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DanArmak comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Meh. He declares war on Azkaban, not on Death. I suppose it could be read (very) broadly to mean he declares war on severe torture.
If only he'd shut up and calculate, he'd realize that to prevent the largest amount of suffering he should dedicate his life to researching magical means of granting immortality to everyone, like the Philosopher's Stone.
He was already at war with Death, AND with Azkaban/severe torture. The big character-shift in 63 is that he no longer believes in democracy. If he becomes God, he will not necessarily be a CEV, he'll do what he personally believes to be right.
Democracy isn't CEV. People will vote for all sorts of things when they're not as good or smart as they could be.
Granting immortality is not the same as preventing suffering. Maximizing life span may in fact maximize the opportunities for suffering.
Future suffering or death must be discounted to provide a present value. It is more valuable to save a life now than to save a life a year from now, all else being equal.
Harry would also have to consider opportunity costs and the likelihood of success. He knows that dementors can be killed now. Finding an acceptable magical approach to immortality is less certain, and may actually take more time to develop than a non-magical approach. Harry's optimal approach may be to kill dementors now, research the nature of magic, and to wait for muggle science to find immortality.
I question the extent to which the two goals have to be juggled in any case, since he already knows how to kill Dementors, and isn't willing to throw his life away to destroy them, which would be the main conflict. Destroying the Dementors is now a tactical issue that need only concern him when playing politics, so the only way it interferes with his transhumanist goals is if his politicking interferes with his research more-so than it would have if he weren't doing it with Dementor destruction in mind.
It seems pretty clear that Harry's opposition to Azkaban is because of the Dementors. He isn't opposed to prisons in general, and all of his emotive thinking about Azkaban has centered on the Dementors.
And we've established that the Dementors are, in the HP:MORverse, instances of Death. I'll admit that I haven't the foggiest clue what that actually means, but that's kind of true of pretty much all magic; I accept it on narrative grounds.
So I stand by the original statement.
Harry is opposed to people feeding other people to Dementors, slowly, over many years, until they die. If Dementors were just dangerous evil creatures roaming out there and occasionally killing unlucky people who didn't Apparate away in time - like trolls, or dragons - Harry wouldn't care much about them and their association with Death.
This is precisely what I'm saying: he previously swore to end death (not just Dementors!) but now he's swearing to end Azkaban - a much smaller goal. In fact it's insignificant in comparison. Let's hope it doesn't get exclusive priority on Harry's time.
I don't think the important thing in Ch. 63 is that Harry changed his goals (you're right, he didn't really) but that he changed the methods he's willing to consider. The long-term argument (since chapter 35) between Harry and Quirrell has been about the utility of democracy. When Harry declared himself with the 3 and against the 47, he is acknowledging (at least the way I read it) a willingness to become a benevolent dictator if necessary.
Agreed that taking out the Dementors is a relatively narrow goal compared to other goals he might have adopted instead. (Like immortality, or unlimited Fun, or whatever.) He's only human: it may take him another year or two to completely reshape the universe.
The fact remains that he just made a commitment to oppose Death, in a universe where Death really does seem to be something other than just death, and (unlike his previous oaths and determinations) this declaration seems to have had some implications in terms of the foreseeable future.
"Humanism" suggests he'd technically want to eliminate them anyway, and as it turns out this desire seems wise. Dementors can breed (asexually) if whatever makes decisions for them decides to prepare for more victims. It happened in canon. In the absence of any Patronus 2.0 this seems like an existential risk or a risk of an unpleasant future for humanity, depending on how the Dementor decision maker works. And again, given the existence of Dolores Umbridge with her canon use of Dementors, I see no reason to believe that every present and future Ministry official will refrain from offering them Muggles. Nor does it seem wise to wait until Dementors start multiplying before reducing their numbers.
Now, Harry doesn't know all this, but "hole in the world" sure sounds like a possible threat to humanity's existence. He must believe in a non-zero risk from Azkaban. Logically Harry should ask if this risk exceeds the Star Goat or Anti-Pascal's probability. (Example: the chance of cryonics working, in any particular case, seems to far exceed the Star Goat probability of it interfering with or preventing an afterlife.) And neither his pessimistic mentor nor his conditionally pro-death mentor seems to consider the chance of ending humanity through killing Dementors worth mentioning.