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JoshuaZ comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 7 - Less Wrong
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All the way back in chapter 1, Petunia says:
The main (although not the only difference) between canon and HPMR is Lily and Petunia's interaction in this context. In canon, centaurs are creatures which see the future. This makes me very worried that a centaur foresaw that if Lily helped Petunia bad things would result. Since this is the main departure from canon, is this a reason to think that the story is going to have a really downer ending?
To comply with the prophesy, her actions need only result in a bad ending for centaurs.
Perhaps. Or perhaps it meant that the Second War would be much worse this way, though they still are victorious. Or perhaps even just that the possibilities were worse, not necessarily that it could only end in failure.
The end of the world is not necessarily a downer ending.
The only ways I can imagine the end of the world not being a downer ending are:
1) There was an even worse alternative in the cards (since this is LessWrong, let's say it was 3^^^3 years of agonizing torture for the whole human race) and we managed to dodge it by dying. But the fact that we were even faced with such a choice sounds pretty down-ish already.
2) You're some kind of negative utilitarian. Or perhaps a Buddhist.
3) From a certain point of view, you could describe the emergence of a new utopia as "the destruction of the old world" or something like that. That's how they got away with it in Alexander Senki. Or else "the end of the world" refers to something that would have happened anyways, like the end of Sol or the heat death of the universe. Thus, it will happen if Lily is nice to Petunia - it just neglects to mention that it would also happen if she wasn't nice to her sister, too, thus letting the listener believe there is a causal connection where none exists.
Promethea used a version of #3, saying the end meant the end of our ideas about the world.
Thinking about this, it occurs to me that perhaps the centaurs saw history along this path proceeding up to a certain point in time and then (it seemed to them) stopping. They might have explicitly told Lily that they couldn't perceive anything after the Event Horizon, and the subtlety got lost along the way to the second repetition.
I figured he was talking about an "end of the world" as in The Sword of Good.