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Alsadius comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 17, chapter 86 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think I preferred the old version of 85 more than the new one. "The phoenix only comes once" seems a lot more made-up than Harry's original determination to abandon comic-book morality as soon as someone died, which felt very much in character.
86 is certainly interesting, even if it largely felt like a wrapping-up restatement of what we knew. That said, I loved the Moody duel, and after six months a bit of restatement is quite useful. Also, I'm torn between how to interpret Snape's last question - my first thought was that he was verifying the truth of a story he had been told("Your master tortured her, now join the light side already!" being the most likely), but upon rereading, I wonder if he was worried that she had been used as Horcrux fuel.
The new version was like a shock-glove-plated punch to the gut right at "I thought it was to my death I went". Wouldn't trade anything for that feeling. :)
Greater emotional impact in much fewer words. It actually feels awful, rather than sounding like a drawn-out rationalization. New version wins on both counts IMHO.
I get the impression that the phoenix is a rewrite prompted by someone pointing out to Eliezer that in terms of consequentialism abandoning that woman was the same as letting an innocent bystander catch a curse, so Harry had already violated the new vow he was taking.
The title of the arc is "Taboo Tradeoffs". The phoenix was the original intended ending. I just couldn't get it written in time.
Aand, maybe you didn't want to face the wrath that would no doubt have risen with such a heart wrenching cliffhanger. ;-)
Not really - she could be rescued, while a dead person cannot be.
I never liked the old version. Harry pretty much admitted to himself that he was making a wrong choice, he expected his attempt to not kill anyone to fail, and yet he still delayed making the right decision because he couldn't accept it emotionally. That is not a superhero of rationality. Frankly, that is not someone to whom a phoenix would come.
I think part of the point of HPMOR is that rationality is hard.
Like people, phoenixes need high but achievable standards, and I think you're setting yours too high.
Phoenix utility functions are not human-friendly; they do time discounting differently from us. It's not that rationality is hard, but that true rationality combined with human values like Harry's does not meet with phoenix approval.
The post-edit Harry decided he would do the phoenix-right thing later. Once he decided that, the phoenix went away, and will not return. If he had decided that firmly earlier, presumably the phoenix would not have come to him in the first place.
The pre-edit Harry struggled with a similar question. To be consistent, I agree that a phoenix could and should have come to him while he was struggling. But once he had made his decision, the phoenix would definitely not come. Those are the phoenix rules, as given by the update to this chapter.
The decision Harry had come to pre-update was that he would not do whatever it took to free the prisoners of Azkaban; and also that he would not do whatever it took to protect his friends and strike down evil, until he allowed another person to die through being ineffective. Those are not decisions a phoenix would approve of. (Which is not to say I don't approve of them.)
What are phoenixes trying to accomplish?
Do they have goals, or just drives? They're implied to be closer to animals than people.
In the same way (in HPMOR canon) Dementors are the projections/personifications of death pheonixes may be the personifications of courage or whatever.
[Maybe there's some sort of magical collective unconscious thing going on?]
Courage doesn't run on a model of "if you fail one test, you'll never get another chance".
Perhaps they are personifications of "The Call To Go On A Magical Quest Requiring Great Courage". But I admit it doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.
"Heroism" seems like a more succinct way of putting that, although it's a fairly specific sense of heroism.
Maybe there's a limited supply of phoenixes and they just figure they can find better heroes if they keep trying out new people.
True, but death doesn't wear a cloak etc. The personifications of a concept don't necessarily have to model it perfectly,
How so? So far as I can tell, in this war, nobody has died, and since we don't know it's a war against Voldemort again, we don't know that it's part 2 of a war where a lot of people did. Now, there's a good chance that the war will result in deaths, but "I should go around killing innocents if needed to win the war" is a pretty extraordinary statement, and I won't fault him for requiring fairly ordinary evidence to make it.
A war means people risk death, Voldemort or not. The last plot tried to have Hermione die in Azkaban, and (since Harry doesn't believe Quirrel did it) seemed designed to kill Draco right away; the next plot may succeed. And people are dying in Azkaban all the time, second by second.
Pre-edit Harry was unwilling to commit to killing as an acceptable instrumental goal given a sufficiently high payoff. Making a goal sacred and of infinite value, while also wanting to balance it with other terminal values, is a contradiction. Harry realized this, and did it anyway, and that is a rationalist sin. He disobeyed the rule that "if you know what you're going to think or do later, you should think or do it now".
Post-edit Harry is willing to commit to killing if that's what it takes. He asks Moody not to harm the suspect if possible, but he doesn't say they should not attack him if they expect to have to harm him. He is both a better rationalist and a better person.
Harry's discussion with Moody in 86 didn't bother me. I'm referring specifically to the old version of 85. And remember that the vast majority of conflicts in the world don't turn out to be "war" - thus far, we've had one attempted murder and a jail that's basically a worse version of a stereotypical third-world oubliette. That's well within the realm of things police deal with on a regular basis. Police don't generally give themselves license to, say, burn Narcissa Malfoy alive.
(Anybody have a copy of old-85? I'd like to see the exact phrasings of it if possible, for continuing this discussion)
"What's that, Lassie? Somewhere a LWer is wishing they had made use of my archiving system so they could pull a particular page out of their local cache and upload it to Dropbox? Then we'd better hurry!"
The thing is that people aren't perfect rationalists, and part of being a good rationalist is acknowledging your own flaws and limitations.
If you accept to kill, you'll kill, even in situations where killing wasn't necessary, because you'll stop searching the hypothesis space when you find a solution that involves killing. Or because you'll estimate that killing one will save two, but your estimation was flawed - you killed one, and yet the two still die. And it's also something you should know about the way humans work, that once you did something once, it's easier to do it again - and the killing curse seems to model that quite well.
Harry putting himself a "I'll not kill" rule is him forcing himself to find solutions that don't require killing. Especially when you see how his "dark side" work, finding solutions to "impossible" problems when really pressured to do it, it doesn't seem irrational from him to test the hypothesis that he, with his rationalist training, and his "dark side" creativity, can find solutions that don't involve killing. And that only if that hypothesis is falsified, he'll resort to killing.
I think Harry's mistake is that he has left himself no setting between, "no killing" and "all bets are off".
Yeah - it's not so much the downer, that's fine, it's that I miss Harry's resolution. Hopefully that pops up later.
Probably not - there's just no room for anywhere to put it!
I think you did, though it's not exactly the same decision.
In this version, Harry didn't even wait for a bystander to die. He deliberately sacrificed Azkaban prisoners, some of which are innocent, in the name of higher probability of success. The decision is not very explicit, but he had decided to stop playing nice right away.
I would've liked to include the resolution too - but there simply wasn't room for that and the phoenix. I decided the plot could better survive the surgery of one than the other.
So I've got an alternate version that includes the important parts of both endings. Feel free to use or modify it if you like it.
The boy stood there on the rooftop, his own eyes locked with two points of fire. The stars might have had time to shift in their constellations while he stood there, agonizing over the decision...
...that wouldn't...
...change.
The boy's eyes flickered once to the stars above; and then he looked at the phoenix.
"No. Not yet," the boy said in a voice hardly audible. "I can do better. I can end death itself, not just Azkaban, if you give me the chance. If I can't stop death, if more have to die while I wait for the right time, then I will. But not yet. I still think I can win this without loss, and I won't...can't!...throw away that chance at a big victory later for a small one tonight."
Without word, without sound, a sphere of fire surrounded the bird's form, crackling and blazing with white and crimson veins as though it meant to consume that which lay within; and when the fire dispersed into grey smoke, no phoenix remained.
There was silence on the top of the Ravenclaw tower. The boy gradually lowered his hands from his ears, pausing only to wipe at his wet cheeks.
I figured it was for plot reasons. And upon rereading, it does make more sense - for some reason, I thought it was Fawkes that was coming, not another phoenix. My original reading was that Fawkes was somehow going to spitefully reject a chance to destroy Azkaban because Harry had missed his chance, which seemed absurd - knowing that Harry was giving up his chance at a phoenix of his own, and not his mission, annoys me much less. I'm still not sure if I like the new 85 more than the old, but it's closer now.
Also, I'm probably being optimistic about how easy the writing of it would be, but my first impression is that it should be possible to make a version of it where Harry's resolution is the rejection.
Or verifying a deal he made with Voldemort, though that might not make as much sense with Snape's character.
What, as in he made a deal not to hurt Lily, but killing's okay? Snape's messed-up, but I don't think he's quite inhuman enough to treat that as a deal honoured. The earlier part of the events, perhaps, but not the "Lily died without pain, then?".
I read it as Snape being happy that Voldemort offered Lily an out: his deal with Voldemort must have been "please let Lily live and I'll do anything". The memory confirms the story that Voldemort gave Lily an option out ("stand aside"). So he considers Voldemort to have held up his side of the bargain.
This interpretation does not bode well for the Dumbledore-Snape alliance (which already seemed to be in bad shape in MoR)
That's how I read it as well.
Snape saw that Voldemort had kept his word, and only killed Lily when she attacked him first.
It seemed to me that Harry hadn't learned his lesson about his talks with Snape. He even noted that Snape's allegiance was wavering, and yet he shows him that Voldie given Lily her chance.
Harry didn't learn, no. But is that an advantage or a disadvantage? To go back to Chapter 76:
Now, yes, this separates Snape from Dumbledore. But Dumbledore is not the protagonist. Harry is the protagonist. And what Snape can learn from Harry's actions are:
Harry Potter will tell him the truth; Snape can trust Harry Potter. -or- Harry Potter is a brilliant plotter; so good that even at age eleven he outclasses both Voldemort and Dumbledore with his ability to fake being honest and trustworthy.
If the first is true, Snape can put his trust in Harry, where he cannot trust Voldemort or Dumbledore. In a world where the prophecy clearly declares Harry Potter a power that ranks with Voldemort, isn't the obvious power to align oneself with the one who you can trust? When looking at the future, do you want it dominated by someone who let you wallow in foolishness and pain for their own advantage, or someone who treated you as you would wish to be treated? (Well, it might just mean the boy doesn't have enough guile to win, of course, but that suggests merely not burning your bridges. You're already in the other camp, after all . . .)
If the second is true, the only sensible course is to make oneself as useful to Harry as possible, because Harry is unstoppable.
Who were Snape's two mentors? I used to think they were Voldemort and Dumbledore, in that order. But from the new chapter we learn that Snape only became a Death Eater when he told the prophecy to Voldemort, and that must have been immediately before Voldemort died or vanished. That doesn't seem to leave enough time for Voldemort to be a mentor to Snape.
Note that the prophecy is from before Harry was born, and his parents died when he was over a year old.
The timetable is getting tight for Voldemort to mentor Snape significantly, but I really don't see who else it could be; especially since it doesn't sound to me like it's supposed to be a huge mystery who the second mentor was. (I think we can exclude Quirrel/Monroe entirely.)
I like this as a hint as to where Snape might move next. His detachment from Dumbledore makes him a free agent in my book, unless he's more beholden to Lucius than I know.
Right, Chapter 76 was mainly to verify that Harry was trustworthy.
He gave her a slight chance of living with the guilt of having scarified her son, which sounds more like torture than generosity to me.
If he really wanted to let Lily live, he would have stunned her, or he would moved to cast the Killing Curse on the crib without harming her.
Asking her to voluntarily stop protecting her child is sadism, not a real attempt at sparring her life.
That's true enough.
But I don't think keeping his deal with Snape required making sure that Lily lived, it required giving her a chance. You say it was a crappy chance. Maybe so. But this was a concession on Voldemort's part, and expecting a Dark Lord to do more than the letter of an agreement is asking a bit much.
Harry isn't much of a believer in the noble lie, if you haven't noticed.
He didn't even have to lie. All he had to do was say the thing in italics which he thought, right before the end.
Snape if anyone understands exactly how excruciating emotional pain can be.
But after his previous encounter with Snape, where he offered Snape advice while not knowing what the advice was about, he seemed to accept that discretion can sometimes be the better part of valor, and maybe sometimes you should just shut up.
He didn't need to be sharing these facts with Snape, he even recognized in the moment the undesirability of doing so, and yet he spilled the beans regardless. That boy just aint never gonna learn.