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polymathwannabe comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102 - Less Wrong
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I don't know where else to post this, but I've been entertaining a hypothesis about HPMOR's version of magic. Has anyone already made the connection between magic and Outcome Pumps? During the first chapters in Hogwarts, Harry talks a lot about expectations, and about magic being able to match them, and it ocurred to me that HPMOR's magic was a mechanism to force your universe to branch into one that matches your expectation. Then I read somewhere, in old threads, that EY was at one point in the past planning to write a story about a device to "squeeze the future," and I realized that HPMOR was it. Your wand is the device that squeezes the future and ensures you end up in the world you expected. Has this been discussed already?
If this is the case, I imagine that the story will be darn-near not understandable towards the end, when Harry finds this out.
I mean, what do you expect to happen when you expect reality to fit your expectations? When the territory starts to match to the map?!
Edit: a Added the words 'you expect' and changed nearby words to be grammatically appropriate.
Well, if the "expects" operator starts acting like a "proves" operator, that sounds like Lob's theorem.
I've been writing a story based on this premise. Spoiler: crazy shit happens.
Sounds like the ending of Anathem.
It also reminds me of Friedman's Coldfire books.
The first experiments Harry did, where he told Hermione what the spells did but gave her wrong pronunciations, tested for this theory. If your idea is correct, the spells should have worked anyway. But they didn't.
If Harry did not expect them to work, that might have been enough to make them not work. Was this study double blind?
e.g. Harry should have written down two pronunciations, left the room, and let Hermione randomly choose and cast one.
Harry totally expected them to work. The idea that the universe should actually care about the way you pronounce oogely-boogely is absurd. He planned out a nice long series of experiments, and then had to scrap them after the first one falsified his theory.
I don't think that setup completely removes expectations. There nothing you can do to get rid of expecations if you live in a magical world where they have direct effects.