Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 11

Oscar_Cunningham

EDIT: New discussion thread here.

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. With two chapters recently the previous thread has very quickly reached 500 comments. The latest chapter as of 17th March 2012 is Ch. 79.

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: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.

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:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.

EDIT: New discussion thread here.

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.

I didn't read the wikipedia article fully, and so didn't notice that it only hinted at the primary reason he was important.

The Islamic Golden Age, from ~750 to ~1250, was the period where Islam was the intellectual center of the world. Many Greek texts only survived because they had been preserved by Muslims and/or translated into Arabic, and scholars living in Muslim lands (Muslims, Christians, Jews, and atheists) were at the forefront of science, mathematics, and philosophy. Baghdad was the commercial and intellectual center of the world. Francis Bacon may have formalized the scientific method, but the main advance in empiricism before him came from al-Haytham, six hundred years earlier.

Al-Ghazali was an influential thinker who said that the Greek philosophers were ignorant infidels and that science and mathematics were dangerous because they could lead to loss of faith.

Ibn Rushd, famously depicted in the School of Athens, argued against Al-Ghazali- that the Greeks made valuable contributions, that science and mathematics were valuable. He was too little, too late; Muslim opinion swung Al-Ghazali's way, though a few Europeans took Ibn Rushd's arguments seriously, like Thomas Aquinas (who was also heavily influenced by Al-Ghazali, but agreed with Ibn Rushd's conclusions).

Al-Ghazali, essentially, was the intellectual standard-bearer for the movement to replace openness and inquiry with closedness and faith in the Muslim world. He can't be entirely blamed for the collapse of the Islamic Golden Age, as both the barbarous Christians and Mongols were beating on the doors, but that Islam never really recovered as an intellectual force appears to be centered around him.

(Neil de Grasse Tyson tells this story here (3:24), though he simplifies it somewhat.)

Is there a book you'd recommend on the thinkers of Al-Ghazali's time? The only one that came up for me in a quick Google on his name was a screed with all the hallmarks of cherry-picking history to support a point of view about present-day politics.