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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5
- This thread has run its course. You will find newer threads in the discussion section.
Another discussion thread - the fourth - has reached the (arbitrary?) 500 comments threshold, so it's time for a new thread for Eliezer Yudkowsky's widely-praised Harry Potter fanfic.
Most of the paratext and fan-made resources are listed on Mr. LessWrong's author page. There is also AdeleneDawner's collection of most of the previously-published Author's Notes.
Older threads: one, two, three, four. By tag.
Newer threads are in the Discussion section, starting from Part 6.
Spoiler policy as suggested by Unnamed and approved by Eliezer, me, and at least three other upmodders:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR 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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
It would also be quite sensible and welcome to continue the practice of declaring at the top of your post which chapters you are about to discuss, especially for newly-published ones, so that people who haven't yet seen them can stop reading in time.
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New thread after 500 comments, now in the discussion section.
Chapter 62
Dumbledore's comments on The Lord of the Rings and his keeping Harry at Hogwarts seem significantly more rational than usual. Any chance Dumbledore is secretly awesome?
A degree of realism is selected for by the process of wizarding wars against dark lords. He's not awesome on purpose, as far as we know.
MoR!Dumbledore is clearly set up as Genre Savvy rather than rational- part of the interest of this work is the way it distinguishes the two.
I've got to say, I think the wizardly mentor character pointing out the mistakes of Gandalf is about as far from Genre Savvy as one can get!
I don't understand your comment. He's casting himself as the Gandalf of this story, and trying to avoid one of Gandalf's grave mistakes. That is exactly what is meant by Genre Savvy.
Well, that's exactly what is meant by Genre Savvy if he is correct in his casting. I worry that he's really Wrong Genre Savvy.
Hm, I guess you are right.
However, it still seems to me that Dumbledore is acting significantly more sane than he has in previous chapters. So far he has attempted to fill the role of Wise Old Wizard exactly.
Harry attempted to fill the role of Brave Young Hero and succeeded at that, but in the process, committed to something incredibly dangerous with less consideration than he would have given it under other circumstances.
Role-filling =/= sanity.
I'd say rather that role-filling isn't necessarily a smart thing. Much of how humans interact is little more than negotiated role-filling. In fact, choosing to fill-roles can be quite useful and adaptive. I don't think it's useful meaning of the word to consider 95% of the human race to be insane. Jumping into such choices without sufficient introspection, thought and intent is likely to lead to poorer outcomes, of course.
Chapter 61: Proofreading (I think)
Albus looked at her, his face as expressionless as Severus's, now; and she remembered, with a shock, that Albus's *own* - "It is the best reason I can possibly imagine for removing Bellatrix from Azkaban,"
Albus's own what, exactly?
I'm guessing it's that Albus's own father was committed to and died in Azkaban.
Hmm. That makes sense, and I can understand why you might leave the sentence truncated like that... but honestly it doesn't come across to me as clever writing, it just looks like a mistake. If there's a way to write it so that it's clearly a truncated thought instead of a writing error, that'd be better.
Possibly wording it 'Albus' own fa- "It is the best..."
Cutting it off in mid-word makes it a little more clear what is happening, and "fa" has the benefit of looking a bit like "face" so that it still takes some effort to process what the actual thought is.
It should be done with no space and an em-dash:
If em dashes aren't possible on ff.net, then use two hyphens in a row.
Honestly I don't think this is a case where making the audience work for it is really useful. The actual answer is revealed in the next chapter, so it's not like you're keeping it a secret for any length of time, but most people probably won't connect Albus' "my own father was in Azkaban statement" with Minerva's truncated though. The people wanting to solve the mystery don't have much payoff, the people who assume it's writer-error will just be confused.
Honestly I think "Albus' own father --" would works better. There are places for clever, mysterious writing but this isn't it.
FWIW, I like the more elliptical version. I thought it was fairly transparent iff you read the chapters relatively quickly (much more so than the release schedule) -- there are references to his father in earlier chapters.
It wasn't a matter of I forgot about his father (although no, I wasn't thinking about it at that particular time). It was that I didn't even perceive it as a sentence that needed completing.
Yes, you're probably right. I wanted to comment only on what could be done with the grammar while keeping the same basic text.
If he did want to preserve that, yeah, I think your take on it's the best bet.
Come to think of it, the earlier reference to the Confounding of Neville Chaimberlain doesn't make sense. Historically, Chaimberlain's motives are easily explainable- nationalist sentiments (most of the lands were still seen as German), learning to negotiate through trade-union negotiations (where concessions can be compensated for as inflation erodes wages), and post-overrun of Chekoslovakia getting his head out of the sand (he referred to a "general conflagration" if I remember right) and starting buildup necessary for war.
Yes, despite his famous speech, Chamberlain knew that he had only delayed war while Britain rearmed, leaving only the hope of averting it entirely later. He may not have acted wisely, but he wasn't as Confunded as all that.
I take the reference to Chamberlain as a joke and don't worry too much about it.
Rationalist fiction should at least be plausible within it's premises- the story may be an alternate universe, but unless Chaimberlain was super-wise to begin with a Confounding would not be necessary.
Yes, but one of the premises that I accept is that there are jokes. For example, all of the references to real wizards named after characters in works of fiction ought to blow Harry's mind, but they don't; they're just jokes. It's TvTropes' Rule of Funny.
So you just accept jokes as Dis Continuity when asessing the story?
I'd like to be able to think up an explanation for them, but it's OK if they stretch the bounds of rationality for the joke. Chamberlain didn't really need to be Confunded (proof: in real life, he wasn't), but Grindelwald (or his minion named after a fan artist, I forget) did it anyway. And if a fictional Wizard is now real, then that work of fiction must have been based on rumour and legend of the real Wizard (even though that also isn't necessary, by the same proof as before). Etc.
I agree that all of this does stretch the rationality and make that aspect of the story weaker. But in my opinion, it's worth it. Your Mileage May Vary.
The passage (from ch. 49):
For explanation, see the Author's Notes for that chapter. :-)
Thanks, I had a vague memory that Amanda Knox was in there, but I rejected it since the whole point is that she's innocent. So actually, we never did know who (Grindelwald or a minion) did the Confunding (not that it really matters).
If he were Confounded, his actions wouldn't a rational explanation for his motives and he wouldn't be building up for war. Either things in MOR diverge from Harry Potter significantly earlier, or this is a plot hole.
OK, that one I agree with. Although one might still find a way around it (he was unConfunded? but he never repudiated the Munich Agreement).
Chapter 61: I don't get what the laws of time are supposed to be. At one point, it seems that it's impossible for information to get back more than 6 hours, by any method. At another (and for the test they plan to do on Harry), it's impossible for a single person (or time-turner?) to go back more than 6 hours over the course of a day(/24 hour period?). Or both (with a strange coincidence between the absolute limit and the personal daily limit).
In any case, Harry can pass the test without breaking any laws of Time if he can find someone else with a time-turner.
It certainly does seem to be both. However it's possible that the personal limit per time turner is specific to the construction of the time turners and is not an iron law of time travel. If they were constructed to have personal daily limit equal to the absolute limit ("Who would ever need to go back in time more than 6 hours in a single day?") that would explain it.
Alternatively, the characters are just very confused, but I would expect they have enough experience with time turners that they are familiar with their operating limits (in "ordinary" situations, anyway).
Dumbledore has one. :) My theory is that the message from McGonagall to Flitwick is going to pass through many hands (or pockets), including Dumbledore, Snape, Quirrell, several versions of Harry, and at least one use of Harry's patronus.
You gotta understand, this is Eliezer doing the plotting here.
Of course, a different trick that could be used, if necessary, would be to bring a fresh time-turner (or several) back from the next day. I'm sure Harry has already experimented with what happens when you carry a time-turner back from just after midnight, and then hand that freshly recharged time-turner to an earlier version of yourself. Can a time-turner be transfered back in time? I'll bet Harry knows. Harry is already familiar with puzzles involving trucks leaving caches of gasoline cans in the desert. The Ministry of Magic is not.
Harry has likely not yet experimented with taking time-turners back in time. He stopped all time travel experiments after he got the warning about not messing with time.
I expect he may bypass the test a different way. I could be wrong about the timeline, but it seems to me that McGonagall's patronus is about to show up in the warehouse where Harry and Quirrell are having their little chat...
Could be. But another possibility is the McGonagall's patronus passes the message to the Harry that she expects to reach, but then, after visiting McGonagall and receiving her message, Harry dispatches his own patronus to pass a message to the warehouse. From there the message passes to Mary's room, and from there to Flitwick as an errand run on the on the way to Azkaban.
Need send a message to the past? Don't have enough charge in your time-turner? No problem. Just find someone who has already traveled back (using a fresh time-turner) and ask them to carry the message for you.
But in this case, his patronus will still have to show up at the warehouse. IOW, it doesn't alter the prediction that a patronus will show up at the warehouse to give them the message.
They already went to Azkaban, so they can't undo that to run an errand. The message would have to be sent on their return trip from the warehouse, i.e., before Harry's "rescue" from the washroom. These are the only currently-blind spots in the story where a change can occur now.
What's still not clear to me is whether this is even remotely possible within the story's current timeline. Aside from it being not at all clear what the current clock time is throughout the story, the mere fact that the time turner was used in an overlapped way (first turning back to before lunch, then again back to the same point after the prison break), may mean that their total travel may not span the full six hours.
I'm guessing that Eliezer forgot to tells us about the errand in the earlier narrative.
If it turns out they did it before they left, there will be a clue in the narrative now, as Eliezer will already have used his timer turner to update the text by now. ;-)
[Edit: ...and, it turns out I'm wrong. Also, disappointed in Eliezer. This does indeed lower my credence for future cliffhangers turning out awesomely, as it's way too much of a deus ex machina here.]
I disagree. The existence of a Slytherin girl's time-turner was all but spelled out before, which qualifies it as not-DeM. It was difficult to remember (I didn't, until Eliezer pointed it out) because it was a minor passage from many, many chapters in advance, but that only makes it even less of an Ass Pull.
If anything is wrong with that resolution, I think it's that Snape didn't think of that possibility despite being Head of House Slytherin and a master schemer.
A minor flaw: The Slytherin girl who likes to get there first with gossip (in chapters 41 & 46) is named Millicent Bulstrode. But in Chapter 62, her name is Margaret Bulstrode.
Millicent is a 1st year girl, normally there is no reason to hand out time-turners to 1st years (no conflicting elective classes) and it would probably have been more difficult to directly include a 3rd or higher year in the foreshadowing. Presumably Margaret (4th year) is Millicent's elder sister and told her the gossip in secret.
It's not that, it's that the entire timeline of events is inadequately spelled out (we're NEVER told what time it is, throughout the TSPE arc), and no mention was made of advance preparations to defeat time turner tests, or even that HP had to go run an errand that Q thought would be important later. (So that we would remember it and be curious what it was for.)
IOW, I was fine with him using someone else's time turner; it's the order of revelation of events that's problematic.
I thought that would be impossible. Otherwise you can just chain them, and travel further than 6 hours, or more than 6hours over a day.
The Test McGonagall administers seems ridiculously stupid. She should be aware of ways to counter act it. It seems odd that there is no way to simple find out how much a time turner has left or even where/when it was used by looking at it, or using the <retrievelogfile> spell.
I expect that you can chain them, but you still can't travel (or even send information) more than 6 hours back in time. That restriction is part of the nature of time, not a limitation of time turners, and a chain of time turners can't break it any more than an individual time turner can, even if you were to turn it 7 times.
That's my interpretation, anyway.
What was the passage?
The bit with the Slitherin girls in chapter 46.
Ah. From http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/46/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality :
...
Chapter 61: 'There was another pause, and then Madam Bones's voice said, "I have information which I learned four hours into the future, Albus. Do you still want it?"'
This seems like a useless question. A bit of information was already conveyed representing the fact that Amelia Bones was 4 hours into the future & found some information that would be useful to Dumbledore. Is this not sufficient information transfer in and of itself to prevent Dumbledore traveling backwards?
Sorry if I'm confused, but reasoning about time is hard, and my diagrams are not as helpful as Snape's and Dumbledore's.
I think the info was sent to Bones rather than her finding it and going back, but your point may still stand. Perhaps "somebody sent something back to Amelia Bones" is vague enough to slip past the filter. There must be some nonzero cutoff, because otherwise the info would affect the whole future (from the point of receiving the info) light come of anyone who got time-traveled info, and the whole earth would be interdicted whenever somebody went back.
If I'm wrong about that, it's possible that either Bones or Dumbledore wasn't thinking, or Dumbledore realized that he was already blocked and that's part of why he decided he wanted the info.
Amelia Bones learns something at time x is an event happening at time x and information of that event could be taken back to time x - 6. If the information that she gets is from time x + 4 then that information could only go back to time x-2.
But she got information from time x + 4: the fact that there was interesting information to get at that time.
Think of all of the logic puzzles where you have (just) enough information to deduce that somebody else had enough information to deduce that somebody else … etc.
"Is this not sufficient information transfer in and of itself to prevent Dumbledore traveling backwards?"
Obviously it is not. I'm sure that Harry would find it ludicrous that such a rule exists permitting the transfer of this one bit of information but not the rest of it... but neither Amelia nor Dumbledore think in terms of "bits".
Btw this "6-hours" window? Though I don't expect it, it'd be hilarious if in-story this had anything to do with the infamous "TimeCube" ramblings. Something like "Gene Ray was once an Unspeakable that went insane trying to figure out the mysteries underpinning the 6-hours rule.".
It seems to be anything that would change the actions of the ones who hear it can't be passed back. I'm thinking it's a simulation that's processing 6 hours at once, with the earliest arbitrarily small unit of time being finalized at the same rate new time starts processing. So Harry just needs to upgrade the universe's hardware and he'll be good to go further back, but he should be able to get around the maximum daily uses per Time-Turner before then.
In other words:
All Cube Truth denied. 4-corner days, 24 hours divided by 4 corners is 6 hours per corner. The math is simple but no wizards will debate me. Time-Turner can only turn one corner at a time. 4 days are in one rotation. If Time-Turner turned more than 6 hours it would be in a previous day! Turners are connected in ONEness with Time and to disconnect equates death of opposites.
This is the best timecube reference I've ever seen. I think its very clear that the wizarding establishment is afraid of confronting your revolutionary claims.
That's not obvious; what's obvious is that Amelia thought that it was not. (I guess that Dumbledore also thought that it was not, since he had to think about whether he wanted the information anyway.) Amelia might actually be wrong here; she's good, but time travel is confusing.
I imagine there are many ways in which it can be inconvenient to have information about things that have, from your own perspective, not happened yet. Your own actions could become constrained on pain of paradox when previously they had not been.
But you aren't allowed to cause a paradox while ignorant any more than while informed. From a determinist viewpoint, your actions are already constrained.
That's true. When I first considered the situation, it seemed obvious to me that accessing the information could have a controlling effect on your own behavior, but on further reflection it shouldn't actually matter. However, it would still be able destroy one's illusions of freedom of choice, which would probably be discomforting, if not actually tactically disadvantageous.
This is unrelated to the current plot, but rather a more general thought: We know Severus is the most accomplished occlumens in the world. Might he also be the most accomplished legilimens as well? It seems that Severus, being Voldemort's spy who spends inordinate amounts of time under Dumbledore's command, would natually come under the Dark Lord's suspicions, prompting plenty of sessions of eye-staring where Voldemort verifies his allegience. Severus, of course, passes all these checks, but could he not also be legilimensing Voldemort at the same time? If the only prerequisite of Legilimency is a staring match, could Severus be probing Voldemort's mind as well as receiving the reverse probe (and successfully defending it).
I feel as if Severus' role in the story could be even more important (especially post Voldemort's resurrection) in HPMOR than it was in canon, simply because he has so many opportunities for strategic play that were not fully explored in canon. (Admittedly, the Dumbledore killing double-play was staggeringly magnificent bastard worthy.)
I don't recall Snape being said to be the most accomplished occlumens in the world. He's good enough to prevent Voldemort from reading his mind, but unless there's some indication otherwise that I've forgotten about, I think there's supposed to be a number of perfect occlumens, who are good enough that nobody is capable of performing leglimency on them.
I highly doubt that Snape is capable of performing leglimency on Voldemort. Not only does Voldemort have tremendous incentive to become a perfect occlumens, but if Snape could read his mind and not have his mind read in turn, he could probably have ended the war himself.
But training to become an occlumens seems to involve letting people perform legilimency on you. Voldemort seems to have an incentive to avoid that.
Imperius a Legilimens, or have him Imperiused; use him; kill him. We already know from canon that someone under the Imperius curse can in turn Imperius another, so it seems likely that being under the curse doesn't affect one's magical ability too much.
That was my first thought. Possibly add in some obliviate-and-confine based recycling of the legilimens just as a practical consideration.
Tom Riddle got a Time-Turner in his third year and Legilimized himself.
Enough times to train himself in Occlumency? By the book? There are sooo many ways this should have fail, even not counting the Interdict. By the way, do you have any canon evens in mind that tie in with the Interdict of Merlin, or is it fully specific to your 'verse?
Occlumency is a mental skill, not a powerful spell, so there's no reason the Interdict of Merlin should apply to it. And there's no reason he shouldn't have been able to do this every day once he got the time turner.
Tom wins.
Then why all the brouhaha about not seeing yourself while messing with time, if this is doable?
(To be fair, though, the canon justifications - "you wouldn't know what was going on, you might even attack yourself!" - do not make sense if both the past and future selves are aware of the presence of the Time-Turner.)
Why, to ensure that nobody else does it! The brouhaha could easily have been stirred up by Voldemort himself through any number of means in order to further restrict the Good Guys' options.
Of course, it could have been stirred up by the first wizard to discover the power of working with yourself, and it's been passed down for so long that it's accepted without question, and Voldemort was either mad or foolhardy to have ignored the dire warnings. It just so happened that the dire warnings were wrong - Voldemort is incentivised not to correct them.
That's one of those hyped up rule for do gooders. It even makes kind of sense for people before they know what they are doing. But you get to ignore it when you are evil (and hence practical!)
Canon itself agrees that the canon risk is exaggerated; Harry and Herminone did see their past selves, and Harry even saw his future self (but thought that it was his father). Nothing bad happened.
However, the canon warning can be justified: If you attempt to change what you remember from your past, then the time-consistency force will stop your contradiction, and that can be dangerous. If the easiest way to enforce consistency is to mess with your memories, it just might drive you mad!
The force isn't so simple. While the time turner use will increase the prevalence of a stable loop involving distorted memories this is far from the easiest way for a stable loop to result. It is far more likely to ensure that the world of which you are a part to not to have ever existed, with the measure diverted to the possible stable loop that is the result of iterating from the effects of your new interference.
The way I use the word ‘exist’, the world that I'm a part of necessarily exists. In any case, it's the only world that I care about.
All this stuff about iterating unstable loops to a stable limit (assuming that one even exists) can be a good way to think about time travel from the outside, but that can't be how it appears to the people on the inside. (The world isn't going to notice that I'm a mind with a right to existence and change around me while preserving my unusual memories, despite what Doc Brown told Marty would happen to Jennifer in Back to the Future II.)
All this is trivially circumvented. Remember those instruments Dumbledore regretted inspecting? Well, just build a backdoor into them to modify their readings, and make sure that you're the only one that the backdoor lets through. Messing with sensory input is less dangerous than messing with the mind. Can't use rely on some vague instruments when you are an active participant of events? What about plain old glasses or a mask? Can't unsee your future self? Well, as long as your previous self knows that your future self is able to make glasses show you anything they wish, you're free not to believe your eyes. Might throw an extra hallucination once in a while just to make sure. Plausible deniability FTW!
Voldemort's resurrection spell calls for the blood of an enemy, and everyone is assuming that means Harry Potter. But Voldemort and Harry aren't enemies! He should try to take Dumbledore's blood, not Harry's.
I admit, I've been wondering whether Harry is actually the servant, not the enemy
I'd go ahead and make him both, just in case.
Are you sure? What if in MOR, Harry's scar is from where Voldemort already took his blood? ;-)
This has already been brought up in this discussion thread, but remember that Dumbledore, at least, has no reason to suspect that Voldemort and Harry have any relationship other than prophesied adversaries.
61: So they plan to ward Askaban against "opposite reaction". What would that even mean? Are they all going to fall down through the floor for lack of an opposite reaction pushing them up?
Heh, I just thought they'd find themselves unable to walk but that's just horrific. Then I realised that they wouldn't fall as gravity is just the opposite reaction of their pull on the earth, so it's okay. Then I realised that the electromagnetic forces of the chemical bonds within their bodies all rely on opposite reaction, and it went back to horrific. Still, despite the tragic deaths that would result hopefully it would be made up for by all the prisoners who presumably would get somewhat better treatment after Azkaban mysteriously disappeared.
Another thought: Newton's third law is equivalent to conservation of momentum. If you can magically counteract the former you could potentially use this to make a magical reactionless drive! Not what the Aurors are going for.
If it were that easy to create spells of mass destruction simply by tampering with little understood physical principles, I'd think people would have done it before.
Of course, in the wizarding world, I suppose that if people have done it before, there isn't a strong expectation of evidence that the knowledge would be publicly available.
They'll just check with somebody who knows what they're talking about (such as Dumbledore, or whoever he recommends) when they get around to the real work.
I loved the Weasleyisms in this chapter.
They'll probably just put in a ward preventing large objects from moving faster than a broomstick. That's what they're actually worried about, and it's probably easier.
I suppose it triggers off your brain to see if you learnt that trick in a Muggle physics or chemistry class. Same way "it" triggers off your brain to see if you have at least a vague idea of what a spell does before making the magical bats appear.
I'm reminded of the Mage: The Ascension tabletop RPG. In that setting, Paradox forces inflicted very painful backlash on mages who performed magic that a watching "muggle" would find hard or impossible to believe in - so a lot of the game revolved around finding a way for your spells to look like plausible accidents. Cast fireballs near something that could have exploded on its own, give heart attacks preferrably to elderly or overweight targets, and so on.
The Hogwarts anti-tech jinx could be the inverted, less vicious version of it. If Harry gets around to seriously tackle it, perhaps he'll find the solution to be as simple as passing his tricks off as magical artifacts or Charms.
My guess is that the aurors working on it are all as clueless as Arthur and that the project will be a complete wash.
That's what they plan to do, based on what little information they have, but that doesn't mean such a thing is actually doable.
Hogwarts interferes with electrical devices, but brains still work.
There certainly seems to be a common thread in many magic worlds that "physics doesn't work, but all the stuff physics causes that most people intuitively EXPECT to happen, still happen"
And it doesn't simply degrade into bullshit because you think that you can explain why things work as expected for some physical reasons. You may have a certain level of reductionistic insight, you may expect things to stop behaving as usual, but magic is lawful, and so it continues working according to naïve physics, according to expectations of somebody who does not even pretend to understand world in physical terms.
Technology is (bastardized ancient) Greek for trickery. Electricity works, gravity works, macroscopic thermodynamic works. Counterintuitive trickery without Atlantis-issued license doesn't.
Ch. 61: more disappointment. End of chapter tries to create suspense by setting up a hard problem for Harry to solve in the next one. Again. I don't believe you, Eliezer, not after you made Harry blink away twelve Dementors. I still feel that the turning point of the fic was Ch. 55; after the events of 54 Harry should have woken up in a holding cell.
I sort of agree, but I think 61 was better than recent chapters. It's entertaining to see smart people reason and make clever true deductions, but get some things wrong.
I'm not happy with the rule about time travel not allowing travel more than six hours back of information. If that's the case then time travel should be much less common since anything sharing the same light-cone segment will transmit information back based on minute changes to gravity. This only makes sense if it means information that humans would regard as information because magic works like that. If that's the case, I'm really waiting for Harry to find the explicit rules for that and then find a loophole to engage in major havoc.
This is what I figured.
The same thing applies to prohibiting time travel in Azkaban, or allowing one person to tell another person (while giving them access to who knows what subtle face expressions) to talk to a person that the first one can't communicate with.
Which suggests that to time-travel further than 6 hours back, you'd just need to completely Obliviate yourself, wiping your mind so clean that a Remembrall in your hands would blaze like a miniature sun. Best to also take the form of an infant, since you'll be a mental one anyway.
I suddenly really hope Harry doesn't "Where did all you zombies come from" travel back to himself as an infant to destroy You-Know-Who for the second-first-only time as the end of the book, leading to his obliviated-adult-in-the-form-of-a-child brain as the cause of his "childhood" genius.
I'm in an unusual position I find hard to express!
I never considered that possibility until your comment.
The possibility is awesome and if the story had really ended that way I would've been totally satisfied, I think.
Now that you've pointed it out and I've thought about it, I'm greedy and want a different awesome ending, so
Now I agree with you and hope it doesn't end that way.
As long as the Remembrall blazes in the same way (as far as any person would notice), regardless of what you've actually forgotten.
I think I can actually deflect this one by appeal to Actual Reality. (Some familiarity with quantum mechanics required.) Note that photons, by virtue of their momentum, have gravitational pull; yet in the quantum double-slit experiment, the gravitational pull of the photons is not enough to "collapse the waveform" as to which path they have taken. This seems to me to be exactly the same sort of "prohibited information" as in the fic. The best explanation I'm aware of for this is that the uncertainty in the quantities involved is high enough that, even though the photons' gravitational pull could in theory transmit information, in practice the resolution of the universe is simply not high enough for that to happen. The same thing could be at work here.
I feel like I just used a sledgehammer to kill a fly.
I think a pretty straightforward answer is that for it to be information, an intelligent being has to perceive it as such. I don't think there's a loophole - if you would successfully send information farther back in time using any means, Time Gets Mad, and things somehow work out so that you don't. And even if you get around that, unspeakably bad things probably happen.
However, I suspect that the six hours is an artificial safeguard built into the spell. You could PROBABLY create a new time travel spell that can go seven or eight hours without breaking things. I doubt the 6 hour limit is actually the snapping point. It's just the limit to what you can do before you start to deal damage to reality. Going farther once might work, but if everyone did it then Very Bad Things happen. If the payoff matrix for "everyone defects" is that the universe stops existing, you should probably cooperate.
Edit: NVM, reread the end of the chapter, and it seems like if there's any way to go more than six hours, period, it's such a well kept secret that no one thinks its possible. Then again, this would not be the first time Eliezer has employed the "powerful weapon being an amazingly well kept secret" thing, and it was somewhat foreshadowed when Harry mused that maybe scientists had come up with things worse than nuclear weapons.
If the six hour limit is or resembles a natural limit of any kind, which it may, it seems most likely to correspond to one quarter of a day, where "day" might be sidereal, stellar, or solar (probably not civil). Hours are just... very artificial, and while magic seems perfectly happy to abide by artificial rules, this limit is likely to predate accurate timekeeping (and accurate timekeeping precedes the careful pinning down of how long an hour is!)
The "quarter-day" interpretation would have the following implications:
Depending on which sort of day limits time travel, certain astronomical phenomena would mess with time travel.
Six hours is unlikely to be an exact figure, and the figure in question may vary depending on seasonal and geographical context.
Time travel in outer space will behave very strangely.
Maybe the natural limit is some naturally derived constant that happens to be slightly more than six hours, and the time-turner was designed by humans to operate in units of exactly an hour. Which you could test by seeing if it was possible to send information back in time 6 hours and 1 second using two chained time-turners.
This makes for an interesting question: How do you test stuff like this?
It seems dangerous. What exactly breaks when you go back too far? Just the local area? Can I launch a time turner into space with a suitable automatic device and watch from a safe distance? Is having an observer involved relevant (more likely with magic than quantum mechanics)? Would testing with wizard or house elf participants be unethical? Is the anthropic principle relevant?
Yet Dumbledore says that someone erased Atlantis from time, and I'm guessing Atlantis existed for more than six hours. (Also, it was erased from time in such a way that people still know about it).
We know that earlier wizards were stronger, yet the book says "time turners can't go back more than six hours" multiple times, so it seems an important fact and widely believed by the characters. We know that strong Dumbledore can't do it, nor can efficient Quirrellmort (or he wouldn't suggest to Harry the plot with Bulstrode), and that time travel can be blocked long-term by the Wizards who created Azkaban. I think it will be a matter of partial-transfiguration style understanding for Harry to find some kind of loophole.
I think Atlantis serves as a cautionary tale for what happens when you TRY to go back more than six hours.
That's what you get when you program your universe without checking your array indexes consistently!
Perhaps the six hour limit was placed on time travel a long time ago, by wizards much more powerful than today's, who knew (perhaps first-hand) how nightmarishly screwy time travel could get. This sort of thing has precedent: the Interdict of Merlin prevents the most powerful magical knowledge from being passed on in writing. The reasoning is similar, too: some magic is just that dangerous.
I would not be surprised if the destruction of Atlantis involved Time Travel. Especially if we consider that this fic might be influenced by "Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time."
Either that, or that's the size of the simulation's event buffer. ;-)
(That is, it might be a hard limit on the size of time loop the simulation is able to process, if they're actually in a simulation.)
Assume they are in a simulation - why would it have an event buffer created able to compute time travel at all, and why pick 6 human hours (equivalent) as the magic number constant for it?
Presumably simulating a human brain is harder than simulating the same mass/volume/atom count of solid metal, so as the population increases has the time-turner interval shrunk correspondingly? Seems unlikely it would settle on such a round number if it was changing with population. (Or is that why magic is getting weaker - as the simulation computer fills up?)
Why not? I think it'd be kind of cool to simulate a universe with magic and I'd feel altogether clever if I could implement time travel in it. :)
OK, simulating time travel for the hell of it sounds good, I still question the buffer limit idea:
"Simulated time travel now working, but what should we set the Horological Constant value to?"
"Dunno. Three years? A thousand years? Just enough time to undo saying something rude? MAXINT seconds? AVAILABLEMEM? User configurable?"
"Oh whatever, it's time to go home, I'll just put six simulated hours and be done with it. Shall I start locking up?"
That would be a disappointing reason for the 6 hour limit, and an unconvincing way to make the universe work so that the plot works. I hope the 6 hour limit is either not real, or something more interesting.
It may be that the limit is not due to the physics itself but because of the intervention of an early wizard. Unbounded time travel is one of the most powerful abilities imaginable. The first witch to exploit this and take ultimate power would obviously want to prevent others from overthrowing her. It would be in her best interest to find a way to put constraints on the powers of others. Longer than six hour anomalies may well trigger destructive countermeasures.
My first hypothesis would be simple processing complexity. Time travel is complicated. It is the kind of problem that grows ridiculously with time and space. The programmer has been able to invent an algorithm that simplifies it for low dimensionality but even with that algorithm higher order time travel would still take too much time on the given hardware.
Second: the programmer initially programmed the buffer in to allow for short term time processing. Things like the soda that prompts you to drink, spell dodging time hop magic, etc. It didn't even occur to him that the wizards would find a way to exploit the mechanism for long term use.
Another possible reason to have a time-buffer in a world simulator (which, btw, I don't believe the HP:MORverse is) is that the simulation doesn't actually do everything in real time.
Rather, you may have situations where process A and process B are defined as taking the same number of simulated time-slices, but process B takes more actual time to simulate for whatever reason, and so the simulation of process A is halted until process B catches up. (This presumes that it's not possible to reallocate simulated processes across simulating resource threads with arbitrarily fine granularity.)
Which means that at any given real-world moment, some parts of the simulation are at timeslice T, some parts are at timeslice T+1, and so forth. The six-hour limit might simply reflect the typical spread, and simulated time-travel might be a hacking of the system that is bound by that spread, rather than an explicitly simulated capability with an explicitly simulated upper bound.
Something like this is true of the only reality-simulating system we know of, namely our own brains. For example, color phi is a kind of simulated time travel where, in response to a perceived event E1 at time T, your brain constructs an illusory event E2, which you experience as occurring before T. This works because different parts of your brain construct your experience of time T at different rates, and tag those parts as occurring at T; the experience of simultaneity is constructed by your brain.
If the six-hours is to avoid too much time-skew, it's a hack and one would expect better from simulation-builders.
There are plenty of ways to efficiently calculate differing time-space regions, using lazy evaluation or equivalents thereof. For example, the famous Hashlife algorithm for Conway's Game of Life does exactly that - different regions can be billions or trillions of generations apart thanks to memoization. Lazy evaluation proper allows weird techniques like the reverse state monad or circular programming (aka time-traveling).
It occurs that magic is basically the ability to hack the simulation; the wizards who developed time travel didn't know what was actually safe, what was unsafe, what would crash the simulation, and what the simulation could actually even do - so they picked the weakest version of time travel to implement (both branches consistent) and slapped a bunch of arbitrary limits on it so it (hopefully) couldn't break anything major.
Also, Merlin in T.H. White's The Once and Future King lives his life backwards in time, from old age to youth - is that canon!Merlin, and does that property carry over to the Merlin to whom the characters refer in HP:MOR?
Merlin is not in the canon except as a curse-word of sorts (By Merlin's beard!).
And as the figure referenced by the Order of Merlin, which is awarded to people who perform exceptional deeds, and as the first person to get his face on a chocolate frog card
If the simulation is filling up that might make time travel less powerful but I don't see why the processing/resource constraints should make other forms of magic also need to be restricted.
(fixed simulation resources / increasing population) = less magic per person
(fixed simulation resources for magic / increasing population using magic simultaneously) = less spare magic at any given moment
Were the sort of ideas I was thinking. But, if it's a simulation it needn't compute in realtime, so it is a weak suggestion.
A 6 hour simulation buffer would explain a T-6hour limit, but not that you couldn't go back into the same simulation buffer more than once, or that you couldn't operate on the 4 disjoint 6-hour segments of the 24 hour limit.
With an un-shelled Time Turner, could Harry go backwards from 23:59 to 17:59, then cover most of the same 6 hour interval again by jumping back from 00:01 the next day to 18:01?
Depending on how the 6 hours in 24 constraint is imposed, (Scotland's midnight-midnight, noon-noon, whenever the operator's variable 24-30hour days roll over, 9:00pm-9:00pm, a leaky-bucket token at 15sec/min, or whatever), what happens at 9 hours past lunch could be odd.
If it is a simulation, and time travel devices are limited in ways to save on computation and such, some of these restraints make sense: the quibble over what counts as information is resolved as "anything that will force the simulation to recalculate futures", the simulation buffer is locked to one per time-turner because allowing an arbitrary number of retries would cause the computation requirements to explode, and Harry can get around the limit by using someone else's "turn", even if they can't use it, because they have information that the simulation won't allow to travel.
My money is on Dumbledore's timeturner. McGonagall, Snape, and Amelia Bones won't suspect it, all having witnessed Dumbledore receive future information (therefore he can't travel back in time far enough). Harry will capitulate to Dumbledore's offer of the Timeturner once he determines that a) Dumbledore knows Harry was involved in the Azkaban break, and b) being able to travel the full 6 hours will convince the rest of the wizarding world, including his teachers, that Harry was not involved. Dumbledore will do this because it suits his interests (or sense of drama) to have war declared on Voldemort.
I don't think Dumbledore would knowingly declare war on Voldemort prematurely. If he doesn't believe Voldemort is back, he won't try to convince others that he is.
Dumbledore very nearly took over the wizarding world of Britain last time there was a war, according to the Malfoys. This is a good reason for him to have war declared yet again, even (especially!) in the absence of Voldemort.
Then why wait until he actually has reason to think that Voldemort may be on the brink of returning? Why not simply fabricate evidence?
I'm fairly confident that the Malfoys are wrong in their assessment of him. Not only would it be an arbitrary departure from the original canon, having nothing to do with making certain characters more rational, there are also plenty of ways he could have pursued his supposed ends more effectively if those were his real goals.
People like to think of themselves as good. Many ambitious people might use unfortunate circumstances as a reason to get power even as they wouldn't go out of their way to cause those circumstances to come about.
I don't think it would depart from canon, and it would be very much in line with fanon: the fanfiction involving Dumbledore shows him as someone who thinks he knows better - and has no qualms about misleading or mistreating anyone to get them to do as he wishes. Canon never states this outright, but it does give you all the evidence you need to make a decision: Dumbledore, with full knowledge of the situation, condemned Harry to spend nine years of child abuse under the Dursleys.
Chapter 61:
Two minor (and easily fixable) plot holes:
1) Harry never got around to tell McGonagall that the Hat called her an impudent youngster etc., and it's an interesting enough exchange that one doesn't expect it to have happened off-screen. More importantly, he freely told the story to random Ravenclaw pesterers just minutes after his Sorting, so it wasn't at all a safe security question since it's the kind of funny anecdote two-thirds of Hogwarts would know by now.
2) Lesath addressed Harry as his (Dark/Light) Lord, and didn't stick around to hear Harry "compare" himself to God while talking to Neville; nor does it seem likely that he would have learnt it indirectly at a later point.
2 isn't a plot hole. Severus saw Harry make the comparison. That's what matters to the analysis.
Oh, right. I had forgotten about that. Nevermind then.
Snape was pointing out that Lesath unknowingly prayed to Harry.
Chapter 61:
So Voldemort is a perfectionist seeking the "most powerful" combination of enemy, servant, and ancestor. Nice and good. But it sounds like if he were maybe a little less perfectionist, he could get any servant (I'm sure Lucius could spare Crabbe or Goyle, or he could just buy a house elf), any enemy (it's not like he doesn't have enough enemies, and anyone who wasn't an enemy before he took their blood would certainly be afterward), and so the only even slightly hard-to-come-by ingredient is the bones of the ancestor. So why in the name of Merlin haven't the bones of all Voldemort's ancestors been dug up and placed in a locked box under Dumbledore's desk? How come Mad-Eye Moody is out guarding the graveyard as if leaving Dark Lord Resurrection Ingredient #3 literally lying in the ground is at all safe?
(even so, an MoR-worthy solution would be for Voldemort to grab a sufficiently old hominid from a museum and assume it was common ancestor to everyone, but it would at least slow him down).
That would not be a safe assumption; most of what we dig up are our auncles, not our parents. Still, it's worth a try.
Canon Voldemort killed his own father. Since he was already planning to make the horcruxes anyway (or perhaps that was how he started? I forget.) what I would have done in his place was secure some of his bone at that time so I would have it available I case I ever had need to revive myself.
Of course, I would also have had Bellatrix donate some flesh, which I would keep frozen somewhere inconspicuous, unless the recipe actually requires that it be fresh.
I think Voldemort would have been staggeringly stupid NOT to have kept a remnant of his father's body given how much blood magic requires these types of ingredients.
I had assumed that Dumbledore had destroyed the remains but posted a guard at the grave in case someone showed up.
Another question is: would the most immediate or the most distant ancestor possible count as the best option for Voldemort? If the most distant, then he'll probably be wanting Salazar Slytherin's bones. If their location is known.
A hominid fossil might have no living descendants at all.
I think a fossilized hominid might have worse than average chance of having no living descendants too: To be fossilized they have to undergo a fossilization event, which is probably correlated with disaster: and given that ancient human did not stray far from their genetic siblings (and progeny) this probably indicates a high chance of that disaster affecting their progeny. I certainly wouldn't rely on it.
Nevertheless, given my cultural heuristic for what counts as most important, it would probably be father (in terms of how much various cultures put a value on either the father or the mother), or most recognized powerful ancestor (Salazar Slytherin in this case).
I congratulate you on noticing your own confusion. Yes, I thought of that.
I'm a little baffled about how Dumbledore and Co. aren't at least CONSIDERING the possibility that Quirrel is involved, especially since Dumbledore was already suspicious of him.
He doesn't have a Time-Turner. The thought that he could turn into a snake Animagus in Harry's pouch is not in their hypothesis space.
They don't need to assume he actually went to Azkaban, just that he was involved somehow.
One of them mentioned "the obvious choice as to who was pulling Harry's strings." I'm not sure whether that's intended to be Quirrel or not.
I took it as a Quirrel reference. Who else (besides Voldemort) does any of Severus, Dumbledore, or McGonagall think has manipulated Harry in the past?
Malfoy.
This thread is going to reach 500 posts soon. Should future threads be posted in the discussion section?
The poll is evenly split (tied 13-13 now), which I see as support for moving to the discussion section, considering that the poll is located in the middle of the MOR comments.
I was leaning in that direction anyways. Most of the MOR discussion is about the story, not that closely related to rationality or that interesting to people who aren't reading MOR. And these discussion threads do clutter up the site, especially for people trying to follow the site via the Recent Comments. We've had over 3200 MOR comments over the past 6 months (over 17 comments/day). Plus another 600 Luminosity comments over the past 3 months. Having so much fiction discussion on the main page also doesn't accurately reflect what LW is about.
One disadvantage of switching is that it's a bit inconvenient. For one thing, the tags are separated - a main page tag only shows main page articles, and a discussion section tag only shows discussion section articles - so you won't be able to get all the MOR discussion threads just by clicking on one tag. Also, the MOR thread might help get people who found LW via MOR to stick around, and that won't work as well if it's hidden away in the discussion section. But I don't see those as strong enough reasons to stay on the main page, especially since it seems like the story still has a ways to go.
This thread is already over 500 comments. I plan on posting Part 6 in the discussion section later tonight, but first I'll wait a few more hours to allow for disagreement and debate.
Poll:
Vote this comment up if you think that future MOR threads should continue to be posted here on the main page, not in the discussion section.
vote discussion section, reason for this poll, karma balance
Poll:
Vote this comment up if you think that future MOR threads should be posted in the discussion section instead of here on the main page.
vote main page, reason for this poll, karma balance
A note about the fic in general.
Harry gets frustrated when Dumbledore claims to not know what to do with immortality and immediately claims to have an immortal soul. It means Dumbledore compartmentalizes and does not "truly believe as he speaks". But Harry exhibits the same compartmentalization when he defends democracy to Quirrell and simultaneously wants to become a "Light Lord". And belief in democracy doesn't mesh very well with establishing scientific conspiracies, either.
I see a few flaws in the fic myself, but: 1- Harry is not portrayed as totally rational. 2- He probably sees a "Light Lord" as not interfering with democracy.
Agreed that it doesn't mesh well with establishing scientific conspiracies.
Knowing better than (most) everyone and forcing his will onto others clearly don't mesh with democracy.
It might given he approves not of the general ideology of democracy but it's role (according to him) in preventing the problems of dictators- see his conversation with Professor Quirrel post his speech post the War of the Three Armies.
The answer to Harry’s question at the end of Chapter 60, “Why am I not like the other children my own age?”, is, of course, that he is the protagonist of a story, and therefore he must do interesting things to amuse the readers. It would be pretty cool if he actually realized that and started considering in his decisions the likelihood that this story will have a happy ending and the likelihood that he will be killed off as a result of a minor accident as opposed to an epic duel with Voldemort. It would be really hard to write, though, and Harry would naturally be cautious about thinking he’s in a story, to protect against being Wrong Genre Savvy, so we are unlikely to see this.
As per a comment by Pavitra in an earlier thread, I think it might be that he's a copy of Voldemort, without (most of?) Voldie's memories - hence the single soul under the hat, the red remembrall, and various insinuations by Quirrelmort.
In the latest couple chapters, the remembrall's importance has been revealed I think: He was at broomstick flying class, and yet he had forgotten Newtonian mechanics and thus failed to see they didn't apply to broomsticks.
I don't like this interpretation because I don't think there's any problem to solve.
My memories tell me that broomsticks in both the books and movies were determinedly Newtonian, and not Aristotelian. Broomsticks do not stop instantly, people smash into the ground when they can't pull up enough, and so on. Before I accept that Eliezer has not made a mistake or is not deliberately diverging from canon and so there is even a forgetting for the remembrall to be linked to, I want to see some citations where broomsticks act in a clearly Aristotelian manner.
It seems that they might act in a hybrid Aristotelian/Newtonian manner. Certainly in canon they talk about broomsticks having maximum speed not maximum acceleration. And people have trouble pulling from being near to hitting the ground, something which sort of makes sense in an Aristotelian framework because objects want to go to the ground.
Outside canon, the movement of the broomsticks in the movies does seem to be a definite mix but this is likely more due to standard movie physics than anything else.
It makes sense by postulating that a broomstick always goes where it's pointed (no Newtonian momentum), but there is a maximum angular speed for turning the broomstick. The rider applies force to turn the broomstick, which means there's resistance, so it's not difficult to assume that the resistance creates an effective maximum angular speed.
This doesn't sum up to Newton, of course, because this maximum angular speed isn't dependent on current linear speed.
I remembered the top speed from the whole Firebolt/Nimbus sequence of events, but I don't regard that as even weak evidence for Aristotelian mechanics.
Wind resistance/drag means that there's a 'terminal velocity' even in free fall; change of acceleration simply changes a broomstick+wizard's terminal velocity upwards, doesn't remove it at all.
(Another example: my car operates according to Newtonian mechanics in the real world - but still has a top speed, which is why I'm not setting land-speed records on Nevadan salt flats in my spare time.)
But the terminal velocity should then be a function of the cross-section of the person on the broomstick. Instead the brooms themselves have maximal velocities.
I don't think Quidditch players vary all that much in cross-section. As well demand that auto manufacturers list their speeds as a function of how clean the car exterior is, how inflated the tires, what weight is being borne, the altitude, etc.
EDIT: OK, after looking at the descriptions on the Harry Potter Wikia, I've changed my mind. The Seeker article specifically characterizes seekers as small and lightweight and the fastest players on the team. Which, fortunately for my self-esteem, is consistent with my position that canon uses Newtonian mechanics.
Broomsticks have very tiny cross-section, so cross-section due to the person will be the majority of the air resistance. The difference in size between say Harry Potter and some of the big Slytherin Beaters should matter a lot.
Newtonian brooms are supported by canon then even more, aren't they?
Most Beaters are large and burly, and all the Seekers (with their premium on top speed) are the opposite. Exactly as expected with Newtonian brooms (or horses).
But if air resistance didn't matter because brooms move at a fixed velocity/acceleration in an Aristotelian manner, one would expect Seekers to have normally distributed body sizes as Quidditch team captains select for things like piercing eyesight, lightning reflexes, or just simian arms.
(Harry & Draco are both relatively small and thin; Viktor Krum is tall, but also 'thin'.)
Um, I thought it was pretty clear that he forgot he wasn't supposed to use his Time Turner for silly shit like that.
That was also my belief up until this passage:
In-universe, this is little evidence for or against anything. But from a narrative point of view, if the answer to "What did the Remembrall flare up about?" had been "Do not use the Time-Turner for showing off", this was the time to reveal it, rather than show Harry and McGonagall being confused. Certainly it wouldn't be an answer worth waiting over forty chapters for.
I agree that you could read it like that, but I'd have thought that if it was something immediate like that, we'd have seen Harry realize and acknowledge it to himself. There doesn't seem much point in leaving it a bit mysterious if that's all it meant.
There's an abrupt scene change, after which Harry is sitting in McGonagall's office. Now, his conversation with McGonagall is evidence for Harry being dim about that question (which is not that unlikely) or it being foreshadowing, possibly for this (which is not that unlikely). (McGonagall would also have to not point out "hey, maybe it was that you forgot my rule", which makes the first somewhat less likely.)
That doesn't seem like sufficient payoff, especially since there was no way to anticipate that meaning ahead of time. Also, that's not really something Harry forgot, more something he didn't even notice.
Whether it's "sufficient" is a matter of taste, I'd say. It's just sufficient enough payoff for me and avoids becoming ludicrously much payoff -- the Remembrall is a child's toy, afterall, not an ancient Artifact with DarkLord-detecting capacity. Indicating you neglected to do something (forgot to lock your door, forgot to apply your knowledge of physics) is more in tune with what I'd expect it to do.
More to the point it correlates heavily where locale is concerned -- the first broomstick lesson. So it's more likely that it indicates something near those events, instead of something in Harry's remote past.
That just doesn't feel like how Remembralls work, though. For one, "forgotten something" involves having known it: using Aristotelian instead of Newtonian physics seems like a mistake, not a forgetting. Like, if he had learned through some comically painful experience that broomsticks did indeed follow Newtonian laws, and then put a rocket on his broomstick: I would expect the Remembrall to be glowing this brightly at this point.
For two, a simple magic item that works exactly as intended, no matter how trivial or gigantic the task - that feels like how magic items in the MoR Potterverse ought to behave.
For what it's worth, I believe Vaniver has the right answer.
Considering the language used to describe the brightness of the remembrall, I'd guess that it's supposed to imply that he's forgotten something of great magnitude or importance.
Magic doesn't appear to think in terms of natural laws (insofar as it can be said to think,) so forgetting to apply Newtonian physics in a particular situation doesn't sound like something the remembrall should mark as a major lapse of memory.
Regardless of what magic thinks the laws of physics are, it ought to notice how important they seem to Harry. However, I still doubt that they're important enough to Harry as all that (although the writing in Ch 60 may suggest otherwise).
I'm not sure if this has been mentioned before, did anyone else catch the Gurren Lagann reference? Very subtle Eliezer, I almost missed it.
Having a spiral of green energy is subtle.
Calling it the Breaking Drill Hex is less subtle.
Having the incantation being "Lagann!" is not subtle at all.
There are subtle references in there, but that ain't one of them.
I look forward to your GL fanfic where Simon pierces the heavens with his unrivalled knowledge of AI and Robotic systems.
I was thinking whether, considering the nature of the wizarding world, Azkaban is really that unreasonable a punishment for Death Eaters. Keep in mind that in order to deter crime (to acausally prevent it) a potential criminal calculating the expected utility of committing a crime must get a negative value.
This value depends on:
EB, the criminal's expected benefit from getting away with it.
SP, the severity of the punishment should he get caught.
p, the probability of getting caught.
Specifically we want (1-p)×EB < p×SP or equivalently (1/p-1)×EB < SP.
In this case the expected benefit of successfully taking over the government and establishing a dictatorship is quite high. Also the Death Eaters were only stopped by a complete stroke of luck, so p is quite small. This suggests we need a very sever punishment to deter would be dark lords and their minions.
The punishment needs to be so sever that even though the would be dark lord and his minions have a good chance of succeeding, they're still deterred because of how severe the punishment would be on the off chance that they fail.
Given this, condemning them to spend the rest of their lives being tortured by dementors sounds about right.
I have always had the impression that, in real life, people treat very small probabilities of being caught as zero, however severe the punishment. Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right torturing criminals isn't a good strategy.
That depends on how available the punishment is.
Azkaban was not created, in-canon, in order to specifically deter potential Dark Lords. Its history is never stated, but it seems likely that it is a fairly old arrangement between the wizards and the dementors. It was created, instead, as a prison for ordinary criminals (viz. the woman Harry hears pleading while in Azkaban, who is forced to keep reliving the moment of her presumably accidental murder). The Dark Lord and his followers were indeed put in Azkaban when the opportunity arose, but this was for their crimes in the way of murder and such, not for their intention to take over magical Britain. Dark Lords are not very common (the only marginally-modern ones mentioned are Voldemort and Grindelwald, and Grindelwald is not even put in Azkaban, nor ever really messes with Britain except with the Muggle side, aka World War II). With this in mind, I think it becomes very obvious that Azkaban is vastly, awe-inspiringly overkill in the SP.
Many Death Eaters were put in Azkaban, but Voldemort never was. Indeed, there's no evidence in canon that Azkaban has ever been used to hold a Dark Lord.
Also, and this has come up before although I forget whether it was in this specific thread, increasing the severity of punishments statistically tends not to result in a reduction in the rate of crimes, whereas increasing the certainty of punishment does. Creating a justice system on the assumption that criminals are good rationalists would be profoundly misguided.
I suppose this depends on what we consider evidence. I would personally assign high credence to that based on 2 considerations:
1) that there have been quite a few Dark Lords, such that they are considered a generic natural category and are spoken of collectively; the Harry Potter wikia includes a list of 9 wizards/witches who don't appear in canon events, but I'm not sure on what basis they are listed. 2) the only other Dark Lord whose disposition we know of was put into an institution much like Azkaban, but not Azkaban for at least 2 plausible reasons (Grindelwald having built that prison himself, leading to it being poetic justice that he be confined there rather than Azkaban; and having rampaged mostly over Europe, and not Britain.)
Given that Grindelwald was not given the death penalty, it seems reasonable to think that captured Dark Lords are not executed out of hand, but imprisoned; and where to imprison the many Dark Lords but Azkaban?
What basis do we have to suppose that there have been many dark lords? There have certainly been multiple dark lords, but canon provides us with a grand total of two examples, and the gap between Grindelwald and Voldemort was implied to be atypically short. We don't know how far back the history of Azkaban goes, and how many Dark Lords have been contemporaneous with it. We only know that the one canonical example of a dark lord who was imprisoned, was not imprisoned there.
That's my own personal reading of the language scattered over the seven books; obviously, it's not easy to prove this to someone else who didn't already pick up on it - I would have to re-read all 7 and take notes where language that could have pointed to Dark Lords being rare as hen's teeth instead pointed to them being fairly commons (1 or 2 a century, which is 10-20 over the lifespan of Hogwarts).
Given the powerful magics implied to have been used on it, and the general Golden Age conception in the Potterverse where older=more powerful, again my inference is that Azkaban is hundreds of years old - per above, we could expect >5 Dark Lords contemporaneous.
The only powerful magic in the defense of Azkaban seems to be the fact that time turners can't be used on its premises, which might be deep old magic, but I'm inclined to suspect otherwise. Aside from that, its defenses seem to mainly boil down to
1) taking away wands 2) anti apparation jinx 3) dementors 4) human guards.
Our impressions may differ based on the fact that I still tend to draw most of my background information from the original canon, which didn't actually contain the Golden Age element used in MoR. New magic was described as being invented over time, but very little was ever described as being lost, and Voldemort was described as the most dangerous dark wizard of all time, not just the last century, with Grindelwald, his immediate predecessor, a close second. While the two are both referred to as Dark Lords, when they are compared to each other, it's within the class of dark wizards, and I infer from this that Dark Lord is a prohibitively small class within to draw comparisons.
That's Yudkowsky-only, I think. I expect Azkaban to be as well defended as Gringotts in Deathly Hallows - all sorts of intruder spells, monsters (if they can survive), and whatnot.
I think canon has the Golden Age! The founding of Hogwarts, the heirlooms of the founders, controlling the basilisk, the Deathly Hallows themselves, the Dark spells Voldemort uses, the list goes on. If it's powerful, it's probably old. The entire 20th century sees only a few new magical feats: the Philosopher's Stone (maybe); Inferi; and... some new uses of dragon blood, I suppose.
The part about time turners being unusable on Azkaban premises doesn't show up anywhere in the original canon, no. There's nothing in the original books I can think of that suggests that any especially strong magic went into the creation of Azkaban. Its main strengths are that it's guarded, and that the people who aren't supposed to get out have their wands taken away.
While plenty of powerful things in canon are old, most of the old knowledge is still available. The Interdict of Merlin is also HPMoR original. Voldemort knew old dark magic because he looked it up, the basilisk was controlled by communicating with it via Parselmouth, and the heirlooms of the founders are presumably powerfully magical, having been made by some of the greatest wizards of the day, but the greater part of their value comes from the fact that they are heirlooms; if you made another sword with all the properties of the Sword of Gryffindor, it wouldn't be the Sword of Gryffindor. The only founder's heirloom that actually does anything really remarkable is the Sorting Hat, and while it's probably a work of magic far beyond ordinary wizards, it doesn't appear to be treated as an awe inspiring relic of the golden age of wizardry. If Dumbledore hasn't created anything like it, it's quite probably because he doesn't have any incentive to. He already has the Sorting Hat, after all.
Rather than the founders of Hogwarts setting an unreachable standard, Dumbledore is described as the greatest headmaster Hogwarts has ever seen (albeit by a probably biased source,) and Voldemort and Grindelwald are referred to as the most dangerous dark wizards of all time.
The Deathly Hallows have powers which surpass ordinary magical objects in the original canon, but their powers are not that outstanding compared to other, non legendary magical objects, and while they were probably not actually made by Death, the people who did make them never divulged the methods of their creation.
All in all, the wizarding world of the original canon certainly didn't demonstrate the sort of meteoritic rise in knowledge that the muggle world does, but the general trend seemed to be that while individual wizards might not be getting more competent, knowledge is being added to the community on net, rather than being lost.
Flamel's stone presumably dates from the 17th Century, since that's when Flamel himself (a real historical figure) dates from.
I'm not sure. I seem to recall that the language implied that Dumbledore co-created it with Flamel, which would mean 20th century, after all; it's not clear how long wizards naturally live, speculation based on apparent size of Magical Britain to the side.
But it's also possible Flamel created in the 1600s, this is how he survived to the 1900s, and the brilliant young Dumbledore hearing of Flamel's stone, independently reinvented it. Or something.
I believe Harry considers some punishments completely out of bounds, too severe for anyone. Certainly I do. The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice). Some possible punishments may have such negative utility for you that a course of action which avoids such increases, but which almost certainly leads to your death, would still have positive utility. Azkaban seems like a good candidate for such a punishment.
Furthermore even if one is a pure consequentialist, there may be a case for acting like a deontologist in some cases. While a perfectly rational entity can properly weight costs and benefits, people can't. Chances are if a person's moral code says "it's a good idea to subject some people to mind rape for decades" that person has made a mistake, and one should account for that.
On the other hand, reducing the deterrent for potential dark lords, increases your probability of winding up living under a dark lord at which point your chances of suffering horrific torture, either in Azkaban or somewhere else, is greatly increased. Assuming you don't consider being wrongly punished in Azkaban under the current administration vastly worse then being punished and/or tortured under a dark lord, you can't simply declare certain punishments out of bounds.
Another way to think of this is that any government that fails to provide sufficient deterrent to prevent successful overthrows will be overthrown. This process will continue until you get someone who is willing to be sufficiently brutal. So it doesn't matter how nice your ideal government would be; if it can't prevent overthrows, you won't get to live under it.
That certainly seems like the relevant Star Goat probability. (I speak of the One True Star Goat, braise His mane, who will devour the souls of all who believe in God and make them stew in His Holy Bile for eternity, not the vile worship-demanding blasphemy proposed by the Restored Church of the Star Goat.) The Anti-Pascal's Wager argument may not work here, though.
The part of your argument that deals with Dark Lords overthrowing each other until we reach sufficient SP assumes that some possible deterrent will stop them -- although canon!Voldemort clearly did not fear Azkaban after enlisting the dementors' aid, and he allegedly altered his own mind, ensuring himself another dreadful fate if he lost. The argument also seems to assume an inexhaustible supply of at least minimally competent Dark Lords. It may further assume that said Lords themselves can make a subjective distinction between 'different' people who've altered their own minds, repudiated their original names/origins and left bits of soul strewn around the countryside, since otherwise Voldemort would have no rational reason to object if some 'other' Dark Lord of this kind tried to possess him. More on that later.
In practice, the ambiguity in the term "Dark Lord" makes it hard to show that reducing deterrent increases the probability of Azkaban or some other torture >= Azkaban. Offhand I don't recall canon!Voldemort personally doing anything worse than kill people, give them brief though intense pain or try to use the Imperius curse on them. I just realized something that makes our disagreement seem silly, but I'll finish for the sake of completeness: while canon!Voldemort used dementors against Muggle-born wizards in a horrific way, I don't believe we know if he favored prolonged happiness-free death such as we find in Azkaban. So wrongful punishment of the sort we find under the current wizard administration could easily seem far worse, for individuals, than canon!Voldemort's version. A lot of Fudge's victims might have living friends and relatives who would have died under canon!Voldemort, but the victims themselves wouldn't remember.
Now, as I say, while I wrote this response it took on a certain deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic feel. Because it turns out the dementors, once they'd accepted canon!Voldemort's offer, started multiplying ("like fungi", according to J.K. Rowling, which seems compatible with the hole-in-the-world theory) in anticipation of having more victims to eat. As I understand it, no single Patronus works very well against dementors that attack from behind, from above and possibly from below you as well as in front of you. Nor can you shoot them in the head. If genuinely immortal predators multiply enough I think "deterrent" and "Dark Lords" cease to matter. So a non-Azkaban version of your argument might hold true with a vengeance if not for the plausible claim (by MoR!Voldemort) that the Ministry keeps increasing the use of dementors precisely to give the impression of grasping deterrence to the nominal decision-makers, and the established fact that Dolores Umbridge sends dementors after canon!Harry while serving the elected government. She didn't seem to care if the evil creatures killed Muggles, whose population far exceeds that of Muggle-born wizards. The set of Muggles who nobody would miss probably exceeds Muggle-born wizards in number. Assuming Azkaban continues to exist indefinitely, what probability would you assign to the claim that nobody would ever try sacrificing them in order to enlist the aid of dementors for personal gain? Even if people who want to stop the ensuing disaster catch the culprit, the culprit can't go to Azkaban, because we've already established that dementors can agree to release people in return for more victims. Going back to Dolores Umbridge for a second, we know she seems eager to join in the possibly apocalyptic Holocaust once canon!Voldemort takes over. This brings me to the last of my original points:
MoR!Voldemort can possess people. It seems likely that he plans to create and possess a dictator. If the government he secretly takes over will do whatever it takes to deter normal usurpers, people may not notice the change. Except that MoR!Voldemort might have a greater chance of shutting down Azkaban and finding some relatively certain way to avoid an existential threat. All hail the savior, MoR!Voldemort.
Although for him to know this would work he might need, say, a dictator with a known propensity for trying on Horcrux-ed rings, or a dictator who contained a Horcrux from the start.
We don't know if he can possess people against their will. In canon, Quirrel allowed Voldemort to make use of his body. Even if he can, He's claimed that he's trying to set Harry up at the ruler of the country, and Harry is one person he almost certainly can't possess.
In canon, Voldemort did possess people against their will, including Harry (despite his mother's protection) in the climactic Ministry scene in Book 5 (although it was a struggle that Harry shortly won).
He inhabited Harry briefly, but it's not clear that it afforded him a useful degree of control over Harry's body, and as Dumbledore noted, inhabiting Harry caused Voldemort excruciating pain. Considering the way their magic has been shown to interact in MoR, I'd think any attempt to possess Harry would turn out even worse in this canon than that one.
As far as Harry goes, I agree, but possessing some other dictator would be much easier.
Hear, hear!