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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Update: This post has also been superseded - new comments belong in the latest thread.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)
Ha, I was just waiting for a new chapter to go up to post one.
Drat! It looks like you missed out on a couple of hundred karma and the chance to have all new insights and comments appear in your inbox! ;)
Would you mind going and editing the previous post with a forward reference? Bidirectional linked lists are far easier to navigate.
I put the link in; thanks for the reminder.
And comments on my top-level posts don't appear in my inbox, only (direct) replies to my comments. Is that different for you?
They don't? I haven't actually written all that many posts to be honest.
I thought of waiting for a new chapter, but the number of "load more comments" links got annoying enough for me to start the new thread right away (especially since it broke my search the page for "29 aug" method of reading new comments).
Yeah, I have to search for ‘load more comments’ before searching for the date. Then I also have to search for ‘loading’ (since occasionally it doesn't load) and ‘continue this thread’, opening a new tab for each of these, where I begin again.
Or I could see what this RSS thing the kids are talking about does for me.
If you want to track comments, it needs to update awfully often - I recommend Google Reader.
Now my comment is wreaking havoc on the system that it describes!
I have been entirely staying away from HP:MoR, but given some of the recent discussions, I thought I'd share a story idea, "Yowie Potter and the Methods of Pickup-Artistry".
Yowie is a young female genius and manga fan who lives alone in a forest with her robotic creations. But one day her cyborg scouts, who function as her roaming eyes and ears - one should imagine birds and cute forest animals fitted out with sensors - run across a cottage inhabited entirely by high-IQ male nerds, cut off from the outside world somehow. Along with science and futurology, their favorite pastime is to practice seduction techniques, but since there are no women around, they have to take turns being the target of seduction. Yowie enjoys this a lot and decides to amplify the situation, first ensuring that the cottage remains isolated (by blowing up a bridge, jamming communications, etc), then kidnapping some of the nerds for psychological and other experiments in her lab (chapter title, "Operation Abductive Inference"), and finally engineering the social situation in the cottage in various perverse directions, which she monitors from afar.
I'm sure that story could be a hit! Just not in this Everett branch.
It sounds interesting enough in this branch too. :)
Mind you I think I was one of the nerds I'd be rather adamant that I wasn't to be involved in any practice of "kino escalation"!
Unfortunately for you, this sounds like the sort of fiction where Yowie Potter would make certain such things happened.
Not going to happen. I can be confident in this because the very nature of "kino escalation" is that it involves implied consent and implicit or explicit participation by the other party. Without this it is called 'molestation' or 'sexual assault'. I don't especially mind people writing fiction about me being sexually assaulted. For that matter I don't particularly care if people write fiction in which wedrifid is participating in homo-erotic kino escalation. I just don't identify the latter fictional character as 'me'.
But the former (the one being sexually assaulted) you do? and still don't mind it? Interesting …
I should be clear that I consider it a fictional me, as distinct from a fictional some other guy. I can certainly understand why some people will be hurt or even traumatised by such things. I just don't see any reason why I must be. I could instead just be flattered that some girl is including me in her erotic fantasies. So it is a crazy girl and homo-erotic fantasies but there is still no harm that is done to me.
Everything that we choose to be care deeply about gives another vulnerability that can be exploited. Choosing to care about fiction that other people write about you seems silly to me - it is completely and utterly out of your control and is essentially a property of them and not you. Not having that vulnerability means that you are immune to torture simulators without even relying on any acausal decision theory.
OK, I undestand (I think). As long as the fictional person has the same character as you, then you can identify yourself with them, but if they have a different character (as they must have to engage in homo-erotic kino escalation) then you don't identify yourself with them. But either way, you don't mind that people write stories about them, since they're fictional.
Got it!
and... seriously? There are girls that go around reading and writing male homo-erotic stories? Here I was thinking only guys did that (or the analogous) sort of thing to a significant degree. How narrow minded of me.
Text-based erotic stories in general are mostly the province of girls. Yaoi stories are a subset of that, still largely by and for women. (Of course there's also manga and whatnot; I have less explanation for that.)
The link Khafra gave me the impression that Yaoi was often graphical too (compared to anime or manga). Does the same trend apply to those works? (Or, perhaps, are the wikipedia authors just biassed towards graphical media?)
The word "yaoi" is extracted from Japanese; I don't find it surprising that it would retain a connection to the Japanese story form.
Yes they do.
I don't get it. Can someone explain this to someone who isn't familiar with what "pickup artistry" has to do with HP: MOR?
Nothing directly. Just to some of the distracting references to PUA in the thread.
It's probably already been done.
Does anyone else find the HP idea of sorting children into different houses at age 11 abusive and detrimental? The houses aren't arbitrary labels; they're supposed to define your character. No real person fits into any one of those houses. Sorting students restricts their growth and causes them to develop into a House stereotype. And it's the main cause of tension, hatred, and eventually war, in their world.
Well, specialisation has benefits, and since the sorting is done by magic most people should end up happy where they are put. It's not like they get different curricula or anything.
How did you choose your prior for anything done by magic to be done correctly? :)
Ending up happy doesn't feel like a good goal. Maybe I'm being irrational. But it reminds me of the characters in Brave New World who said, "It's Good to be a Gamma!"
But it really is best (sub-Gamma) to be Gamma. The people in Brave New World really are happy and content.
Yes, I know. That's why I said what I said. (E.g., your observation is taking the dialogue back one step, not forward.)
Erm. Not really. It really is best (sub-Gamma) to be Gamma. It is not best to be Gamma. We don't want to self modify to be super-happies, even knowing that we will reflectively endorse the change having become super-happies. The people in Brave New World are honest about their class being correct in a way that normal people aren't being honest when they say it's best to go to their school or root for their sports team or like their sort of art. That's what I'm pointing out - the next step is to realize that the reply to a Gamma telling us it's best to be them is "so what?". We don't have Gamma values so the fact they're human shaped shouldn't inform out values.
The original context was Oscar saying that the sorting hat will make people happy. I commented that maybe happiness isn't the right goal - not a very helpful comment, frankly; Oscar's comment was a fine contribution, whereas mine is tangential, nit-picking, and sounds like a criticism.
If being happy were your only goal, you might very well say, "Make me a Gamma!" "We don't want to self modify to be super-happies" implies that being happy is not our only goal, which is the point I was (pedantically) making. So I think you're agreeing with me more than you're disagreeing with me. You're bringing in more subtleties to the issue.
I believe Lucas was trying for the "morality as a 2-place function" notation as in this post, but using different notation made this more confusing.
My first, knee-jerk reaction to your suggestion was, "yeah!" Then I thought about it for a second and realized just how nice it might've been at that age to be given:
an identity to be proud of, based on something I was being acknowledged to be good at, and
a peer group of (literally) like-minded individuals with whom to share a common goal (winning the cup), camaraderie, and mentorship.
(As an interesting counterpoint, I actually did participate briefly in a house system around the age of 12 or so, but the houses were assigned randomly, and IIRC the point system was purely athletic, so I didn't give a damn about it.)
It might be worth disentangling the effects of Sorting (possibly bad, should probably be moderated by mixed-House projects) and the effects of the House points system (entirely bad as far as I can tell).
The house point system might not be completely bad. It might encourage competitively minded people to work more if they might be lazy otherwise. Empirically in the real world this sometimes works. For a few years (not sure if still active), Yale and Harvard students had competitions about which could reduce energy per a capita more. When I went to highschool there was a fundraiser for raising money for foodbanks and each class competed to see which could raise more. There was also a "neutral box" for people who wanted to give but didn't compete. By the end of the fundraiser the neutral box would generally have about an order of magnitude less money in it than the the grade box with the lowest amount.
Tradition.
I can imagine that sorting students into universities or groups on Meyer-Biggs indicators or learning types could lead to some good things.
Also it could be that the founders of Hogwarts wanted to make sure that their society is made up of 4 main character and culture lines, which all work well together in the end. When putting teams together for real world projects i enjoyed having all kinds of characters working on their respective area of interest.
What does Slytherin contribute? The Slytherin attributes are negative-sum. Whatever positive value they have is negated by the presence of opposing Slytherins; and they generate huge negative externalities.
Surely you're overlooking Slytherin's positive qualities as defined by MoR. Slytherin are focused on manipulating people, concerned with power, and quite cunning. If you want to keep fooling the muggles, have good PR guys, and keep alive the dangerous, secret lore that other houses would consider too evil (so we can use it to fight aliens), you need Slytherin.
It's the only house that has consistently churned out people who actively work at defeating death!
JK mentioned how Slytherin is not just the house of evil people, but that each evil person came out of Slytherin. I do not remember what other positions Slytherins have in Canon but we can surely come up with reasons to have such a house. First it helps students to reach their full potential (at least in the theory that fiction is), second it provides a training ground to have people for the more dirty needs of society like leading in a war. Was there ever a mention which house Dumbledore went too? Third it provides society with some training for how to deal with evil people. If there are none left society gets overrun by an outside force. Fourth there is the value of not having the Slytherins poisoning other houses. Having a house of Bullies would be a nice add to the real world (till your research shows that a strong hierarchy forms in every social group.) Fifth it gives you someone to contrast yourself against. Sixth if Slytherins are more adventurous, prone to doing dangerous things that they are also the inventors of new things. A healthy society needs some innovators, some bureaucrats, some workers, some people to provide Emotional support, some teachers and so on. I remember reading some reasons for the House of Slytherin in Canon, but memory evades me.
He was a Gryffindor, o' course, since that was the standard Hero House in canon.
Dumbledore? Gryffindor, I'm afraid; it's mentioned by Hermione on the train ride of the first book. He seems like so much more of a Slytherin, doesn't he?
Wormtail was Sorted into Gryffindor and turned out to be a bad dude. This seems to have more to do with Rowling's desire to have him plausibly be a Marauder, than anything related to any aspect of his revealed personality. She's very prone to that - the same rationale was likely behind making canon!Hermione a Gryffindor.
I'm not sure that it's so much what Slytherin contributes as how best to deal with the Slythery people in society. Best to put them in school to keep an eye on them, then to put them in their own House to keep them from bothering the others. Even if you would prefer to be rid of them entirely (as Rowling, at least, might be), that's not possible.
JKR did, grudgingly, show us a positive-sum Slytherin, which is to say a pre-Riddle Slytherin; his name was Horace Slughorn. Warning; essays on that site are addictive, and they will make you hate Deathly Hallows even more than you already ought to.
Quite the reverse. The worst thing about our education systems is that they force a bunch of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws to put up with years upon years of abuse by Slytherins and Griffyndors in an environment that they have no opportunity to escape from. I would absolutely love, even now, to have a sorting hat that can essentially weed out @5@#%s pre-emptively.
It is cruel and abusive to force people in an environment where they can not choose the peers they are willing to have in their immediate proximity. At least a sorting hat would help minimise the damage. "Us" vs "Them" is far, far better than "cruelest most powerful political animal vs most socially vulnerable".
That would make more more sense if they sent those different types to different schools after sorting. At Hogwarts, they force a bunch of Hufflepuffs and Ravenclaws to put up with years upon years of abuse by Slytherins and Griffyndors in an environment that they have no opportunity to escape from.
They can go to their own Houses, and do not have all of their classes together. The canon books, and MoR, spend considerable time focusing on inter-house interaction because that's where the interest lies, but a Hufflepuff who wanted to avoid bullies of other houses could likely do so at least 90% of the time.
And as well as the reduction of social abuse via the reduced time spent with jackasses it can be a whole lot easier to tolerate social aggression if it comes from outside what you identify as the most local social hierarchy. If a Hufflepuff is insulted by Draco it may be a minor nuisance but if it was a high status Hufflepuff like Neville bullying them it would probably seriously damage their mental health over time.
As explained in some of the other comments, there are some good points about it, but it's got some major flaws. One thing I really don't like is that the teachers are House-identified. They're players in the game, and it's OK for them to arbitrarily punish kids from other Houses and show favoritism to their own. That's like making coaches the referees. Hmmm, maybe that's why the House Cup ends up getting decided by something as random as "Who can catch the golden mosquito first?"
An idea I had: Sort kids into the House that's their greatest weakness/what they're least like/the element they need most to improve. So the Hat would be like, "Well, Draco Malfoy, hrmmmnnnn...better be: HUFFLEPUFF!" "Harry Potter...unfamiliar to the Wizarding World, as like to eat an Exploding Snap as play it properly. If I don't do something you might just cast some random curse labeled 'For an Enemy' on somebody without figuring out what it does first...better be: RAVENCLAW!" "Neville Longbottom...you could go faaaarrrrr, in Slytherin." "Not Slytherin! Anything but Slytherin!" "Ooooh, a wise guy, eh? GRIFFINDOR!"
In each House, kids are taught the virtues of that House, rather than put there because they've already got 'em. And also, everyone gets Sorted each year, so you're not pigeonholed once and for all as an 11 year-old (what, nobody who was a bully at 11 ever learns his/her lesson and becomes a better grownup?).
This system would help kids become more well-rounded. Just look how much MoR!Neville is benefiting from his "tuition" by Harry, who is the very model of a modern NiceGuy!Slytherin. Even in canon, Neville does seem to benefit in terms of developing courage and getting over his fears by being Sorted into Gryffindor when (in the canon Sorting process) he "should" have been a Hufflepuff. Plus, since everybody would probably be Sorted through more than one House during their school years, it wouldn't divide the whole freaking society into four sects. Also, it would change things up a bit so one House that got the good Seeker when s/he was 11 wouldn't always, always win the Cup.
That wouldn't work at all. Slytherin wouldn't be Slytherin without any Slytherin kids there. Maybe it could be made to work with a lot of additional adjustments, but the result probably wouldn't be much like the house system you describe.
You don't think you could take a bunch of young humans and mould them into selfish, Machiavellian, politically minded, corruptible schemers?
Of all the houses I suggest Slytherin is the most natural! Making Slytherins into Hufflepuffs, now that would be a challenge.
You could - "with a lot of additional adjustments". You would to have to actually work at turning them into Slytherins, and doubly so if there are no natural Slytherins there at all to lead the way. And probably not everyone anyway.
My claim is that most humans outside of fairy tales already are Slytherins.
If that were so it would defeat the whole point of placing anyone in Slytherin to become one. And my point would still hold for the other houses.
Yes, more or less. Unless there is some reason you want people to become better Slytherin.
And Gryffindors, Hufflepuffs, and Ravenclaws.
I seem to have a somewhat more cynical outlook. Judging real humans by the criteria of the sorting hat would result in far more Slytherins than members for the other houses.
Even if you take 'em when they're kids?
It's inevitable when you recruit all your teachers from the school alumni, which itself is more or less inevitable when you're the only school in the nation.
I suppose you could rule that upon taking the job each teacher gets assigned to a new House at random other than the one they were students in (note that this would be a purely informal role, except for the four Heads), but I doubt it would be very effective and not counterproductive.
What makes the Houses have their particular character? the diktats of the Head? that 7th-year students remember what they were taught about the House the last time, they were Sorted into it, 3 years ago, and try to teach the others? I like the idea of putting people into Houses that they have the most to learn from, but then I think that you have to keep the House assignments permanent, or else lose the House characters entirely. (Not that that would necessarily be a bad thing ….)
Not directly related to MoR, but whatever. I recently joined a massive HP roleplay forum and what i noticed among the players was a huge deal of optimisation by proxy. Basically the general sentiment is that being sorted into one house means that you have no traits from the others. This makes some sense, because a wizard employer will probably look at the candidates' house affiliation first. I'll need to reread some of the books, to check if it's canon, but in the fans' minds at least, all of Magical Britain is aligning itself to an arbitrary division. It's a bit disturbing, really.
I was in a White Wolf MUSH some while ago, and it was the same story. The stereotypes helped bad roleplayers be not awful, but hindered really good roleplay.
I have a question about TDT's application in 33 of HP:MoR.
Should businessmen collude on one-shot pricing? The decision theory I learned in school says "Never!," but I can see Harry's beliefs going in either direction.
Links to a good summary of TDT are welcome.
*cough* They certainly would be!
Yes. If the expect to be using the same decision algorithm, they will maximize their personal profits if they both set the price that gives the greatest total return.
Well, not really good. Merely best.
I don't understand TDT, and the people who write about it are very smart; but that passage made it sound like sympathetic magic. You're not choosing for all the people who are similar to you.
You can argue that doing so leads to better outcomes in PDs - but then you're really just arguing for cooperation, not choosing the decision theory that maximizes your utility. "All the people who are similar enough to you that they'll probably do the same thing you do for the same reasons" just means "All the other cooperators". So saying "I implement timeless decision theory" seems to be a way to clothe saying "I cooperate on PD" in bogus Bayesian respectability.
"I always cooperate", "I always cooperate with agents I know will cooperate with me", and "I always cooperate with agents I know will cooperate with me iff I cooperate" are all separate decision making processes. Depending on who they're playing the PD with, they can make different decisions.
When I said "I cooperate on PD", I didn't mean to lump all those together. It's shorthand for those who cooperate in the way resulting from TDT. My point is that TDT itself, as described in that one sentence from the Harry Potter story, is no different from saying "People should cooperate because then they will all get better payoffs" (although in a more specific way).
OK, this is off-topic, but why do people stop there? Why not ‘I always cooperate with agents I know will cooperate with me iff I cooperate iff they cooperate’, and so on? These are not equivalent.
Incidentally, in classical logic, I cooperate iff (you cooperate iff (I cooperate iff you cooperate)) is always true. (But we don't really have that here, because the modal operator ‘I know’ interferes.)
It isn't necessary to stop there, and you can follow that chain pretty much infinitely.
I think TDT jumps to the end of that regression by cooperating iff you and I are both implementations of the same abstract computation.
Yeah, but each stage is rather different from the one before; at no stage would you actually cooperate with yourself, since those ‘iff’s are so strict.
But if this (which I've seen here before) is not supposed to be what TDT really says, but just some handwaving to give the idea, then that's all right.
TDT hasn't been published in anything resembling a finished form, and I'm a curious amateur when it comes to decision theory, at best. I imagine there's more to it, but I can't really speculate about what it might be.
People stop there because going further starts hurting instead of helping. The PD payoff matrix implies that I want to avoid cooperating if I can, but it's more important that I get you to cooperate, even if in order to do that, I have to cooperate. Adding more restrictions on your reasons for cooperating can't make the outcome better for me, I only care that you do it.
Going one step further doesn't (generally) add restrictions; it just changes them. Consider:
Using classical logic after the modal operator, these reduce to:
Actually, now that I write it out like this, I can see why one would choose (3)!
It's important that there's an ‘if I know that’ instead of an ‘iff’, which I've seen before. But the version above is how I parsed WrongBot's statement, so hopefully WrongBot quoted it correctly. (The search function is not helping me find an original.)
It's pretty clear that if your opponent in a symmetric game with the same information is running the exact same deterministic algorithm as you with the exact same computational resources, you'll have to make the same move. This essentially "vanishes" the off-diagonal boxes. The TDT proponents want to take advantage of this to have a "better, more winning" decision theory, which would give both of them the (C, C) payoff rather than (D, D) even in a one shot prisoner's dilemma.. Grafting this on by itself currently buys little, as there is never this degree of symmetry.
Now, suppose we are playing a symmetric game and 90% confident that we are playing a clone with the exact same computational resources, and 10% confident that we're playing some one random (and that if we're playing a clone that it's 90% confident that we're a clone that's 90% confident that ...) What do we do in this case?
I claim that in this case we can still take advantage of this, as long as the probability is high enough relative to the utility losses. We need to do both the calculations for "they act independently" (Assume they choose the Nash equilibrium, if we don't know anything else about their decision-making) and "they act the same" (diagonal) and merge them. The proper thing as always, is choosing based on the expected utility, which is just the probability weighted utility for each choice.
For the standard prisoner's dilemma, where (C, C) = (3, 3), (C, D) = (0, 5), (D, C) = (5, 0), and (D, D) = 1. We can see that no matter what your opponent chooses, it's better to Defect than cooperate, so the Nash equilibrium is the pure strategy D. If, on the other hand, your opponent is a computational clone, you choosing to Cooperate gets you the (C,C) box, not the (C, D) box. So, we have 0.9 * 3 + 0.1 * 0 = 2.7 for Cooperate, and 0.9 *1 + 0.1 * 1 = 1for Defect. Cooperation is the better choice, and remains so up until p < 1/3.
I also claim this is pretty much the limit of what we can do. If the algorithm you share is non-deterministic (with different random number sources), then off-diagonal results are now possible. If the computational resources are different, then we are analyzing to a different recursive cutoff than our opponent, and so may come to different conclusions. If we have the same resources, but the problem is asymmetric, than we can't simply say "they'll do the same thing we will". All the boxes must then be considered.
In some sense we also get to choose the algorithm we use. If the game is close enough to symmetric we can choose to play as if it is, and so long as that decision process is symmetric, we recover the result. If we were computers we could choose to avoid using true random number generators, and only use the same pseudorandom number generators (we do want to keep the ability to act randomly against non-clones).
Why do we assume that?
In order to figure out our best move, we need to something about how the other person will move. It's generally a good idea to assume your opponent is indeed rational and utility maximizing. The Nash equilibrium strategy is the one that is stable such that neither side can do better by switching, which gives it a great deal of stablity. As such, it's often a good model for what people will do.
In this case, the full machinery isn't necessary. Defect strictly dominates Cooperate in every choice, so barring special considerations like TDT, it's what anyone with a modicum of sense will do.
Why? I'm not just asking rhetorical questions - your opponent may be non-rational in one of a trillion of very realistic, very common ways: maybe he'll cooperate because of his personal moral/religious views, maybe he'll defect because he doesn't want to think of himself as a 'sucker'. Or maybe he is rational but has made a mistake somewhere along the way of his musings on PD.
If all your formulation says is that you're playing against "someone random", at a minimum this means a randomly chosen human, most of which have a terribly flawed rational process. At a maximum it means any randomly-chosen or randomly-generated entity capable of picking an option - you could be playing against Eliza or Paul the Octopus for all you know.
Also, if you are going to assume that he is rational and not mistaken, why assume that he is just rational enough to do the obvious, zero-depth payoff analysis, but not rational enough to have a model any more sophisticated than that? (indeed, why should TDT be discarded as a "special consideration"?)
This is a fair point. For games people are not familiar with, have not played to death, this is absolutely true. For the games people have played a lot of, (or have had their genes and memes evolved under and contributing towards their moves), anything but what the Nash equilibria does must get outcompeted. Playing poker against a novice, there should be options much better than Nash. Against a pro? Not so much. Against a hustler (who isn't actually cheating)? Well, they're optimized to take advantage of novices, by leading them into bigger bets, so you can probably take advantage of this by not scaring them off by playing too well too soon.
These are, of course, part of the utility function -- and if you don't know that modeling is a bitch.
Most people do not play by reasoning it out to any great depth at a conscious level. They play by gut instinct, set by genes (and memes) and shapened by experience. For games where the genes are relevant, this is going to push towards Nash. Experience is also going to push towards Nash.
Is this a fact? Where can I read about the evidence for this?
I don't have any direct citations to current social science, no, but I'll tell a plausible story, and give some indirect citations.
Often? Yes. Always or near always? No. It depends crucially on the complexity of the game, the familiarity of the person playing the game, and the intelligence of the people playing.
Most people playing a game iteratively update their strategies with each game, learning both which moves of theirs worked better, and what their opponents are likely to do.
If both sides constantly do these updates, they are driven towards a Nash equilibrium. (It might be better to say they are driven away from anything that is not a Nash equilibrium.) The definition of a Nash equilibrium is a combination of strategies where neither side can do better by unilaterally altering their own move. If one side can do better by altering their own move, and realizes it, they will.
Complexity makes it harder for people to explore the space and find the Nash equilibrium. The more familiar with the game, the more likely you are to have found that neighborhood and play near it.
The smarter you are the faster this happens -- you can essentially model your opponent to figure out what they'll do, and respond. But your opponent can model you as well, so you must include that in your model of him, and so forth.
A surprisingly large number of people are essentially "level 0" modelers, who aren't influenced at all by a model of what their opponent does until they have gained data on it. They may use the "maximin" strategy that says pick the choice that maximizes your gain if in each of your possible choices your opponent does what helps you the least -- brutal pessimism. Similarly there is an optimistic "maximax" strategy -- pick the choice that maximizes your gain if in each of your possible choices, you opponent chooses what is best for you. Or there is the expected value over a flat distribution of the opponent's choices. And ones that output a number for each choice can be combined with some weighting. There are many other possibilities, of course, but if there is one choice that strictly dominates another (better for every value of the opponent's choice), they should not pick the one that is strictly dominated.
Another large number are "level 1" modelers -- they figure the other guy will do something given by one of these "level 0" models. There are a few "level 2" modelers that model the other guy as "level 1" , and level 3, and so forth. The Nash equilibria are the stable fixed points of this process, so are what "high enough" people will do. (Note that this process may not converge unless it starts at a fixed point -- consider rock, paper, scissors. But doing the equivalent of Cesàro summation will make it converge to the unique mixed strategy of randomly picking one).
In practice, you want to be exactly one level higher than your opponent. It is, of course, possible to model your opponent as a probabilistic mixture of these, though your best response is (in general) not going to be a probabilistic mixture of levels one-higher. And the best response to you modeling like that will not be a simple mixture of levels either.
So, why do I say many are level 0, and level 1? Well, consider the Guess 2/3 of the average game. People are restricted to numbers between 0 and 100. The person guessing closest to 2/3 of the mean wins (utility 1), and everyone else loses (utility 0), (pick the winner randomly in case of ties). What will a level 0 modeler do? The maximin strategy gives no restriction -- you can always lose. The maximax strategy eliminates everything above 66 2/3, because that's the maximum the average can possibly be. The equiprobabal expected value strategy puts the mean at 50, and suggests 33 1/3 (getting more peaked the more people there are and the more they are modeled as independent). A level 1 modeler realizes that everybody else should know at least this, so will probably guess around 2/3 * 33 1/3 = 22, perhaps higher realizing that some level 0s won't go through even the utility analysis and pick randomly. A level 2 modeler will be 2/3 of this, at roughly 14 or 15. This obviously converges to 0 for a "level infinity" modeler, and this is the Nash equilibrium.
But of course, very few people pick near 0, so it is not a good idea to pick 0. What is it rational to pick? From the link, a newspaper ran this with a prize, and the winner was at 21.6 (so the average was around 32.4). http://museumofmoney.org/exhibitions/games/numberpop.html references a study with college students winning with 24 (average of 36!), and a financial newspaper winning with 13 (average of 19.5). When I've seen histograms, they tend to have a spike at 33 1/3, indicating lots of pretty directly level 0. Curiously, there also tends to be a spike at 66 2/3 indicating a fair number really not quite understanding the game.
In this case, with an unfamiliar game, playing the Nash equilibrium is not optimal, and people don't do it. Levels 1-3 seem to be what wins in this case, with the majority effectively playing at levels 0-2. But I can guarantee that played multiple times with the same people this will go down to 0 quite rapidly. Tautologically, people are more familiar with the games they play more often, and will in practice be effectively higher -- not because they explicitly model higher levels, but because the "level 0" models are not random, but incorporate how people have played before (rather than how they should play now).
For the specific case of the Prisoner's Dilemma, all of the "level 0" strategies pick Defect, which is the Nash equilibrium. Even so, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma#cite_note-2 claims that 40% cooperate. I would expect that this is from some innate valuing of fairness so that the rewards they get are not actually their utilities for those outcomes, but this is not clear.
EDITED: links fixed, and a bit of clarifications and grammar rewrites.
Thanks; upvoted.
That's because the passage isn't actually about TDT; Eliezer is trying to avoid throwing anachronisms into a story set in the 1990s. It's instead about the closest thing that existed at the time, Hofstadter's idea of superrationality, which does (IMO) suffer from the flaw you posit.
All they need to do is find someone who can help enforce the decision, or make it matter reputationally to friends, or iterate it, and they don't need to worry about whether they're doing the same thing for the same reasons.
I think we should be charitable (make the interpretation that makes the question most sensible or interesting), and assume b1shop is assuming those conditions don't apply.
What about new entrants?
I'm still waiting for the most obvious way to learn the epistemology of magic to be adopted by Harry. i.e. "Prof. Flitwick, How does one create new charms/spells?", but am having a lot of fun reading this fic, so no complaints, yet.
You know, Harry not even considering asking a non-Quirrell teacher something wouldn't even seem out of character. :)
It struck me as odd that Harry was repulsed by the idea of the Sorting Hat losing consciousness, then regaining consciousness (or being "reborn" as a somewhat different entity) repeatedly. Seemed a lot like falling asleep and waking up.
I would have thought that the additional creation of more consciousness, which seemed to be enjoying itself or at least not suffering, would just be added utility to the universe. Then I remembered that Eliezer is an average utilitarian. Which raises the question: Would an average utilitarian average together utility per life, or utility per second?
It doesn't feel right to say, "We must deny these potential entities life, even though they would enjoy it and not be taking any resources away from any other entities - indeed, most likely increasing the utility of those other people they talked with - because they will harm our average utility score." It reminds me of a student who won't take any classes they can't get an A in.
"Odd" or "typical of the kind of superficial moral reasoning Harry usually employs but essentially completely arbitrary"?
I wasn't modeling Harry, so just odd.
I appreciate that Eliezer tries to explain the Death-Eater point of view - they're heroes in their own minds; and they're the only ones trying to solve a terrible problem that the "good guys" are ignoring. He also points out flaws in eg Dumbledore (though that may be dumbing down the character). Overall, his treatment of the conflict is more balanced and nuanced than Rowling's. More the kind of thing that I think I like (though I could be deceiving myself).
But if the book had been written that way, could it have been a bestseller? Is stupid moral oversimplification necessary in a mass-market bestseller? E.g., Tolkien, Narnia, Star Wars.
I'm trying to think of mass-appeal war stories with a balanced or ambiguous or at least non-stupid treatment of good/bad, but the ones I come up with are not exactly blockbusters: Gormenghast, Ender's Game, Grendel, The "Good War".
Some blockbuster movies qualify: Saving Private Ryan, High Noon, Blade Runner, Watchmen, The Searchers, Rashomon, Apocalypse Now, Unforgiven. Odd that movies, which are thought of by intellectuals as more lowbrow than books, may be more successful at communicating non-stupid ideas.
His Dark Materials is a possible counterexample.
I haven't read past the first book; but in the first book, the bad guys are really obscenely bad. Calling God a bad guy doesn't make it morally ambiguous, if God is really bad in the story.
Well, there's a reason I named the trilogy rather than the first book.
Perhaps I'll read the next book, then!
Yes, they're bad, but they have justifications for why they're doing everything. (They're horribly mistaken about the consequences of what they're trying to do, but most of them honestly believe in their cause.) And you get to hear their explanations first, before Lord Asriel gets to speak - and when Lyra finally meets up with him at the end of the first book, the first thing he does is pretty horrible.
Gregory Maguire, the author of Wicked and other books, achieved considerable success turning the morally simplistic world of Oz into something more complex. The Broadway musical was also very popular as such things go. Not quite on the same level of success as your examples, but it shows there’s some market for it. (Maguire also wrote similar retellings of Snow White and Cinderella, which I think sold pretty well, although not as well as Wicked.)
Edited to add: Although if you're only asking about "war stories" strictly defined, it may not be a good example.
Any sufficiently high-stakes conflict presented with moral overtones should do.
That reminds me that I really, really liked John Gardner's Grendel (Beowulf from Grendel's view). But it wasn't very commercially successful.
If the Wizard of Oz had been written that way to start with, could it have achieved its popularity? The fact that so many people know about Oz definitely helps anybody who wants to sell a deconstruction of it.
Good point. Wicked also is an imperfect example because it was written for adults, unlike the examples in the grandparent.
I wonder if there's something different about the way (most) authors write books for children and (some) authors write books for adults - HP, Narnia, Star Wars, and Oz all had young audiences in mind. Most of the more morally complex movies mentioned in the grandparent were for adults. Do any of Stephen King's bestsellers have moral complexity?
I also wonder if those writing and creating works for children (if they do gravitate towards moral simplicity) have the correct understanding of what their audience wants? Of course, HP and Star Wars certainly broke out well beyond children, so maybe a lot of adults want moral simplicity too.
I read an essay by Stephen King where he claimed that his writing was basically socially conservative and morally simplistic - there's always evil in his worlds, but it's always an invader from the outside that must be repelled.
But McGuire's works work because they are deconstructions; he is a fanfic writer, albeit working in the mainstream business model.
What the world needs are financially successful original stories, and indeed children's stories, with grey morality.
Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book, leans grey. The villain is unambiguously The Bad Guy, but the protagonist is decidedly unsaintly, as is his mentor.
So that's one.
Thanks; I like Gaiman but didn't know about that, so now I can read it!
I have to disagree. The ‘morally grey’ approach can be interesting if the author is writing a story of ideas – exploring unconventional morality, novel social forms, etc – but very few authors have the ability to do that. Usually they’re writing a simple plot-driven story of romance and tribal conflict, which requires obstacles (for the romance) and enemies (for the tribal conflict). In this type of story trying to introduce sympathy for the villains just ruins the reader’s enjoyment to no purpose.
Besides which, morally grey stories have been in fashion for the last twenty years, and anyone who considers themselves a serious author has already taken at least one shot at it. Most genres are inundated with the stuff, some to the point where it’s hard to find anything else. The last thing we need is even more of it.
This is probably just a matter of taste, but I get enough simplified morality from people who believe that it applies in real life; I don't want it any more in stories, even simple plot-driven ones.
Not children's literature. The children of today are the closed-minded partisans of tomorrow.
How would people characterize A Wrinkle in Time? It’s been ages since I’ve read it, but it’s another indisputably (?) classic children’s book. IT and a lot of the good/evil shadow imagery seem somewhat morally simplistic in my memory, but I seem to recall other moral complexity, e.g., with the Mrs. Ws.
I’m also having trouble characterizing Charlie and the Chocolate Factory in terms of moral complexity, but it also doesn't fit in with the other examples in that it lacks a high-stakes struggle. Alice in Wonderland is the other major children's classic fantasy I can think of, but I can't recall what, if any, type of morality it presented.
Good question. As I recall, I found the first half much more interesting than the last half. In retrospect, I think that one reason was that the Ws required thought to understand but It did not. (But I don't recall thinking this at the time, so take that with a grain of salt.)
The morality in these is farcical, so it's easier to be grey, or just meaningless. (In Tim Burton's recent adaptation of Alice, which has a coherent plot unlike the original, the morality was very black and white.)
Now I remember the famous debate in The Horn Book Magazine about the morality in Charlie. I found most of that debate pointless because Charlie's morality is farcical, so why would you expect it to make sense? (Well, the debate wasn't only about morality.)
And that reminds me of Ursula Le Guin (who took the anti-Charlie position in the first April 1973 Letter to the Editor at the above link); she wrote the children's fantasy trilogy Earthsea. This has a fairly grey morality, especially the middle book, which is told from the perspective of an antagonist (at first) of the trilogy's main protagonist. Years later, Le Guin wrote a sequel trilogy, which (while earning a mixed reaction from the fans) addressed some of the problems that she saw in the original trilogy; it was even greyer, but it was not marketed to children anymore. In any case, Earthsea is not a counterexample to ewbrownv's claims, because the story does explore ‘unconventional morality, novel social forms, etc’ (and does it well, IMO).
Ob MoR: Earthsea has an anti-lifeist moral, but because it is grey, it treats the lifeist position with some respect; the villains are more misguided than evil, and you can sympathise with them. Lifeists still won't be happy with it, especially in the sequels, where gur urebrf qrfgebl gur nsgreyvsr (although once you get to that point, this is pretty well justified). But at least the lifeist position is not dismissed out of hand.
The saga of A Song of Ice and Fire has sold around 7 million copies (Wikipedia) and it's extremely far away from Manichean morality. I would estimate that no more than five percent of the text involves truly heroic or truly depraved characters.
Sven Hassel's best-selling books can also be a good example. We must, however, distinguish between works that derive their nuanced morality from an attempt to be faithful to reality, and those that donate nuanced morality to a fictional setting.
If we go back in time, we find emphasis on heroism more than good vs. evil. E.g., the Iliad.
It is if you are writing children's stories!
I would say The Silmarillion is not very morally simplistic. Specifically I would call it Black and Gray morality [TVTropes], because I can't think of a single non-God major character who's totally good. (Maybe Luthien?)
In Avatar: The Last Airbender, the original bad guys become good guys, and there is an effort (well, a couple of lines in one episode) to understand the worse bad guys.
The bad bad guys are definitely bad, but really only a couple of characters (and their nameless goons) are like that. And there is at least some mention of "wouldn't it be great if we could get Germany running again? Whoops!" Rather than simply saying they're evil for evil's sake.
Here's my Slytherin theory.
Almost all Death-Eaters were Slytherin for the same reason why almost all Mussolini supporters were Italians. People from different houses just tend to stay together, especially when organizing a major conspiracy. If Dark Lord was a Hufflepuff, most Death Eaters would be Hufflepuffs. Dark Wizardry is no more inherent character of Slytherins than fascism is of Italians.
Seriously? But, but... Hufflepuffs would suck at being Dark Lords. There are important traits that Slytherins have that Hufflepuffs just tend not to have.
If one Hufflepuff happened to have them, imagine the loyal, hardworking, tight-knit followers, diligently working to acquire the traits deemed necessary...
Dark Marks would barely even be necessary! I wonder how difficult it would be to game or work around the house selection system somehow. Can the sorting hat see through mind control spells?
All you have to do is think really hard that you can't stand any other house, will not find your fellows there, will not reach your full potential...
Or, and this is where the real threat of Hufflepuffs comes in, you really just want to help help people but are rather confused about how to go about doing so. (Unless the confusion is on the part of those who are using the label 'Dark' and you really are helping them.) Altruists are scary. Hard to control.
"For the greater good!"
I could imagine a Hufflepuff developing some spell to merge or link minds so the group can be even more cohesive and cooperative. A Hufflepuff Borganism could be pretty freakin' scary. "We are One. We are Together. We are Loyal. You should join Us. Yes, yes, you really, really should. What's that? Oh. You just don't know what's best for you. Let Us help you."
Anyone who tries to manipulate Sorting Hat at age of 11 would automatically and deservingly be sent straight into Slytherin.
Do you think it is possible for the Sorting Hat to see through powerful mind control spells? Modified memories, obliviation, imperius, etc.
Better yet, polyjuice. Send some other kid in that looks like you and is willing to go along with your plan out of loyalty.
Just brainstorming here. It's quite possible that the Hat would yell out "Well, this guy is going to Hufflepuff but wedrifid is going to Ravenclaw!"
Which reminds me, the hat works by piggybacking of the intelligence of the wearer. So I would pick the dumbest Hufflepuff friend that I could find!
It was made by founders of Hogwarts. Possibly Dark Lord or Dumbledore could cast a spell like that, but few 11 year olds or their parents.
I wonder how much consideration the founders put in to the effects of non-magical chemical interventions.
On the day before the sorting I could conceive and then carry out the following plan:
MDMA would likely be sufficient to influence the sorting. Especially if combined with extensive psychotherapy over several months. Since you have allowed influence by the parents there is even more scope for influencing the sorting by non magical means. Chemical and psychological interventions can make a huge and somewhat reversible influence on psychological traits.
There may be similar non magical ways to enhance a polyjuice based plan. Legal name changes. Chemically enhanced hazing to convince the volunteer that their actual name is wedrifid, etc.
Wizards are notoriously narrow minded when considering non-magical loopholes, especially in the MoR!reality. Bypassing the hat as an eleven year old may be difficult without assistance but should definitely be possible with parental assistance. As an extreme measure:
But what would be the point? Has the Sorting Hat ever placed anyone in a House they very strongly didn't want to be placed?
It assigned Harry to Gryffindor not Slytherin because Harry was strongly against the idea of joining Slytherin.
I'd guess with strict system like that, most people get pre-conceptions about which house they belong to long before sorting, so Hat's job is usually very easy.
Official house traits:
It seems to me Hufflepuffs are most likely to turn Magical Britain into well-meant but ruthlessly-run authoritarian state, with disastrous consequences for all.
Slytherins would probably turn against each other before achieving anything if one of them wasn't so much more powerful than anyone else.
Ambition, Cunning and Resourcefulness certainly don't rule out the possibility of solving cooperation problems. Even Draco with the lessons Harry has taught him would be sufficient for him to take over the world rather effectively if Harry was out of the way.
World used to be filled with revolutionary movements, and very few managed to grow past Dunbar's number or so before falling apart by everyone trying to out-politic everyone else.
Only very few that were extraordinarily loyal like Bolsheviks won. The primary difference between Bolsheviks and everyone else was their strong belief in strict loyalty to the party, whose decisions were to be absolutely binding upon all members.
Even after they started killing each other, very few defected the Party to join some other group.
Compare it with far more typical Slytherining in Kyrgystan where people keep joining, defecting, and plotting everyone against everyone else.
These are good points. Yet I also suggest that monarchies, any kind of feudalism and for that matter republics, religions and democracies are maintained by Slytherins. In the case of monarchies and feudalism in particular all changes in power are more or less the outcome of Slytherin machinations.
Feudalism feels more like Gryffindor to me. It was more about personal authority than about cunning. Not to mention he was the one with the sword.
Personal authority is something that takes rather a lot of cunning to acquire and maintain. A Gryffindor may be claim a territory here or there but his children either adopt a Slytherin mindset their power dwindles or is usurped.
Slytherins by definition lack necessary bravery to keep getting into all fights that maintaining a position within feudal system requires.
As long as acquiring power requires personally charging into an enemy army, Gryffindors will hold most of it. Fellow Gryffindors will be easily impressed by someone who does so without a second thought. Slytherins won't last long. To someone who actually values their life and comfort like all Slytherins do, this is very expensive kind of signaling.
I don't agree on this one. Slytherins will do what they need to do to get power. There is also quite a difference between creating, maintaining and enforcing an image of personal bravery and being personally brave. Those who maintain the greatest image of personal bravery will be those that are best at choosing to personally engage in the elements of a battle that pose little risk to themselves and who proficient at arranging the demise of anyone who doubts their courage. It isn't hard to choose the bravest rivals and ensure they are put in the most dangerous situations. As I understand it that was standard practice for dealing with rivals without damaging morale.
Gryffindors will be in the upper echelons in such a system but they will rarely if ever be at the top.
There's also the power behind the throne. Cardinal Richelieu was definitely a Slytherin. (Well, the character in Dumas was; I don't know so much about the real person.)
How about the Vedic castes of India? Brāhmaṇa = Ravenclaw, Kṣatriya = Gryffindor, Vaiśya (later Śūdra) = Hufflepuff. Nobody admits to being a Slytherin, which is suspicious, don't you think?
Well yes he was. But he never organized a circle of Slytherins to permanently take over France.
And don't forget how unsuccessful were Machiavelli - model of everything that is Slytherin.
Brits were playing Indians against each other extremely successfully. They took over India before anybody even noticed.
That's a much later time period than Vedic society, but I like it all the same.
I would have said Śūdra = Hufflepuff, Vaiśya = Slytherin. Vaiśya are the "merchant" caste, which plays rather nicely into a number of negative stereotypes, including the fat-cat capitalist robber-baron and the Evil Corporation.
Yeah, I thought of that, but I didn't think that it fit very well. So I went back to the original caste system, before Śūdra existed. I agree that when Śūdra came around, it replaced Vaiśya as Hufflepuff; I just don't feel that the newer Vaiśya fits any house.
And still later, Dalit = House-Elf?
The pre-Śūdra caste system also corresponds the the Three Estates of pre-Revolutionary France: First = Brāhmaṇa, Second = Kṣatriya, Third = Vaiśya. But again, the Third Estate later consisted (and had for centuries by the time of the Revolution) of both merchants and laborers. If you want to split those, you get a very good correspondence between Hindu castes and the European classes that allegedly inspired the 14th-century playing card suits that we still use: Hearts = Brāhmaṇa, Spades = Kṣatriya, Diamonds = Vaiśya, Clubs = Śūdra.
So by composing these relationships, we get a correspondence between playing cards and Hogwarts houses! (if we accept Vaiśya = Slytherin). There exists a set of Harry Potter playing cards by Bicycle which almost agrees, but they swap Slytherin and Hufflepuff (pic).
Most of the Trotskyist groups from the 1930s to the 1960s also adopted democratic centralism, but they infamously split all the time. Of course, Trotskyists are selected (amongst Leninists) as those willing to defect from the majority.
Trotsky was a total Slytherin, just see how many times he switched sides even before the revolution.
Chapters 43-46 of MoR are up. Go read them!
The most recent author's notes will be added to the archive shortly. I'm also pondering adding the fanart, as well, but it occurs to me that I should probably get permission from the artists before doing so, and I don't like contacting people I don't know. Therefore, I'll leave it to you all: If anyone else would like to see the fanart archived with the authors' notes (perhaps in a different folder, perhaps in the same note as the relevant chapter's author's notes - suggestions welcome), get permission for that to be done and I'll go ahead and do it.
I'm not particularly interested in the fan-art, especially since it's often not quite canon; but I don't mind if it does end up getting included, so consider this a neutral vote.
On the other side, I am very appreciative of having the Author's Notes preserved in some form. This update was not the first one where the AN were about as interesting as the fic itself.
Chapter 45. I wept.
Death.
(Chapter 45. I jumped up and down on the edge of my seat.)
Wedrifid's response to this makes me wonder how many people there might be here who aren't all fired up about defeating death. I get so excited when I think about it that I forget that some people are pro-death (including a few people that I care about very deeply.)
I am fired up about defeating death. (I also literally jumped to the edge of my seat in chapters 44 and 45.)
I rolled my eyes in 45 mostly when I reread it with 46 already in mind. I could see where Harry was inserting drama to set up a soap box for the future preaching. It soured the experience for me.
I am probably one of those not-fired-up folks. I don't want to defend that position (or attitude, or whatever) here. But I can offer that, even for someone like me, Chapter 45 was an extremely effective exposition of the emotional attractiveness of the anti-death position.
Well done, EY!
These chapters (43-46) seem to have several pieces of evidence for the "Harrymort" theory. Quirrell's reaction suggests that he recognizes the particular ideas that Harry had, which in turn suggests they're where he hid his horcruxes. That those locations also seemed obvious to Harry could be simply because they are obvious, and Voldemort used them for that same reason, but it could also indicate Harry somehow "remembering" them. That Voldemort might not have actually attempted to kill Harry after having killed Lily also suggests something may have been up there, though Voldemort may have been simply lying. And we also now have a bit of evidence that Harry's "dark side" may actually be real.
While I agree that this might be the case, there is a logical defense for the case where Harry is non-Voldemort. Consider, if you were Voldemort hiding horcruxes. Where would you put them?
Now if you are not very smart, you would probably put up some protections, and you will expect the hero to try to break them. If you were smarter, there would be some feints and double feints and deceptions involved in the process. But if you were very smart, you would go for the hardest locations, as Harry named. These might represent a kind of "fixed point" of hiding places: You know the hero will find out, but its not like you could do any better. The perfectly-logical-Quirrell knows that Harry will figure it out, but nonetheless, he has no better option! Any other choices would only make the quest easier, not harder.
Now since Harry is brilliant, he figures this out independently. Because with the above fixed-point theorem that these 5 locations are the hardest possible even assuming common knowledge of the theorem and the 5 locations among your foes, then every sufficiently smart thinker will come to the exact same conclusions independently, which in this case are Voldemort and Harry.
(Personally I disagree with the locations as Harry says them: There is one better: Randomize everything that Harry said. Of the 5 hardest options, make a probability distribution over them [weighted by difficulty: I would expect the space version to be weighted higher as it seems harder to find things in space than say the earth version of digging a hole a kilometer under the ground of which there are a much smaller number of hiding spots.] Then, randomize each version so that the launch trajectory (in the space case) or the burial site (in the earth case) is selected randomly. Finally, build a machine that will do the randomized selection and auto-launch independently, so that you yourself are unaware of the selected locations. Even obliviation seems weak: perhaps there are ways to be unobliviated ex-post.
This way, a machine chooses 7 modes (space/air/water) randomly for your 7 horcruxes. I imagine there would be 4 space horcruxes, 2 air horcruxes, 0.5 water horcruxes, etc. (depending on the probability distribution chosen) Ideally you would obliviate yourself ex-post so that you don't remember the probability distribution you chose. Then once the modes have been selected for each horcrux the machine spits out for each of the horcruxes a random trajectory/location and launches. Then you destroy the machine (and sufficient surroundings so that remaining bits of information cannot be used to reconstruct even partially the entropy bits surrounding the machine to regenerate the random numbers). Then you obliviate yourself of every thing.
Even then, this isn't foolproof, because a smart enough person looking to find out where your horcruxes are would arrive at the same conclusions and realize what you've done. But it is the strongest possible that could be done. (That is, if I haven't made a mistake: which I don't claim to have. I'm not Quirrelmort/Harry smart, I'm dumber. Presumably if they came up with the solution it would be without any holes I might have overlooked)
Randomization is the only hope here. Your solution needs to be sufficiently hard that you yourself cannot ex-post figure out where they are, so that the hero cannot either. The more random, the larger the search space for any future searcher, and no additional information can be obtained. Harry does grasp this by suggesting obliviating yourself after randomly selecting a trajectory for the space case, but I would make that more rigorous and have a very strong random number generator of which you were a not part of.)
I would normally suggest throwing the horcrux across a horizon (black hole or outside the future light cone). But in a world with time travel and apparition that doesn't seem quite so safe. I would weight the distribution more in the direction of space, leaving the 'air' ones out altogether.
If possible I would make the acceleration factor on the space bound item vary based on quantum effects at regular intervals, leaving it thoroughly distributed across an ever expanding part of the universe.
It matters somewhat just what the device being hidden is made of and whether it can, say, resist insane tidal forces, supernovae and the like. The flying item may need to be programmed to avoid such things or perhaps dive right in, depending on the specifics.
The other thing to consider is that obscurity isn't the only way to make something inaccessible. Even if the direction is guessable, spending sufficient effort in making the item accelerate into space could make it extremely hard to find. If you can charm the item to accelerate at 10g away from the earth forever and also manage to prevent anyone from chasing after it for 10 years then you have made your horcrux damn hard to catch.
Before I did any of these things, well, at least before I did it with the >=3rd horcruxes I would thoroughly research just how the horcruxes manage to make you unkillable. I would need to confirm that wherever I hid a horcrux enabled the horcrux to do its thing in a way that is useful. ie. I don't want to respawn inside black holes, outside the light cone of everything I hold dear or even inside any volcanoes.
If a horcrux of Type 1 is found, that greatly increases the chance another horcrux of Type 1 is findable. You actually do want to use as many different modes as possible, not randomize across modes, because the probabilities are not independent.
Well, both goals should factor into your decision. The probability of hiding your (n)th Horcrux in Type 1 should be (much) less than the probability of hiding your (n-1)th Horcrux there, but you still want to inject a bit of randomness into how many Horcruxes go where...otherwise a devoted pursuer might be able to deduce the general location of your one remaining Horcrux after deactivating your first six, thereby saving a crucial few weeks and thwarting you once and for all.
The Wizards can create dimensionally orthogonal pockets of spacetime (for their bags of holding, mokeskin pouches, and TARDIS trunks). If a Horcrux simply has to be hidden where no one can get at it, and doesn't have to maintain a signaling link to the "rest" of the maker's "soul," perhaps Voldy could have made some dimensionally transcendent space (like a BoH or the Mirror of Erised), put a Horcrux in, then destroyed the connecting interface with our reality. Basically, a magical corollary of multiverse cosmology, where the Horcrux is placed in a new "pocket universe" that is then separated from ours so that it cannot be reached even in principle.
I would guess from MoR canon that relativity-compliant signaling is not necessary for a Horcrux to work, since light-lag between Earth and the Pioneer Horcrux would already be significant.
Speaking of horcrux types, will you give us some hints as to just what effect such devices have in the MoR universe? ie. Backup copies, respawn points, part-of-your-intellectual-capacity, etc. Can a voyager horcrux allow you to recover from a 'death' back on earth despite being a gazilion miles away?
Canonically, IIRC, obliviation can be broken by sufficient torture.
Canonically? Where?
The only thing resembling actual "unobliviating" that I can think of is Lockheart apparently slowly slightly recovering from his memory charm blowing up in his face via the broken wand. And that was after several years of ongoing treatment at St. Mungo's.
Goblet of Fire, Bertha. We could possibly assume that her Obliviation was intended to be of the undoable sort to begin with, like what canon!Hermione did to her parents (so Bertha could still work on her job while she was at work, or regain the memories after the Tournament).
Huh. I had no memory of that (appropriately enough. :P) *goes to look that up* Huh.
Although according to this, she did suffer permanent brain damage from the memory charm itself, so not exactly what I'd call reversible, but yeah, point to gwern and you.
Bertha Jorkins. After she found out that the Crouch family was keeping Barty Crouch Jr. imprisoned in their house, Crouch Sr. put a Memory Charm on her strong enough to cause her permanent brain damage and forgetfulness. But Voldemort was able to break through it with torture.
Yeah, as I replied to Eliezer, I had no memory of that, appropriately enough. :P
I just thought of another from an earlier chapter.
Equal, as in mathematical equality.
Also, from Ch. 45: "A strange word kept echoing in his mind." Probably 'horcrux'. [ETA: gjm's right. Missed that.]
I'm still trying to figure out what happened at Godric's Hollow.
Voldemort went in there with the intention to kill Harry (evidence: the prophecy, his seeming willingness to let Lily escape). Lily asked him to spare Harry's life in exchange for her own. It would seem that Voldemort accepted this offer in some way: he verbally agreed to the bargain, he killed Lily despite a previous intention to spare her, and Harry ended up surviving the encounter. But why would Voldemort do that when he could as easily have killed both, when he wanted Harry dead for prophecy-related reasons, and when he wanted Lily alive for Snape's sake?
Theories:
Voldy had always planned to save Harry's life for his own purposes - maybe he interpreted the prophecy as meaning this would be the boy into whom he could upload his personality. He only came to Godric's Hollow to cast the personality-transfer spell onto Harry and maybe get rid of the parents. He accepted Lily's offer because it amused him to have Lily sacrifice her life when he wasn't going to kill Harry anyway.
Voldy came to kill Harry, and never gave up on that intention. He pretended to accept Lily's bargain because he was Evil, and pretending to accept bargains and then breaking them is what evil people do. However, there was some hidden magic that auto-cast the Unbreakable Vow spell without Voldemort knowing. Voldemort tried to kill Harry, which broke the vow he had made to Lily, insta-killing him. Harry was Horcruxed and Voldemort's soul survived in the Horcruxes in a way relatively similar to in canon.
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.
Comments cover up to Chapter 46. UN-ROT13'd SPOILERS.
Love the new chapters! Harry's takedown of the Dementor was epic! Yes, I know, that term has been devalued by inflation quite a bit, but in this case its original value and meaning hold. A very nice and emotionally powerful summation of Singularitarian values in Harry's buildup. Also, I didn't stop and try to guess what Harry's Patronus would be, but "the rational animal" is the perfect choice!
One little quibble though. When Dumb-ledore and Harry were trying to guess why Quirrell might want to bring a Dementor to Hogwarts, Dumbles never bothers to mention, "Well, Quirrell did challenge me to a bet, that if any of the First Year students could produce a corporeal Patronus, that I'd let him teach the Killing Curse to anyone who was interested." Naaawwwww, there couldn't possibly be some ulterior motive to Quirrell's desire to teach Dark Magic to the kiddies, could there? Surely not!
And isn't this supposed to be an "Unforgivable" curse, as in, "life in Azkaban" or "the Dementor's Kiss" for using it? Given the existence of such a law in Wizarding society, it doesn't make sense to me for Dumbledore to allow Quirrell to teach young children something that, if used in a moment of immaturity, could completely ruin their entire lives. "The WIzengamot has decided that having a temper tantrum is not an excuse. Send for the Dementor!" Imagine a boy like Canon!Draco given the Killing Curse to use as a First Year.
On the other hand, there are other spells that could be equally lethal, like Diffendo (a cutting spell) or Fiendfyre, and those aren't "Unforgivable." I suppose the thing about Avada Kedavra is that there's no defense against it. So, while other spells might be like teaching a young kid to shoot, the Killing Curse is like giving them a rocket launcher. One that's always loaded, has unlimited ammunition, and is carried with them wherever they go. I.e., not the same thing as a young kid having a gun that they take out and use under parental supervision.
There is something all too appropriate about comparing AK to a gun.
That 'unforgivable' label always seemed utterly arbitrary. Yes, torture, coercion and killing tend to be nasty things to do but there are far more ways to go about doing it than those three spells. Effective use of winguardium leviosa could kill dozens of people at once, for example. And combining healing magic with a sharp stick over a period of a month is probably worse than crucio for a couple of seconds. Then there's the old 'sleep/stab' combination that makes 'sleep' the most feared spell of all in certain magical worlds.
That seems to be the big distinguishing feature. Teaching 12 year olds something that Dumbledore himself could not protect anyone against seems like it may have downsides.
I've always taken the position that stigmatising AK was arbitrary and pointless but I've never quite taken that position all the way to teaching junior grades how to use it. Surely it is something that should at least have the limitations that are in place for apparition? (Even if that just means removing the limits RE: apparition!)
One justification I liked was that AK, being "fueled by hatred", can only be cast by those who are already beyond the Moral Horizon. So it's not the murder itself that's so terrible, it's that fulfilling the prerequisites for using AK means that you are a dangerous sociopath who cannot be safely let loose in the wizarding world.
Unfortunately this doesn't cover Crucio and Imperius, which IIRC are even used by some "good guys" in canon. But I'm sure you could come up with some other fan-wank to explain them.
I like that justification too, in as much as it is the best of the possible 'fan-wank'. Even so I suspect that Lily could have pulled off an AK if she had more of a chance. She had huge reserves of magical talent and a hell of a lot of hatred. Yet she still wouldn't be a dangerous sociopath. In fact, the scariest thing about sociopaths is that they don't even need to have overwhelming hatred to do brutally nasty things. The fact that most people need to be overwhelmed by emotion before they violate mores is what distinguishes them from sociopaths.
Oh yes, I was talking about canon; IIRC Lily Potter, or any non-Death Eater, doesn't attempt AK there, does she? The wiki doesn't say so, at least.
Not that I recall. Mad Eye AKed a spider but technically that was a death eater impersonating Mad Eye. (Although nobody, not even Dumbledore, seemed to blink when Mad-Eye was AKing arachnids. That suggests that people within canon!verse do not all believe that casting AK means you are actually evil.)
I never really understood the claim that there's no defense against Avada Kedavra. Sure, there's no direct countercurse, but you can dodge it or levitate an object between yourself and the curse (Dumbledore levitated a statue in front of Harry to protect him from the curse in Book 5). Both of these responses can be trained to the point of instinct, and voila, you have a defense.
Wait, the fact that the second strategy works is inconsistent. If the Killing Curse can be blocked by inanimate objects, why is it that clothing doesn't block it?
Maybe it's like a liquid, and can get through cloth but not an entire sofa or wall.
That makes sense!
I love the recent (Humanism-era) take on Dumbledore. It's about time MoR stopped portraying him as a fool and showed his real scheming, ruthless side. Portraying Dumbledore as weak or foolish doesn't appeal. But seeing him as a scary, morally ambiguous, overwhelmingly powerful wizard who saved the world from Voldemort with gossip is a development I like. That's a guy who can really bite the bullet (in this case regarding his implications of prophecies) and then shut up and multiply.
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.
A couple of days ago I was scouring the site to get recommendations on some good fiction to read. MoR and Luminosity just seem to whet the appetite! I came across a recommendation for Lawrence Watt-Evans. In the resulting discussion Caladonian comments on Sherlock Holmes:
That did spring to mind when I was reading the passage you describe.
I thought of Conan Doyle too while reading that passage. I think it was a conscious attempt by Eliezer to incorporate some detective-style reasoning. IMO it doesn't work perfectly, but makes for a fine read anyway.
Watt-Evans is nice, but he can't write exciting endings. If only we could cross his work with the Night Watch novels (you might've seen the film, it's an adaptation of Russian fiction) - they aren't as carefully written, but have good unexpected climaxes of just the type Eliezer is shooting for. One of the books ends like this: Gur tbbq thl, jvgu ybgf bs tbbq zntrf yraqvat uvz gurve cbjre, tbrf nybar gb snpr gur ivyynva naq fnir gur qnl. Fhqqrayl ur fcraqf nyy uvf cbjre ba n fuvryq gb cebgrpg uvzfrys, jvgubhg gelvat gb nggnpx gur ivyynva ng nyy. Gur ivyynva tbrf sbejneq jvgu uvf rivy cyna naq xvyyf uvzfrys. (Gur tbbq thl ernyvmrq gur synj va gur ivyynva'f cyna whfg va gvzr naq pnfg gur fuvryq gb pbaprny uvf gubhtugf. Ba n erernqvat bs gur obbx, gur synj jnf va cynva fvtug nyy gur gvzr.)
That ending was a truly awesome moment, especially given the buildup.
Did you mean to say, "if the MoR-truth is the same as the canon-truth"?
Because Harry is mistaken compared to canon truth. In canon, Snape eavesdropped on the original prophecy when it was spoken in front of Dumbledore.
Thanks for the spotting - fixed. (I actually originally wrote "if the MoR-truth is actually different and Harry...", then threw in "from canon-truth" during a cursory edit pass).
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.
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.
Yes. That part made me simultaneously tingly and teary.
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.
Yes. That was one of the most beautiful scenes in all of fiction.
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.)
From the current Author's Note:
What's "Always and Always"?
It's listed among Eliezer's favorite fics via the feature for designating such things on ff.net. Here it is. It's quite nice.
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.
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.
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...