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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4
[Update: and now there's a fifth discussion thread, which you should probably use in preference to this one. Later update: and a sixth -- in the discussion section, which is where these threads are living for now on. Also: tag for HP threads in the main section, and tag for HP threads in the discussion section.]
The third discussion thread is above 500 comments now, just like the others, so it's time for a new one. Predecessors: one, two, three. For anyone who's been on Mars and doesn't know what this is about: it's Eliezer's remarkable Harry Potter fanfic.
Spoiler warning and helpful suggestion (copied from those in the earlier threads):
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 (649)
The website hosting MoR now has a popup with audio when you go to it, so it is now NSFW.
Would Harry's patronus block any killing curse, or only one thrown by Quirrell?
Harry's own interpretation of the DOOM feelings are that any two magics cast by Harry and Quirrel might mutually annihilate in this way.
New thread after 500 comments.
With Chapters 55-56, I have some theories regarding Quirrell's true plan. He is Voldemort (or rather contains a piece of Voldemort) but we know he doesn't want Harry dead; he's had ample opportunity to simply murder Harry if that was the goal. I think rescuing Bellatrix is a distraction as well, really nothing more than a cover story or "fortunate side effect" of achieving the true goal. If rescuing Bellatrix was the true goal, he wouldn't have jeopardized the mission by attempting to murder the auror.
I think Quirrell's ultimate goal is the Dementation of Harry, probably in order to draw out Harry's dark side (which I think is the horcrux-fragment of Voldemort). He tried this at Hogwarts and it would have worked if not for Hermione's intervention. Since he was unlikely to be able to bring Dementors to Hogwarts a second time, he concluded that he'd have to bring Harry to Azkaban. The rescue plan is a cover story designed to persuade Harry into going to Azkaban--although I suppose Quirrell figured he might as well make the rescue target someone who could actually be useful to him/Voldemort if freed.
So basically Quirrell deliberately put himself out of commission, thinking that Harry would quickly fall prey to the Dementors in such a situation. The hole in my theory is that this seems like an all-or-nothing play: he's now revealed at least three pieces of important information to Harry (1. His own willingness to kill innocents; 2. The spell-clash aspect of their joined magics--which for my theory to be correct, Quirrell must already have known about; and 3. Quirrell's own insanely-high power level). These three pieces together are probably enough to make Harry suspect that Quirrell is an aspect of Voldemort, once he has the chance to think things through. Quirrell is subtle enough that he should have had a backup plan in place in order to retain Harry's trust in the event that Harry is not Demented, but I can't imagine what that might be. Maybe Quirrell's backup plan involves the Imperius Curse or memory charms or something. I'd say that "Kill Harry" would be the simplest and most obvious backup plan, but I think Voldemort wants/needs Harry alive.
Not a prediction so much as a guess: Bellatrix's Innervate charm did work on Quirrell. He's currently faking unconsciousness (and remaining in the form that gives himself some protection from the Dementors) as he waits to see whether Harry will or will not succumb to Dementation.
To counter this, it was Harry's actions that lead to the fight with the auror. Up to the point that Harry almost lost control of his patronus Quirrell had been acting to shield Harry's hearing, perhaps fearing that exact response. I don't think there is any evidence that the fight was inevitable.
I agree that it's unreasonable to expect that Quirrell could have anticipated the entire chain of events that led to the duel with Bahry. However, it's not at all unreasonable to expect that a duel with one or more aurors would occur at some point during the course of breaking in and out of Azkaban, and in fact we know that Quirrell planned for this contingency, because he gave Harry standing orders for what to do if/when it happened. So, while that fight was not inevitable, a fight was always likely.
Doesn't work. It was Quirrell (and only Quirrell) who spotted Harry's wand next to the Dementor's cage and alerted Flitwick so he could remove it.
If he had wanted Harry Demented he would have kept his mouth shut.
I think he did that because he didn't want Hermione going in front of the Dementor again -- she was getting too much information from it -- and also because he figured (rightly) that Harry had already received enough exposure for his purposes.
Wha? Quirrell knew about Harry's superpower against Dementors before he proposed the mission.
I think that's why he cast the killing curse -- to get Harry to expend his Patronus.
I don't think it's reasonable to assume that he could predict the Patronus stopping the curse. Harry didn't know it could do it. How could Quirrell, who can't even cast Patronus 2.0?
Additionally, he had to be certain that Harry wouldn't be able to recall his Patronus, which would also be beyond him.
But it was more likely that Harry would get picked up be Aurors than Dementors (now it doesn't look that way, but Quirrell couldn't have predicted Harry's actions), and Quirrell wouldn't risk his own arrest.
Yes, my theory definitely depends on believing that Quirrell COULD predict Harry's actions when he cast the killing curse on the auror. You also have to be willing to believe that Quirrell knew Harry would figure out a way to observe the battle, even though he was ostensibly lying out of sight. I think the first is more of a stretch than the second. Anyone who knows Harry at all could predict that he would try to find a way to spy on the battle: using the Patronus to block the Killing Curse is a much more specific action that only somebody who understands Harry really well would be able to predict. I guess I'm willing to believe that Quirrell does understand Harry that well.
Could Quirrell have guessed that Harry's patronus would block a killing curse? That seems like a stretch.
Is it possible that any magical interaction between Voldemort and Harry would cause that effect -- a kind of blast radius that cancels both their magic, causing painful feedback in the process?
Then Quirrell wouldn't need to know exactly what magic Harry would use in response, just that he would do something, and that in doing so both of them would be temporarily shut down...causing Harry to lose his Patronus no matter what kind of magic he'd used to try and block the Killing Curse. This might be consistent with the sense of doom that Harry feels when close to Quirrell--it's kind of a magical matter/antimatter thing, for lack of a better metaphor.
I concede that Quirrell should have have known that Harry would intervene if possible, and that he might have guessed that painful feedback would be the outcome of any intervention. I would also offer that Quirrell throwing away his wand does imply he had some idea of what was happening.
However, I still don't see that Quirrell intended for the fight to occur.
He gave Harry instructions for what to do in the event that they encountered an auror, so clearly he'd at least anticipated the possibility that a duel would happen at some point during the prison break. We're also told that Harry's maneuver with the mirror is something he'd "practiced...in the Chaos Legion," so Quirrell should also have anticipated that Harry would be watching the duel if/when it happened. At the very least, he knows that Harry will be able to hear it.
So. The duel was not outside Quirrell's plan. Therefore his actions during the duel must also have been deliberate and have been part of the plan. If those actions seem to foil the plan, then...it was never the real plan. And the real plan must somehow be furthered by Quirrell's actions. So the only way I can make sense of Quirrell's behavior is to think that he was deliberately trying to provoke the reaction he got from Harry.
Why? What does it gain him? Well, it leaves Harry exposed to Dementors. And coincidentally enough, this is the second time that Quirrell's actions have left Harry exposed to Dementors. At which point I decide that it's not coincidence at all. So my theory is really just trying to answer the question, "Why does Quirrell want Harry exposed to Dementors?"
At the risk of building this theory on top of another unconfirmed theory... It's been speculated that Quirrell himself is Demented. He doesn't appear so when Voldemort is telepathically controlling him, but when Voldy takes a cigarette break or whatever Quirrell enters zombie mode. Quirrell is just kind of an empty body, zombie-like unless Voldemort is logged in.
Maybe Voldemort wants to control Harry's body in a similar fashion. What the difference is between dementing and then telepathically inhabiting, versus simply using the Imperius Curse... /shrug.
Removing happiness makes for better evil.
Alternatively, Voldemort has tried killing Harry, it didn't work, so he wants to eliminate Harry as a potential obstacle through other means. If Harry's soul is sucked out (or whatever the Dementor's Kiss does, actually) then he is still alive technically but not an obstacle. It's worth a shot as an alternative approach to just trying to kill Harry over and over, which is what canon Voldemort tries to do.
Also, and this can't possibly be Quirrell's reasoning, but it's still an interesting thought: the MOR version of The Prophecy says that "either must destroy all but a remnant of the other". If Harry is subjected to irreversible Dementation, all but a remnant of him is destroyed.
I am confused by Quirrell's behavior in attempting to kill the auror, so I assume that there is something that I don't know or understand about Quirrell's motives.
What I don't see yet is that Quirrell was relying on the dual to occur, only that it was a possibility that he accounted for.
Assuming that this was part of the Plan, in some sense, then it comes across to me as a test. Perhaps to force Harry to confront his sensitivity dementors, perhaps simply to test him in an apparent no-win situation.
You're right, that's all we can know for sure from the story so far. My theory is purely speculative, a guess at Quirrell's true motives. It springs more from earlier chapters than from this one: I think it was really suspicious of Quirrell to go to all that trouble to bring Dementors into Hogwarts, and I'm inclined to believe that Hermione got true information from her encounter with the Dementor (namely, that Quirrell wanted Harry drained). Given that background, it seems more than a little suspicious that Quirrell has brought Harry into the same danger all over again, which is why I'm so quick to believe that stripping Harry of his Patronus was part of the plan. But I definitely don't think I have all the details worked out.
But in that case isn't he risking a lot for very little reward?
Your point would seem to apply to the whole rescue attempt, and especially to Quirrell's attempt at murder.
A Bayesian villain plots under uncertainty, and shouldn't be judged with Hindsight bias.
I agree that we can't reasonably assume that the Patronus teleport, magical feedback and subsequent Dementor exposure had been part of Quirrell's plan.
However, the much more limited and much more certain prediction that AK'ing a guard Auror while in Harry's earshot would cause a mess and make the stated "perfect crime" plan impossible is easily within Quirrell's ability to figure out beforehand, even on the spot.
Therefore, his casting of AK - if not the very unusual result - is sufficient evidence that the "perfect crime" plan was at least to some degree horsecrap. Not that he must have wanted Harry to get caught, but, unless he had a doppelganger of Bahry in his pocket to replace him with, he certainly wasn't as interested in a clean breakout as he had claimed.
I agree. The exact disastrous consequences of Harry's reaction were most likely not part of the plan, and can't be seen as a serious flaw or rationalized-in-hindsight as having been part of the plan all along.
But there's nothing in the situation that would have come as a surprise to Quirrell. If his goals were the ones he stated to Harry, then Quirrell is indeed left holding the Idiot Ball.
EDIT: By "nothing in the situation that would have come as a surprise," I mean the fact that there's a duel with an auror in Azkaban, and that Harry is present and observing. In that situation casting a Killing Curse is idiotic, if the goal is simply to keep moving with minimum fuss. Quirrell would have known that perfectly well when he was making his plan.
He could have confidently foreseen that the AK would have ruined the "perfect crime" and pissed Harry off.
He could not have confidently foreseen that Harry's Patronus would teleport in the way, block the Killing Curse, cause a magical backlash, and disappear.
Harry really isn't that hard to predict... If he had a few moments spare I can even imagine him giving an impassioned speech on the subject before he used the patronus.
I've figured out what Harry's "sense of doom" reminds me of. The old action movie Timecop with Van Damme. The antagonist there used a clever plot to help a younger version of himself succeed in the past, but they had to avoid touching because "the same matter cannot occupy the same space". In the end the protagonist forces them to touch, whereupon they both die in freaky fashion and disappear from the timeline. But it's probably just another of Eliezer's clever shout-outs, not an actual clue.
Chap 65:
Harry's treatment of the different (agents?) in his head make me wonder about the MOR Horcrux mechanics and the possibility of making copies of a being. If the horcrux copying process is repetatively damaging, like analog copies of a wax cyinder recording, there would be a degradation in each stage, and the last horcrux, Harry would be the poorest copy. Or if each horcux was same-quality, there might have been only something like limitations on the first analog-digital conversion, and successive generations of copies might be exact, like digital-to-digital. The ability to copy consciousness is interesting. One can, a la Star Trek transporters, destroy the original to keep from having duplicates, you could let either the scanning process not destroy things, or you could make the construction process repeatable. High-fidelity digital reproduction make software and IP copies have constant marginal cost, and I wonder what that might mean for copies of consciousness.
If Voldemort can have a number of horcruxes, each of which can regenerate a new Voldy, why can't he generate multiple selves from them? Would a being with the ability to copy itself do so, or not? A team of Voldemorts, or post-horcrux-Voldemorts would be more powerful and resilient than a single one. Or is Voldemort too selfish to work with himself?
Most of them do, for reasons that should be obvious.
Copying mind state differs from sexual or asexual reproduction. I was wondering how the MOR soul-splitting, copying, backup, imprinting, and possession mechanism works and how it might be exploited.
Could, for instance, Harry split his soul into its separate agents without the act of murder? Or is the important part of the Horcrux magic stealing someone's soul to use as media to make a copy your own soul? How close are Harry's suppositions in Ch20 to the MOR-reality?
Evidence for a 'soul' and the need to eliminate another in order to do horcrux like magic gives some credence to theories that MoR is in a simulated world. You need to wipe out an existing virtual machine in order to put an extra instance of yours there, splitting your own may require dividing your 'soul/computational resources' between multiple instances, etc.
How do we know that one needs to eliminate another soul in order to do horcrux-like magic?
If copies require wiping out of existing virtual machines, population growth should be impossible. Since, at least in the muggle world, population growth happens, would this be evidence against a theory of a simulated world?
Also, if the Bacon Diary is a "very recent" Horcrux, wouldn't that imply the cost to the original is not a strict division?
I think that was a reference to canon - creating a horcrux requires murder (Confirmed in MoR by Dumbledore in chapter 28)
In which case change 'do' to 'would' in Toby's comment, keeping reasoning the same.
Perhaps I'm dense, but the obvious bits seem interesting. If resources are limited, each copy would end up sharing a smaller fraction of the same pool. If there is some fidelity loss in the copying, copies may have conflicting objectives. The risk of a duplicate becoming a rival seems non-trivial. If there a significant cost/damage to the original in the copying process, perhaps most would not.
MOR's horcruxing process seems different than canon, and the differences between what is required by the author's narrative, by what actually happens in biology, or by what would hypothetically happen in really-real reality given some future copying process seem non-obvious.
ETA: It seems like Toby's comment uses "is" to prove "ought", and extending that to cover future mind copying does the same.
You're not dense; they are interesting. It was Darwin's great discovery! And you're right to suggest that under certain conditions (such as limited resources and poor fidelity) they would not.
I certainly didn't intend to say anything about ‘ought’. Maybe it's bad that most beings with the ability to copy themselves do so; then how can we stop it? (Perhaps we should limit resources and interfere with the fidelity!)
My posts was fuzzily asking a couple things: one about what Voldemort in MOR would/should/did do, where I read your answer as that we should look to the natural world, and a more general one about beings in general, where it is obvious that they do indeed copy themselves.
In the biological world, resources are limited, and we're in competition with fairly evenly matched competitors. AI-wise, I don't see how we could effectively limit the resources or interfere with the fidelity for a sufficiently advanced AI.
Back to the particular example of horcruxes in MOR, It seems like the costs and perhaps fidelity are significantly different than canon (Bacon's diary?), and I wonder if that will have interesting implications.
He does not.
Regarding Author's Note:
Perhaps: Some Anvils Need To Be Dropped
More like AnvilOnHead. But I don't that this is what EY was getting at either.
Chapters 55-56: disappointment. Harry recovered way too easily, if the story were consistent he'd be screaming on the floor until the Aurors arrived. The obstacle of Bahry's future testimony shouldn't have been so easy to remove, now I'm suspicious that Eliezer will deal with the obstacles posed by McGonagall, Dumbledore and others in the same fashion. In general, the end of Ch. 54 seems to promise all hell breaking loose, 55 undoes that, tries to build more suspense instead, and fails to be believable because it erased previous suspense too easily. It's like a prelude that promised a fugue and didn't deliver. But the part where Harry momentarily thinks of Bellatrix as a good unquestioning minion was one of those moments of brilliance that I love the fic for.
The best description of hell breaking loose I've ever read was the first part of Dostoevsky's "The Idiot". I first read it assuming it would be a difficult work of "serious" literature, and it totally upset my expectations by being more exciting than any "fun" literature I'd seen. Here's how it goes: all the heroes and the main conflict are introduced in the first couple pages, then the situation quickly becomes tense, then passions begin to flare up, then the whole thing explodes while we're not even halfway into the chapter, and when you expect it to subside it explodes some more instead, then more and more, and unbelievably the chaos just keeps growing until the last page of Part 1 when it ends with a couple paragraphs and you have to close the book rather than read on to Part 2, because you're shaking and you need to work out who was thinking what.
I've thought about this a bit. Emotionally, I agree with you. But all the counter-arguments make sense. I've finally narrowed it down to a single sentence, at the end of Chapter 54:
This sentence is epic. It sent shivers down my spine when I first read it. It resounds with finality. The jig is up. The battle has been lost. Despair, all ye mighty. I couldn't wait for the next installment to find Harry waking up in an holding cell with his plans crumbling about him, desperately thinking his way out of this jam without giving up his friend.
Now, I do actually enjoy the next two chapters. But the promise of finality was broken. Ch55 starts out with "And then it was already too late... PSYCH! It's not too late at all!" It feels like the X-men comic books I'd read as a kid, which on the cover showed our heroes dead or mortally wounded, the villain of the month triumphant above them, but when you grab the comic and read it you find that nothing like that happens in the story.
If that line was removed (or at least changed to not be so Final) the transition between 54 and 55 wouldn't be jarring.
Prisoner's Dilemma, huh? :-) I had the same hopes for 55. Right now it looks like Harry will escape the mess without losing anything. Whyyy? Corwin of Amber had a spectacular failure that got him imprisoned and blinded, and the story was better for it.
I think you're right. The power of that line even confused me into jumping to conclusion that Quirrell died, despite a much better explanation. The book will be better if this device is changed.
Well, to the accusation of inconsistency I will respond that (a) Harry is not standing five paces away from a Dementor this time and (b) he has been strengthened somewhat by previous realizations, thus he does not instantly fall over and gets a chance to recover.
I agree entirely.
In chapter 52, I was able to empathize with Harry. I felt what he was feeling. And the feelings were was surprisingly intense.
But in the next chapters the story just started getting too unrealistic, and Harry became an impossibly superpowered character, and I lost my emotional connection with him.
This was a constant problem throughout the rest of the story too, but the problem is especially egregious in this story arc. And the impossibly-superpoweredness kept escalating.
Chapter 52 was vaguely plausible.
Chapter 53 might have been plausible, if Harry had a lot of time to prepare.
Chapter 54 was only slightly less realistic than chapter 53.
And I thought that after Chapter 54, this story arc was over. Harry failed at his mission, and just had to keep from losing his mind entirely before the aurors found him and he had to face the consequences of his actions.
But then in chapter 55, he made a miraculous recovery. Noone could recover like that. Not even Eliezer Himself could recover like that.
From then on, this wasn't a story about a real person, it was a story about an impossibly superpowered character, and the story lost almost all of its emotional impact.
I still think Harry should have just given up, and turned himself in to the aurors. I don't see how this could possibly end well, and Harry's actions in chapters 55 and 56 are just making things a whole lot worse.
But this is a story, and so of course it's going to end well, no matter how stupid or reckless the protagonist seems to be acting.
It's still an awesome story though, it's just that the suspension of disbelief is gone.
But that's just my opinion. Your Mileage May Vary.
EDIT: ok, I accept Eliezer's explanation and David Allen's explanation of why Harry was able to recover. I take back my complaint about Harry's recovery being unrealistic. But, not knowing what Harry's plan is in chapters 55 and 56, it still seems to me like Harry would have been better off giving up.
One of Harry's established traits is his highly trained reflex to question his own perceptions, especially under difficult circumstances.
This situation is probably the most extreme that we have seen Harry in. In this context that ability comes across as a super-power, but it is not out-of-character.
I agree with most of your comments, but -
So you'd offer 4-1 odds on that bet?
sorry, what I should have said is that the story as a whole will end well. It's still possible that Harry's actions in this particular story arc will have disastrous consequences, that Harry will have to try to fix later. It's also very likely that Harry won't be able to fix all of the disastrous consequences.
but I would still offer 1-1 odds that this particular story arc will end without disastrous consequences... though there is some ambiguity about what counts as "disastrous".
um... oops... did I just challenge Eliezer to not give this story a happy ending? I want a happy ending. or at least a bittersweet ending. It's just that I would prefer if the protagonist didn't recklessly get into impossible situations that he then goes on to use impossible superpowers to get out of.
And what happened to Harry having learned how to lose? This seems like a situation where losing immediately is the best option. The more Harry resists, the worse things will be when he loses. Unless something really improbable happens.
Anyway, I expect that all of these things that I'm complaining about are probably a case of "the plot demands it". It would have been nice if Eliezer could have avoided these problems, but sometimes you just can't please everyone.
Also, we won't know for sure if Harry is holding the idiot ball until we find out what his plan is, hopefully in the next chapter.
oh, and is it just me, or are the words "trust the author" really unconvincing? I mean, if you already know how generally awesome Eliezer is, it's a whole lot easier to trust him as an author, but those words would be entirely unconvincing to anyone who hasn't heard of Eliezer before... though he has already earned lots of trust with the previous chapters...
(Harry having to learn how to lose was great.)
Remember "The Cold Equations"? I wouldn't be shocked if Eliezer wound the entire fanfic up with some similar message.
What an awful story. I just read it, and am now in a state of outrage.
The message is ostensibly that the laws of nature don't care about human welfare, which, as we all know, is true enough. But the problem described in the story is entirely human-caused: a straightforward engineering failure. It's the result of stupidity, poor planning, and failing to learn from past mistakes.
And the sexism ("OMG It's a girl!") makes it all the more distasteful, although that's probably unfair of me, since it was after all written in the 1950s.
I can't see Eliezer writing a story like this. Ever.
No no no no no. Not a stupid space Aesop as in the cold equation. No!
I remember the extensive discussion about "The Cold Equations", in which it was concluded that the only way that sort of tragedy could be generated would be if there was massive organizational incompetence.
Stowaways were a known problem. Why wasn't the spaceship locked? Why was there a door on the closet?
I think a reasonably happy ending is forced for MOR. Harry survives. So do other major good characters. However, perhaps a MFAI (Magical FAI) is created, and power and responsibility are handed off to it. What would Harry do with the rest of eternity then?
I would think Rowling's creation and management of the Harry Potter universe is quite clearly an example of massive organizational incompetence. Eliezer's characters might try their very hardest to save themselves, but like the stowaway they were dead the moment they were born into Rowling's universe.
Harry will invent Fun Theory, of course. And then he'll spend the rest of eternity testing and improving this Fun Theory.
I think there's textual evidence suggesting that he would have descendants and then attend a lot of birthday parties on celestial objects.
He might still enjoy exploring how magic works-- I expect it's as rich a field as physics. (Last I heard, the idea that physics may offer unlimited depths is still respectable.)
Ending for a rationalist fairy tale: And then they learned how to live happily ever after.
But he gets the 'ever after' before he learns how to make 'happiness'
Even with Bahry obliviated there should be lots of clues it was Harry. Especially now that Quirrell is down and whatever spells he was casting to confound the wizarding equivalent of forensics are probably down. Harry sized foot prints in the dust, cloth fibers where Harry lay down? The angle/position that the stunning spell hit Bahry implying it was cast from a low elevation?
Or to put it another way who are the Wizarding community going to think did this?
Ex-death eaters? Not killing Bahry is a sign that it is not them. The unusual patronus that seemed to be able to hide Bellatrix, and will possibly kill Dementors next chapter, has the hallmarks of Harry.
If they didn't know about the existence of time turners then they might be fooled, but he has used them so much, it is really a poor alibi.
So yeah put me in the camp of all hell should still be breaking loose even if Harry doesn't get caught red handed in Azkaban.
The wizarding world doesn't stoop to non-magical forensics. Footprints? Fibers? How barbaric.
I don't think that it is obvious to most of the other characters that it is a patronus that is hiding Bellatrix. It would also be discounted because she remains invisible under the cloak after Harry's patronus is extinguished in Ch. 56.
Canon Dumbledore would have observed the masking power of Harry's patronus, and would be clever enough to to guess that the Harry's cloak could have this property. Presumably the HPMOR Dumbledore is at least this clever.
Dumbledore however observed Harry's extreme response to an unshielded dementor, so he might be confused at a Harry that walks around unprotected and apparently unaffected.
Working against Harry is that Dumbledore's patronus could be used to identify Harry's patronus as the one it observed in Azkaban, and that any dementor that observes Harry, and survives, could also identify him. It seems that if Dumbledore wants to later verify or exclude Harry as the intruder, he can.
1 ) But Harry thinks the scapegoat was possibly him! Which doesn't help.
2) Or if Quirrell wasn't trying to set up Harry it could have been random ex-death eaters, hence the need to kill Bahry with a killing curse for a consistent story. Which Harry scuppered by saving him.
3) Assuming a scape goat likely to obliviate rather than killing curse, Harry doesn't know who it is and what power they should have and how smart they should be. His actions, such as stopping cast the patronus, while keeping Bellatrix hidden, are giving more information to the wizarding world. Might they be able to guess that whoever is keeping Bellatrix hidden has a deathly hallow cloak thing?
Actually apparently Dumbeldore believes that Dementors should be able detect people in an Invisibility cloak, because they sense them through emotion. According to the wiki page anyway. So maybe Dumbledore would be fooled.
Everyone expects invisibility cloaks to not be very good - they usually aren't. The Deathly Hallow one is described as being fantastically valuable for being a 'true' invisibility cloak*, and not merely equivalent to a 'very strong Disillusionment charm' and weakening quickly with age (to quote from memory Luna Lovegood's dad; and speaking of them, we haven't heard very much from them since the first few chapters).
If Dumbledore expects a 'true' Invisibility cloak, then this is basically == expecting Harry.
* Yes, this does raise the question how Dumbledore could apparently see through it to Harry and the Mirror of Erised in book 1. The charitable explanation is that he was bluffing or heard Harry; the uncharitable one is that like Lucas, Rowling only came up with the Deathly Hallows and the ultimate ending late in the game.
That is undeniable. Invisibility cloaks are mentioned in the early books, and no hint whatsoever is given that Harry's is special. It would have been better if she could have done a real Lucas (or an Eliezer) and edited the earlier references in the earlier books.
I'm not sure which is worse - a single magic gene or midichlorians. But to be honest I might be willing to trade off Ron for Jar Jar.
Grandparent (my comment) was probably
chp 55
Cognitive therapy as a pre-Patronus intervention in early stage Dementation
Slight spoilers for those who haven't read chapter 55:
My god, Harry is infuriating. Why, after realizing that Quirrell might have set him up, after deciding to doubt everything Quirrell said about the plan (and needlessly dismissing his doubts), did he assume that there really is a magical psychologist to fix Mme.Black up?
Why, after deconstructing his predicament did he then fail to apply the same rationalism to its immediate effect? Ugh. If there's one scene that convinced me that he's under the Imperius curse, it's his thinking up ways of convincing the likely-fictional-Doctor of healing the likely-uncurable maniac.
These past 5 chapters have been as infuriating as thrilling. I hope Harry stops being human and once again becomes his hyper-rationalist self at some point in the near future.
P.S. Does anyone else find dramatic irony to be the most infuriating, anxiety-inducing literary tool known to man?
No, I personally find it a close second to the comedy of errors (which I just plain cannot watch or read, I instinctively curl up in a fetal position or storm out of the room upon exposure - being unjustly blamed is my biggest rage button by far).
The comedy of errors also makes me feel extremely uncomfortable, but I enjoy it anyway out of sheer masochism.
It must be played for laughs, however.
I have the same "problem". Though I could claim that it's a personality flaw in everyone else that allows them to enjoy watching the misfortune of others.
The rot13 use is becoming excessive in this forum, there is already a spoiler warning on the post. Let EY make a special request for it when he thinks speculation goes too far.
I think the policy should be that you do not need to rot13 anything about HMPOR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.
More specificallly, (and I have to use rot13 here), vg'f svar gb jevgr nobhg Ibyqrzbeg pbagebyyvat Dhveeryy (jvgubhg hfvat ebg13), ohg lbh qb arrq gb hfr ebg13 vs lbh zragvba gur qryrgrq nhgube'f abgr nobhg gung be pynvz gung Jbeq bs Tbq unf rfgnoyvfurq gung D=I.
I affirm that this is what I think the policy should be. Speculation does not require spoilers.
Downvoted for endorsing a policy that requires people to keep track of whether something is still in the current version of the fic. I didn't know until today that the thing Unnamed put in rot13 had been "disrevealed".
I only just discovered what you meant here. I totally agree. Enforcement of 'unrevelation' spoiler policies is utterly absurd and is a norm that I would oppose rather than support.
The worst that can happen is that you make an error (and possibly fix it). A meaningful question could be, for example, whether the incentives drive the outcome in a wrong direction, or their enforcement is more trouble than it's worth.
Independent of the fact that I believe the desired outcome (less free discussion) is itself a wrong direction, it also encourages EY to be careless with authors notes in the future, due to believing he can "take them back". It also punishes people for honest mistakes.
Maybe 8 karma isn't a lot to you, but it's what I lost just for disagreeing, not even for violating the rule myself. I also think that rot13 is a bad choice, since it requires external programs - implementing a spoiler tag for comments the way there appears to be one in use in some article posts would reduce the burden both to discuss spoilers and to read those discussions. (this is more "compliance is more trouble than it's worth" than "enforcement is more trouble than it's worth", but it's a similar kind of problem.)
I think a likely result is that people either shy away from discussing it at all, or have it as an implicit assumption (to their unrot13ed posts) and are caught in a trap when someone who doesn't know asks what they're talking about. Or we end up with a lot of noise whenever someone who isn't aware of the rule runs into it.
I will add, having read some of the thread again with an eye for it, that it is enforced haphazardly. I've seen numerous posts that mention it and have a positive score.
EDIT: Here's a link to my post with a list of such posts
Don't do that. You're just helping the arbitrary punishers find more targets!
I would add: Or if X can be reasonably derived from evidence in MOR and/or canon.
EY has made such a special request for it, and most of the rot13 content here is in compliance with that particular request.
I've noted a general request to rot13 actual knowledge of future events, but that this does not cover speculation on future events or on possible reasons for past event.
I've seen only a specific request from EY on a specific post, but it wasn't clear to me that this expanded the general rule.
Did I miss a critical point here?
My answer in more annoying rot13, to be very explicit:
Vg jnf erirnyrq ol RL va na nhgube'f abgr gung Dhveeryy vf Ibyqrzbeg, orpnhfr ur jnf sehfgengrq gung ur rkcrpgrq uvf ernqref gb vaghvg gung ohg fbzr crbcyr jrer abg trggvat vg. Ubjrire, ur'f orra pbaivaprq gung vg orvat nzovthbhf jurgure Dhveeryy vf Ibyqrzbeg vf n tbbq guvat, fb unf erzbirq gur nofheqyl oyngnag uvag ur oevrsyl nqqrq gb bar puncgre naq unf orra pbafvqrevat vg n fcbvyre rire fvapr. Nyfb eryngrq vf gur snpg gung Dhveeryy!zbeg ghearq gur Cvbarre cyndhr vagb n ubepehk.
Perfect, thanks for the clarification.
I will respond in kind to maintain that rule:
Vg vf snve sebz pnaba, naq bhgfvqr bs RL'f fgngrzragf gb nffhzr D=I. Ng yrnfg nf snve nf nal bgure fcrphyngvba va guvf sbehz. Fb V jbhyq nethr gung pbzzragf yvxr guvf bar sebz lbh ner vaureragyl serr sebz gung pbagnzvangvba, hayrff lbh ersre gb RL'f pbasvezngvba qverpgyl:
Just my opinion, perhaps we should let the lawyers fight it out. :)
I wonder how difficult it would be to add a "Rot13 this" button to the options under each text item (that is, next to "Vote up" and "Vote down" and so forth).
That would significantly reduce the nuisance factor associated with reading r13'd posts, without the site having to give up whatever value it is people see in using them.
Not that I'm offering to write the code, or anything actually useful like that. Just ruminating.
That's much too much work, and it'll be pretty bad for the website. It'll require another database query for every post on every thread (which means the site will be slower and more expensive), but it'll only be used on, what? The Harry Potter threads and the occasional brainteaser?
Textbook example of overkill.
EDIT: I misunderstood the request. I stand by it being overkill, though.
Whence the extra database queries? Presumably it could all be done on the client side in JavaScript.
I agree that it would be overkill to have it on every comment, though.
How would this be done client side? Perhaps I'm misunderstanding the request, but to me it sounded like he wanted to have an option to vote to rot13 posts that you think are spoilers.
Edit: To clarify, the reason I think that's what he meant is that he said it should appear next to the vote up/vote down buttons. Those only appear after you post. I suppose you could still have a client-side rot13 button down there, but it'd be a bit useless.
You would use the button to un-rot13 spoilers that the poster had already rot13-ed. It would be for the convenience of the reader only.
The Firefox add-on is even better if it can rot13 inside TEXTAREAs, which is a convenience for the writer as well.
QuickROT sort of works inside text fields. Select, rightclick, QR, copy to clipboard, paste (your text has stayed selected).
The drawback is that QuickRot won't appear for the same text more than once, even if it's in a different text field in a different tab.
It was earlier pointed out to me that the same goal can be achieved already (and without any changes to database interaction) by means of a browser plugin, which is a superior approach all around and makes this whole thread moot. So, yes, agreed that it was a lousy idea in the first place.
If we are going automate this, we should just use spoiler tags, so the marked text can be revealed on highlighting, or when a button is clicked or whatever.
This is not an endorsement of the add-on , but if you use Firefox
/dave feels sheepish/
Yes, of course there would be such a thing, and I ought to have looked for it rather than proposing that the feature be built into the site itself. Clearly, my intuitions have been distorted by working on self-contained rather then Web apps for too many years.
Thanks for both the thought and the pointer.
It occurred to me that Harry is confused with Hermione's reactions (possibly Dumbledore's) not because he is a consequentialist and she is a deontologist, but rather because he hasn't yet realised that offending her is a consequence of being a consequentialist, and so he should include "deviates from deontological ethics; may offend friends and society" as one of the negative consequences for actions that otherwise seem right by consequentialism.
So, what's the importance of Roger Bacon's diary? Canon & conservation of detail both suggest it's something, possibly a horcrux or possibly some other tool of Quirrelmort. This Voldemort is too smart to horcrux his own diary, but this diary would be an awfully convenient trojan horse for him to have (extremely durable, treasured by Harry).
It doesn't seem to produce any sense of Doom, though, which seems to count against the horcrux hypothesis.
Could Quirrell be using it to spy on Harry, to get his curiously accurate priors? Does Harry keep the diary in the pouch which he carries around everywhere, and which he brought to Azkaban, and which the Quirrell cast a spell on and entered in snake mode? If so, it could be a part of Quirrell's current plot. (Or, Quirrell could've done something else with Harry's pouch, which doesn't involve the diary.)
If it is a "very recently" created horcrux, one thing it means is that the maker is healthy enough to make horcruxes. Taken with Ch54, killing-curse ricochets might not be as damaging as one expects.
Perhaps for similar reasons that death by basilisk glare isn't all that that damaging when reflected.
In canon Harry's sense of pain when encountering Voldemort doesn't occur when encountering horcruxes. Moreover, it turns out that Harry is an accidental horcrux and he doesn't have any similar reaction to himself, or even to a time traveled version of himself that he sees. So by analogy a horcrux here may not be enough to trigger the sense of doom.
Could Roger Bacon's diary have important information in it?
I would be pleased if Quirrel was using the diary to affect Harry (whether by getting Harry to accept a gift or by some magic-related method), but Harry read it with more knowledge and/or attention and/or willingness to make deductions, and got some crucial addition to his abilities thereby.
Consider how, in 51-54, Harry decides to trust Quirrell. No one ought to trust Quirrell, at all. He has some agenda, which he does not let on to. Even if he did describe his complete agenda, you'd never be able to trust that he was telling the truth, because he's so rational and self-controlled that he would be equally able to tell you something almost the truth, except for certain modifications made to make your cooperation more likely.
And few people trust Harry; and with good reason.
The more rational someone is, the less you can trust them. The less rational someone is, the more you can trust them. You can trust a bigot to keep acting bigoted. You can trust a religious zealot to stay true to her faith. You can trust someone who votes the party line without thinking to keep voting the party line.
Whereas, a religious zealot who actually thinks about her religious principles is much less reliable. The Jesuits are a perfect example of this - religious, but prone to thinking about their religion, and thus a neverending source of heresy and controversy within the Church. A politician who actually thinks about the issues might break with his party, or vote differently than the people who elected him expected.
How much does society rely on our irrationality, on our inability to change our minds or avoid signalling our true intent, and our inability to avoid following through on our emotional commitments (revenge, punishment, reward, nepotism)? What's the social cost of rationality? Is it reasonable to think that people have evolved to be less-than-optimally rational?
This is not always the case. In fact, in practice I trust rational people far more than those that are irrational. If I know what a rational person's goals are, know the respective payoffs for each of the various available options then I can reliably predict what the rational person will do. Irrational people can not always be counted on to do what is in their own best interest - this makes them less predictable than they would be if they were rational unless they are an adversary trying specifically to foil your intelligence.
I think in this post when you say 'trust' you really mean 'predict'. A trivial counterexample: the more rational someone is, the more I can trust them to be free of errors in their reasoning. And it IS easier to predict a religious zealot staying religious, or predict that a bigot will remain bigoted, than it is to predict a rational agent attempting to maximize their utility (especially if you're an obstacle to their utility).
Well, yes, if there was some shortcut that gave the mostly-optimal answer, or gave the optimal answer most of the time, and gave it in a significantly faster time than optimal rationality. The common example is, I think, reacting to the presence of a lion. Abject, heart-pounding, run-for-your-life terror is not optimally rational (it generally precludes climbing a tree) but it gives a mostly-optimal answer in a much shorter time than attempting to reason out the optimal course of action.
But what if our irrationalities aren't quick-and-dirty heuristics optimized for speed? What known cognitive biases are even applicable to running away from a lion?
What if some of our cognitive biases are evolved adaptations that make human society work better? It would be pretty surprising to me if this weren't the case!
Okay, not evolved adaptations, but how about culturally/socially imprinted cognitive biases? Something about
clicks with Nancy's comment here.
The more I thought about it ... it seemed like rational agents couldn't trust anyone (the best course is to convince them to trust you and then betray them while never trusting anyone yourself) except in the early and middle stages of iterated games. But a society where everyone irrationally trusted everyone else, and irrationally nobody betrayed anyone else, would be more successful than the 'rational agent' community. (all things being equal; if their irrational trust also caused them to irrationally trust lions...) It might stretch the word evolution too much, but I think the term "competitive selection" applies to this process of societies competing with each other for growth and the most effective societies wiping out the less effective societies (wiping out or completely integrating, as the lesser society's land and resources would already be purposed towards supporting a society, and therefore more desirable than land requiring work).
Basically, what if 'trust' is because a society where everyone trusts the other guy to cooperate in a PD was successful enough to dominate the landscape?
NB: Originally I had thought of trust as a sort of greenbearding. Is there an analogous concept in sociocultural evolution?
In the real world, the iteration never completely ends.
A population or society in which everyone trusts completely is not an ESS. A population or society in which everyone adopts the slogan "trust, but verify" and cooperates in the punishment of defectors and non-punishing freeriders probably is an ESS, assuming the cost of verification and punishment are low and verification is reasonably effective.
ERROR: POSTULATION OF GROUP SELECTION IN MAMMALS DETECTED
If group selection wasn't responsible for naked mole rats, what would be the right term for it? Kin selection seems like too much of an understatement for them.
Speech seems like an evolved adaptation that makes human society work better.
Why are people voting Tim's comment down so hard? Are there actually three people out there, let alone a majority of LWers, who do not believe it is correct?
Speech, sexual selection rituals, sex itself, cooperation in the social insects ... There are many things which seem to require a more complex and subtle narrative for their explanation than the usual simple Darwinian story of a mutant individual doing better than his conspecific competitors and then passing on his genes.
But that doesn't mean that a died-in-the-wool neo-Darwinian needs to accept the group-selection explanation any more than an Ayn Rand fan confronted with a skyscraper has to admit that Kropotkin was right after all.
However, I am taking your implicit advise and dutifully upvoting Tim's comment.
I wasn't suggesting that speech evolved via group selection - just that it evidently did evolve - and so proposing the existence of "evolved adaptations that make human society work better" is not an error.
Tim's comment doesn't say that speech evolved via group selection. It could be that it did not; in that case, Tim's comment would be pointing out that Eliezer was unjustified in calling out a belief in "evolved adaptations that make human society work better" as an error.
I have seen people observe that they tend to be inclined to downvote tim readily, having long since abandoned giving him the benefit of the doubt. (This is not my position.)
Absolutely - when considering what it means in multiple level context which Tim explicitly quoted he is wrong on a group-selection-caps level of wrongness. (I was not someone who voted but I just added mine.)
I thought your (PhilGoetz) post on group selection was a good one, particularly with the different kinds of (subscripted) group selection that you mentioned and mentions of things like ants. But now that I see what prompted the post and what position you were trying to support I infer that you actually are confused about group selection, not merely presenting a more nuanced understanding.
... is spot on.
You are reading in too much context. You only have to look at the portion reproduced in Tim's comment. Eliezer asserted that there is no such thing as evolved adaptations that make human society work better. Tim provided an example, proving Eliezer wrong.
If you think I'm confused, try to say why. So far, no one has presented any evidence that I am "confused" about anything in <EDIT>the group selection post</EDIT>. There is some disagreement about definitions; but that is not confusion.
Close, but not exactly correct. My interpretation of what Eliezer EMOTED is that there are no adaptations which evolved because they make human society work better. That would be group selection by Eliezer's definition. Eliezer might well accept the existence of adaptations which evolved because they make humans work better and that incidentally also make society work better.
ETA. Ok, it appears that a literal reading of what EY wrote supports your interpretation. But I claim my interpretation matches what he meant to say. That is, he was objecting to what he thought you meant to say. Oh, hell. Why did I even decide to get involved in this mess?
Using "because" on evolution is tricky -- particularly when co-evolution is involved --and society and humans are definitely co-evolving. Which evolved first -- the chicken or the chicken egg (i.e. dinosaur-egg-type arguments explicitly excluded).
I believe this to be correct representation of Eliezer's meaning and that meaning to be be an astute response to the parent.
It surely is an unsympatthetic reading to conclude from: "What if some of our cognitive biases are evolved adaptations that make human society work better?" - that those adaptations did not also benefit social human individuals, and may have evolved for that purpose.
You may note that I took care to emphasize that my reply was to what you were conveying in the context. Phil's comment does postulate group selection. While as a standalone sentence your comment is literally correct I downvoted it because it constitutes either a misunderstanding of the conversation or a flawed argument for an incorrect position.
What is the incorrect position? If you say "that group selection is possible", please state your reasons for being so certain about it.
In any case, my comment does not postulate group selection. It wasn't even on my mind when I wrote it.
I was just thinking how there's a weird hivemind thing going on with the downvotes. Well-written and cordial posts arguing against the site's preferred positions are being summarily downvoted to invisibility.
This doesn't look like a very healthy discussion dynamic.
I have been using the Kibitzer since I started posting, and my handle on this matter is that well-written, cordial posts that don't use LW techniques are downvoted. That is, they argue against the preferred position, and they are downvoted because they argue badly. Small corroborations: the posts that get summarily upvoted are ones that point out lack-of-rationality in the arguments, upvotes on topics when they aren't flawed.
If that seems like an unhealthy discussion dynamic then you should review the LW techniques for rationality and make a top level post explaining how using these techniques, or how requiring everyone to use these techniques, could result in unhealthy discussions.
Possibility: Well-written, cordial posts are your criteria for upvotes because cordiality and well-writtenness usually correlate with clear thinking and good reasoning. This is true over most of the blog, except for the edge cases. These cases have their roots in subtle cognitive biases, not gross emotional biases, and it's possible that lack of writing skill and cordiality points out gross emotional biases but not subtler ones.
The kibitzer does nothing to protect people from groupthink.
What exactly do you mean by groupthink? Let's taboo the word a bit:
Those last two are important parts of groupthink. Without that last one, mathematicians are guilty of groupthink, because they all apply the same (somtimes flawed) processes and get the same answers. Maths isn't groupthink because attempts are made to discover and fix flaws, and these attempts aren't ignored out of hand.
The kibitzer blocks out names and karma scores; so you can't tell what the group consensus is (either by the person's name; "the community thinks this guy is a troll" or by vote; "-5? this post must be bad"). I follow the same process as everyone else in evaluating a comment, but I don't know if I've gotten the same answer as them. In practice, when I've checked, I do get the same answer, so it satisfies the first two conditions. But is the process flawed? And is meeting the group's consensus more important than fixing these flaws?
I think I feel the problem is more a mismatch between the subtlety of the problem and the bluntness of the tool. Downvotes are a harsh and low-signal way of pointing problems in arguments, and seem more suited to punishing comments which can be identified as crap at a glance. Since this site isn't doing the free-for-all comedy club thing Slashdot and Reddit have going, I'm not sure that the downvote mechanic quite belongs here to begin with. Users posting downright nonsense and noise don't even belong on the site, and bad arguments can be ignored or addressed instead of just anonymously downvoting them.
And yes, this probably should go to a toplevel post, but I don't have the energy for that scale of meta-discussion right now.
Downvoting wrong comments may be harsh for the person being downvoted, but hopefully in the long run it can encourage better comments, or at least make it easier to find good comments.
There may be some flaws in the karma system or the way it's used by the community, but I don't see any obvious improvements, or any other systems that would obviously work better.
Look at mwaser: he complains a lot about being downvoted, but he also got a lot of feedback for what people found lacking in his post. Yes, a portion of the downvotes he gets may be due to factors unrelated to the quality of his arguments (he repeatedly promotes his own blog, and complains about the downvotes being a proof of community irrationality - both can get under people's skin), which is a bit unfortunate, but not a fatal flaw of the karma system.
Downvoting mechanism is one way of making sure that obvious nonsense-posting gets visibly and quickly discouraged. Without it, there would be more nonsense.
I haven't seen any recent examples of this recently (since the last times cryonics evangelism was considered, of course.) I suspect that instead you do not recognise the kinds of error in reasoning that have been detected and responded to.
That would be a systemic problem that deserves its own top level post.
Error: Most of human history is a recounting of group selection in humans. Every time one group of people displaces another group by virtue of superior technology or social organization, that's group selection.
Having a belief in, or at least openness to, group selection, is one of my rationality tests.
In related news, this weeks Science has the clearest demonstration of group selection that I've seen: The ability to self-pollinate in plants gives individuals a great reproductive advantage; but also increases the likelihood of the entire species going extinct. The presence of a feature (self-pollination) that provides an advantage to the individual, provides a disadvantage to the species, that causes species-level selection.
I realize your views may have changed by now, but isn't that obviously caused by Red Queen effects? Just like all other sexual reproduction?
That is one definition of "group selection". However, there is another definition - according to which "group selection" must refer to a different theory from "individual selection" - a theory that makes different predictions. For that you would need to show that the genetic traits that led to technological mastery benefited groups in a way that was systematically different from the way that they benefited the individuals that composed those groups.
I think it suffices to show that selection can operate at the level of the group. Even if all of the traits involved provide some advantage to individuals, if they also provide an advantage to the group, then group-level selection needs to be considered.
It is more interesting if you can show that a trait that does not confer an advantage to an individual, has an effect on group selection. But it is an unreasonable bias to demand that group selection requires traits that do not provide any advantage to an individual, and yet at the same time not insist that the theory of individual selection requires traits that do not provide any advantage to the group.
I should clarify - "group selection" connotes what Tim is describing: Selection for altruistic traits in individuals, by selection at the group level. That's because, historically, group selection has been invoked only to explain things that individual selection can't.
However, this has led to people excluding selection at the group level from models and simulations, because "group selection bad".
This is something of a quibble, but you really shouldn't think of species-level selection as a kind of group selection. In both group and individual selection, it is the species that evolves. But in species-level selection, the species does not evolve. It is selected - it either lives or dies.
Another key difference - the usual argument against group selection is that it is ineffective since individual selection is a stronger force. That is, individual selection is said to push harder and change the species more than does group selection. But comparing species-level selection and individual selection, it makes no sense to say that one is more powerful than the other. They are playing different games.
My apologies. Most theorists say species selection is a subclass of group selection; but Stephen J. Gould says it is not. See the long explanation here.
That is true if you're talking about features that groups have and individuals don't, or traits that aren't inherited genetically. But all the literature on group selection is about the competition between individual and group (including species) selection, within the same game of selecting genes.
I appreciate the effort you are putting into this, but I fear the terminological and theoretical confusion regarding group selection run far too deep. One enthusiastic person is not going to straighten things out in a forum where evolutionary biology is not the central focus. And now that academian has weighed in, the cause is hopeless. ;)
I agree with you (and Tim) that Eliezer's opposition to group selection was a bit naive and under-informed. But not completely wrong-headed. Many incorrect arguments in favor of group selection have been made over the years. A lot of them were incorrect because they simply did not work. Others were "epistemologically incorrect" because, though they worked, they could be reinterpreted more "parsimoniously" as individual-level selection.
D.S. Wilson's "Truth and Reconciliation" blog series strikes me as an example of extremely dishonest labeling. What he is really saying is that if everyone who disagrees with him would just accept his version of the truth, then reconciliation will take place. And his book "Unto Others" strikes me as even more dishonest. He defines "group selection" extremely broadly, provides examples of corner cases in which his "trait group selection" mechanism works, and then (here is the dishonest part) claims that if group selection works even in this extreme case, then it will obviously work in other cases.
Then he proceeds to discuss the case which every non-professional has in mind when he thinks of group selection - human evolution with groups = tribes, group death = tribe extinction, and group birth = split-up of a successful and populous tribe. The trouble is that the math of group selection really doesn't work in this case.
The only cases I know of where the group selection models do work are (1) Species level selection (Gould/Eldredge), examples like your non-selfing plants; and (2) the examples that Wilson gives in which "groups" are rather short-lived entities which "succeed" by keeping their members alive for a while and then returning them safely to the general population, where the individuals reproduce. A good example of a group that Wilson might use as an example of trait-group selection would be a flock of geese conducting a seasonal migration. Such a group might be selected against if it got seriously lost, or blundered into a tornado, or suffered some other collective catastrophe.
A human hunting party is another example of a "group" such that the mathematics of group selection works. A human tribe of hunter-gatherers is not, unless it is so reproductively isolated from other tribes so as to qualify as a species. I'm pretty sure that this degree of isolation (less than two cross-tribe matings per generation) has never held over any long period of time in human history.
But group selection for cultural traits is another question. If genes get transferred between tribes, but memes do not, then selection at the level of tribes may well help to determine the course of human cultural/memetic evolution.
Well, I seem to have provided you with a long response, which, unlike your own efforts, does not include any links/citations. Sorry about that. You are under no obligation to trust or believe me on this stuff. I will merely assert that I (and tim_tyler as well) have been a serious amateur enthusiast for evolutionary theory for many years. Clearly, you have been too. I do recommend though, that you take a second look at D.S. Wilson's work in light of my criticisms. He really is pulling something of a bait-and-switch. See if you agree.
Thanks for your 2p on D.S. Wilson's Unto Others.
It sounds as though I like multi-level selection a bit more than you do.
Evidence from our own species suggests habitat variation can cause significant morphological differences (despite gene flow) which selection can then act upon.
I also find things like this one interesting:
"Senescence as an adaptation to limit the spread of disease"
Josh Mitteldorf , John Pepper
http://www.mathforum.org/~josh/Epidemics-JTB.pdf
I think so. I'm not quite so purist as Dawkins, but I am pretty close. But I do realize that it is not really an empirical scientific question. It is really simply a matter of what kind of models you prefer. Most cases in which group selection models work can also be explained just as well by individual-level selection or kin-selection.
Speaking of which:
Yes. Very interesting. Red Queen strikes again. But since they are already thinking about Bill Hamilton, why don't they take the further step and realize that the senescent death of an old individual not only reduces the population density for the benefit of the group - the death specifically is beneficial to those individuals in the group who are the most immunologically similar to the deceased.
In other words, this mechanism ain't Red Queen + Group Selection; it is Red Queen + Kin Selection.
Sorry, but I think this is completely wrong. Species-level selection isn't "like" group selection. It is group selection. In group selection, groups are selected for or against. That is the mechanism for group selection. That is the mechanism for group initially described by Darwin in chapter 4 of Descent of Man, and defended by Edward Wilson. It just happens not to be the straw-man depiction used by some opponents of group selection. They chose to ignore selection at the group level because it is easier to rebut group selection if you first assume that it doesn't happen.
Can you provide a reference for that usage?
They are both attempting to influence the same germ line. They are both attempting to influence the same set of traits. It makes reasonably good sense to look at a trait - and to ask whether it is more for the benefit of the individual or the species.
For example, one such trait might be: a love of swimming. That might be bad for an individual (drowning), but good for the species (island speciation).
Just because we are dealing with one individual, that doesn't mean it doesn't evolve. Check with the definitions of the term "evolution" - they (mostly) refer to genetic change over time. You could argue that they also (mostly) talk about a "population" - and one individual doesn't qualify as a "population" - but if you think through that objection, it too is essentially wrong.
Uh, I'm pretty sure I just stated that an individual - the species - does evolve. It evolves by way of organism-level or group-level selection. It just doesn't evolve by going extinct or not.
As for whether one individual qualifies as a population, I've thought about that and completely failed to imagine a population of one individual evolving by way of the standard mechanisms of evolutionary population genetics. That kind of population cannot evolve by differential birth, death, or migration. (I suppose it can change by mutation).
The thing you have forgotten in trying to extrapolate the meaning of 'population' in this way is that the essential feature of a biological evolving population is that its size is not fixed and its membership changes in time, whereas a population of exactly one entity by definition does not change its membership count in time.
Now, I will agree that a population of entities (say, the population of biological species within a genus) can evolve by selection even though its membership count occasionally fluctuates through having only a single individual. The genus does evolve. But the evolution of the genus as a population of individual species and the evolution of the component species as (possibly structured into groups) populations of individual organisms are conceptually distinct processes.
But here is not the place to continue this discussion. If you wish, please bring it up on sbe, and Dr. Hoeltzer can join in. I think he is getting probably lonely over there since we left, and the newsgroup is dominated by John, Tom, and Peter.
"Does NOT evolve" was the term you used. However, with your clarification, it now looks as though this was mostly just a misunderstanding.
IMO, it is mostly OK to think of species level selection as a type of group selection - where the "groups" are species. Maybe there are some meanings of "group selection" for which this is bad - but I would say: mostly OK.
Yes, a population of 1 changes by mutation. Self-directed evolution is an example of that.
If you A) insist on a population having more than 1 member and B) define evolution in terms of genetic change in populations, then the conclusion is that one big organism would no longer be "evolving" when it changed - which I think would be a totally absurd conclusion - a sign that you had got into a terminology muddle.
That may not be a big deal for today's organic evolution - but it makes a big difference for the study of cultural evolution. There, populations with only 1 member are much more common.
Hmmm. Presumably there would be no objection had the speculation been worded "evolved adaptations that make people thrive in human society".
Now all I need to do is to figure out whether the meanings of the two are really different.
Be careful.
"Adaptations that make people thrive" can be interpreted in two ways: "adaptations that make people [who possess those adaptations] thrive" or "adaptations that make people [in general, including those who don't possess the adaptation] thrive."
As I understand it, the latter interpretation is essentially equivalent to group selection; the former is not. So it helps to be clear about what exactly you're saying.
Your original formulation ("make society work better") implies the latter pretty strongly. Your rewording is more ambiguous.
In any case, if you are proposing the former -- that is, if you are proposing that some of our biases have evolved to make the individuals expressing that bias more successful -- there's no group selection error, and I agree that it would be pretty surprising if that weren't the case.
Of course, as has been said several times, that doesn't mean those biases currently make individuals expressing them more successful.
Just because they are evolved, doesn't mean they are optimal. An evolved adaptation can be just as "dirty" as a fast cognitive heuristic; the architectural constraints of learning through genes can be just as constraining as those of coming up with something to do fast.
I've put forward a hypothetical, not claimed a proof. What's the point of responding, "But that isn't necessarily the case"?
You know, you're right. I was responding to peripheral aspects of your proposal rather than central ones, which is a waste of everyone's time. My apologies.
So, OK... rolling back: if I'm understanding you, you're hypothesizing that our biases are not design flaws, but rather adaptations to obtain the group-level benefit of having individuals be more irrational and therefore predictable.
(Is that right? I'm trying to infer a positive claim out of a series of questions, which is always tricky; if I've misunderstood your hypothetical it might be helpful to restate it more explicitly.)
Perhaps irrationality does provide a group-level benefit, as you suggest. For example, maybe it's easier to get valuable group behaviors by manipulating irrational people than by cooperating with rational ones. That doesn't strike me as too plausible, but it's possible.
Even granting that, though, I have trouble with the idea that the benefit to individual breeders exceeds the costs to the individual of being more easily manipulated by others.
Yes, and let me add to that, just because something was adaptive when humans evolved doesn't mean it is at all adaptive now. To use a concrete example, the weight humans put on anecdotes is likely connected to the fact that in our ancestral environment, that was the primary source of data about what the risks around us were. However, now this leads to silly things like people being terribly scared of shark attacks precisely due to the rarity of such attacks making them get a lot of news coverage.
Your second quote is ill-formatted.
Cheers!
This gets to one of the Hard Problems, both for FAI and a great deal of life. How can you tell who can be trusted to do a good job of taking your interests into account?
chp 54
So much for Harry's intent to kill. The Most Dangerous Student in the Classroom gets to his first real battle and he does just the opposite.
I guess Harry's Gryffindor/Patronus side is leading the way here, not his Slytherin/dark side (as I mentioned in the last paragraph of my other comment).
Well, it wasn't an individual who deserved death. Harry may have an intent to kill but he isn't going to direct it at someone like an Auror without a lot more provocation.
The way I understand it, MOR is meant to be an example of how a rational being might go about approaching a completely new and confusing set of observations, such as discovering that magic is real. However, I think harry has missed a lot of the low hanging fruit he could be researching. Although my suspension of disbelief shut down these thoughts pretty fast when I first started reading, I was always pretty curious about why magic was created in the first place, why only certain people could control it, and how exactly the energy needed for spells was obtained and applied. So here are a few things I would want to research ASAP if I was harry.
A) Is it possible to fool the source of magic (sm) so that it allows a muggle to cast spells? It was pretty safe for harry to rule out the idea that your DNA contains all the information needed to create a complex mechanism which can generate a magical field and respond intelligently to your intentions, so it makes sense that your DNA only serves as a signal that tells an external force to activate spells when you verbally or non verbally cast them. However, this raises a few interesting questions. does sm actually read everyone's DNA constantly/ whenever they try to cast a spell? or does the sequence of DNA cause a more obvious external change to your appearance that sm looks for? If it uses something like the pattern of your brainwaves, the shape of your face, etc as a marker, then it may be possible for a muggle to mimic a magic user easily and vice versa, but if it actually DOES read your DNA, then where? Could you grow a heart using a magicians DNA, have it implanted, and acquire magical abilities? For that matter, if you preserved the body of a dead wizard, and set up a electric transmitter in their mind which mimicked the signals sent when someone cast a spell, what would the effect be? Any recognition system should be possible to fool, and this would be the most important thing to test for me. Imagine being able to give every person dying of thirst or hunger in the world unlimited access to the resources they need. there would be no more third world countries, although you would also be distributing a terrible weapon.Which actually brings up another question...
B) Why on earth would you invent a powerful system for allowing someone to directly effect reality with their thoughts, and then let everyone with the right DNA use it with no inhibitions whatsoever? Avada Kedavera, Imperio, and fiendfyre may have their uses, but I would not let all of my ancestors use them without supervision with no more training then it takes to cast any other kind of spell. It would be as idiotic as giving everyone I knew the codes required to launch a nuclear missile whenever or wherever they wanted too using their cellphones. Even if they all had good intentions, someone is going to make a dumb mistake eventually. Creating a system for inhibiting the use of such spells would be complex, but only an idiot would not try. This has several implications for harry, either magic was invented by a moron, there are even MORE powerful spells out there that he could cast if he knew the access codes (!!!), or someone already found out how to game the restrictions so they fell apart long ago and nobody even realizes they exist, you may even be able to get it working again.
C) the SM has to have a a sustainable energy source somewhere, a method for using this energy to create the effects we call spells, and in order for it to perform the complicated routines needed to assess someones intentions, it probably has to be somewhat intelligent. Somewhere out there may be an AI, a group of slaves being used to perform observations and calculations, or the work is being sent on a distributed computing network to the minds of every sentient being on the planet. this may be the hardest thing to research since there are almost an infinite variety of of possible systems which may be the cause, and it is probably concealed. But, If you could find the physical source of magic, you could reprogram it to do whatever you wanted, and could achieve world peace or destruction in one step
I would write more but I am honestly hoping for people to actually read through this and give their thoughts, so I guess I had better stop now in the hope of remaining somewhat concise.
Harry makes mistakes too. He once planned out a whole series of experiments only to have the first one turn out way different that expected. I hope there is a completely usefull justified explanation for magic, but even if not it was well worth reading. Hopefully it is not something like scrapped princess.
In chapter 30, Harry makes himself pass out by casting Luminos 12 times rapidly. That could be a foothold for investigating the effects of casting magic on the human body; he could see if he can replicate the result consistently, then try it with different spells or combinations of spells and different rates of casting, and possibly other varied conditions.
This is why, in canon at least, they must be cast with hatred. That's a great safety valve for getting rid of accidental murders.
(I also suspect you mean descendants, not ancestors.)
I think I'd prefer the safety valve working the other way. "Let's limit it only to the people most likely to abuse it" sounds like a dubious tactic. Although come to think of it it is a rather good analogue to elements of standard morality (with respect to power and status).
I agree that a safety valve that makes sure only Good Guys (who?) kill Bad Guys (who?) would be more morally valuable. But if you're doing that you might as well program moral laws into the universe itself, so it is impossible to lie, steal, or murder.
This is a technically feasible (but this is magic we're talking about) hack which makes it more difficult to mistakenly murder or torture people with magic.
I think that many people here would disagree with you about how easy FAI is.
Furthermore, we already have magic plenty, but not understanding of how to use it.
The "low hanging fruit" which you argue Harry ought be researching... they seem to involve organ transplants and the manipulation of dead bodies with "electric transmitters in their mind which mimicked the signal sent when someone cast a test".
Are you serious? How the hell would a first-year student of Hogwarts perform these experiment? How can you call these "low hanging fruit"?
Low hanging meaning that the concept would be fairly easy to come up with, reveal a lot about how magic actually works, and it would be simple to implement. If you can convince a dying wizard who sympathizes with muggles to donate their body to science, the rest is easily within harries means. Also, harry could even test the idea on himself or draco first. If you set up a radio to mimic human brainwaves, tell the wizard to hold onto a wand without casting any spells, and mimic the signal from a wizard casting a spell, you would be able to at least confirm whether or not it is worth trying to get a unconscious / dead / completely artificial body.
As for the organ transplant, that idea sucked which is why I should not write when I am tired, there are a lot more tests you should logically do first. I imagine that you could find a dying wizard who consented to the experiment and was willing to be an organ donor, a muggle who needed a new heart, and see what happens, but since there is no evidence that the DNA in your heart, mind, feet, etc is what is read, it would make more sense to wait until later.
And finally, I resent the implication that his being a student makes a difference :p if their society makes it impossible him to do it, he has more than enough influence to get help from an adult.
How exactly do you propose that they set up a radio to mimic human brain waves? Not only would this be extremely technically complicated, almost certainly beyond Harry's resources or knowhow, even if the source of magic actually constantly reads wizards' brain waves, what reason do we have to suspect that it would not be able to distinguish neurological activity from a radio transmitter projecting the same patterns?
It sounds like a huge amount of work for a test which stands a great chance of being completely useless given that Harry doesn't have anywhere near enough data to home in on this as a meaningful avenue for investigation.
A) is very hard to test given the restriction on using magic around muggles. As for B), powerful spells are mostly restricted by the edict of Merlin. C) is, as you pointed out, extremely difficult to research effectively. I'm more surprised that Harry never bothered to ask how new charms are discovered. After all, how are you supposed to figure out that you are supposed to say "Wingardium Leviosa" and then move your wand in a certain way? And he as been told that new charms were discovered every year, so we know it's possible.
IIRC, in canon they tend to talk about spells being "invented" rather than discovered. For a while I pictured advanced wizards somehow writing particular programs into the Source of Magic, which were then run by saying the spell name; or at least something like that.
ch53
Also... why in the world is Harry using the labels "He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named" and "Dark Lord" in his thinking, rather than "Voldemort"? Ditto Quirrell. It seems pointlessly imprecise.
We've established that there can be multiple Dark Lords, maybe even at the same time, and I see no clear reason to believe there's only been one in the last century. And one can manufacture "He Who Must Not Be Named"s to one's heart's content. Is this deliberate, either on the author's part or (bizarrely) the characters'?
[edit: oops. I'm a doof; thomblake points to the relevant cite below. (Thanks thomblake!) Which now makes me really wonder whether there's a massive piece of misdirection going on along the lines of what I reference below.
What I ought to do is go back through the fic and see who says what about the-presumed-to-be-singular-entity variously referred to as "Dark Lord," "He Who Must Not Be Named," "Voldemort", "Tom Riddle", etc. and decide what I believe about that entity's singularity.
Well, no. What I ought to do is get back to work. Here I go...)
Now that I think about it, this would be a decidedly clever strategy for a mastermind in the HPverse has to adopt.
That is, suppose I establish the "He Who Must Not Be Named" convention and then order a trusted (male) lieutenant to do something, and order everyone never to call him by name, on pain of death.
Now, "He Who Must Not Be Named" is doing that thing, while I am doing something else (say, establishing an alibi).
There's a term for the fallacy this takes advantage of, where I confuse myself by forgetting that the referent for a label like "the President of the United States" can change between uses; I've forgotten what it is.
Of course, this wouldn't work with any forensic technique that actually involved interacting with objects in the world outside one's mind.
But magic in the HP-verse (and, really, magic in fiction more generally) is so bizarrely inconsistent about when it's interacting with objects and when it's interacting with labels that it might be worthwhile.
In fact, there have been at least two Dark Lords in this (the 20th) century, since Grindelwald (defeated 1945) was also a Dark Lord. (But in canon, he is still alive at this time and imprisoned, although in Nurmengard rather than in Azkaban.)
Do we know he is still alive? We know he was alive late enough for him to overlap with Voldemort. Is there any canon that says he is alive by the beginning of book 1?
Who, Grindelwald? He's alive up to Deathly Hallows, where Voldemort breaks into Nuremberg, I mean, Nurmengard, and kills Grindelwald for control of the Master Wand.
Thanks. I forgot that those events occurred in Book 7. For some reason I misremembered how Voldemort found out that Dumbledore had the Master Wand.
In book 7, Voldemort visits Grindelwald at Nurmengard in order to interrogate him about the location of the Elder Wand, and then kills him. So Grindelwald was definitely alive in book 1.
In canon, using Voldemort's name was highly discouraged. Also:
Chapter 3:
A few thoughts, just to go on record with them. As always, apologies if I'm repeating well-covered ground; I have not read all the comments on this thread, nor am I likely to. I would appreciate pointers to comments I ought to read, though.
OTOH, the same person is described in ch52 as
It's unclear whose voice that is in, but the same sentence describes the voice as "unfamiliar," which suggests we're getting Harry's POV rather than Word Of God. So Harry believes Quirrell Polyjuiced into this man.
So either: A. Harry is right, and Bahry is mistaken about what's possible while Polyjuiced. B. Bahry is right, and Harry is mistaken about what happened. C. They're both right, and something weird is happening. (E.g., Harry's companion is not actually doing magic as delicate as he appears to be doing, or some such thing.)
B seems most plausible to me, as Bahry ought to know about such things. The simplest explanation is that he isn't Polyjuiced at all -- the "sallow lanky bearded man" with the "low and gravelly" voice is Harry's companion's natural form. (Of course, there might be other means of changing his appearance that we've never heard of before, but that would be a cheap narrative trick.)
Which suggests he is not and never was the actual Quirrell. And also that he is not and never was anyone Harry would recognize (from pictures, from extrapolation in mirrors, etc.)
So either: A. There is in fact no plausible reason for this. B. There is a plausible reason, but neither Quirrell nor Harry can think of one. C. There is a plausible reason, but Harry can't think of one, and Quirrell is pretending not to be able to think of one.
The most likely of those given the data I'm aware of is A. Which suggests that Professor Quirrell is not and never was possessed by Voldemort (ETA: er, I mean, by the shade of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named).
Which is not to say that Harry's companion isn't or wasn't.
The fact that Quirrel sometimes reverts to zombie mode suggests that Voldemort is teleoperating that body. Perhaps he has more than one body for that purpose, and simply used a different body for the breakin, rather than polyjuicing the first one. It would be odd that both bodies could assume snake-form, but I see no reason in principle why that magic wouldn't be transferrable.
If that's what happened, then the Quirrel body might still be alive somewhere. Voldemort might be alive (in which case he would return to Quirrel's body, and pin the blame on Harry), or temporarily dead, in which case Quirrel's vacant body might turn up somewhere.
This is plausible, and fits with my speculation that Quirrell's been Dementor-kissed.
On the other hand, Harry still feels a sense of doom when Quirrell is in zombie mode, which suggests that Voldemort isn't completely gone then.
Re: Voldemort teleoperating Quirrell... if there's a quick summary somewhere of why this is a plausible explanation for Q's occasional zombie mode, I'd love a pointer.
Re: remote-snakeform... if that's what's going on, it would be better writing to introduce the possibility of remote animagusing somewhere along the line. Lacking any such introduction (or have I just missed it?) it seems a far simpler explanation that Harry's current companion and Harry's DODA instructor share a body, and that body is a snake animagus. (cf hooves, horses, zebras)
Yeah, I think the naive reading is that the narration is from Harry's POV, and Quirrell Polyjuiced into the man (as planned), and Quirrell is such a badass that he can do whatever magic he wants while polyjuiced, which is unusual enough for Bahry not to expect it.
And Quirrell claiming there's no plausible reason to think he's possessed by Voldemort is just him thumbing his nose at the reader (aside from the usual misdirection).
If it turns out to be just "Quirrell is such a badass" then I'll be very disappointed.
My reason for choosing A over C wrt: possessing Quirrell is not that Quirrell lying is implausible (that much is entirely likely) but that it raises the question of why, if there is a plausible reason, and Harry was invited to think of one, he didn't come up with any.
That said, we're only getting cherry-picked fragments of Harry's thinking, and he's being manipulated anyway. So maybe Harry just isn't thinking straight.
Still, until I see a plausible reason to believe it, I don't.
Considering that Quirrell is one of the most powerful and feared wizards ever to live, sheer competence is probably the simplest explanation for him being able to perform exceptional feats of magic while handicapped.
From Bahry's perspective, the possibility that the unknown criminal he's facing is secretly the most dangerous dark wizard of modern times is unlikely enough not to merit immediate consideration. From the readers' perspective, it's an established fact.
Huh.
When you put it that way, it seems plausible.
In fact... you're right, and I'm wrong.
If there's a highly salient fact in play that Bahry neither knows nor can reasonably be expected to consider, which is certainly a strong possibility, then Bahry's beliefs about the situation stop being credible evidence about much of anything, and I should not be treating them that way.
I'm falling into the trap of assuming that everybody else already knows what I know.
I hereby repudiate my earlier speculations.
Thank you.
Ch 54 (emphasis in original)
Are things like the "insanely powerful opponent", the spell caught on the end of the wand, and wizardry run wild and then controlled when "[t]he man threw his wand away from himself (he threw away his wand!)" like stuff in canon, Or is this something we should take particular note of?
Perhaps Voldemort/Quirrell are manifestations of something insanely powerful that really does not want to be examined by human science?
Chapter 51 (emphasis added):
Chapter 54:
Seems to indicate that Quirrell casted some kind of spell on Harry at that point in Chapter 51.
Anyone have any ideas as to what this is about?
Why does he need to float the pouch about at all? Why not just pick it up?
That's the telekinesis that allowed Harry to activate the time-turner. If Harry's hypothesis about the sense of doom being magical disharmony is correct, then the creepiness would just be from getting close to one of Quirrell's spells. And the subterfuge with the wand direction isn't intended to fool Harry (who knew that Quirrell planned to cast telekinesis), but rather is Quirrell's distrust of the privacy wards.
Re: 54:
Harry can still salvage the situation somewhat, if I understand the ending. They're going to know Bella escaped, but Harry can still put Quirrel in his pouch (since he's in snake form) and hide with Bella under the invisibility cloak, right? Or can Aurors see through the cloak in HP:MOR? I think in canon nobody can penetrate the Cloak's invisibility.
In canon there are ways to penetrate it. Mad-Eye Moody's magic eye can see through it.
They can't touch each other, so no. Quirrel also obviously knows this, because his pre-mission prep was carefully designed to avoid them touching each other or casting any spells on each other, vs. easier ways to accomplish the same tasks.
Auror Bahry threatened some "area effect curses" and "anti-disillusionment" charms, so they seem to have some effective methods if they suspect invisible adversaries.
Moody's eye can see through the Invisibility Cloak.
One of the systematic changes in MoR is that things which are sufficiently powerful are artifacts, and things which are artifacts are sufficiently powerful: The Marauder's Map was originally devised by Slytherin as part of the creation of Hogwarts and only slightly twisted by the Marauders (Ch. 25), and the Cloak of Invisibility is now in a class of its own compared to standard invisibility cloaks or Disillusionment (Ch. 54).
Rowling, of course, wrote that thing with Moody's eye before she decided the Cloak of Invisibility was a major artifact. So if Moody's eye can still see through it in MoR, it's going to be because either Moody's eye is also a major artifact, or, more likely, a specialized artifact devoted to seeing through invisibility (a specialized, specific artifact can defeat a generally more powerful artifact if the specialization is narrow enough).