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gRR comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 12 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I notice I am confused.
We, the readers, know directly about lots of evil things Quirrell has done (e.g. kill Skeeter, break Bellatrix out of prison). We have also used this knowledge to guess at nefarious motives in other, less obvious, cases: like guessing that he was trying to dement Harry, or guessing that he is Hat&Cloak, or guessing that he is constantly manipulating Harry for his own ends.
Dumbledore has access to none of this knowledge. To Dumbledore, Quirrell is an exceptional teacher of Battle Magic who has the interests of the students at heart. He does not appear to take part in politics, with the exception of his pro-unification speech after the battle in the lake.
Dumbledore thinks that Voldemort is "less than spirit, less than the meanest ghost." The ancient tales he found speak of "wizards possessed, doing mad deeds, claiming the names of Dark Lords thought defeated."
The two pictures don't fit together — Quirrell is not doing mad deeds nor claiming the name of the Dark Lord. It's true that Dumbledore knows Tom Riddle was exceptionally brilliant, but I don't think it's idiotic of him to not guess that maybe the old tales of past dark lords only told of the stupid ones, and that Riddle's style of possession would be different.
Wait, killing Skeeter was evil?
I was under the impression that that created a tremendous dose of positive utility for pretty much everyone. Readers included.
Author's notes for chapter 27.
Rita Skeeter deserving it and her death being a positive net utility to everyone are two very different things. I doubt, however, that her existence actually was a net negative, considering that she's simply fulfilling peoples' need for gossip, and if not her, someone else will.
Can you clarify what you mean to imply by the distinction between someone deserving death, and someone's death being a positive net-utility shift for everyone?
Certainly. If someone deserves death, that means that it is good for them to die, even if their death does not serve any further purpose. The death penalty is given to those who "deserve" to die.
In order for it to be a positive net utility for someone to die, the consequences of their living simply have to be worse than the consequences of their death. If someone has a stress-induced breakdown and goes on a shooting spree, it is better to kill them than not to kill them (by killing them you are averting more deaths), despite them not "deserving" to die in any meaningful sense.
The idea of someone deserving death in itself is deontological (some people must be punished and that's a rule) while talking about the net utility of whatever is consequentialist. Ethics should be impersonal (that is, treat everyone equally) so a consequentialist ethical system that doesn't approve of death in general should never approve of a death of any single person as an end in itself.
Generally, it seems to me that for a consequentialist, talking about an act or a person being evil should only be computational shortcuts over the real substance of moral reasoning (which consists of assigning utility to world-states). Like in the common example of an airplane that we describe using aerodynamics because that's convenient even though really it runs on the same fundamental laws as everything else. We tend to use those shortcuts reflexively without really thinking what we are trying to say in consequentialist terms.
This.
Of course, the deontological view does have its place, specifically where it precommits to punishing undesirable behaviors even if there is no benefit to doing so after the behavior has occurred.
But would you want to "[punish] undesirable behaviors even if there is no benefit to doing so after the behavior has occurred"?
I would want to pre-commit to punishing criminals after the fact if I thought this would lead to a world where the pos-util of averted crime outweighed the neg-util of punishing people, but not if there were no benefit, and I would be doing this on consequentialist grounds. (I'm basically asking if the deontological view truly "has its place' in this scenario.)
I disagree with your implication that there is no benefit to punishing undesirable behaviors after they have occurred... there sometimes is.
In cases where there is in fact no benefit, though, then the fact that holding a deontological view precommits me to doing so is not a reason for me to hold that view.
Some disagree. And beware of "should" statements regarding "ethics".
OK, thanks for clarifying.
FWIW, I don't share your model of what it means for someone to deserve death.
Out of curiousity, what is your model?
That the consequences of their living are worse than the consequences of their death.
It's really easy to feel a total lack of empathy for fictional characters, especially if they're the sort that nobody likes. I don't actually want to murder hack journalists, but it's pretty funny to do when there's no real human dying.
FTFY
Killing Skeeter is about the only truly questionable action of Quirrellmort that I can remember.
Even here, I find it hard to hold it against Quirrell. Rita made a career of libeling others, blithely unconcerned about the harm she caused to their lives. In fact, she seemed rather smug and self satisfied about exercising that power. Quirrell even confronted her and asked her to stop. She had a chance and chose not to take it. She was destroyed in the act of her preferred crime by the person she intended to harm.
I suppose I have a bit of Quirrell in me. He takes a grim satisfaction in the poetry of citizens being destroyed in the same prisons they demanded be built. The word for that is justice. A harsher justice than I'd want to seen meted out, but justice nevertheless. I wouldn't have squashed Skeeter, but I can't condemn Quirrell for it either.
And yes, Skeeter likely had children who would miss her. Just as good people have some bad, bad people have some good. Recognizing that the world is not black and white shouldn't stop you from seeing that some grays really are darker than others.
I would just like to point out the unintentional irony in that paragraph.
I'm afraid I can't spot it. Could you point it out for me?
Is probably precisely the rational people used when demanding the prisons be built.
Thank you, that makes it very clear.
Was it Quirrell or Voldemort who wiped out the martial arts school?
I don't think we have sufficient evidence to conclude that anyone did. All I witnessed as a reader was Quirrell telling a story that he used to make an ideological point. Why should I believe that story is true?
This is a point I've made elsewhere. What convincing evidence does the reader have of any of the horrific deeds of Voldemort/Quirrell?
The fact that his death is remembered as a national holiday seems pretty convincing evidence that he at least did something naughty.
That evidence is about as convincing as Christmas convinces me Jesus did something good.
However, because the figure Voldemort is not historical but a very recent event practically everyone in the wizarding world affirms to have existed and have been responsible for murders, then we have to choose between the alternative theories that practically the entire wizarding world has been deluding into believing the false story of the Dark Wizard Voldemort or else there was some Dark Wizard Voldemort.
My assessment is that it is more probably Voldemort existed, and was responsible for evil deeds.
If Christmas had been celebrated when Jesus was still a child, instead of being invented to undercut a pagan holiday three centuries later, I would actually regard that as pretty strong evidence.
wait, Quirrel killed Rita? Can any of you quote that part for me? I can't believe I skipped this one.
Squished her like a bug.
See Chapter 26:
(The stumbling happened earlier in the same chapter, Quirrell covered it though, feigning dizziness.)
Squished her as a bug.
There's a lot of stuff in the fic that's explained only indirectly, leaving the reader to infer the truth - the Pioneer Plaque horcrux; Malfoy's belief that Harry is Voldemort; that Dumbledore is partially responsible for the potion that cleared up Petunia's appearance; the solution to Rita Skeeter's mistaken evidence (though that was made explicit recently); Skeeter's death; the self-serving nature of Quirrell's "strengthening" of Harry (learning to lose, inability to testify under veritaserum, rescuing a former minion, etc); the list goes on...
Wait, breaking out Bellatrix was evil?
If you assume that Quirrel is Voldemort, then either he was lying and Bellatrix was just flat-out evil, or he MADE Bellatrix the way she is and presumably his motives for breaking her out have less to do with healing her and more to do with freeing his evil minion. It's possible Riddle's body had some sort of neurological problem that made him psychotic, which Quirrel does not share, making him regret his past actions, but I think this is unlikely and that he's still just evil.
I don't think anyone in HPMOR is "just evil". Just like no one is "just good".
Dementors are just evil. Fawkes is just good.
The problem is, Fawkes fits a little too well into the Spaceballs maxim - "Evil will always prevail, because good is dumb". Fawkes certainly has a purity of intent that'd put any of the human characters to shame, but the consequences are not always quite so good as would be hoped.
(Incidentally, the comparison you drew makes me notice something - if Harry is searching for eternal life, there's a path to resurrection that neither MoR!Harry nor canon!Voldemort has noticed - phoenixes seem pretty good at that sort of thing. Mentioning them as an absolute contrast to dementors makes me wonder just how strong an antithesis they actually are, and if that might be an answer.)
This is not a problem. Dementors are also not particularly cunning; there are other players.
I think I viewed them more as forces than people. But is this WOG against the people pedanterrific refers to in this comment?
Against? How could a thing be pure evil if it's controlled by people's expectations of its behavior?
I'm confused. I may misunderstand you. Your second sentence seems to support that it would be evidence against, but I read your first as incredulous of my question.
ETA: Nevermind. I understand now. I did not phrase my question well. I meant WOG against the people that you are disagreeing with in the comment.
When you said this, did you mean my theory of independent decision making, or what I referred to as Harry's initial hypothesis?
I don’t think Eliezer meant that they’re necessarily sapient, only in the sense that one might say “slavery is evil” or (closer to the point) “death is evil”.
It's possible Quirrel will use Bella to perform an evil deed in the future. But breaking her out was, in itself, not evil.
Well, considering Quirrell is in custody, it can't hurt to look elsewhere. If Dumbledore doesn't bring Quirrell under heavy interrogation of his own after he is released, then I will be confused.
So the question is, does Quirrell know that the Map exists / is possible? If he does, either he's already beaten it or he can't risk ever going back to Hogwarts. If not, he's about to get caught by Dumbledore in the seat of his power while weakened.
I would be a little annoyed if Quirrell's circumvented the Map- it would be way more impressive if he arranged for the Great Quidditch Reform plus Ravenclaw and Slytherin winning the House Cup from outside Hogwarts.
Edit: I am wrong.
What will Quirrell display as on the Map? One would think that, if the Map read "VOLDEMORT", the Weasley twins would have figured it out. (There's an analogous, hilarious, inconsistency in canon; how did the twins never see Peter Pettigrew sleeping in Ron's bed?)
If Voldemort did steal Quirrell's body rather than use Polyjuice, he might just appear on the map as "Quirrell".
What makes you think they didn't?
</humor>
(The obvious answer to this inconsistency is that they had no reason to spy on their brother/the first-years' dorm, but... He used to be Percy's rat. They never spied on Percy? BS.)
Rowling's handwave was that, due to (iirc) worry over being discovered, they only took out the Map when they needed to scope out areas for their pranks, and then they always focused on the areas in question. They apparently never felt the need to use the Map to actually spy on anyone, and never bothered to look beyond what was needed for a prank. According to Rowling.
It wouldn't read Voldemort in any case; Dumbledore expects, and I have no reason to expect otherwise, that Voldemort would show up as Tom Riddle.
The Twins' POV mentions two errors in the Map, one constant and one intermittent. If Quirinus Quirrell sometimes (maybe whenever he's out of zombie-mode) reads as Tom Riddle, that would be the intermittent one, and if Quirrell and Riddle were constantly superimposed, that would be the constant. The Twins wouldn't necessarily think this was extremely suspicious; if they looked it up, they'd find a Tom Riddle was Head Boy in 1945, and nothing after that. (His identity wasn't common knowledge.)
Of course, both of those ideas have the problem that if Dumbledore ever talks to the Twins about the Map, the jig's up. So another possibility is that Quirrell did something (to himself or possibly the Map) to keep his name from showing on it correctly. If Quirrell's name is constantly (or only when out of zombie-mode) scrambled or blurred into illegibility, that would work too.
Quite right, I completely overlooked that.
However, this does raise an interesting and completely tangential question about the Map. How does it know everybody's name? What 'database' does it---or rather the enchantment that it is an interface for---make reference to?
An obvious answer would be birth certificates. It is not (too) unreasonable to suppose that wizards have them too, and that the Map is clever enough to map people to their birth certificates. I have no idea how it would do this, but in any case I don't think this can be how the Map works.
First, what if my birth certificate is destroyed? Of course I can get a replacement, but there will be a period in which there is nothing the Map can refer to in order to determine my name. It could 'cache' my information, I suppose. But what if a baby is born in Hogwarts? What does the Map say before the baby is named?
This leads into the second, larger, problem. The enchantment that the Map is an interface for is supposed to be part of the Hogwarts security system. I've gotten the impression that Hogwarts was raised all at once by the Founders; the enchantment in question would have been cast then. 'Then' is the 9th or 10th century, according to canon. "Civil registration" of births didn't begin in the United Kingdom until 1837. Prior to that I think births were often registered with churches, but surely there were many whose names had no official status; they had 'common-law' designations (this still must occur often).
So how does the Map work?
This discussion reminds me of the "Bag of zahav" experiment of Chapter 6.
And therefore the answer is "Magic, Mr. Potter" and "It just uses your name." This doesn't predict much, but it allows us to eliminate obviously nonmagical hypotheses like a database that reads in names announced during Sorting. That's just not how the Hogwarts founders would have thought about the problem.
I guess that a baby that hasn't yet received a name would be known as "Mr. Potter" or "The Potter baby" or something equally vague.
That doesn't mean the Founders could do the impossible. Saying that "it just uses your name" might be true, but it doesn't tell us how it can use your name. There must be a way that it works (although it may very well be that there is no consistent way-that-it-works that can be extracted from the text). Compare this to another example in which the creator of an artifact "thought about the problem" differently:
Broomsticks don't work the way we would expect them to work, because that's not how Celestria Relevo thought about the problem, but that doesn't meant there isn't a way that they work.
To clarify, what I believe is that magic works in a top-down way, not a reductionist way. If you were writing a computer program, you would have to specify where the name comes from and what to do in marginal cases. But the Founders believed that each individual came with an XML-tag name attached to them, and the map just tries to figure out that name.
I realize this is an incomplete theory because it doesn't explain what the map does in weird borderline cases (although I can make guesses). I am using this theory (which we can derive by comparing the map to Harry's pouch, and to broomsticks, and to Transfiguration) to reject hypotheses that involve a reductionist, computer-program approach to magic.
The Founders may have been Truenamers, in which case each person who walked in would have a singular name attached to them.
So the Map can't find married women?
My guess is that, in the world of HP:MoR, the Simulation Argument is true. Muggle science works within the boundaries of the simulation; magic operates directly on the underlying data structures, bypassing most of the Muggle-oriented interfaces by using debugging APIs. That's why it has rules that make some sort of sense, but that don't correspond to most laws of nature as Muggles understand them. Of course, the virtual machine that powers the "reality" of HP:MoR is fairly robust, which is why magic is relatively safe (i.e., you can't crash the whole of reality with a miscast Lumos), and also why magic is not all-powerful (those debugging APIs are still fairly limited).
My original guess at why names are needed for magic was that the Source of Magic uses the names as pointers to the information in other people's heads.
It's using everyone else's knowledge. This would explain why wizards can transfigure things which have been discovered but not created, like CNTs, but can't transfigure Alzheimer's cures. Sadly, this possibility would be undermined by 'Tom Riddle' appearing on the map, since almost everyone knows him as Voldemort.
From a Muggle point of view, maybe. From a Wizard point of view, that's probably the least obvious answer.
Your name is your name, and no piece of paper can grant it or take it away.
If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that a person's name would be something like "$givenName $familyName", such as "Harry Potter" or "Albus Dumbledore". The givenName is the name your parents gave you when you were a baby. The family name is the name of your Noble House ("Malfoy", "Potter", etc.), or simply the last name which your parents share ("Granger"). This is the naming convention that (as per my guess) wizards and witches have been using since the time of Merlin, so it's reasonable to assume that the creators of the Map imbued it with the same rules.
As to the question, "yes, but how does the Map compute the values of givenName and familyName for any specific person", the answer is, "Magic".
Also middle initials, apparently:
Ah, yes, good catch. Though we could probably count middle initials as part of the given name, since they are granted to the baby by its parents at the same time as the givenName... aren't they ? I'm actually not entirely sure how middle initials work in Britain.
If the world of HPMOR is some sort of simulation, as you claim, then this is true and significant; your name exists as a fixed value that can be referenced by a program like the Map. But if the world of HPMOR is more like our own, then to say "your name is your name" is pretty empty; like most everything else, there is an explanation of why your name is your name. In our world, what makes it true that we bear the names we do is not that we all have own values for the variable $name. Rather, what makes it true is some other fact; one possibility (one that I don't believe myself) is that what makes it true that my name is Alex is the fact that my birth certificate reads 'Alex'.
So I think our disagreement arises from what we think the world of HPMOR is like.
I think these are two separate issues.
One issue is concerned with the wizards' concept of names. The wizards who created the Map would seek to imbue it with whatever naming convention felt right to them.
The other issue is concerned with how the HP:MoR universe works, and which resources the Map can tap in order to implement its functionality.
These issues are somewhat related, but they aren't identical. We could very easily envision a world where names are stored on birth certificates, and yet the wizards still believe that, even if Mr. Harry Potter goes through life calling himself "Mr. Spoo", his name is still Harry Potter, because that's what his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Potter, called him. On the other hand, we could envision a world where names are stored in some underlying data structure in the simulation, and yet the wizards believe that what a person calls himself is more important than whatever name parents gave him. Or we could envision some combination of the two.
That said, IMO no wizard would conceive of actually perusing the birth certificate database for anything; nor would he deliberately enchant a map to do anything of the sort. For all we know, wizards and witches don't even have any birth certificates. It's pretty likely that, even if they do have birth certificates, they don't have any centralized databases that store them; we never seen any wizard use one, IIRC, neither in canon nor in MoR.
So, "how does the Map work ?" Well, it works the same way Harry's Mokeskin Pouch works: by magic.
Other than the "external database" option, the only other sources of name information I can think of are:
I feel that picking someone's name from their own mind seems the most elegant and consistent. It doesn't handle babies (Before the parents choose a name, can a baby even be said to have one? Babies would have to be special-cased regardless), but it does allow arbitrary people to be mapped (multiple strangers being indistinguishable from each other seems like a serious flaw in a security system) and requires no external registry. On the one hand, it seems like interrogating the mind of every human is vastly more complicated than just looking up the name in a database, but to the kind of epistemology which would seem obvious to a 9th-century witch or wizard I can see it being "obvious".
(And to respond to your question about Pettigrew in the great-grandparent, I would assume that the map skips over animals entirely, which would probably include animagi. This would tend to lend a slight amount of weight to my "the map displays your name as you know it" theory, as if the names came from how everyone else around you knew you there would be no reason not to include pets.)
If my theory is true, it raises an additional interesting question: Is it possible to obliviate yourself selectively so that you lose all knowledge of your own name? (Possibly storing the memories in a pensieve first so you can recover them later) And if so, is the map the only piece of the Hogwarts security system which might be impeded by this?
A further idea: Professor Quirrel is shown to take a very loose approach to identity and names ("Identity does not mean, to such as us, what it means to other people.") Possibly Quirrelmort is the constant error, not because his name is wrong, but because he doesn't have a name attached to his marker at all.
A large part of the plot of Prisoner of Azkaban hinges on the fact that Lupin noticed Pettigrew on the Map while he was in rat form.
In Quirrell's case, he may be a powerful enough Occulumens to prevent the Map from reading his mind and so learning his name (if your theory is correct).
I'm not saying this is true. But I hope it is because it would be awesome.
Maybe it works by a registry of current and former students and faculty at Hogwarts, and people who are neither show up as "Intruder (number)" or something. In modern Wizarding Britain this would include basically everyone.
I mean, if the Founders created the Map as part of the Hogwarts security system, they wouldn't have been all that concerned with putting a name on everyone who could possibly step foot on the grounds, they'd just want to be able to locate students and differentiate them from anyone else.
I can't remember, did the Beauxbatons and Durmstrang delegations show up on the Map in GoF? Not that it really matters, the canon!Map and MoR!Map are different enough that it wouldn't be much evidence.
This theory, unlike the birth certificate one, can easily explain how the Map matches people with names. During the Sorting, McGonagall reads aloud a name, and the next person who puts on the Sorting Hat is assigned that name. (Assuming the Hat is hooked up to the security system, or vice versa.)
Actually, that's even better- we have a known mechanism by which (something that could be hooked up to) the Hogwarts wards can read minds to determine names. So it actually doesn't require some extraneous piece of paper or database or whatever, but on the other hand would only work on people who've been Sorted.
So no foreign professors!
Possibly "Tom Riddle".
Is he really ? It seems to me like he's merely enjoying some R&R. Once he's done relaxing, he will Obliviate (or possibly just annihilate) the Auror, get up from his chair, stretch, and warp out of that room to the next destination on his agenda.
And we heavily suspect that once Quirrel returns to Hogwarts, the Marauder's Map will show Dumbledore Tom Riddle's name next to his location...
I don't.