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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 14, chapter 82
The new discussion thread (part 15) is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 82. The previous thread passed 1000 comments as of the time of this writing, and so has long passed 500. Comment in the 13th thread until you read chapter 82.
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: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
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Comments (790)
Hermione is dead. Hermione Granger is doomed to die horribly. Hermione Granger will very soon die, and die horribly, dramatically, grotesquely, and utterly.
Fare thee well, Hermione Jean Granger. You escaped death once, at a cost of twice and a half your hero's capital. There is nothing remaining. There is no escape. You were saved once, by the will of your hero and the will of your enemy. You were offered a final escape, but like the heroine you are, you refused. Now only death awaits you. No savior hath the savior, least of all you. You will die horribly, and Harry Potter will watch, and Harry Potter will crack open and fall apart and explode, but even he in all his desperation and fury will not be able to save you. You are the cord binding Harry Potter to the Light, and you will be cut, and your blood, spilled by the hand of your enemy, will usher in Hell on Earth, rendered by the hand of your hero.
Goodbye, Hermione. May the peace and goodness you represent last not one second longer than you do.
Out of curiosity. Given that Eliezer's cited this post as his inspiration for creating SPHEW, how likely do you think it is that he's aware of the "women in refrigerators" trope, and if he's aware of it, that he would ignore the objections to it and use it anyway?
I'd be happy to record this, but I need some more specifics (I can't just say 'Hermione will die' - what if Eliezer fastforwards 10 billion years or some other mindblowing epilogue). Dies by what chapter? Or alternately, something like the end of the school year? What happens if she gets better?
"Record this"? What? Did I, like, fail to perceive some unwritten rule that every future-looking statement on lesswrong.com has to be a formal prediction written in academic prose with explicitly enumerated premises?
I just thought this last chapter represented Quirrell's final decision to kill Hermione, and I posted as though I was eulogizing her, to try to prepare myself for the darkness I believe is coming. I think it's all about to hit the fan, and I was expressing how I felt about it, not trying to score points in some game I didn't know existed.
gwern is referring to his use of PredictionBook.
Thank you. That helps, but it doesn't explain why my post was downvoted into oblivion (until people upvoted it to conform to Eliezer's opinion) apparently based on a rubric that judges posts solely on their suitability for copying and pasting into a prediction market.
Well, to give one data point: I downvoted your comment when it was at -1 for being (what seemed to me) pointless and depressing. When you explained it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek I reverted the downvote, although to be honest I still don't get it.
I also downvoted Eliezer's comment for being weirdly irrelevant as far as I can tell, and upvoted Spencer_Sleep's criticism.
I think gwern might have just mixed up where your comment was posted; a lot of people have made top-level comments in his PB thread just containing similar predictions which he's asked for clarification of.
Predictions know no article bounds! Such confidence in predictions as 75th deserves either reward or punishment.
Heh. To be honest, I'm not that confident that Hermione will die. If this story has a happy ending, I would hope Harry has somebody close to him left after the dust settles. I do think this chapter means that Quirrell's plan is to kill Hermione, but I'm not supremely confident that Harry won't pull another trick out of his bag.
What I am supremely confident of is that when it does hit the fan, things are going to be bad. Harry hasn't gone through all that very much yet, he needs something tragic to happen. Hermione dying horribly is about the most tragic thing that could happen to him, and Eliezer knows that, and I don't trust or expect Eliezer to show mercy to Harry or Hermione or me.
So like I said elsewhere, my original post was not meant to establish a prediction that I can point to later, it was simply my attempt to look into the abyss, to be pessimistic, to imagine the worst possible thing happening, so hopefully nothing worse ends up happening.
I don't think Hermione dying is anywhere near the worst thing that could happen; I mean, come on, there's plenty of worse possibilities. Draco and Hermione could do a mutual slaying; Draco could kill Hermione and then Harry has to kill Draco; heck, Hermione could unjustly kill Draco and then Harry has to kill her. That sort of thing.
Why are people downvoting this? It's a testable prediction.
There's reasons besides unfalsifiability for downvoting. Like poor logic, or asserting p=1, or writing so melodramatically that my eyes glazed over.
Edit: I stand by my downvote, for the last two reasons, but I'll give him props for a correct prediction.
Thanks for having my back, but I have to ask if I've missed the boat on some Less Wrong policies or unspoken understandings somewhere. What I said may have been a testable prediction, but I wasn't aware that people's posts had to be testable predictions to deserve upvotes. Am I required to list all my supporting evidence every time I make a future-looking statement? If I don't, or even if I do, must I disclaim them the way corporations do on quarterly earnings conference calls?
gwern said above that (s)he'd "be happy to record" my prediction. I had no idea my predictions were being recorded at all. I thought this was just a discussion forum. Is Less Wrong actually a simulation of the prediction markets from Three Worlds Collide? Is Less Wrong a subsidiary of Intrade? Do I have cash or prizes waiting for me somewhere thanks to one of my earlier correct predictions?
No, it's severally sufficient, not necessary - testable predictions deserve upvotes.
Predictions about MoR are commonly recorded on PredictionBook, which sadly does not offer prizes but can tell you how good your past predictions were so you can get better.
If so, I missed the same boat. I looked at the downvotes and was like 'Wha?'
I can also make the testable prediction "The universe will cease to exist on May 19th, 2034 at 10:03:09PM", but unless I had some truly excellent supporting evidence which I posted along with that prediction, I would not expect people to think well of my statement (particularly if I made it in a rambling, melodramatic way that made it difficult to determine the purpose of the post).
I thought it was pretty obvious that it was a direct response to the information and imagery in the chapter posted last night.
Yes, it was rambling and melodramatic and over-the-top; it was supposed to be amusing, while at the same time accurately expressing my belief that some seriously dark shit is coming.
Sorry for offending everyone.
Did anyone notice the bit about the Philosopher's Stone? I had initially assumed that the PS was following canon, and the reason that the PS remained intact in Hogwarts was that Voldemort made no attempt on it and bypassing the incredibly elaborate protectings (per book 1) prompting its destruction by Dumbledore & Flamel.
But now we have Harry suggesting it be moved, Dumbledore agreeing and it not being moved because Flamel wants it at Hogwarts. Well, in book 1 when they discovered it could not be kept safe at safest place #2 (Gringotts) they moved it to safest place #1 (Hogwarts) and when safest place #1 failed, they just destroyed it. Dumbledore breathes no word of destroying it, despite both him and Flamel consenting to it in canon.
And notice, if you check MoR carefully, at no point is Harry aware that the guarded object is the Stone; nor has Flamel been mentioned anywhere near Harry as creator of the Stone - Flamel has only come up in conversations with Dumbledore/McGonagall/Snape/Quirrel. (Although the topic is one would expect to be of keen interest to Harry: the Stone, recall, grants immortality or at least anti-aging.)
Conclusion: Eliezer has diverged from canon and carefully kept Harry ignorant because the Stone is going to play a role in future plot events. Given its properties, probably a large role - it's now a massive Chekhov's gem.
EDIT: See especially http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=722rasd1fu9p8mn5fdcbp572&page=89#2214
Ever since I read the Potter books, I knew that the Philosopher's Stone stood a very high chance of being MoR!Harry's weapon of choice.
(Yes, I read the actual Potter books for the first time after reading the first few dozen chapters of MoR.)
Slightly less Chekhovy though, since the removal of the reference from Chapter 4.
Quirrell to Snape, I think, not Harry.
Whups. Yes. So that makes Harry entirely ignorant of Flamel and also the stone.
The current chapter is destroying my head (like Quirrel's humming) - Bones's story is consistent with some of Quirrel, but has so many problems with other stuff.
But OK, we can assume that Bones is telling the truth 100% about the past person, even if Quirrel is not him or related to him, and speculate who it is. She specifies he's Noble, so we don't have a lot of canon characters to go through. I initially thought it was Regulus Black since it fit the Noble Houses last scion disappeared during the wizarding war.
And then I remembered a year was cited. He was born in 1926.
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/1926
Oh shit! House Gaunt, last scion (mother dead, uncle dead in Azkaban), disappeared during the Wizarding War... But the story gets strange since he disappears long before visiting Harry. Quirrel suggested playing a double-game to Harry, so this suggests Voldemort/Riddle was also a double-game - but why stop before 'a key vote'? Why return as Quirrel? Why the cataplexy (which made sense if he was Regulus Black, injured/cursed destroying the locket Horcrux, but not for the hero Riddle returned)? Does Dumbledore know? For that matter, has anyone figured out Riddle=Voldemort with this massive departure from canon? etc.
EDIT: Apparently this is on the wrong track entirely, as Eliezer has wiped the birth-year. Back to the starting point...
Something doesn't quite fit.
Dumbledore knows that Voldemort is Tom Riddle, so the double-game wouldn't have worked. Maybe Dumbledore only found out that they were one and the same later on?
Snape and Mad-eye Moody also know it's Riddle since they poison his father's grave. Minerva was present when Dumbledore said that, and did not comment on it ('surely not the heroic Riddle, our old ally!'). So we have multiple examples, but they're all trusted key members of the Order who even know about Horcruxes, so they don't tell us anything about when the identity was found (assuming I'm right).
The first part of the description - date of birth / graduation, Slytherin, disappeared in Albania - was meant to make us think Bones figured out that Quirrell = Riddle. Shock! Then nothing after that tracks, and apparently she's talking about a good guy? Huh?
So, apparently what happened is that Voldemort waylaid one of his (usefully Noble) classmates in Albania early on, then decided to assume his identity part-time twenty five years later, with the goal of rising to power as the hero who vanquished the Dark Lord (who he also was). Bones thinks that Quirrell's Yule speech about a 'Mark of Britain' sounded familiar; so apparently he wasn't able to give up on the tyranny bit. I think we can take Quirrell's explanation to Hermione as roughly similar to fact; he saw that the hero wasn't getting respect, and people were falling all over themselves to grovel before the Dark Lord, and decided to stick with the persona he found more pleasant to assume.
Not to be, er, pedantic, but there does seem to be a difference between Noble and Ancient houses. By Draco's reckoning, the House of Potter is Noble but not Most Ancient.
I noticed a typo:
"The old wizard nodded, but his eyes still seemed distant, fixed only on the road head."
Road head is a little bit different from road ahead.
I could not stop laughing for a whole minute.
Thought I'd post the two typos I found here, since there seems to be no other place aside from fanfic.net (and I don't know if EY is still looking there):
On Asch's Conformity experiment: The correct answer had obviously been C. The other 'subjects', the condeferates, had one after another said that X was the same length as B.
"There was the part of her which said that right was to go on being a heroine, and stay at Hogwarts, she didn't know what was going on but a heroine wouldn't just run away. The voice of every storybook she'd ever read with a hero, child or not, or who didn't run away."
If there's a way to parse that last bit, I can't find it. And with that done, a magnificent chapter, and I'll have trouble going back to my homework now.
I noticed this gem on my second reading of Chapter 81:
I actually didn't understand the third clause. My best guess is that it's hinting that the 88th Wizengamot broke out into open warfare/dueling among the factions? (And no one could leave until the head let them? That would be a sensible power for the Line holder to have.)
I just read it as a throwaway gag; Rowling's style often has funny little background references to violence or bizarre happenings. I took this as being something similar to Rowling specifying the Quidditch match that caused the rule banning broadswords to be introduced.
My interpretation is that there was no time limit for sessions during the time of the 88th Wizengamot, and one session went on so long that some of the lords and ladies starved to death — or died of old age. I don't know which is funnier.
I thought that too, basically. Like, maybe in the past there were strict rules of order about when you could adjourn a session, so even the Chief Warlock couldn't adjourn until the formalities were concluded, and that in the 88th Wizengamot a war broke out in the chamber before the formalities were done.
I'd like to give an updated version of my thinking about the Night of Godric's Hollow:
1) The official story requires Avada Kedavra to behave in very funny ways against a love shield (a normally invisible kill turning a body into a burnt crisp.) Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the only way it can be known to be true is if someone cast prior incantum on Voldemort's wand. Which seems unlikely, because Bellatrix snatched it (See Ch. 53).
2) This indicates the good guys are lying or deceived. Possible reasons
a) Godric's Hollow was a trap laid by the good guys, who don't want to reveal their methods, so they made up a story about how it happened to fool the Death Eaters. Unlikely, because if they had, they probably would have prevented Bellatrix from getting Voldemort's wand.
b) Voldemort faked his death. The good guys showed up, noticed they were confused, and figured Voldemort had just executed some inscrutable plot. They make up a story to prevent a panic.
c) Voldemort faked his death. Bellatrix switched a look-alike wand that had, recently, only been used to cast Avada Kedavra, fooling the good guys.
"Voldemort faked his death" is also supported by what we know of his intelligence.
The question is why did Voldemort fake his death? Everything we know about Eliezer's philosophy in this story suggests Voldemort should not have tried a plot that was more complicated than necessary. And it doesn't seem like this plot is necessary. The evidence we have indicates Voldemort was winning the war. So thus far, no theory I've seen for why he would do that looks convincing.
But perhaps, contrary to what we've been led to believe, Voldemort realized he would not win the war if he kept fighting it in a straightforward manner?
Assume for a moment that Quirelll was being honest with Hermione, in a twisted way. He was the hero and he invented Voldemort in order to defeat Voldemort. He then realized that being a hero wasn't working out for him, so he went away, but unlike his Riddle persona, Voldemort would continue to be hunted, so he had to fake his death.
Your suggestions are based on a faulty premise. Even in canon, Avada Kedavra has varying effects. Usually it causes an instant, silent death. At the end of Half-Blood Prince, it blows Dumbledore's body over a railing and off the tower. In Godric's Hollow, the rebounded Killing Curse exploded the upstairs of a house, and we never actually hear what happened to Voldemort's body.
I don't think we're necessarily meant to suspect something amiss here; I think Eliezer just filled in a blank that was left open in the novels.
And I also don't necessarily think a "love shield" is what's involved in this story. In canon, Lily's nonviolent sacrifice is what protected Harry. Eliezer presumably doesn't believe that attempting to defend yourself makes your sacrifice any less noble, so it's probably something different here. I think the likely story in MoR is that when Voldemort sarcastically said "I accept the bargain, yourself to die and the child to live", he accidentally created a magically binding oath.
I actually think the clearest clue here is probably the "but how does anyone know that's what happened?" problem. Other problems: reference to souls, bizarre behavior of the killing curse, total lack of explanation for why a totally reliable spell backfired so spectacularly. But Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story.
Yes, but we saw the actual event in Humanism, part 1. We saw it right up until the moment Voldemort cast the Killing Curse. The "small, small note of confusion" refers to what Harry realized much later: "Dark Lords were not usually scared of infant children." The confusion was about the reason Voldemort was so intent on killing Harry in the first place.
The reference to souls is simply because that's what Dumbledore believes, not because of any plot. Yes, the Killing Curse behaved bizarrely, but we're supposed to think "Why did it behave bizarrely?", not "That must be a lie!", especially given that it sometimes behaved bizarrely in canon.
If "Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story" and we don't know what it is, that means he lied to us in Chapter 43.
You're misremembering the chapter, that scene ends like this:
Thank you for quoting the bit in chapter 46. I had forgotten it, and it is worth taking into account. But in context, I don't think it shows what you think it does:
So prior to recovering that memory, Harry didn't have nearly as much reason to think Voldemort had been afraid of him. In Ch. 3, for all Harry knew Voldemort was just the sort of person who would murder his enemies' children given the opportunity, and he would have been largely correct to think that.
But it seems Harry's inference that Voldemort meant to kill him may not be as safe as Harry assumes. It is equally consistent with everything Harry notices to think that Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry. Consider this part:
Suppose Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry other than kill him, and that he succeeded in doing whatever he meant to do. If so, "your death here will not save your child" would turn out to be true. In that case, perhaps what amused Voldemort was realizing that Lily had misunderstood what he was going to do to Harry, and that she had offered up her life to prevent something that was not going to happen anyway. In that case, "Yourself to die, and the child to live" also reflects Voldemort's true intentions.
At this point, it looks to me very much like Voldemort somehow decided killing baby Harry was not the right response to the prophecy. The prophecy looks like a key clue here; probably Voldemort wouldn't have bothered with such a complicated plot as he appears to be pursuing without the prophecy. But what thought process led to that plot?
An experienced mage making an unforced error of that magnitude sounds an awful lot like the Idiot Ball to me.
"Held the Idiot Ball" does not mean "made a large mistake". It means "behaved implausibly stupidly so as to cheaply advance the plot". If Voldemort could never make significant mistakes then Harry could never defeat him.
I agree with you about what "Held the Idiot Ball" means.
I evidently disagree with you about how implausibly stupid it is for Voldemort to accidentally, for no apparent reason, magically bind himself to the infant Harry in the middle of a fight.
Or do you imagine this to be a thing that happens a lot when wizards fight, such that it happening in this case is plausible?
I don't think it happens a lot, because I don't think such ironic offers are made very often. The reason for Voldemort to say what he said was to be prideful and cruel, to make Lily feel how futile her sacrifice would be. In the heat of the moment, in his cruelty, he might not have thought of the magical significance of verbally accepting such a bargain. If indeed this theory is correct, his first fall was a result of his hubris, which fits his character well; and it also fits his character well for him to have learned from it and to not make the same mistake again in the future.
I'm not married to this theory. I'd put it at maybe 50% or 55% confidence? But it seems clear to me that Voldemort made some large mistake that night, because no explanation I've seen for Voldemort willingly stopping his war in 1981 holds any water at all.
2b seems unlikely given Harry's memory of the night matching the official line. Did Dumbledore do a FMC on baby Harry?
Also, remember that for someone with Horcruxes, one can de facto fake one's own death by actually dying and waiting for the resurrection. There's no particular need to assume that he survived that night in the traditional sense of the word.
But Harry's memory didn't include Voldemort casting Avada Kedavra on Harry. That memory is neutral WRT the "rebounded Avada Kedavra" hypothesis.
Also, no part of a rebuttal to your comment, but re-reading the scene, what's with this line?:
A FMC is described as completely envisioned and controlled by the caster, putting as much time into it as the memory covers; so Dumbledore in FMCing a baby Harry is choosing every detail of the scene. Given that... why would Dumbledore direct a scene like Harry recollects? It has several oddities which reduce its value as a 'you killed my parents! In the name of the Moon, I will punish you!' memory.
Anyone remember this ....
Now he's gone and spent a hundred THOUSAND Galleons on a friend's folly, and I don't think Quirrelmort would've expected that.
On the other hand he internally declared war on magical Britain when it looked like they would cost him something dear to him, i.e., Hermione.
I, and others, interpret the scene exactly oppositly from how you seem to.
I'd like to predict that whatever actually happened with Dumbledore and Narcissa, it will turn out to have been foreshadowed by whatever happened in Chapter 17 between Dumbledore and the chicken.
That is, I can't actually figure out whether he seriously burned a chicken alive, made it look like he burned a chicken alive, or that actually is what a Phoenix looks like right before regenerating. But he appeared to set fire to a chicken, and I predict that he used essentially the same move on Narcissa, as suggested by the law of conservation of detail.
I don't think its possible that he just whisked her away with Phoenix-travel, as this apparently doesn't actually look anything like someone burning alive, viewed from the outside. But whatever he did with the chicken at least looked enough like burning to fool Harry:
But faking her death (and even the type of death) doesn’t really match the rest of the story. There’s no obvious reason not to return her after he thought Voldemort was gone, or at least to let Lucius know what happened in case she’s alive and didn’t want to return—which is unlikely, we had no indication that she was really unhappy or didn’t wish to be a part of her son’s life—or if she died in some much-less-objectionable way (he could give Lucius the memory).
Not doing this led to the last ten years being rather complicated due to Lucius’ enmity; Dumbledore mentions to Harry he’s quite constrained in his political actions. Eliezer also seems to write his stories such that serious actions have serious consequences.
None of it proof, of course, just strong evidence IMO that she really is dead and either Dumbledore or an ally he’s protected did it.
But he never thought Voldemort was permanently gone in the first place. The Hogwarts inner circle knew Voldemort was still around as of the beginning of the story. And in any case, he's still maneuvering against Lucius, so he has an incentive to uphold the notion that he will not cooperate with blackmailers and that he will resort to equal retaliation, even while his greater enemy is absent.
I'm not saying I think Narcissa is alive, but...
Except that Narcissa could then testify in front of the Wizengamot that Dumbledore kidnapped her.
Dumbledore believes Voldemort will return. This would limit his ability to threaten Death Eaters in the next war.
Point. I forgot he knew about the Horcruxes since basically the beginning.
I don't think Dumbledore would risk leaving her as a loose end, what I suspect is that he really did kill her, but only appeared to burn her alive.
Oh, no, he did much worse:
He switched her brain with that of a chicken (with Magic!), then burned the chicken alive—in her body—so that the chicken’s thrashing around in horrible agony left marks around the room (while he forced Narcissa to watch, with Magic!). Then he kept Narcissa alive (with Magic!) in the chicken’s body, to keep company to Fawkes; he kept her hidden (with Magic!) right near his perch, so that every time Fawkes re-spawned she was reminded of what her captor was capable of. Then he burned her in front of Harry (with Magic!) just because he thought it was funny :-)
By the way, Lucius is not actually mad because he killed her—Dumbledore told the first part the above to him, but he kept silent about the details because it was embarrassing to have his wife turned to a chicken. That’s why Dumbledore had trouble during the trial; he felt a bit embarrassed about having killed Narcissa after all.
Also, Draco actually picked “fire” as his army’s symbol because he’s secretly fantasizing about being burned alive.
It's chickens all the way down, isn't it?
This fits together so well I'm going to have trouble remembering that Dumbledore didn't switch Narcissa's brain with a chicken.
It all just clicks seamlessly into place!
Surely, you mean it all clucks seamlessly into place.
I'm not sure I get what Harry's evidence for being able to summon the Phoenix is. It seemed more like wishful thinking to me. Any ideas on why he believed he could do that?
Also, Fawkes did have some connection with Harry after he returned from Azkaban - he asked Harry to help him destroy the place, and it's clear he asked the same of Dumbledore (perhaps many times).
So he's not totally off the mark in thinking that Fawkes would come to him - in that case he'd be agreeing to do what Fawkes wants, instead of restraining him like Dumbledore usually does. I bet if Harry called to Fawkes with a wish to go to Azkaban and destroy it, Fawkes would be there to take him in a heartbeat.
Chapter 82,
I'm noticing the Hugo nominations just came out. I'm not sure about which category it would be eligible for, but I think it would be worth trying to push for a nomination next year. For one thing, HPMOR is definitely in the same class as Ender's Game, which did win a Hugo.
Ah, so you're an optimist.
From a cursory glance, it seems that the categories it'd be eligible for are "Best Novel"(>40k words) and "Best Fan Writer"(non-paid work). I'd advise the latter, because the competition will almost certainly be lighter.
When the book is done I'm going for the former, but the rules call for the book to be complete, I believe.
Why would you go for the former - what's the reasoning here? Yes, it's gotten praise from some writers, but not the kind of rapturous praise that would give it the most important prestigious prize they have. MoR is amazing for a fan work... and good for a novel. Is this some sort of satisficing reasoning, where it's better to be nominated for best novel than win best fan work?
I know I'm not an average voter, but HPMOR is literally the best book I have ever heard of. Are there some other books I have missed out on?
Try looking through the Hugo or Nebula best novel awards. Most of them are not didactic like MoR is which makes comparing MoR to them a little unfair since you lose out on the 'I want to base my life on this' effect, and MoR is length-wise at... a trilogy? now, so comparing them to MoR is unfair, and it definitely helps to have read multiple times the heavy influences on MoR like Godel, Escher, Bach or Ender's Game, but I am doing it anyway! Looking through the list, here are ones I've read (~1/3) and would rank as either not much inferior, equal or better than MoR:
And this is far from a complete list; for example, Blindsight is fantastic but was only nominated for a Hugo in 2006 (losing to Spin which I have not read).
It's gotten sufficiently rapturous praise. I see no reason not to try.
I found citations for ESR and David Brin (only the latter is a SF writer), who praised it but did not receive it rapturously; are there writers I have missed?
I am curious about your concern.
Do you want to save EY from a hubris born smackdown?
Do you want to keep public attention off fanfiction so you aren't tempted to publicly defend it and publicly identify as a fanfic fan?
Do you fear a loss of face for the Singularity Institute?
Forgive me for visiting your intentions, if that is unwelcome.
You only get one shot at the awards. My best calibrated guess is that MoR has a chance at best novel somewhere between 'not a chance in hell' and 5%, while best fanwork moves the odds of victory to 50+%. Which one do you think is better?
(I'm also a little concerned that EY is casually making what looks to me like an incredibly obvious mistake.)
You're assuming that Best Fan Writer and Best Novel are equally valuable awards. This is not even close to true.
There are people who make a practice of reading all the Best Novel nominees, for years after the award is given, and I think people are much more likely to read Best Novel nominees before voting than to get around to the fan writing awards.
If anyone can track down number of votes in the different categories, it would be a way of checking on my opinion.
I have twice already pointed out that possibility.
It would be good information, yes. As far as I can tell, there may be some very recent records of recommendations by the Nebula members (and also claims of considerable politicking, so an appeal by Eliezer to fans would be far from unprecedented nor especially effective).
The Hugo voting system is pretty complicated, but apparently they've released detailed statistics since the 1980s - one of the first quotes in that 1997 analysis is
The most recent data is for 2011. Best Novel took 1813 ballots, with 779 vs 753 for #1 vs #2 (as I said, complicated - it's IRV).
The fan categories are fanzine, fan artist, and fan writer; the last had 323 ballots, with 70 vs 40. So in other words, just to get within spitting distance of Best Novel #2, you would need almost twice as many ballots as were cast for the entire category of Best Fan Writer.
You see why I would give MoR for Best Novel 0-5%, and EY for Best Fan Writer 50+%?
I'm curious as to what would have been your original probability estimate for "Given that Eliezer writes a Harry Potter fanfiction, it becomes the most popular Harry Potter fanfiction on the Internet." Or, for that matter, getting out of the AI Box. Not everything impossible that I try, works - nobody coughed up $1.6 million to get faster HPMOR updates this time around, which I tried because, hey, why not - but to me, not trying for Best Novel, given feedback so far, just seems horribly, horribly non-Gryffindor. To me it seems like you're the one making this obvious, horrible mistake whose reference class of timidity errors could put a shadow over someone's entire life. Don't ask her out, don't interview at the hedge fund, don't try for the scholarship, go for Best Fan Work instead of Best Novel...
Offer 20-to-1 odds against HPMOR winning Best Novel and I'll buy in. Hm, now I'm curious as to which side of the bet Zvi or Kevin would take.
I would have assumed that the proper reference class was all your other fiction, which as much as I enjoyed them, were all short compared to MoR even the popular ones like 'Three Worlds Collide'. (One of my favorites, the Haruhi fanfic, was, what, 2 pages on FF.net?) Short fanfics cannot become the most popular, so I would have assigned it a very low probability. Had you asked an estimate for 'wrote a full trilogy of HP fanfic novels', my estimate would be quite different. I won't pretend to know what it would have been. (I remain surprised and amused that it has become as large and popular as it has been, and that you now procrastinate on both your rationality book(s) and the Center by writing MoR. Truly, fortune passes everywhere!)
Oh, I would've bet for you back on SL4. You already had succeeded in getting SIAI running, after all. (Although here again the counterfactual gets hard - I barely remember what I was like back in 2003-4 when I joined SL4 and IIRC you had already won an AI Box by then.)
Sure. I am poorer than a church mouse, so I can risk no more than ~$100. How's this:
"For any Worldcon 2013-2017, MoR will win the Hugo 'Best Novel' award. The stakes will be $100 against $5 (non-inflation adjusted). Payment by either Paypal or Bitcoin (at that day's exchange rate on the largest exchange eg. Mt.gox) to the winner or a charity of the winner's choice. In case of any dispute, the verdict will be judged by Carl Shulman or another person mutually acceptable to Eliezer Yudkowsky and gwern."
I've pinged them.
I expect you meant that as a rhetorical question, but I'm not sure it is. I generally agree with your confidence estimates, but of course it's also worth looking at the payoffs. It's also worth comparing the payoffs for being a Hugo nominee for best novel and a Hugo award winner for best fanwork.
I don't have an informed opinion about those payoffs, just saying that it's not as simple as "50+% chance of winning an award" vs "<5% chance of winning an award."
Which is precisely why I am asking these questions, because there are many ways Eliezer could conclude it's a good idea:
he has non-public information
the rules favor MoR in some way I am unaware of
etc.
Rachel Aaron (author of the Eli Monpress series, sample of "The Legend of Eli Monpress" currently on my Kindle being read) is I think the most effusive praise I've gotten from a published author, though I've heard rumors of certain others speaking in the halls of SF conventions. But you're probably thinking of the Nebula, which is voted on by members of the SFWA. The Hugo is a reader award, voted on by the attendees of Worldcon. Look at the review page of HPMOR if you're questioning whether the readers have been sufficiently enthusiastic.
I'm honestly a bit nonplussed at the idea that reader reception of HPMOR has been insufficiently enthusiastic to try for a Hugo. It's fairly routine for a review to say that HPMOR is the best thing they've ever read out of all of fiction. If that is insufficient enthusiasm to think, "Hm, I might as well try for Best Novel, or the Gryffindors will look at me funny for my sheer lack of courage", I don't know what level ought to be required.
Ranked preference voting, though. I'd expect a significant numbers of voters to rank "no award" ahead of any fanfic just on general principles. If it was just a single round of single preference voting the odds would look much better.
Not only the attendees. People with supporting memberships can vote as well.
OK, she's apparently not self-published, so I've added two interviews with her to the article as references. EDIT: And would you believe it, I forgot Hanson is a Notable person and so his recommendation on Overcoming Bias also counts.
I thought it was the other way around, but OK. That will help, but one wonders how much - the awards overlap a fair bit. (A quick count suggests 1/3 winners the same over the past 15ish years.)
The question is which Hugo.
Gee, I wonder how that could possibly be less-impressive-than-it-looks evidence...
Is the prior that low or something? What should the world look like if HPMOR does have a chance of winning Best Novel?
Yes. Can you name a single fanfic that has ever won either prize for best novel? I can't. Keeping in mind that fanfics long predate the Internet, that many noted authors got started as fans or were published in fanzines (Charles Stross being the most recent example I can think of), etc. So Laplace's law gives us a starting point of single percents, and it only gets worse if we take into account nominations as well...
Well, see above. Acceptable substitutes would include reviews and praise by the sort of people whose reviews & praise predict other nominees or winners - Brin is a good start, but we're talking novels that are discussed or reviewed in all the major SF organs and sell into the hundreds of thousands or millions, so the n should be into the dozens for starters.
My guess is there'd need to be more respect for fanfic among the older sf fans, but I could be wrong about that. I'm not the only person for whom HPMOR is the only fanfic I read. (I've read some other good fanfic, but I don't get around to fanfic generally speaking.)
I think a sufficiently high proportion of likely voters are on line, but this is based on a feeling of plausibility rather than actual knowledge.
When you talk about which award you're going for, is this just a matter of which award you encourage people to nominate it for?
In terms of prestige, I think you'd be much better off being nominated for Best Novel and losing than winning the Best Fan Writer award.
I find it hard to imagine you winning, but I also find it hard to imagine specific reasons that would make it extremely unlikely. It's quite possible that I'm just engaging in availability bias (all the other winners have been conventionally published) rather than anything more solid.
There was some interest in getting the podcast nominated but I guess that didn't amount to anything. I'm not familiar with the Hugo Award categories but since there was no concurrent push for the nomination of the fic in written form, I imagine there was some difficulty finding a category for it. Maybe the pool is a lot smaller for podcasts though and the Eneasz thought that the fic wasn't popular enough on its own to compete in a much larger bracket.
This has probably been mentioned before, but:
a) what if primary goal of this plot was never hurting Draco or Hermione, but to weaken Harry by making him relinquish his money/his claim to the debt from Lucius? Either the money or the claim to the debt that House Of Malfoy has towards him could be something that is dangerous to a hitherto unknown plan of H+C, which is why H+C devised a plot which would strip Harry of both. A genius (like Quirrelmort) could have predicted that Harry might offer either, in exchange for freeing Hermione. In fact, it might have been a win-win-situation for H+C: either Harry loses his Light soldier Hermione, or Harry loses his money.
Does anyone else find it strange that Hermione just happened to know the formula for swearing allegiance by heart? I mean, sure, she could have read it once and that would have been enough, but the fact that she knew it seems awfully convenient in the case that the plot was meant to end like this.
b) Dumbledore mentions that the House of Malfoy has "certain rights over Harry" now. This means that Harry is, to some extent, now alleged to both Slytherin and Ravenclaw.
Now, remember which two houses are supposed to win the House Cup, simultanously, according to Quirrel's "cunning plan"? (Ch. 54)
I agree with bogdanb. "Hermione knows X by heart" is usually equivalent to "Hermione saw X in a book", and Hermione seeks out books.
a) Unlikely, but I think it's a payoff that Voldemort will still consider to be worth the (rather trivial) costs of setting his plan into motion. It's not as ideal as denying Hermione to Harry, but it still imposed significant costs, which is all to the good.
b) Oh lord.
Gut reaction is the same, but the part of me that remembers the rule of rationalist fiction is thinking there's no way Quirrellmort could have predicted both Harry's and Lucius' actions that exactly.
Which is why I say my a). He had no believable way of predicting this outcome, and the one he almost certainly expected didn't happen(well, it partially did, p>0.5 Draco is lost to Harry now, but Hermione is not), but it's still a result that was worth the effort he put in, so I doubt he's shedding too many tears.
Feeling exactly the same.
Not really, she is indicated to be interested in history, and shown reading history books all the time. In another situation I would have be surprised by her willingness (given her wish to be “her own person”), but after being threatened with Dementors...
There's a passage for that in Chapter 9.
I'm actually annoyed by this. Since the next digit is 6, he should be rounding to 3.141593, not truncating at 3.141592.
The difference between the two is 0.000001, and the difference in quality of approximation is roughly 0.0000003. So I don't think it matters as a practical preference. Aesthetically, the string of digits of Pi has a cultural significance of its own, quite apart from its numerical value, so I think it's preferable to memorize a number that's actually a prefix of that string.
Also, only if you truncate can you truly say that you've memorized "the first six digits of Pi after the decimal" as opposed to "An approximation of Pi to plus or minus 0.0000005 tolerance".
(The following is a meta sort of question about the eventual total length of MoR, as it pertains to certain comments by the author.)
Crbcyr xrrc fnlvat gung jr unir Jbeq bs Tbq gung gur fgbel vf zber guna unysjnl jevggra. Ba jung qngr qvq Ryvrmre fnl guvf, naq jung jrer uvf rknpg jbeqf?
V'ir frra zber guna bar crefba fnl guvatf yvxr "gur fgbel vf jenccvat hc", ohg gung uneqyl frrzf cbffvoyr, hayrff jr fbzrubj jenc hc gur ubepehk vffhr va n fvatyr nep, be vtaber vg pbzcyrgryl. V guvax vg'f zhpu zber yvxryl gung jr'er, fnl, 55% guebhtu gur fgbel, engure guna 85%. Naq V qba'g oryvrir gung gur raq bs gur fpubby lrne vf tbvat gb znex gur raq bs gur fgbel.
He said it on March 26th, though if you look one comment up you'll see that he also may have said so at some point in the past.
Here.
I think we're starting to outgrow the original spec for the lesswrong.com discussion functionality. Plenty of discussions from previous threads were not strictly related to the most recent chapter, and I can think of a few such threads I'd like to start, but I'm holding off because I know that as soon as a new chapter is posted, all past threads will be made obsolete by the creation of a new discussion page.
What are everyone's feelings about putting some dedicated forum software on a subdomain of hpmor.com?
I do know that these discussions are responsible for a significant percentage of Less Wrong's traffic, and obviously I don't know what the actual statistics are, but I do know that all my Less Wrong binge sessions have been instigated by links from commenters (which would still be made on external forums) or by links from the Author's Notes (which are not part of Less Wrong) or by other causes, none of which were related to my posting in the MoR discussions here.
So unless raw pageviews and user accounts are very important to this advertisement-free site, I think it's at least possible that Less Wrong might not be adversely affected by these discussions moving to a closely related external site. But again, I don't know any relevant statistics, and there may be a lot of considerations I haven't thought of, so please don't crucify me if this was a blasphemous suggestion.
One possible deterrent to implementing that might be that people who initially came here to discuss the story might also participate in other non-HP related reading activities, such as going through the Sequences and discussing other posts, becoming better rationalists in the process. I don't have the statistics either though so I don't know how accurate this is.
If the 'How did you come to find less wrong' thread is accurate, a lot of people came here through HPMoR. I'm not sure how many would have come if the HPMoR forums were elsewhere, but it seems like a non-negligible fraction of the community.
I got here through HPMoR, too, but not at all because of these discussions; I got here through Eliezer's links in the Author's Notes. Indeed, I had no idea this was the primary venue for MoR discussions until the link on hpmor.com made it obvious. I don't think it was very obviously linked to from anywhere on FFN before; or at least, I never saw it.
If we had dedicated forums, I think a series of banner "ads" ("Learn everything Rationalist Harry knows by reading the Sequences at Less Wrong", etc.), in addition to the frequent links to MoR-related posts by commenters, might be just as good as (or maybe better than) these suboptimal discussion threads for awareness and traffic.
I read a couple of the Sequences as a result of these discussion threads, FWIW. I've been familiar with EY's work for some years, but this brought me back in.
In his Author's Note, EY mentions that he's considering releasing the next plot arc in one fell swoop, instead of doing weekly chapter releases. Personally I prefer the weekly chapter releases for the following reasons:
I was wondering if other people felt the same way, or if I'm alone in preferring the weekly releases to a one-fell-swoop release.
Very much agree. Co-readers and discussions are cool.
I have no strong preference either way on this issue, but I suspect that spacing the updates out is more useful.
One reason for this is that a lot of updates means that the story spends more time on the first page of ff.net's HP story list. The HP fandom is one of the most active ones and stories tend to get bumped off the first page quite fast. To that end, I also think it would be a good idea to occasionally update the story at some other time of the day than the usual 7 PM Pacific Time. Who knows, maybe that alone would bring in some readers who miss the story again and again for no other reason except that it's updated at an inconvenient time of day.
The communal aspect shouldn't be overlooked, either, and having time to discuss chapters is definitely a legitimate reason to draw out the process. This doesn't apply to everyone, of course; I gave myself five minutes to think of solutions for the end of chapter 80 and refrained from discussing them with anyone, and I doubt I'm the only one who plays the game that way.
IMO, the optimal update rate would be once per four or five days. Enough time for folks to talk things over if they wish, but not so long that the anticipation has the time to collapse.
I would much prefer to have them released all at once. I could read them and re-read them at my own pace. There would still be plenty to discuss. The cliff-hangers mean that I currently think about each update more than is productive. It would be nice if the disruptive effect they have on the rest of my life was more localized.
Mostly, though, I'm happy to read it whenever EY gets around to posting it.
I think exactly like that.
I vote up to have them released all at once.
+1 for the very same reason. Reading a HPMOR chapter is a day-long distraction. it simply won't leave my brain alone for work on the rest of the day.
Sounds like a good opportunity to practice mental discipline skills that will serve your well for the rest of your life.
I take the opportunity to apply Harry-like awesomeness to my own life. What other options aren't I considering? What epicness can I plot? What resources am I not taking advantage of?
Waiting for a whole week is the worst part.
I would also like to vote in support of weekly releases.
I prefer them spaced out, although maybe slightly more frequently than once per week. Mostly for a "draw out the HPMoR experience" reason.
Personally, for anything except comedy I like to read moderately-long bursts rather than short snippets--when I follow works that update daily but have updates that are too small I often stop reading for a while on the assumption that when I start again later I'll have a juicy backlog to trawl through. (Part of me wonders if it's just a matter of how good the author is at finding good stopping points though). HPMOR updates are not that small, but with its plot-heaviness I think I still found that I enjoyed it better when I read entire arcs at once than when I read chapters as they came out. I even considered not reading chapters once or twice until the next existed.
Of course, individual chapters are healthier for my sleep schedule...
Having just started following these threads, I've decided to reread the entire fic from the beginning. I'm only in chapter two, but has anyone considered why Harry has a 26 hour sleep cycle? This always seemed like a bad excuse to get Harry a time turner to me, and when I was reading it the first two (I think?) times, I excused it as bad writing. Now I'm thinking it may be deliberate, and my model of EY was wrong. Perhaps Horcrux!Harry has control (strongly put) over Harry for two hours every day, and this is the rise of his odd sleep cycle.
So you're thinking a Fightclub sort of control? I don't think that works: we have no unexplained gaps and things happening of themselves, or characters whom Harry could be hallucinating (Quirrel doesn't work). And the problem goes away with the Time turner, which a Horcrux!Harry wouldn't. As well, existing Horcrux!Harry moments seem evenly spaced out through the day (like in the latest plot arc, which was noon-1ish, IIRC).
"The first rule of the Bayesian Conspiracy is that you don't talk about the Bayesian Conspiracy. To laypeople, I mean."
"The nth rule of the Bayesian Conspiracy may be deduced from the (n-1)th rule."
No, no, "The first rule of the Bayesian Conspiracy is that you talk about the Bayesian Conspiracy just as much as a typical member of the general population does."
"The Bayesian Conspiracy was just the beginning, now it's moved out of the classroom - it's called Chaos Army."
Never seen Fightclub, so hard to evaluate. But I meant more "influence". Whenever the story says Harry's "blood goes cold" I would evaluate that as control.
I think HP is partially based on EY. For example, EY once bit a teacher. Also he stopped attending school for different reasons.
This is everything I've wanted to know about Eliezer.
It probably shouldn't be everything you wanted to know about him.
This is what EY thought of his own history in 2000. He was only 21, at the cusp of adulthood.
Now EY has a better understanding of present EY, of EY in 2000, and of his own history throughout. And he's still probably wrong about things about himself that are obvious to others and go unmentioned anyway, like almost everyone.
You could reasonably want to know less than everything, you could reasonable want to know all the things on that page, but you are probably not serving your own interests well if the things on that page are all you seek to know.
Yeah, I wasn't being literal. What I meant was that I really enjoy reading a personal narrated biography of someone that I really admire. Usually you can't get that until they're super famous or dead.
That is really interesting. But I can't help but feel like I'm violating his privacy when I read that:
In light of that, it's difficult for me to feel OK reading it on WayBack Machine...
Duplicating the page, maybe, but he absolutely can't forbid quoting it or linking to it; those actions'd fall under fair use in most cases.
(That is, if you care about copyright law at all.)
I'm sure Eliezer knows that old stuff of his is on archive.org. If he wanted to, he could have it removed.
Indeed, information security is a process, not a status.
I'm roughly 50/50 on whether there's some deeper meaning behind it, or if it's just a piece of rather bad/inelegant writing...
It's a real disorder If that's what concerns you. But if you're asking "why use that excuse to exclude Harry from public school and give him a time-turner at Hogwarts? Is there a logical progression that definitively gives Harry a reason to have such a disorder?" I had never considered that.
Thanks, I didn't realize that was a real thing.
Harry's sleep schedule wasn't on the red herring list. Further investigation warranted.
But equally not everything that happens is intended to have further meaning, eg. the Bacon diary was just intended as a character piece
How do you know this?
One or two chapter discussions or so back, someone spoke to Eliezer in person and got super secret spoilery information about the diary, which they posted under ROT13. The first part is that the diary wasn't meant to be anything special. Second part is gung orpnhfr bs nyy gur ernqre fcrphyngvba urf qrpvqrq gung ng fbzr cbvag uneel jvyy tb onpx gb vg naq qvfpbire fbzr eryngviryl zvabe ohg urycshy cvrpr bs vasbezngvba nobhg jnaqyrff zntvp
That would've taken too much time, actually, I've got new plans now. But by reader demand, it will reappear.
I admit I'm kind of surprised. You thought you could have Quirrell give Harry a spelled-indestructible diary for no apparent reason and that wouldn't be a red herring?
As I've said recently I think Eliezer severely overestimates the readiness of people to let go of perceived patterns.
The indestructible diary was meant by Eliezer to be a red herring for the duration of a couple paragraphs, until the readers were told it was the diary of Roger Bacon, not Tom Riddle. At which point, I suppose readers were supposed to smile at themselves for being deceived.
But of course readers just pattern-matched "indestructible diary" to "super-significant plot-point and Horcrux" and wouldn't let go.
For the record, it never occurred to me it could be Riddle's diary, and yet I assumed it was a horcrux because it was indestructible. I was probably pattern-matching with the Pioneer probe, which Quirrelmort also said he had spelled to be indestructible and this was, indeed, a Clue that it was a horcrux.
Also, in canon, a horcrux can possess you if you become emotionally attached to it. The diary seemed calculated to become a prized possession of Harry's, and that when Harry learned Latin he could well be in for a nasty shock...
Perhaps I should have updated when it was never mentioned again. Hmm.
As for myself, I quite liked the inclusion of Roger Bacon's diary as part of the background. Though it did lead me to expect a bit more information on 'leakage' between the magical and mundane worlds.
Even that's strange though. I didn't seriously entertain the thought that it was Tom Riddle's diary or a horcrux. And then it being Roger Bacon's attempts to apply science to magic was super-awesome - it was sort of a Chekhov's Gun and I kept expecting Harry to gain some sort of insight or initial boost or secret knowledge from reading it.
That's probably a fair analysis.
Similar to this is Quirrel's mannerisms at the very start of his first class, meant to get you to think he'll be the typical Quirrel before he bursts into a confident diatribe, but people have speculated on that one, too.
EY said so in a post. He said he didn't think anything of it and didn't mean to go back to it, but the readers wouldn't stop asking about it.
I guess that means Erratio should have ciphered?
I knew it was a real disorder, but the probability of having it is so low as to bother me - why does he need a disorder and why locate that disorder in all of diseasespace? And if it's based on EY, I don't believe he has that disorder, unless I've missed something.
It's also the sort of disorder that people are told to suck up and deal with if they get it in real life. I mean, I'm sure there are some people who get lucky, but a lot of others get misdiagnosed as being bad sleepers who just stay up late. There is, IIRC, no cure other than rearranging your life. Harry's parents get marked as understanding and caring (and affluent). And the magic world gets to show off it's 0th world status.
Although I agree that it sounds mostly like a contrivance to get him a time-turner. They do have sleep spells afterall.
ch. 82 stepped on my toes just a tiny bit, because I'd been planning a piece of short meta-fanfiction (and by planning, I mean that in the 4 months since I had the idea, I've written 2 paragraphs of it, or so) in which Harry among other things referred to Hermione as of "infinite value" to him.
Now it's gonna look a bit redundant and repetitive if I ever do finish it up -- though on the upside, it seems I had a decently good feel for Harry's character. :-)
So it (not very surprisingly) came to pass that Draco was not sent back to Hogwarts, at least not yet.
Might be some pressure off of Harry to actively harass Dumbledore what with the enemy pledge. Especially as Draco might be unable to continue with his part of the deal. Though Harry is probably curious at this point himself what the real deal is.
I'd still call it possible that someone else did the deed and Heh just took credit for the good of all, but the probability of him being directly responsible got boosted as he was depicted to consider it important that he doom his brother in person also. Then again, though I'd rate it unlikely, perhaps mommy dearest can be found in a private dungeon or a memory charmed witness protection program.
Anyway, Draco. He's probably restricted from communicating with Harry. As if that'd do any good, it having been established that they can communicate through Patroni. It would, of course, require Harry to reveal his Patronus 2.0 to Draco, though. Draco will certainly be the one to initiate contact, mentioning that he's in a secure location. It seems from TSPE part 6 that the Patronus just appears into existence if the caster is far away from the target, so if Draco actually is in a secure location, others wouldn't probably see it. Harry might just risk it.
So I'll bet there will be a visit from a silver serpent soon, though perhaps only after things have settled down for a couple of chapters.
As soon as I read that Draco was to be pulled out of Hogwarts, I imagined Lucius was going to obliviate or memory charm Harry's influence on Draco away.
It's pretty much a given that Draco was interrogated under Veritaserum by Lucius privately, what we don't know is if Lucius is aware of the total extent of Harry's influence over his son. Precisely what questions would he ask Draco, and based on these questions and the quantity of veritaserum taken, what would the answers be?
He can't know the full extent of what Harry taught Draco, because it would take a lot of time for Draco to explain it, and because Lucius would then also have to forcibly see the flawed logic behind blood purism if he happens to analize what Harry said and it makes sense to him, as he would want to understand the details behind Draco's brainwash (from his point of view) in a deep level. Perhaps. Maybe.
How much would he be willing to invade his son's privacy and forcibly extract information from him? Does he know the gist of what Harry did or in full detail according to Draco's recollections? To Lucius, Draco's knowledge about Harry is extremely valuable intel, and it'd make sense for him to want to know Harry's modus operandi in as much detail as possible.
Draco compared his awakening as a scientist to unknowingly participating in a ritual that irreversibly sacrificed his belief in blood purism. Would Lucius see the irreversibility of this state of mind and decide that the best thing for his son would be to not have this knowledge any more? I assume the obliviation of such a large amount of memories would take its toll on the mind of the mind-wiped as it has happened in canon, but it's more likely Lucius would want to do this carefully and not screw around with his only Son's brain. Would it result in a slightly different personality from the original Draco none the less?
I was under the impression that Draco thought that that was literally what happened.
You know what they say, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
I hear this inversion all the time, but this is the first circumstance under which it was actually very appropriate and witty! Well done.
IIRC, at multiple drops of Veritaserum, you volunteer information you think is relevant. So unless Lucius is holding the idiot ball, he should know all about the blood purity experiment stuff.
Of course, Draco was entangled with Harry from the start, so unless Lucius wants to Obliviate his entire Hogwarts career, basically setting him back a grade...
Not quite, you can answer to a patronus and it carries the message back. This happens in all caseswe’ve seen in MoR. (McGonnagal checking on Harry in Mary’s room, and even when Harry and Draco tested the communication method, when Harry answered in Parseltongue.)
So Harry just can’t initiate a conversation, but if Draco does they can communicate freely.
Minor magical nitpick: the Patronus is described to move away, not just dissappear, except it doesn’t actually cross through the intervening space. Or in other words, it dissappears but doesn’t appear to. Nice UI.
Hm. Can a poisonous snake Patronus poison someone?
I don't think a Patronus can bite someone; I don't think they're corporeal. If Harry's Patronus could have grown and grown until all the Dementors in Azkaban were destroyed, that's a pretty good sign that it can pass through ordinary matter.
Yup. Guess I was just being paranoid. As I would be, if I were Harry.
I'd doubt they can actually be poisonous.
But can Harry suborn a snake Patronus using Parseltongue and perchance gain leaked information from the other side of the link (or even fake a message from Draco to someone else)?
I'm surprised that people think saving Hermione for ~$3.4MM was expensive. It does mean Harry needs money soon, but if her intelligence plus magic gets her a VP position at an investment bank, she can earn up to $.5MM per year (worked example: [1]). And Harry and Hermione could almost certainly come up with a better (ethical) plan.
Some presumably sophisticated real-world investors have actually invested in people in this way, e.g. investing $250K for a 2% stake in a "technologist's" income (worked example: [2]).
Again, Harry does need money soon-ish; but even if his magical hedge fund doesn't pan out, the-Boy-Who-Lived should be able to secure ten house-sized loans (abroad if necessary; Unbreakable Vows greatly reduce credit risk, and there must be people other than Draco who see the value of loaning money to HPJEV.)
(There are many possible objections, but both of these kids are really smart and have years to think about it. And magic.)
[1] Hermione takes five years to get to VP level, then saves an average of ~.5MM/year for fifteen years. After twenty years, she gives all of her savings to Harry and is freed from all further obligations. Harry has earned ~30% per year over this period, and Hermione has well over 150 years of life left. This may not be optimal, but it's clearly better for both than letting her rot in Azkaban.
[2] Multiply by 15 to get an investment of $3.8MM for a 30% stake. Harry pays less and ends up with whatever stake he likes - and unlike the investor, he can order Hermione to maximize her income. Hermione being a witch raises the value of the investment further.
1) Those numbers are about American finance in 2011. British finance in 1991 probably did not have salaries quite that ridiculous. But more importantly:
2) As Dumbledore explains, it's not this rescue price that is the problem, so much as all the cumulative rescue prices Harry's enemies will now expect him to pay for each of his friends (not necessarily once, either... Hermione could well be attacked again).
It looks to me like they don't have quite enough time for Hermione to get a job as an investment banker. Of course, he still has plenty of options if the arbitrage trick doesn't work.
The present debate is not how he can fulfill his obligation. They are arguing specifically if Harry made a justified investment by paying such a high price to save Hermione's life. It seems conclusive that the pure monetary investment is actually sound, he can directly gain the money he invested back at a decent rate even besides the additional benefits of rescuing her.
The approximate actuarial value placed on a human life is $6-8 million. Even after inflation, this seems somewhat cheap(assuming that she would literally die, and not merely be traumatized and sidelined for a decade).
Dumbledore says her mind wouldn't take the strain. To be entirely honest, I doubt he's exaggerating. If Hermione came out of Azkaban alive (yes, if), I'd put her chances of still being sane or curably insane at <10%.
One thing I found very interesting - it was Voldemort who blinked first when families were targeted.
Dumbledore suggests a plausible explanation for this when he says "If my opponent had been Lucius, perhaps." Suggests that Lucius is not a rational agent in the sense that he will make negative expected value moves for the sake of vengeance. Voldemort, however, is a rational agent in that sense.
Though I'm not sure Voldemort "blinked," exactly. Voldemort probably didn't care if the families of Death Eaters were killed in retaliation for things done to family members of the Order of the Phoenix. Instead, he made the following calculation: (1) I can afford to tell Lucius I will torture him to death (and maybe kill his baby boy) if he does anything stupid in retaliation for Narcissa's death and (2) but if I go on killing family members of my opponents, my Death Eaters may rebel to protect their families, Dark Mark or no.
Be careful when describing negative-expected-value vengeance as irrational. "I will precommit to be the kind of person who takes vengeance, even after it's too late for that to have positive expected value" is almost just a sub-case of "I one-box".
Hence the "...in the sense... ...in that sense..." qualifiers. If you can suggest a better term, I might switch to using it, otherwise next time I'll wave my arms even harder to show I'm tabooing my words.
It's interesting in part because Harry is right that the behavior is unusual. Historically, the group that (1) is led by a strong leader who encourages personality cults, (2) doesn't believe in the rule of law, and (3) resorts to violence at the slightest excuse is not the group that unilaterally ends dynamics like hostage taking and hostage killing.
They're the only group that can unilaterally end it since the other side wasn't doing those things to begin with.
As I understand the historical dynamic, there is a conflict and the status quo is that dependents are safe. One side (call them Blue) escalates by attacking dependents, breaking the status quo. The other side (call them Green) might not have chosen to break the prior status quo, but once it is broken, they decide to start attacking dependents. Green might even escalate further.
Historically, these types of conflicts seldom return to the prior status quo. Most frequently, a new (bloodier) status quo is reached, or one side wins and ends the conflict. Occasionally, Green does not escalate, or decides that the new status quo is unacceptable and unilaterally deescalates (which doesn't always successfully return to the old status quo). What essentially never happens is Blue escalates, Green escalates, Blue unilaterally deescalates, old status quo returns.
In short, I notice I am confused by Dumbledore's story of the safety of dependents at various times during the last war.
Just to make sure I understand, consider the following hypothetical account: Sam and I are having a nonviolent argument. I get furious and punch Sam. Sam punches me back. I apologize for having turned this into a violent interaction and promise not to do that anymore. Sam agrees not to do it anymore either. We return to our nonviolent argument.
Is that an example of the sort of situation you're describing, which you claim essentially never happens?
If not, can you clarify what excludes it?
The historical assertion is in the context of group political conflict involving violence.
Apocryphally, the Mafia had a rule that they didn't target families. Assuming this was true even in conflicts between families (and I don't know this to be actually true), I'm saying that the family (Blue) that first broke that norm was not likely to be the family that unilaterally returns to the "don't kill dependents" rule. Particularly if a lot of the unity of the Blue family is based on the strong personality of Blue's leader.
(Mostly, I'm thinking of the Cold-War era internal conflicts between proxies of the United States and the USSR, especially in Latin America and Africa i.e. the Sandinistas. I'm not saying every conflict of that type escalated in the way I'm describing, just that the escalator basically never deescalated while the conflict continued).
Care to elaborate? 'Interesting' is a word with many connotations.
You got downvoted for a request for an elaboration? I just don't know what people are thinking sometimes with their downvotes.
I found it interesting because it was out of character for the usual Evil Dark Overlord, who is generally portrayed as wanting violence for the sake of violence and terror, or at least willing to match you death for death.
It's almost as if his goal was to push Dumbledore's side into doing/supporting something horrible. Having accomplished that with minimal losses, he stopped. I can see that as making a lot of strategic sense. It would solidify the resolve of his side - and Malfoy in particular - but wouldn't get into an escalation that he was sure to lose, given the numbers on Dumbledore's side.
Interesting also that much the same happened to Harry. Malfoy was after revenge against Hermione, not capitulation to blackmail from Harry. But from Harry's perspective with respect to the magical government and Dumbledore, it would have been much the same result if Harry hadn't paid off Malfoy. Instead of Narcissa tortured to death by the forces of "Good", it would have been Hermione.
More likely it was his intention that things sit like that.
He 'lost' on purpose. But before he did, he taught Dumbledore to lose in the hostage and ransom thing.
Step 1 : gather the fearful and lead them by fear
Voldemort championed the old blood that felt threatened by muggleborn and was very cruel to them to keep them in line.
Step 2 : force most powerful opponents into taking actions contrary to their ideology
Voldemort probably did any number of nasty things to break lower rank ideologists and might have done an evil thing or two that did not break Dumbledore, but eventually he was successful.
Step 2a : keep a lid on things so they cannot resolve themselves through reasonable application of voilence
Voldemort killed Narcissa once he knew Dumbledore was conditioned to accept the blame and the conflict extending truce that came after.
Step 3 : watch for an opportunity to exit the stage, take it
Voldemort faked his death when he found circumstances that could make a death event of sufficient believabilty for the masses.
Step 4 : hide out under assumed identities while enemies and former subordinates continue to not resolve things either peaceably or voilently for as long as necessary
Voldemort is Jeffe or Quirrell or any number of other people for ten years. He might also have been technically dead for some or all of that time. That does not significantly alter the scenario.
Step 5 : gather tools and staff as opportunities present themselves
Voldemort has the Resurrection Stone, Bella, and who knows what all else.
Step 6 : watch for an opportunity to stage a coup over either side of now old conflict, take it
Voldemort may have multiple scenarios for returning to power. Right now he is playing king maker for Boy Who Lived.
Step 7 : smash opposing side of nearly meaningless conflict because they have been conditioned to fight entirely the wrong kind of war, unite as many factions as possible
Step 8 : dominate world
Step 9 : throw tasteful party with select guests and absolutely, positively, never, ever monologue
I'd propose that he has a slightly different plan. I'm going to give you my pet theory here so hold onto your hats.
I think Quirrellmort probably decided at one point in the past that it would be way easier to take over magical Britain if everyone thought he'd already failed at doing so. I think he's probably going for control of both sides. Imagine if Darth Vader had created the rebel alliance in order to funnel potential opponents into a harmless straw-opposition: he could let them attempt the occasional coup, always avoiding any real cost to himself and throw them the occasional minor victory to keep them on the hook.
To quote the chapter Contagious Lies:
That's obviously not the same plan I'm talking about, but we can see that Quirrell has at least been thinking along similar lines to me. I can see a number of different ways he could have formulated this plan, but the simplest one seems to be:
This is also foregrounded in Coordination Problems 2 and 3. Quirrell wants Harry to bind the population together under him and Harry makes a short speech about the dangers of group thinking. Quirrell's reaction is one of anger - obviously he can't have Harry breaking the monopoly that the Order of the Phoenix has on do-gooding, because that opens the field up for thousands of free-agent challengers to Quirrell's power. It also mirrors Harry and Draco's plan to play the two sides off against each other, except obviously Harry is aiming for world optimisation, not domination.
Finally, Dumbledore seems to think Voldemort is still alive, but he's either pretending to have irrational justifications for this or he really does. I think it's waaaay more likely that Dumbledore is just playing dumb, since he's definitely smarter than he lets on, as evidenced by his and Snape's big discussion about the Bellatrix thing, but I'm not entirely sure how much Dumbly knows for sure. Quirrell knows Dumbledore acts as though he thinks Voldemort is still alive. The real wildcard is Harry, because Quirrell probably wasn't expecting him to be such a major agent in all this, he's almost certainly playing Xanatos chess at this point trying to keep ahead of Harry and keep his plan alive.
Or at least that's my theory.
According to the (admittedly non-canon) game The Force Unleashed, this is the original source of the Rebellion.
If I were in Voldemort's shoes I definitely wouldn't want to stake decades of work on a plan that could be derailed by my "hero" simply dying in an accident, and that's disregarding all the ways he could fail to be properly impressionable.
I don't think either of those represent a big risk to him. Consider that he knows this particular child will be under Dumbledore's constant care, and that Voldemort himself will always be available to step in and rescue the kid if there's a risk of him dying early. Obviously that doesn't lower the risk to zero, but it's still a big reduction. Also, remember that during the "grooming" phase of this plan it'll be an eleven-year-old against the most intelligent and insidious wizard in history: given what Voldemort did to Bellatrix it seems like he would be very confident of successfully being able to brainwash Harry.
So, the risk of Harry dying or being unbrainwashable seems low, but it also pays to consider that either contingency wouldn't stop the plan in it's tracks. If Harry dies (or has to be killed because he can't be brainwashed) there are a whole battalion of potential replacements who could emerge as the new posterboy for good - Neville being clearly at the top of the list. Harry is the >best< choice, but he isn't the only one.
I've actually cooled a little on this theory since the latest arc began because I think someone is clearly trying to turn Harry evil (see my theory from earlier in the thread). That said, I still think this would be a workable plan for attaining uncontested dark lordship.
So, basically the plot of 1984.
Voldemort won't always be able to step in and rescue him, he doesn't have him under constant tabs, it's not like he'd instantly know if something bad were about to happen to him.
There are other ways aside from being oppositional that Harry could have failed to be properly impressionable. For instance, he could have been extremely stupid (there would be no way to tell when he was a baby,) and it would have been impossible to set him up as a figurehead leader because he was too obviously incompetent.
In Voldemort's place, I would never attempt a plan like this, because the odds of success, even at their best, do not justify sinking a couple of decades into its execution. Given the same amount of time, I'd expect him to be able to take over the country several times over. I could probably take over the country several times over in his place, given the same level of power along with an outside perspective on wizarding society, and I don't think I'm as good at plotting as Quirrelmort.
I'm betting on what happened with Harry not being intentional, because, for all the ways that one can postulate that the events that followed benefited Quirrelmort, I think the fact that he lost his body, much of his power, all his servants, and a decade of time, should shift our prior considerably away from whatever happened that night being deliberate.
Again, I've cooled on this theory myself, so I think I probably agree with you in the broad sense that I don't think this is exactly what happened. I'm still going to argue a few of the points you made though, because if we share an opinion but disagree on the justifications for it I still think that's a disagreement we should try to heal. Better to be justified but coincidentally wrong than unjustified but coincidentally right, right?
Anyway, I agree with your first point. remember that I said:
So what I'm saying is, having Voldemort hanging around in the wings won't save you from everything, but it certainly won't hurt your chances of survival. There's nothing to say Voldemort hasn't done little things to increase Harry's survival like magically lower the risk of lightning strikes in Surrey. Wizards are more durable than muggles AND Harry also has Dumbledore's protection AND there's no absolute reason Voldemort has to use /Harry/ as his posterboy for good - he's just the best available choice. So I don't think the risk of Harry dying unexpectedly is great enough to invalidate this plan, although I do agree that it would be inconvenient if it happened.
Your second point, on the other hand, I have to disagree with prima facie. The wizarding world in general has no problem taking idiots as leaders - look at Fudge. If anything, a stupid figurehead would be BETTER, because it would give Quirrelmort more control. The only thing I can see being a barrier here is if Harry had some obvious, crippling mental condition. That sort of thing, though, WOULD have been obvious from a young age and as I've said, in that case he can tragically kill off Harry in such a way that Neville becomes the new posterboy. So again, whilst there is a risk here it is low, manageable and avoidable. I don't think it's enough to rule out this plan.
Your third argument. I've discussed the odds of success already, but I think the effort and time involved is an important point. You're absolutely right that Voldemort could have taken the whole country over several times by now - he was winning when he disappeared, after all. The difference, though, is that before Voldemort would have had control over a broken, wretched country and a whole generation of wizards who had no goal except vengeance. On the other hand, if he fakes his own death at the eleventh hour, lets the goodies think they've won and then takes them over from the inside eleven years later, he now has control over a strong, united country AND their opposition. He's unopposed because he controls both sides. I had only heard the term "super villain gambit" when I came up with this theory, but having read the article here on LW since I think you'll be able to see the utility in this ploy. I think it's worth ten extra years.
Finally, I should point out that I'm theorising he FAKED the Godric's Hollow scene. If this is what happened then Voldemort wouldn't have been hit by a rebounding curse that night and wouldn't have lost his body or his power. Harry's scar would have been intentionally created to mark him as the storybook hero everyone wanted and Harry would have been intentionally made a horcrux to in order to keep tabs on him. Also, in cannon horcruxes are close to indestructible: if this carries over in some form then it would be a good way to keep Harry safe.
To reiterate: I now doubt that this is what happened, because it looks like someone is trying to turn Harry evil.
Fudge isn't particularly stupid, he's just not particularly smart. He occupies a position of nominal power with significantly more competent people maneuvering around him, so he looks dim by comparison.
A not-very-bright figurehead would probably be better than a very clever one, but a legitimate dimwit, someone significantly less intelligent than average, not merely about average, would be very unlikely to make it into high office.
It's possible that Voldemort faked the Godric's hollow scene, but I seriously doubt it; real or fake it took too much time and resources for too little return for me to think it's likely.
Downvoted for massive violation of Lucius' Law.
Please elaborate.
From Ch. 24:
Your plan is unworkable, because the probability that everything needed for the plan to happen would happen is too low. HPMOR!Voldemort is not a fool, so he would not have planned an unworkable plan (and, as Hat and Cloak, advised Blaise Zambini not to try such plans). Therefore this is not Voldemort's plan.
Fine. You accept that Voldemort did rise to power, yes? Let that be one plot that had however many "different things to happen" but worked. That is one plot with one payout that is collected without being dependent on other plots and covers step 1.
In step 2 his plot depends on his most idealistic enemies breaking from their ideals. That is 1 "different things to happen". He maybe tries a lot of different time, and eventually the Aberforth Event occurs, so the plot progresses.
Step 2a is the same plot and includes another "different thing." After he kills Narcissa, his formerly idealistic enemies must claim responsibility. He has conditioned them to do this in the way he has spread terror and treated them, so it does not come out of the blue, but it is the second "different thing" for that plot.
It works and he is rewarded with a conflict without escalation, where he can continue to amass power while his own side does not get out of control and his enemies become more reasonable and less idealistic, therefore easier to manipulate and less unpredictable. This second plot covers steps 2 and 2a. He could continue at this point as he had, building power for a faction, taking different steps or starting different plots.
The third plot has the goal of unity and only depends on two "different things." The first is that he have an opportunity to step out of the game, the second is that he has an opportunity to step back in. Again, there is the throwing shit at the wall approach, here. He can set up situation after situation that might lead to an opportunity to step out or in, and take the ones that he expects to work best.
When this plot is completed, he is rewarded with control of a new third side in a two sided war. He can do what he wants with this new faction, execute any number of plots from this point forward. This covers steps 3, 4, & 5.
The fourth plot is what he is preparing for, but isn't executing as far as I can tell, taking over the government. Whatever this depends on, you know he's up to something and this is no worse an answer than many other reasonable answers.
I'm fairly certain that Voldemort is not planning a party, though. That was a joke.
Well, yes, if it was planned from the beginning. It could have been improvised. To summarize Percent_Carbon in a way that brings out the potential that the plan he explained was improvised... Step 1. Conquer Britain as Voldemort. Doesn't work as well as hoped, Britain is divided, not united. Step 2. Use power to try to set up a situation that you think you can exploit later. Wait years before you see a good way to exploit it Step 3. See the way Harry Potter came out, see an opportunity to conquer a united Britain, and go for it
Considering that he was winning the war before making his untimely exit in the early 80s, this strategy seems overly complicated.
So Dumbledore was hiding behind a curtain, aced Voldemort, and carved a tasteful little scar into Harry's forehead? Because that seems to be the closest thing to a conclusion one can draw from that method as applied to Godric's Hollow.
You seem to be doing the opposite than what the quote indicates, trying to find ways in which Voldemort supposedly benefitted, in order to present him as the person behind every ploy.
If Voldemort benefitted from his supposed defeat at the night of Godric's Hollow, we've not yet seen how.
If Voldemort benefitted from the burning of Narcissa Malfoy, we've not yet seen how.
You are following the exact opposite process than the quote indicates. Which may be okay, after all it's only one technique, not the ONLY possible technique, but nonetheless quoting it as an explanation for your reasoning seems misguided.
This line seems to have caused some confusion downthread. On Percent_Carbon's view, t's a very good explanation for the reasoning, in that it seems to have generated understanding of the reasoning.
Perhaps equivocating on 'explanation'?
This is awesome.