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shokwave comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5 - Less Wrong
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And I maintain that Quirrell planned out all the reasonable methods for Harry to interfere, and took steps he felt were enough to combat these methods. That they weren't enough is not something he could have known ahead of time; he was reasoning under uncertainty. We aren't reasoning under uncertainty: we are reasoning with the certain fact that he did not prepare for enough ridiculousness. He doesn't have that fact!
If you want to claim that Quirrell should not have been surprised, should have been prepared for anything Harry could do because he is that much better than Harry and that if he isn't that much better, he is holding the Idiot Ball, well... this is where the needs of the story comes in. If Harry is to be masterful at interfering and creating dramatic tension, he needs to be surprisingly good at interfering: if he can't surprise Quirrell, he can't interfere, because it will already be planned for.
I maintain that EY is doing a believable job of keeping Harry surprising, because even if a perfect rationalist had updated on all the evidence available to Quirrell so far, it could not have predicted that Harry would be able to interfere, under the restrictions Quirrell had placed on Harry.
By the way, that is where all these rationalisations for Quirrell holding the Idiot Ball are coming from. Quirrell is updating on all evidence prior to his decision and making the right decision. We're updating on evidence that comes after his decision: namely, that his decision was wrong. It is, of course, very tempting to say that Quirrell did something wrong, and that is why his decision was always wrong. But it was right when he made it! That later evidence makes him wrong does not mean he was always wrong; we are not talking facts here, but decisions.
I'm not so much concerned with the reasoning around the duel (apart from why AK was needed to make someone dodge). I'm mainly against Quirrell taking the boy to Azkaban in the first place. General common sense says that is not a good idea unless it is a desperate situation. Especially since Quirrell can't cast magic on Harry if he decides to do something rash.
What is the expected utility of taking Harry to Azkaban in total, from Quirrells point of view?
How many more months could Bellatrix last in there?
I don't know his numbers, but something like (Bellatrix's life - risk of failing and both dying). Given that he had the perfect plan, is maybe the most powerful wizard around, and had Harry along to beat the Dementors, the risk of failing was probably lower than half, which means the expected utility is positive.
We have very different views on how Quirrell reasons... the stakes are a lot higher from my perspective.
Taking him at face value I would expect him to be concerned with the outcome of the wizarding world's fight against the human, thus him and Harry dieing would jeopardize that fight (there is no one else that seems concerned, no lieutenants to carry on the fight). So we are talking thousands of lives, from this perspective.
Bellatrix might be able to help the fight, whether she would save half as many lives than Harry and Quirrell, I'd guess not.
Surely Quirrell should have considered the possibility that Harry would come up with a surprisingly powerful move. It's at least plausible that Quirrell's plan was too brittle.
Actually, judging from his rant upon being awoken, his error was that he overestimated Harry. He thinks that someone as smart as Harry should have realized it would make no sense to kill the auror.
Essentially Q's error was simply the Usual Error, i.e., assuming that others think in a way similar to ourselves, and especially, that they will find our intentions or conclusions equally obvious. To Q, it was obvious that nobody would be dumb enough to kill the auror under those circumstances.
That's assuming Quirrel is telling the truth, though. If he didn't intend to kill him, why use the Killing Curse? If the goal really was to subdue, to dominate, this doesn't seem to be the logical approach: The battle was almost won at that point, surely using other attacking spells would have been almost as successful. I think real-life fights could be used as analogy: If you intend to subdue, not kill, in real life, you use a taser/pepper spray/whatever, not a gun.
Ever heard of a "warning shot"? ;-)
Seriously, though, you're not noticing that you're confused, here. For at least a week, a whole bunch of people here and on Fanfiction were going, "Wtf? Why is Quirrel holding the idiot ball?", precisely because it would be idiotic to kill the auror, unless Q's plan is considerably more complex than the story lets on.
In a way, we were suffering from Harry's Intent To Kill bias, and thereby overlooking the non-lethal strategic potential of having a spell that must be dodged, and thus can be used to put an opponent on the psychological defensive.
Bahry took all the non-lethal damage Q could dish out, and spat at the offered terms - but he took the AK threat seriously, and might have negotiated in preference to having to dodge a second AK -- especially if Q told him the first was just a warning shot.
It was clearly within Quirrelmort's power to subdue Bahry without escalating to the use of the killing curse. He wasn't even exerting himself during the duel; if he needed to position Bahry for some reason, he could simply have started to pursue and maneuver. Bahry was clearly already on the psychological defensive, and was being forced to dodge his attacks, so using the killing curse is redundant for those purposes. Bahry's own monologue notes that his magic was almost completely exhausted. He wouldn't have been able to hold out much longer anyway.
If Quirrelmort had been forced to maneuver Bahry out of the way of his own curse, it would show Bahry that he was not actually trying to kill him, which stands to lower Bahry's threat estimate of him and further galvanize his resistance, because Bahry will know Quirrelmort is committed to taking him alive. Bahry is certainly not going to decide to surrender because of Quirrelmort's willingness to kill him, since he's already been using potentially lethal spells, and he's already aware that he's outclassed. He's implicitly prepared to go down fighting. It's simply not clear how using the killing curse is useful in this situation.
When Quirrelmort used the killing curse, I noticed that I was confused, and after his explanation, I noticed that I was still confused. Quirrelmort's explanation simply doesn't add up.
On the other side, one doesn't usually say "So be it" before firing a warning shot.
True - Q's use is more akin to walking away from the bargaining table in a marketplace or a business negotiation. That is, it's intended to make the other side go, "no, wait, let's work something out". ;-)
I don't know what you think I'm confused about, if you elaborated on that, it would be helpful. I do know that I'm confused about the current events in the story. I don't know wether Quirrel lies, I just noted that your explanation doesn't make sense to me because it relies on Quirrel telling the truth, something we shouldn't take for granted, in my opinion. I can't offer a better explanation, though.
It doesn't rely on Quirrel telling the truth, it concludes that something (which Quirrel happened to say) is true.
This turns out to be an important distinction, at least in my own life. Trying to decide a priori whether someone is lying almost never works for me. (Paul Ekman, I'm not.) The answer always turns out to be "maybe," and I frequently end up biased by whether I like the person, whether I've caught them lying in the past, etc.
It works better for me to decide what I think is or might be true, regardless of who said it.
Q1: Did Quirrel try to kill Bahry? It seems dumb for him to do so... it achieves no goals I can think of that couldn't be achieved more easily, and it makes his stated goal of not being noticed far more difficult. So either (A) he was being dumb, (B) his actual goals are entirely opaque to me, or (C) he didn't try to kill Bahry.
Q2: Did Quirrel try to achieve some nonlethal goal using an AK, as he claimed? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me... like you, my intuition is there have to be better weapons for that purpose. So either (A) he was being dumb, (B) my intuition about Battle Magic is wrong and AK really is a sensible spell to feint with, or (C) he was trying to kill Bahry, see Q1.
I'm prepared to eliminate both A's on narrative grounds... the author seems committed to not having Quirrel do dumb things. Both B's are plausible, so my jury is still out... but I have more confidence in my intuitions about human goals than about Battle Magic, so if I have to choose I choose (Q1-False, Q2-True). But there's a lot of uncertainty there.
If this were reality, I could (eventually) reduce the uncertainty by researching Battle Magic -- is it ever tactically plausible to use an intentionally nonlethal AK as a forcing move? If not, then my tentative decision changes; if so, I hold it more strongly.
Of course, Harry does not have the time right now to consider that (or maybe he already knows enough to make it seem plausible, and the audience simply isn't privy to that).
Anyway, my primary point here is that it's often more useful for me to think about the events that happened and what seems a more plausible explanation, than to think about whether the person reporting them is lying or telling the truth. Accuracy is not reversed deception.
Interestingly, my intuition tells me that AK is perfectly sensible to feint with. It's like putting someone in check in chess - they have to get out of it by one of a very few limited ways. To not do so would be checkmate and the end of the game, much like dying is the end of the duel.
(And there are plenty of analogues in existing martial arts. In a taekwondo sparring match, I might execute a very strong roundhouse kick to the head, knowing that the other fellow will see it coming well in advance and that their only sensible reaction is to dodge it by stepping backwards and loosening their guard - giving me room to instantly follow up upon landing with a front snap kick.)
Well, yeah, Quirrell could have considered the possibility that Harry would do something he couldn't have possibly planned for. But considering the possibility isn't the same as planning for it, and almost by definition he couldn't have planned for it. If you look at the passage just before the fight with Bahry, he did maneuver Harry into a position where even if he did have some spell that could block an Avada, he wouldn't have been able to direct it into the fight in time. He was expecting some interference, and he planned for it so that Harry wouldn't be able or would feel inclined not to interfere.