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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2
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.
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Comments (696)
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?
There obviously isn't any need for Harry to be obnoxious about it. I would expect Hermione to consider that Harry owes him for that one. I would acknowledge a certain symbolic debt and fulfil demands for recompense (within reason) with grace and good cheer. But remorse of the kind Harry was throwing around is something that matters. Sometimes you really do screw up, and that's when you need forgiveness. Throwing out your biggest apologies when you did basically the right thing and would (if you were sane) do roughly the same thing again next time just cheapens the whole thing. Just how much does an apology mean if you go around apologising to people for, roughly speaking, wussing out and letting them beat you?
(Mind you, I'm evaluating Harry by the standards of the someone somewhat closer to the age that he acts than to the 11 years old that he technically is. With a few years of marinating in testosterone ahead there is hope for him yet.)
Fixed for you.
It does seem to happen that way sometimes, doesn't it? But in my observation the only cases where marinating in testosterone makes people worse in the areas of grovelling, supplication, unnecessary apologies and approval seeking are in people who refuse to update based on evidence. We can assume that unlike many nerds Harry is able to make observations from the environment and use them to realise that his strategy doesn't work and go ahead and create a better model of human behaviour and a better strategy.
In guys who are good at instinctive instrumental rationality will tend to be prompted by testosterone to, as they say, 'grow a pair'. Simply because experience tells them that the other options just don't work.
The feather-fall potions were protection against a case that wasn't supposed to happen. Harry doesn't take precautions so that he's licensed to need them, he takes precautions so that people don't get hurt. Hermione falling wasn't supposed to happen -- he endangered her for the sake of a game. He raised the stakes farther than they were supposed to go, and it was someone else who could have gotten hurt.
I don't think Harry is romantically interested in Hermione, he still thinks kissing is icky, etc.
I figured Harry gave Draco and Hermione the potion because he wanted them to triumph over him together, but in a really dramatic challenging way. If their triumph was hard-fought and dramatic they would be more likely to bond over it. Once Draco was friends with a muggleborn, he would be forever lost to the blood-purists, and Harry would have one a great victory. That is what Harry cares about the most. He obviously is willing to lose to let it happen because he engineered the Dramione alliance from the beginning.
Really? I thought those two things were entirely compatible. And rather cute. :)
First you write
Then you write
I think that you've answered your question.
And, in so doing reinforced the core thesis: Harry!Ch41 is a wuss. The overprotective thing can work, particularly when produces displays of dominance or heroism (eg. Christmas Eve dinner) but pointless supplication is the opposite of what he wants to be doing.
It totally breaks the flow of the story for me. If I am reading along empathising with the main character and he pulls stunts like this I feel a huge surge of revulsion. This is particularly the case if it seems like the behaviour is presented as a good moral that gives good results rather than "look at the naive character act like a git and then realise he needs to wise up!"
Sure, I agree with that.
But I don't agree with this:
It finally made Harry seem like a real person to me again. I like seeing how MoR!Harry (and MoR!everybody) differs from canon, but sometimes he's a little too perfect.
I expect that to happen in a later chapter. Surely EY doesn't think that Harry is acting sensibly? That would be a horror! (Unless Harry has some really devious plot that I don't anticipate, of course.)
That's just eh experience I got from chapter 36 (visiting the Grangers), my favourite chapter thus far.
I think that's the thing for me. I actually aren't so sure. Some of the other foolish things Harry has done MoR!Author seems to be trying to convey as sensible decisions. For example... the other apology Harry has made to Hermione. When Hermione had panicked and cast finate incantatem on their transfiguration work. The apology itself was reasonable but it seemed like both Harry and MoR!Author were trying to convey that casting finate was a sane thing to do. Not, for example, isolating the room and running to fetch McGonagal. Being responsible doesn't mean turning off your brain at the first sign of danger!
ETA: The latest chapter was interesting. Less nauseating but more bizarre.
Not.
Yes, but using feather-fall costs her Quirrell points! That's why she's upset. Or at least, that's one hypothesis that explain the facts. Harry's apology is unnecessary grovelly otherwise.
It's a great point and should get mentioned in the text. Even if it's only a minor reason for Hermione's annoyance, it would tie in nicely with the earlier scene of Hermione having trouble knocking on Quirrell's door.
Excellent. That is the desirable outcome. If enemies unite against you should sabotage their Quirrell points wherever convenient.
"So Granger, how about next time you want something from me you ask nicely for me to participate before you unite with Malfoy?"
They tried that, didn't they? All three generals went to Quirrell together to ask for no more traitors. Harry defected.
Eh, even if Quirrel points were the problem, Harry's apology is still unnecessarily grovelly.
Also, I don't think fire is prohibited, so did Harry warn everyone that they shouldn't try eliminating his bungee cords by burning them?
Unsurprising, and I don't see it as a problem.
Come on - Harry clearly manipulated that situation and needed to lose to make it work. Forcing Draco and Hermione to work together would not have worked nearly as well if they hadn't actually beaten them. Now Hermione doesn't think Draco is evil and irredeemable (especially since he tried to save her), and Draco was actually protecting a mudblood and then shut up and multiplied in order to win.
Wouldn't you like to know? I can think of three main categories of reasons:
In light of the fanfic's famed/notorious length, this presents some disturbing implications...
Haha, I was just going to post the "Harry is Rand al'Thor" theory myself. Clearly the best explanation.
I'm such a wrong person, I read that as "Draco made friends with a mudblood and then went forth and multiplied in order to win".
If Harry is actually in love with Hermione, is apologizing his best move? Would he do better to show more respect for her intelligence?
Or is he apologizing for something other than setting things up so that it was likely that she'd be dropped?
I'm assuming that Harry had a background plan-- to get Draco and Hermione to cooperate, and to feel as though they are on each others' side on a gut level.
Even though the "drop me" scene is cute, I'm not convinced it's plausible behavior for Draco. I bet he hasn't had the Anglo/muggle training about not hurting girls, and learning that blood purity isn't true may not have affected his reflexes.
Harry's apology may be strategic. Or he may still be learning to navigate between empathy and rationality. Or (not an attractive hypothesis) tropes may be taking over some of the story.
ETA: Perhaps that should be empathy-signaling rather than just empathy.
Er, who says Draco's grabbing Hermione because she's a girl? He's grabbing her because she's falling off the roof.
Fair point. I jumped to a conclusion.
On the other hand, it isn't dangerous for her to fall. Draco grew up in the wizarding world. I'd expect him to have a gut-level trust in the potion.
Or is Hermione showing excessive trust in the potion because it's labeled as working a certain way, while Draco has more experience with magic that doesn't quite work?
"I bet he hasn't had the Anglo/muggle training about not hurting girls"
I agree. The "don't hurt females" meme and the idea of chivalry arise from the fact that men are physically stronger than women. But in the magical world, physical strength hardly matters in comparison to magical ability, which seems to be evenly distributed between the sexes. A witch would feel angry, or perhaps just confused, at being treated like porcelain. Granted, Hermione and Harry come from the muggle world, but Draco doesn't, and he shouldn't behave like he does.
Didn't it arise, at least partially, because power and legal rights belonged to men (by decree of Heaven) and therefore it was seen as the duty of men to protect women, as an item under the general heading of protecting the weak?
What did chivalry (ed: fixed) look like in cultures other than Medieval Europe?
You mean chivalry? Wikipedia says that the European Christians actually got it from Muslims, whose version was more extreme. This probably includes the doctrine of courtly love), which is the source of chivalrous ideals on the treatment of women.
In contrast, one website says the ideal wife of a Japanese samurai would also be a strong person, so perhaps bushido took the opposite attitude. (Internet searches on this turn up too much modern stuff for me to get any good idea.)
So Eliezer fell prey to counterfactual muggling while writing that part?
MOAR
Thank You.
How is it safe to Transfigure a desk into a pig? Pigs breathe.
There was an Author's Note about this. Do we still have it anywhere?
It's been linked below by AdeleneDawner. Relevant parts:
Several reviewers have asked why dangerous!Transfiguration allows Professor McGonagall to Transfigure her desk into a pig that breathes in oxygen and breathes out a snort of carbon dioxide.
So the first answer is that I wrote that in because it was in canon, and didn't realize it was a problem until some reviewers pointed it out. Congratulations, you win.
With that said, the obvious retroactive rationalizations are as follows: (1) Professor McGonagall used a specialized Charm rather than free Transfiguration. This is the generic explanation I left open for anything in canon that doesn't fit the rules. (2) For the same reason organisms don't eat their own waste products, pigs don't breathe out anything that'll end up incorporated when another mammal breathes it in. Plants might be in trouble, but not people. (I have no idea whether this is actually true.) (3) Once magic is in the mix, things don't work by reductionist chemistry any more, they work by Forms like the ancient Greeks believed in. Just because the desk has been Transfigured into the Form of a pig doesn't mean that the carbon dioxide breathed out has an actively Transfigured Form; the carbon dioxide has had its own Form permanently transformed by something that was Transfigured, rather than having any change maintained by active magic. Contradicted to some extent by what I had McGonagall say about a constant loss of the body's matter to the atmosphere, but I could always go back and delete that. (4) The first wizards to experiment with Transfiguration didn't realize that there ought to be a problem, so there isn't one. (5) It's an emergent phenomenon
That's actually rather disappointing. This is supposed to be a story where the rules are consistent.
Sadly, being not logically omniscient, I am not capable of always perfectly living up to my endeavor to write a story with perfectly consistent rules. There are these things called mistakes.
Well, yeah, but... you could have tried to fix it, rather than just saying "whoops, guess I messed up".
ETA: I realize that could have sounded petty. The reason I'm making a big deal out of this is that the presence of inconsistencies pretty much shoots to hell our ability as fans to speculate meaningfully about the fic.
I feel reluctant to directly contradict canon in this case by having McGonagall not transform the pig, never mind the havoc it wreaks on all neighboring paragraphs. Do you have a different suggested fix?
I'm definitely in favor of a wizard did it. Word of God might be enough on this one, though a don't try this at home could still be called for.
ETA: TVTropes warning
Please don't link to known memetic hazards without appropriate warnings.
fine
A witch did it, silly.
I'm partial to adding an incantation and a stern warning.
Edit: It occurs to me that the Animagus transformation doesn't require an incantation either, so that's not a general rule about free vs. non-free Transfiguration, and it's hard to imagine that an incantation like Crystferrium ("Furniporcis"?) wouldn't give away the direction. Just the warning, then.
Yes, the big thing that's missing is the warning not to try to copy her example. Anything else can be chalked up to the Professor's leet transformation skillz.
Pavitra and Caspian's suggestions above seem good.
"She's McGonagall" is a perfectly acceptable explanation. I had assumed that McGonagall gained the ability to maintain safe transfigurations to living creatures through years of hard work in controlled conditions of the type we gain just a glimpse of when Harry is showing off his new trick. It doesn't seem all that much harder than, say, flying.
Other possibilities: (6) It was a non-breathing imitation of a pig. (7) It was inside an invisible box isolating it from the surrounding air.
OK, let's take (1). Does McGonogall's lesson still make sense?
Mostly. If she used an incantation (which I was under the impression was necessary for non-free Transfiguration) then the narration didn't mention it. Also, she should have pointed out explicitly to the class that the desk-to-pig transformation was non-free and should never be attempted using free Transfiguration. Other than that, no objections.
I don't think she said whether it was a desk-to-pig or pig-to-desk transformation, she'd told people not to guess and she asked Harry to wait until after class about his speculation.
But she should have also warned against using free Transfiguration to convert something into an animal. It's kind of covered under not transforming things into liquids which can evaporate but you'd expect her to be explicit.
She might also have pointed out that guessing whether it was a pig-to-desk or desk-to-pig free transformation would have got the wrong answer either way. Sure it's a trick question, but so was asking whether Harry cared to guess in the first place.
Perhaps trust in entropy is enough--in a life only long enough for 10^2 exhales, a pig would exhale 4g of CO2. Even if it were oxygen, and the classroom's inhabitants managed to inhale all of that before it untransfigures, that's .1g apiece among 40 students, and guaranteed to be well-mixed in molecule-sized pieces in the blood stream. So each student would lose thousands of red blood cells and have some extra load on their blood filtration organs, but not enough that anybody would be likely to notice a problem.
I think it was way less than 100 exhales, and the breaths may not have had time to travel away from the pig, especially if she could guarantee there'd be no wind. So maybe she knows how long something can safely be transfigured into a pig or a liquid, but has a simpler rule for the students on their first class.
Or maybe she could create a magical barrier around the pig so it was as safe as if it were in a glass box.
2 and 3 don't seem to work - even if the carbon dioxide isn't a problem, pigs evaporate! And, now that I think of it, so does wood unless it's completely desiccated.
This should be safe if done briefly, right?
When it turns back into a table, we get bubbles in the table and sawdust in the air.
If a large amount of transfigured air has been incorporated into the bodies of bystanders (and pigs do breathe out oxygen, or at least humans do, because our lungs aren't terribly efficient), then we might have a problem.
That doesn't seem like a sufficient degree of caution, considering how McGonagall behaves with respect to other potentially dangerous Transfigurations. She doesn't say to only Transfigure things briefly into liquids because of evaporation, she says not to do it at all.
And she especially wouldn't do a potentially dangerous Transfiguration as the introduction to a Transfiguration safety lecture without making a big deal out of all the precautions she had to take to do it. In fact, she specifically says that the students could guess the direction of the Transfiguration based on safety principles, and based on safety principles, it should have been pig to desk, not desk to pig.
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.
I was going to say Mr. Hat and Cloak/Blaise's Mom. Except that I'm kinda hoping that Mr. Hat and Cloak IS Blaise's Mom.
There were some sparks between Harry and the Sorting Hat.
Or there could be something between Fred, George, Hermione, and time-turned Hermione, which would be a completely inappropriate use of a Time-Turner, but I suspect it's been done and thus would fail the originality requirement.
The Durmstrang houseboat from Goblet of Fire, must be the unconventional ship.
*ducks*
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.
Really? Fifteen percent of all yaoi fans are yaoi fanboys and eighty-five percent are yaoi fangirls? I'd like to see that statistic before I believe it. Also, you've got to keep in mind that we're talking about the set of yaoi fans who are squeeing over Harry and Draco while they're still eleven. This, to me, says "yaoi fangirl", though I fully admit I'm working from 100% stereotypes and 0% experience.
Huh? Why is yaoi fandom the relevant population?
Ah, I see what is going on. When Pavitra wrote "thinks Harry/Draco is hawt", did he mean "thinks Harry is sexy and/or thinks Draco is sexy" or did he mean "thinks that the concept of a romantic relationship between them is an exciting concept"?
The latter. And I talked about yaoi fans because Eliezer did.
FYI, X/Y is read "X slash Y" and is a way of calling out a ship.
Cool. Thx. I'm more ancient than I like to admit, and this is my first fanfic experience. I'm very proud that I didn't have to look up "ship".
I however did -- because I didn't find my correct guess plausible. (An apostrophe would help: " 'ship ".)
(Imagine if I wrote: "It was my first ence of that sort." You might be able to guess that "experience" is the most likely meaning, but it would need verification and still feel weird afterward.)
I also don't understand "call out": does it mean "refer to", or "advocate"?
I'm tempted to start using "ence" as an abbreviation for "experience". I like the sound of it and it seems like a word that deserves a monosyllabic version.
I know people who use "tech" for "technique," "grade" for "upgrade," etc. Once you get used to it, it really is more efficient, but at the price of making it more difficult for outsiders to understand what you're saying.
Bah. Those two abbreviations are terrible. People use those? There is no context where tech(nique) is used in which the existing use of tech(nology) wouldn't be appropriate, given that techniques can be considered technology. Why oh why would you not use 'nique' or 'niq'? I suspect I would be willing to signal myself as an outsider so as to avoid sacrificing my dignity like that!
For a while I've wondered what exactly Robin Hanson is doing (what he's trying to signal, perhaps? I don't know) when he uses abbreviations like "med", "docs", "tech", etc. (Pretty sure there are other common ones not coming to my mind right now.) He doesn't otherwise come off as a lazy writer, he can't really pass for "folksy" (and super-contrarian econblogging isn't quite the right context for that anyway), they aren't difficult or cumbersome words...
This is the characteristic feature of jargon. (And fanfic has its jargon like anything else.)
I've seen "tech" for "technology" but not for "technique". Interesting.
That's not representative. Yaoi specifically, as opposed to fiction depicting male homosexual relationships in general, is written almost exclusively by women for girls. The issues addressed are calques of the issues that come with being a teenage girl -- some works go so far as to get the guys pregnant.
The idea was developed in the Ravenclaw girls' dorm, by the girls. They summoned a couple of professors for safety, but the word didn't spread outside of that particular group - otherwise there would have been a large and varied mass to see the show, regardless of romantic interest.
Incidentally, is sexual orientation usually well-established by the age of eleven?
Very good point. My objection is rendered moot.
While this is also a relevant point, I would expect it to have nearly the opposite effect. 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.
Actually, I've just thought of more stuff. Why would there be gender-segregated dorms in this world?
Unless they're trying to deliberately encourage homosexuality in teenagers as a strategy for avoiding accidental teen pregnancy. This would also explain Lupin's possible attitude (though I may be misreading) that homosexuality is a thing for the young, while adult relationships tend to be heterosexual.
On the other hand, if this were the case, I would expect the childhood sexuality taboo to only apply to heterosexuality, in which case Lupin shouldn't have had the "when you're older" reaction to telling Harry about Sirius and Peter's relationship.
Remember also that the girls' dorms are magically protected against boys, but not conversely (at least in Gryffindor, at least midway in Harry's career). IIRC, Hermione derides the rule as old-fashioned (but then, she's Muggle-born, so that proves nothing).
A wise strategy, I would think. One reason why teen pregnancy rates are higher in the more relgious areas of the United States?
This was the attitude of the classical Greeks (and then Romans), at least for men.
I think that has more to do with the idea that it's immoral to provide kids with sex education. (This theory would be falsified if there's a significantly larger difference in teen pregnancy than in teen STDs.)
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..
This is a good point.
Is there a specific reason to be significantly more concerned about male-on-female rape than the other three combinations?
It's by far the most common, outside of certain highly artificial settings that don't apply to Hogwarts.
Boarding schools and prisons create similar social scenarios. I believe male-male rape/harassment/"hazing" is/was a significant problem in many all-male British boarding schools.
Fraternities fit into more or less the same category, and likewise frequently feature various forms of ritualized homosexuality. It just isn't considered acceptable to acknowledge this; being the receptive partner in gay male sex has been considered damaging to masculinity for thousands of years, in at least the West and Japan.
I'm not sure 'by far' is appropriate in this context. In the US, for instance, 91% of reported rape victims are female and 9% are male, with estimates usually of about 10% reporting for males and 40% reporting for females, which would yield an actual rate of about 28% of rape victims being male. That's hardly an inconsiderable number.
Though I'm not sure how many of those are in prison, however.
Where are you getting your numbers? They sound to me like they come from the National Crime Victimization Survey. These are not reports to police, but the result of asking random people if they have been raped. I don't think that they sample prisoners, so they are probably highly biased against prison rape, but should catch some.
I presume you refer to, for example, prisons? Anywhere with sex based segregation and artificially enforced proximity (that rules out ostracism.)
Yes, I had prisons in mind.
I know it's by far the more common in the real world, but MoR!Hogwarts seems to differ significantly in the politics of gender and sexuality from most of real life, and I wanted to investigate how those differences would affect this situation. Since I don't yet have a clear theory of mind regarding why rape occurs or is gender-biased, I was trying to gather explanations from the rest of the peanut gallery.
I must have missed the part where we see that MoR!Hogwarts in general differs in gender politics and sexuality than most of real life, except for the "girls can compete in contact sports/armies with boys" bit, but that's a logical consequence of inherent equality of magical power. Lupin and Harry accepted a Peter/Sirius relationship without any squick, but Harry's a child of the Enlightenment (who, by dint of his uber-prodigy-ness likely didn't have jock-type macho-boys or religious conservatives as his formative peer group) and Lupin's a member of a disadvantaged minority himself. Do we have any evidence that someone like Lucius Malfoy would not be about as homophobic as the average medieval baron, of the sort who would teach his son that raping uppity peasant girls with impunity is one of the bennies that comes with "good breeding?" Or that, say, Seamus Finnigan wouldn't have the same kind of teen-boy homophobia/bullying reaction that's fairly common in our world?
This is not the case. Many gay people know that they are gay at a young age, often well before puberty. Or they realize that they are somehow different from the others around them. Human sexuality is not as simple as an on-off switch with the whole system coming into play when people hit puberty.
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.)
On reflection, I was generalizing from one example as well. I was pretty sexual-hangup-y as a kid. I didn't begin to suspect I was gay until I was seventeen, and it was another two or three years after that before I was comfortable with the idea that I had a sex drive at all.
Where is this number coming from? The incidence rate of male homosexuality is pretty low and guys are generally less likely to go squee over things anyway.
I heard it somewhere.
WIkipedia says that estimates range from one to twenty percent, and I would expect most estimates to be low because living in a still largely homophobic society biases reporting.
Yet often those making the estimates try to compensate for that bias, particularly those who are motivated to report higher statistics.
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.
And just where did this whole 'unanimously vote that Draco should drop Harry' thing come from? Why would a bunch of girls (or anyone) unanimously vote for something so boring? When you have seen someone voluntarily have himself beaten to a pulp how could it be remotely exciting to see him float down a building in controlled circumstances when a girl had already done it voluntarily without preparation? That doesn't sound remotely like the sort of things girls would suggest.
It does seem odd that in the past Harry has made sure that he doesn't moddycoddle Hermione in the battles, realising that she would be insulted if he did and yet now acts in completely the opposite manner. And Hermione and even Draco don't find it strange...
This could be a situation where nobody really likes the outcome, but (since it was obviously a very fair punishment) they all treated it with respect (wanting to signal that they liked it). So nobody suggested anything really exciting, figuring that nobody else would go along with it. (There's a name for that fallacy of decision, where everybody votes for their second choice to be nice, since they think that it's the first choice of everybody else.)
Or else, they each had a secret plan (to summon Harry to their arms).
This is honestly making me feel a bit aspie over here. As I understand the rules for social interaction, dropping a 12-year-old girl off the roof should generally be recognized as a misdeed. Hermione, as I was modeling her, was annoyed enough by having to climb the icy castle walls, and after falling off the roof, had gone beyond annoyance into a kind of detached curiosity. Bear in mind that she doesn't know anything about Harry's plans for Malfoy; so far as she knows, Harry is doing all of this for no other reason than to be annoying. I had trouble understanding wedifrid's reaction to Harry and hypothesized that he enjoyed empathizing with a dominant character and didn't want that dominant character to apologize, but now Nancy thinks Hermione is being unfair and, well. I feel a bit aspie because I don't quite understand where it's all coming from. Canon!Hermione in particular seems like she'd be really really annoyed with Harry making her climb up an icy wall and then getting her dropped off the roof. She'd forgive it in a flash as part of the war against Voldemort, but not if it was, say, part of a prank. What am I missing here?
I approve of sane apologies.
IMO you aren't missing anything. I found your depiction of Hermione's reaction, and Harry's reaction to her reaction, quite realistic. The other commenters are demanding 12-year-olds to be unrealistically sane. In fact most women I know would behave the same way at 20, and a lot of men too.
But 12 year olds are sane - at least relative to what will be going on three years hence. If I were to criticize EY's handling of this stuff, it is that he should have followed canon by putting off dealing with romance issues until the kids are in their third or fourth Hogwarts year.
But, if EY has to drag romance into this story, I wish he wouldn't have the heads all of his minor female characters so filled with romantic mush and gossip about same that they don't seem to be much use for any other purpose. Eliezer gives his male characters a variety of idiosyncratic, yet typical young male foibles - twin Weasley pranks, Ron Weasley quiddich mania, Harry's enthusiasm for things military, even Draco's misogyny. I wouldn't mind if he teased his female characters regarding a variety of equally silly and endearing stereotypically female traits. But it seems he can only think of one.
Dropping a twelve year old girl off a roof is generally recognized as a bad idea in this world, but we don't have magic spells.
Hermione was enthusiastic about the war, and had asked to be dropped.
Since I might be a weird person myself, I've set up a poll about the plausibility of MOR Hermione.
Meanwhile, I recommend Jo Walton's Among Others, a fantasy novel with autobiographical elements about the coming of age of an intelligent, stubborn young woman. It won't be out till January, but I'll lend you my advance reading copy if you'll PM me your snail address.
Tentative theory: MOR Hermione is shaped by a combination of feminism and PUA, and the result is extremely odd. In any case, I find Harry, Draco, and McGonigle quite plausible, and I wonder if you've used different methods for creating them than you used for Hermione.
Early returns on the poll suggest that I was generalizing from one example. More people find Hermione plausible than not. Admittedly, it's a small sample, but I'm not expecting the results to reverse.
I know nothing about PUA except what I read in other people's blog comments, and this part honestly leaves me baffled. Wha? Amplify please?
My knowledge of PUA is almost entirely from the comments here, too. Part of what gets on my nerves about it is that it seems to have a model of relationships in which people are in them solely because of status and fertility markers. There's nothing I can see about people actually liking each other (or, for that matter, disliking each other), or not being completely fungible if a better deal comes along.
There's that bit where Harry explains Lily's choice completely in terms of status issues-- this suggests that PUA/evolutionary psychology at least seems like a plausible set of theories to you. It's possible that I'm conflating them as having more in common than they actually do.
It gets to me that Hermione seems to be thinking in terms of herself and Harry having a Relationship rather than focusing on what they actually are to each other-- I think she'd have better sense. Or maybe I just hope she would.
It's interesting that I've gotten upvoted and a couple of positive comments for my complaints about the most recent chapter, while still getting information which suggests that Hermione is generally seen as more plausible than I see her. I tentatively suggest that my suspension of disbelief is broken, while other people are seeing some specific implausibilities that don't bother them nearly as much.
One suggestion about the Ravenclaw girls' vote-- they may well be voting for the most entertaining drama for themselves rather than what's best for Hermione. This may have already occurred to you, considering that so many of them wanted to catch Harry.
In their case, more of them should have generalized from one example.
As I understand it, there are at least three separate things there: actual scientific evolutionary psychology; pop ev-psych, which is generally used as convenient rationalization for sexism and (less frequently) racism; and PUA, which is less science than engineering, but which comes with certain theories about why it works. I suspect that distinguishing the three properly probably requires a certain level of familiarity with the first one.
The fact that status influences our behaviours does not make them any less real. Nor does the fact that there are good evolutionarily explainable reasons for loyalty mean that loyalty is any less noble.
I agree that status influences our behavior. I don't agree that status is the only thing going on.
If you replaced "I don't agree that" with "I don't believe that" then it would avoid a misleading implication. ;)
I see that you made a claim that I didn't address, but I think you also missed what I was saying.
I haven't seen people who are into PUA make an explicit claim that there's nothing to relationships but status and fertility signaling. What I do see is talk about relationships as though there's nothing else. All I know about you folks is what you write, or at least how your text looks to me.
Do you remember where you saw writing that gives you this impression? I've seen PUAs talk a lot about status and fertility signals underlying relationships. I don't think that the consensus is that "there's nothing else," but I've seen some PUAs write stuff that could give that impression, such as Mystery.
I was making almost the opposite point. You addressed a claim that I wouldn't make and I was distancing myself from it!
"You folks"? I am not and have never been a PUA of any kind! You are welcome to your stereotypes but please exclude me from them. :)
I believe I've pointed this out before, but at least some "PUA" training emphasizes personal development, emotional connection, and trust as the foundation for interaction and relationships. (The word "status" is not mentioned once on that page, and if I recall correctly, it is not mentioned in any of the videos being sold there either.)
Here maybe I see (but also generalising from one example) why people like your comments but don't qutie agree with you. This is definitely what I'd expect from a 12-year old, at least in the society that I grew up in, which should be similar to Hermione's. (Come to think of it, this reminds me of my sibling at that age, although not myself.) But it's not what I would have hoped.
I don't want to bring up PUA, but...
...if you're empathizing with the character...
...then one thing you might feel here is searing embarrassment at the sight of a boy acting this way in front of a girl. I had in mind the old saw about men being attracted to looks, women to status. 'I'll do anything, I'm begging you on my knees' is utter abasement, and even if 11-year-old Harry thinks this is what normal interaction between the sexes looks like, it's still painful to see someone humiliate himself.
To be honest I would have been almost as embarrassed if Hermione had done it. And probably even more bewildered.
While it's true that the average man is more attracted to looks than to status, and the average woman is more attracted to status than to looks, be careful not to over-generalize these preferences. Harry doesn't seem to mind, for instance, that Hermione is plain looking, and admires her intelligence, while the average man prefers beautiful women noticeably less intelligent than he is. Hermione isn't particularly attracted to high status men in canon (she picked Ron over Viktor Krum, for chrissakes), and there's no indication that she's different in MoR. Neither of them fit the personality profiles that the PUA community has studied most heavily, which I've heard described as "extroverted young women of average intelligence" and... well, I haven't been informed about the type of men specifically, but I'll hazard a guess that they're not like MoR Harry. So PUA models of interaction between the sexes wouldn't give you very reliable intuitions about how Hermione and Harry should act towards one another. Never mind that they're prepubescent and applying any adult models of interaction that were developed with sexual relations in mind to them seems kind of creepy in the first place. "Relationship" aside, they're mostly friends at this point.
I mean, I agree with you that Harry's apology was rather embarrassing, but that was because it wasn't warranted by the circumstances. If he'd actually done something worthy of an abject apology to Hermione, then he should be giving one, not restraining himself in order to protect his dominance over her.
Yes, this is why I didn't want to bring up PUA -- it drags in a host of connotations which were unrelated to my point. Which was simply that loss of dignity in front of the opposite sex is far more painful for males. The PUA-disclaimer was meant to convey that, even though I attributed the difference to the evo-psych reason I gave, I didn't want to derail the conversation with this sort of thing. Ah well.
The differences are also typically exaggerated in popular culture and also in individual reports. If we compare actual behaviour to reported preferences the sexes are a whole lot more similar in their preferences (when it comes to status and money vs looks) than they tell themselves. Mind you, there is only so much faith I can place in the results of such studies (usually done in speed dating type 'laboratory' settings.)
Interesting. I'm not sure if the correct dichotomy is status vs looks either. It could very well be money vs looks with both as indicators of status, since a woman's status (and ability to confer status on a man with her attention) is often determined by her looks. Have their been studies comparing attraction to, for example, very beautiful female sex workers vs less beautiful cheerleaders? Disclaimer: I'm wildly speculating here...
Not as far as I know, but there definitely should be. I don't think there is any way such a study could not be interesting. There should also be some studies done on The Cheerleader Effect.
People kept emphasising that being dropped was safe, and it didn't feel like Hermione was that afraid of it, probably because the scene wasn't from her point of view. Maybe you could portray that a bit more. When Harry was dropped it was quite vivid that he was overcoming his fear.
Also it seemed obvious that Harry went out on the roof as part of a plan in order not to lose the game, and I assumed Hermione and Draco would have come to the same conclusion. So of course it wasn't a prank. So when Hermione suggested it was revenge for the date and Harry also had something against Draco, she was just joking about their unpleasant situation.
I can see I missed a few things there, but that's how it seemed on my first reading.
I noticed later they might think it would have been easier to win without Hermione having the gloves. So it could be somewhat plausible they'd think it was a prank or revenge, given that they don't know Harry's motives and may jump to conclusions.
Not as much as I'm missing. They were in the final stage of an important war(game), so climbing icy walls with magic technological help seems to me a minor discomfort, just part of the game. They all had Feather Fall potions, so no-one was in any danger, whatever the lizard brain thinks of looking down from a long way up. Hermione even told Draco to drop her (according to the possibly unreliable girls' chatter afterwards). Harry had no way of knowing exactly how the rooftop chase would play out, although I would guess that he secretly practiced beforehand to get an advantage.
So, what is there for Harry to apologise for, and in such an extreme manner? I was expecting something else to be revealed in 42, but apparently not.
I know nothing about canon HP, but I don't think that matters here.
(We read that play out ourselves.)
Have you ever been rock climbing? I assure you that the fact that you're safe, and even the fact that you know you're safe, does not shut off the (untrained) lizard brain, at least not the sort of lizard brain that's afraid of heights.
I haven't been rock climbing, but I can tell you that the main reason I'm scared of heights is because I get an urge to jump off, and I have to fight it back down again. If there's a full glass window or something between me and the drop, on the other hand, heights don't bother me at all.
It doesn't mean anything afterwards, though, and afterwards is when the puzzling scene happens.
Bizarrely enough, I went rockclimbing a couple of months ago. The first time in years, and the knowledge that I was safe seemed that it did make a lot of difference. At 50 metres up I deliberately violated the "don't look down" rule because I am somewhat masochistic when it comes to challenging my (miscallibrated) instincts. But the vertigo I expected just didn't come at all - I was genuinely surprised. My theory is that my "lizard brain" was already engaged with my rather stronger competitive instincts.
I find the same thing. Climbing isn't scary at all when you're tied on.
I only went climbing less than a dozen times, so I can’t be sure about “getting used to it”, but then again Hermione probably wasn’t used to dropping from castles.
When I climb a “simple” vertical wall I don’t get any vertigo or other “lizard-brain complaints” as I had expected. (I rarely get vertigo from heights in general, and among my friends I’m usually the guy closest to any ledge, with everyone telling me to get back, from a safe distance.)
However, I did once a climb an indoor route (not sure about terminology) that wasn’t just vertical, it had a kind of lateral transfer to a ledge at the top, and the part where I didn’t see a wall below me all the way down did feel like having butterflies in my stomach despite being tied to a rope. I liked it, but I can see it as a very unpleasant experience for a bookish (i.e., not a tom-boy) 11 years old girl.
Technicality: she's 12 by now; in fact, she's been 12 since mid-September. (Yes, I am a nerd.)
My own take on this. Hermione didn't have to go on the roof. She could've thought of a different method of taking Harry down. I forget if it has been specified, is there a time limit? They could've waited for harry to get tired walking about on the roof and picked him off later.
As such she is responsible for the risks she took going on the wall after Harry. Harry should have shown concern after her fall, but a full on apology does seem a bit thick.
Hermione and Harry are acting a bit out of character in these last few chapters. Canon Hermione is straightforward, sometimes even abrasive, and extremely concerned with fairness. That is why she started S.P.E.W., after all. I can understand making her more social and diplomatic in order to strengthen her above canon, but the preoccupation with fairness and justice is pretty central to her personality. Is she toying with Harry (which isn't like her), or are they both blind to how silly he's being?
This apology business doesn't strike me as cute, like Ch. 36 was. It's just strange.
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. ;)
Brooms are illegal magical artifacts, Wingardium Leviosa presumably too impractical because because it offers neither sufficient mobility to dodge nor allows for using cover so extended use (as opposed to using it just to pass obstacles) would make the levitated person an easy target (Harry can still cast with one hand while hanging on with the other and his feet), and would soon exhaust the levitating person as well. Besides they would be giving up their two to one advantage.
Good points, but I think that with some practice in teamwork of the sort employed in Neville's "Special Attacks," they could have come up with something. Say, Draco levitating Hermione horizontally out the window, so she can use a Shield Charm to cover herself completely while Draco moves her out of Harry's one-handed firing arc. Throw in a baseball-style hand-signal code between them, so if Harry is concentrating on Hermione, Draco lets her go while she casts Leviosa on herself, and he zaps Harry, or if Harry tries to take aim at Draco, Hermione drops her shield charm and fires. And this assumes that neither of them (or Genius!Harry himself, for that matter) can come up with a better flying spell than Wingardiam Leviosa.
Maybe their problem is that they weren't quite ready for that level of teamwork, though if it was me in either of their places I'd have wanted to look into developing an inventory of "Special Attack" type maneuvers after seeing them work so well for Chaos.
OTOH, the likely real reason is that the Gecko Gloves give Harry a chance to use Science! in a fun way, so the Rule of Cool applies. Still, reactionless flight is such a trivial matter in the Potterverse that I still found myself wondering why they just went out after Harry on his own terms instead of trying to wield air power against him somehow. Maybe a couple lines of dialogue along the lines of "Why don't we use [flight-based attack X]?" "We can't because Harry would just use an Indra's Net Jinx!" (or some other expected counter that makes using the Gecko Gloves then sliding around on the slippery roof their best response to the situation).
Does that work? I know Voldemort can fly but I got the impression that was something a bit more advanced than Winguardium Leviosa. Something off the order of an enhanced continuous form of apparation that requires huge amounts of concentration and skill to maintain. It would come with an advanced understanding of the mechanics of magical transport, along the same lines of Harry's advanced understanding allowing him to partially transfigure objects.
I know brooms can fly but have we been given reason to believe that reactionless flight is trivial in the 'first years can do it' sense? It sounds like the sort of thing Harry would have tested but I could have forgotten him doing so. If self casting doesn't work then try casting winguardium leviosa on a heavy object while yourself floating on a raft in a tub, measuring the displacement of water...
Oops, I should have been more clear. By "reactionless flight is trivial" I meant in general, not necessarily for persons playing Superman. Wingardium Leviosa is a spell that generates reactionless flight, and it's literally the first thing kids learn. It can be used on persons and has already been employed in combat in MoR (e.g. "Chaotic Twist!"). Then there's other things like Quick Quotes Quills that float and move reactionlessly as they write, brooms, flying carpets, etc.. Since Hermione is a stupendous genius with spells even in Canon, and MoR!Draco is no slouch himself, it just seems likely to me that they would have tried to come up with something. Leviosa on a chair, or Hermione's shoes as a semi-permanent enchantment ("Wait, Draco, I know some 3rd Level spells..."), or something like that.
But it's nothing the Rule of Cool and the MST3K Mantra can't fix. :)
Consulting the wiki, it does state that "Snape could fly without the use of a broom or any other visible materialistic support. The only other wizard that was known to be able to do this is Lord Voldemort, who most likely taught Snape the method to do so."
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?
Let's just say that it's a good thing that some of them have disappeared, and leave it at that.
From the Author's Notes:
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 inferences about the world of the fic. If not, we have only the fanfic itself to draw upon.
As a reader, I would rather have more information available. But this would require the author to have potentially unbounded knowledge of canon, depending on whether Word Of God was included, and at minimum to have read all the books.
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 easy with the aid of UDT/TDT.
So the only possible conclusion: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is the rationality book!
Consider:
Positive Proof. With the aid of magic, probably even p=1 now.
I look forward to the sequel; Eliezer Yudkowsky and the Unfriendly AI.
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 the caster and use that as a substitute, or Transfigure a rock into a copy of the caster (under heavy precautions, of course). He displays an irrational degree of revulsion at the idea of killing people. One gets the idea that he would let five die in the trolley problem.
I got the same impression. Harry!MoR in general seems to be very good at giving rationalist speeches (and internal monologues) but rather poor when it comes to actually thinking rationally under this kind of pressure. He may not let five die in the trolley problem when it is presented in a nice philosophical form but it wouldn't surprise me at all if he encountered an analogous problem like we see here and completely fail to even look at options once he hits an emotional roadblock. It would make me hesitant to trust him.
As I understood it, Harry's revulsion wasn't against the need for a sacrifice but against Dumbledore's fear, Harry would consider the cost of a sacrifice as comparately low. Thinking about ways to lower that cost would not have convinced Dumbledore that Harry took that cost serious the way rejecting the thought outright might have.
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 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 appropriated as a horcrux.
This also explains his prodigious intellect and indignation at being treated as a child: he's really an adult mind, overwritten onto a child's brain. This is also why the Remembrall reacted the way it did: he's forgotten decades of his former life as Voldemort.
"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.
That’s a cool idea! Also, it nicely has an analogue property to cryonics: you need to do something squicky (kill the guy) to save his life, in a fashion. Since the results would be closer in time and less speculative, it should overcome part of the revulsion of cryonics but allow the rest of it be overcome consciously.
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)
I agree that it's a very cool idea, though it may be because I still have fond memories of KotOR myself (on a side note, it was the first instance where I realised that interactive games have certain artistic potentials unmatched by other media - that moment would not have been nearly as effective had I not walked in Revan's shoes for dozens of hours).
It does, however, sound like the kind of idea other fanfiction works might have explored before. Does anyone remember something like that?
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.
I like Harry's poetic exposition of moral sentimentalism in chapter 39:
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 the time. (My latest thoughts on desirism are here.)
This seems like a reference to a quote by Stanley Kubrick:
Or, possibly, a quote by Richard Dawkins in Garden out of Eden:
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.
So, the root of all suffering is desire - for new fanfic?
If you get a fanfiction.net account, you can sign up to be notified of new chapters by email. Try it; your mental health will probably improve. (It worked for me!)
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'.
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 surprised if he didn't also have a colddarkside. Partly because I am generalising from a sample of me and partly because that cold practicality is required if you are going to maintain rational beliefs about yourself and also function.
A caricature of the non hyper-rational person suggests that they have the ability to act in an effective approximately instrumentally rational manner in most typical situations while simultaneously presenting a warm front. The 'dark side' is denied but also harnessed. It 'subconsciously' arranges things to achieve pragmatic ends while maintaining plausible deniability even to yourself.
When you are super-rational you don't have that luxury. The 'cold, dark' instincts must ally themselves with the rational side and the conscious awareness. You don't 'accidentally' kill someone or screw them over with unconscious passive aggression. If you need to kill someone you kill them. If you need to hurt them, you hurt them. The colddark may prompt you to lie but it need not call you to lie to yourself.
The Intent To Kill is somewhat similar. It isn't a a sadistic part of you that secretly wants people dead. It isn't malicious. It is ruthless and practical. If you must fight, it says, then don't fight fair and don't fight half heartedly. If you have a goal then the actions you take should be about achieving the goal rather than adopting the persona of a person who has a goal.
While in most types of fights killing is usually easier and safer than disabling, it is neither ruthless nor practical but simply short-sighted to lose track of why you are fighting.
There are plenty of situations where killing your enemy bears great costs. Maybe it would expose you to revenge from someone more powerful; maybe it would lead you to waste years of your life in court if not prison. Maybe it would be a massive PR victory for those who oppose you, undermining the entire plan that brought you into a fight in the first place (sounds familiar?). Maybe it would prevent you from obtaining critical help or information from the defeated enemy; the list could go on.
Of course preserving your own life has tremendous value (I heard there's a saying among some policemen: "an ugly trial is better than a beautiful funeral"), but it is not an absolutely incommensurable value. For a certain subset of X and Y in ]0,1[², you would accept an X chance of losing your life to a not-quite-dead enemy in exchange for a Y chance of not wasting decades of life (arguably), or (certainly) of not dying later on to unstoppable revenge.
All of the above being pretty much a very long-winded way of rephrasing Prof. Quirrell's dismissal that "there is a time and place to take your enemy alive, and a Hogwarts classroom is usually one of those".
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 times, or that it wasn't quite a three-quarters Moon when he started, or that a sudden gust of wind might impale her on the spikes of a wrought-iron balcony fence, or blow her into the Forbidden Forest or whatever other horrific Murphy's Law scenarios his all-too-imaginative mind could concoct, right up until her feet touched the ground.
Also, from the descriptions it looks like he was fighting this battle in ColdDarkLordHarry mode, so in addition to the above, he might even have been worrying that his Dark Side had subconsciously arranged things (such as a Potions failure, or just the situation of random danger with the Feather Fall potion as a false guarantor of safety) in a way that would bring his Intent To Kill to bear. It might even be revealed later that, for just a moment, his Dark Side produced a desire that she actually die, and that's what's making him feel so guilty.
Then, he would have spent the time until she came to meet him imagining that she would have been imagining the same things as an expression of his Planning Fallacy-based ur-pessimism combined with his tendency to try to model other people's minds, i.e., in this case, in the most pessimistic way possible. So, by the time he sees her, he's got himself expecting her to hate, hate, HATE him, and since he cares about her he really doesn't want that. And for her part, she's got him apologizing and willing to let her avenge herself on him, so why stop him now?
Some of the comments here have pointed out Hermione's strong sense of Justice and Fairness as an objection to her behavior in this scene. Maybe we're seeing some Unintended Consequences to Harry's "get Hermione and Draco to work together" plot. For Draco to reflexively try to catch Hermione is (I think) a major change in his character. 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.
So, for Draco to try to save Hermione, and have difficulty letting her go even as what's left of his Pureblood conditioning is railing at him, and Hermione herself is begging him to drop her so he can beat Harry, is a huge change in his character. If we grant that so much of Hermione's[1] sensibilities have rubbed off on Draco during their collaboration, it's not too much of a stretch to imagine that some osmosis has gone the other way. Hermione's spent the last few months of warfare learning the art of Devious Plotting, and since her alliance with Draco, would be getting lessons from a master. So, if we accept the changes to Draco's character, it's not too implausible IMO that Hermione might have become less of a "goody-goody" by now, and be willing to let Harry grovel, and even enjoy it a bit.
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.
One powders hens' teeth.
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.
Firmly identifying yourself with a position, especially with a cute little word, tends to lead to that, yes. I would definitely avoid using "deathist," "lifeist," etc.
It was a very brief moment in the conversation, not even remarked upon by anyone. It did make me think of it in an entirely new light, though. They were coming up with defenses partly because, if I was right about 'death being a bad thing', then there would be a significant amount of social policy decisions that need to be overturned or changed: politics rears its ugly head. Even without theism, decades of acceptance, etc., it will be a dangerous topic.
Am I the only one who now wants to campaign for gay rights with the slogan "Death Eaters against homophobia!"?
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.
Or they could've just created self cleaning houses, so no one is forced to do work.
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.
This is a bit of a false dichotomy - you don't have to force anyone to do it. Offer a sufficiently high salary to scrub Hogwarts' toilet (or just to cast Cleaning Charms on them), and voila, you have free-willed, willing, unmodified house workers.
The meaningful question (at least, to the degree that any moral question can be meaningful) is whether there is any value in that "unmodified" qualifier.
They still don't enjoy the work, even if they find doing it instrumentally rational. They are forced to do it by circumstances, and in a better world they wouldn't be.
But in a world with house elves, they are even worse off - they are just unemployed, rather than having the option of taking the job. I doubt more than a trifling amount of the money saved by Hogwarts trickles down to them.
I realise that considering the effect of house elves on the job market goes far outside the scope of this problem in the philosophy of consciousness, and much far outside the scope of the Potterverse; but once you start taking into account the welfare of the hypothetical replacements for house elves, there's no real way to dodge the question.
For philosophical debates, it's probably better to stick with the pig that wants to be eaten.
I pointed out that your argument doesn't contradict Locas's statement that those who don't enjoy the work will be forced to do it, and specifically disclaimed that choosing to do the work regardless might well be rational of them (and hence making them better off). Yet in reply you elaborate in what manner this decision can be rational, as if objecting to what I said. I don't see what you disagree with (besides usage of the word "forced").
Also:
They are not unemployed, they choose the next best option available.
That.
You're right. It's still a strictly worse situation for them, though, since they lose one option and gain nothing.
It matters precisely to the extent that the premodified entity desires to not be modified and that the premodified entity's values matter.
That the premodified entity's values matter seems to have been generally assumed all round in this thread. That the premodified entity desires to not be modified seems an extremely reasonable assumption.
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.
It had been, but...
...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.
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.
True. You have persuaded me back to my original position. Whoever made house elves was disgusting. It could have been done right (complementary intelligent species that enjoys doing a lot of necessary things we don't, while still having rich lives of their own), but it wasn't.
This is pointing at a general problem in sf-- problems are needed to move the plot along, so some development which might have good or mixed results is burdened with other features that make it obviously bad.
The usual handling of longevity and immortality in sf is an example, but so is the [spoiler] included with the cosmetic surgery in Westerfeld's Uglies or an AI in a novel called B.E.A.S.T. which was challenged by throwing a series of deadly attacks at it-- it becomes violent and we have a story, but what would happen with a better treated AI would be more interesting.
Do you think it would be evil to create house elves that honestly enjoy their jobs and situations?
You could get them elegantly embroidered little dishtowels clipped into place with stylized sugar tongs made of silver.
You can't give them clothes, but no one said anything about not giving them ARMOR. Give them fine spider silk armor, it will be indistinguishable from silk.
Hogwarts elves in canon do wear something very much like that.
That's certainly canon!Hermione's problem.
But there is something wrong with House-Elves, at least in canon, even after whatever went into their creation. They enjoy serving humans, fine; I'm with MoR!Harry about that. But (possibly unbeknownst to Harry and Hermione yet) there are House-Elves who are very unhappy with their current situation, such as Dobby (who disliked his master) and Winky (who loved her master but was fired and never recovered from this). It always bothered me that canon!Hermione never outgrew her early phase of S.P.E.W. and never tried to do anything that would actually help them. (However, the Word of God is that she did help them in her adulthood, so that's all right then.)
Is it wrong to make a pig that wants to be eaten?
I'm not sure, but I wouldn't make one and would work to prevent one's creation. On the one hand, death is an intrinsic evil, unlike mere drudgery. On the other hand, I support the right to self terminate.
Have you ever closed an application on your computer? What distinguishes a person from any other computation, and why does that particular distinction carry so much moral weight?
A person is reflectively self aware.
Evolution built me to care about humans, and upon reflection, the values I have include non-humans who have features like being reflectively self aware.
Is that what you would want to want, given the option, or is that a lizard-brain instinct that gets in the way of your ability to evaluate what's really the right thing to do?
I can still interpret that either way. Do you mean that on reflection you realize that you emotionally desire that, or that on reflection you *decide" that that's what's important?
There's also Hayekian arguments-- self-aware agents are apt to accumulate information about their own desires and activities. Systems which allow that information to have an effect seem to be more capable.
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 strikes me as unnecessarily complex.
However, it seems to me that the most obvious way for Eliezer to continue with the plotline is to simply make Sirius actually be a traitor, and Peter actually be a hero. This would wrap up several previously mentioned discrepancies (e.g. Scabber's death), and also preserve his ability to spring a surprise twist on everybody even though we already know what occurred in canon.
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".
I just got an urge to take a sip of Comed-Tea.
(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.
Agreed, I was waiting to hear about this and disappointed that it didn't come up.
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.