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Percent_Carbon comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 14, chapter 82 - Less Wrong
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Parseltongue speakers don't just talk with snakes, they command them.
English speakers have no greater ability to command than speakers of most other languages.
Do they really? The boa constrictor seemed pretty interested in its own stuff, Nagini is a pet and pets in general are obedient, Harry didn't command the Basilisk... so is this actually canon? Admittedly, maybe I just missed something, but I don't remember this.
Harry didn't give the boa any commands, and both Nagini and the Basilisk are being commanded by someone else (specifically, a Voldemort). In Chamber of Secrets, Malfoy summons a snake, Harry talks to it and tells it to not attack anyone, and IIRC, it does not.
(The original suggestion is still improbable though - Patronuses wouldn't be the ne plus ultra of secure communications if they could be suborned like that, especially in a war against a famous Parseltongue.)
Now that I think about it, why hasn't Harry bought a pet snake yet? Having an animal minion he could command would be extremely useful in any amount of situations, and you'd think he'd make the best of his abilities. If he's worried about remembering to feed it, he can have Hermione be responsible for it.
In fact, a pet snake would be a great gift from professor Quirrel.
Evil image, more work and complexity (Harry is busy - is a animal minion really a marginal gain?), the need to run it by Dumbledore to get a vault withdrawal (large healthy snakes in the real world are expensive, AFAIK) and the lingering issue of creating sentience?
Because the pet rock turned out so well.
Because getting a pet snake is going to be interpreted as either a sign of Slytherin(which will hardly play well in Ravenclaw) or, if the observer is clever, as a sign that he's a Parselmouth, which is something he'd prefer to keep hidden. The image effects may outweigh the uses.
Oh, crap. Malfoy's blue krait is Voldemort's spy in the Malfoy home.
The Malfoy's have a whole bunch of snakes. I think there's a word for a place you keep a bunch of snakes, like an ofidarium or something.
Also, they know that Voldemort was a Parseltongue. Lucius would at least be aware of these spies. I think he would, anyway... do we know that the Death Eaters know that Voldemort was a Parsletonue in this fic?
Also, what kind of snake is Quirrell's animagus form? Should we have compared descriptions?
Not sure if joking.
Thanks!
That is exactly the passage I didn't find.
Besides the reasons already mentioned, the standard Hogwarts letter in canon had restrictions on what kinds of animals were allowed as pets -- owls (like Harry has), cats (like Hermione gets in PoA), and toads (like Neville's). All three are stereotypical wizardy/witchy beasts.
The Weasley rat is not explained in canon but can be assumed to have been granted as an exception. A snake would probably not be given such an exception, as it might be used to scare other children.
Or perhaps snakes are disallowed because then the Gryffindors would ask to be allowed pet lions.
And you wouldn't want an explicit rule against pet lions, because then the Gryffindors would definitely have secret pet lions.
...Lions are cats.
Hmm.
I read a crackfic once where this loophole allowed Calvin to bring Hobbes to Hogwarts. (Hobbes is, of course, a magical creature that Muggles perceive as a stuffed toy.)
...if it is not ( http://www.fanfiction.net/s/2134884/1/Calvin_and_Hobbes_go_to_Hogwarts ), then I would like a link to that fic, please.
I was talking about this one.
IIRC, Harry thought through similar issues with respect to having a pet owl in the early chapters and rejected it on ethical grounds. Perhaps he is generalizing that to all pets.
If so, though, I don't think he's correct to do so. A pet that is (assuming Parselmouth works this way) only social when it's with me and not when I'm absent has a very different set of ethical costs than one that is social even when I'm absent.
Even if it were possible, it would only affect snake Patroni. If no one in the Order happened to have one, it would be irrelevant.
I guess it could work either way. I mean, Nagini could be obeying Voldemort by virtue of being a well-trained pet, the Basilisk for... whatever reasons the Basilisk does anything for, and Malfoy's summoned snake might listen to Harry because it's inclined to grant random non-difficult favors when asked. None of those seem any less probable than snakes winking, talking, having theory of mind, speaking in ridiculous hisses or knowing Spanish. In fact, none of the snakes in this series seem like snakes at all, so I'm not sure what my priors are regarding them.
I'd say that "Hey, this guy speaks our language, he must be a cool dude" is a lot simpler a hypothesis than linguistic mind control, given that none of the commands are particularly unlikely anyways.
Wait, so you think snakes really are independently sentient?
No. We already know that sentience-borrowing can be accomplished magically(cf. the Sorting Hat). Given that they need to be sentient for the sort of commands Harry discussed earlier to be possible, that is a necessary feature of whatever it is that a Parselmouth does. Mind control is also magically possible, of course, and there's no particular reason it couldn't be included in Parselmouthing, but it seems to violate Occam's Razor to assume that it's necessary as well.
You are assuming that Parselmouthing gives snakes the ability to judge whether to fulfill a request based upon its feelings towards the one requesting. That's something social animals have been naturally selected for; snakes don't have that built in. That Parselmouthing causes snakes to consider requests doesn't seem less of an assumption to me than that Parselmouthing causes snakes to obey commands.
Every species that reproduces sexually needs at least a little bit of skill at socializing. And again, using the example of the Sorting Hat, we know that borrowed sentience closely resembles the sentience of the lender, so snakes don't even need to be good at socializing as long as humans are.
true, about the borrowed sentience - if it is gaining the ability to understand language, and especially if it can understand very social words like "teacher" that we know are representable in Parseltongue, is it really a stretch that it's borrowing human social cognition as well? I should have thought of that.
Using Parseltongue to get a snake to do something is supposed to be persuasion, not mind control. (Although getting a snake brain to understand what you want would take quite the feat of magic... they're not social animals and they aren't as smart as, say, dogs.)
If this is stated or implied anywhere in the fic, I can't find it. What are you referring to?
Well, it's what I assumed from reading the original books...