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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 3
Update: This post has also been superseded - new comments belong in the latest thread.
The second thread has now also exceeded 500 comments, so after 42 chapters of MoR it's time for a new thread.
From the first thread:
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 (560)
And lo, there was a fourth discussion thread...
Stylistic note to Eliezer: you frame 98% of your dialogue with "X said" or "said X". This is usually inconspicuous when there is action or reflection to break it up, but in chapters like 47-48 that are full of back-and-forth it can suddenly jump to your notice - and once it does you cannot stop looking at it. More attentive/pedantic readers than myself may well have caught on it earlier.
I would encourage you to mix it up a little with the dozens of options available : blurted, replied, retorted, acknowledged, asked, mused, told [him/her], asserted, stated, questioned, countered, suggested, mumbled, declared, urged, pushed, pointed out, etc.; I've seen some writers overdo this, but a rough 1:1 ratio of "said" to everything else should be fine and make dialogues feel perceivably more alive.
(Not sure if this type of comment is appropriate for the thread, but I'm sure Eliezer reads it as much as he does the FF.net reviews, and I wouldn't want to pass on the chance of being corrected or supported by LW readers)
Reminds me of Tom Swifties. For instance:
Harry placed the hat on his head, as he'd done during the sorting ceremony. "You should remember our earlier conversation," Harry reminded the Sorting Hat.
Heh, took me a bit to get that one (for those as dense as me, the pun is in "reminded").
"Upvoting both joke and explanation", he remarked.
Well then, I'd be happy to correct you.
It's fairly common writing advice that you should do your best not to use any other verb than 'said' to carry on a conversation.
To put it simply, most people simply ignore the repetitive nature of 'he said', 'she said'. Therefore, conversation flows fairly smoothly and naturally. Constantly injecting synonyms for 'he said', 'she said' is a sign of a new writer.
Naturally this doesn't mean "never ever use anything else besides 'said' to mark the dialogue". However, the alternatives should be used only in places where they fit exceptionally well and not just for variety's sake.
Disclaimer: This should not be taken as a definitive opinion on the subject since there are writers out there who will agree with you. I'd say, however, that the consensus is on the side of "use said as much as possible".
I agree with the first, but not the last. There is also the option of dropping "he verbed" entirely.
This can cause problems. Sometimes when I read a lengthy dialogue in this style, I read a line which seems to me much less likely to by said by character whose turn it is to speak, and I have to go back to the last anchor point where it was made explicit who was talking, and carefully keep track of it. In some cases, after doing this, I have wondered if the author lost track.
Being clearly understood is more important that avoiding the appearance of redundancy.
In some case, I have confirmed that the author must have lost track, and have had to make a guess as to where the mistake is.
I confirm that Grautry's answer is the conventional one, and that I often worry that I am overusing adverbs or verbs that are not simply "said", which is what we are told to worry about.
Yeah, after seeing this responses I did a bit of looking around and I acknowledge that it is apparently quite frowned upon, at least in English prose (to the point of having a name: "said-bookisms").
No matter how many compared examples I read, after trying hard to "blank" my mind beforehand, I still find myself liking the "exorted/rebuffed/pressed/" version over the "said/said/said" more, so I'm probably just a statistical anomaly.
Another way to check would be to see whether there are well-loved stories which engage in said-bookism.
The idea that authors ought eschew synonyms for "said" might merely be a theory which works fairly well, but doesn't reliably cover the range of what people like in their fiction.
That comment was based on CS Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism-- the argument is that any fiction which attracts devoted rereading has something going for it, and it's better to evaluate fiction by the sort of reading it gets rather than evaluating readers by whether they like the right fiction.
This was published in 1961-- I think the idea of dethroning official lists of Great Books was more revolutionary then.
See also his High and Low Brows, which argues that the only reliable difference between high and low status art is that high status art is more difficult to appreciate, with the clinching argument being the likes of Shakespeare, Dickens, and Mozart becoming high status as they become less accessible.
He further argues that both high and low status art have good and bad features and should be evaluated by the same standards.
I'll support grautry position too. The content of the dialogue itself should indicate a musing, a question, a counter, an apology, a suggestion, an urging -- using the superfluous words "mused", "asked', "questioned", "countered", "apologized", "suggested", "urged" is very very clumsy.
And some of your other suggested words like "stated" instead of "said", and "retorted" instead of "replied" don't even seem to be trying to indicate anything other than the desire to use a synonym. In which case the story is no longer about communicating anything, or depicting a scene, but instead a game of how much of a thesaurus you can use.
This is the sort of suggestion that I've seen the fanfiction.net forums actually give out to writers -- new writers actually go there and say "I want more synonyms for the word 'said'"! And the people there instead of saying "No, you don't, you need less synonyms", actually do offer suggestions for more synonyms. It's just horrid horrid advice.
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I loved the whole introduction section. I was laughing out loud.
Harry isn't someone I would trust anywhere near absolute power - I'd probably form an alliance with Dumbledore and Voldemort just to crush him before he does something catastrophically naive like implement F(Magical)AI<CEV<Grass>> (or FAI<CEV<humanity>> for that matter). But damn the guy has a sense of humour. :)
If he's somewhat like Eliezer at an earlier age, he might think a sufficiently smart AI might autonomously figure out the "meaning of life".
I'd take CEV over that, though it'd make an interesting ending.
So would I. (And I note that CEV is fine, so long as it is the coherent extrapolated voilition of the right group. Preferably me but I'm willing to compromise. :P)
I take it the Malfoy house is just a stand-in for Hanson?
This particular advice is Older Than Feudalism. The Romans asked ‘Cui bono?’ (Wikipedia).
I don't think it is. This is just good sense. If Malfoy House and Lucius in particular is meant to be Hanson or just Hansonian, they are a spectacular failure.
I'm not sure it's "just good sense."
For example, some people see the school system failing at all its stated goals and assume the school system is broken, and they can point to institutional reasons why it's terrible. Hanson assumes it is optimized to serve other, implicit goals. I'm not convinced either viewpoint is necessarily true.
I'm not saying that assuming efficiency and looking at actual accomplishment is a wrong paradigm, or that Hanson doesn't use this paradigm frequently. What I'm saying is that 'Hansonism' involves all sorts of skeptical/cynical/outside-view approaches, and Lucius and Draco, as presented, fail almost every metric - they are obviously biased, in self-serving ways, they make and track no predictions, they do privilege their ethical views ... etc. etc. etc. (A thorough read of OB will turn up dozens of techniques and views and criteria which the House of Malfoy miserably fails.)
If anything, the single most Hansonian character in MoR is Harry and Draco becomes Hansonian only insofar as he is becoming more like Harry.
Surely the most Hansonian character is the (as yet unknown) wizard who created house elves? Or possibly the elves themselves. If Dobby starts running a prediction market in the Hogwarts kitchens, I called it first :)
That would be hilarious. House-elves could be very clever, but they are obsessed with particular topics. So EY could write them as excellent rationalists who are focused only on Hogwarts matters, and as excellent rationalists they would set up prediction markets about various predictions (students' grades, their cleanliness, relationships, popularity of reducing the salt in the mutton, etc.)
I'm afraid you don't get to call it because your comment might inspire EY to add them in the first place. :)
Today I noticed that Harry is dealing with a lot of strikingly rational people compared to canon and it feels wrong. We can understand this because we know that Eliezer's subscribes to the first law of fan fiction ("You can't make Frodo a Jedi without giving Sauron the Death Star") but it seems that in this respect MoR is actually much less plausible than canon unless the "implicit demography" has been changed somehow. Its like the gold/silver exchange rate in canon... except this is brains.
Given a normally distributed trait (like intelligence?) the larger the population, the more spectacular you should expect the maximal outlier to be. And you shouldn't expect lots of similar outliers unless their production was non-linearly explained (like a bunch of students taught by a singularly great teacher or something). The smartest person in a village of 1000 is going to be (literally) "1 in a 1000" compared to the smartest person in China who is going to be (again literally) "1 in a billion". So those sorts of intuitions had me wondering about population sizes.
I googled it and came up with data and speculation. Roughly, it looks like Magical Britain (MB) has a population between 800 and 30,0000 with a median expectation somewhere around 5,000 depending on things like how many students are in Hogwarts (40/yr to 140/yr), whether Rowling's numerically implausible media pronouncements are to be taken seriously, whether everyone in MB really goes to Hogwarts, what the life expectancy is, and what the age pyramid is like due to murder and tribal warfare and magical diseases and so on.
Once I'm calibrated this way, and I look for size-equivalent institutions, the "Ministry of Magic" starts sounding to me like like the "Small Town Chamber of Commerce of Magic" and the "Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" should be expected to work much more like an ordinary high school (tropes link tongue in cheek).
This contextual re-calibration makes it even more obvious that Rowling was (forgivably) pretending that the people at the top of a very tiny wizarding world would have anything like the political sophistication and infrastructure of the muggle world in order to say something meaningful about the muggle world by analogy.
A ministry with many departments makes me think of large buildings with complex hierarchies like in London or Washington DC or Beijing. In canon, the ministry can be similar to a modern government and enable the author to comment on non-fictional governments and the sociopolitical critique of reality can work symbolically and who cares about the sociology in a story for ten year olds :-)
But if the authorial physics changes (as per MoR) and analytical thinking is asserted to have some kind of mechanical reality in which to gain traction, then the wizarding world makes me think of, perhaps, a medium to large college campus. It could probably be run with a single office where anyone can stand in line for 30 minutes to see one of about 5 to 50 admins to personally get their stuff straightened out directly or to make an appointment to talk to the president of the school if something really unusual comes up. Obviously it wouldn't be a fee-for-service arrangement the way a school is, but I wouldn't expect the admin:student ratio to need to be that far off of the bureaucrat:citizen ratio of Magical Britain.
Following the re-calibrating further... Hogsmeade might contain 10% to 50% of the wizarding population... Why doesn't Hogsmeade have one elected sheriff with a handful of deputies, with Diagon Alley similarly protected, and then just be done with it? And what are all these appointed "Aurors" running around for? Is Magical Britain some kind of "totalitarian police village" or something?
Rita Skeeter probably isn't (or in MoR, wasn't) truly similar to a professional journalist in a "large news organization" that was so big to create institutional anonymity and strategically deploy tabloid tactics and so on. People are generally more polite in small towns because reputation matters a lot more than in cities. The newspapers are more "yay for our pancake fundraiser and boo for littering" than malicious gossip rags. Its almost plausible (following the "small town" economic insight) that Rita may have been the only journalist in magical Britain (other than Luna's farther, if you count him).
And politics wouldn't need to work by mass-media-spread ideological PR in Magical Britain. You could just write 10 letters per day, five days a week, and wander around Hogsmeade or Diagon alley on the weekends, and after 25 weeks you'd probably have had direct personal contact with the bulk of the adult population who cared to involve themselves in group decision making. Simple, easy, done. We're talking about a civilization way smaller than Athens, and look how big an impact Socrates appears to have had by wandering around talking to people!
In this light, all the trappings of muggle government kinda start to look like a cargo cult. The politics around who runs Hogwarts starts to look kind of pitiful... like a sociopathically deranged PTA squabble. And what happens if Harry notices this stuff? And comments on it to Hermione and explore the implications? And then insert "some explanation" that shows why the ministry is actually necessary (rather than a cargo cult) and have "whatever the need is" become a vivid plot mechanism?
In Chapter 36 Harry compares the world of muggles to a third world country relative to the wizarding world. Magic appears to be so powerful that this is true in some sense... but its pretty weird if they appear to be the one's with cargo cult versions of our political institutions...
And in the meantime, it really seems to make "Voldemort's Deathstar" (that is, his general rational turbocharge and massive preparation for conquering several thousand people) look really silly to me, because it is such overkill. If Voldemort really wanted political power over Magical Britain, and was being simply rational about it, and MB is little more than a two or three small villages... then why not apply social psychology to winning the hearts and minds of a bunch of unsophisticated "magical rubes" in a local election and just be done with it?
Which gets me back around to Harry, boy genius, and all the people he's interacting with in tiny little Magical Britain who have also somehow gotten rationality super powers. Maybe someone needs to plot wizard IQs and notice the weird bi-modal distribution caused by all the people just a bit less smart than Harry so he has people with whom to interact and thereby create a compelling story?
Maybe I'm overconfident in my ability to connect numerical population models with lived socio-political realities, but I'm thinking this is probably just me being more confused by fiction than by reality.
I don't think Hogwarts is supposed to be the only wizarding school in Magical Britain. It's referred to on a number of occasions as the "best", never the "only".
Hogwarts does seem to have some fairly incompetent students, but HP canon makes it pretty clear that the wizarding population has plenty of incompetent adults, so there's plenty of room at the bottom. Less capable students (such as Crabbe and Neville) probably get in due to family connections, while muggle born students may have some sort of affirmative action initiative going on for them (think how disadvantaged they already are, having no family at all in the world they're going to inhabit, on top of discrimination from the higher classes.)
Since Hogwarts is the premier school of Magical Britain, it's not surprising if the most important and/or successful individuals in Magical Britain were mostly educated there, but we do not know that more than a small fraction of all the various wizarding adults who appear in the series outside the school were educated there. It also makes sense if the administration of Hogwarts is taken particularly seriously by the government, since field and government leaders disproportionately graduate there.
I've always figured canon Magical Britain to have a population of perhaps 3-600,000 (although I believe Harry speculates a smaller number in HPMoR.) I also figured that they have a disproportionate amount of the population in government positions because governing the wizarding world is much more complicated than governing a similar population of muggles. Magic provides each trained wizard with far more varied and creative ways to cause trouble than an ordinary muggle (imagine if every person in a First World country had access to a set of fully equipped and funded university laboratories, with at least basic understanding of how to use them. Even the least dangerously creative individuals would have access to poison and explosives. Wizards are more troublesome than that.) They also have to manage all sorts of magical creatures (dragons, manticores, etc.,) which as Hagrid proves can even be cross bred in danerous and unpredictable ways. And they're sitting on top of a bunch of weird and potentially dangerous mysteries which the regular population can't be trusted with (the Death Portal, research of time magic, prophesies, and so on.) And to top it all off, they have to keep all of this secret from the muggle population. A governing body in the same relative proportion to the population as we have in the muggle world couldn't possibly manage all of that.
Quirrel and Harry are clearly both outliers in the Wizarding World with respect to intelligence, but considering the outlets that every individual in the wizarding world has at their disposal, it wouldn't be surprising if their culture and education tended to develop more creative and original thinkers.
I also only just noticed that the comment I'm replying to was posted two years ago yesterday, not yesterday.
It's clear that magic must carry with it a fairly different psychology -- not just (nonlinear, bimodal) changes to the level of general intelligence, but differences of personality as well.
The question is, can we coherently analyze what the Wizarding psychology looks like?
Maybe with magic giving each wizzard much more destructive power, a higher degree of regulation is required.
Or maybe it was just JK Rowling's Labour affiliations showing through.
Yeah, I was thinking maybe the "world level" issue could be defense: perhaps witches spend 90% of their time on self defense in a state of nature and so a government that only uses 60% of the economy is a net good deal? It seems like this would necessitate magical mechanisms that make it easy to spread "generic safety" but hard to limit coverage to free riders. If such dynamics don't "fall out" of magical physics, it should raise an additional flag.
I hadn't thought of the Labour affiliation on the "author level". I'd been thinking maybe it was just easy to ignore incompatibilities of this sort because of near/far dichotomies - its easy to pretend "famous people" are inhuman beings whose exalted struggles can not be truly influenced by "we mortals".
I think the Labour insight is a better theory because it makes more concrete predictions about the symbolic level. If Rowling wants a story that teaches her kids to favor political wealth redistribution it predicts lots of specific details about what to expect in the "political realm" (many of which seem true of her story), rather than just to predict that the politics will be inconsistent with the near mode.
Ooh! Idea! Applying this insight to Eliezer himself (because it was his characters acting funny that got me on the track of the population size in the first place) ...
Earlier, I didn't think time travel prime factorization would work because Eliezer is writing about rationality rather than time travel. If time travel was too easy the rationality would lose center stage. But since then I haven't been using the supported theory to predict other things...
The didactic function of MoR means that Eli has to tie up the lose end of Voldemort at some point, and it should be really dramatic and cool ending because otherwise the story loses its aura of awesome and the rationality lessons suffer by proximity. In the meantime, it seems like awareness that one is living in a story explains magical physics and other discrepancies like those related to the population size...
So my over-specific prediction is that evidence is going to build up for a while until Eliezer has room to impart all the lessons to the readers that he thinks are sufficient to make his political case (utilitarian ethics, scope insensitivity, simplified humanism, politics is the mindkiller, maybe "insight cascades" since they are critical to his theory about the singularity?). Then Harry figures out that he's in a story, necessarily immediately , but the end means "no more lessons" so the end and the amount of teaching have to be synced and genre-awareness could help the ending be awesome.
The "I'm in a story" insight and a super amazing trick or two that grow out of it (unknown at this point, but Eliezer is clever), are being saved up for the fight against Voldemort at the end, with the insight coming after Harry and Voldemort have a falling out (unless Harry's true task is to redeem Voldemort, rather than defeat him).
Its quite possible that the falling out could actually precipitate the insight, because in point of fact, Voldemort's Deathstar almost certainly exists to make the story interesting, rather than because it's necessary to conquer Magical Britain. When Harry finds out his enemy is also his favorite teacher who has even more super powers than he thought, this is more evidence that Harry is in a story.
So it would be good timing all around to have Voldemort be revealed and reality fall apart when all the lessons are done or in sight of being done.
I was hoping Eliezer wouldn't go there since it would seem rather trite. But thinking about how it would relate to the subject matter it does have some potential. A suitable lesson would come if it was actually Voldemort who figured out where he was. He would then solve the "Dark Lord in a Box" problem, break out by hacking a reader, leveraging the intellectual capacity of the author to give the hacked reader the ability to create an AI capable of extracting Voldemort's volition. By that mechanism Voldemort would then take control of the cosmic commons of the "1 level up" reality.
Obviously the "1 level up" reality couldn't be this one. Because that requires that Eliezer (or a combination of Eliezer and the hacked reader) solve both the Friendliness and General Artificial Intelligence problems. (Where 'Friendly' is ' to Voldemort'.)
Better yet would be if Harry continues to defy the usual form of fiction and not define himself in terms of an enemy. He has his own goal of universe optimisation and Voldemort doesn't actually need to be a big part in that for good or ill.
Oh man, I hadn't thought of Quirellmort as a sentient being running under a layer of emulation with a goal to escapes from its emulation layer. I'm imagining some kind of crazy moral principle here like "Though shalt not emulate sentient beings capable of becoming metaphysically meta-aware."
If Quirellmort found out that we were all muggles, would he even want to escape if he couldn't be a dark wizard up here? Maybe he wouldn't see us as muggles if he remained focused on the way we have "god level access" to his "plot physics" by virtue of our ability to communicate with Eliezer?
I don't know if it would be horrifying or amusing if he managed to escaped into our world... and then turned around and started writing novels about civilizations with 10^50 slaves in thrall to an obvious author insert :-P
I'm drawing two conclusions from your analysis:
The first point is ignored in canon, but ought to be noticed by Harry in MoR. This makes it even more in need of explanation that Wizards never noticed the Enlightenment (or never had it themselves much earlier). The interesting possibility is that they did have it, and the Methods of Rationality have long been actively suppressed for some reason.
In contrast, the second point seems to be well recognised in canon. Besides all of the off-hand references to silly regulations (flying carpets, anybody?), the Ministry seems to account for around half of the adult employment, and well over half of the employment of intelligent people. All three of the main characters went to work for the Ministry in the epilogue, with Hermione having two Ministry careers in succession. Outside of Hogwarts (which is only somewhat independent of the government, like the BBC), the Ministry is the only source of high-class professional careers in Wizarding Britain. (I don't count Gringott's, because it is an international Goblin-run concern, although Bill Weasley worked there in canon. Now that I think of it, both Bill and Charlie Weasley left the country to find good careers, so maybe Britain suffers from this more than other countries do.)
When Grindelwald was setting up his Muggle puppet states, he wasn't trying to be evil; he was just doing what comes naturally to a Wizard.
The new chapter is spectacular fiction, but I'm not sure it's true that bigots are necessarily low-grade people, though it's possible that they are, on the average. Is there research available?
Henry Ford and Richard Wagner had notable accomplishments, and were also energetic anti-Semites.
Portraying bigotry as low-status is tactically useful, both in the story and in the real world, but has an interesting blow-back-- it means that pointing out someone else's bigotry becomes a threat to lower their status. (This didn't come up in the story because Draco hasn't been in those discussions.)
In the real world, people of all sorts of status levels are active bigots-- that's why prejudicial laws can be passed and enforced.
This doesn't deny the idea that bigoted groups will tend to drive away lively-minded and benevolent people, but there's a difference between a trend and an absolute.
I read the chapter much more narrowly as saying that racist people are low-status. Racism is now reviled in Britain (or at least the U.S., and I'll guess also Britain) to such a degree that anybody openly espousing racist views (at least based on skin colour rather than, say, immigration status) is automatically looked down upon. Other forms of bigotry don't usually have this effect, nor did racism until fairly recently.
However, we are looking more at racism in the 1940s (at least by the standards of the U.S.) than the 1990s. Judging from To Kill a Mockingbird (which is the only documentary evidence that I have onhand, sorry), extreme overt racism along the lines of using words like ‘Nigger’ (analogue of ‘Mudblood') was still looked down upon and associated (rightly or wrongly) with low class. But that's just because moderate and subtle racism was the norm. This is how it works in the Wizarding world too.
A warning about what? Sure, evil Dumbledore sounds cool... but what's Dumbledore getting out of this apart from an infuriated nemesis?
An infuriated nemesis who now knows that Dumbledore is not only able but willing to hurt their family members... such as, say, their young only son who might just be the first student in 50+ years to have a terrible accident in Hogwarts.
Though I remember from canon that Lucius wanted to send Draco to Durmstrang instead, so he wouldn't be under Dumbledore's authority, and it was just Narcissa who vetoed the idea.
Well, there's a fact I did not know. Then again this Lucius is more competent anyway. Shrugs.
Easily fixable the first time Durmstrang gets mentioned in MoR in the presence of a Malfoy.
I was going to suggest that MoR!Lucius positioned Draco to be able to gain influence with the Boy-who-Lived, but then I remembered that he was willing to drop all his other plans against Draco getting hurt.
...unless that's just what he wants us to believe.
making it all the more odd that MoR!Draco went to Hogwarts
Yeah, I'm aware of that (hence my use of "and" and "just" rather than "but" and "").
Sorry, I missed the ‘just’.
In ch47, Harry's list of conditions for his agreement with Draco is broken: he has forgotten an extremely obvious condition. Namely, that Dumbledore did it deliberately. This doesn't seem like a very likely oversight for MoR!Harry; I wonder whether it's deliberate on Eliezer's part.
I now imagine that it is. Here is my scenario, with so much detail that its probability is extremely small, so that it cannot be a spoiler:
Dumbledore, being cleverer than in canon, discovered the existence of the diary Horcrux. After diligently searching for basilisk venom and researching any other safer means of destroying a Horcrux, he realised that he would have to use Fiendfyre. He broke into Malfoy Manor but found it more difficult than he expected and was badly weakened when he found the diary, so he was unable to overcome additional protective enchantments on the diary itself and remove it. Having good reason to believe that the manor was empty, however, he used Fiendfyre right there and then used his last strength to escape. As it turns out, Narcissa was home, and her valiant efforts saved the manor from destruction but cost her her own life.
Later, Dumbledore spoke to Lucius to apologise. While he did not dare to explain why he had started Fiendfyre in the Malfoys' home, he told Lucius that he never intended to kill anybody and only reluctantly cast the spell that would have destroyed the house. He also told Lucius that, while he could not give details, the act was only necessary because the Malfoys were still working for Voldemort, and he warned Lucius to rid himself of anything to do with Voldemort to avoid any future accidents.
When Harry discovers these facts, he will realise his omission and beg Draco to trigger the first condition. Drama ensues.
On second thought, the character of the Dumbledore above is more like in canon than in MoR. Under the circumstances, Dumbledore would probably start the Fiendfyre even if he knew that Narcissa might be killed. This is another missing exception: if the act that killed Narcissa, despite her having no dirty hands, saved more lives than it took. (Whether or not that applies in this case, it would certainly be Dumbledore's defence, and Harry might buy it, given enough evidence.)
It would be very interesting to watch Harry try and convince a very smart and angry Draco to let him out of his promise, in such a situation.
It seems likely that he would give it at least some weight. The justification reasoning even crossed his mind when considering the possibility that Dumbledore set Voldemort on him and his parents.
For Harry, is morality about intentions or consequences? Maybe he doesn't care whether Dumbledore did it deliberately; if anybody is so careless as to do such a thing accidentally, then they're an enemy.
It's hard to tell. Harry's morality seems to be somewhat ad-hoc in nature. For example, he declares that sometimes killing is necessary but torture can never be, which rules out being purely consequentialist but is hardly typical of deontological ethical frameworks either (but fairly normal for standard human thinking).
Even so it would surprise me if Harry didn't distinguish at least partially on intent. Completely not caring about intent, well, just "doesn't seem like his style". I observe, for example, that Harry judges Dumbledore for sharing gossip to Severus with the intent of setting Voldemort after Harry's family. When looking at raw causal interactions there are no doubt countless trivial actions that have the consequence of really bad things happening. Yet Harry singles Dumbledore's (alleged) conniving out purely based on the fact that he intended it to lead to particular a chain of events.
That is an important omission - I'm not sure what Harry should do under those circumstances.
MoR is now the ninth Google autocomplete result for "methods" (screenshot).
Just came up 5th for me.
From the most recent Author's Note:
I reread a few chapters for fun, and then something hit me like a piledriver.
Interesting, no?
TVTropes is pretty sure Peter Pettigrew turned himself into Harry's father's rock, instead of a rat.
Peter means rock in Latin/ Greek.
And then was killed when Harry transfigured the rock?
Wouldn't that be funny?
Get all guilty about eating meat and then...
ROCKS ARE SENTIENT!?
Rocks aren't sentient.
(Paperclips are, though.)
Why do you think paperclips are sentient?
Do you value sentience?
Are you saying you don't think paperclips are sentient? Why don't you try saying that right to a paperclip's face-homologue, and see if you can live with yourself after that.
Yes!!! Sentience is GREAT! All sentient beings should be protected! Like humans! And AGIs! And paperclips!
How do you reconcile that with being a paperclip maximizer?
If I had to make a guess, I'd posit that this is a purely rhetorical claim in order to gain favor with humans here who do favor protecting sentient life as a major goal.
It could be that the desire to cooperation is sincere. In movies the 'bad guy' is usually the one that doesn't just have conflicting preferences with the good guys, but is also psychologically incapable of cooperating effectively to reach the goals. There is no good reason that an agent with preferences as 'evil' Clippy's could not effectively cooperate with humans as effectively as we cooperate with each other.
(Although I agree that even in that case there outbust was heavy on the rhetorical flair!)
I don't think they are sentient, but am willing to consider evidence otherwise. Have any paperclips even claimed to be sentient?
Which part of the paperclip is the face-homologue?
Have human infants?
It's hard to describe, but I'm told diagrams like on this page help humans locate it.
Update Scanner reports: Chapter 1 has been edited so that Petunia recounts that she was ugly and Lily's potion improved her skin and curves, but no longer mentions having been fat nor losing weight thanks to the potion. As a secondary change, possibly unrelated, Prof. Verres is also more tender towards his wife, an improvement on his characterisation.
My working hypothesis is that Eliezer is going to set up some rules about what potions can do (possibly just Polyjuice and variants), which could not be reconciled with sudden weight loss.
Another one now, chapter 3, when Harry sees Quirrell for the first time:
My working hypothesis would be a slight political correctness adjustment as to the perceived importance of being physically fit, even if improved self-esteem resulting from the physical changes would be sufficient for her to aim just a tad higher in her mates.
Also, the potion would need not just temporarily alter the mass (as would Polyjuice), but rather shed it extra-quick, so any such limit on Polyjuice wouldn't need to apply here.
I considered that hypothesis, but the current text still mentions her having a "slim form".
EDIT: Fresh new change, "slim form, smooth skin, slight curves" has been replaced by just "lithe form".
EDIT2: I'm an idiot. I checked the wiki and the reason was much simpler: Petunia was actually supposed to have been thin in canon.
Chp 47 Author's Notes
Is the hint in chp 45 the Dementor saying to Quirrell "that it knew me, and that it would hunt me down someday, wherever I tried to hide"? I'd assumed that was related to Voldemort cheating death, but I haven't read all the books so I don't know if it's suggesting anything non-canon or just more evidence for Q=V.
What was Professor McGonagall busy doing, maybe?
I thought that was (probably) rather straightforward; providing extra guard for the Philosopher's Stone, the theft of which was (probably) what Dumbledore earlier suspected the Dementor plot to be a distraction from.
I thought that the strange word that echoed through Harry's mind could be somehow related to this completely mysterious fragment of text found at the beginning of chapter 1:
Not that I think this would explain anything.
Chapter 20:
Chapter 43:
There are blind spots in Harry's mind, and in 20 he doesn't even seem to notice it.
Doesn't the Interdict of Merlin imply that either blind spots are easily magically manufactured or that everyone has them?
Add to that spells like the Fidelius, and.. yes. They're easily manufactured.
Oh yes, and also all the places hidden from Muggles. Can't believe I forgot about those. The Interdict is specifically Eliezer's, though.
Another notable thing from chp 45 was Fawkes's role in getting Harry to take another shot at the Dementor - perhaps a phoenix is something like an anti-Dementor (peace of mind, rebirth, etc.)?
If snakes are sentient, they can't work as Patronus 1.0.
Possibly the important thing is whether Draco thinks of them as being sentient (sapient) as he's casting the charm.
Yes, I originally thought of it as the most plausible explanation. But then, Harry's remark must also make Draco's Patronus ineffective, just as explanation of Patronus 2.0 would, which very likely isn't the case.
It might yet make it ineffective, but only if Draco grasps the implications. Harry might begin the next chapter by deciding to shut up and not explain to Draco why it matters to him that snakes have a language. (It obviously doesn't matter to Draco, who I don't think has fully accepted that Muggles are sapient, despite their obvious language.)
If. I don't think they are; it would have been obvious to some scientist at one point or another, not to mention anyone who lives in close contact with them.
It seems more plausible to me that their apparent intelligence is another product of magic; that when you're talking to a snake, you're actually talking to a magic-induced AI of some kind that will, if you asked it to do something, control the snake afterwards to suit your purposes.
The laws of physics here are already AI-complete, so it doesn't seem like a large leap to me.
Actually, I'm pretty sure snakes are sentient. They're not sapient, though, as far as we can tell.
(Yes, I'm aware that the error is in the original text.)
Please don't allow arguments about definitions be presented as arguments about substance, as objecting to something previously said. Distinguish them by making it clear that your observation is on a separate and unrelated topic of English language, and thus doesn't constitute an irrational argument.
Sorry, I thought it would be obvious enough what I was objecting to.
It is, I just think it's a healthy debiasing style to keep the intentions explicit.
Upvoted. This should be on the advice-to-new-users page, if it isn't already.
I have seen so many people use them interchangeably, and I think I've even seen dictionaries disagree about which is which, that I've pretty much given up on the words 'sentient' and 'sapient'.
Even though people use the words inconsistently, those people who distinguish them at all do so consistently, and you can use cognates to remember which is which: ‘sense’ = ‘feel’, so ‘sentient’ = ‘feeling’; ‘Homo sapiens’ = ‘wise man’, so ‘sapient’ = ‘thinking’ (more literally ‘discerning’ in the Latin).
I usually take it for granted that snakes are sentient but not sapient, although I don't really know enough about snakes to be sure of either.
But there's another idea, neither of which these words quite captures, that seems to be what really matters to Harry: self-awareness (‘anything that lives and thinks and knows itself’). A snake may sense its prey, but does it sense itself? It may discern that its prey is food, but does it discern that its self is a self?
...Unless there's something very weird about their psychology. Which, given that they're snakes, seems entirely plausible.
Perhaps they're just not conscious of mortality?
Wouldn't that be convenient? What's special about mortality making it a plausible gap in the mind?
You know what? A WIZARD DID IT.
Giant cheesecake fallacy!
It actually makes quite a bit of sense to be unaware / indifferent to death for a family of species that do not take care of their offspring (with a few exceptions, eg. pythons, which might also never appear as Patroni).
Personal survival is a basic drive in any case, and being aware of something doesn't require caring about it, only the potential for instrumental worth.
Schedule theory: Could Eliezer intentionally be updating unpredictably, to minimize audience habituation?
I'm not nagging him, as writing that book is important, and as I would be more pleased than critical of a scheme like this.
Not addressed to Eliezer because he would only answer in the negative or not at all.
Did you mean maximize? Slot machines, for example, do not minimize habituation.
I have the answer, people. Have no fear.
Quirrel isn't evil. Evil people like Voldermort only exist in stories. It's just that Eliezer built an FAI, and as a reward got a chance to pretend to be Raistlin.
Hermione is going to found SPEW, and then, to save the house-elves from having to work all the time, will create an Auto-Geomancic Incantation, or AGI, to do the housework. It will recursively self-enmagic and optimise for the first item on it's to-do list: get more paperclips.
The world will end, and the moral is that everything can be destroyed very quickly by things you weren't expecting, because you're not in a story.
I know this to be true for a fact, because Eliezer laughed when I suggested it.
Also, in the real world acausal trade is magic, so in the Potterverse, magic is just acausal trade.
Remember the bit in Chapter 27 where Harry has the same conversation each time with his Obliviated instructor in Occlumency?
Well, it turns out that this is actually the case:
Also, the parent Reddit thread is simply excellent. Trust me, you should read it. (Thank Yvain for the link.)
I had no idea this would be so good; I'm shaken.
For those who are like me and like to imagine a soundtrack, the final chapters seem to go with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9vv4cPh4BI The subject matter isn't far off either.
I found something interesting today: Dawkins/Hermione
I will be very disappointed if Methods of Rationality doesn't include some kind of explanation for this.
There appears to be some photo-retouching involved to improve the match.
It's a well-known photoshop, FWIW.
There's no particular reason why Emma Watson's appearance should necessarily be MoR!Hermione's appearance. For that matter, it doesn't look to me like they look that much alike anyway; they just got caught with very similar facial expressions.
I'm wondering about the relationship between Quirrel, who is obviously at this time at least being driven by Voldemort, and Voldemort as Voldemort. Quirrel's story about the martial arts monastery, in particular, has a clear dichotomy between Quirrel and Voldemort. Quirrel's actual seeming competence at martial arts lends some support to Quirrel's story that he learned them there, though it is possible that he just picked them up somewhere else either earlier or later. So, a.) did Quirrel(mort) make up at least one of the two incidents out of whole cloth? Or b.) was Quirrel pre being-possessed-by-Voldemort actually competent as well, and Quirrelmort's story as himself came from that personality (which possibly no longer exists)? Or c.) did both events happen to either personality, and Quirrel's distinction between them is the lie? (Sub-question: how would that work?) Are there other possibilities that I'm missing?
My guess was that Quirrell was already possessed by Voldemort, and that both events happened to Quirrelmort roughly as he described, the first with him acting under the identity of Quirrell and the second with him openly identifying as the Dark Lord.
While investigating the theory that wizardry is becoming less powerful because of a decline in the alliterative naming of wizards, I discovered the identity of Harry's nemesis: Barberus Bragge.
I'm still can't figure out what's dangerous about sharing that knowledge. My obviously unsatisfying guesses in no particular order:
*Making yet unreachable sour grapes of immortality more sweet.
*Harry's concern for self-awareness of patronus v2.0.
*Outlaws will be better protected from law enforcement.
*Increased chances of Azkaban break out.
*Disclosure of Harry's unique power.
*Extinction of dementors.
Wizards formerly able to cast the Patronus charm, once they realise that Dementors are not about fear but (much more scarily to them) death, are no longer able to avoid thinking about it in the way necessary to make the Patronus charm (v1.0) work. As knowledge of the true nature of Dementors spreads, ability to make Patronuses lapses near-universally. A key tool for keeping Dementors under control is lost. Dementors become much harder to handle, everyone in Azkaban escapes, many wizards are killed (or worse) by Dementors, and the only way to stop it is to get Harry to destroy them all, which is a bit much to ask of a 13-year-old or whatever exactly he is.
He's still eleven years old.
Anyone who hears the explanation of Patronus 2.0, but is unable to cast it, will lose the ability to cast Patronus 1.0 and be left defenseless. Most people will not be able to cast Patronus 2.0.
When I was a kid, adults would sometimes ask me what kind of animal I would be if I were an animal. I always told them that I would be a human. They never liked that answer.
I think that Harry is too dismissive of ‘souls’. He didn't think that magic existed, but it did, and if the people who deal with magic also claim to deal with souls, then there might be something to that. The idea that every human has a soul that goes to an afterlife may be silly (and even Wizards don't act as if they really believe that), but when talking about ghosts, Horcruxes, or the Dementor's Kiss, there might be something real that Wizards mean by ‘soul’, and Harry should investigate that possibility.
I'm curious, did others find Chapter 45 as deeply moving as I did? I'm was having trouble avoiding crying when Harry tells the Dementor why death shall lose.
DEMENTORS REALLY ONLY REPRESENT AN EXTREMIST FRINGE OF MODERN MORTALIST THOUGHT.
I FEEL LIKE ELIEZER IS FAILING TO ENGAGE WITH MORE SOPHISTICATED PRO-DEATH THINKERS. FRANKLY, HIS IGNORANCE OF THANATOLOGICAL APOLOGETICS IS STAGGERING.
Your comments intrigue me; I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Please don't use all-caps; it makes your comment harder to read and it's considered shouting.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about everlasting paperclips? Do you feel that all paperclips must eventually be destroyed, or do you limit the scope of your deathism to living things?
MY DUTY - sorry, my duty is toward living things only. i would prefer to leave your question on paperclips for my friend Oxidation, but he has trouble using computers. it's the wires, you see.
I WOULD LIKE TO HEAR MORE ABOUT YOUR MORE SOPHISTICATED DEATHISTS.
Why don't they have Asscaps in this wiki/blog/forum?
Yᴏᴜ ᴊᴜꜱᴛ ɴᴇᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ꜰɪɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ꜱᴇᴄʀᴇᴛ ᴄᴏɴᴛʀᴏʟ ᴘᴀɴᴇʟ ᴀɴᴅ ᴇɴᴀʙʟᴇ ᴀᴜɢᴍᴇɴᴛᴇᴅ ᴍᴀʀᴋᴜᴘ.
Iɴᴛᴇʀᴇsᴛɪɴɢ
I assume you just copy and pasted characters into the comment box from another source? I just played 'newspaper ransom note' and used the letters you used and that seems to work fine. The weird symbol you have for an 's' I replaced with the lower case - which is conveniently the same as a small capital.
Edit: Yup. I downloaded BabelPad and can now insert 'ᴋ'. It looks like the unicode section called "Latin Extended-D" (Starting at &#A720) that you used for S and F doesn't display correctly. The ᴀ area does.
I got bored of doing that and just put my text through
def sc(x): return unicode(x).translate(dict([(ord('a') + i, c) for i, c in enumerate(u"ᴀʙᴄᴅᴇꜰɢʜɪᴊᴋʟᴍɴᴏᴘ-ʀꜱᴛᴜᴠᴡxʏᴢ")]))I find it odd that Unicode doesn't have a Latin Letter Small Capital Q but does have all the others.
Iᴛ ɪꜱ ǫᴜɪᴛᴇ ᴏᴅᴅ, ʏᴇꜱ.
It's a trap!
I believe D. is imitating the style of Terry Pratchett, who uses small-caps for his "Death" character. The full-size caps are a bit annoying, I agree.
Not really -- I found it long-winded, even though (perhaps because) I already agree with the content.
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.
"Death. F@#$ that! \<implacable motivation\> Whooosh!"
yes. F@#$ that!
Grammar note: Actually, that's exactly what Harry should have said, which would not have been denial. According to Fowler, that sentence is not a statement of fact about the future, but a promise (in the "coloured-future" system). As others have said, in this sentence Harry is expressing his intention to defeat death.
However, that's not a direct quotation, and Harry almost always used "will" instead of "shall". Of course, Fowler's advice is obsolete, and we now rarely use "shall" (even in England, and more so in other English-speaking countries). So it's possible that Harry still meant "shall", although that's not what he said.
So in that nomenclature Harry isn't in denial, he is just making promises he can't keep. ;)
Right. But still a promise that he intends to keep. (And who knows, the way the story is going, he just might keep it!)
Although he didn't use that language, that is how I (ETA: initially) read it. So I would fault him for using imprecise language rather than for self-deception. But it's not clear what he meant; you may well be right.
Downvoted for reading in distinctions that aren't there. What Fowler may have thought is irrelevant, what matters is what was actually meant and how the words are actually used. "Will" and "shall" are interchangeable in almost all dialects of English, and in the few in which they aren't, the exact distinction is complicated.
The change since Fowler has been to use ‘will’ in place of ‘shall’, not the other way around. I have read more than Fowler on ‘will’ vs ‘shall’, but I've never read anything to suggest that any dialect uses ‘shall’ with the third person in a declarative statement to mean the simple future.
This is all only a minor point, since Harry didn't say ‘shall’ and it's clear what wedifrid meant. But I hope that it gets downvoted for unimportance rather than incorrectness. Some time a character may say ‘shall’ for a good reason.
ETA further clarification: My previous comment contains an element of saying that wedifrid used bad grammar. I stand by that, but I also accept the response (from your reply) that grammar usage varies and what wedifrid really meant is what matters. And that's why I wouldn't write a comment whose purpose was to say that wedifrid used bad grammar.
But my real purpose was to point out how, with a certain interpretation, ‘will’ and ‘shall’ give different meanings, which are just the meanings that people are debating as to what Harry meant: a factual claim that is (I admit) unjustified, or a declaration of intent that is (I would argue) justified. And the second meaning could be what Harry meant, if he used bad (or at least unnecessarily ambiguous) grammar.
The problem is that this isn't a "change since Fowler", since it predates him by centuries. Also really we shouldn't speak of using either in place of the other, since after all the original meaning of both of them became replaced with the meaning of just being a future marker. (Also this isn't exactly "grammar". :P )
I should be clear - I didn't downvote it simply because it was wrong as such, I downvoted it for spreading confusion about language when there's already a lot of that. :P
This is not correct. For further discussion, I refer you to Fowler. I will write no more on the subject, since I think that it's getting pretty far off-topic.
No, it's something to protect. There are certain ways one needs to communicate with a human, and this is an example of that. See The Affect Heuristic and Trying to Try.
Edit: changed "something to protect" into a link.
For the most part I agree with Thom in reading that as a declaration of intention rather than a knowledge claim, but I'll also point out that to a person who is familiar with the trajectory of science and not familiar with existential risks (which Harry might not be), "Death shall [eventually] lose" isn't a terribly unjustified thing to believe.
<quote>Perhaps I'm not a humanist so much as an intelligent-life-with-my-values-without-the-outright-obnoxious-parts-of-humanity-ist.</quote>
Edit: quote syntax anyone?
I feel like embracing humanity, but actively striving to overcome the "outright obnoxious" parts like biases IS humanism. At least, moreso than just adopting an "I love humanity unconditionally" attitude. I think harry's patronus, as eliezer's own would likely be, represents not just simple anthropocentrism, but the hope for a better future for humanity without losing those "my-values" that make us distinctively human.
Having a patronus that takes the shape of an intelligent life form with your values and no obnoxiousness is just representing abstractly that hope for the future of humanity.
I think the underlying values are one in the same. And the difference in shape does not correspond to a difference in concept.
From: Comment formatting
Use a > before the paragraph.
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.
No, that demonstrated (at least, gave some small amount of evidence that) some people may be able to use self delusion to useful effect. In fact, there are dozens of post here on the subject. But if Harry wants to actually fight death instead of just use his beliefs for the purpose of signalling then denial doesn't cut it. If he can't even judge the probabilities of death defeating strategies succeeding then how can he be expected to choose between them rationally?
No, I say if Harry is deliberately deceiving herself because he thinks it is instrumentally rational then that would be a bigger concern than if he had a case of simple naivety.
"Death" isn't a particularly cohesive force. There's no central armory which, if emptied or sabotaged, would simultaneously disable everything that kills us. Ending a Dementor isn't 'just signaling;' in doing that, Harry permanently removed something which would otherwise have gone on to destroy countless objects and minds. However many Dementors there are on Earth, Harry is now equipped to defeat them all in, at worst, linear time, which would also e.g. stop the ongoing atrocity at Azkaban.
For that matter, Harry doesn't seem to be deliberately, consciously deceiving himself. He just did something, said what he believed, and it worked. The rationality of whatever it is he did is clear in hindsight, specifically because it worked.
Is there any course of action you can think of that Harry could have taken under the circumstances, which would have 'actually fought death' more effectively than what he did?
No, you are fundamentally confused about what rationality means. Betting your entire life savings at even odds that an unbiased dice roll comes up 6 is irrational even if in hindsight it worked. Eleizer's catch phrase just confuses people.
Killed the dementor the same way he did, except making claims based off a sane model of reality.
For some background on just why self delusion is harmful for people with the kind of goals that Harry has see Eliezer's Ethical Injunctions. An excerpt:
First, I'm not so sure Harry's claims are as crazy as you're making them out to be. There's at least one charm which violates the second law of thermodynamics, which means some basic assumptions about what's possible and what isn't need to be reworked.
Second, you're comparing the immediate, apparently permanent and total defeat of a Dementor to the warm-fuzzy feelings from religion, and you're also comparing the risk of Harry being wrong about the possibility of eliminating death to the risk of someone with strong religious beliefs neglecting proper medical care. Both comparisons are deeply flawed, due to substitution effects.
If someone wants warm fuzzy feelings, they can get them from something other than religion. A good meal, hanging out with friends, arguing about fanfiction, or even certain types of recreational drug use, provide comparable benefits without the same risks. Other people in the MoRiverse have tried to destroy dementors before, but Harry is apparently the first to succeed, so substitutes simply aren't available. Considering the way partial transmutation works, Harry's attitude toward death may very well be an inextricable part of the technique.
If Harry is wrong, and people will continue to die until the human race goes extinct and all evidence that we ever were slowly fades toward heat-death, if it's really true that nothing can be done about all that, it's not clear (to me at least) how he's making the situation worse by trying. Hastening the collapse by a few minutes, using up resources that might otherwise have produced a slightly more amusing light-show near the end? Insufficient data for a meaningful conclusion, if you ask me. For all we know, his insane obsessions might provide a net benefit to humanity in the long term. If someone is wrong about faith-healing, the consequences are much less ambiguous: sickness and death, which could have been prevented.
Are you saying that there's some way to end death which would, for whatever perverse reason, elude anyone totally determined to find it, but be discoverable by those with a more nuanced attitude? That there's some better, but mutually-exclusive goal? What, exactly, is the black-swan risk you're worried about here?
It sounds to me like you're just upset that he used the wrong ritual but it worked anyway.
I'm not doing either of those things. I did refer you to a document that explains why the author of HP:MoR believes self delusion is a mistake when it comes to important beliefs. That document did include extreme examples to demonstrate the principle tangibly.
I downvoted this. I am disagreeing with you because you are confused about what rational decisions are. I have explained the reasons.
It didn't work. Nor did it fail - success or failure in defeating death hasn't happened yet. I have no reason to expect that self delusion would prevent Harry from killing a dementor, which is why I never suggested that it would.
What's confusing in discussions such as this is the lack of a clear definition of self-deception.
Minds are complex. They contain stuff other than conscious verbal beliefs, things like gut-level feelings (aliefs?), unconscious assumptions, imagery, emotions, desires. We absolutely suck at conveying mental phenomena other than explicit beliefs and attempts to do so result in silliness like "believe in yourself" or "just do it".
This leads to two problems. First, it is not clear what you mean about self-deception. Trying to deliberately alter your beliefs is obviously bad. But what about controlling your attention? Do I self-decieve about something by refusing to look at it? What about influencing emotions through positive mental imagery? Or using a relaxation technique to calm myself down?
The second problem is that when someone says "I will win" you can't be sure wheter he really means "I expressly believe that my success is certain" or maybe "I know of the possibility of failure but refuse to bring it to the forefront of awareness. I feel energized, motivated and determined to achieve my goal." The second option seems like a more reasonable interpretation, unless you already have reasons to suspect the speaker of being an idiot.
This leads to a question: Would this have worked just as well if a sincerely religious individual who believed in an eventual resurrection of all had cast the patronus? Does it require both belief and the likelyhood of that belief being objectively correct? I doubt that Eliezer intends for this to work with someone thinking about Death be Not Proud and making a patronus in the shape of a man on a cross.
It would require that they cognitively mapped the existence of the Dementor onto the concept of soul-death and that they forcefully rejected this event on an emotional level instead of just having a quiet factual opinion that it never happened. Such a hypothetical individual is simply a non-reductionist isomorph of Harry's reductionist belief. It would just be difficult for a religious individual to get into that state of mind in the first place. It probably would help a lot if they believed that the Dementor's Kiss actually does destroy a soul.
I mention this because I did think about what would happen if someone like a Buddhist acknowledged the existence of true Death, soul-death, and still accepted that without the tiniest bit of sour grapes; and concluded that although that wouldn't make a Dementor-destroying Patronus, they would be able to see the Dementor's true form and cast a perfect shield against its fear.
Incidentally, Harry didn't say at any point that any of what he said was a certainty.
Yes, I did.
Further, the Humanism sub-arc contained some of the best chapters, overall. I hadn't yet become bored with the chapters about armies, but it seemed a noticeable dip in interestingness.
A thought re Chapter 43...
Hermione is (as established here) rather intelligent. Is she aware of the concept, in some form, of quantum immortality? Because I can't help but wonder if the particular fear she saw, what she experienced with the Dementor (not counting the "message"?) was basically a fear of QI. I mean, assuming via QI you don't incrementally lose your mind and effectively gradually decay, you'd expect to see everyone else die, with you yourself all alone at the end.
So, is quantum immortality effectively what Hermione saw/feared?
Also, re chapter 46.. Harry has nothing to say about involuntary memory charms? (Not to mention the notion that letting them know that dementors can be defeated, even without telling them how, might plant the seeds that would let them later on be ready to learn.)
Hermione's reflections during Chapter 46 imply that her fear is not of everyone else dying, and her being left alone, it's of everyone else dying first and her dying alone.
Priorities, priorities …
Something about Harry's deductions in Ch.46 smells fishy to me. It could be that he didn't consider that two or more professors could have been present at the revealing of the prophecy. It could be that he automatically assumed the prophecy must have been freshly produced, rather than having been found in an old book as is usually proper. It could be that "It was Snape who told Voldemort about the prophecy (not knowing whom it spoke of)" does not in any way follow from "At some point, Snape begged Voldemort to spare Lily's life".
It could be a number of such things, but they could be explained away somehow: the real problem, I think, is that this looks like one of those magical trains of thought that bad crime fiction writers give their Holmes-ripoff protagonists, wherein the author starts from the solution and then, looking backwards, draws a path that enables the character to figure it out.
But it ends up looking fake, as it does now, because the character runs straight from the minimal facts he has to the hindsight-correct solution. This is not how an intelligent, realistic character thinks: before moving on to the next deduction, you try to take into consideration as many possibilities as you can, before you risk wasting your time or - gasp - take action using your very first idea as a logical premise.
And yet here, before the "Perhaps Dumbledore..." passage, Harry spends almost an entire page nose in the air, following his author-granted Magical Truth Compass. He doesn't even mention any alternatives, even though there are a boatload of those. Of course he knows Voldemort's and the Death Eaters' psychology well enough that he can confidently interpret his disinterest in Lily as a servant's prayer. What else could it possibly have been?
I don't think Harry's deduction chain needs to be scrapped, but I definitely think it needs more work, because in its current state it shattered my suspension of disbelief, hard. Make him consider and dismiss more options along the way, or make him express some thought along the lines of "It was a shaky conclusion, and he could have been mistaken or misinformed on any number of points... but if it was correct, the implications were dramatic, and if it wasn't, asking those questions would cause no harm, and might still provide important clues", or even better, both.
PS: The above applies even if the MoR-truth is actually different and Harry is therefore tragically mistaken. The narrative would be a lot more interesting, but the undeserved confidence of that train of thought would remain an artistic problem.
Fortunately Eliezer gave himself some phoenix-magic wiggle rooom:
From Chapter 45.
Three questions:
What happens next?
Why do Harry and Hermione know about it but I don't?
Does this narrative device remind anyone else of a certain "objectivist" author popular a few decades ago? Larger-than-life-protagonists who telegraphically communicate their shared knowlege of their own twisted psyches with cryptic stoicism.
Aftermath, Daphne Greengrass in chp 46 starts to show what's next. The story of their kiss spreads unstoppably, Hermione's life as she knew it is over, her attempt to define her public identity separate from Harry has failed...
Hmm? This seemed pretty obvious. It connects with what Hermione worried about her life being over. The point is that what happens next is that everyone knows she really likes HJPEV. Given the standard attitude of kids in that age range what happens next is likely going to be lots of silly mockery.
Ok, that is somewhat reasonable. But ...
I would have thought that, even to children, Hermione's willingness to kiss Harry would be something like a willingness to apply CPR. It is something anyone would do for a fellow human, let alone a friend.
It is Harry's response to the kiss that provides evidence. Evidence of Harry's feelings for Hermione, rather than Hermione's feelings for Harry.
The standard narrative is that such things work through The Power Of True Love, so it's not at all surprising that the other kids will assume that that's what happened. Seen through that lens, the fact that Hermione tried it at all implies that she loves him (otherwise she wouldn't've expected it to work, and wouldn't've tried it, per the standard narrative, which to the best of my knowledge doesn't allow for people trying it just in case) and the fact that it did work implies that it's reciprocated.
We know better - in fact, Eliezer's account seems to imply that a kiss from anyone would have worked, as Harry doesn't seem particularly aware of who's kissing him; it's just that Hermione is the only one who knew that that particular thing would get a strong, automatic emotional reaction from him - but the other kids don't know that, and I don't expect them to be particularly open to alternative explanations, either.
I don't get the impression that a kiss from anyone would have worked, not naming 'a person' was just building suspense! His instinctive reaction is then "I told you, no kissing!"
The relevant belief for Hermione to have as I see it is he loves her. Hermione knows enough about the way dementors and patronuses work to realise that his emotions are what matter. Whether she is feeling it too, so to speak, is irrelevant. Although of course we know she is. :)
Maybe Hermione should've gotten Neville to do it.
It would've gotten rid of all the readers who were halfway out the door because of Sirius/Pettigrew.
No, give the quibbler something real to write about - fetch for Draco!
Well, it has now become abundantly clear that the major departure from canon is going to be in attitude toward death. Ravenclaw rationality in place of Griffindor bravery is only one aspect of the central thematic difference.
I just happened upon a link from Robin's "Overcoming Bias" blog to this article asking "Do protagonists of great novels have children?". It occurs to me to ask whether anti-death activists have children. Is it the case that the kinds of people who sign up for cryonics don't tend to want children? Does having a child change your outlook so that you can contemplate your own death with greater equanimity? Or am I completely delusional in thinking that there might be some correlation?
The technical term for "anti-death enthusiasts" is Methusalites.
Sex and death. It reminds me of the maintenance/reproduction axis.
Transforming reproductive resources into maintenance resources is widely thought to be responsible for the life-extending effects of calorie restriction.
You mean r selection vs K selection?
That wasn't what I had in mind, but you are right: natural selection does tend to play off one against the other. And a member of H.sap. does sometime find verself in one situation or the other, so it is natural that our psyche's would be comfortable with either approach, depending on circumstances.
The r/K thing is a teensy bit different. That is more to do with offspring quality - with many vs few offspring.
The idea (from dietary energy restriction) is that organisms face resource-investment tradeoffs between self-maintenance and reproduction - and that circumstances and diet can affect where that tradeoff is made. If there isn't enough dietary energy to support reproduction, what resources are available are devoted to maintenance - so the organism can live to reproduce another day.
It is a bit like K-selection taken to an extreme where no babies are produced at all - and all resources get invested in personal survival.
I have a page all about this general topic: http://cr.timtyler.org/why/
I'd be surprised if there's any correlation. At least as a matter of anecdote I haven't noticed any such correlation. IIRC from Eliezer's descriptions the groups of people when he went to a cryonics meeting for young people resembled close to a representative sample of the population.
Also 25% of the people there were, iirc, children of cronicysts. That number goes up when you count parents. And we're talking about an age group and demographic that isn't having a lot of kids anyway.
Eh? No, there were just a few kids, like 2 or 3.
Anyone have any guesses as to what Quirrell's game is?
Quirrell is operating on a level that I surely don't understand. The only theory I can think of that's neither preposterous nor disappointing is that Quirrell is protecting Horcrux!Harry.
In light of the recent exchange where Quirrell asks Harry how he would hide something:
Assume that Quirrell was asking where he could hide a Horcrux. It's funny because all those options leave Horcrux!Harry dead. The riddle is thus:
Any takers?
Is this a MoR explanation for the Pioneer anomaly? Because that would be awesome.
Also, I assumed Voldemort was talking about the classical elements, too, and was amused that Harry, a scientist, had come up with those at random.
I noticed that as well, but the Pioneer anomaly doesn't randomly fluctuate IINM, and he would have had to not only horcruxed both Pioneer plaques, but also screwed up his randomness so as to get approximately the same anomaly on both.
Unfortunately, he only did one plaque.
Unless he lied.
Unless it's all part of his fiendish plot to trick Harry in precisely that way, there really isn't any point in telling that story with that untruth. But you are correct.
Naw, the "interesting pattern" is the contrived "fire, earth, water, air, void" pattern to the suggestions. It seems rather out of character for that meme to slip into MoR Harry's subconscious, though.
Really? Not "inaccessible places ordered by increasing distance from the centre of the earth".
These two patterns are the same. Recall that the world is composed of four elemental planes, and each element is attracted to its plane. This explains why rocks fall but air rises in water.
Classically, we would expect the plane of fire to lie above the atmosphere, because fire rises in air. But in this case, fire is the lowest plane.
I now want to see someone write a high school physics' handbook in which every single fact that gets mentioned is correctly described, but everything is interpreted according to Aristotelian physics.
True, I didn't look at it that way. It seems more likely that that's correct -- "Why those exact five?" -- but why would Quirrell find it so amusing?
edit: Maybe Voldemort has already hidden his Horcruxes in just those manners -- we already suspect that he launched one into space. In that case the riddle may be -- given that Harry and Voldemort think in precisely the same way, how can Voldemort think of a hiding place that Harry wouldn't think of himself?
edit2: It's out of character for them to come naturally to Harry, but not to Voldemort. Voldemort is into that kind of superstitious ambiance -- e.g. he wanted precisely 7 Horcruxes, because it's a lucky number. Harry is part Voldemort, so that's why they slipped into his subconscious.
*shrug* maybe I'm grasping at straws.
Not been reading the series recently... but I noticed that these are classical elements
Roughly fire, earth, sea, air and void. Which fits the japanese element system.
Unsure of the meaning though.
Edit: I've recently learnt that Voldemort real name was Tom Riddle, did he like riddles in canon? It could just be Voldy checking to see how strong his horcrux's influence was on Harry?
That is, it sounds like something Riddle would say.
Already the ancient Greeks extended their four elements with the fifth: quintessence, or æther, the substance of which the heavens are made. (So four elements in the world, a fifth in the heavens, and never shall they meet.) So I took Voldemort's riddle as referring to Greek rather than Japanese elementology.
I don't recall any Riddle riddles in canon. In Book 2, identifying Riddle as Voldemort is the riddle that the reader (or Harry, but he never did) must solve. Later on, Dumbledore considers the riddle of why Riddle became what he did.
Well, in book 2, it seems to be a point that the reader is supposed to solve a riddle based on his name. This is parodied in Barry Trotter where everything remotely connected to the villain is some anagram of the villain's name.
Eliezer:
I just wanted to thank you for this quote
My grandfather just died and it captured a lot of the outrage and hope for the future I have.
Semi Spoiler for chapter 46 on humanism
If Draco already had an ability to cast a patronus, it may now be another thing harry has taken. This may make him feel obligated to tell the secret.
Given that Hermione already can't cast a patronus, and for similar reasons as Harry I rather hope that he is giving her training too. Starting with necessary background if necessary. In this instance that will more or less the distinguishing factor between 'pretentious short-sighted cleverness" and wise restraint.
What, exactly, is necessary to cast the Transhumanism Patronus (or something else that destroys Dementors)? If it's just a recognition of the Dementor's nature and a resolve to overcome mortality, haven't there been a few other wizards (e.g. Flamel) who should be able to do the same?
EDIT: Oh, never mind, Eliezer did mention this after all:
I don't take that as saying that GG (and maybe RR) had the ability to cast the Transhuman Patronus. Only that they had had the insight into the nature of Dementors that made it impossible for them to cast the usual sort of Patronus, just like Harry and Hermione couldn't.
That makes sense. If they had been able to cast Patronus 2.0, this probably would have been recorded, even if the method for doing it remained a secret. This is in keeping with the oft-alluded-to tradition that it's okay to tell that somebody could do a magical feat, but sometimes it's not okay to tell people how.
Which leaves us with orthonormal's question again: why is Harry the first?
Someone like Flamel might not have tried to produce a Patronus after he'd begun work on the Philosopher's Stone, and others like Godric Gryffindor might not have had knowledge of the Philospher's Stone, or might not have approved of it. I think this is a plausible explanation.
Harry is the first because he's the first wizard to be familiar with transhumanist ideas. (Why, in the MoRverse, did such ideas not crop up before? Dunno. Maybe because the only forms of death-defying magic known to wizardry are things like Horcruxing that would only be done by the Bad Guys, so that the idea of defying death is seen as characteristic of Bad Guys. Maybe because wizards are (for good reasons) keen on tradition -- that is, after all, how they learn most of their spells, and it seems like new magical discoveries are much rarer than new scientific ones -- so that the tradition (pretty well entrenched even in our society) of finding excuses for death, reasons (however specious) to think it a good thing, has been too strong to break. Maybe it just happened that way; lots of ideas go un-thought-of for a long time even though there's no particular reason why they shouldn't have occurred to someone.
Well, I haven't read canon, but I think Flamel is portrayed as a Good Guy whose elixir-of-life-producing-rock is sought by Dark Wizards. (And I think he'd used it on himself and remained a Good Guy.)
I'm guessing in MoR there should be no (actually working to significantly prolong life) philosopher's stone, as not using that more widely would be altogether too crazy.
It could just be extremely difficult, known only to a selfish few, with the knowledge heavily guarded (perhaps using the Interdict of Merlin).
In canon, Nicolas Flamel may have toyed with being a bad guy, but in MoR he would definitely be a bad guy … for the opposite reason.
No more crazy than reality.