pinnate comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94 - Less Wrong

8 Post author: elharo 08 July 2013 12:04PM

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Comment author: Roxolan 08 July 2013 04:24:47PM 1 point [-]

How would that help if Dumbledore Finite the ring? The dispelling doesn't seem that specific.

Comment author: Benquo 08 July 2013 04:42:57PM *  13 points [-]

It wouldn't - but it would reduce Harry's risk of losing a finger to a Finite Incantatem in combat. And Harry does take pains to physically separate the ring from the stone before Dumbledore inspects the stone:

Slowly, Harry did so, removing the gem and setting the ring off to the other side of the desk.

Unless that's just an intended second red herring, to make Dumbledore feel even worse about mistrusting Harry a second time. But just like Harry, Dumbledore, McGonagall, and Snape err in completely distrusting the wards when they say the Defense Professor killed Hermione, we can't treat possibly falsified evidence as anti-evidence, this has to shift our belief at least a little bit toward the Ringmione hypothesis.

The ring is also a significantly less suspect place to hide Hermione than the stone, because transfiguring something into a ring that you wear goes directly contrary to McGonagall's safety advice. Partial transfiguration provides a way around the safety issue, and Dumbledore and McGonagall are unused to thinking about things that can be done with partial transfiguration, so the idea is less likely to occur to them.

I'm about 50% confident that Hermione is in the ring.

(By the way, the wards' identification of Hermione's killer as the Defense Professor is strong evidence for the theory that the Defense Professor was carrying some nasties standing in his pocket when Dumbledore drew a circle around Quirrel to mark the Defense Professor to Hogwarts's wards.)

Comment author: pinnate 08 July 2013 07:55:58PM 6 points [-]

Losing a finger shouldn't happen. A human is a torus. Depending on which way he puts the ring on, he'd just wind up with his finger in her mouth, or otherwise.

Comment author: solipsist 08 July 2013 08:20:27PM *  4 points [-]

So...you're saying that transfigurations have to be homeomorphisms? You couldn't transform the toroid Hermione into some sort of Klein Bottle, even if you really, really wanted to?

Comment author: mjr 09 July 2013 09:09:48AM 1 point [-]

He's saying that there should be less danger of snapping stuff off due to sudden topological changes when there's holes going through both the source and target form (and damn, got there before me).

As for control, it seems to me like the orientation is even intuitively clear in this instance once you actually think about the topological similarities. What with mental images being rather important with magic, it's likely to be doable. (And for getting rid of the mental image later, there's Obliviate!)

Comment author: jkaufman 08 July 2013 09:08:13PM 3 points [-]

Is there a reason to think people have control over what parts of the input to transfiguration become what parts of the output? Most people just think whole input object to whole output object. Harry has figured out how to take only a "partial object" as input, but choosing what parts end up where sounds much more complex.

Comment author: linkhyrule5 08 July 2013 09:37:22PM 2 points [-]

A desk is not a torus.