HPMOR is making me rethink human nature -- because of how people react to it. This is a story full of cunning disguises, and readers seem reluctant to see past those disguises. RL rkcerffrq chmmyrzrag ng ubj many readers took forever to decide Quirrell = Voldemort; I think I now know why.
I suggest that humans are instinctive "observation consequentialists." That is, we think someone is competent and good if the observed results of their actions are benign. We weigh what we observe much more strongly than what we merely deduce. If we personally see their actions work out well, we'll put aside a great deal of indirect evidence for their incompetence or vileness.
In HPMOR, Quirrell's directly observed actions are mostly associated with Harry getting to be more of what he thinks he wants. Even rescuing Bellatrix amounts to Harry getting to save a broken lovelorn creature in terms of what we directly observe. To believe Quirrell evil we have to bring in all kinds of expected consequences to weigh against those immediate positive observations.
Does the resistance to saying Quirrell=Voldemort maybe reflect a broader unwillingness to overlook what we directly witness in favor of ab...
Additionally, abusive relationships persist because the victim just can't help but forgive the abuser when the abuser is choosing to be nice. It can be hard to even believe your own memories of abuse when the abuser is smiling at you and giving you compliments.
I try to recall Quirrell murdering Rita Skeeter in cold blood every time I catch myself feeling like he's the good guy in the story.
I don't think anyone failed to see the signs that Quirrel is Voldemort in HPMOR. There are just those of us who believed it to be a Red Herring, because "that's how stories are supposed to work." If a potential solution to a mystery seems very obviously true in the first quarter of the story, then in most stories it's probably not the true solution. . Of course, at this point there's just no denying it.
I think the reason I was reluctant to accept that Quirrell is Voldemort is that Harry is a lot smarter than me and he trusted Quirrell.
That's actually a surprisingly good reason. In real life, the best rationalist you know is probably not a character in a story and feeling a sense of opposing pressure when you disagree with them is probably a pretty good idea.
Could you explain what you mean by this? I'm having trouble parsing "update down your view of".
Aumann's Agreement theorem is a neat true result about fictional entities. Its applicability to real entities is subjective, and based on how close you think the real entities are to the fictional entities. Increasing that distance makes AAT less relevant to how you live your life, and increasing that distance is what I mean by "update down your view of."
My feeling is that those entities are really distant, to the point where AAT should not seriously alter your beliefs. "I trusted X because Y trusted X" is a recipe for disaster if you trust Y because of different domain-specific competence, rather than their deep knowledge of X.
To be honest, I'm not even sure if Voldemort is Voldemort, in the sense of being the man behind the proverbial curtain here. Everything about him from the name up screams "assumed persona": he's far more theatrical a figure than a blood-purist demagogue would need to be, and some aspects of what he does even look counterproductive in that context. And while the canon Tom Riddle did all the same stuff and all for no particularly good reason, in the context of MoR I think we can assume that there's an agenda behind it.
I don't know for sure what that agenda is yet, but a good first step seems to be this question: why would you want to pose as a supervillain? As it happens, Eliezer has touched on that before.
Is it me, or does Harry's solution to this dilemma seem rather... half-assed? Ignoring potential the loss of effectiveness from his resolving to suddenly switch directions the first time things get bad, is he really going to know the first time someone dies as a result of his war? How will he know the difference? He's already gotten someone killed by his actions (Rita Skeeter, who he doesn't even know about) and another person gravely injured (that auror hurt by the rocket, who he doesn't know about but admittedly he thought the whole affair was a mistake afterward anyways). How about opportunity costs, the fact that if you handed me 100000 galleons demanding I save at least 10 lives with it I could hand you back 99000 in change. And that's before the "war" even "started"; hostilities are going to get more open and more direct from here. It's madness to think you can finish war, even a weird semi-geurella war like this, with zero casualties, or that you'll know about every one.
With the condition he gave himself anyone should be able to see that "failure" is a foregone conclusion. And there's very good odds he's not going to learn that what he's doing isn't working until he's racked up a far worse bodycount than one.
He's already gotten someone killed by his actions (Rita Skeeter, who he doesn't even know about)
Not for any realistic sense of the phrase 'by his actions'. Quirrel squished Rita of his own accord for his own purposes and Harry's presence there is damn near irrelevant.
Morally he didn't do it, and maybe Quirrel even had a desire to kill her sitting on a back burner before Harry got involved, but her death was caused by her interaction with Harry. It is no stretch to say that there is at least one hypothetical sequence of actions Harry could have taken, even given knowledge at the time (not realizing she worked for Lucius or was an animagus) which would not have resulted in her death. Heck, doing nothing would have resulted in her not death.
That is the level of challenge Harry is taking upon himself. Not just to not kill anyone, not just to keep your hands clean, not just to save people when he can. He's declaring that if any innocent person anywhere dies and there's something he could have done differently to save them, that's his failure condition. You can't do that.
That said, I thought about it a few minutes more and it could be his resolution is really about knowing he doesn't know how bad the situation is. It's certainly possible to get through, say, a political power struggle with someone like Lord Malfoy without anyone getting killed. Harry considers it possible but doesn't yet believe that his opponent is Voldemort. If his opponent is Voldemort avoiding casualties is impossible. If his opponent is someone less evil (though still pretty nasty), and the scope of the conflict is much smaller, he might be able to pull it off.
but a single nameless innocent bystander who catches a Cutting Curse
It seems that he promised himself to stop trying to save everyone even if a minor character dies accidentally. In that case it wouldn't matter if he considered himself directly responsible for the death of Rita Skeeter.
You can't do that.
Indeed. I don't see how he could manage not to compromise his 'every human life is precious' principle in a war. He's hesitating between two possible courses of action -- doing the math or playing Ghandi -- and neither seems like a satisfying choice. He really needs to become omnipotent or at least avoid the necessity of making such a choice.
Quirrel squished Rita of his own accord for his own purposes and Harry's presence there is damn near irrelevant.
Kinda-sort of.
Harry inadvertently gave Fred&George the idea of making up rumours about Quirrel (by telling them he doesn't like rumours, and asking them to leave Quirrel out of it). Which Rita Skeeter published.
And the prank he actually commissioned gave Quirrel a plausible explanation for Rita Skeeter's disappearance.
Morally Harry is not really responsible IMO. But causally, eh... her death would have probably not have happened if he hadn't talked to the Weasley twins about her.
Morally he still deliberately fucked her, regardless of whether he thought it would cause her death.
Different language would be more appropriate to the context. Not because I have qualms with foul language, but because I actually got the impression that we were considering rape-ethics or philosophy in magic-mediated edge cases till I followed the link.
Okay, after thinking a few minutes about the Batman-Joker/where do you put Dark Wizards if you're determined not to use Dementors anymore problem...
Unbreakable Vow anyone? Just give Dark Wizards the option "either you take an Unbreakable Vow to never knowingly kill/torture/Imperio a human being ever again, nor to ever knowingly assist in such, or we just execute you right now".
I can think up of possible ways out of this meta-problem, in order to sustain the dilemma: Perhaps really powerful Dark Wizards require too vast a portion of magical power to sustain the vow. Perhaps there are dark rituals whereby using them, Dark Wizards can break out of even an (ill-named) Unbreakable Vow. Perhaps Dark Wizards tend to have made other rituals that already make them immune to Unbreakable Vows... Perhaps unbreakable vows need be really really specific in some weird manner like "I will not kill Bill Weasley", and "I will not kill Charlie Weasley" necessarily are two separate vows, so that "I will not kill any human" isn't enforceable...
But these are additional problems that are not yet mentioned/listed/foreshadowed in the story. Ugh, Unbreakable Vows seem something of a game breaker right now.
Sidenote: Whenever I think of something such, I worry that the author will think he'll have to rewrite/revise everything he had already planned, and that we'll never get an update again. Not my intention, I swear.
Unbreakable Vows are ridiculously broken, as Harry briefly observes in Ch. 74. They're even more ridiculous in fanfictions where people can just grab a wand and swear something on their life and magic and thereby create a magically binding vow. I had to nerf the hell out of their activation costs just to make the MoR-verse keep running. I can't depict a society with zero agency problems, a perfect public commitment process and an infinite trust engine unless the whole story is about that.
Frankly, we don't know enough about why Merlin did what he did to judge his action either way -- we don't know what danger was being foreseen, we don't know the limitations of his own powers. There's really no sense in criticizing him or praising him at this point of time - we lack crucial information.
Back up one step further: what evidence do we have that the Interdict actually exists? As opposed to, say, all powerful wizards simply having the same inclination toward secrecy and self-discovery. How did Quirrell put it...
The fools who can't resist meddling are killed by the lesser perils early on, and the survivors all know that there are secrets you do not share with anyone who lacks the intelligence and the discipline to discover them for themselves! Every powerful wizard knows that!
I've never received the impression that wizards powerful enough to be subject to the Interdict have actually tried to circumvent it. If all known examples of written instructions for powerful spells were gibberish to begin with, would the world look any different? Not to mention, why would it be necessary to cast a huge mind-altering spell to make people do what they were inclined to do anyway?
You could just strip their magic.
If there exists any ritual that happens to permanently remove a portion of somebody's magic (Unbreakable Vow), then you could just repeat that ritual meaninglessly until that person was completely stripped of magic permanently. Or you could use other rituals which require similar permanent sacrifices until you achieve the same effect. Keeping a permanently magicless wizard imprisoned is a trivial task, and obviates the need for dementors.
Side Note: That's actually my pet theory on why Dementors as prison guards are acceptable to the public. It could be that governments used to use rituals to permanently strip prisoners of magic before imprisoning them. This would make them a revenue center instead of a funds sink. This would naturally encourage the magical government to find more and more excuses to imprison people, similar to how the 'tough on crime' cycle is accelerated by the for-profit prison systems in some places. A police state would be soon to follow. Then, after a cultural revolution, Dementors were adopted as the less evil option to house criminals. It also helps explain why so many rituals are banned. It's unlikely to be true in HPMoR, but it'd be a nice thought for another fanfic.
Another problem with this system is the permanence. People get sent to Azkaban for less than lifetime sentences, but if you use this to strip someone of magic it's gone forever. I suppose you could use degrees of magic removal as punishment but that seems hard to balance to different powerlevels of wizard.
I've been reading about muggle prison conditions lately, and while I've understood that "prison conditions are terrible and torturing people is pointless etc" for both systems, it did not occur to me that you were making a commentary.
So the (physical) conditions of the facility may be almost beside the point (despite the fact that this is what it is most socially acceptable to focus on).
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that massive institutionalized rape is not beside the point.
Let's back up. Here is the history of this conversation:
It seems much more like a commentary on the American prison system than anything else. The Western European systems don't generally suffer many of the problems of American Muggle prisons, or the problems they do share are often to a smaller degree. Britain is one of the middle range countries in this regard, but this may be enough for some people to not get the point.
Notice what this says: Western European prisons are so good that Eliezer's commentary is really only about American prisons. (Also note the implication that the Muggle world is partitioned into two regions: Western Europe and the United States.)
3. I -- having become familiar with the similarities and differences between the U.S. and European criminal justice systems as a result of the Amanda Knox case -- disputed this, in a comment whose point was to argue that Western European prisons are not pleasant places. They are, in fact, really awful places. Yes, they may not be as bad as U.S. prisons, but they are still bad: places of torment, suffering and despair, despite...
Here's one more option:
e) People don't think enough about the level of brutality in prisons, and when they do think and talk about it they find it easier to applaud brutality; because anyone who spoke against it "would associate themselves with criminals, with weakness, with distasteful things that people would rather not think about", while speaking in its favor make you look tough on crime.
Given political discussions I've partaken in other forums, I know full well that whenever I condemned prison rape and suggested ways in which it might be reduced/prevented, the typical response was something to the effect of "Why do you love criminals so much?"
I think you misunderstood me: by "point in the story she had gotten to" I meant literally the point in the actual story (MoR). It wasn't some kind of figure of speech about her experience. (I wonder how many other people misunderstood my comment in this way; it's an interpretation that never occurred to me. I thought people knew she was a MoR reader.)
However, her experience itself was no picnic, fluff pieces notwithstanding.
Perhaps there are dark rituals whereby using them, Dark Wizards can break out of even an (ill-named) Unbreakable Vow.
Well, they can die. I've seen nothing to suggest that Vows destroy Horcruxes.
I wonder if this fact is possibly relevant to some Cunning Plot in which - perhaps just as one among many positive results - Voldemort "died" and resurrected via horcrux in order to escape an Unbreakable Vow. I remember in response to chapter 84, people were wondering what, if Voldie's apparent death at Godric's Hollow was intentional, was in it for him.
Unbreakable Vow anyone? Just give Dark Wizards the option "either you take an Unbreakable Vow to never knowingly kill/torture/Imperio a human being ever again, nor to ever knowingly assist in such, or we just execute you right now".
I don't think it would be that easy. This is isomorphic to making wishes with an evil genie--or coding a human-level AI with a list of deontological commands. It could be done, but probably not in an EY fanfic and probably not without a skilled magical lawyer.
are not, as a rule, a different intellectual order than we are
Yes they are— in the sense that they will have decades to spend ruminating on workarounds, experimenting, consulting with others. And when they find a solution the result is potentially an easily transmitted whole class compromise that frees them all at once.
Decades of dedicated human time, teams of humans, etc. are all forms of super-humanity. If you demanded that the same man hours be spent drafting the language as would be spent under its rule, then I'd agree that there was no differential advantage, but then it would be quite a challenge to write the rule.
"Are there Dementors in Nurmengard?"
"What?" said the old wizard. "No! I would not have done that even to him -"
The old wizard stared at the young boy, who had straightened, and his face changed.
"In other words," the boy said, as though talking to himself without any other people in the room, "it's already known how to keep powerful Dark Wizards in prison, without using Dementors. People know they know that."
The Killing Curse is unblockable, unstoppable, and works every single time on anything with a brain.
Professor Quirinus Quirrell, HPMOR chapter 16. Unless he's wrong or lying, nonsapient animals are killed by it just fine. (In canon, doesn't the Fake Defence Professor Du Jour use it on a spider in, er, book 3 or thereabouts?)
Which reminds me of something. At (IIRC) that point in canon, the teacher who's introducing the Killing Curse says something like "It kills absolutely anything, every time. Only one person has ever survived one, and he's right here in this classroom". Here in HPMOR we have Quirrell introducing the Killing Curse in a classroom that's got Harry Potter in it, and everyone knows the story just as much as in canon, and he conspicuously doesn't make any such remark.
Maybe it's just coincidence. But (assuming, as is customary, that Q=V) it looks to me like another bit of evidence that in HPMOR what happened at Godric's Hollow was not that V. attempted to AK Harry and failed.
The grim version of an ongoing joke in some potter circles is that you could strap a bunch of puppies to your body and use them as living armor.
My favorite mental image is covering yourself in bees. What can I say? I'm a fan of Eddie Izzard being able to beat the Dark Lord.
This implies that nonsapient animals do have a soul, which I didn't expect in the MoR-verse.
Or simply that the “separate the soul from the body” is just a mumbo-jumbo explanation from people that believe in souls.
The introspective morality-dump chapters are not my favorites (eg. I find the 'imagine distant descendants' to be entirely useless intuitively, and would prefer versions of the update-now argument which are more like 'decide now how you would update your beliefs based on predictions you make now failing or succeeding, since once they actually fail or succeed you'll be embarrassed & biased'), but oh well let's begin analysis.
...A year ago, Dad had gone to the Australian National University in Canberra for a conference where he'd been an invited speaker, and he'd taken Mum and Harry along. And they'd all visited the National Museum of Australia, because, it had turned out, there was basically nothing else to do in Canberra. The glass display cases had shown rock-throwers crafted by the Australian aborigines - like giant wooden shoehorns, they'd looked, but smoothed and carved and ornamented with the most painstaking care. In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia, nobody had invented the bow-and-arrow. It really made you appreciate how non-obvious was the idea of Progress. Why would you even think of Invention as something important,
Hmm, reading your argument there I'm convinced. The tertiary nature of the sources claiming they had fire-making, combined with the well-documented preservation of fires are both pretty strong arguments.
The Parlevar were wiped out entirely. Both species of chimp have an ICUN Red List status of Endangered. I would suggest that being wiped out or nearly so by competitive pressure brought to bear by close genetic relatives who took up a different strategy is not a marker of a strategy being an "evolutionary success".
That sounds kinda awesome in a "specialization is for insects" way, but at the end of the eon you're still dying of appendicitis.
If your argument is simply "brutality acts as a deterrent," it's almost certainly true. If your argument is, "Therefore the current level of prison brutality is optimal," or, "we should be happy with prison brutality," the only counterargument needed is that nobody's provided any evidence at all for those positions.
But if either of those is the assertion, here are some counterarguments: 1) There is a countereffect: longer (and therefore more brutal) prison sentences increase rates of recidivism. 2) Flogging and caning are brutal deterrents. Many (most?) people will take a punishment of flogging over a punishment of a long prison sentence when given the choice. Ergo at least for many, prisons are more brutal than literal torture. 3) From a cursory glance at stats, violent crime rates don't seem to be much lower in countries with higher incidences of prison rape or prison hospitalizations. I would like to see some rigorous analysis on this. 4) Violent crime rates don't seem to be much higher in countries that employ flogging or caning. Again, not a rigorous statistical analysis, but weak evidence nonetheless. 5) Let's not forget that we're trying to mini...
Perhaps a better suggestion is that his "down time" involves synchronisation of his memories/program state between Horcruxes, and it gets worse the further Pioneer moves from Earth... Even with magic, there's no way round speed of light limits.
Quirrell probably wasn't expecting that, which could explain why his days as a Dark Lord are numbered (and also explains why he's desperate to train up Harry as a replacement, assuming his goal of uniting the wizarding world is sincere).
I'm also wondering if the 6 hour limit of Time-Turners is a crucial variable somehow, so that he could synch at distances up to 6 light-hours, but not otherwise. Does anyone know when the Pioneer 11 probe got more than 6 light-hours away from Earth? Was it around 1991/1992??
As of February 8, 2012, sunlight takes 11.9 hours to get to Pioneer 11 at its approximate distance. (Wikipedia)
It's been on its way since April 1973 (for right about 39 years), so assuming a steady speed, it would've passed the six-hour limit roughly 19,5 years ago, or in late 1992.
Given that Pioneer fooled around in the Solar System for a while, making flybys of Jupiter and Saturn, our calculation should be a bit different. 1992 is a useful lower bound, which we arrived at by calculating what would happen if Pioneer took a straight path out into interstellar space. In fact, it flew by Saturn in September 1979. A bit of trigonometry tells me that if it left Saturn in a straight line tangent to that planet's orbit, it would probably reach the critical distance some time between '95 and '97, depending on Earth's own position in its orbit. This rough map seems to suggest that it did take that approximate path, but it's hardly accurate. If Pioneer skirted closer to the sun again, inside Saturn's orbit on it's way out then the critical distance comes later, but if it veered away harder then it comes earlier.
I had typed my calculations up, but I lost them just now when I accidentally pressed the back button. Hell's bells and buckets of blood.
Anyway, basically what this tells us is that Quirrel probably has at least a few years of grace before Pioneer gets too far away, if that is in fact what's going on. I think there's a fair likelihood that this theory is correct, but given what I've said here, I don't think the timing of the Pioneer's critical distance should be counted as strong evidence in favour of that.
From Chapter 61:
(weighing, Minerva knew, the possibility that he might want to go back more than two hours from this instant; for you couldn't send information further back in time than six hours, not through any chain of Time-Turners)
If information cannot travel back more than six hours, and a "soul" (stored on a Horcrux) is information (as Quirrell describes it), then it is a reasonable guess that the soul cannot travel over a spatial separation of more than 6 light-hours. Further than that, and it seems the soul parts must fall out of synch, though exactly what happens then is anyone's guess. Does Quirrell die? Are there two separate Quirrells, one stranded permanently on Pioneer, and the other on Earth? Can the one on Earth be killed, even if the one on Pioneer is never destroyed?
If information cannot travel back more than six hours
This does seem to be a constraint that exclusively affects the time-turners. Otherwise prophesies wouldn't be possible. It also seems like it's an artificial rule rather than a deep law of magic because after the Stanford Prison experiment, Bones tells Dumbledore that she has information from four hours in the future and asks whether he'd like to know it. That there is relevant information from four hours in the future is information from the future - she would not have said that if it were otherwise, so it seems there must be exemptions of that kind.
Alternative hypothesis: prophesies are jive, and Eliezer didn't think of the other thing.
If information cannot travel back more than six hours, and a "soul" (stored on a Horcrux) is information (as Quirrell describes it), then it is a reasonable guess that the soul cannot travel over a spatial separation of more than 6 light-hours.
More then 6 hours in what reference frame?
If Time Turners went backwards in intervals of 81 minutes, instead of an hour, that'd fit with the "you fell to the center of the earth and oscillated back" method of inertial time travel.
First, imagine yourself in a spaceship far away from any gravitational sources. If your rockets are off, objects inside the ship left at rest relative to it will stay at rest. In this situation, your ship is in an inertial reference frame, so called because in it the law of inertia is valid. (By contrast, if your rockets are on, objects left at rest will start accelerating towards the back wall, unless there is some countervailing force acting on them).
Now imagine your spaceship close to Earth, within its gravitational field. What is an inertial frame now? Not the situation of the ship at rest relative to Earth: in this situation, objects will accelerate ("fall", as we usually say) towards the bottom of the ship. The ship is in an inertial frame only if it is freely falling towards Earth[1], like an elevator when the cable breaks: then, objects left at rest inside it will stay at rest relative to it absent countervailing forces (because they will be "falling" at the same universal rate g = 9.8 m/s^2).
So a frame accelerating towards Earth with g is an inertial frame. If we abstract away all other forces that will come into play when the ship crashes hitting the E...
In Ch. 7, the Harry-and-Draco conversation needs to be toned down even further because multiple parents have announced their intention to have their children read this fanfic – and I know that revision is going to be controversial, but Draco’s current conversation is also a little out-of-character by the standards of the Draco in later chapters.
I am very saddened by this. Chapter 7 was what really hooked me into the story. Half of it was Harry's incredible "This is why science ROCKS" speech, which is still one of my most favorite monologues ever. And half of it is the pure emotional shock of hearing an 11-year-old boy casually say he plans to rape a 10-year-old girl. It had an immediate physical effect on me, and the after-effects lingered for the rest of the day. The fact that it came so out of the blue in such an unexpected setting... it was damned effective. I will be very sad to see it go.
This raises a question for me - I know of at least one 11 year old reading this story. Sometimes kids read things above their grade level, and are exposed to concepts earlier than usual (I suspect that happened to almost everyone on LW). So... is HPMoR intended primarily for adult...
Strongly agree with this.
I have no problem with making Draco's character more consistent, and if Eliezer honestly feels that that should mean removing or altering his casual dehumanisation of peasants, so be it.
But I urge Eliezer to seriously ask himself, with all his strength as a rationalist, about this and any other changes: "Would this be sacrificing the quality of the narrative for the sake of making a very, very mature story superficially more marketable to children?"
And yes, I feel those apparently charged words are wholly appropriate: removing a rape reference is just a terribly superficial way of making the story 'kid-friendly', because it isn't kid-friendly in much, much deeper ways. If a kid isn't ready to know what 'rape' means, would you want him to read Chapter 82? Or the Bellatrix chapters? If anything the rape reference in Ch. 7 works as an excellent gatekeeper, filtering the audience before the really disturbing stuff begins to kick in.
Does anyone else think it plausible that Harry's third last name, "Verres," comes from Mr. Verres in the webcomic El Goonish Shive? EGS Mr. Verres is a government scientist with a bespectacled semi-magical mad scientist son, and pretty much everything else in MOR is a shout-out.
Accidental, but I'm willing to claim credit for it. It started as a portmanteau of Vassar and Herreshoff.
The stated function of a prison is to imprison (i.e. detain). If the function of the prison was to get people physically hurt, then the state would have official torturers to brutalize people to such exact specifications as their convictions by the courts (e.g. official sentences would state things like "ten years in prison, plus three beatings and one anal rape per month", and the state would hire official rapists for the purpose).
If brutality was supposed to be part of a prison's specification, then we would have the responsibility of quantifying how much brutality is deserved for each crime. (the question you asked "How brutal should they be?" doesn't only work for people criticizing their current brutality, but also for the people who support it, you see)
But the delegation of this task randomly to convicts speaks of the same hypocrisy that Quirrel mocks in the chapters in question.
I think the downvotes come from you making a claim about the quoted text that doesn't seem particularly well supported. I would think that what you quoted is evidence against his dark side being Voldemort (since it emphasizes that they aren't really separate entities, just separate mind states), though I do think Harry is a Horcrux.
I think your edit is a bit annoying in tone. (Complaining about downvotes and groupthink + only having -1 karma + calling the site bizarre and unhealthy + unnecessary sarcasm)
In canon, Bellatrix Lestrange is married to Rodolphus Lestrange and does not have a child. In MoR, Bellatrix Black is unmarried, but has a child- Lesath Lestrange, the acknowledged bastard of Rastaban Lestrange. (In canon Rodolphus' brother's name was Rabastan, but I'm assuming that's a typo.) Lesath is currently a fifth year, so he was born in either '75 or '76. Bellatrix was actively leading attacks as a Death Eater in '71. Presumably a pregnancy would require some amount of maternity leave from the whole 'going on raids, fighting Aurors' thing.
So. Why would Voldemort allow / order one of his most powerful servants to have a child?
Um. Maybe he was experimenting with the powerful magic protection that a mother's love grants her child?
Oh, Harry. Who have you just doomed with your folly?
Harry realizes the error, and yet continues to generalize from fictional morality.
Which error does he realize? So far as I can tell, he sees a failure mode on both sides, and so chooses the best compromise he can come up with.
Two illustrations:
It was abruptly very clear that while Harry was going around trying to live the ideals of the Enlightenment, Dumbledore was the one who'd actually fought in a war. Nonviolent ideals were cheap to hold if you were a scientist, living inside the Protego bubble cast by the police officers and soldiers whose actions you had the luxury to question. Albus Dumbledore seemed to have started out with ideals at least as strong as Harry's own, if not stronger; and Dumbledore hadn't gotten through his war without losing friends and killing enemies and sacrificing allies.
For commentary, we turn to Bismarck: "A fool learns from his mistakes, but a truly wise man learns from the mistakes of others."
...Even if Dumbledore was right, and the true enemy was utterly mad and evil... in a hundred million years the organic lifeform known as Lord Voldemort probably wouldn't seem much different from all the other bewildered children of Ancient Earth. Whatever Lord Voldemort had done to himself, whatever Dark rituals seemed so horribly irrevocable on a merely human scale, it wouldn't be beyond curing with the technology of a hundred million years. Killing him, if you didn't ha
Why does he think the future will hold life to be as precious as the present does, instead of cheap, as it did and will again in Malthusian economies?
Because he has no intention of letting that happen.
Quirrell's tale of "I played a hero, but it didn't get me political power" doesn't hold up. The "lonely superhero" is just as much a mere storytelling convention as the "zero-casualties superhero". Either Quirrell is leaving something out, or the author is ignoring real-world politics for storytelling convenience.
In real life, successfully fighting societally recognized enemies gets you all kinds of political opportunity. Look at American Presidents Eisenhower, Grant, Taylor, Jackson, Harrison, and Washington. This is true in nondemocracies too: consider the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Marlborough, or Sir Francis Drake.
What gets you loneliness and isolation is being a pioneer.
In real life, heroes go unrewarded exactly and only when their enemies aren't yet regarded as enemies by the rest of society.
The socially isolating thing isn't fighting Nazis when you're an American, it's fighting Nazis when you're a German. Being a reformer is isolating.
"The lonely superhero" is just as much a mere literary convention as "the zero-casualties superhero".
Of course, "the lonely superhero" reflects an underlying truth. The real brave...
Good points, but reading carefully, it seems Riddle's hero persona wasn't a pure "lonely hero." Rather:
There was a man who was hailed as a savior. The destined scion, such a one as anyone would recognize from tales, wielding justice and vengeance like twin wands against his dreadful nemesis.
Also:
Several times he led forces against the Death Eaters, fighting with skillful tactics and extraordinary power. People began to speak of him as the next Dumbledore, it was thought that he might become Minister of Magic after the Dark Lord fell.
However:
It was as if they tried to do everything they could to make his life unpleasant... I was shocked how they seemed content to step back, and leave to that man all burdens of responsibility. They sneered at his performance, remarking among themselves how they would do better in his place, though they did not condescend to step forward.
In particular, Quirrell's Yule speech reminded Bones of one or more speeches hero-Riddle apparently gave, which she describes as "castigating the previous generation for their disunity against the Death Eaters."
So taken together, it seems hero-Riddle was widely liked, and could have bee...
In real life, successfully fighting societally recognized enemies gets you all kinds of political opportunity.
Well, yeah, it got Quirrel's "hero" political opportunity too. He was invited back to the fold of the Most Ancient House, and after the death of everyone else there, he would have wielded the vote in the Wizengamot. But they didn't sufficiently obey him as leader.
Look at American Presidents Eisenhower, Grant, Taylor, Jackson, Harrison, and Washington.
Alcibiades was accused and recalled by the Atheneans while on the expedition he had been advocating. Pausanias (victor of Plataies) and Miltiades (victor of Marathon) barely lasted a year after their famous victories, before getting accused of treason.
But within the context of the story, Quirrell's "I fought the villain but got no respect" is nonsense. Humans don't work that way
Knowing something of Ancient Greek history, and how they tended to treat all their most successful generals, it seemed very believable to me.
Successful generals are threats. You also see this in Byzantine history (inspiring a similar situation in Asimov's Foundation universe), and Chinese history too: a successful general like Belisarius becomes a threat to the throne and may be sabotaged in various ways. Belisarius was lucky: all his emperor did was short-change him and set him impossible missions. Chinese generals might just see themselves executed.
I've always hated (not really but I've always disliked) people who take pains to be polite in discourse for the same reasons that I dislike people who take pains to frame themselves as victims.
You should get over that (the former). You'll end up hating people simply for not being utterly naive. Getting along with people is necessary if you wish to achieve anything.
Manners are almost always used as a ploy for power.
Yes. It is a kind of power that people are willing to grant you and that, as far as ways to grab power go, has rather good externalities. Start using it.
Manners hinder productive conversation and allow for framing techniques that automatically give certain positions more weight than others.
Both good and bad manners do that. The bad ones make it easier.
I care about downvoting because it reflects widespread ignorance and most people here seem to not recognize the ignorance.
You are wrong. I haven't followed closely enough to know whether the other guy was right but your own behavior in your comments is more than sufficient to get downvoted according to local norms - and you'd be shunned or shamed in most social environments where you tried to pull this crap.
I don't think I need to be polite when I'm having everything I write be downvoted and "argued" against by about twelve different people.
Neither of these gives a licence for rudeness. Having a variety of people argue against a position is not a reason that defense of that position should be less polite. As to downvoting- you yourself said that people should care less about downvoting, so maybe do so?
In general, you need to think carefully about what your goals are. If your goals are to convince people then being polite helps. If your goal is to convince bystanders of your position or something similar then being polite still helps, because people are more inclined to take a position seriously when the one arguing for it is calm and polite. At a completely selfish level, being rude makes it harder to accept that one is wrong, due to cognitive dissonance issues and invested-effort/sunk cost issues. So if one wants to become less wrong one should try to be polite for purely selfish reasons.
I am not downvoting this comment of yours, but here's a piece of advice: attacking the whole forum over a single downvote is probably the best way to ensure you'll get more downvotes.
If you want to get fewer downvotes, best way possible is to complain less about the occasional downvotes you will get. All that a downvote means is that one person out of the hundreds that visit the site didn't like your comment. But when you attack a whole community over what a single member of it did, well... that'll cause more people to think that such an attack merits a few more downvotes.
I am totally using that as my rejoinder there - "If Dudley can get a Playstation in 1993, clearly Playstations are timeless in canon."
Wait, you can violate the six-hour limit on backward movement of information with Playstations?
Does that mean the Department of Mysteries has a Playstation department?
plots evilly
So all of the above are obvious rationalizations and are also pathetic.
This is at least rude. Downvoted without having to read more. Learn about the principle of charity.
obvous
Illusion of transparency.
pathetic
Unnecessarily insulting. What do you mean on the object-level, and how could you say it in a way that is not rude?
Alsadius asserts that I'm overconfident and that I'm not thinking very clearly. That only makes sense if my comment is wrong
No. You can have true conclusions from a fallacious argument or false premises, or true beliefs following from faulty reasoning. And for example, precisely 100% is overconfident that the sun will rise tomorrow, even if it turns out to be correct.
Obviously I'm not criticizing literally each and every one of the people who visit this site,
Again, illusion of transparency. If you say the community, and the community means "the sum of [all] the individuals" here, then it is not obvious that you do not mean "each and every one of the people who visit this site".
it makes sense to talk about groupthink
'Groupthink' is a highly technical term, and shouldn't be bandied about. If you're going to assert tha...
I'm not sure how my mind dug this up, but way back in Chapter 17, Harry visits Dumbledore's office and is overloaded with bizarreness: Dumbledore sets fire to a chicken, he gives him his father's rock, he gives him his mother's potions textbook which contains a terrible secret... but one of these things is not like the others. Dumbledore gave Harry his father's rock, with instructions that Harry satisfied by creating a magical ring and wearing it at all times.
Blur out all the hilarious details for a minute, and that scene is: Dumbledore made Harry create a magical ring and wear it at all times, and distracted him so well that he never thought about what the ring does. My hypothesis is that some aspect of magic is governed by an XP-like mechanic, and that sustained transfiguration (especially of large masses) is an unusually effective way of gaining magical power. Dumbledore wants Harry to exploit this, but he considers it a major secret, so he substituted a nonsensical explanation and prepared a collection of very flashy distractions to keep it from being questioned. He might've even left the real explanation in his pensieve, so that he wouldn't have to lie. Read in this light, the scene makes a whole lot more sense. It explains Harry's anomalous magical power. It explains Dumbledore's anomalous magical power.
It is also the only way Dumbledore could truly mark someone as an equal.
Hasn't Harry basically signed up to be a Dark Lord in 85, at least by the Sorting Hat's standards?
then the gloves come off and the villains die as fast as possible; and I won't pretend that real people in real life can go through a war without sacrificing anyone...
Compare the talk with the Sorting Hat:
I am not Dark Lord material!
“Yes, you are. You really, really are.”
Why! Just because I once thought it would be cool to have a legion of brainwashed followers chanting ‘Hail the Dark Lord Harry’?
“Amusing, but that was not your first fleeting thought before you substituted something safer, less damaging. No, what you remembered was how you considered lining up all the blood purists and guillotining them.
Oh god, I have this mental image of Harry standing next to a blood soaked guillotine insisting that he is a Light Lord!
Idea: someone should compile a list of times when Quirrell says "Interesting" or is otherwise surprised by Harry.
He does it a lot, and we might see an interesting pattern emerge.
I guess this has come up before, but I take it the reason to be Voldemort is that as soon as muggles get load of magic, they'll figure out how become magical, transmute 3 stage thermonuclear devices from concrete, apparate them over cities, etc. So magic means the total removal of all technological or economic restrictions on nuclear warfare. And time travel.
So if you figured the muggles would discover the magical world pretty soon, and if you wanted there to be any people at all in the future, you'd have to make the society of magical knowledge completely closed. This means taking over, at least, the magical world and probably the muggle one too. And in order to prevent anyone from seeing magic as technology and doing productive research on it, you'd have to make it completely scary, so that their fear and moral hatred would override their ability to study it proficiently.
If that's true, then muggle science is similar a soon-to-be-uncontrollable AI (it is at least by many orders of magnitude a better optimizing system then the magical world's own research efforts), and Voldemort is a last ditch effort at reboxing. If that's right, it seems hard to argue with Voldemort.
I think people in the Less Wrong community are a little too fast to analogize any existential threat to the threat of rogue AI. The threat of people blowing up the world with nuclear weapons seems a lot more analogous to the threat of people blowing up the world with nuclear weapons.
I was thinking about it earlier and Harry has massively underranked the utility of Horcruxes. If one person must die so that a different person can live 100K+ more years then that is an incredibly desirable tradeoff from an impartial utilitarian standpoint and everyone should be doing this. You could even choose to murder only old and dying people so that there would be almost no loss of net time that people spend alive. He dismissed it way too quickly during his conversation with Dumbledore.
I wonder if burning Narcissa Malfoy to death would count, or if it had too many positive externalities. (I'm less and less sure how to model Dumbledore as MoR proceeds, particularly since even if he's "supposed to be good", Eliezer is writing him and Eliezer is some sort of consequentialist; I wouldn't want to rule out the possibility that Dumbledore deemed himself indispensable and his soul's contiguousness dispensable to the war effort.)
Utilitarianism has to be equally-blooded for all outcomes, but this can also be accomplished by being hot-blooded about everything. Instead of shrugging and not caring about the pain and two-year loss, you can mourn it while also grinning and clapping your hands and jumping around shouting for joy at the perspective of someone gaining so much life.
Just by reading your comment before the Edits, I thought that you're probably correct, Harry seems confused about his dark side and that (to me) also seems to be Bayesian evidence for Harry being at least partially a horcrux. So to me, it seems like you're qualitatively right, although the importance of this piece of evidence can be discussed about. The downvotes could simply be bad luck, and I'd have expected this comment to go back at zero and beyond in a few hours.
However, posing yourself as a victim of this sites supposed groupthinking and attacking us using sarcasm makes things worse. I'm not surprised that in this form, the comment got to -6 points. These sorts of attacks (posing oneself as the victim and then vigorously attacking) are neither liked here nor in most other places, I'm afraid.
Why should the time of an ominous decision be so relevant to seers? Even if the consequences of the decision have a big impact on the future, that future already was the future. It's not like there is a default future before you make your decision and a different future afterwards, your decision itself would already be a part of the future of any earlier point in time. From a many worlds perspective you might have several different possible futures so your overall prospect of the future might significantly change after an important branching, but Harry's decision doesn't seem particularly influenced by recent random chance; it seems unlikely that from the perspective of 6 hours ago most future Harrys would make a completely different decision.
The clock is a gift from Dumbledore. On the one hand, it could be recording. On the other hand it could be transmitting. On the gripping hand, Dumbledore has a Time Turner.
If Dumbledore wanted to assure that any time he was the best pressure-release for a prophesy that pressure was released as easily and discretely as possible and less likely to be overheard, he would want to make it easy for the Prophesy Force to get that information to him.
So he gives her a clock and tells her to ask it for the time each time she wakes up in the middle of the night. The clock tells Dumbledore. Dumbledore gets invisible. Then it's just a jump to the left and he receives any prophesy intended for him.
That's so obvious in retrospect, and Dumbledore is so meddling, that now I don't think he's allowed not to have thought of that.
Hmm. On first reading, I just took the premonitions as being an indicator of how close we are to the apocalypse, not necessarily being caused by Harry's resolution. And yet you're right; both the premonitions we've seen so far immediately followed Harry's resolving something.
The first resolution was Harry saying that he would destroy Azkaban, whether it meant ruling Britain or summoning arcane magics to blow the building up, and that those who support Azkaban are the villains.
This resolution was Harry saying that if his war caused a single death, he would start killing villains as fast as possible.
So if these are all related, I guess all Quirrell needs to do is make Harry remember both those resolutions after someone dies and while he's in his Dark Side, and then sit back and watch as Harry exterminates 90% of the British population.
Eliezer seems to be taking a page from Alicorn's book. In Luminosity Alice is plagued by differing visions as Bella constantly changes her mind about her future, and then the actual future snaps into place when a final choice is made.
Essentially? It has to happen at some point along the timeline, and whatever engine runs magic finds it simplest to give visions simultaneous to the decisions that cause them. (Or at least, contribute in some major way to them.)
Or, in other words, enforced narrative causality.
I think HPMoR has colored my thinking about scholarship and I'm really happy about this. Recently I have been reading the literature on mathematics education, and I find myself thinking of what I read as books that can give me power, like uncovering principles of magic and becoming capable of greater battle magic. I'm basically doing what Dumbledore and Riddle did and it works in real life.
There's an argument (first advanced by Beccaria in the late 18th century) that it matters more that punishment be swift and certain, than that it be harsh. If people don't really believe a punishment is likely to happen to them, it won't deter reliably. Human cognitive biases being what they are, we might be better served trying to make punishment visible, rather than horrifying. Azkaban, being remote and unpleasant to think about, is perhaps less effective than some punishment that would be constantly in sight. Having the convicted criminal's wand broken. say.
Beccaria puts it much better than I could, so I'll just refer you to his essay on the topic: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/An_Essay_on_Crimes_and_Punishments/Chapter_XXVII
In a society with veritaserum, legilimency and assorted other magic you'd think it would be straightforward to establish guilt or innocence in the vast majority of cases.
I've never had the opportunity to respond to a single comment with both of these, but if you haven't yet, you should check out Well-kept gardens die of pacifism and Why our kind can't cooperate. (the latter is less directly relevant)
If anything, there should be less rudeness and more downvoting on this site. For this community, rude disagreement and lack of downvoting would still be the default if we weren't actively suppressing it.
Politeness is useful. Rudeness is the way to mind-killing. If you don't want people to engage with your ideas rationally, be rude to them - that strategy works very well on humans.
In the 40,000 years since anatomically modern humans had migrated to Australia from Asia
BTW - this was the accepted figure as of 1991, but molecular evidence suggests 62,000-75,000 years. Which makes Harry's point even more strongly: it took a long time for humans as we know them to invent what we think of as basic stuff.
At a cursory glace the date you cite seems to be for the time the population they are descended from split from African populations, not for when they arrived in Australia. Genetic evidence cannot show where your ancestors lived, only how they were related to other populations (which might imply things about where they lived provided you already know that for the other populations)
Isn't Harry a little young to have played Fate/Stay Night, both in the sense of it being a Japanese porno game not suitable for 11-year-olds and it not having been made yet when the story is set?
EDIT: Clearly this is intended as a hint that he has the time-traveling adult Voldemort's memories implanted in him.
Those are very valid objections, but since the phrase "great works of literature like Hamlet or Fate/Stay Night" constantly causes hilarious overreactions whenever I link Three Worlds Collide around, I'm entirely supportive of Eliezer taking liberties for this purpose.
Eliezer isn't bothering to consider publication dates, and has ignored them in the past- eg Barbour's The End of Time wasn't published until 1999, yet Harry still knows timeless physics.
According to canon, the original PlayStation was available in 1993. So if certain electronic media are available earlier in the MoR universe, it's only a slight embellishment of an existing canon discrepancy.
Personally, I find shout-outs less jarring than straight out references to Harry having consumed fiction that shouldn't exist yet. The Tragedy of Light isn't Death Note, it's The Tragedy of Light, even if the real life inspiration is obviously Death Note.
By Word of God, we know that horcruxes exist in the HPMoR universe. It seems like by now we ought to be able to start figuring out what a horcrux is.
In Canon, a horcrux is a fragment of a soul. But it stands to reason that this will not be the full answer in MoR, as it's a fairly serious violation of the author's beliefs. So if we're to disregard supernatural and religious concepts, the obvious first idea is that horcruxes are storage media for some portion of a brain's data.
The problem is that most of what makes up a brain has been strongly hinted to not be the answer, either. It certainly looks like Harry is a horcrux in this universe, and Harry already thought of that possibility in different terms, yet the Sorting Hat says with 100% confidence that there is no extra "mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings" in Harry's head. And I'm disregarding out of hand any clever-schoolboy loopholes like "The horcrux is Harry's foot!"
What is left of a brain, if mind and intelligence and memory and personality and feelings (and a soul) are eliminated? It would be fitting, though a bit precious, if the answer were somehow "rationality", if you could ...
It certainly looks like Harry is a horcrux in this universe, and Harry already thought of that possibility in different terms, yet the Sorting Hat says...
The exact phrasing of the Sorting Hat's statement was as follows:
...there is definitely nothing like a ghost - mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings - in your scar. Otherwise it would be participating in this conversation, being under my brim.
Now, anyone that's read the sort of fairytale where riddles are important should immediately be able to come up with a half-dozen loopholes in that, but I think we can dismiss most of them out of hand given that the Sorting Hat has no particular incentive to be misleading. The most promising option that remains, by my reading, is that there's nothing separate about the Horcrux contents for the Hat to key off of -- they effectively are Harry, or part of him. He's probably tapping that part of himself when he has his Dark Side episodes, at the very least, but I don't think that's the full extent of the Horcrux's influence: at various points he asks himself or people around him why he doesn't think like other children, and narrative parsimony points rather strongly to th...
Voldemort's Killing Curse worked. Lily's son is dead. The sacrifice magic hurt Voldemort and created a new person in Harry's body from Voldemort's mind, who we've been reading about ever since. The hat doesn't notice this because it never met the previous Harry. Voldemort knows all this and is treating Harry as his mind-child.
Hi, I'm Omega. You have a choice between one person being tortured or 3^^^3 people getting dustspecks in their eyes. Also, if you respond with profanity, an additional 5^^^^^^5 +1 people will be tortured, and two puppies and a kitten will be drowned, and Busy Beaver(3^^^3) fruit flies will have their wings torn off.
Eliezer,
It might be useful to put a notice at the bottom of the chapter about new entries taking a while. All previous chapters have a similar note about the next update, and the lack of one on this chapter may imply the ending of the fic to some (especially those that don't read the discussions).
I don't think so- the passage implied that other muggleborns might know it as well:
Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics
Plus I get the feeling that it's beyond Harry's own capabilities, since his original thoughts/ideas are also (generally) Eliezer's original thoughts/ideas
You sure can! It's a bit hard on the complexity, but probably less so than spontaneous collapse.
there are a bunch of different versions, the most obvious (but not only) class consists of proceeding the simulation as if time travel didn't exist then pruning paradoxical branches retroactively. There's tweaks and hacks needed to figure out how that actually works with interference, and to fix the problem of any branch where time travel is invented at all losing all it's measure in effect acting as a probability pump preventing it, but you're smarter than me and can probably work out better versions.
Just think about it for 5 minutes. ;p
Semi-accurate? She blatantly makes things up and spins things in order to smear her subjects. You could as well call an article "semi-accurate" which accuses someone of being a child molester, when the reality is that they do, in fact, spend time around children.
This is what motivated the insults in the first place, you've got the chain of causality backwards.
Or there's a feedback loop, where someone downvotes you, you then insult people, then more people downvote you for the insults, then you insult people some more for those downvotes, which causes even more people to downvote you... and so forth.
In an attempt to find Quirrell's motives, I have listed the evidence I have about him, and now have a theory I have not seen on LessWrong or anywhere. I did it mostly mentally, but I'll try to put down all the evidence I took into account as unbiasedly as possible. I assume you know Quirrell = Voldemorte = Tom Riddle.
-Quirrell said Harry's wish was impossible. The wish was that Quirrell come back again the next year as the Defense Professor at Hogwarts. He also burned the paper on which the wish was written and he did not tell the audience what it was. If ...
To be honest, I'm not convinced that it isn't true even in first-world countries. Solve rates for murders in the US appear to be around 66% as of 2007. I haven't directly been able to dig up solve rates for crimes in general, but clearance rates (the rate of crimes prosecuted to crimes reported) are available, and are well under 50% for pretty much everything except murder. Most prosecuted crimes appear to result in convictions, but this still says to me that TheOtherDave's got it right, at least in a US context and assuming that most reports aren't fri...
Okay, seriously, how strong do you think the groupthink effect could possibly be on the question of whether Harry's dark side is a piece of Voldemort's soul in HPMOR? For the record I think you were probably downvoted for claiming that something was "clearly" implied when I (and so presumably others) can't see how it's implied at all (and I still can't see it, having read the comment which is apparently supposed to make it clear, and which wasn't, incidentally, linked to in the great-grandparent), and then downvoted further when you decided to insult everyone.
FWIW, when I see someone making really bad comments, I tend to look at their other comments to see if they're also downvote-worthy, since it's a source of low-hanging fruit for moderation.
Updating on evidence that hasn't arrived yet?
Not quite. I think the point is that because we aren't perfect Bayesian reasoners, we neglect to update on some of the available evidence. But getting into the right frame of mind can help you avoid that. (Cf. the reasoning behind Harry's decision to tell McGonagall about the Parseltongue message from the sorting hat.)
The heuristic Harry is using here, is to imagine a future test he thinks would be decisive, and ask himself what outcome he expects from that test. That's a way to "unlock" and find o...
Personally, I get very little use out of this technique, since my problem tends to be uncertainty about the likely consequences of my actions, not uncertainty about which outcome would be best.
Have you tried it on a micro-scale? I employ a modified version of this technique as a constant motivation tool. (Eg, I don't feel like going to the gym and prefer to read things on the internet, so I query my future self from 4 hours ahead and future self from a couple days ahead for each Everett branch of action and poll my imagination of their opinions. Invariably the 4 possible-future me's all outvote present me and force me to the gym.)
I find it very good for peer pressuring myself with my future selves, but it only works on things I cognitively know the 'right' answer to yet am emotionally unconvinced by. It also helps exceptionally well for hyperbolic discounting. I think that Harry is using a similar tool to line up his emotions and motivations with what he knows cognitively and to avoid the shortsighted path (Kill 2/3rds of the Wizengamot) in lieu of the path he'd previously decided on.
What is the Anansi the Spider quote from? Anansi the Spider is a character from mythology and folklore, so it's not as obvious as the others... is it Neil Gaiman, or some other source?
It may be para- or misphrased. The author told us at some point that HJPEV quotes from the author's memory while Hermione quotes from reality.
I was re-listening to the podcast of Chapter 20 (Bayes's Theorem) when I was struck by an idea. It builds on another idea I heard in this same forum. The original idea was that Quirrel had Horcruxed the Pioneer plaque and that, due to the nature of magic, his Horcrux passing beyond a distance of 6 light hours would lead to his death due to a limitation on magic's ability to affect things more than 6 hours into the past - which would be needed for faster than light communications.
Having now re-listened to that chapter, I've picked up some new clues. Harry h...
Something is definitely funny with Goyle. He's able to do martial arts, is extremely good with a broomstick, and doesn't trust Draco when Draco lies to him. At first, my interpretation was just that Goyle was much more capable in this version. That's still a possibility, but I feel like if that were the case then maybe Crabbe also would have been made more capable. I feel as though Goyle will do something important soon, definitely.
I even briefly entertained the possibility that Goyle was a Mary Sue, for about ten seconds, but that idea doesn't have anything to recommend it besides the humor of it.
He also spent a long time with the sorting hat.
"Goyle, Gregory!" There was a long, tense moment of silence under the Hat. Almost a minute.
Chapter 9
I think it's pretty clear he got that information, along with many of his other dark secrets, from the Basalisk.
Has there been any serious discussion of the implications of portraits? I couldn't find any with some cursory googling, but I'll be really surprised if it hasn't been discussed here yet. I can't entirely remember which of these things are canon and which are various bits of fanfiction, but:
I think that Salazar's Serpent was a trap Tom Riddle fell into. It was a Langford Basilisk Horcrux, like the book Ginny got in the original timeline, so When Tom Riddle read out the information embedded, he was possessed by Salazar Slytherin. That's why nppbeqvat gb Ibyqrzbeg/Evqqyr/Fnynmne vg frrzf gb unir whfg orra n terng frecrag, abg n onfvyvfx, juvpu vf whfg jung ur jbhyq fnl. Guvf nyfb rkcynvaf gur qnzntrq guvaxvat Uneel frrf.
This might well explain Harry as well, since in OT Voldemort had a giant serpent hanging around. He might not have had one in...
I just thought of something.
When Quirrell shows Harry the stars in outer space he's probably getting the images from his probe-Horcrux.
Vaniver wasn't talking about Harry's evaluation of future outcomes, he was talking about Harry's predictions of future thoughts that future people would have. That's why Vaniver said "why does he think the future will hold life to be precious", etc. "He think the future will" clearly refers to a prediction made by Harry.
I believe you are incorrectly modelling the way Harry thinks and misunderstand the implications of the words Harry has uttered. The implicit prediction is conditional. On, for example, not catastrophic failure and ext...
Wondering how Dumbledore knew Harry was planning on reformulated Quidditch. Seems possible that he was just on the platform.
On a related note, it occurs to me that we should just assume there's two Dumbledores running around any time anything important happens. No immediate consequences leap out at me, though =/
Harry thought the deepest split in his personality wasn't anything to do with his dark side; rather it was the divide between the altruistic and forgiving Abstract Reasoning Harry, versus the frustrated and angry Harry In The Moment.
This as well as the distant descendants part seems to draw on Robin's near vs. far theory.
I was a bit surprised to not see the "many who die deserve life" quote from Tolkien, but perhaps that one is about deciding to kill prisoners or not.
Andromeda is not the closest galaxy. The closest currently known galaxy is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy but this wasn't known until after the story took place. However, others were known at about this time such as the Large Magellanic Cloud which is only visible from the Southern Hemisphere but has been known for centuries, or Draco Dwarf which you can see with a good telescope in the Northern Hemisphere. Andromeda is however the only one that is easily visible and very large in the Northern Hemisphere.
Re: revisions
...Harry reached up, wiped a bit of sweat from his forehead, and exhaled. "I'd like this one, please."
Harry's entire body was sheathed in sweat that had soaked clear through his Muggle clothing, though at least it didn't show through the robes. He bent down over the gold-etched ivory toilet, and retched a few times, but thankfully nothing came up.
Hermione shut her eyes and tried to concentrate. She was sweating underneath her robes.
"Forget I said anything," said Draco, sweat suddenly springing out all over his body. He neede
Ng gigebcrf, rl fnlf, "V gubhtug crbcyr jrer tbvat gb trg "gur cybg" sebz Pu. 1-3, cbffvoyl Pu. 1, naq guvf jnf gur Vyyhfvba bs Genafcnerapl", naq yngre "Ru, lbh'yy frr jung V'z gnyxvat nobhg nsgre lbh ernq gur svany nep naq gura ernq Puncgre 1 ntnva."
What would a hypothesis about the end of the story look like which uses only information from chapter 1?
Claim: Harry's war with Voldemort will destroy the world. Support: In Chapter 1, Petunia says about Lily's reasons for not making her pretty, "And Lily would tell me no, a...
This may have been addressed already, but why doesn't Harry suspect at this point that Quirrell is Voldemort, or at least working for Voldemort?
This is especially puzzling after we get to hear Harry's thoughts on what happened to Hermione in 85.
Now, maybe I'm suffering from obvious-in-retrospect syndrome here, given that I did not realize Quirrell was Voldemort until V ernq Ryvrmre'f fvapr-ergenpgrq fgngrzrag gung Dhveeryy vf Ibyqrzbeg. But that was before the Stanford Prison Experiment arc. Relevant facts in that and the Taboo Tradeoffs arc:
I think you're missing the mundane explanation. Harry really likes Quirrell. He's the person he most relates with in the world; he's the person he looks up to; he's the smart/strong/cool teacher Harry wants to be when he grows up.
Surely there were other people, maybe better people, to trust and befriend? Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick, Hermione, Draco, not to mention Mum and Dad, it wasn't like Harry was alone...
Only...
A choking sensation grew in Harry's throat as he understood.
Only Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick, Hermione, Draco, they all of them sometimes knew things that Harry didn't, but...
They did not excel above Harry within his own sphere of power; such genius as they possessed was not like his genius, and his genius was not like theirs; he might look upon them as peers, but not look up to them as his superiors.
None of them had been, none of them could ever be...
Harry's mentor...
That was who Professor Quirrell had been.
Any person, especially a child, will gladly ignore and forgive a million counter-indications as long as they really like the person.
For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.
Voldemort is the only person in the world with an obvious motive for wanting to break Bellatrix out of Azkaban, and is who everyone else thinks is responsible
What motive would Harry expect Voldemort to have? As far as I can recall, he doesn't know about the components required for the spell to revive someone kept from death by horcruxes, and Bellatrix is not a very capable servant for the time being, and he doesn't believe Voldemort cared about her in any case. Quirrell, on the other hand, has already claimed a selfish motive that he personally has for freeing Bellatrix that would not apply to Voldemort.
Keep in mind that for Harry, the potential hypothesis space is huge. Quirrell might secretly be Rudolph Wizencamp in disguise. Don't know who Rudolph Wizencamp is? Well, neither does Harry, he's only lived in the wizarding world for a few months after all. We can reason by dramatic convention and conservation of detail, but for Harry, the list of all possibilities raised by the facts about the wizarding world that he's aware of is far from exhaustive.
Dumbledore told Harry in the "Today your war has begun" speech that Bellatrix was one of three things Voldemort needed to return as strong as he was before.
Was it this bit?
"He didn't have any choice," said Harry. "Not if he wanted to fulfill the conditions of the prophecy."
"Give me that," said Professor Quirrell, and the newspaper leaped out of Harry's hand so fast that he got a paper cut.
Harry automatically put the finger in his mouth to suck on, feeling rather shocked, and turned to remonstrate with Professor Quirrell -
Earlier in this very same chapter, Harry tells Quirrell that he can't imagine Quirrell hurting someone unless he means to. (This was in context of their discussion of the Gryffindor who cast a dark curse without knowing what it did.)
So we can assume that either Quirrell isn't as precise as Harry thinks and accidentally hurt Harry, or that he's exactly as precise as Harry thinks and took the blood on purpose.
She doesn't destroy any lives. Who does the Inquirer destroy? She makes people embarrassed and the only effects we ever really see are schoolchildren making stupid assumptions about harry. Certainly nothing CLOSE to deserving the death penalty. Killing Skeeter was EVIL.
And I've yet to hear a good counterargument.
It's not as if you've stated the exact position you want a counterargument to: Is it "the more brutal the better"?
the purpose of prisons is to reduce crime.
Rapes, murders, and beatings in prison are also supposed to be crimes, no?
The two main methods by which they accomplish this are being sufficiently nasty to deter would be criminals,
At this point you're surely using the same argument that would be used to justify Dementors in Azkaban -- it makes Azkaban nastier: hence it serves as deterrent.
Vaniver was talking in terms of predictions about what the future people would think. You responded in terms of what Harry wanted to happen.
Vaniver was talking about Harry's evaluation of the future outcomes. Once again, I point out Harry's forceful and unambiguous declarations to the dementor about what the future 'shall' be and assert relevance of that kind of thinking to how Harry would evaluate the thoughts of of the people he labels as those from the future.
Intentions have no effect on what the future actually will be.
I've heard about a particu...
I don't think I need to be polite when I'm having everything I write be downvoted and "argued" against by about twelve different people.
Consider the case where some mugger is pointing a gun at you. That should help give you a more practical perspective. Sure, the mugger doesn't deserve politeness. It isn't fair that politeness is necessary. But you still need to be polite to him if you wish to minimize the chance that he will shoot you in the head.
Sometimes other people really do behaving like dicks and be unreasonable or unfair. Yet that does...
Makes sense. I was confused so I looked it up: "And the third wizard, the binder, permanently sacrifices a small portion of their own magic, to sustain the Vow forever." I guess the self-improvement part is out of the question then...
Still; it'd be a pretty hardcore thing to do for an ambitious dying grandfather. Make his grandson, age 3, swear the vow (something along the lines: "I will never spend an awake moment on anything except improving my abilities or the situation of my family" - it could be phrased better) and then die happily.
Still; it'd be a pretty hardcore thing to do for an ambitious dying grandfather. Make his grandson, age 3, swear the vow (something along the lines: "I will never spend an awake moment on anything except improving my abilities or the situation of my family" - it could be phrased better) and then die happily.
Age three? Does the vow actually impel you adhere to it or does it just kill you when you are about to break it? (I thought the latter.) Didn't he just kill his grandson?
Um, the accepted Outcome Pump explanation of prophecies says that only the right listener will discharge the time "pressure". (Possibly relevant.) The same prophecy could fail to erupt many times.
OT: In Ch. 25, Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, Harry considers only intelligent and evolutionary causes of optimization. I have no clue if an Outcome Pump could coherently explain all magic.
The deeper problem in Ch. 6 is that Harry’s conflict with Professor McGonagall looks too much like a victory – it is a major flaw of Methods that Harry doesn’t lose hard until Ch. 10, so he must at least not win too much before then. That’s the part I’m working on at this very instant.
Strongly disagree with this. That's the bit that caused me to continue reading. Luckily, I have the raw text downloaded, and can make my own canonical printed version.
Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...
(black robes, falling)
...blood spills out in liters, and someone screams a word.
That, of course, appears before the start of Chapter 1. It's gotten a lot of attention and a lot of speculation. Clearly it depicts something that happened in the past, or that will happen in the future, and we'll all get lots and lots of goosebumps when we figure out what it is.
But that passage has a little brother that I haven't seen anyone talk about. Before the start of Chapter 2, we get this:...
...And then there was that promise Harry had sworn.
Draco to help Harry reform Slytherin House. And Harry to take as an enemy whoever Harry believed, in his best judgment as a rationalist, to have killed Narcissa Malfoy. If Narcissa had never gotten her own hands dirty, if indeed she'd been burned alive, if the killer hadn't been tricked - those were all the conditions Harry could remember making. He probably should've written it down, or better yet, never made a promise requiring that many caveats in the first place.
There were plausible outs, for the sort of
No, this does not explain any dormant-times. See chapter 20: While Quirrell shows Harry the sphere of stars, he is not in zombie mode; he talks to Harry and even notices Dumbledore's imminent arrival.
Note though, that this doesn't not rule out the hypothesis of him visiting his Horcruxes during zombie mode – for all we know, there might be another mechanism one could use to check on one's Horcruxes.
since my account is already ruined, by continuing to bump this comment thread I can wage a war of attrition against you. there is no real impact to my receiving more negative karma although there is a high probability. conversely, there is a small probability that you'll receive some negative reputation (or even better, this part would all be deleted) and there is also an impact to your credibility.
You overstate the degree of ruination of your account and so I don't quite support the details of your reasoning. Nevertheless, drethelin has something to le...
"This comment will be downvoted" is a testable prediction, agreed.
"This comment will be downvoted because it's not a capitulation" is not a testable prediction.
Regardless of its testability, it is also an attempt to impose a specific interpretation on all downvotes. It asserts that my downvote is an expression of the desire for chaosmosis to capitulate, rather than an expression of the desire to have fewer comments like his on LW.
I'm confused. What did I do that was jerklike? I was under the impression that you disliked downvotes, and my comment's intent was to dispel a source of confusion that would cause some people to erroneously downvote your comment.
Several people (myself included) do tend to downvote comments for whining about downvotes.
If you have future interactions on this site, please try to avoid "convincing" as a primary goal. This is not debate club.
But the Potterverse is dualist. Even if horcruxes get some massive retcon, animagi preserve that in MOR.
It enjoys the mind/body distinction, for sure, but not necessarily strongly (not more strongly than a physicalist who wants to be neuropreserved). Random proposed mechanisms for animagi:
Or the obvious one: space is compressed using the same method as every other bigger-on-the-inside object wizards use everywhere all the time.
This is a pretty meta comment thread. Speaking of different sides, or different ways that you sometimes are, and simultaneously illustrating it.
My goal isn't to get good karma, it's to get a few of people who are reading this to realize how stupid the commenters here are behaving.
What was your goal before you got that first downvote? Reflecting on the change in your goals, do you endorse your original goal, your post-downvote goal, or some third option?
Prediction time!
Due to Harry's new vow he'll feel forced to kill Quirrel: 0.2 > p > 0.15 [UPDATED from 0.1 > p > 0.05]
Due to Harry's new vow he'll feel forced to kill Dumbledore: 0.12 > p > 0.08
Due to Harry's new vow he'll end up killing the wrong person (bad judgement call on Harry's behalf): 0.15 > p > 0.1
Due to Harry's new vow he'll end up killing the wrong person (bad execution on Harry's behalf): 0.1 > p > 0.05
Due to Harry's new vow he'll not kill the right bad guy at the right time hence become indirectly r
Ah, a chance to use a simple heuristic - if I see 3^^^3 in a philosophical question, terminate thought and respond with profanity. It's the simplest accurate algorithm for responding to such questions, I've found.
Please don't do that (in a way that is in any way visible on this forum). If you can't keep your inability handle extreme cases to yourself then please leave.
Secondary source: I have seen the first 3 films, and Alice explicitly (and repeatedly, I think) states that "a decision has been made" when she has a vision. That decision needn't be made by Bella specifically though.
There are muggle artifacts containing immense investment of intelligence. I bet some sort of Potions Master could make an unprecedented intelligence potion - or at least one good enough to let them figure out how to make the next one...
The potion should make a soft "foom" when stirred.
I read the first chapter and it doesn't seem particularly good, let alone "excellent". It has thoughts in quotation marks and clumsy narration and dull dialogue. Does it get markedly better a ways in?
From chapter 74: "Even so, the most terrible ritual known to me demands only a rope which has hanged a man and a sword which has slain a woman; and that for a ritual which promised to summon Death itself - though what is truly meant by that I do not know and do not care to discover, since it was also said that the counterspell to dismiss Death had been lost."
I missed this the first time I read it, but to me, it seems to pretty clearly refer to creating a dementor - Quirrell doesn't understand what it means because he doesn't know about the true p...
I'm doing a reread.
..."In any case, when I was thirteen years old, I read through the historical sections of the Hogwarts library, scrutinizing the lives and fates of past Dark Lords, and I made a list of all the mistakes that I would never make when I was a Dark Lord."
Harry giggled before he could stop himself.
"Yes, Mr. Potter, very amusing. So, Mr. Potter, can you guess what was the very first item on that list?"
Great. "Um... never use a complicated way of dealing with an enemy when you can just Abracadabra them?"
"The te
Pox on ninja edits. I liked the Ghostbusters' song. :(
And I liked it when Quirrel said the single most dangerous monster in all the world was "The adult wizard".
Wonder how many more happened that I haven't noticed yet.
"The adult wizard" was changed quite a while before the most recent round of retcons. Most of the other changes I can understand, even the removal of Ghostbusters, but this one seems completely indefensible. He's listing species that are dangerous, so it makes more sense to use a biology-type word like "adult".
And as Quirrell is perfectly open later on in telling everyone that he believes Harry wishes to become a Dark Lord, and also that he still wishes to teach Harry how to defeat his foes, there's no reason for him to put on false airs and claim that all the students present will have Dark Wizards as their enemies. He even took "Defense Against Dark" out of the class's name for crying out loud!
I just reread this bit, while Harry and Quirrel are discussing where to hide things:
Or ideally you would launch it into space, with a cloak against detection, and a randomly fluctuating acceleration factor that would take it out of the Solar System.
I just noticed that this could be the in-world cause of the Cvbarre Rssrpg.
Chapter 83 on hpmor.com ends with a "you have reached the story's in-progress mark" note even though it is no longer the latest chapter.
When Dumbledore is entertaining the possibility that shade!Voldemort possessed Hermione he doesn't say "But we know that's not the case because the back of her head isn't deformed."
More generally, there's been lots and lots of specific changes to how magic in general and certain magics in particular work. Forex: in canon there's no such thing as "magical exhaustion". Basically everything about Transfiguration is different. Combat is different, and far more detailed.
The natural answer is the latter right? Well yes, except the part where you have to hand a criminal whose crime was severe enough to warrant stripping some of his magic a wand and give him enough mental breathing room to perform a complicated, powerful ritual. Some of them are just gonna go along with it, sure, but you only gotta have one high-profile screwup before that kind of a policy is abolished.
Or, you could think strategically for a few minutes then, for example, only give magic wands to wizards for this purpose after they have themselves sworn unbreakable vows that would prevent any misuse.
The implication of the next part was that IF there was a different spirit anywhere in harry it would be participating in the conversation. Considering how frank the hat is about Harry's potential for evil, I don't think it would have lied in a petty fashion like this.
But then, we had decent reason to take for granted that Lucius thought Harry was Voldemort, until we learned a couple of chapters ago of the mysterious unnamed hero from the seventies.
Am I misreading you, or do you think the new information about Noble Hero is evidence against the idea that Lucius thinks Harry is Voldemort? If that's so, could you elaborate as to why?
Yeah, eh, that statement was actually based on a major stupid error that I didn't realize was a major stupid error until I tried to type it just now. Quirrell's Yule speech made Amelia Bones think Quirrell was this Noble Hero; Harry's Yule speech made Lucius Malfoy think Harry was… someone. I stupidly pattern-matched this Noble Hero into that blank, somehow forgetting the fact that the speeches involved were not the same or made by the same person and were in fact in direct opposition to one another. If I hadn't been so coy about it I would have discovered this before embarrassing myself.
Everyone can use Crocker's Rules on me unless I tell them to stop.
As per my standard policy I decline your invitation - because most of the social consequences for the speaker who follows said rules are not significantly influenced by the declaration.
Also, when people say "Make yourself at home" I don't start walking around naked and eating all the food. In fact, in my typical experience when people actually say that I find that more formality and protocol is indicated than in more casual interactions where nobody considers the need.
(This isn't a critique of your motives. It's me expressing little faith in this particular signalling mechanism.)
I read the above (grandparent) comment not as "You're being hurtful, I don't like you, leave me be", but instead as "I can tell that everything you say is a veiled insult, everyone's against me, I am being punished by shadowy figures, when I act poorly it's your fault". Am I missing something?
I was anticipating that people would evaluate my comments based on the arguments I made rather than on their general tone and I didn't update when that was obviously false which was a big mistake.
Even once Harry-potter related arguments are granted you you are left with a bunch of arguments about humans, their words, their behaviors and their motives that are objectively wrong too. The fact that their intent was interpersonal incivility does nothing to excuse the fact that the reasoning contained therein was naive, irrational and all around terrible th...
I had forgotten about the vow to Draco. Maybe that was some of Harry's anger at Dumbledore in the previous chapter - not just denial of what Dumbledore may have done, but denial of what he might do about it.
I don't know if anyone discussed this before, but it's been bugging me for a while.
It's supposed to be impossible to bring information back more than six hours with any combination of time turners. The obvious method would be that once someone delivers a message to you from the future, you can no longer go back in time further than six hours before when they're from. This wouldn't really work. Every time you travel back, you bring the information that you were not stopped by a time-traveler. Either the time turner never works, or anyone that's going to use...
Even though Harry doesn't have magical-love-protection, I think we should take note of the fact that it's probably still in play and fairly broken.
If Quirrell could get Bellatrix to take a deadly spell from for him, he'd have Love's permanent protection against Dumbledore(if that were the caster). And, with the right amount of cleverness, he could probably arrange for her death to protect all death-eaters in the same way Harry provided protection to all of Hogwarts.
Frankly I wouldn't put it past Dumbledore to arrange for something similiar, for the greater good.
Chapter 23:
If Harry is correct about how magic is inherited, this idea can bring some interesting issues in future chapters. Short resume of Harry's idea: there are recessive magic gene (M) and dominant non-magic gene (N). Magic users have two magic genes (MM), and pair of them are needed to work with magic. Squibs have one magic gene (MN) and muggles have two non-magic genes (NN) all of them can't do magic.
First, how squibs appears? Actually people with MN genes can live between muggles because muggle-borg wizards and witches are born from parents with MN...
Some predictions for the next arc and beyond:
This last arc ended ominously; I think we're perilously close to seeing some serious shit. I assigned low probability to this happening in the next arc because Eliezer said the next arc picks up immediately after this one. We're still in April, and I have this hunch that maybe Harry's "What do I get if I can make it happen on the last day of school?" line to ...
Can't you have mixed states that are stable or at least self-consistent? Something like there's a 50% chance you go back and kill your grandfather and there's then a 50% chance you don't exist? I seem to remember David Deutsch discussing something similar at one point.
I just noticed that JKR has identified canon!Draco's wife (which is glimpsed at and never named in the epilogue of Deathly Hallows) as "Astoria Greengrass", Daphne Greengrass's younger (by two years) sister.
I wonder if Eliezer knew of this, and if that's part of the reason he made House Greengrass a "Noble and Most Ancient" one...
It was a lame joke about Dumbledore making Harry protect his Horcrux by telling him it was his Father's Rock. Nevermind me...
IIRC, it’s not actually easier to make iron (you need higher temperatures), but the ore is more easy to obtain. Copper and tin ores are rarely found together, so you need long-range trading to make lots of bronze.
Tom Riddle: "And how exactly does one split his soul?"
Slughorn: "Well, you must understand that the soul is supposed to remain intact and whole. Splitting it is an act of violation, it is against nature."
Tom Riddle: "But how do you do it?"
Slughorn: "By an act of evil -- the supreme act of evil. By committing murder. Killing rips the soul apart. The wizard intent upon creating a Horcrux would use the damage to his advantage: he would encase the torn portion --"
MoR!Horcrux might be different, but it seems likely tha...
You know, this sounds terrible but might be able to put the abortion debate to rest using the creation of a Horcruxes. It would be a horrible violation of human rights and ethics, but you could nail down the exact moment it became murder with enough testing. (Edit: I suppose you could do this on fetuses already slated for abortion anyways to avoid the ethical dilemmas.)
I wonder if pro-lifers and pro-choicers would have different threshholds for age required when to create a horcrux. And if so, I wonder if it would it be possible to create a horcrux with a murder that exists entirely within the mind of the murderer (eg, fake murder like in the Milgram experiment).
It's probably best that I'm not a wizard scientist.
So after thinking about it some more, I came up with a possible rationale/rationalization why a wizard's death might be needed.
Assume the "script kiddy magic" theory is right - A powerful wizard can be bind complex magic into a simple to execute script, with a key phrase (and/or emotion or gesture). Thus it wasn't some perverse law of the universe that decided "Wingardium Leviosa" is how levitation is activated, but some perverse ancient wizard.
A Horcrux stores an image of you, and the activation sequence is bound to the death of a wizard. It was meant to be an emergency backup script, activated on the death of the wizard. I.e. the ancient who created it was thinking that when a wizard dies, they would automatically be backed up into a Horcrux. This explains where ghosts come from, and why the ghosts we know of were all wizards. Later, someone figured out how to activate the script without dying. Unfortunately, the method they discovered involved killing another wizard.
A backup is limited by the hardware that runs it, so ghosts, which can only barely be said to run, don't seem like real people. They have limited ability to form new memories, so they seem more l...
Additionally, it seems (at least in cannon) that making a Horcrux mutilates the person, damaging (or completely destroying) his ability to love, use empathy, ... so from an utilitarian point of view, it's not "a lot of life years" again "a few life years" but "a lot of years living a mutilated life" against "a few years living a complete life", which is not the same.
And if horcruxing really gets rid of empathy, love and related emotions, it's likely that if it were generalized, the whole society would collapse - leading to lots of negative utility.
I'm confused. I'm curious.
Can you see his point of view?
Do you understand why people (me included) feel that you under-clarify your arguments?
Do you realise that we (me, and I guess thornblake as well) do not mean you any harm? That harming you could not possibly help us (sorry, it could, marginally so, if it actually had a behavioural impact)?
Furthermore, it is hard to get social benefits from downvoting, since others can't see anyone downvote you. This does NOT have the same social effect as denouncing something in public.
I do expect that this specific comment will receive a minus or two because it's not a capitulation
Thinking in terms of "capitulation" or similar notions of losing, winning and surrender is not helpful. One doesn't update views as much when one feels like something is at risk of being lost. Trying not to think that way may be helpful.
there's no reason I would want to be polite with people who see no problem being rude to me.
Then expect to be downvoted - anyone else being rude to you will be downvoted as well (not necessarily on net).
...By "groupthink" I mean that people are disagreeing with me simply because other people are disagreeing with me and because I already have negative karma. I also mean that they aren't considering my arguments fairly, they're only looking at the issue from a one sided perspectively. I'm pretty sure that this is a standard interpretation of what
Oh, I see your argument now (not that I think it's decisive enough to make you interpretation "clearly" the correct one, but, you know, whatever) - notice though that there was no way I could have guessed it from the great^3-grandparent. I would have said that's why you were downvoted initially, but looking through your comment history it's quite possible there is someone automatically downvoting your comments regardless of content, in which case I really don't know what to tell you. Sorry about that.
And from what he imagines the future will think. Updating on evidence that hasn't arrived yet?
That is still updating based on evidence that he already has albeit via a possibly dubious application of imagination to make predictions.
EDIT: is the negative karma a mere "I think differently" or did I do something objectionable?
No idea.
You can if nearby Everett branches reinforce each other and 'bleed over' into each other. Then you wind up with a bifurcation diagram, with each path's "weight" based on the number of other paths that are close/similar enough to reinforce it, and some paths can converge into the internal appearance of a stable time loop.
Latest Author's Note Update.
There’s a chance here to reach up toward that impossible dream of a better world where people aren’t crazy all the damn time, because believe it or not, nobody’s really tried anything like this before. [...] Science, reason, and rationality – it’s what Muggles use instead of magic, and it’s all we’ve got.
I thought it was really inspiring.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pet_Rock
I have an untrustworthy feeling like I must have been the only person around here who didn't realize this.
Let's look at Phoenix Fire transport for a minute, shall we?
First off, Dumbledore uses it. That needs no documentation, I hope.
Secondly, he uses it to transport Trelawney:
“He is coming,” said a huge hollow voice that cut through all conversation like a sword of ice. “The one who will tear apart the very—” Dumbledore had leapt out of his throne and run straight over the Head Table and seized hold of the woman speaking those awful words, Fawkes had appeared in a flash, and all three of them vanished in a crack of fire.
Thirdly, he uses it to transport He...
I'm very much in favor of removing the Ghostbusters song from canon, and putting it in the Omakes.
If I were Quirrell, and I wanted Hermione out of Hogwarts, and Dumbledore has warded her against magic, and I failed to convince her to leave, what would I try next?
I would identify those people who have the most influence over her, and attempt to convince them to convince her to leave. Who have we seen to have influence over her? By "influence", I mean that she respects them or might for some reason listen to them. Harry, Dumbledore, McGonagall, Flitwick, Mandy, her parents.
Quirrell likely won't be able to (or won't attempt to) talk Dumbledore, ...
There has been some confusion on how the time turners work and whether they are compatible with relativity.
This comment is meant to explain the simplified mechanics of it, as outlined in the User Manual.
Time turner keeps track of its world line for up to 6 hours back. When activated, it creates a branch of the whole Universe inside the past lightcone of the spacetime point on that world line and transports the wearer to that branch.
FAQ:
Q. Why is my time turner limited to just 6 hours? A. Time turner has to keep track of your personal past well enough to
..."Additionally, I reject (his?) claim that "the downvotes come from you making a claim about the quoted text that doesn't seem particularly well supported". -6 doesn't happen as a result of a factual mistake, nor does +9 for a clever rationalization; both happen as a result of dislike for me as a person and because of social influences and not as a result of a flawed claim. The intensity of reactions to my posts got much stronger as it became apparent that rejecting my arguments was the hip new trend that all the cool kids were doing."
I have upvoted this comment. Even though I'm not thrilled with the way chaosmosis has been conducting emself, "You're being hurtful, I don't like you, leave me be" is a reasonable sentiment and doesn't need to be attacked.
I downvoted the comment as a (mildly) inappropriate personal attack. It's not all that much different in nature to other acts of social aggression against the reputation of an individual. Occasionally a context will arise where such an utterance is justified but this isn't one of them.
Regarding the 'leave me be' in particular...
Mere dualism isn't enough to save libertarian free will. To the extent your decision is characteristic of you it is at least in principle predictable, at least probabilistically. The non-predictable component of your decision process is by necessity not even in principle distinguishable from that of Gandhi or Hitler in any way. So how can you call the result of the non-predictable component deciding with your free will?
Upon further consideration, I'm not sure that's true.
I agree with your second thought. Those two don't qualitatively change the meaningfulness of the term.
I'd actually say that the passage quoted makes the horcrux theory marginally less likely. Wouldn't a horcrux be more universal?
And the reason for downvotes is generally some combination of overconfidence, poor thought, and rudeness. You've managed the first two fairly well, and so -6. Or -7, rather.
So, Mr. Potter made an ominous resolution, and again without a thunder rumbling in the background... Instead, he caused women all around the globe to see nightmares and cry... I don't remember if seers tend to be female in canon or not. I find the fact that seers, while living in different places and being of different age, are invariantly female, suspicious.
The problem is you stated "if you assume both free will and..." as though free will is a thing that exists.
See free will on the wiki. (This is supposed to be a kind of do-it-yourself exercise; the page I linked has spoiler alerts you might want to pay attention to.)
Never mind, the "far too few" comment Harry makes during the trial means you're likely correct.
It may be better to put it like this: "if there are many worlds, then time travel would generally create loops across worlds; it does not force consistency within a single world".
However, if the Source of Magic is careful how it sets up the loops, it can force a consistent outcome, or at least force one of the consistent outcomes to become much more probable than any inconsistent outcome (one which loops between worlds). In particular this still allows any NP problem, or indeed any PSPACE problem, to be solved in polynomial time using tricks lik...
I recently came across an old comment decrying the fact that so many readers fail to conclude that Quirrell is possessed by Voldemort (it's so obvious, anyone who disagrees must be horribly biased, was the idea.)
Could anyone who actually thinks this step forward? I'm kinda curious as to how accurate that comment is, even now.
I am fairly sure that books can still contain information about spells and magic which is oblique or in the form of a riddle. The vast majority of wizards are insufficiently clever and dedicated to discover and then unravel the meanings of such riddles.
This is literally my favorite part of the HPMOR magic system - the fact that it is a magic system designed to reward Conscientiousness. There doesn't seem to be such a thing as "innate power levels" in HPMOR. If Voldemort and Dumbledore are strong, it is for the same reason that Hermione is stro...
I figured out an exploit to make Horcrux users even more invincible.
A. If you make a Horcrux, you cannot be destroyed unless your Horcrux is destroyed.
B. People can be Horcruxes.
QED if one person turns another into a Horcrux and the other reciprocates then they have foolproof immortality.
This method also has three other benefits over the Dark Lord's attempt, that I can think of. First, it requires only two murders, not seven. Second, it causes twice as many people to become immortal. Third, you'll retain a much larger portion of your soul than you would otherwise, and avoid much of the consequent degeneration.
Quirrelmort is playing on the level below mine, clearly.
What's exactly the next step after I notice I'm confused?
...How? How? In retrospect it had been an obvious sort of idea as cunning plots went, but Granger wasn't supposed to be cunning! She'd been too much of a Hufflepuff to use a Simple Strike Hex! Had Professor Quirrell been advising her despite his promise, or...
And then Draco finally did what he should have done much earlier.
What he should have done after the first time he met with Granger.
What Harry Potter had told him to do, trained him to do, and yet Harry had also warned Draco that it would take tim
Who would win in a fight, Harry Potter-Evans-Verres, or the Harry Potter from Wizard People, Dear Reader?
Beware the Löbian death spiral.
Lbh ner ersreevat gb qr-choyvfurq zngrevny, juvpu nf sne nf V'z pbaprearq qbrf abg rkvfg. Nalguvat gung Ryvrmre unf jvguqenja sebz pnaba, ur vf serr gb punatr ng jvyy. Zl vzcerffvba (V qba'g ernq zbfg bs gur UCZBE guernqf) vf gung gung pbzzrag bs Ryvrmre'f, juvpu ab ybatre rkvfgf, vf gur fbyr fbhepr sbe D=I. V nyfb abgr gung gur Cvbarre vapvqrag unccrarq jryy orsber gur riragf bs UCZBE; jurgure D jnf= I gura V qba'g unir na bcvavba ba.
I gave in-world reasons, based purely on published HPMOR canon, for thinking Q != V. A meta-...
Did anybody get hold of that python code by GJM (mentioned in A/N and supposed to be on the official fb page) I went ahead and created a new fb A/C(despite my better judgement) but couldn't get hold of the code. I want to get and play around the code.
Another way to look at this (link me if someone's said this already) is as repeated matches of the Prisoner's Dilemma. The winning strategy tends to be "Start nice then match what the other guy does." So if Harry's considering this Hermione/Draco thing as the beginning of Harry vs. Voldemort (prophecy baby wouldn't count to him), no one died, it's fairly obvious that no one was meant to die (well, after ten years Hermione might have been dead, but that wasn't a given, Bellatrix and others from the last war have survived a decade), so Harry can hang on to his "no killing yet" stance for now.
Please stop commenting on my comments for a while unless you're actually making an argument instead of A Witty Remark.
I'll interpret this like Alicorn did, and stop responding to your comments. We do have a weak norm in favor of respecting such requests.
If you'd actually like answers to the questions you posed in the parent, please restate them in a more readable fashion and let me know you actually would like a response.
Standard Disclaimer: I do not want thomblake's opinion on this comment.
I advise against inserting this into comments. I also advise against mentioning thomblake in general; you should be aiming for and holding up your end of mutual nonmention and nonreply.
What arguments about humans and their behaviors and motives did I even make here?
Specific humans, their behaviors and motives. For example accusing someone of being disingenuous hits all three checkboxes.
I don't think I made any. I think you just wanted to make a list so that you could act as though that summarized everything I've said so that you could conclude I was wrong without actually discussing specific things that I wrote.
I think you are saying more false things about a human, his behavior and his motives.
...I'm pretty sure that Nietzsche wa
I don't feel a need to oppose every argument made against what I've said.
Probably a good quality.
It is possible that he means that more likely than if the comment were already in the positives. It might be interesting to compare the voting patterns in this regard of people who do or do not use the anti-kibbitzer.
I was originally going to complain because Web of Angels was published in late 1992, but then I realized that's a reprint by a different publisher.
Please stop being stupid.
Please stop being rude.
Note: we have community norms against exactly one of these.
Note:
The process of true Bayesians coming to agreement bears precious little resemblance to a typical human argument.
;
You've been willfully ignorant and willfully misinterpreted me
You have a bad model of me.
Either you are being irrational or Aumann is wrong
Aumann's Agreement Theorem only applies to perfectly rational agents in particular idealized circumstances, as much as it's used colloquially hereabouts as though it says anything about humans.
And yes, I'm being massively irrational. I am a human. You are also being massively irrational. ...
Are Harry's Slytherin,etc. sides characters with different values or different beliefs?
If the later, his decision sounds crazy. Could his estimate as to the plausibility of Superman-Plan really be so finely balanced that a single death would push Utilitarian-Scheming ahead?
Well either being superman is possible, and he CAN save everyone, or it's not and he can't. Once he fails to save someone, it's clear he's not living in a world where he can save everyone. Once you're in a world where it's impossible to save everyone, trying to be superman is now a decision that's off the table.
Hrm. Less content than I hoped for, given how long we get to wait for more. Still, sounds like Harry just grew up a whole lot that night, and he made a pretty okay decision(even if it will inevitably bite him in the ass later on, narrativium being what it is).
Crossposted from the WMG page.
Under the potion conservation rule, creating an Elixir of Life would require inputting some sort of immortality. Fawkes killed Narcissa to create an Elixir ingredient.
Edit: I'm an idiot.
A small idea, how time turners may work, or how it can be described in the future chapters:
Let's assume that real travel back in time is not possible. But we can have mysterious source of magic somewhere, and this thing can be supercomputer or (and) superintelligence capable of correct prediction of events that will happen in some limited volume of space and time. And this superbeing can predict activation of time turner in future, predict mental and physical state of the person who will do that and create a copy of this person in the present time. "M...
I could benefit from using the hiatus time to reread MOR and make notes of anything that seems significant in light of 85 chapters' worth of perspective. This would be even more productive if some number of us read and analyzed together, I believe. Anyone care to join in such an endeavour?
In that case you are completely correct! But I think the counteropinion generally being expressed here, if not clearly, is that prisons are extremely brutal.
That's not exactly an undisputed assertion.
Penitentiaries were name for the theory that prisoners should be penitent. More generally, rehabilitation is often a purpose of imprisonment.
It's a factor for every US federal judge to consider when deciding what sentence to impose. In fairness, 3553(a) authorizes a judge to consider just about anything - it's totally agnostic as to the appropriate theory of punishment.
Was anyone else extremely annoyed when it turned out that Harry was a Horcrux in canon?
I thought it was ridiculous for a few reasons:
"Soul" generally means personality, no hint of Harry having an evil personality appeared until book 6, and even that was active possession so it hardly counts. I'm currently of the opinion that she made up the idea to turn him into a Horcrux halfway through the series because of the total lack of any evidence at all prior to book 6.
The idea that you can "accidentally" perform a complex secret Dark ritu
As far as I can tell from my limited research, it appears to be a combination of the SCP Foundation's "Object Classes" with a hypothetical new object class "Roko" which I believe to be named for an LW user who appears to no longer exist, but made a post at some point (the best I can establish is that it had to be prior to December 2010), presenting some idea which later came to be called a "basilisk", because the very knowledge of it was judged by some to be potentially harmful and unsettling. The post was deleted, although it...
I was anticipating that people would evaluate my comments based on the arguments I made rather than on their general tone
The content of comments usually matters more than the tone because usually the tone is OK; you only "lose points" for a bad tone (which is rare), you won't get a lot of credit here if you combine lousy arguments with a great presentation (unlike on say a TV show).
You may want to look into Crocker's Rules, which have been invoked a few times here, and cause much less friction than your "reverse Crocker's Rules".
I've always hated (not really but I've always disliked) people who take pains to be polite in discourse
Ironically, in the other thread you complained that my tone was too rude/snippy/paternalistic/whatever. In that thread I conceded that I was probably being a bit rude. In this thread you're complaining that I'm paying attention to being polite.
So it seems that either being rude or being polite, either paying too little or too much attention to manners, will get you to insult and attack other people. Downvoted.
The Reddit thing is reasoning by anology at best because the argument is that curation is key to stop useless things from becoming popular. You're also completely shifting the Reddit thing from what you initially said it was supposed to show, from "curation key to stop LessWrong to becoming Reddit" to "it shows why curation is important", where the reason it was important was "because it stops Reddit" but yet you conceded that the reason it's important is not "because it stops Reddit", there's an implicit contradicti...
And from what he imagines the future will think.
And where does he learn how to imagine about the future? From the past, or from his fiction?
I wasn't referring to the actual vote, but rather to the reaction to Harry's speech.
Some of the members of the Wizengamot were looking abashed at the Boy-Who-Lived's admonition, and a few others were nodding violently to the old wizard's words. But they were too few. Harry could see it. They were too few.
And that's just those who agree that Children shouldn't be exposed to dementors, and it seems to be like it's <20%. It's probably only around .1% of the population who don't want anyone of any age given to the Dead Things.
Relevant link which FYI was the first thing I got when googling for "Dust Specks vs Torture".
Edit: Actually the second link listed is more direct.
So the issue here is that we might have three points x, y and z, where x and y have a space-like separation, y and z have a time-like or null separation (which is future pointing from y to z) and x and z have a space-like separation. Further, d(x,y) < 6 (measured in light hours), but d(x,z) > 6.
If so, then the principle I described would prevent information passing from x to z. So it either prevents information transmission from x to y; or if a Time-Turner has already been used to get info from x to y, prevents the further transmission from y to z. T...
Why doesn't voldemort have a source of prophecies? If I were him, I'd have kidnapped a known seer, and kept them locked up inside a mountain, or something like that, and recorded their output like it seems dumbledore does. Every power he sees he tries to take for himself, etc..
To clarify, this is only weak evidence in favor of Nornagest's theory, but it seems like we shouldn't be postulating evil mutants without considering other possibilities.
I like the new changes to chapter 7 (I'm not sure how long they've been up). The conversation between Harry and Draco flows better, makes more sense for the characters, and the force of the original text is still present.
Two thumbs up!
Did anyone else think there was no reason Neville should have noticed he was talking to Harry Potter when he was first introduced? I had a firm impression Harry was putting on the scarf when Hermione answered the door.
Hello, could anybody put all chapters in single HTML file?
You already can load all chapters in PDF, EPUB and MOBI formats of ebook, and there are exist links in main page of hpmor.com , but HTML is also format of ebooks and modern browsers have all eReader's features (like: story page position, marks, notes, user styles, and other...), I can say more - my web browser is my favourite eReader)))
So, please add link to single HTML file with all chapters to front page of hpmor.com .
Thankful in advance, alexqwesa.
I was rereading Three Worlds Collide tonight, and a passage caught my eye:
...On screen was the majesty that was the star Huygens, of the inhabited planet Huygens IV. Overlaid in false color was the recirculating loop of Alderson forces which the Impossible had steadily fed.
Fusion was now increasing in the star, as the Alderson forces encouraged nuclear barriers to break down; and the more fusions occurred, the more Alderson force was generated. Round and round it went. All the work of the Impossible, the full frantic output of their stardrive, had only s
I only just realized that Harry must have purchased that Spoon +4 in Diagon Alley, since he's not capable of wandless magic and we never hear of him using a wand when his spoon is stirring his cereal for him.
Interestingly, I also thought that the green goggles mentioned in the same sentence were a Wizard of Oz shoutout -- but they turned out to have an in-story use as well. When will we see bounce boots, knives +3, and forks +2?
The Deathly Hallows need to appear in Quirrell's motivations at some point.
Why? They didn't in the original canon, and while they're useful, there's no obvious reason whatever he's planning must hinge on using them.
I'm twenty-one, and I'm hell of a lot dumber than him in every aspect - despite having an IQ in the top one percent of humanity (135).
Its going to be very interesting if Eliezer manages to top all the fan theories surrounding Quirrell. They have a lot in common, but each one is uniquely fitting and poetic. I'm starting to get the feeling that we're gonna get a curve ball that goes completely against our speculations.
I infer that your intuitions differ from mine but you don't have any cites handy either.
Fair enough.
Updated, to a degree proportional to my confidence in the reliability of your intuition on this matter, in your direction.
it looks like it's saying that Dumbledore used four twists of his time-turner to make it to breakfast.
Well, I think the repeated and explicit naming of Harry's Dark Side as a thing within and separate from the rest of Harry is a decent reason to take for granted that Harry's a horcrux.
Take for granted? Maybe Harry has read some IFS stuff in with all the cognitive science, math, philosophy, modern physics, and other things that he's read.
I believe the reason is that iron weapons are easier to make, hence you can field larger armies.
That roughly the same as my understanding of the advantage of basic iron vs bronze.
I haven't been able to discuss the ending because no one I know has finished the series.
I hate to disappoint you, but I am one of those people :-( I am going through the series on audiobook, which means that I make progress on it only during long trips. I was pretty disappointed by the 4th installment, Wizard and Glass, because it's basically a giant flashback where very little actually happens, so my reading speed declined sharply after that...
The next discussion thread is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: