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bramflakes comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 27, chapter 98 - Less Wrong
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So, speculation for what Harry wants the twins to buy for him. After thinking about this for 5 minutes by the clock, this is what I came up with:
1) A nuclear device (foreshadowed, one of the few things Quirrel fears, useful as a bargaining chip/MAD)
2) Some other form of muggle weapon (superset of #1)
3) Some muggle tech that can speed up Hermione's resurrection process if the main plan fails
4) Related to #3 - ingredients for a magical ritual/potion which will resurrect Hermione if the main plan fails (foreshadowed)
Most of the ideas listed so far are either much too nasty, better done with magic, or both. Mostly both. So, what contingencies could Harry procure from the world for a reasonably modest amount of money that do things he cannot just transfigure, or do by wand, and which the twins would not recognize?
First thing that comes to mind are various non-lethal drugs, since those are going into the targets body, which means transfiguration is out if you want the subject to live. So, LSD (lethal dose absurdly higher than effective dose. .which is useful if you want to dose a crowd) Tranquilizers think this fits on all counts?
Lets see, what else would it be a bad idea/impractical to transfigure. Muggle photography gear? But the twins would recognize that.
Smoke grenades. (Not subject to finite, a counter for every spell that requires you to see your target.)
Protective kit good enough to count as valid precautions for transfiguration stunts.. would break the budget given.
Id say bugging kit, but a purely mechanical recording device would be a museum piece, and cabinet size..
Dosing the water supply might well work better on wizards than on muggles. Muggles chlorinate their water supply, and even a small amount of chlorine will rapidly inactivate LSD.
Then again, some natural water sources have that amount of chlorine in them anyway.
Don't forget useful drugs to use on allies ratehr than enemies.
Small quantity of chemical explosives.
You can't buy nuclear or other WMDs for a hundred Galleons. And the instruction implied buying, not to stealing (and what wizard capable of stealing nuclear warheads would want or need such a paltry payment?)
More to the point, Harry - or any wizard - can just Transfigure WMDs. Quick, free, and no need to carry dangerous stuff around.
He can also Transfigure antimatter. If he can come up with a reliable remote trigger, that is gram per gram the deadliest thing known to Muggle science. It was also foreshadowed a bit (chapter 14):
As above for any weapon I can think of. Antimatter and nuclear weapons trump any area-effect attack. Poisons and biological or chemical agents can be Transfigured too, unless you need them to last for a long time before acting. Magic trumps Muggle personal weapons. ETA: not Harry's magic, though, and guns can be useful against weak or unprepared wizards. Electronics, computers, and software are Sirs Not Appearing In This Fanfic.
Interesting. An irreplaceable Muggle artifact that was created by expending life in some manner, so sacrificing it would release "life energy"? I think though that defeating Death in such a purely magical would not be appropriate for Harry.
I doubt he can Transfigure antimatter. If he can, the containment will be very hard to get right, and he would absolutely have to get it right. How do you even stop it blowing up your wand, if you have to contact the material you're Transfiguring?
Maybe Tazers! They'd work against some shields, are quite tricky to make, and if you want lots of them they're easier to buy. Other things: encrypted radios, Kevlar armour (to avoid Finite Incantem). Most things that can be bought for 5K could have been bought in Britain in the early 90s, apart from that sort of paramilitary gear. Guns are unlikely because the twins would have heard of them.
Consensus on /r/HPMOR was that Harry would have specified a type of gun and its ammo, since if he just said "guns" the twins would probably have brought muskets.
Where would they even get muskets today? In a museum?
My opinion too. Guns capable of killing a troll or being highly effective against powerful wizards would break the budget AND be hard to obtain (Anti-material rifle for the former, which Harry probably cannot fire, and submachine gun for the latter), but there are other possibilities. Early in the fic Muggle rocket launchers are mentioned. I think that in the Third World, an RPG with a few rockets may go for under $1000.
The twins just scanned the list, and the twins probably wouldn't have recognized, say '9mm automatic pistol' even if they know what guns are.
I don't think that Tasers were really a thing until 1994, which saw the first version that didn't use gunpowder as a propellant (and hence was not legally a firearm). Harry could still have heard of them by good luck, of course.
He transfigured a taser for his fight against Moody.
OK, thanks.
Transfigure the containment device first. Then find a way to transfigure the antimatter inside it. To solve the wand contact problem, transfigure the empty container into a full container. Then his wand is in contact with the container, but the container doesn't actually change.
Granted, it's extremely dangerous, especially when practicing.
Yes, there is the problem that no-one knows what containment for macroscopic amounts of antimatter looks like. We have some ideas, but nothing that would be safe for Harry to try.
What? Harry doesn't want a gun because his magic is weak? In canon, guns are moderately effective against wizards. Carrying a pistol or a submachine gun around is the most blatantly obvious force multiplier, especially given that any other spell Harry can cast has at least a half-second casting time AND a two second cooldown.
Guns would be useful against opponents who 1) were not prepared to face them (as the troll was prepared to face specific threats like sunshine), 2) were not adult wizards with shields raised. So yes, that leaves some options against which a gun in the bag of holding would be useful. (Harry will need to practice firing it though.) You're right, I'll update my comment accordingly.
Where are guns in Canon please?
The only mention of guns in canon that I can recall is at the start of Prisoner of Azkaban, where the muggle side of the Sirius Black scare mentions him as armed and dangerous, and the Daily Prophet agrees that muggles are saying he has a gun, which they describe as being something like a muggle wand that they can use to attack one another.
I assume that a great many wizarding children went on to imagine the muggle world as some very interesting variant on the stereotypical Wild West, where "boomstick" was probably a better description of a shotgun than usual.
It's pretty standard fanon that magic interferes badly with electronics. (Canon is similar but less specific.)
Which bugs me. I want to see glorious contraptions based off physics real and fake alike. Too many people try to replicate Tolkein's bucolic countryside scenes with their fantasy universes.
Transfigure a critical mass of uranium, ok. Transfigure several subcritical masses with a working trigger? Much more difficult. Since, as far as I can tell, you have to be within visual range of the thing you are Transfiguring, this would be a bit of a last-ditch option. At least with war gases you could work on the contents of a bottle, or something.
If he can make a model rocket, he can make a uranium gun design. It's one slightly sub-critical mass of uranium with a suitable hole for the second piece, which is shaped like a bullet and fired at it using a single unsynchronised electronic trigger down a barrel long enough to get up a decent speed. Edit: And then he or a friendly 7th year casts a charm of flawless function on it.
That was a lot more than a model rocket.... probably weighed at least 5kg. Also, the fact that either he OR Quirrel could make a working large rocket engine without knowing the exact composition of propellant, precise geometry of nozzle, etc indicates that Transfiguration can work at a really high level of abstraction. He probably would have no trouble at all transfiguring a nuclear weapon with a mechanical timer trigger.
well of course, can't you transfigure animals?
Actually, yeah, you can. I think.
http://hpmor.com/chapter/15
My guess is computer hardware and a source of electricity, so he can finally get started on one of those big projects to gain large amounts of personal power / resources.
The economy-disrupting arbitrage scheme was introduced as early as chapter 4. Lots of money would have helped Harry in pretty much every arc. He could think of many, many other schemes to help him finally start world optimisation in earnest. But he never did that. In story logic, he never got round to doing it due to interference from all sides. In writing logic, this can only happen in the final arc because otherwise, the story will be known as "Harry Potter gets really rich" and cease to be about the methods of rationality anymore.
That doesn't necessarily point to computer hardware, but chapter 87 mentions them as a powerful tool that wizards lack ("If there's a money-making method in this book that sounds difficult for a wizard, but it's easy if we can use Dad's old Mac Plus, then we'd have a plan.") and I have a hard time thinking about world optimisation plans that wouldn't benefit from at least some sensible organisation of data, scheduling and on-the-fly printing.
This would have the inconvenience of requiring an undefended secondary base, perhaps in Hogsmeade or London - Muggle technology doesn't work in Hogwarts, and Harry can't Apparate, so he would have to keep travelling back and forth to wherever he kept his computer whenever he wanted to use it.
Harrys mechanical clock works, so set up a typewriter as input, a seismograph as output and ropes as wire to remote-control a computer.
I doubt Harry has read many RFCs, but IP over avian carrier had been around for just over two years at this point in the story.
And the acid from the previous chapter.
Jugson refused to support Malfoy, if I recall.
This also has the advantage of being cheap in bulk, since it has so many industrial uses. Current prices are under $400/ton.
I don't see a particular advantage to those things. Quirrel doesn't fear a single nuclear weapon -- Voldemort can survive such a thing -- he fears nuclear annihilation or MAD, which is a separate matter and not much overlapped with an individual bomb. Muggle weapons are useful and a matter that might require someone to go outside of the country to get... but even a firearm requires training that Harry doesn't have, and can not kill a Dementor or a Troll. Where firearms could threaten the average unaware Wizard, we've seen that most major players are aware of firearms (including McGonagall, Dumbledore, and Snape, see chapter 61), and thus it would not likely fall under things that a Muggle Expert's sons would not recognize.
And the set of things that Rationalist!Harry knows can resurrect someone is very, very small, and not much overlapped with the Muggle world. Most rituals and potions require ingredients that already have significant magical power.
The "things that Fred and George can't recognize" is an interesting set. Canon!ArthurWeasley isn't very knowledgeable, but he at least had an interesting in electrical power, heavy-than-air non-magical flight, and chemical fueled engines. I think we can expect him to be of similar intelligence or smarter in MoR. It's possible that he's better at hiding his interest in Muggle technology or that Rationalist!Harry intentionally wrote non-standard descriptions for the items, but that seems unlikely. ((We're also taking 1990-ish tech, so some 'obvious' stuff from today either didn't exist or would exceed his budget.))
The first thought is dry ice, and the tools necessary to maintain it. Rationalist!Harry has broken several rules of transfiguration, including "don't burn anything", but the ability to transfigure CO2 is probably the easiest way to 'safely' violate that rule, not terribly expensive, but not within his normal abilities to easily produce otherwise.
I don't think so, per chapter 61:
It seems pretty clear from chapter 61 that MOR!ArthurWeasley knows precious little about the muggle world.
On a side note, I'd like to see the spell-research attempts at preventing "opposite reaction" from working.
I mean, I'm sure they'll get it eventually, but they're going to get some rather hilarious results in the meantime...
So would I, and I wouldn't mind writing some, but posting such snippets here has been previously discouraged.
Hmm.. I guess this is what ff.net is for, at that. I'll send you a link if I end up writing it.
I'd like to see it to, and probably so would many reading this.
When it comes to wizards who lack recent Muggle ancestry, Arthur may well be the most knowledgeable expert regarding these matters. Considering the racism of even well-meaning wizards, this likely gives Arthur a certain degree of clout in certain circles.
Detonating a single nuclear bomb in Washington or Russia would have triggered nuclear attacks in 1993 where the events of this story take place.
The story is currently in April 1992.
I'm thinking sulfuric acid?
Don't forget Space Stuff.
I'd assumed it would be a variety of muggle items that were generally useful but hard to get, rather than preparations for any one specific thing. My "mental image" was basically a chemistry set, since Harry probably knows some tricks that require specific chemicals that you can't get at a normal shop because most people don't want them.
That wouldn't require going outside Britain, though. Something illegal or highly controlled, like Izeinwinter's suggestion of LSD, or the weapons a lot of other people are suggesting. I don't /think/ Harry would go for warheads, but guns maybe.
I was thinking it could be something for cryonics.
Eliezer has mentioned elseforum that Harry hasn't heard of cryonics.
(I'm assuming this qualifies as a public statement.)
The uber genius science wiz kid who wants to live forever, whose father is an eminent professor of biochemistry at Oxford, hasn't heard of cryonics?
I would guess >90% of whiz kids haven't.
Surely you mean ‘hadn't’ here?
And yet, 8 years later, Matt Groening and David Cohen could assume that fans of The Simpsons would know what it is as a matter of course; the pilot episode of Futurama offers no explanation beyond the word ‘cryogenics’, an icy cartoon effect, and a dial with a timer on it. You could blame that on the Internet, but that's for popular culture to learn that a sci-fi genius didn't know.
On the other hand, I could easily believe that Harry has only heard of this in a way that makes it sound like nonsense, and he never followed it up. Its absence doesn't detract from the story for me.
Er, Fry was alive when he got frozen. I hadn't heard about the idea of cryopreserving legally dead people in hope that not-yet-available technology to revive them will be invented until years later than I watched that Futurama episode. (Then again, I read way less sci fi than HJPEV.)
I've seen Futurama mentioned negatively as having introduced cryonics to a lot of people in a ridiculous light, and Groening's Simpsons has always indulged in a lot of very obscure references (read the Simpsons Archive's annotated scripts for an episode and note how many you did not notice on a single watch), so merely appearing on his shows doesn't necessarily mean a lot - especially since Futurama goes to considerable lengths to make the cryonics completely understandable to people with zero idea about it, with Fry falling into a glassy supermarket-style freezer*, being flash-frozen (not vitrified), and then a long timelapse montage explaining visually the lapse of time. The concept comes through clear as a bell to anyone who has ever used a freezer, which in the USA is pretty much everyone.
* note, by the way, how they went with a common piece of technology used in every supermarket for many decades, which looks completely different from every dewar ever used by actual cryonics organizations.
If Futurama really introduced it to many people, then I'm wrong. I always thought that Groening & Cohen expected the viewers to already know about it, but that doesn't mean much, since I already knew about it (even though only as a crackpot idea yet).
It's hard to prove that people were ignorant, of course, but I think it did bring cryonics up to a lot of people who didn't know about it. (If nothing else, all the kids and teens watching it - the younger you are, the less time you've had to run into the idea.) Some links:
I'm kind of surprised by how few books have mentioned Futurama in recent years. (Then again, ISTR that Google Ngram Viewer sampled pre-2000 books and post-2000 books in different ways.)
Well before Futurama, there was a Woody Allen movie called Sleeper with a similar premise. It seems to be a pretty common way to do the Rip Van Winkle scenario.
And before that was the British TV series of 1966-67, Adam Adamant. And before that, Heinlein's The Door into Summer, which Harry has surely read, takes cold sleep back to 1957. So the concept is available to him, and with his mind, he can take it seriously even if no-one else has yet.
Let's even grant that.
How about factoring in "plans to live forever through science"? That's probably the most relevant prior information.
Estimate P(never heard of cryonics | read tons of science and scifi books and researches interests and plans on living forever through science). Isn't that basically Harry before magic came along? He somehow missed mention of cryonics when he looked into means to live forever?
I missed it completely and was doing much the same thing at that age. I actually ran right over cryonics - it showed up in Artemis Fowl and my absurdity heuristic/Colfer's tone tossed it aside.
Space Seed? Several 1970s sci-fi novels feature it.
2001: A Space Odyssey comes close, as does Planet of the Apes. Alien, too (though I wouldn't expect him to have seen that)
HP is set in 1991, so we're too early for Babylon 5 ("The Long Dark") or especially Futurama.
You might have dismissed it, but I doubt he would have. Maaybe if his father dismissed it as rubbish.
KHAAAAAAAANNN!
How could a nerd not know that?
Harry's also interested in space travel and a human diaspora. Cryogenic hibernation is the standard way to travel to other planets, barring warp drive.
Yeah, but to be fair, usually in those stories they're sending live people.
Well, your Harry has heard of "nanotechnology a la Eric Drexler" (Chapter 28), so I find it very surprising that he wouldn't also be aware of Drexler's views on cryonics. Engines of Creation was published in 1986... I would have expected Harry to have read the whole book.
That he would fall into that category seems doubtful given that he's been exposed to so much science fiction though. Cryonics is a staple of scifi, so it shouldn't take him that much thinking to see how plausible it could be or to note that people have actually tried it.
As someone who read Ender's Game at the age of 11, and consequently a lot more sci-fi since then, It took Eliezer's "You Only Live Twice" post six years later to properly elevate my knowledge of cryonics to actual conscious awareness. It took an actual proponent of the procedure telling me about it and that people are actually doing it in real life for me to notice it as a useful idea.
And the only thing I needed for convincing was the feasibility of the science, not any moral qualms about the implications of it all. I was (and still am) in the same mind-set concerning life extension and widespread immortality as Harry, and a single afternoon reading about the procedure had me basically convinced.
So no, I don't really think it's incredibly unlikely that Harry hasn't properly heard about cryonics as used in the manor he needs. Of course, I'm but a single data point. How many smart kids have you met that are or aren't knowledgable about existing cryonic procedures?
I remember reading a cartoon as a kid about cryonics which portrayed it cynically if I remember correctly. I didn't realize it was actually a thing people did, but I remember thinking "This sounds like something I would want to do in real life. There has to be some reason it wouldn't work though, because I'm hearing about it in a cartoon and not in real life."
SF readers don't know either.
What if we narrow it down to "Niven readers"? "Corpsicles" feature in a Niven-verse novel and a novella from the 70s, and Harry makes an offhand reference to Niven-verse Puppeteers in HPMOR chapter 9. Harry might not know about Alcor but he should at least be aware of the general idea.
This claim is surprising. The Psychomech trilogy (published in the mid 1980s) involves deliberate cryonic preservation of multiple characters in the hope that when one of them becomes a functional god he'll be able to resurrect them. In that case, one of the characters who is preserved is the love-interest of the protagonist. And the later books in that series imagine a world in a not too distant future where cryonics is extremely common. Lem's "Fiasco" deals with medical cryonics and is also from the 1980s. Pohl's "The Age of Pussyfoot" also has explicit medical cryonics, albeit with a somewhat reactionary message.
Ettinger himself was inspired to think about cryonics as a practical thing from the short story "The Jameson Satellite" (admittedly fairly obscure).
As a matter of pure anecdote, I had encountered the idea in multiple contexts when I was about Harry's age, and Harry if anything has been exposed to more scifi than I had at that age.
On the other hand, I'd never heard of Psychomech, and I thought I knew sf from that era fairly well. Perhaps the book is better known in the UK.
Does your theory have anything more to say than "the internet has changed things" to explain why I knew about cryonics at Harry's age?
Harry is very, very likely to have come across the concept of cold sleep. That is not cryonics. Cryonics is the idea of freezing the dead in the hope of fixing the problem later with better tech, even if you do not even know how to revive the frozen at the time. As a serious idea, it is new and fringy, as fiction.. It does come up, but not very often - even people wishing to throw a character into the future usually handwave a stasis field.
Sure. That still doesn't answer the question of who does hear about it. We could just say that 1% of people who read SF have heard about it, but then my experience is hard to explain - I hadn't read all that much SF by age 11. It seems quite reasonable to say that the 10 years that the Internet existed between me and Harry was decisive, but I'm asking what variables explain the difference between two SF readers, only one of whom has heard of cryonics.
...not especially? I heard about when I read "Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition", memory says at age 11 but the book's publication date might imply I should have been 12. "The Internet has changed things" - yes it did.
It's important to remember that we're talking 1991, rather than present day. While there are a number of older works featuring cryonics, they tend to include themes you probably don't want to expose a ten-year-old to (Heinlein's Door Into Summer) or are soft science fiction or outright fantasy (Star Wars, Captain America), or use a generic stasis instead of cryogenics (Aliens). Harder popular fiction versions like Futurama, Bujold's Mirror Dance, and Cowboy Bebop wouldn't come out for a few years.
There were older hard fiction pieces that mention it -- Niven, at least -- but it's fairly recent for the concept to be an automatic assumption for near-future or even far-future works. If Rationalist!Harry read and remembered everything, he'd have to be aware of it, but honestly he's got a bit too wide of a knowledge base to be reasonable as it is.
what about from science fiction? star trek: TOS. kirk meets kahn. kahn has been on ice. many other star trek episodes. see also nancy's comment.
Having a futuristic, nonexistent technology which can reliably, reversibly, demonstrably execute suspended animation, is not the same as the realization that mere modern-day liquid nitrogen works to preserve brain state right now and future tech can grab it later.
Or have only briefly heard of it as something for the rich akin to Lenin's tomb.
I thought he'd read a fair amount of science fiction. Shouldn't he have heard of it there?
Second thought: I have a vague impression that there used to be more cryonics in science fiction from before 1975 or so. If I'm right (and I'm not at all sure that I am), would that affect what Harry would be likely to know?
I also find it unlikely Harry hadn't heard of cryonics. I mean, I'm born in 1981 almost like Harry, and when I was Harry's age, I definitely had heard of it, like I had heard of robots, or long-distance space travel, or life expansion, or robotic prosthesis, as a scifi device. I had seen 2001 and Star Wars. And I did think at that time "oh, it's something cool we'll have in the future". Sure, I didn't know it was something actually existing in the real world. But while I wasn't a dumb kid, I wasn't the supergenius Harry is, and I didn't even think defeating death was something possible.
So, yes, I would say it's unlikely for Harry not knowing about cryonics. But... not "1 chance in 1000" unlikely, more like "1 chance in 10" unlikely. And if you have 10 "one chance in ten unlikely" things, well, statistically one will actually happen. And it's fully within the author's "rights" to say "well, among those ten things there is only one chance in 10 Harry doesn't know about, it's cryonics he doesn't know about".
So while it's unlikely that Harry didn't hear about cryonics, it's not unlikely enough to really sound artificial. Harry knows a lot, not all, and cryonics is where he fails, ok, fine.
He could still be inventing it (sort of already did.)
If Harry can figure out how to reverse a Time-Turner and send Hermione's body into the future, he doesn't need cryonics. And there's no worry about paradoxes, so possibly the six-hour limit wouldn't apply.
I don't think paradoxes have much to do with it, but it's a limit of six hours into the past. Since negative a thousand is less than six, sending her a thousand hours in the future doesn't violate the six-hour limit.
It seems hard to believe that Harry managed to reverse engineer it in six hours with no special equipment.
A nuclear device was the first thing I thought of as well, but I'd expect obtaining the parts to be prohibitively difficult for any plausible contacts. Stealing a finished warhead would probably be easier. But it's not that much easier, and either way I can't think of any plausible motive: the wizarding world and the Muggle world are so intertwined that MAD is quite problematic. Nor are there many plausible targets; the wizarding population is so spread out that a single warhead couldn't do much that couldn't be done far more easily, less disruptively, and with less collateral damage using a truck full of ANFO or something. Azkaban may be one; I can't think of any others.
On the other hand, Muggle weapons or controlled substances of some kind (perhaps dangerous chemicals?) seem quite likely. Britain's a wealthy first-world country with plenty of international trade going on; if you've got enough money on hand, about the only reason you'd need to leave the country to get something is if it's not legally for sale.
That would kill the prisoners and the guards, and would not destroy the Dementors.
...a last ditch effort to at least make their deaths quick, while opening up a window to hit the dementors with a point-blank patronus 2.0 without worrying about the guards? Not that I think it very likely, mind you. harry may be broadening his options somewhat, but he has a ways to go before he's quite THAT desperate.
At this point I don't think Harry would consider the guards protected by his ethics, and I'm not sure about the prisoners. The Dementors are indeed a problem.
I don't actually consider this a good option, though, just less bad than all the other targets in magical Britain.
If you kill the prisoners, and you don't harm the Dementors, what's the point of attacking at all? The idea is to rescue the prisoners and destroy the prison, and the prison is just the Dementors - a non-magical building is easy to replace.
It's not a non-magical building; it has several protective wards, such as the time-loop prohibition. But otherwise, I agree with you.
Plastic explosive.
Actually, thermite.