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kilobug comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 28, chapter 99-101 - Less Wrong
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I know Harry is just a kid, but his reaction towards unicorns don't seem very rational to me. Remember, Harry became vegetarian for a while when he was afraid animals could be sentient. And now, he speaks about massively killing unicorns, magical creatures whose sentient status isn't very clear (like with phoenix), for a "temporary" stop of death at a cost of "permanent side-effects", without inquiring how temporary temporary is, what are those side-effects, and how sentient unicorns are. Without measuring those three parameters, there is no way to know if utility(killing unicorns in St Mungo) is positive or negative.
He's only brainstorming now, not actually rounding up unicorns or even in a position to do so. That said, I would have expected him to go into more depth about the possible downsides, to be in character.
I think it's less that Harry is a kid right now and more that he's specifically extra-freaked out than usual by perma-death at the time. Plus the Quirrel Distortion Field is keeping him from ever seriously considering anything Quirrel does as really evil.
Except for its attraction to innocence, there's no particular reason to think that the unicorn is more sentient than a horse, is there? Did I miss something important in the story?
I don't think there's any particular evidence in the story which bears on the intelligence of unicorns, save for the fact that some non humanoid magical creatures such as acromantulas are much smarter than their mundane kin. This alone should be sufficient to raise it to the point of being worthy of consideration.
Here's another possibility which Harry failed to consider; the side effects of drinking unicorn blood may in fact be worse than death, not for the individual, but for society, if it does something like permanently compromising the recipient's morality. Quirrell is already amoral enough not to care, but if Hermione had been saved with unicorn blood, she might have come out like Demented Harry.
It might not be the sort of thing which is obviously likely enough to be worthy of consideration in his position, but the way Dumbledore described in in the original canon, I think suggests it as a distinct possibility.
I would say that "living a cursed half-life" sounds more detrimental to the individual than to wider society. And in general, the limited discourse we hear ("you have slain something innocent to save yourself") sounds more like that of punishment than corruption to me.
I always interpreted it as more of a corruption effect; a cursed half-life sounds to me like something where you lack various things that people consider important elements of being alive, perhaps things like taste and touch, perhaps also things like empathy.
So did I, in canon, I imagined unicorn-blood-drinking to be somewhat like horcrux, ripping you of the ability to love, feel empathy, ... and that's what Dumbledore and others consider "half life". It's an hypothesis that is worth probing before just saying "oh let's farm unicorns".
Makes you wonder if anyone has ever tried to research magics that restored someone's empathy etc., or gave it to people born without. Somehow, I doubt it.
It's likely observation bias, but the whole of the wizarding society seems to lack empathy; I join you in doubting that much research on the subject has been done.
I don't think you did and neither was there anything in canon about this. Unicorns are about as sentient as any other magical animal. The taboo of killing unicorns stems from the bad effects it has, rather than the sentience of the creatures.
Well, the point is that "magical animals" have very varrying degrees of sentience - some, like acromantula are fully sentient, some like phoenix are half-sentient, the status of unicorn can't be established without some inquiry.
That's true, but unicorns are immortal, and they have to be killed in order to give a human a few more years of life. Presumably some number of horse-years are worth a human-year; horses aren't quite so negligibly intelligent that the life-value of infinite horse-years converges to zero.
perhaps, but the unicorns don't actually have infinite life-spans.
Well yes, because people keep vamping on them.
Well, the magical world is full of sentient or half-sentient things, from house elves to phoenix. The hypothesis that unicorns are half-sentient like a phoenix can't be excluded a priori, it's something a rationalist should inquire before taking any decision. And the scope and nature of side-effects should be inquired. Harry doesn't even do the simplest inquiry, asking Quirrel about it, but jumps to conclusion with incomplete data, doesn't sound like him at all.
He does at least know that "temporary" is long enough and the side effects are small enough for Quirrel to consider it worthwhile.
He also knows that Quirrell is totally amoral: Quirrell himself admits that he does not comprehend the thing that people call morality.
Thus, he knows that Quirrell considering something worthwhile is only evidence about that thing's utility to Quirrell, not its moral validity.
I'm not generally in the habit of calling out typos, but that particular one is probably worth fixing. I think Quirrell understands mortality rather well.
True, very true. Edited.
Harry has dropped the Batman code. Life is full of trade offs.
Being alive and sentient trumps side effects and consuming animals, magical or otherwise.
Not if those animals themselves are (note that sentience is not really the relevant quality here, that should actually apply to most animals above a certain level of complexity) also sapient.
Considering that other magical creatures such as centaurs, goblins and house elves are known to be sapient, and animals not normally considered so, such as snakes, may become so due to magic, the prospect is certainly worth considering.
It's weird that you're assuming Harry doesn't know that unicorns aren't sentient. You don't know that, but Harry has already researched the known intelligent magical creatures, and he could easily know that unicorns are just magical horses that are pretty.
Harry isn't even a vegetarian, of course he would be OK with someone killing unicorns to survive.
That's a good point (that Harry might well already know). Then I blame the author for not telling us; this should have come out in an earlier chapter where Harry was reading about unicorns, just so that the readers don't end up distracted from the story by a non-issue.
There was a chapter in which Harry does research to determine which animals are known to be intelligent. I don't remember if unicorns were specifically mentioned, but I think we should assume Harry already knows they are non-sentient by his lack of concern.
(I guess that the new, colder Harry might actually think Quirrell's life is even more valuable than some number of intelligent unicorns--because Quirrell has a lot of extremely valuable knowledge that Harry believes might save many lives some day. But I really don't think this is what Eliezer is going for here.)
Can anybody find this for me? I'm not having luck.
animal intelligence research site:hpmor.com; first hit: http://hpmor.com/chapter/49which is not explained in the chapter, so one looks back to http://hpmor.com/chapter/48 and http://hpmor.com/chapter/47 for the full context of Harry freaking out about talking to snakes and being carnivorous.
Something else not explained there is the namecheck to Paul Breedlove's "Speak and Spell". I suspect the Lady of Flying Squirrels also means something but I don't know what, although the French version of Speak and Spell was called La Dictée Magique, and one of its modules was Les Animaux Familiers.
Just Eliezer throwing in more allusions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squirrel_Girl / http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/ComicBook/SquirrelGirl (this was identified in the discussions for those chapters, and Squirrel Girl actually appeared before in the Ultimate Meta Mega Crossover IIRC).
Thanks, I stopped looking too soon!
This is true. However, in his defence, I will say that he has no real idea of whether unicorns are sentient or not, and although it was remiss of him to assume they are not, under the assumption that they are not sentient it is a good plan.
Yes, though. It is out of character for Harry, who has in the past done things like become vegetarian when he though that there was the slightest possibility that animals could be sentient. He was still in shock, sure, but the Harry that we know should have known to ask.
What leads people to even suspect that unicorns are sentient?
Sentient is not a binary thing, but a more fuzzy ones. The sentience of apes or newborn for example is hard to quantify in a binary way.
Many magical creatures have a higher level of sentience than mere animals. Some are fully sentient like centaurs or acromentulas, some are half sentient like phoenix. Even magical owls or cats tend to be more sentient than their mundane counter-parts.
So it really seems from 1. and 2. that the level of sentience of unicorns has to be carefully evaluated, to be able to figure out if the harm done to them would be worth a "temporary cursed" life, it depends of the values of the three parameters : how sentient they are, how "temporary" it is and how "cursed" it is.