JulianMorrison comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong

9 Post author: FAWS 18 April 2012 02:30AM

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Comment author: gwern 18 April 2012 02:56:52AM *  19 points [-]

The introspective morality-dump chapters are not my favorites (eg. I find the 'imagine distant descendants' to be entirely useless intuitively, and would prefer versions of the update-now argument which are more like 'decide now how you would update your beliefs based on predictions you make now failing or succeeding, since once they actually fail or succeed you'll be embarrassed & biased'), but oh well let's begin analysis.

A year ago, Dad had gone to the Australian National University in Canberra for a conference where he'd been an invited speaker, and he'd taken Mum and Harry along. And they'd all visited the National Museum of Australia, because, it had turned out, there was basically nothing else to do in Canberra. The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines - like giant wooden shoehorns, they'd looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with the most painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how non-obvious was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important, if all your history's heroic tales were of great warriors and defenders instead of Thomas Edison? How could anyone possibly have suspected, while carving a rock-thrower with painstaking care, that someday human beings would invent rocket ships and nuclear energy?

This is actually a pretty bad example. The Australians and New Guineans etc. were not necessarily incompetent (witness the boomerang, or the independent invention of the blow-gun), and specifically, throwing-sticks (atlatl) are really fearsome weapons which can throw darts or rocks insane distances more comparable to English longbows than anything else. Throwing sticks for spears were in military use in ancient Greece or Egypt, areas which always had bows-and-arrows.

A better example would be Tasmania and technology it lost, like making fire.

In a land where Muggleborns received no letters of any kind

This would seem to indicate Harry over-estimated the magnitude of his inference in the early chapters about the implication of so few Muggleborns at Hogwarts, but immediately raises the question of what do those lands do with their Muggleborns.

Finally:

She came awake with a gasp of horror, she woke with an unvoiced scream on her lips and no words came forth

Sybil is now definitely the bearer of at least one unvoiced prophecy, and if I'm counting right, at least two - she woke up without speaking in some earlier chapter as well.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 19 April 2012 10:42:15PM 1 point [-]

I've heard (I forget which of two sources it was so I can't cite) that per anthropological theory, the Tasmanians had taken not a retrograde, but an alternative, approach - that there are two branches humans have taken in regard of technology.

One is to have a maximal technology base, growing as new ideas are learned and maintained down the generations by apprenticeship and later by writing. Even at the flints-and-shells stage this requires specialism to get things done expertly.

The other is to have a minimal technology base, one kind of pot, one kind of weapon, windbreaks instead of fire, and all made out of things that can be expediently rustled up from common materials when needed and casually discarded when not, and which can be taught without effort and without specialism. It means that the species can be scattered down to the least grouping, and lose nothing. It means the individual is complete, alone and naked. They can drop everything and recreate it afresh at need.

The Tasmanians (and to a lesser extent, the aboriginal Australians) took that path. It wasn't some sort of massive technology fail. It was a different way to be successful.

Comment author: gwern 19 April 2012 11:07:42PM 20 points [-]

That theory is possibly the most elaborate sour grapes I've ever seen.

Comment author: JulianMorrison 19 April 2012 11:15:47PM 0 points [-]

I don't follow, care to explain?

FWIW the expedient technology route is the one taken by all other species that have any technology at all. A chimp drops his ant poking stick when he's done poking the ants. It's clearly capable of being an evolutionary success.

Comment author: see 20 April 2012 05:35:29AM 9 points [-]

The Parlevar were wiped out entirely. Both species of chimp have an ICUN Red List status of Endangered. I would suggest that being wiped out or nearly so by competitive pressure brought to bear by close genetic relatives who took up a different strategy is not a marker of a strategy being an "evolutionary success".

Comment author: JulianMorrison 20 April 2012 10:13:44AM *  -1 points [-]

Inability to cope with technology maximizing societies is kind of a special case. It applies to basically ALL animals, birds, fish, plants, and even to other humans who decided on being expedient technologists. If you can't call the Parlevar successful ("Before British colonisation in 1803, there were an estimated 3,000–15,000 Parlevar" -- Wikipedia) then you can't call any of the species successful that we wiped out or massively reduced.

Comment author: MixedNuts 20 April 2012 11:40:40AM 11 points [-]

That sounds kinda awesome in a "specialization is for insects" way, but at the end of the eon you're still dying of appendicitis.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 20 April 2012 06:43:52AM 1 point [-]

Nick Szabo discusses similar ideas here with regard to Polynesians.