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Qiaochu_Yuan comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87 - Less Wrong Discussion

4 Post author: Alsadius 22 December 2012 07:55AM

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Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 23 December 2012 02:29:45AM *  28 points [-]

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...

Comment author: Solvent 27 December 2012 12:10:56PM 2 points [-]

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.

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.

Comment author: Qiaochu_Yuan 27 December 2012 11:27:45PM 1 point [-]

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.

Comment author: MixedNuts 23 December 2012 12:09:07PM 2 points [-]

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.

Comment author: ikrase 24 December 2012 12:28:43AM 0 points [-]

He already knows that the Dark Lord's death protection requires killing people. (Does it prevent physical degeneration or dying of old age?)

Comment author: PotKettle 17 May 2013 05:33:42AM 0 points [-]

Somehow circumventing the Hayflick Limit is a possibility I suppose.