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Donny comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 12 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Where do prophecies come from?
The idea of Time itself designating some people and events as Important and composing vague poetry about them is incompatible with a universe that runs on simple physical laws and is obviously nonsense. Doubly so if those laws are actually timeless. I hope I can state this unequivocally.
If Eliezer wants to teach his readers that a hero can be anyone with the talent, courage, and conscientiousness to do what's right, that there are no auras of destiny, that heroes choose themselves, then he can't actually have the planet's operating system, the Source of Magic, amputating the characters' destinies by choosing which ones to promote to Power User status. Even if it has a naturalistic explanation, a story whose heroes are ordained by fate would teach the same lessons as Star Wars. While David Brin is reading it. And Eliezer wouldn't do that, right?
Dunno.
Depending on where you draw the line, anywhere from four to six false prophets have now appeared in the story. I assumed they were there to prime you - really, beat you over the head - with the idea that prophecies can be human fabrications. But perhaps Eliezer just likes to repeat himself.
Similarly, the repetition of Grindelwald's name should be priming us to accept his subsequent appearance in the story and not find it arbitrary or contrived. Chapter 42 is utterly pointless except as foreshadowing of his motivation for returning. If Trelawney's prophecies have a human author, it should be someone who can play at the same level as Dumbledore and Voldemort, but not be one of the prophecies' dupes. Grindelwald is the only available candidate. It fits the rhythm of the story, which is pounded out with falling anvils: Harry being forced to fight Voldemort and Grindelwald at the same time is the sort of escalation of challenge he faces routinely. It's a reasonable guess.
But there's nothing connecting Grindelwald to prophecy. And I was wrong the last time I guessed at his role in the story, trying to shoehorn him into Voldemort's superfluous second secret identity, Mr Hat and Cloak. So I don't know. Where do prophecies come from?
I note that Brin has to try to explain away the climax of RotJ in order to support his contention as to what the lesson of Star Wars is, and that his contention has gotten weaker over time with the prequels.
The actual story of the Star Wars films is how every Force-user in the whole galaxy was defeated by a handful of scoundrels over a period of less than thirty years. The prequels tell how the Jedi were wiped out by non-force-using clones of the bounty hunter Jango Fett. Then the fate of the first Death Star was not decided by the relative Force power of Vader and Luke, but by smuggler Han Solo shooting Vader's spacecraft. Finally, last movie has the second Death Star destroyed by that same smuggler's force taking down a force shield on Endor and his con-man buddy flying his smuggling ship into the Death Star II and blowing it up.
That is, we have a whole series of six movies that, as a whole, show Force-users reduced from the most important force in the Galaxy to one survivor (who doesn't even lead a faction) by the acts of common criminals, and David Brin denounces it because he somehow concludes that the message of the movies was pro-Force Aristocracy.
A better analysis is that David Brin is a great believer in administration by organized, trained, expert bureaucrats only nominally constrained by the opinion of the demos (see his denunciations of the elected Geroge W. Bush imposing policy preferences on the unelected civil service), and so vastly prefers bureaucratic experts to be the heroes (like in Star Trek) to one where disreputable and even criminal rebels are the heroes. With that emotional reaction in place, he then looked for features in the Star Wars saga that could respectably justify his opinions, and when he noticed that Star Wars was actually a subversion of those tropes, decides that Lucas must have done the subversion by accident.
Thanks for that analysis, helping me understand some of what bothered me about Brin's analysis. (I always understood more of what bothered me, especially the implication that it is evil to understand evil people. And of course Lucas clearly vindicated himself politically in Episodes 2&3.)
What makes you so sure the HPMoR universe is reductionist and/or runs on simple physical laws?
HPMoR is a rationalist story, not necessary a reductionist story. A true rationalist must be willing to update against even reductionism, if the evidence leads there.
It's the fundamental simplicity and regularity of the universe that allows the basic tools of rationality to work at all. Reality is laced together too tightly to permit a world where 'muggle science' can function but Occam's Razor isn't reliable. Eliezer couldn't teach his brand of rationality with a universe that ran on genre tropes instead of particle physics.
ETA: Okay, he could try, but it would be a mistake. And I know that he knows this, because I learned it from him.
Well, to some extent yeah, I guess. If SPHEW's plan to tie up Harry and drag him alongside as a bait to "Adventures" had worked, then Hermione giving up on reason might have had merit.
But that (genre tropes vs particle physics) is a rather false dichotomy. I can imagine a fictional universe which designates pieces of knowledge as fundamental entities, and can therefore designate "importance" on events, based on how many people will come to know of them, and can throw back pieces of knowledge through Seers.
It's not our universe, but that would still be a universe one could attempt to sensibly reason about -- and I think that's the sort of different universe that Eliezer would find fun to write about.
In short, I don't share your model of Eliezer.
Alright then. I don't understand how your non-reductionist universe works at all - how do the ideas interact with the people? Are the people made of anything? - and I don't believe that the person who wrote this
would set a story intended to teach rationality inside a universe he believes he's physically incapable of imagining. But I'm happy to just wait and see.
The problem is, talent, courage, and conscientiousness also come from the genetic lottery.
Anyone can be a hero. Sorry, I meant anyone born with the capacity for great intelligence, probably functioning limbs, and not born into abject poverty. With the magic gene.
My overriding belief here is that the lessons of HPMoR won't contradict those of the Sequences. It's an author-acknowledged Author Tract, and the author will want his readers to learn beneficial habits of thought. Like "The answer will probably turn out to be compatible with naturalism and reductionism, so that's where you should be looking." And this one.
Yes, you need to be genetically gifted to achieve great things. From Einstein's Superpowers:
But you also need to overcome the purely psychological barrier of believing that the people who achieve greatness are selected by fate, a race apart from common mortals.
If Harry Potter is the Chosen One in addition to just being a genius, Eliezer will have reinforced the false belief he's argued against here, giving people another reason to think, "You want to save the world like Harry Potter? Let's see your prophecy, buddy."
I think it's more likely he'll subvert this prophecy business, hard. I'm surprised more people don't agree.
It seems to me that sentiment is exactly what he was getting at at the end of chapter 81, whether or not prophecies are real.
According to my preferred storyline, of Voldemort purposely "losing" to the baby Harry, they could come from Voldemort.
Didn't we get a Trelawney POV of her not-quite-getting a prophecy in the middle of the night with no one around? Why would Voldemort set that up?
There's a lot to like about this hypothesis. It doesn't require any additional characters, and exploiting Dumbledore's love of stories and Snape's love of Lily would be very Quirrell. I can see two problems with it. Quirrell has acted like he takes prophecies seriously, which seems to me more consistent with someone who believes in them than one who orchestrates them. It also doesn't seem to have been necessary. As far as I know, we haven't been given any reason for him to have suddenly changed direction and abandoned his war. If he'd just stayed the course, he'd have won.
In the passage you link to, I don't think Quirrell was interested in the prophecy as much as the plot that took Skeeter down. He seemed generally interested in the latter, and the demand for the paper was one of those "give me that's" where incredulity is pushed too far on something otherwise believed to be real.
As for objection #2, how would he have defeated the invincible Dumbledore, holder of the Elder wand?
In my preferred scenario, where Voldemort uploads into Harry as Harry seemingly defeats Voldemort, Voldemort doesn't have to defeat Dumbledore. Dumbledore becomes his ally, and likely passes the Order of Merlin onto him before he dies. If nothing else, Harrymort would have better opportunities to kill Dumbledore than Quirrellmort.
Ruling as Harrymort has more benefits and is more secure than ruling as Voldemort, even if we assume Voldemort would have won the war. Successfully terrorizing magical Britain isn't the same as winning the war. Once Dumbledore and the Order started using some terror of their own, I think it's likely that they would have eventually won.
That doesn't explain Trelawney's prediction about the baby who has the power to defeat Voldemort.
Sure it does. How do you know that Trewlaney's speaking of a few sentences wasn't arranged by Voldemort?
Particularly in HPMOR, where I'm liking a "make Harry the Dark Lord, and then upload into his body" Voldemort plot, setting that up in advance by arranging for Trewlaney to speak in a funny voice about Harry makes perfect sense.
But how could he have been plotting that before Harry was born? Unless any baby would have worked and he wanted one with the genes of some strong adversaries, then made Harry the way he is by making him a Horcrux.
Harry is definitely the way he is because of what happened with Riddle, whose intelligence and echoes of specific expertise were transferred to the baby in some form (made him Riddle's "equal", quite literally). What remains unclear is whether it's "because he's a Horcrux" (which could be some kind of emergency enchantment prepared by Riddle to be triggered upon his body's death, say using the "sacrifice" of his own life to make his own Horcrux), or a purposeful construction by Riddle (perhaps a way of subverting his interpretation of the prophecy, a response to what he saw as a serious threat). If Voldemort's death wasn't part of Riddle's plan, it could be the result of Dumbledore's trap (possibly a ritual with human sacrifice, and Snape's knowledge of the prophesy a bait). Or both: achieved by triggering Dumbledore's trap, but used as a way of subverting the prophesy.
Remember that Dumbledore said that Voldemort took a trap as a challenge to his wit.
I don't, where was that?
Chapter 61:
The "trap" Dumbledore refers to is one set up in the third-floor corridor of Hogwarts, and has nothing to do with the Night of Godric Hollow. Ch. 77:
But it's pretty well established that having Power User status is genetic.
Maybe it's just an inherent constraint of writing a Harry Potter fic. If you change so many things that there aren't even prophecies anymore, and the one about Harry and Voldemort is a false one, then it's not fanfic anymore, it's a different universe with characters who happen to have the same names,
Edit: my comment was very poorly worded, based on reactions. It's not that there is a sharp division of stories into "real HP fic" and everything else. Please see my latest comment replying to replies to this one.
... Has it occurred to you that "fanfiction" and "original story" may not be sharply delineated categories? Cases in point: every major story from before the Age of Copyright, like the Greek myths or the King Arthur legends or the Robin Hood stories. Pick two versions a couple centuries apart and you'll find changes way more drastic than this one, and yet you can't pick out a version in the chain joining them that wouldn't qualify as fanfiction of the earlier versions.
All that you say is true, and irrelevant. HPMoR is both an original story and, at the same time, a reflection on another author's story (fanfiction). I believe Eliezer doesn't change things (that happened before the story's beginning), and general facts about the universe, without having a specific reason in mind. This makes it more focused and easier to read for people familiar with canon (the target audience).
A change to the universe that made prophecies in general not true/real, would be so big that it would thematically deserve to be the subject of its own story. In this story, the big change is everyone's intelligence, and we get to see how the smarter characters react differently to the same world as in the original story. In my opinion, a story that eventually revealed that "prophecies don't really exist and are always cons" - when even a character like Quirrel believes in them - would be in the same class as a story that eventually revealed that "magic doesn't really exist, it's all sufficiently advanced technology controlled by aliens who are the real mastermind, villain, and Harry ends up teaming with Voldemort to defeat them". It might be a good story, but it's not a Harry Potter story.
First paragraph: Irrelevant.
In other words, you're talking about what makes a fic a Harry Potter fic, not about what HPMoR is about.
In other words, a story where Arthur is king of Britain rather than a supernatural adventurer isn't an Arthur story. A story where Merlin is a major character isn't an Arthur story. A story where Mordred is actually an alien isn't an Arthur story.
What I'm saying here is that you're drawing a line in the sand between "Harry Potter stories" and "not Harry Potter stories", but that line doesn't correspond to any kind of sharp division in the real world.
Something about reading this as it relates to fanfiction makes me smirk.
Implying that fanfiction is not written in the real world.
Like most human categorizations, it's a simplification. There's no line in the sand, but there's a rough gradient or spectrum stretching from stories not related to HP at all, through stories with similar themes that make people think of HP (but don't explicitly make the connection in the text), through stories that use the HP names and characters and settings but change events drastically from the series (like this HP and the Wastelands of Time), through stories that change fewer things (like HPMOR), and ending with some that stick to canon as much as possible.
This isn't about what stories "deserve" to be called "true HP fanfiction". That would end up as a No True Scotsman fallacy. My original wording was poorly chosen in that it made you (plural) think I meant something like this.
Rather, what I'm saying is: the story up till now has been consistent in terms of lying in a particular location on this spectrum. It has been consistently presented and written that way. If, now, in a new chapter, we found out that prophecies don't really exist and are all faked, that would be an idea typical on a story at a very different location along that spectrum. It would conflict with the story so far. Readers would not enjoy it. It would be bad storytelling. Therefore I believe with high probability such a thing will not be revealed in HPMOR.
In which case, I totally misunderstood what you were saying. Never mind.
It took me a bit to come up with a hypothesis about what this means, but... are you referring to the fact that Chapter 42 mentions male homosexuality? I really can't see what else it might have to do with Grindelwald, but that's... that's something alright.
Yes, that would be awful. But I meant this:
I don't expect Sirius to show up, since his tale was told to its conclusion. His nemesis was Peter, and Peter is dead. Which leaves open the question of why we heard so much about him. One reason for recounting his story in MoR would be to establish a parallel motivation for Grindelwald's return as an antagonist.
Uh...
and
Second quote: Excellent catch.
Re. the second quote, in light of Eliezer's statement that the story contains no red herrings: good point.