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simplicio comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3 - Less Wrong
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It would seem so !.
I'm not sure if I'm alone but I've been moved previously by other writings by Eliezer and others and it's like I've, well, been moved. Death is taken for granted a known enemy to be killed on sight. Putting myself in Harry's shoes the reaction I experience is "Death. F@#$ that! \<implacable motivation\> Whooosh!"
The other difference I suspect I would have is that I wouldn't expect to have a human patronus. I would expect something like sentient (white) fire elemental or an elf (symbolic of an intelligent creature with humanlike values, not precisely human and the better for the difference). Perhaps I'm not a humanist so much as an intelligent-life-with-my-values-without-the-outright-obnoxious-parts-of-humanity-ist.
That part I shied away from. It wasn't arational emotion; it was irrational. Being passionate about life with a proactive, vigourous intent to see it flourish doesn't mean you must mangle your beliefs such that you are overconfident. "Death shall lose" is a false claim when the correct belief is "there is a certain chance that death shall lose and it is all the greater for my efforts!" "Death shall lose" is just denial. I wouldn't be able to create a patronus powered by denial because I've trained myself to see denial as the brain's way to make pessimism palatable.
Successfully casting the Patronus charm seems to require positivity-which-must-also-be-sincere rather than truth-which-must-also-be-positive. "Death shall lose" as an attitude may not be strictly correct, but under the circumstances it was instrumentally rational as demonstrated by the fact that it worked.
In E's defence, the tradition of normative English grammar is that "shall" expresses a determination or volition, whereas "will" expresses a fact statement.
vs
Actually, believe it or not, the tradition of "normative English grammar" (i.e. high-status language) is that what you what you wrote is correct for persons other than the first. For the first person (I/we), it's the reverse.
I honestly don't know what the origin of this distinction is, unless it's the fact that British people seem to say "I shall" a lot.
Neither "shall" nor "will" originated as any sort of future marker. Originally "will" denoted intention, and "shall" denoted obligation. "He will do that" |-> "He intends to do that", "He shall do that" |-> "He is obligated to do that". The first-person/others asymmetry comes from what you can know about what you intend vs. what you can know about what others intend.
Fowler has a pretty thorough explanation of this history. It's a bit out of date, but that's OK; it's history.
But also note, EY mostly wrote ‘will’ or ‘'ll’, not ‘shall’.
It was interesting to see confirmation of my silly theory in the first sentence:
Yes, I definitely get the impression from Fowler that, while he knows the correct high-status English usage and can explain how it came about and how to use, he also knows that it's a little silly.
All the same, I do find ‘shall’ useful. As long as I remember not to use it when Fowler would use it as a simple future marker (‘will’ is the only simple future marker in my American dialect), I can use it to express determination. If people think that ‘shall’ and ‘will’ are interchangeable, then I can't do that; but as long as people know that ‘shall’ is something funny, then at least they can look up what I mean if they don't know.
It would be much nicer if things worked the way that simplicio said. Once the last first-person-simple-future user of ‘shall’ dies, then it will be safe to implement this rule. (So please hold off on the Singularity until then.)