Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94

elharo

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94 — LessWrong

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Then the wards should be saying now that the Defense Professor is dead?

On a side note, the actual skill that HPMOR is teaching its readers seems to be not science but rather Talmudism, the skill of finding clever interpretations to some words written in a book. It would be cool to see a fanfic that tried to teach science by similar incentives.

NancyLebovitz13y20

This may not be entirely fair to the Talmud, which at least sometimes grounds out into "what rule for living should we deduce from the clues in the text?".

7Vaniver13y

This seems to be my impression as well, which is somewhat unfortunate. (This is one of the reasons I try to avoid speculation in my commentaries, though it makes its way in from time to time.) I think this is the case because there's an author intending the story. The correct way to predict the story is to predict the human writing the story, which is not the correct way to predict the fabric of reality. The story is also (mostly) non-interactive. Identifying an experimental intervention which could have a high information impact, while the backbone of science, is inaccessible to readers. Instead, observational data must be interpreted, which makes it difficult to distinguish between interpretations that agree with the existing evidence but disagree on other features. And so you could have a game that teaches science (in some ways, Nethack does this, and similar games are easy to imagine), but I don't think you can have a fanfic which does.

5Benquo13y

I hadn't thought of that. Some possible explanations: 1) Quirrel didn't actually use that trick. 2) The wards don't report the deaths of faculty, only students. 3) As long as any part of "Defense Professor" has is alive, the wards don't register its death. 4) The wards did register the Defense Professor's death, but either 4a) Dumbledore didn't notice the extra death report, since he was preoccupied with a student's death, and didn't look it up afterwards Or 4b) Dumbledore knows about it, and (correctly) assumes that the same glitch that attributed the troll's actions to the Defense Professor attributed the troll's death to the Defense Professor.

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