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cousin_it comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4 - Less Wrong
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Chapters 51-54: bravo! Some of the best writing so far. My new favorite line from the fic: "it was a down payment on everything that Harry meant to accomplish with his life". I immediately had to rewatch the training montage from the 2008 film "Wanted" that starts at about 46:00 to get more of the same emotion.
On the other hand, it also contains this sentence:
which appears to mean nothing and serve no purpose except to irritate me by reminding me of terrible BDSM erotica.
Whaaaa? I don't think you and I have been reading the same terrible BDSM erotica.
I think I've been reading the same terrible BDSM erotica as dclayh. It's the last three words, where it slips over into telling, and telling with histrionic exaggeration. (If this were terrible erotica, I would suspect the author of getting a little too excited at this point.)
"Irreplaceable" is dubious as well. Are we, nevertheless, going to see it replaced, and in less time than forever? Only you know that at this point, but if so, the sentence is wrong. On the other hand, if the sentence is literally true, it seems a gratuitous spoiler to reveal it, a random grabbing of a fact out of the narrative future and thrusting it in front of the reader.
‘Something precious inside Harry withered like dry grass.’ also has the advantage of brevity. It now reads to me like a good sentence.
Also has an interesting implication, which may or not be what Eliezer wants-- individual blades of grass die, but grass regrows.
The narration has largely been from Harry's point of view, and so if Harry thinks that it's gone forever, that's a reasonable thing to state.
Also, a line like that one can be fine if it's just pointing out a connection that the audience should have made already. For instance, if we were talking about Harry losing his virginity, it would be okay to point out that some part of Harry's innocence had been lost forever (he can't un-lose it).
If a male who just lost his virginity is obliviated about that particular fact, is any part of his innocence lost?
Only if he develops a rash, or his T-cell count falls.
Not in the emotional and psychological sense that 'innocence' is sometimes used. However sometimes 'innocence' is (or, particularly, has been) hijacked for a more crude but less literal meaning. Like 'know' or even just 'powder my nose'. That kind of trivial boolean innocence is lost.
Not necessarily, if Obliviate doesn't literally restore your brain to the exact state it was in before the period in question.
Hmmm. Now I'm wondering whether obliviation could be exploited to enhance the experience of early (but not technically first) sexual encounters. If one maintained the changes to confidence and presumably sexually relevant skills but also maintained the excitement, anticipation and perception of novelty of the first time...
Didn't Madonna have a song about this?
Sort of implemented in John C. Wright's Orphans of Chaos:
Restoring the exact brain state is probably overkill.
I'd expect resetting to their previous values the connection-strengths in the portion of the conceptual activation network centered around <sex> to restore what I understand by "innocence" in this context.
In fact, it might be sufficient (assuming you didn't have the old values lying around to support a real reset) to just lower those connection-strengths by a constant factor. Which would perhaps be installing a new innocence rather than restoring the old one, but not only do I suspect it would be very hard to tell the difference, I'm not actually sure the distinction means anything in the first place.
Anyway, perhaps I'm just being pedantic. But it seems worthwhile, in a community that is often concerned with mind-as-algorithm rather than mind-as-attribute-of-brain, to acknowledge the distinction.
As long as I'm here, I should mention a third approach: activating an additional node that inhibits <sex>. A lot of real-world attempts at preserving innocence seem to operate this way, although it seems to me that the result is nothing at all like the innocence they purport to preserve.
I suppose that would depend on how one defines virginity. And innocence, for that matter; the two need not be synonymous.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AManIsNotAVirgin
Ah. I guess the laws of narrative causality demand that Draco Malfoy actually be a female 13 year-old rapist pregnant with Harry's baby. Given what he's up against, Harry really needs to be as fully-qualified a protagonist as possible.
I wonder if Dumbledore was the one who arranged it...
Males don't get raped. At least not till 1992. There will be a trope for that too.
The sentence would be greatly improved by deleting its last three words.