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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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Hermione/Griphook isn't completely wrong enough to qualify.
Chapter 42
Is it really Black/Pettigrew? Because I'm not sure in what sense that would be 'completely wrong'. But maybe I've just been hanging out with too many yaoi fangirls.
I told someone in advance; in particular, I told them there would be a completely wrong ship, they guessed Fred/George, I told them "not wrong enough", and then said "Sirius and Pettigrew". They said, "OH, THAT'S JUST WRONG". So I figured that, yes, that was justifiably describable as "completely wrong". Also, the fact that I googled obvious spellings of the ship and found that it only seemed to have been done once or twice (I forgot the exact number), in a fandom that has a convention for using "Snumbledore" to indicate Snape+Lupin+Dumbledore, seemed to suggest that it was pretty damned wrong.
That was me. I still agree with my earlier comment, but I must say that you carried it off in the story in a remarkably natural way. It seemed to just come out as a perfectly natural fact about the universe, not something awful as it is when informed by canon, fan fic, and the horrible depiction of Pettigrew in the films.
Really? I'm surprised that that ship is that rare. It always struck me as one of the more plausible ones. This seems to reflect a general pattern that whatever makes ships common is not very correlated with their plausibility.
Yes, this seems very consistent, except for canon ships, ships of minor characters, and MY favorite non-canon ship, which is popular and plausible :P
Which non-canon ship is that?
I was being (mostly) facetious, but Sirius/Remus.
I approve of this ship.
Are you a Shoebox fan?
Hell yes I am a Shoebox fan.
What does Shoebox mean in this context? (This is one of the few cases where I think I've got a good excuse for asking instead of Googling.)
It does. None of the four possible combinations of Pettigrew, Black and Lupin seems remotely unlikely. The fact that in the Sirrius-Pettigrew case one of them killed the other doesn't particularly reduce the plausibility either (in the real world or in fiction!)
I assume you mean in MoR rather than canon?
No. Reconstructing from what I wrote way back then I seem to be referring to the fact that it is not unusual for lovers of any kind to kill each other.
--François de La Rochefoucauld, Maximes 72
Congratulations on a completely wrong ship done completely right.
Professor Summers/Author insert?
Can you do worse? Try harder.
In my secret SIAI slash fics, I ship you with a tsundere Nick Bostrom. Is that worse?
Maybe an acausal ship? Say, Harry / Riddle?
Sinhababu's 2008 Pacific Philosophical Quarterly article is the definitive essay on acausal ships.
Lewis may actually have heard of the physics, but Sinhababu seems to think of many worlds as a purely philosophical construct.
Only on Less Wrong does the phrase "acausal ship" make sense.
I'm not sure it even makes sense here...
Now it does.
Hedwig/Quirrelmort. Dog!Sirius/Firenze. Cat!Mcgonagall/Nagini.
But the Hedwig can never be ...
Oh yes, she can be. Even hedgehogs and porcupines can be, contrary to a somewhat popular opinion.
MoR!Harry / canon!Harry. Must be done. (Maybe a three-way with Clarence the Angel, who was clearly responsible for bringing them together.)
I think MoRDraco and canonDraco would be funnier.
The problem is 'wrong' and 'worse' here operate on multiple dimensions and are highly subjective. Fred/George is one way to go.
That can't possibly be original.
It's so, so not.
There are 252 results on FanFiction.net for Fred/George fics genre-tagged with "Romance". I'm sure that's vastly underestimating the true number of fics with Fred/George twincest.
"Misestimating" may be closer to the mark - it looks to me like there's there's a lot of threesomes in that list. That said, check out the degree of interest on Livejournal. Or, for that matter, the first bullet under "Fan Works" on the TV Tropes "Twincest" page.
But Nicolas Flamel is married!
And I'm still not sure if that's completely wrong enough to qualify. I tried to get some wrongness from the perspective of canon and some just plain squick into each of those suggestions.
I was being silly - the joke was that this was the only thing I chose to object to out of the list.
The relevant trope being I Take Offense To That Last One. Or, depending on perspective, Arson Murder And Jaywalking. Warning: TV Tropes (obviously).
At this rate, if the FAI problem isn't solved before nasty AI's arise accidentally, I think the immediate cause of failure will be TV Tropes.
I now have the image of an UFAI tiling the universe with TV Tropes stuck in my head.
Sadly, the best I can come up with is Lensman!Harry / James Randi.
No, wait. Gandalf / Obi-Wan Kenobi.
Okay, cat!McGonagall/Dobby and Crabbe/Fawkes are both completely wrong enough to be competitive.
But of course, it's more impressive if the completely wrong ship is less high-entropy - that is, if you don't have to dip so low in the search ordering to find it.
Incidentally, I tried to look it up, and as far as I can tell, this particular ship has been done exactly once before. Surprising, considering how near the characters are in canon. I suppose it's just that wrong.
What about a high-entropy but suitable ship, like Sorting Hat/Voyager Horcrux? The intelligence without sentience and non-intelligent vital spirit seem like a perfect match for each other.
Perfect. (But I note that the sorting hat doesn't have intelligence. It piggy-backs off the wearer's.)
A relationship with a non-sentience doesn't seem to me to be something I'd really call a "relationship" in that sense.
Someone really doesn't like this entire branch of conversation. Even the parent was downvoted. (I went through and removed all the -1s myself.)
The problem is that the pairings feel too reasonable higher up in the search ordering. For example, I considered Moaning Myrtle / ?, Hagrid / ?, and Trelawney / ? but couldn't find other high-search-order matches at fanfic-SL4. With students characters I found it especially difficult, as magical teenagers are just too plausibly randy + weird.
Hey Mr. Tambourine Man, play a song for me...
Firenze/Hagrid?
It should feel at least somehow wrong but it actually does not. Then again, I suspect that most "happenings" that include Hagrid could pretty soon end with a grave medical emergency of some sort, generating copious amounts of squick.
Luna/Draco/Karkaroff?
(I wonder how many of those (that consist only of canon characters) have already been done. Probably all of them.)
Btw, after some complaints about suspension of disbelief, I substituted Michael Shermer for James Randi.
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?)
That was the complaint.
Personally I think a lot of people are confusing expert skepticism with expert science, but if the reader says you're messing with their suspension of disbelief, the reader is always right. Substituting Michael Shermer just makes it a Shout Out instead of an actual conspiracy theory.
Obscure technical tangent but no, they are not. The reader can be confused about the meaning of the phrase, introspectively weak, using the claim purely as a rhetorical soldier or, as is most likely to be the case, some combination thereof.
They're still right. If that's what happened to the reader and broke their suspension of disbelief, that's what happened. It doesn't matter if the reader made a mistake. Your text caused that mistake.
There's this principle, which is good to apply when you can; and then there's the principle of choosing your audience. If you explain a fact in plain language in one sentence, you will miss some percentage of skimmers. If you bring it up four times, you will catch more skimmers and lose anyone who wants a faster pace and less repetition. Similar balances hold for what things do and do not cost suspension of disbelief. If you obey the reader who finds Randi to be a challenge to that suspension, then you weaken your hold on the reader who thought the original version of the tidbit was charming, and has never heard of this replacement fellow. And the reader who disapproves of excessive editing after the fact.
I shouldn't need to explain this to you. You have authored essays on the concept of 'subjectively objective' and my statement was quite clear and even noted that it was purely a technical tangent. In fact, the upvote on its parent was mine.
"What the reader says" is not the same thing as "what happened to the reader". 'What happened to the reader' can be fully determined by the timeless state of reader themselves but is not necessarily the same thing as what the reader says. Just as someone who says "my prior for A is 0.34" when their prior is actually "0.87" is wrong, despite the fact that priors are subjective. Subjective does not mean what people say about themselves must be true.
Still false.
True.
As Eliezer says, a lot of people confuse expert skepticism with expert science...
Randi in real life, as far as I can tell, would not "scientifically investigate magic", but instead, whenever anything happens that looks to some people like magic, he tries to cover it up and pretend it never happened.
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.
Agreed
I did have some issues there, but I don't think it was that serious.
The $1M prize is a clever way of finding muggleborns! (though of course anyone doing real magic is whisked away and declared a failure)
Three way between Kreature, Umbrage, and Filch. Actually, make it a four way by adding a Dementor. (Since we know from book 6 that they have some means of breeding)
There, is that worse enough? :)
Hermione/Umbridge/dementor.
+Haggrid
It's true, every orgy is better with a half-giant.
And you just know that Hagrid would bring a pet or two.
Okay, I think we can end this thread now.
Got it. Something else for the weirdtopia?