hairyfigment comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: Unnamed 25 August 2011 02:17AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (653)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: hairyfigment 05 September 2011 08:30:41PM 0 points [-]

...I don't know what you mean by "important part of the spell" if you exclude secret ingredients, physical motions like drawing a symbol, or the vague-but-intuitive general procedure behind these.

Comment author: Sheaman3773 05 September 2011 08:47:10PM *  1 point [-]

I'm saying "an important piece of the spell" because you used that phrase.

My point is: Harry knows that the Cloak keeps him hidden, not just invisible; this is similar to Thestrals; there's Thestral blood painted on the inside of the Cloak.

None of that indicates that he knows how to replicate this effect, which is what I thought you meant when you said:

Harry believes he knows an important piece of the spell that made the Cloak.

Comment author: hairyfigment 06 September 2011 04:50:14AM 0 points [-]

Yeah, I wrote the grandparent hastily and badly. I felt confused about the difference in interpretation. But it doesn't seem like an interesting difference; looks like you just took "spell" to mean the effect rather than the cause.

I hope you'd agree that knowing part of the cause should increase the chance of successful replication.

Comment author: Sheaman3773 06 September 2011 06:42:00AM 0 points [-]

I do agree that knowing part of the cause should increase the chance of successful replication. I just think that there's still a long way to go. We're probably both reading more into each others' posts than we should.