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pedanterrific comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 14, chapter 82 - Less Wrong
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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...