I can't believe I didn't realize this before.
Someone complained elsewhere (I think it was in the other thread) about Harry being the Boy-who-Lived and having a prophecy and having a cold dark side and being super-rational.
From MoR itself:
It's too much coincidence for one girl to be the strongest magically and academically unless there's a single cause.
It's plausible that one of the Muggle-raised students at Hogwarts could be a science nerd. It's not plausible that that student would also be the Boy-who-Lived. There must be a single cause.
I think it's most likely that Harry's dark side is somehow an effect of being AKed. Perhaps he's a horcrux, like in canon. The hat said no, but it's possible that Harry was killed and the only soul left in him is Voldemort's fragment. Or, without positing souls, maybe horcruxing a person overwrites the victim with a copy of yourself.
Harrymort has a warm side because he was raised in a loving household; he doesn't remember being Voldemort because he was stuck in a child's brain, with the plasticity and pruning that entails (or maybe V. wiped Harrymort's memory for some reason?); he didn't survive the attack, but rather his fresh corpse was appr...
"Ghosts," Harry said, his voice flat. "You mean those things like portraits, stored memories and behaviors with no awareness or life, accidentally impressed into the surrounding material by the burst of magic that accompanies the violent death of a wizard -"
"Why," I said to myself, "would you have to die to make a ghost? It seems completely arbitrary." But then I thought that perhaps death releases a huge amount of magic that can't normally be drawn upon safely.
But then I had this wicked awesome idea.
What if a Horcrux is the same effect, harnessed deliberately? That's why it requires human sacrifice -- the violent death of a wizard. A controlled ghost-making, operated by a wizard who remains conscious and alive through the whole process, can bind the mind into an object, arrange for contingent regrowth of the caster from the record... Yes. Horcruxes are ghosts created under controlled conditions.
Which in turn suggests that you might be able to make a dying person into a superghost (or maybe even an immortal living person). Kill them to make a horcrux, but make the sacrifice immortal instead of the caster.
ZOMG! That makes sense! So much sense that J.K. Rowling really missed a chance to have a great Revan Moment in canon. Imagine the shock ending if, as Voldemort staggers from a mortal wound in the last pages of Deathly Hallows, he explains this to Harry, then: "I...am only a shell...and have never been anything more. (cough) My purpose has only been to prepare you...Make you strong...make you gather the Hallows and become invincible... You. Are. Voldemort! BWA! HA! HAAAAAA!"
This would make sense of canon scenes like, for e.g., Voldy's re-animation ceremony in Goblet of Fire only using a little of Harry's blood, instead of having Ratface cut his throat, and how he calls his Death Eaters off and fights Harry solo instead of having them Just Shoot Him.
Back to MoR, yeah, I think "Harrymort" is a fiendishly cool idea! (up-voted)
Is it the author's opinion that the creation of house elves was a terribly evil deed? It would seem that to think that after their creation, they would want to do what they have been designed to do and so would be no more evil than creating an intelligence which would want to bowl and fish all day. Even if we accept that creating conscious entities which are forced by means of their preferences to do menial work is wrong, it would seem to be better to create them, than to force those who don't enjoy such work to do it. Is Harry just confused by his intuitions about the evil of slavery, without sufficient reflection?
ETA: While this argument works in the abstract and is useful for countering human biases against "slavery" and applies in the particular for the creation of Gammas, Deltas and Epsilons, house elves have addition features I wasn't considering which makes their creation morally evil.
Is it the author's opinion that the creation of house elves was a terribly evil deed?
It had been, but...
Even if we accept that creating conscious entities which are forced by means of their preferences to do menial work is wrong, it would seem to be better to create them, than to force those who don't enjoy such work to do it.
...is a powerful argument I had never considered.
Though there's logic to this argument, pretty much everything else about the way house elves were made is evil. They're created, or conditioned to brutally torture themselves if they even think they've displeased their masters or broken a rule. They have no labor rights and can be mistreated at will, to the point that mistreatment is built in as a product feature.
We can only imagine what sort of miserable Dickensian conditions they live in when they're not at work. They're forced to wear ragged, salvaged sacks, as giving them clothes = firing them, i.e. denying them the work and subservient position they're designed to want. This is a needless cruelty on top of everything else. Heck, if I were an aristocrat wizard with house elves, I'd want mine to go around in elegant livery, as a demonstration of how magnificent my Estate is. But I couldn't do that, because the poor little creatures were made (modified?) by a sadist.
Heck, if I were an aristocrat wizard with house elves, I'd want mine to go around in elegant livery, as a demonstration of how magnificent my Estate is. But I couldn't do that
You could get them elegantly embroidered little dishtowels clipped into place with stylized sugar tongs made of silver.
...is a powerful argument I had never considered.
How would you say this relates to the ethics of creating an FAI? In some ways house elves were created for a similar reason that we would create an FAI. Would it be something about 'consciousness' that separates the two constructions ethically? If so, I wonder whether creating a 'helper' agent that in some sense is conscious and 'enjoys' what it does is better or worse than creating a raw optimised agent that we wouldn't consider conscious.
It occurs to me that what a house elf considers fun is not all that much different from the perspective of all of value-space from what we might consider fun.
I think it's worth distinguishing creating work-loving entities ex nihilo from modifying existing entities against their will to become work-loving. Canon rather implies the latter; handling the procedure ethically would be tricky, as baseline elves likely would not only resist being value-enslaved, but would want the children they birth and raise to be like themselves.
Theory: the 'spell of starlight' is a scrying or remote-viewing effect which Quirrelmort originally developed to keep an eye on the Pioneer horcrux. It's strenuous because of the extreme range, possible at all only because of the strong sympathetic connection involved. Reinforcing the sympathetic connection is important to maintain the possibility of Apparating out there, and sharing the experience helps to establish a sympathetic link between Harry's scar/mysterious dark side and the horcrux, which will eventually make it possible to do something nasty to him from far away.
Just occurred to me: if magic ability is genetic, it should in theory be possible to use gene therapy/retroviruses/etc. (and perhaps some magic) to make all the Muggles into wizards! (Or at least all the ones yet to be conceived or something.) I can just imagine Harry creating a Plague of Magic.
Almost certainly not in the timeframe of the fic. I think that 1995 was about the first time we successfully used a retrovirus to cure a human disease, and we still don't have the tech to create a contagious disease to do so.
Why do wizards - particularly in MoR, where most people are smarter - carry one wand apiece? This doesn't seem to be an absolute practical limitation wherein only one wand may be mastered at a time. In book seven, Harry is simultaneously the master of the Elder Wand and his own original with Fawkes's feather in it. Why doesn't everyone habitually walk out of Ollivander's with two, so as to have a spare in hazardous situations or in case one should be lost?
Wands cost 7 Galleons. People throw around comparable sums all the time in canon. Percy Weasley bets 10 Galleons on a Quidditch game, heck, Harry buys three sets of Omnioculars (wizarding binoculars) at 10 Galleons apiece to watch the Quidditch World Cup. Many wizarding supplies less useful than a wand cost considerably more. There really is no good reason for witches and wizards not to carry multiple wands except for tradition. Even the Weasleys could afford multiple wands if they made it a priority.
Eliezer, is there any chance any speaker at the Singularity Summit might open or close with "Happy happy boom boom swamp swamp swamp!"? For numerous reasons, I think it would be most hilarious if Ray Kurzweil could be persuaded to do so.
Am I the only one who now wants to campaign for gay rights with the slogan "Death Eaters against homophobia!"?
Upon seeing DinosaurusGede's awesome pic, my first thought was that were I able to draw (I cannot), I would draw Dumbledore wailing on an electric guitar and saying "THIS was your father's rock".
A few reviewers are speculating that Lucius thinks Harry is Voldemort. Any thoughts on that? I'm not sure yet, but rereading their conversation with that in mind is pretty interesting.
Well obviously I'm not going to popularize a method of immortality that requires killing people! That would defeat the entire point!
Actually...
We know from canon that a Horcrux is really just a backup copy, so that on average you probably only about double your lifespan by making one, at best. But it seems to me that based on what Harry has been told, he should believe that a Horcrux makes you immortal and unkillable. Given this belief, in the absence of any better way of achieving immortality, the spell is considerably better than baseline.
Set up a Horcrux clinic. A pair of people come in, fill out some paperwork, flip a coin in the presence of a notary, and the winner of the coin toss kills the loser to make a Horcrux. If nobody ever cast the spell, the loser was going to die eventually anyway, and if you do it when both parties are close to dying of old age (though this would probably be a needlessly reckless strategy, all things considered) then the loser doesn't even lose all that much.
You could save half of the wizarding world from certain death.
Oh, and Harry didn't even ask whether it might be possible to substitute an animal for the human sacrifice, or make a portrait of...
For all those who say that the 'unconventional ship' hinted at is Hermione/Griphook, I'd just like to say that's preposterous, and there is no way Eliezer would include such a thing in the story.
Sinhababu's 2008 Pacific Philosophical Quarterly article is the definitive essay on acausal ships.
Aww, I liked that element, and it doesn't seem that implausible as such things go; I once heard an apparently sincere conspiracy theory that holds that the reason nobody has ever won Randi's million-dollar prize is because he uses his own prodigious psychic powers to stop them from doing so.
Aw, why? Randi looks more wizardly (and must be shipped with Dumbledore at some point, they're perfect for each other, they're both wise accomplished old white-bearded gay wizards...), and I don't see why Shermer requires less suspension of disbelief. (The main thing that made me confused there was figuring that if Randi were really a wizard but still the Randi we know, he'd probably have long ago tried to scientifically investigate magic as Harry intends to, and made some of the same discoveries and many more, and possibly become a supremely powerful and well-known wizard. Am I on the right track or have I overlooked something else implausible that people complained about?)
It's short for "relationship", but it's also used as a verb, which means to portray or want two (or more) characters to be romantically and/or sexually involved.
Examples:
"I ship the Whomping Willow and the Devil's Snare." = "I am amused by imagining those two plants in a relationship" or "in at least one derivative creative work, I have represented those two plants as being in a relationship."
"This fic contains only canon ships." = "This work of fanfiction romantically pairs characters in the same arrangements they have in the source work."
Ch. 33:
The three-way tie, while clearly dramatically convenient for Eliezer, and adequately foreshadowed, is just so boring.
Was anyone else briefly confused because they had forgotten that the war was continuing even after the awarding of the Christmas Wish?
Re 2: Yes, I'd forgotten that as well.
Also, very disappointed about the skipping of about a month or so there. If Eliezer doesn't explicitly fill in the gaps, I'm considering writing a MoR fanfic (tentatively titled "MoR: Battle School") after at least the wars are over and intervening events are solidified, to fill in that time.
(41)
So, traitors. Were there any? Did they play any part in the fight at all or was it just the principle of the thing? The whole point of the Draco+Hermione vs Harry war was on the subject of unity. I was kind of hoping for some object lessons on just how much Harry's advantage of being able to trust his soldiers helped him while Draco and Hermione had to put in place extra precautions to protect themselves from sleeper agents. Or, well, even an offhand mention of "Chaos got 3 extra fighters" to acknowledge the issue.
[I]f we lived in the sort of universe where horrible things were only allowed to happen for good reasons, they just wouldn't happen in the first place.
I love this line and am probably going to be quoting it frequently.
Edit: ...and Harry was pretty magnificent in that scene, in general. "Wrong! I want the secret of the Dark Lord's immortality in order to use it for everyone!" was one of my favourite moments, even if Harry was mistaken about the feasibility of that particular plan.
I just had a thought WRT Harry's controversial apology to Hermione in Chapter 42. This is the Harry that lectured McGonagall on the Planning Fallacy, while demonstrating that he really does assume a worst-case scenario (insisting on purchasing a magical first aid kit just in case one of his fellow students ended up maimed and dying in front of him). I think it's entirely plausible that he could have spent the whole time Hermione was falling imagining that maybe he'd forgotten to stir the ground hen's teeth (or whatever) into the Feather Fall potion six t...
This is a boy who casually expressed his intention to rape Luna Lovegood to someone he'd just met, assuming that boy's stated "intention" to murder her was equally casual, and equally serious. Major, major misogyny here.
I don't read that as misogyny. Merely a willingness to utterly humiliate a low status enemy by whatever means practical. If it was Larry Lovegood I expect the conversation would involve castration. Or perhaps sodomy via broomstick.
This is a good analysis. I have two nitpicks:
1) I think Draco is mostly classist rather than sexist.
2) Hermione is currently Draco's ally. Her parentage greatly obstructed her getting there, but now that she has that status, much is changed.
The most compelling evidence for an afterlife in canon was Harry's "near-death experience" in Deathly Hallows. While "dead", Harry talks to Dumbledore one last time, and Harry learns things that only Dumbledore would have known.
Of course, MoR!Harry doesn't have this evidence.
Harry learns things that only Dumbledore would have known.
Does he? It certainly seems possible that Harry is just filling in the blanks himself. I just went back and re-read it. Consider:
"Explain," said Harry.
"But you already know," said Dumbledore. . .
...
"But if Voldemort used the Killing Curse," Harry started again, "and nobody died for me this time -- how can I be alive?"
"I think you know," said Dumbledore. "Think back. . ."
The information that Dumbledore actually does provide to Harry is either inconclusive or insubstantial -- e.g. Harry asks about the peculiar behavior of his wand, and Dumbledore says he cannot but guess. Harry asks where they are, Dumbledore cannot answer and says that they are where ever Harry thinks they are. Harry asks about the Deathly Hallows:
..."Real, and dangerous, and a lure for fools," said Dumbledore. "And I was such a fool But you know, don't you? I have no secrets from you anymore. You know."
. . .
So you'd given up looking for the Hallows when you saw the Cloak?"
"Oh yes," said Dumbledore faintly. . . "You know what happened. You know."
Of course, MoR!Harry doesn't have this evidence.
More to the point, MoR!Author doesn't have this evidence!
Chp 39 (the Dementor)
I think that Dumbledore and Harry were too quick to conclude that the Dementor could just be used as a distraction. It was Harry's first idea (once he turned cold), and Dumbledore stopped him there. Cold!Harry didn't even spend 5 minutes on the problem - compare with Harry's instructions to Fred & George in the Hold Off on Proposing Solutions MOR chapter. If there's a plot, that seems much too obvious for Quirrell.
What immediately occurred to me (similar to the infamous scene in The Princess Bride), is that if your opponent believes you will have a distraction and a real attack, simply lauch two real attacks, with the expectation that whichever one the opponent takes to be the distraction will succeed. Obviously this requires a greater sacrifice of materiel, but Quirrelmort doesn't exactly seem short in that department.
while he'd never been young enough to believe in Santa Claus, he'd once been young enough to doubt.
This line probably improved the upbringing of any future offspring of mine. I had considered either being totally honest, or telling the typical Santa stories as a low difficulty exercise in spotting falsehoods you're raised with.
Now, I'll still casually detail the Santa myths while being honest about his nonexistence, but I'll also adopt the parental Santa role, down to using magic tricks to make presents appear at midnight, and reindeer tracks in the l...
if Hitler had been allowed into architecture school like he wanted, the whole history of Europe would have been different
Is this a subtle difference from the real world, or just Harry thinking more deeply?
As I understand it (confirmed by Wikipedia), Hitler was rejected from a school for pictorial art, not architecture. However, Wikipedia has more: the art school recommended that he become an architect instead, and Hitler agreed. However, Hitler never bothered to apply to architecture school, because he lacked the necessary academic qualifications (inc...
Regarding Chapter 38: Am I correct when I say that Lucius Malfoy is modeling Harry as a level 3 player (pretending to be an ignorant player pretending to be a knowledgeable player), when Harry is actually level 2 (an ignorant player pretending to be a knowledgeable player)?
I had a recent conversation with a few friends of mine about life extension, death, etc, brought on by reading the chapter from HP&MoR where Harry discusses the topic with Dumbledore. I used all the standard arguments (their general response was 'it would be boring'), and eventually used the word deathist. After hearing the word, one of my friends recast their position, jokingly, as "anti-liveite", which made me realize the whole thing might just be arguing politics.
Ch. 42:
The idea of casual acceptance of homosexuality in magical Britain doesn't seem to be thought out fully. Even this very chapter (and I've noticed that major premises from one chapter tend not to show up in others, but that's a separate issue), there's the casual assumption (inherited from canon, inherited in turn from most of Western media as a whole) that "thinks Harry/Draco is hawt" equals "female". About fifteen percent of those squeeing fans should have been boys.
Before puberty, identification with a sexual orientation would have to be completely socially constructed, so in a gay-friendly society most people should identify as bisexual by default.
A society can be gay-friendly and still heteronormative. In fact, I'd say that contemporary First-World youth fit right into that, although gay-friendliness hasn't spread to the whole society yet. Still, as long as heterosexuals are most common, gays and bis will still be seen as unusual, even if OK. So socially, I expect that most people will still assume that they're het until they learn otherwise.
However (contradicting both you and me), there are gay people who say that they knew that they were gay from a very young age. On the other hand, puberty has been known to mess with one's expectations.
Generalising from one example: I can't quite describe the environment that I grew up in as gay-friendly, only moving in that direction. Perhaps if it had been, then I'd have identified as bisexual at puberty, but perhaps not. In any case, it was a heteronormative environment, so I expected to be attracted to the opposite sex, and was. Then I jumped to conclusions, self-identified as het and suppressed my attraction to the same sex (ETA: because it messed with my idea of who I was) for another ten years. (Before puberty, I was completely asexual.)
The real answer, of course, is that Hogwarts is shaped after British public schools, and it inherited gender-based dorms just like it did the four-house system.
A possible justification/rationalisation is that there are drastically different dynamics between a sexual attraction that involves a vast majority of the population, and one that involves a minority: heterosexual affections are much more likely to be potentially returned, compared to homosexual ones. Hence, while the occasional homosexual affair will sprout up in an all-male/all-female dorm, a mixed teenage dormitory would be completely overrun with drama, awkwardness, and unpleasant sounds and smells.
I can think of a good reason for segregated dorms: In the MoRniverse at least, rape is something aristocratic boys can do casually with the full expectation of getting away with it. Not to mention panty raids and other assorted sexually-harrassing nonsense. Even in a society without medieval/Victorian mores, girls would still need a place of relative safety in which to sleep, shower, dress, etc..
Harry has already noticed that he gave too much information to Dumbledore, but now he trusts Quirrel too much.
Let it stand that there is something else I must do this afternoon.
To wit: find that stone which I saw earlier and which I now recognise from the design that you showed me!
The following is my speculation about where the plot of the story is going. It is just speculation, but on the off-chance that any of it is correct and non-obvious, it will contain spoilers.
Solid control by a central authority seems to be more difficult for magic folks. (e.g. A few dozen Death Eaters nearly brought down the government). I assume this is because Apparition makes control of transport impossible, everyone having wands makes control of dangerous weapons impossible, and the Imperius curse makes central authority untrustworthy and spreads paran...
One illustration of this is that in Goblet of Fire, there is a point where canon!Harry on a broomstick faces a dragon called the Hungarian Horntail... which in Ch. 16 of Methods is said to breathe fire quickly and accurately enough to melt a Snitch in midflight, implying that canon!Harry would have gotten roasted in an instant if he'd tried the same thing in this universe.
What if, in accordance with the Tournament's goal of providing an interesting challenge and spectacle without massacring all competitors, the dragons were actually subdued or sedated ...
The big speech by Quirrel troubles me.
I thought we had Word of God that Quirrel was in some way Voldemort (Quirrelmort), and that we should've become certain of that early on (especially with the Voyager horcrux implied).
But the speech doesn't make sense for me. If Voldemort was so close to winning, if it took a freak Black Swan to defeat him and his followers, if magical England is still utterly incompetent, if many of his followers are still at large (as we know from canon they are), if...
Given this situation, why doesn't Voldemort just start over? The p...
My impression is that in MoR Voldemort was a passionate young revolutionary in the first war, but since then he's gotten older and his outlook has changed. He sees the muggles as the greatest threat now, and he recognizes that his history means he can't take power in his own name without a long and devastating series of wars that would leave the magical world exhausted and vulnerable to this outside threat. So it would be rather convenient if he could sway Harry to his way of thinking and arrange for the wizarding world to unite under a leader who sees him as a mentor...
I agree with your analysis.
But gwern's description of Harry's victory over Voldemort as a "black swan" doesn't satisfy me. The canon explanation - that the Power of Love auto-defeats all dark magic, and either no one had ever noticed this before, or Voldemort just assumed no one would use that strategy despite its obvious game-winning power because Evil Cannot Comprehend Good - doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would cut it in Methods.
One remote possibility is that Voldemort realized he'd inspired so much hatred that he'd never be able to unite the magical world without first breaking its power so badly it would be useless to him, so he found a kid with Dark Lord potential, stuck enough of his soul into him that he felt in control, and then faked his own death in such a way as to make his chosen heir the sort of hero whom everyone would rally around. This is probably too complicated for a smart Slytherin who'd seen The Tragedy of Light to try, but there's got to be some sort of weird explanation for why Voldemort lost ten years ago, and why he lost to a kid with precisely the sort of plotting ability and mastery of Muggle methodology Voldy needs for his plots.
Eliezer's Timeless Decision Theory solution to The Prisoner's Dilemma is compelling.
It's something I've thought about for a long time. There must be some solution to the bloody thing - my gut instinct tells me to cooperate, even when dealing with a paperclip maximizer, but all of my justifications wind up being little more than mathy ways of saying 'Honor'. And to be perfectly frank, I'm not convinced that the story's solution is much more than that either. Just replace "acts honorably" with "holds true to TDT".
That said, I do hold m...
On page 96 of the PDF version, the $ signs need to be escaped, in "an unconditional gift of $5 was twice as effective as a conditional offer of $50"). As it is now, the text between the $ signs is typeset in math mode.
(I post this here as I have no contact info for the PDF maintainer.)
What would the incentive to become a traitor before the battle of Chapter 33 be? Before Quirrell added the ability to switch sides, you'd just be helping your army (which you've already developed a bond with in the first battle), and therefore yourself, lose. I'd expect this to strongly outweigh the fun of being a spy.
I just Googled for "airsoft betrayal" and "paintball betrayal." I found no stories of similar events in either sport. (I did however find one person hypothetically talking about betrayal in laser tag, even though many/most systems ignore friendly fire.)
A couple of recent comments have prompted me to consider my impressions of the cold, dark side of Harry. In particular how it differs from an 'evil, bad side' and why it seems to me to go hand in hand with being 'super rational'.
Someone complained elsewhere (I think it was in the other thread) about Harry being the Boy-who-Lived and having a prophecy and having a cold dark side and being super-rational.
Given that I know Harry to be super-rational and also that he is functional and has a credible ability to achieve goals I would actually be somewhat su...
It seems obvious that V. has more complicated interests than just governing a few wizards. In some stories, and sadly also in reality leaders fall into the notion that they have to unite the country under a strong hand to achieve anything useful. It might be that young V. thought so and tried to take over, but older V. is wiser and looks for other approaches. I don't think he wants Harry to become a dark lord, but shove him a bit into his own current goal system and avoid having him fall into stupid pitfalls.
From the Author's Notes:
A word on the rules this fic follows. It is not a strict single point of departure. [...] I've posted a disclaimer in chapter one to this effect ("This is not a strict single-point-of-departure fic"). If anyone thinks this was a bad idea, now would be a good time to speak up.
The question that most interests me is not single vs. multiple departure, but rather known vs. unknown departure. If the set of points of departure is finite and known in full to the readers, then we can draw on canon evidence to help make inferenc...
having not read all of the books should not stop him.
That's not true. Without exhaustive knowledge of canon, there's no way to know whether a given detail is specified at all or not. For example, Eliezer may not have realized that Harry and Draco's experimental results should have been outright confusing given the canon-available information on inheritance.
why is Peter Pettigrew as Scabbers stupider than the rules of Quidditch, for example?
This much at least makes sense to me. Scabbers!Pettigrew requires one person to have done something ridiculously stupid, all on his own. Quidditch is a group error, the kind that can accumulate insidiously from an initially reasonable state and linger for a long time even when every member of the group would have been smart enough not to initially make the error that they're all propagating.
Unity. Which is more powerful? Unity within an army or an alliance between two? Hermione and Draco seem to have granted Harry complete internal unity within Chaos while leaving themselves open to betrayals from their soldiers or from each other. A best case outcome gives them a 2:1 advantage over Chaos but they must expend effort monitoring for internal or external betrayal. I would estimate that 2 spies in each of Sunshine and Dragon would give Harry a win.
The other aspect to consider is that the battle is now a game for points not a fight for mock surviv...
I've been having some problems with MOR Hermione, and chapter 42 amplifies them, with a side issue of what seems like very strange behavior from the other girls.
She seems like a bit of a monster, without concern for whether Harry's apologies actually make sense. Is it plausible that she would have so little interest in fairness?
I'm not talking about whether you think some, or many, women (or girls) would behave like that, but whether it makes sense for Hermione.
It isn't creepy, but it's very impersonal so far as relationships are concerned.
I agree with your perception that a lot of pickup discussion seems impersonal in the sense that it discusses commonalities across large groups of women. Why is this? Is it a "bug" in pickup, or a "feature"? In my view, the answer is "both."
A lot of knowledge in pickup is about the stages of the interaction that occur before you can really get to know someone on a personal level. You have to make a good enough impression for someone to even want to sit down with you and let you get to know them. As a result, it doesn't work to build models of people completely on-the-fly from the ground up in the middle of interacting with them.
Until you can get to know someone on a personal level, all you have to work with is an impersonal initial model. You start with a set of priors about how someone works based on what reference classes seem appropriate, and you update your beliefs about how they work when you gain new evidence.
Pickup artists have been doing a lot of work trying to figure out the correct priors to approach women with. As you can see from how AMP differs from what you...
The problem, as I see it, is that even that link still doesn't have any hint of wanting to be with a particular woman because of her individual qualities.
Hm. I guess you missed the part where fully one-third of the program being sold is devoted exclusively to cultivating curiosity about, and appreciation for "her individual qualities." ;-)
That being said, from a marketing perspective, there's no need to discuss what qualities the reader is looking for, since those will be distinct to the individual reader. Instead, the copy assumes only that they be women that the reader wants to have a deeper connection with.
(I'm not sure about the testimonials on that page, but I have seen others on the site from men who purchased some of this company's programs in order to improve their connection with a girlfriend or spouse.)
An important piece of background info, by the way. The number one question received by PUA trainers, or asked on PUA forums, etc. is, "How can I get that one girl I like?" (followed by, "How can I get back that girl I like that I blew it with?")
What guys actually want, and what they like to signal to other guys that they want, aren't alw...
One thing I do find myself wondering about this latest chapter is why neither of these two Most Brilliant Students (Hermione and Draco) seem to have thought of "Accio Broom!" or "Wingardiam Leviosa" instead of pursuing Harry with Gecko Gloves. If one or both of them is flying while Harry's got his hands stuck to a wall, they win. Also, since they've been fighting Chaos soldiers using hover charms to move while using ball bearings to make the floors impassable, they should have at least tried to adapt and use that strategy (granting that they can't use brooms or other means of flight due to rules of engagement or some such) when facing Harry on the roof. They need to work on their OODA Loops. ;)
Hi, first comment from me. I recently was linked to the fanfic, and then happened to also read some of the discussions here.
Just in case: contains comments on chapters 17 and 29.
I have a few questions, both related to the fanfic and (a bit) unrelated:
Concerning suspension of disbelief and James Randi. I was one of the readers whose suspension of disbelief was broken. Indeed, I did think until now that the virtues of a skeptic are similar - or even the same - as those of a scientist. Rather than just substituting the name of another skeptic who is less kn
By reading about high-status people, you pretend you're high-status too. Fiction is escapist. Nobody empathizes with the Muggles in HP - they identify with Harry, or Hermione, or Ron or another Wizard.
Some wild hypotheses:
Horcruxes As Mind: If we assume there is no soul, then a Horcrux must preserve the mind. At least, part of it. Perhaps what is preserved is some random subset of the person's memories, desires, priors and weights. Or perhaps the division is along some nice mental function. The container probably has some extra functions (see below). It's a play on the phrase "cached thoughts"!
Losing Your Mind Step 1: Tom Riddle was probably brilliant, and more complex than Voldemort in his final days. Perhaps you lose the part of your mind en...
Ch. 40:
Interesting that Harry said "besides Avada Kedavra" rather than "besides Imperius". (I suppose it's that "intent to kill" acting up again.) But I wonder how easy it would be to Imperius someone into being more rational.
According to Rowling's description, the Imperius curse is a lot like Heinlein's slugs: the controlled person keeps all their capabilities, but feels no worry or feeling of responsibility, and they want whatever the controller wants them to want. To make them more rational, the controller would essentially have to do their thinking for them. It's most useful for making someone else into your secret agent.
The thing I find most intriguing about the Imperius curse is that it's possible for someone under it to cast the curse on someone else. And several people can be controlled by a single Imperius-caster. This means that, if enough people could perform the curse, you could theoretically turn the entire world into your brainwashed slaves by setting up an Imperius tree.
Of course, your commands would be passed on through the imperfect interpretation of O(log n) intermediaries, where n is the size of the controlled population.
Is anyone collecting the Author's Notes in a publically-accessible place? Or is there a good reason (aside from aesthetic considerations) why they disappear?
I have the notes for chapters 12, 17, 18, 19. It probably makes the most sense to have them all in one location, so I can send you them if you want to add them to your page.
Eliezer said he was writing Methods because he was having trouble writing his Rationality book.
Now, I find this confusing. If you're having trouble writing, the last thing you need is another book, competing for your attention. Perhaps if the second book had been more scholarly, he could have procrastinated from it by writing the rationality book, but this isn't the case here.
Equally, if it's rapid and constant feedback he needs, I'm sure we could find some, somewhere on the internet. -We'll all buy the book anyway, and a plausible pre-commitment should be...
If you're having trouble writing, the last thing you need is another book, competing for your attention.
This is not generally true. This is true iff the reason you are having trouble writing is because there are too many other demands on your time. If you can sit down to write, with nothing else to do for the next six hours, and plunk out a pathetic WPM because you're blocked or distractable or frustrated or depressed - then this isn't the case. In such a case many writers find that the way to get over the block is to write something else - something they can write copiously, enjoyably, without running into the same problems. Such as Harry Potter fanfiction.
"Enjoy" isn't necessarily the relevant metric from which to predict productivity. I enjoy drawing my webcomic, and it only takes me a couple hours to do each one, but I haven't the patience to do more than one page a week - not because I don't enjoy it, but because my brain resists too much of the same thing spaced together too closely. Conversely, I don't think I could be said to "enjoy" some of the pointless Flash games that have eaten entire days of my life singlehandedly, but I went on playing them anyway.
Thought on Chapter 39 re ghosts (and possibly paintings)
If ghosts in the MoRverse are essentially echos/final states of someone, while they perhaps aren't people, would they effectively implicitly encode the final brain information, thus, while not exactly the person, would essentially contain the person "in storage/paused" (ie, act as a magical equivalent of cryo)
Also... the animagus issue is at least a partial evidence for the other side, given that a human mind managed to continue working in a cat brain, (or so it would seem)
What does "Xanatos" (as mentioned several times in the current Author's Note) mean? I'm not familiar with that reference.
P.S. That's one sexy PDF! And wow, 641 pages — I think that's already about the length of the sixth book.
Xanatos is a mastermind from Gargoyles whose convoluted plots usually relied on the heroes stopping one scheme in order for the real objective to be attained. He became eponymous for such plots, especially on TV Tropes. (Sorry in advance for wasting your next few days.)
I just caught up on the last ten chapters.
I feel like the entertainment value is trending up, perhaps because most of the transparent lectures-for-the-reader material is off the author's chest, or that the characters are taking on a reality of sorts in his head. Sometimes the cuteness is formed of stock elements, but I feel like there are also real moments of discovery and invention in the interactions.
I like Harry's poetic exposition of moral sentimentalism in chapter 39:
There is no justice in the laws of Nature... no term for fairness in the equations of motion. The universe is neither evil, nor good, it simply does not care. The stars don't care, or the Sun, or the sky. But they don't have to! We care! There is light in the world, and it is us!
This reminds me of the video trailer (complete with a soundtrack by Talking Heads and Muse!) I made for "desire utilitarianism" aka "desirism," a version of moral sentimentalism I held at...
I have an argument for why telling someone that there's a new chapter of MoR hurts them!
Say that
Then if you alert someone to MoR before they would have naturally thought of it, you increase the length of time during which they are at risk of checking ff.net and being disappointed.
I have actually been moved by this argument in the case of the one person I know IRL who reads MoR.
Ch. 33-34 Author's Note: "It is a general law of MoR that no one is ever holding the Idiot Ball."
We know (from Ch. 42) that Sirius is in Azkaban. Canon!Sirius was thrown in without a trial, and without having been administered veritaserum; however, this would seem to require the Ministry and Dumbledore to both be holding the Idiot Ball, violating the above rule. Alternately, Sirius could have been obviated personally by Voldemort, prior to his death (I assume that an obviation subtle enough to escape notice would require Voldemort), but this stri...
Chapter 41 (So spoiler alert and chapter notification.)
(Fun chapter and all... go Neville! But...)
Harry is a total wuss. What on earth is he doing going about with grotesque supplication and begging for forgiveness?
I bet he hasn't had the Anglo/muggle training about not hurting girls
So Eliezer fell prey to counterfactual muggling while writing that part?
Theory: Quirrelmort is helping Harry not (just) to become his pawn, or to rule in his stead, or to get him to adopt Voldermort's value system, but simply/also because Harry is Voldermort's Horcrux, and Voldermort wants his Horcrux to survive.
Harry wins. At least, I am presuming he is actively trying to weaken the Draco/Lucious alliance and enforce cooperation between Draco and Hermione. Losing a game to achieve that would perhaps be the first example of Harry doing something that wasn't motivated by his ego.
Now, I don't recall, is there any tangible motivation for the generals to keep winning these games now that the wish has been decided?
"Tell me, Harry, what evil could you accomplish if a Dementor were allowed onto the grounds of Hogwarts?" ... "Gur Qrzragbe vf n qvfgenpgvba," Harry said.
I spotted this one right away because it matched a certain pattern of thought that I use relatively often. Rirel gvzr V'z qevivat va n gvtug fcbg naq gelvat gb nibvq uvggvat fbzrguvat ynetr naq fnyvrag, V znxr fher gb nfx zlfrys: Nz V cnlvat fb zhpu nggragvba gb gur ovt guvat gung gurer fbzrguvat ryfr gb juvpu V'z abg cnlvat fhssvpvrag nggragvba?
I just finished reading chapter 36 and loved every word. Not taxing rational complexities but still incisive. My favourite part was "The dining room table was much longer than six people - er, four people and two children". Offhand and innocent sounding but still utterly brutal commentary!
Ok, that was a blatant lie. My favourite part was Harry and Hermione being such an utterly adorable couple. Aside from the signs of unacknowledged romance they were both acting so much more human than they ever had before.
But now I must drag myself away and save...
Depending on the soldiers' motivations, would it make sense for them to secretly adopt/publicly declare allegiance to 'the side that is going to win' ?
Would it make sense for one of the general's (probably Harry) to encourage their soldiers to adopt/declare this?
At this point, wouldn't it be stupid for draco/hermione to not coordinate their use of spies against harry? It only makes sense for them to agree to not use spies against each other.
"But your comprehension of me, I fear, is sorely lacking."
I agree with Dumbledore, and I hope that Eliezer does too. (Not that I agree with Dumbledore in everything, far from it, just this one line.)
On second thought, it seems clear that Eliezer must agree with this line. Because otherwise he could not have made it so obvious to me that Qhzoyrqber unf jnagrq gb qvr sbe fbzr gvzr abj ohg unf ersenvarq bhg bs pbaprea sbe bguref, although Harry doesn't understand this.
..."There is no justice in the laws of Nature [...]. The universe is neit
Just wanted to share some Milk ads I found that reminded me of your fanfic. Just switch the girl's glasses to the boy and you have Harry and Hermione. :P
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/__XCWUd8FFjQ/TGF-l7Ny2LI/AAAAAAAAK4I/O4D9RDhBZuo/s1600/MilkTurkey1.jpg
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/__XCWUd8FFjQ/TGF-q73rwdI/AAAAAAAAK4Q/LILHIHVcHHI/s1600/MilkTurkey2.jpg
Chapters 33-34: why didn't Draco and Hermione institute a policy of "traitors don't get to fight in the next battle" after the first battle with traitors? Why didn't Quirrell or Harry notice that all Muggle armies use top-down dictatorial control and this isn't something special or scary? Why did Hat-and-Cloak bother talking to Zabini before Obliviating him?
Ch. 34:
Presumably, by Occam's Razor of Fiction (or whatever the appropriate TVTrope is), Mr. Hat-n-Cloak = Santa Claus?
I was betting Mr. Hat-n-Cloak = Quirelmort. (Remember that after the little scene Harry witnessed, he had to rush off. Perhaps to catch up and meet with Zambini? And the ultimate purpose of this was to arrange for Harry to further mistrust Dumbledore? At least, that was my very first thought, although now I'm thinking there were probably easier ways to accomplish that.)
Not sure if Eliezer has mentioned or considered this... but these stories should totally be the lead in parables to his book of rationality, G.E.B. style. Just read the whole thing yesterday, really enjoyed / enjoying it. Favorite concepts: intent to laugh, Draco's "most people are stupid, and you have to look good in front of them anyway", and transfiguration of parts.
If Robin Hanson were here he would undoubtedly call this "hero porn."
Chapter 34: I can't tell who outplotted whom at the end. Neither Quirrell's nor Dumbledore's plots were completely revealed. If Hat-and-Cloak is Quirrell, why did he bother talking to Zabini before obliviating him? And why did Dumbledore ask Hermione to make that specific wish?
ETA: There is now a third thread, so send new comments there.
Since the first thread has exceeded 500 comments, it seems time for a new one, with Eliezer's just-posted Chapter 33 & 34 to kick things off.
From previous post:
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.
