work.
From reading it, I got a sense that Eliezer actually has something in mind on how magic works in the story. That would be mindblowing because it would have to be a consistent explanation how magic works, how magicians got to use it, why they loose power over time. And why no physicists stumbled over it by accident.
Is that a shared idea, or am I the only one?
I would be staggered if he pulled such a feat of SFnal genius off. The only comparable feat I can recall actually seeing is the reveal in Robert Charles Wilson's Spin.
So far many chapters managed to up the ante. Meaning there is way more depth than i expected initially. The story wouldnt loose much if there is no magic explanation, but well. it would be mind blowing if there is. And of course Harry will research till he hits the solution or a dead end.
I made up a few trivial sounding solutions for all the patterns shown in the story (trivial for LW/OB readers) but do not want to invite too much speculation.
Another thing I really liked was the depth of characterization. Usually in SF thats not too well done. Here the nice old teacher lady, Dumbledore, Harry, Hermione and so on all appear as full characters with strengths, weaknesses, insecurities and motivation.
Looking forward for the next chapters!
See Larry Niven's "The Magic Goes Away" universe. He does not seem to have worked out "particle physics with magic" to explain how to cast spells exactly, but he does have a universe that makes more logical sense in terms of economics and sociology and so on.
Basically all atoms in his universe had an aura of mana which functioned as a non-renewable source of "magical energy" for "everything magical you've ever heard about". Some magic can also be gimmicked out of events with emotional resonance to recharge nearby atoms but not very much, and most really huge emotions happen because of personal loss, so there is still an implicit sort of "third law of magic dynamics" at work relative to any magic that's worth acquiring.
The reason physicists haven't discovered it is that there's basically none left.
Rot13 for spoilers about the physics and economics but not the plots:
Fbzr betnavfzf hfr guvf nf cneg bs gurve zrgnobyvfz (abj nyy rvgure rkgvapg be fghagrq naq abj ribyivat jvgubhg zntvp, sbe rknzcyr jvgu cbavrf orvat zntvp qrcevirq havpbeaf, fbzr zbqrea yvmneqf orvat zntvp qrcevirq qentbaf, naq tbqf orvat zbfgyl rkgvapg).
Jngre zvkrf, fb gur yriry bs zntvp gurer vf zber fzbbguyl fcernq nebhaq. Ynaq qbrf abg zvk irel zhpu, fb zntvp ba ynaq vf eryngviryl pyhzcl, jvgu pvgvrf (rfcrpvnyyl tnzoyvat unyyf naq cbyvgvpny ohvyqvatf) univat eryngviryl yvggyr orpnhfr fb znal fcryyf unir nyernql orra pnfg gurer naq hfrq vg hc. Va zbqrea gvzrf gur bayl fbheprf bs zntvp ner nfgrebvq snyyf, fyhqtr frqvzragvat fbzr jnl orgjrra gur obggbz bs gur bprna, pbfzvp qhfg, naq bgure "rkgreany fbheprf", naq n ybg bs gurfr gevpxf jrer nyernql rkcybvgrq jura guvatf tbg ernyyl yrna. Erfvqhny zntvp nppbhagf sbe ehzbef bs tubfgf naq fhpu guvatf, ohg nyfb rkcynvaf jul vg qbrfa'g znggre irel zhpu abj. Fhcre nznmvat tbqf ab ybatre rkvfg va nal sbez gung vf fhcre cbjreshy, ohg gurl unq n qbzvanag crevbq nebhaq ovt onat, naq fbzr fgvyy rkvfgrq jura uhznaf ribyirq, naq tenagrq zntvpny snibef gb crbcyr jub urycrq gurz npdhver zntvp - onfvpnyyl nf n fbeg bs flzovbfvf.
Vs V erpnyy pbeerpgyl, gur zbba unf fbzr zntvp, ohg zbfg bs vg jnf hfrq hc va n fbzr fbeg bs zntvpnyyl cbjrerq qvfnfgre gung qrcyrgrq vg gurer gbb. Fvzvyneyl, Ngynagvf jnf n pbyyncfr bs pvivyvmngvba fgbel jura zntvpny qvxrf naq nagv-grpgbavp fcryyf fgnegrq gb snvy... vzntvar Arj Beyrnaf vs nyy genpgbef sbe rnegu zbivat fgbccrq jbexvat fbzrqnl.
Rpbabzvpf naq cbyvgvpf ner frafvoyr va guvf havirefr jvgu jvmneqf orvat rabezbhfyl jrnygul naq pncnoyr bs jvcvat bhg jubyr nezvrf (ng yrnfg orsber "crnx zntvp"). Nsgre crnx zntvp, gur cbyvgvpf jrer vagrerfgvat... yvxr jrerjbyirf jvgubhg zntvp ghearq bhg gb qrsnhyg gb jbyirf vafgrnq bs uhznaf, fb gurl orpbzr n irel cbyvgvpnyyl pbafreingvir snpgvba gung snibef nagv-zntvp hfr ynjf va cynprf gurl yvir, fb gung gurl pna xrrc ubyq bs fragvrapr sbe nf znal trarengvbaf nf cbffvoyr. Qbycuvaf ner jung lbh trg jura inevbhf fcrpvrf bs zre-crbcyr ner qrcevirq bs zntvp, naq gurl hfrq gb genqr svfu sbe gbbyf va frn cbegf, juvpu rkcynvaf cneg bs jul gurl ner fgvyy genvanoyr navznyf.
There's been some speculation on what a +4 spoon would do, so I figured I'd weigh in as an expert of sorts on D&D.
Really, it depends upon what it's being enchanted for. I think the default assumption is that it's enchanted as a melee weapon, and so functions as a diminutive one-handed weapon that does 1d2+4 damage - given the strength of such creatures, you're probably looking at 1d2 damage after the strength penalty, which is a modest improvement over the 1d2-4 (minimum 1) an unenchanted spoon would get you, for the reasonable price of 32,300 gold pieces.
For justification of this, that effectively makes it a diminutive club (d6 stepped down 3 times); it would be capable of being wielded as a light bludgeoning weapon by a tiny creature (something about cat-sized) at a -2 penalty, and not effectively usable as a weapon by anyone small (halfling-sized) or bigger.
An alternate explanation would make it a spoon which gives you a +4 bonus of some sort to a spoon-related skill, which would then be about 4000 gp (twice normal for not taking up an equipment slot).
Would the +4 also go to the attack roll not just the damage roll?
Yes, but it won't stack with the enhancement bonus for masterwork, if it's a weapon. Incidentally, these bonuses do stack on at least some skill enhancement items, like musical instruments, because they give different bonuses ("circumstance" and "competence", IIRC).
Right, but the masterwork enhancement is just +1.
For instruments it's +2.
It gives a +4 bonus to the dexterity check to avoid dropping ice cream on your clothes, or others' clothes. However, due to a quantization issue in the laws of physics, exactly one-twentieth of all scoops still result in critical failures, and many of those failures lead to food fights, which is where the +4 to hit and damage comes in.
Don't be silly, it's just a bonus to Craft (cooking) or Profession (chef).
Does a dex check have a critical failure on a 1? I think that applies only to saves and attack rolls. Skill checks don't suffer that problem and I think the same rule applies to flat ability checks. (I'm going off the 3.5 rules here, I seem to remember when critical failures occur was slightly different in 3.0 which may be relevant here)
Of course not.
I'm not sure most people have the rules so intimately understood that they would think the "of course" in "of course not" deserved to be there. This may be related to understanding degrees of inferential distance.
Yes, that was the joke.
Ah, in that case, I must spend too much time on the Giants in the Playground Forum where a statement like that would seem perfectly natural.