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gwern comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8 - Less Wrong
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Travel often involves danger in Harry Potter; Floo ports can be unpleasant, likewise Port keys, and when apparating, one can 'splinch' oneself. Time travel with the heavily restricted Time turners is quite complex and hence possibly dangerous, as MoR has already shown. In the HP time-travel fic Eliezer recommended, each instance of multi-decade time travel damages the protagonist ever more, until during its settings, one more travel back will probably kill him upon arrival.
(And logic? In a fiction universe where we can trust nothing?)
I must have missed this. Where is it written that you can touch your past self, mingle magics with your past self, cast spells in your past self, etc.?
Eliezer has said that Tom Riddle (aka Voldemort aka Professor Quirrel) taught himself occlumency in his third year by getting a time turner and leglimizing himself.
Oh. Hm. That's a good point then.
Cool! (Where did he say that?)
http://lesswrong.com/lw/30g/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/30d1
(Took me a long time to dig that up.)
Thankyou! My googling didn't turn anything up and I've reread all of MoR itself in the last couple of days (except the bits I didn't like) so I was failry sure it wasn't in the story itself.
I notice that I myself replied to Eliezer in that thread. Over the last five years or so I seem to have lost the ability I once had to remember nearly perfectly every conversation I participated in. Shame. :)
This is Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. If we're not supposed to use our logic here, then the whole thing is pointless.
Absence of evidence is evidence of absence. You have a number of time-travel interactions in both canon and MOR!verse where you could attempt to find any such hint of a prohibition, sense of "Doom", bouts of sickness is relation to time-travel, etc, etc.
If you can't find such evidence of a prohibition, or the other phenomena you describe, then that is evidence against there being such a prohibition or such phenomena.
You don't use logic because you're "supposed to".
I won't downvote you, but I was tempted to, for seemingly intentional lack of clarity in your objection. Making us guess at what you mean seems a waste of our collective time.
By the phrase "if we not supposed to use our logic" I meant "if we can't apply our logic to make testable predictions about plot-points and revelations in subsequent chapters".
Is that more agreeable with you?
If we're going to divert to this tangent then I'll say that yes, in fact, often people do use logic because they are "supposed to". You could make the normative claim that you're not "supposed to" use logic because you're "supposed to". But the descriptive one is as false as the normative one is arbitrary.
And wasn't intended meaning.
And intended meaning of ArisKatsaris fits perfectly well in context.
I don't think it was. If there is any notion of consequences at all, there are methods to be developed for steering consequences where you want them to go, it's not a matter of social or genre convention to break this principle.
I don't believe you parsed the context correctly.
Yes. I dislike connotations of "supposed to", since it equivocates between laws of thought and social expectations, but this distinction doesn't map to the context, because two worlds are involved instead of just one. In context, the intended distinction is between the author following or breaking in-world laws of nature, filtering the evidence essentially.
Non sequitur
Privileging the hypothesis - that mingling with your past self is harmless. It's the rare timetravel fiction (fanfiction or otherwise) where such interactions are harmless; usually, it's disastrous in some respect. In the absence of an actual example that it is not disastrous, like the Tom Riddle citation, our priors are not 50/50 or outright assuming it's harmless.
No. Please read the grandparent again. I cannot explain more clearly without explaining basic logic itself. The reply simply does not follow.
The remainder of what you say here could be made as a reply to the great grandparent where it would at least fit (even if I would still disagree based on priors).