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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89 - Less Wrong
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Without endorsing any part of this comment dealing with events which have yet to take place, I congratulate user 75th who receives many Bayes points for this:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfo/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/6aih
When I first saw this comment, it was downvoted to... I forget, -6 or something. Going by the percentage score, at least 11 people downvoted it. From the replies, some people didn't like the tone of apparent certainty with which 75th spoke. Sounded uppity to them, I guess. It was at +3 before I linked to it on /r/HPMOR.
I wanted to say something at the time about that, and how penalizing people for sounding certain or uppity or above-the-status-you-assign-them can potentially lead you to ignore people who are actually competent, but at the time all I could say was "Why are people downvoting this? It's a testable prediction" whereupon it climbed up to above 0.
Everyone who downvoted 75th or agreed with the downvotes at the time, please take note. Speaking in a tone of what seems-to-you like inappropriate certainty does not always indicate that someone is arrogant. Sometimes they have seen something you have not.
Or alternately, somewhere in the literally thousands and thousands of predictions or claims (I have ~200 in just my personal collection which is nowhere comprehensive) spread across the 20k MoR reviews on FF.net, the >5k comments on LW, the 3650 subscribers of the MoR subreddit, the TvTropes discussions etc etc, someone got something right.
You know perfectly well that one does not get to preach about a single right prediction. He had the opportunity to make more than that prediction, and he failed to take it.
He also predicted that Hat and Cloak was Quirrell, Santa Claus was Dumbledore, and S. was Snape. He considered these predictions blatantly obvious as well. I remember receiving ~13 upvotes for arguing that Quirrell could be ruled out as H&C, so it wasn't as obvious to all of us.
All of which were consensus beliefs; do not make the mistake of interpreting upvotes as object-level agreement - you may have received the upvotes for making the anti-Quirrel case well or bringing up some bit that people hadn't remembered or just being funny.
It's a large space, not a binary yes-or-no, so successful predictions are impressive even given a large base. Also I could be prejudiced but MoR is supposed to be solvable god damn it.
Someone was criticized. S/he was right, the critics were wrong. The neural net updating algorithm calls for a nudge in the appropriate direction of "Beware of dismissing those who speak with what you think is too much confidence."
I update in favor of "user 75th is more experienced in the tropes of enigma fiction." Indeed I would not be at all surprised were I to discover that user 75th writes such fiction him or herself. It similarly wouldn't surprise me if user 75th had gone to the library and checked out and read some of the same 15 books Elizier checked out and read before writing HPMoR.
For example, before reading the author's notes on HPMoR I was not familiar with Chekhov's Gun. Now that I am, I am much more likely to catch such a device when it appears in other fiction. I now suspect user 75th is quite familiar with Chekhov's Gun and other standard tricks of this sort of story. 75th picked up on one such trope (one I'm still not familiar with) that signaled that Hermione was heading for death.
If there's a general update to be had here, it may go something like this:
Before dismissing those who speak with what I think is too much confidence, I need to consider the possibility that their confidence is based on facts or experience I am not aware of. I should probably take five minutes to ask them why they are so confident before dismissing them.
Ha, you've got me all wrong. I am woefully under-read, particularly in fiction. I get a very small percentage of the references Eliezer makes in Methods; most of the time, I find out that he's borrowed something months (or, let's face it, years) after I read it, only by seeing someone else explicitly point out the reference. I have had my life ruined by TV Tropes, but most of what I'm familiar with there is video games, and not too awfully many of those.
But it's not a matter of picking up on specific tropes, exactly. It's more a matter of getting into the author's head. Of constantly asking "If this were foreshadowing or a setup or a clue, what would be the most effective payoff?" I read Chapter 84, and then, put together with many other quotes from my many rereads of HPMoR ("Nothing really bad ever happens at Hogwarts", "Her life was officially over", etc.), I answered that question with "Hermione will die horribly," then posted how I felt about it.
It's the same deal with my prediction — which I'm far more certain of than I was that Hermione would die horribly — that Nzryvn Obarf xvyyrq Anepvffn Znysbl. I got into an argument with someone on Reddit once, who was bringing up all sorts of random canon characters who haven't even been introduced in Methods and coming up with categories in which to score them 1 to 5, then giving them wildly inappropriate scores and adding them up. She said things like "We're in a state of abysmally low evidence" and "At least I appreciate what Eliezer is trying to do," claiming to be following the spirit of Bayes better than me, when all I was doing was pointing out three successively more blatant clues that Eliezer put into the text and saying that my certainty had increased as they were successively pointed out to me.
I see a lot of that, it seems. A lot of people thinking the whole Bayes thing is about immediately reducing a situation to a bunch of numbers and seeing what the numbers say, and fie upon anyone who acts sure of something without attaching their spreadsheet. But it seems to me the numbers themselves are not the most important part of Bayesian thinking. Perhaps the least important part.
Re the rot13 bit, I called it that Qhzoyrqber xvyyrq ure based on text evidence before that was revealed, so the idea that it's Obarf has always seemed wrong to me. They can't both have done it, you know?
Arf, didn't mean to start this again, but here's my usual litany:
Gur bayl rivqrapr jr unir gung Qhzoyrqber xvyyrq Anepvffn vf gung Yhpvhf fnlf Qhzoyrqber gbyq uvz fb. Jr qba'g xabj gur rknpg jbeqf Qhzoyrqber hfrq, naq oheavat fbzrbar nyvir ernyyl qbrfa'g frrz yvxr Qhzoyrqber'f fglyr (nygubhtu V jvyy fnl gung Puncgre 89 vf gur svefg gvzr V'ir gubhtug gur Qhzoyrqber-vf-rivy pebjq zvtug npghnyyl unir fbzrguvat fhofgnagvir gb jbex jvgu). Zrnajuvyr:
Jura V bayl xarj nobhg #1, V jebgr vg bss nf n cbffvoyr pbvapvqrapr. Ohg gura crqnagreevsvp cbvagrq bhg #2 gb zr, naq V fgebatyl hctenqrq gur ulcbgurfvf'f cebonovyvgl. Gura yngre #3 unccrarq, naq V orpnzr nf pregnva nf V nz abj.
And if that's not as close as you can actually come to a Bayesian updating process when reading a fiction book, where the only experiment you can perform is "Wait for more chapters and then read them", I would love to learn what's legitimately closer.
1) Gryyvat fbzrbar gung lbh qvq fbzrguvat frrzf yvxr sne fgebatre rivqrapr gb zr guna hfvat n fvzvyne jbeq bapr.
2) Erzrzore, gur oheavat unccrarq evtug nsgre Noresbegu jnf xvyyrq, fb Qhzoyrqber'f zbgvir vf nyzbfg pregnvayl fgebatre guna Nzryvn'f.
3) Nyy guvf erdhverf vf na nyyl pybfr rabhtu gb xabj jung lbh'er guvaxvat naq gb trg lbh gb onpx qbja. V qba'g qbhog gung Nzryvn xabjf nobhg vg, V whfg qba'g guvax fur jnf gur bar jub crefbanyyl qvq vg. Tvira gung Obarf naq ZpTbantnyy ner(V guvax) gur bayl BBGC zrzoref va gur ebbz ng gur gvzr, vg'f irel jrnx rivqrapr - gur cebonovyvgl gung fur'f fcrnxvat hc nf na nyyl vf nyzbfg nf uvtu nf gur cebonovyvgl gung fur'f fcrnxvat hc nf gur thvygl cnegl.
Lbhe gurbel vf abg penml, ohg vg'f yrff cebonoyr guna gur Qhzoyrqber gurbel fb sne nf V pna gryy.
I think you miss that this is a work of fiction that has an author. Think about why the author was motivated to make certain choices instead of thinking why the characters were motivated.
That is actually the other reason that I believe as I do. It seems like a much more interesting storytelling decision for my theory to be correct than for the competitor theory to be.
Amelia Bones isn't a member of the Order of the Phoenix.
One wonders why she would even know about it at all, if she had nothing to do with it.
Well, I think Lucius probably made sure a long time ago that everyone knew what Dumbledore (supposedly) said to him. I didn't get the feeling from that scene in the Wizengamot that Dumbledore-killing-Narcissa was any kind of a secret idea that people were just then finding out about.
This does rather change my view of some of the peripheral details, though. Previously, one possibility I pictured was Dumbledore restraining Amelia from her vengeance until Aberforth died, then relenting. I knew Amelia Bones wasn't in the OotP, and I knew she felt distaste at Dumbledore's softness, but somehow I never completely drew the conclusion that she wouldn't care one whit about what Dumbledore said or thought, and therefore probably wouldn't have cared if he had tried to restrain her.
Perhaps more likely, then, is the other way I pictured it: that Amelia couldn't get to Narcissa by herself, and after Aberforth's death, Dumbledore actively approached Amelia and said "Okay, I'm ready to help. I'll be the ward-breaker, you do the deed."
Which is why I think it a significant possibility that Dumbledore helped in some way.
Any of those defenses might be sufficient for a single clue, but you have to take the clues together. Three successive clues (plus her character) pointing to Amelia, and only some words spoken to Lucius that we never saw pointing to Albus (and everything else we know of his character pointing away from him, though I know some would argue that), increase the probability of Amelia's guilt quite a bit more than linearly.
I heard that it was na nppvqragny frys-xvyy ol Anepvffn hfvat Svraqsler ntnvafg fbzr rarzl.
I prefer the theory that qhzoyrqber hfrq svraqsler gb qrfgebl gur qvnel ubepehk jura ur gubhtug gur ubhfr jnf rzcgl, naq gura pynvzrq perqvg sbe anepvffn'f qrngu fb gung ure fnpevsvpr jbhyq abg or zrnavatyrff
Really? I remember being about eight years old, watching an episode of Power Rangers, and seeing some random no-name tourist drop a camera and the shot lingered on it for about half a second. My instant thought was "Oh, the bad guy is going to be built from a camera", and sure enough it was. They'd never have put that in the episode otherwise, and that was obvious to me at that age.
http://xkcd.com/1053/
No, it doesn't, not out of thousands of predictions of which you selected one post hoc. If I may quote you, our minds do not run on floating point beliefs.
If 75th's predictions were just luck, wouldn't it be likely for there to be other people who got a smaller number of the predictions right?
Yes. If you look through the threads or the PredictionBook entries, there are plenty of people blowing predictions. (A particularly good example was the Wizengamot trial: how would Harry rescue Hermione? The actual solution was 1 of the top 2 or 3 suggestions, but that still implies a lot of people favoriting wrong solutions.)
Even if 75ths predictions aren't just luck, you don't have enough information to meaningfully update across such a broad reference class. If it's got to overcome the weight of everyone I think is speaking with too much confidence on the other end of the lever, it's not going to move far enough to be noticeable.
I totally get the point of the rest of your comment, but not this sentence. A correct prediction is meaningless because it wasn't accompanied by another correct prediction?
I'm not trying to toot my own horn here; I've gotten things wrong too, and my original comment in question here was much more about expressing my despair at Chapter 84 than trying to register a prediction for later credit. But I don't see how I had any particular "opportunity to make more than that prediction" that I failed to take, beyond the fact that anyone can make any prediction they feel like any time they feel like it.
More or less. Think of it in terms of selection bias: a bunch of people enter a lottery of some sort. After the lottery concludes, the lottery organizer Yliezer Eudkowsky praises the winner, entrant #57, for their deep insights into lotteries and how to guess the winning number and admonishes everyone who told #57 to not get his hopes up. Do we now credit #57 for wisdom and study his numerology? No, not really.
Now, if #57 had simultaneously entered 5 other lotteries and won 3 of them, then we would start wondering what #57's edge is and preorder #57's upcoming book Secrets of the RNG Illuminati. Or even if he had won none of those other lotteries and simply gotten 3 near-misses (5 out of 6 digits right, for example), that would still serve as replication of above-average predictive accuracy and not mere selection effects, and persuade us that something was going on there beyond randomness+post-hoc-selection.
Mm. I think there's wisdom in the approach of only making public predictions when you're very confident in them, and that may have been the only thing 75th was that confident in. (This isn't a very good approach for calibrating your brain's sense of uncertainty, but it has other benefits.)
You can always make public predictions with the confidence that you have on prediction book.
Could be that 'use 75th' only had the right information and mental algorithms to produce the correct prediction in this one case. Other cases 'user 75th' might not have passed a sufficient threshold of probability to spout out a prediction.
Please label me as user 2nd when it comes to predictions of 'user 75th' 's predictive powers.
I doubt, though, that Harry will turn evil due to this.
Well, in the spirit of sticking your neck out:
Harry was sorted into Slytherin.
Dumbledore created Harry to be the ideal literary hero.
Lord Voldemort doesn't want to conquer the world.
Dumbledore is working on way more advance information than everyone else.
Counter-evidence: Harry produces blue and bronze sparks at Ollivander's.
As long as we're sticking necks out, though:
Definitely: The horcrux technology uses the ghost phenomenon. Specifically, by causing the violent death of a wizard under controlled conditions (i.e., murder) it's possible to harness the powerful burst of magic to make a ghost of the living caster instead of of the dying victim: a backup copy. A ghost may be static data rather than a running instance, but hey, so is a cryo patient.
Definitely: Baby Harry was overwritten with a horcrux-backup-copy of Voldemort. Voldemort didn't plan on childhood amnesia, though, and much of the information was erased (or at least made harder to access consciously). The Remembrall-like-the-Sun indicated the forgotten lifetime as Riddle. Remnants of Voldemort's memories are the reason Harrymort has a cold side; his upbringing in a loving family is the reason he has a warm side.
Mere hunch: In chapter 45, the Dementor recognized Harry as Voldemort and addressed him by name: "Riddle".
Mere hunch: Voldemort may have chosen to impress his horcrux in a living human in order to try to get around the "static data" problem. If it had worked, he would have forked himself -- there would have been two fully functional running instances of Voldemort, all the time, plus twelve hours a day worth of Time-copies.
Some of the horcruxes in canon are made from murdering Muggles, though.
I don't see anywhere that this happens in Chapter 45.
Very early in the chapter: "He had regained an impossible memory, for all that the Dementor had made him desecrate it. A strange word kept echoing in his mind."
And later: "Harry glanced in the Dementor's direction. The word echoed in his mind again. All right, Harry thought to himself, if the Dementor is a riddle, what is the answer? And just like that, it was obvious."
Once Harry figures out what Dementors are, he stops being able to hear their "voices", because he no longer sees (hears) them as sentient. But if "the word" was actually coming from the Dementor, I don't know what would've kept everyone else from hearing it.
Nice job!
I think Voldemort sets himself up to move from host to host, and who better to move into, than the hero who saves the world from Voldemort?
Does that mean that both Harry and Quirrel are Voldemort?
Without getting into a tiresome analysis of identity theory, Quirrell is currently almost entirely Voldemort, while Harry has a little of the devil in him.
Not yet, but that would seem to be a plausible end-game for Quirrelmort.
This is canon.
To a lesser extent, this is as well.
Let me be more specific then.
*Dumbledore has had the intention of creating the boy who lived since before Harry's birth and likely, before his parent's marriage.
*Dumbledore has access to many, many more prophecies than anyone else and has been using this fact for decades.
Those are vastly more interesting predictions. Plausible, and it'd be an interesting story if true.
I am breaking my "only comment on LW if you expect some benefit" rule because I am in a somewhat unique position to comment on this, and I agree with Eliezer that "penalizing people for sounding certain or uppity or above-the-status-you-assign-them can potentially lead you to ignore people who are actually competent". See, I made this update at an earlier time under not-dissimilar circumstances. (In short, I thought ArisKatsaris was making an overconfident prediction about HPMoR, bet against him, and lost.)
An excerpt from my journal, 3/28/2012:
So, you know, here's a chance to learn a $30 lesson for free, people.
I went to check on the original comment, saw that I had downvoted it, and now I am embarrassed.
Upvoted for embarrassment.
I wasn't one of the downvotes, but if I'd seen it I would have been.
I count 14 sentences in that post which each deserve an upvote, but then a 15th sentence which more than cancels out all the rest, not due to certainty, but due to literal malevolence!
But you're awarding Bayes points for a combination of brilliant analysis and anti-goodness motivation? I thought we were anti-UFAI here...
Ha, interesting take. That last sentence was not actually an endorsement of horrible murderous things happening, it was just my way of saying "Now let's get down to business" about the home stretch of the story.
Thanks for the clarification! I retract my objections.
As for the common criticism, although I'm as adamant as the next person here that "p=1" is impossible without infinite evidence, I don't think that fact demands that every casual conversation must quantify "1 minus epsilon" or even explicitly acknowledge it.
I stand by my downvote. Not for the prediction, but for the way it was phrased. (That said, if the parts I considered to be melodrama turn out to be literally correct, I will revise it to an upvote)
Some of the melodramatic parts have already been proven right:
Both of her legs were eaten by a troll before she died, and as she died, she whispered to Harry, "Not your fault." Check.
Check.
Interesting that Harry uses his med pack he bought in anticipation of almost exactly the scenario which played out when he used it, except that Hermione absolves him instead of cursing him.
The detailed foreshadowing often seems like part of the story, not just as aspect of the story. What is said comes true much more than it should, and in much more detail than it should. "Bitten" is a very specific way to die.
You know, speaking of foreshadowing...
That very quote led into McGonagall's theory that Harry had suffered some kind of trauma and had it Obliviated. And then there was that business with the Remembrall in chapter 17. I'd have to go back and check for more instances of Harry specifically foreshadowing a future event like this, but more and more I'm beginning to think that Harry has forgotten or locked foreknowledge that's leaking into his subconscious.
But in Chapter 17, McGongall rejects the theory that remembralls detect Obliviation.
But, strange that Harry doesn't think to keep experimenting with the Remembrall.
This bothered me as well. It's a mysterious phenomenon that directly relates to Harry's own mental state. He should have been all over that.
Harry had forgotten that he was not to use his timeturner in front of other people- a fact which got him a very stern rebuke from Mcgonagall.
That's plausible, but if so, it seems like a very disproportionate response from the Remembrall; that is assuming that under ordinary circumstances Remembralls light up like they do in canon, which I suppose is not necessarily a given.
From what we've seen of Wizard courts, they aren't exactly bastions of prudence and rationality.
And we never did hear back from her on that topic, did we?
Could he have forgotten without obliviation?
Don't go making that second checkmark yet - we're still within the Time-Turner window here. (I'd put it at maybe 2% that he manages to save her - EY doesn't seem the type for cheap copouts like that - but that's still high enough for a bit of bet-heging)
It's not going to happen. You don't hang that much drama on an event if you intend to reverse it quickly, unless you're going for comedy, and comedy doesn't make sense in this context.
That said, if you'd asked me a day ago I would have said that there are too many dangling plot threads surrounding her for the story to do what it just did, so it's probably a good idea to adjust your confidence of predictions based on narrative mechanics appropriately.
Like I said, very low odds. But Eliezer is a clever guy, he could plausibly figure out some way of bringing her back without tripping off too many narrative bullshit detectors.
It sounds like you might be mistaking Eliezer's role in this, and mistaking your desires for desires we can reasonably assign to Eliezer.
This isn't something that happened to the HP&tMoR version of Hermione Granger, this is something that Eliezer, the author did to the HP&tMoR version of Hermione Granger.
He did it for a reason. He's almost certainly been planning it all along. If it made him sad then it first made him sad quite some time ago. He's not feeling the surprised dismay you have today.
He wanted this.
Edit: I just reread
And now...well, I think the odds are below 1%. There's no elegant way to walk that back.
Time turners cannot alter anything the user knows about (for some value of `know'), so it would require reenacting this exact scene. So someone would have to simulate Harry's experiences, including the magical event, confuse Harry's patronus as to location of Hermione (or cause Hermione to actually be on scene, albeit invisible), and control the troll, so that it behaved exactly in the way Harry remembers it to have behaved. Also, Dumbledore would need not to tell Harry anything that he couldn't have lied when he said he was responding to the death of a student.
I'm betting Hermione is really, really dead (though Harry may yet resurrect her). However, remember that writing a story is often the inverse of reading it. It's like solving a maze by starting from the goal and working backward to the beginning: often much easier.
If (big if) Hermione is resurrected and/or not really dead, then Eliezer very likely started from a narrative goal of having Harry see Hermione's horrible but fake/reversible death and then worked backwards from there to make it happen. As readers we have the much tougher task of working forward from the clues to the correct conclusion.
That is, Eliezer did not have to figure out how to write himself out of this series of events. He constructed these events to lead to the conclusion he wants.
Hmm. How about having someone else die in Hermione's place?
I don't recall offhand if the death burst was recognizable as Hermione, but otherwise it seems doable. Dumbledore said he felt a student die and only realized it was Hermione once he saw her.
You'd need polyjuice for the visual appearance, and either Hermione's presence or a fake Patronus for past-Harry to follow. Hermione is unlikely to go along with the plan willingly sho she'd need to be tricked or incapacitated. Hard to tell which would be easier.
Given the last words, Hermione's doppelganger might need to be complicit with the plan. Easy to accomplish if it was Harry, but I think he's too utilitarian for that. He'd need someone loyal but expendable. Lesath would seem to fit the bill, but I wonder if he'd agree to literally die on Harry's command.
Either Dumbledore is on it and lied to Harry, or it was a student.
Harry seemed to think so, but he was obviously biased by seeing Hermione.
Doesn't it wear off after death?
Ch92 spoiler: Ur'f nyvir ng qvaare naq ur unf ab gvzr-gheare (Uneel pna'g gnxr bgure crbcyr nybat), fb vg qbrfa'g frrz vg unq unccrarq.
Overall, this plan requires at least 2 hard things to happen correctly: identical fake magic burst and getting real Hermione there and screaming or Patronus shenanigans. I disbelieve this strongly.
The soul releasing seems easy enough to fake, as does Hermione's comment to the Patronus. Hermione being under an invisibiliy cloak near fake-Hermione would do for the Patronus taking Harry to her(though screaming mid-combat would be quite dangerous, even invisible).
The hardest part would be creating a fake Hermione sufficiently well to convince both the troll and Harry. Do we know of any magic sufficient to that task? Copying the form can be done, as was done with the Azkaban breakout, but the blood and the talking both seem outside the capabilities of that spell.
It's not obvious to me how to fake the soul releasing. It was perceived by the magic-sense, not just with the muggle senses.
Here's a miserable plot possibility. Hermione was concealed, something went wrong, and the feeling of her mind going past was because a number of other things happened, and the concealed Hermione was killed.
Neutral plot possibility: usually, dying minds aren't felt in the wizarding world. Something unusual was going on, and I don't know what it was.
This seems unlikely. This would end up sounding a lot like "don't tamper with fate". That sort of thing is very common in time travel stories where someone tries to save someone's life, but it has a massively anti-transhumanist, pro-deathist vibe. I doubt Eliezer would do it.
I'm assuming that Hermione is going to be brought back somehow, so the implication isn't that you can't fight fate, it's that the world has wildly complicated plot twists.
This seems unlikely. There was a mention about ghosts being caused by "the burst of magic that accompanied the violent death of a wizard" (or something along those lines -- I don't feel like looking up the exact quote right now.)
Thank you for saying this. I've been hoping someone would make note of this. Don't people remember the fight with the bullies in ch 73?
If the mad burst of intellect and magic and etc. was standard, they wouldn't have been able to fake it for even a second.
Now, I'm not necessarily saying that the feeling was only because of something fishy going on. I'm just saying that it cannot be the standard.
That's true, it's still possible. Nonetheless, there is still a scene where Harry watches Hermione die and can do nothing about it. So I'd consider that it checked even if he brings her back / somehow prevents it retroactively.
Certainty would have been inappropriate whether he turned out to be correct or not, but seeing it here, I took it as a prediction and not a guarantee, and regardless, any mistaken certainty should not be held against the hypothesis anyway.