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gwern comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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I can't reconcile that theory with the combined Voldemort-Quirrel history. (I did think of it after the discussion about scientists nearly dooming humanity.)
I don't think it works. Quirrelmort snuck into NASA in the '70s, when the Voyagers launched. That is, decades before his defeat. Quirrelmort knew of Voyager, knew where to find it, knew what building, what campus, how to defeat the many security systems, and so on. This bespeaks an intimate and long-standing interest in NASA's projects. Given the horcrux is a large fraction of his life, it also means Quirrelmort trusts rockets a great deal. Which means he trusts in The Power of Science.
Nukes, nuclear winter, and other existential risks were definitely common knowledge in the '70s. Quirrelmort couldn't've possibly missed them, especially with things like Project Orion. So, he knows muggles can kill all humanity and also wizards; he believes they might do it; and yet, it's only after the Black Swan of Harry that Quirrelmort suddenly realigns all his priorities?
Well, I'm sure a good author could write that and make me believe it. But I'm not going to make myself believe just to explain away Quirrel's speech.
I agree with ewbrownv's theory in most particulars except for the part where Voldemort experiences a shift in personality post-Harry Potter. I think it more accurate to say that for a very long time it has been his goal to unite Magical Britain/Humanity under one leader who was capable of dealing with the threat posed by Muggles and Science. He initially tried to united them by force and fear, but has come to think that it would be easier/better to united them behind the much beloved Harry Potter, who he thinks he can control.
I think there was a personality shift along with the change in strategy. Voldemort was too arrogant and power-hungry to be anything but the leader - he needed to learn to lose before he could be content to pursue his goals in this subtler way.
This is the natural next step - he wants to become the éminence grise. I don't like this either. It's not faster. I don't see any plausible way of Harry leading and unifying magical Britain within less than 5 years, and the world would take longer, and humanity even longer. So Quirrelmort loses a good 10 years or so (and remember, he's already lost 11 years just to Harry growing old enough to enter Hogwarts). It may not be easier, since Quirrelmort has to expend a tremendous amount of effort to hide himself and plot circles around everyone. And better? He will forever be at Harry's whims, which undoes a lot of Harry's value as figurehead.
Indeed? I would hope that Quirrel by this point has been disabused of any notions that Harry is easy to control. I certainly have.
I don't think he necessarily has to spend all 11 of those years just waiting, there's plenty of other things for a plotter of his caliber to do in that time to advance their plans.
This probably mirrors Eliezer's life too much, but he could have put world domination on hold while he learns more foolproof (or less destructive) methods of world domination.
Well, all the bits after finding out about Voyager could be done with the liberal use of Imperius, legilimency and other magic.
Alright, I'll modify my intimately familiar claim. He needs to be only reasonably familiar. Up in the top few percentiles of Americans/Englishmen vis-a-vis space knowledge, but not much much higher.
However, if you assume he got in just by using Imperius, this reinforces my point about the respect Quirrelmort needs for Science. A normal arrogant wizard wouldn't even bother to ask his pet muggle NASA technician to disable all the alarm systems. ('Alarm systems? What are those? I don't detect any wards or magical traps, therefore I can just walk in and make a horcrux.')
Depending on the magical system he could well bypass them accidentally. In the Buffyverse, for example, runes designed to protect against magical detection also work against any form of modern surveillance. In the HP universe I would expect Harry's cloak to protect against any visual detection technology and a Voldemort strength anti-detection spell would probably also be sufficient. Pressure sensitive plates would be a different matter but may also be the sort of thing that a wizard would expect. In fact, a competent wizardly burglar would quite possibly levitate as a matter of course while on a job.
Apparate to wherever it's being stored, Horcrux it, apparate out. Even if there is an alarm to set off, you're in virtually no danger.
And risk the materials in the storage being thrown out as possibly contaminated or damaged beyond tolerances?
(Actually, can one apparate somewhere one has not been?)
Only if you're suicidal. It's stated that you can't, because you'd likely end up overlapping with some object; I suspect there's a good chance you could, if the target area was in space, but I wouldn't want to try it on the ground.
Another crime of the wizarding world - they are why it still costs thousands of dollars per ounce to put stuff into space.
Truly, they have much to answer for!
Choosing not to help is not, generally, considered a crime. There are of course exceptions in the case of imminent loss of life, but sending things to space is not one of them.
So while it may be, in a sense, their fault - it isn't a crime.
I lack any pithy word like 'crime' to express my sentiments; 'the Wizarding world has much disutility to answer for' does not come off right at all, and 'has much evil to answer for', while true, is a bit stronger than I'd like.
(Because no doubt someone would immediately question exactly how many lives cheap access to space would save and how many lives qualify as evil exactly?, and someone else would point out that it has significant downsides inasmuch as it democratizes weapons of mass destruction ie. heavy metal rods raining down from space on the cheap - and it's just a discussion I'd rather not get into.)
The wizarding world is not living up to its potential. :)
Which gets to the interesting question of what the wizarding world owes to muggles. Giving muggles what gwern thinks they should get would be a tremendous amount of work for wizards-- and either they force a lot of forgetting, and maybe enough isn't possible, or they radically change their society, which they like as it is. And they might be right that they'd risk serious persecution. It is certainly the case that they would suffer ridiculous persecution. They'd be chased by paparazzi-- isn't Rita Skeeter enough?-- and harassed by wannabees.
The help/reward ratio reminds me of The Marching Morons.
Forget crimes of inaction-- what about the fact that the wizarding world erases memories in order to prevent their secret from getting out?
I think it qualifies as a black swan even if Voldemort set it up. Black swans are just extremely rare, hard to predict events with huge consequences.
(Missing grandparent was mine; I deleted it when I read further in the thread and discovered that Yvain had already made my point, and done a better job than I had.)
If what actually happened was that Voldemort cast the killing curse and it bounced, then yes, that'd be a black swan. But I think it's more likely that he didn't cast the killing curse on Harry at all - he just set it up to look like he did and then went underground, as part of some larger plan. If that counts as a black swan, many complicated plots would too, and I'm pretty sure I've never seen the term used that way.
How complicated does a plot need to be? 9/11 is the standard black swan, and took fairly complicated plotting, though it doesn't involve the level of misdirection that you're attributing to Voldemort.
It may just be a case of me not being fully aware of the common uses of the term, then.
I would consider 9/11 a black swan event from the US's perspective, but not from al-Quaeda's - it's rare for a terrorist group to make (or at least succeed at) a display of that scale, but it's not hard to predict such things when you're the one planning them, and that seems to me to be the more relevant characteristic. The term also seems to be used specifically for events with primarily negative outcomes. So, in the case of Harry Potter, the traditional take on the event would be a black swan from Voldemort's perspective - rare, unpredictable, and deadly - but it wouldn't be a black swan from the perspective of the rest of the wizarding world, because the outcome was good for them. If I'm right about MoR, the event still isn't perceived as a black swan by the majority of the wizarding world (because the outcome appears to be good), but it wasn't a black swan for V, either. (It would be perceived as a black swan event by the Death Eaters, but I'm considering V's perspective to be the relevant one.)
But, like I said, I may have my definition a bit wrong.
Voldemort's motives have been a mystery from the start - why would he become a Hogwarts teacher, and what does he want with Harry Potter? He must be working on some kind of plot, but what? It's not a sneak-in-and-kill-people kind of plot, judging by his behavior.
To me, the speech and the conversation with Harry afterwards aren't further mysteries - they provide some of the best clues we've gotten so far about what Quirrelmort is thinking. He sees a conflict between wizards and muggles and is trying to make sure that the wizards win. Coming to Hogwarts to teach battle magic and mentor Harry Potter could fit with that motivation, and ewbrownv does a pretty good job of filling in some more of the details.
In canon, IIRC, LV actually did want to become a Hogwarts teacher.
Regarding personality shifts; is it possible that this is another point of departure, and we're looking at a LV who made fewer Horcruces? Again IIRC, there seemed to be a linear relationship depicted in canon between Tom Riddle's physical and mental decay and the number he created.
Correct - that's the source of the supposed curse on the Defense position.
Albeit I understood EY's latest Author's Note to be saying that there was no curse on DADA in MoR canon. Is that a misreading?
Right, the issue is that JKR didn't seem to notice that there was a curse when she was writing the first book or so, and so it was made more explicit earlier in MoR.
I read it as stating that there was a curse, and everybody had noticed it, and acted accordingly (McGonagall trying to keep Quirrel through the entire year, Quirrel refusing to stay the next year.)
Ah! That makes more sense. I was reading it as "were there a curse, and everybody had noticed it, it would be god-damned fixed by now to avoid having to pay every DADA professor a zillion Galleons of danger money".
There seems to be a consensus that if there were war between wizards and muggles, the wizards would lose.
This isn't obvious to me, but I might be assuming more intelligence (both information and skill at using it) on the wizard side than they've got.
However, if we assume that wizards are reasonably competent (insert bitter laughter from anyone who's read the original books), what could they do?
My impression is that wizards don't need human civilization. It seems to me that their ability to pass unseen and destroy memories would be enough to destroy a lot of infrastructure. Would it be that hard for wizards to rule what was left?
What's the use of human weapons if you need magic just to enter wizard population centers?
Anyone who remembers the books better than I do, go ahead and tell me if there's some way for humans to resist.
One reasonably powerful wizard defector to the Muggle side could enlist other wizards via subterfuge or magical control, and such wizards could create magical items to aid the Muggles. If the Muggles were sure that they could trust such a defector, they could hand em a nuke and have em wipe Hogsmeade off the map in spite of all its anti-Muggle protections.
There are plenty of Muggle-borns, half-bloods, wizards married to Muggles, and wizards merely fond of Muggles a la Arthur Weasley, that in an all-out war, there would be considerable numbers of potential defectors.
By contrast, a Muggle defector to the wizarding side would be harder to come by per capita, and also less useful, as Muggles don't have special abilities that let them be particularly useful to wizards.
Um, I rather thought the whole point of MoR was to falsify this claim. Unless you're claiming rationality is not "special" because anyone can in principle have it.
Rationality isn't particularly common among Muggles. Like, at all. I was thinking more about the physical tools, anyway - there's nothing stopping a wizard from using Muggle tech as long as they don't have lots of magic going on nearby (or I would have expected some Muggle-born child to complain offhand about how they can never make the TV work over summer holidays and their parents are annoyed about all the brownouts). Whereas Muggles cannot use wizarding tools one bit - or even see wizarding locations.
On the other hand, wizards don't have the mental flexibility to see how muggles can be useful to them.
Muggles could just destroy the planet rather than conquering the wizards. Note the "heap of ash" comment in Quirrell's speech, which echoes what he said in chp. 20 about nukes.
People have used scorched earth attacks against their enemies, but that's if the enemies have defined territory. Does it seem reasonable that governments would engage in a nuclear spasm which would mostly destroy human territory? This is a real question.
I can imagine a nuclear spasm happening, but I was around during the cold war, and read relevant science fiction.
I realize there were some close calls[1], but is the world still as delicately balanced? Could wizards make sure the nukes stayed in their silos? My guess is that wizards have the power, but possibly not the organizational ability.
[1] Fanfiction about the unlikely absence of WWIII being the result of wizard activity?
A muggle society that doesn't know about wizards is vulnerable to sneaky tactics involving mind control and memory alteration. But in an open battle cannon!wizards don't stand a chance against a competent military force - they have superior mobility and medical care, but in every other respect magic is hopelessly inferior to technology.
Of course, a war isn't a battle. To predict how the war would go we have to explain why the muggles don't already know about wizards, which requires a drastic re-write of large sections of cannon. Any adequate justification is going to require giving the wizards god-like abilities of information control, which could easily give them the ability to win a wizard-muggle war as well.
I can't see any reason for wizards to engage in open battle against muggles.
A muggle society that does know about wizards would still be vulnerable to mind control and memory alteration-- the wizards themselves are vulnerable to such tactics. Covert defection is so easy for wizards it's almost surprising they've got as much large-scale organization as they do.
I believe that muggles do know about wizards (though perhaps no very accurately), they just don't talk about it any public sort of way. However, this is deduction, not canon.
One thing to check in canon would be the scene where the Wizarding minister pops in to the British PM and gives him a status report. I can't remember whether it is implied that PMs are routinely obliviated after their terms are up.
From the flashback scene near the beginning of Book 6 Chapter 1, where the Muggle PM first meets Cornelius Fudge:
So it's implied that no Obliviation is needed. On the other hand, I wouldn't it past Eliezer to decide that this is not credible in a story for adults. And after all, Fudge never really answered the question.
Thanks for the lookup. Yes, that implies that a limited number of muggles thought to be 'safe' are permitted to know about the wizarding world.
Somehow I rather doubt that Quirrelmort believes what he says in public speeches to the unwashed masses.
There's other evidence, including his chp. 20 "Those fool Muggles will kill us all someday!" diatribe to Harry.