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iemfi comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 12 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why is everyone 100% convinced that Voldemort is Quirrell?
In my read through I would have given that outcome a very low probability because it seems too obvious and the authour explicitly makes fun of it in one of the first few chapters.
The trick is to ignore personality. Never mind how calm or mean someone seems. Just ask: which characters show actions and knowledge that are distinctive to Voldemort?
In canon, Quirrell could not touch Harry because he was Voldemort. In the fic, Harry and Quirrell also cannot touch.
In canon, a Horcruxed object becomes especially long-lived and durable, and the maker of the Horcrux tries to hide it or get it out of others' reach. In the fic, Quirrell tells Harry he enchanted the Voyager 2 space probe to make it super-durable, and talks to Harry about where to lose objects so they'd never be found.
Voldemort knew how he behaved with Bellatrix Black, and is almost the only person with strong reason to rescue her. Quirrell knows and tells Harry how to behave with Bellatrix Black, and persuades Harry to rescue her.
Dumbledore identifies the Bellatrix rescue as bearing the style of Voldemort. Quirrell designed the Bellatrix rescue.
Dumbledore identifies the Hermione frame as having been done by Voldemort. Quirrell was the one who found the bodies, and is the only wizard in Hogwarts we know to be a post-Voldemort newcomer to Dumbledore's acquaintance.
"Quirrell" admits to the interrogating Auror that he is an imposter.
It's easy to miss because we don't think that a personality like Voldemort could turn so calm and un-sadistic as Quirrell. In fact that's the whole background to my post above -- that it's weird how much MoR!Quirrell's leadership style differs from MoR!Voldemort's. How could be so dumb in the past and so clearheaded now?
But once you allow for the possibility of a personality change, or an incredible Occlumens-style personality disguise, Quirrell is the overwhelming candidate. Just watch knowledge and action, not attitude.
past voldemort seeming dumb should also clearly be at least partially the effect of the winner's narrative. (is there some name for this?)
Hindsight bias.
If X happened, then X must have deserved to happen. In this case, if Voldemort failed, then our bias is to assume all Voldemort's choices must have been bad ones, and all of Voldemort's enemies' choices must have been good ones.
However, this is complicated when looking at a deliberately told story, because storytellers choose stories for being what they feel are representative cases of true things. In other words, just as there's a difference between you picking a card at random and me choosing a card and handing it to you, there's a difference between you looking at a random failed politician, and me choosing to tell you a story about a particular failed politician.
Thus, the original Harry Potter story represents Rowling's views about what matters, not a random selection from actual events, and so too HPMOR represents EY's views about what matters, not a random variation on the original story.
None of which means hindsight bias isn't an issue - but the storyteller's bias, or accurate judgment, is also an issue.
In this case, peculiarly, hindsight bias might be more likely than average, because the author of the story is trying to illustrate the challenges and methods of being rational.
I thought hindsight bias was specifically about believing something was higher probability than it really was simply because it did in fact happen.
I suppose what I mean is the collection of biases which causes people to choose interpretations of their past actions that reflecting favorably upon them.
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