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Izeinwinter comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Harry is missing a point, tough. Flamel is 600 years old, and started out powerful. Presumably, "trying to blackmail / kidnap Flamel" has been the endpoint of the careers of enough dark lords that they do not attempt this anymore.
,,, Wait. alchemical diagrams need to be drawn "to the fineness of a child's hair"? ... ... Eh,, I think it entirely possible that Flamel is the only wizard to ever manage to make a stone because he is the only wizard to ever try it while young enough to use his own hair. In which case, Hermione is going to show up with a working stone shortly.
Harry's failing pretty badly to update sufficiently on available evidence. He already knows that there are a lot of aspects of magic that seemed nonsensical to him: McGonagall turning into a cat, the way broomsticks work, etc. Harry's dominant hypothesis about this is that magic was intelligently designed (by the Atlanteans?) and so he should expect magic to work the way neurotypical humans expect it to work, not the way he expects it to work.
In particular his estimate of the likelihood of a story like Flamel's is way off. Moreover, the value of additional relevant information seems extremely high to me, so he really should ask Dumbledore about it as soon as possible. Horcruxes too.
Edit: And then he learns that Dumbledore is keeping a Philosopher's Stone in Hogwarts without using it and promptly attempts a citizen's arrest on him for both child endangerment and genocide...
I disagree. It seems to me that individual spells and magical items work in the way neurotypical humans expect them to work. However, I don't think that we have any evidence that the process of creating new magic or making magical discoveries works in an intuitive way.
Consider by analogy the Internet. It's not surprising that there exist sites such as Facebook which are really well designed and easy to use for humans, rendering in pretty colors instead of being plain HTML. However, these websites were created painstakingly by experts dealing with irritating low level stuff. It would be surprising that the same website had a surpassingly brilliant data storage system as well as an ingenius algorithm for something else.
We have some weak evidence, namely McGonagall asserts that new charms and whatnot are created on a regular basis, which puts an upper bound on how difficult the process can be. But point taken.
It might be too surprising and horrible for him to let himself think that people might have access to the obvious stand-in for cryonics and just ignore it.
He already knows that the Dark Lord's death protection requires killing people. (Does it prevent physical degeneration or dying of old age?)
Somehow circumventing the Hayflick Limit is a possibility I suppose.
You can't use the fineness thing as a reason for the Philosopher's Stone to be unique to Flamel as it says explicitly in the chapter that all alchemical magic has the same requirements, and it doesn't sound at all like Flamel is the only one who can do alchemy.
I don't see why this would be an advantage over an experienced alchemist who's old enough to use their own children's.
Or any other children's for that matter. Or they just know from experience how thick hair is. (It varies a lot between people, at least as much as between ages.) Or they're dedicated enough to make it much finer than needed just to be sure.
Do strands of hair really become thicker over time? I doubt this.
No, I am thinking that the process of making the stone may simply not work for wizards that have begun to age. - That the crafting process draws on the youth of the wizard or witch crafting the stone, - the hair of a child. And it has to be the hair of the crafter - Everyone after Flamel have substituted the hair of some random kid, which just does not work. it is a spell that can only be done at all by a child prodigy, Which explains why it has not been duplicated - Very, very few teenagers and below would try it. This would also explain why he has not mass produced it - He can not make it again.
Also, there is the point that Hermione knocking off a philosophers stone out of the blue would derail everyone's plots in the most hilarious fashion. Flamel's Stone locked away behind insane security? Too bad Dumbledore, there is a second one in a students trunk. Heck, she would probably start selling the darn things.
Probably? Definitely - the whole idea is her Get Rich Quick scheme to repay Harry.
You don't need to sell the literal hen that lays the golden eggs to make money from it. It turns stuff into gold, remember?
Penalty for incorrect use of the word 'literal'.
Hmm. In my head I wanted "literal" to modify "golden" but not "hen" or "eggs." I guess that didn't work out so well on paper.
Try ‘You don't need to sell the hen that lays the literally golden eggs’.
I thought it was a goose.
So it was!
Yhea, the open selling of stones would be more about "Not being kidnapped" than "making money". Her defenses rather obviously not being up to Flamels standards (and Flamel appears to rely in large part on hiding!)
Baby hair is very fine...
I have read that the reason shaving seems to make hair thicker and stubbier has something to do with the thicker hair taking longer to grow. The baby hair may remain as fine all one's life, but be slowly hidden under the slower-growing thicker hair?
Shaving doesn't actually make hair thicker and stubbier, it just takes off a hair's tapered point and exposes a cross section.
I'm pretty sure not. While I don't examine the hair in my hairbrush hair by hair, it all looks to be of about the same thickness.