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gwern comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87 - Less Wrong Discussion
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So, in MoR, we see that not only do Pensieves work well, it's apparently easy to transport the memories to boot, since Voldemort sends Dumbledore a torturous memory. This means Pensieves are even more broken than canon, and you'd think Harry, who said he was specifically looking for intelligence-related magics, would've noticed this...
New theory: Pensieves are rare and expensive as part of a conspiracy of elite schools and their elite graduate-alumni to keep education rare and expensive - their business & prestige respectively would be destroyed if anyone could go into an assembly line school, dunk their heads in pensieves for a few months, and walk out the equivalent of the best Hogwarts graduates.
For education purposes, Pensieves seem entirely analogous to video recording. Is there a relevant distinction?
Pensieves appear to function equivalently to a video lifelog - they give you an accurate view of things that have happened to you, and allow you to share it with others. As a teaching tool, it is a VCR. It would be very useful for DADA, if you can talk some aurors into sharing memories of real fights, but I'd not expect exposure to that prior to NEWT level classes, and having that record be restricted to auror trainees would be easily justifiable.
As an investigative and intellectual tool, it is highly valuable, of course. But for basic education? Nah.
How do you know that when they're never used for education, and are only ever shown for personal experience? Perhaps they burn in memories effectively, in which case they're a clear win: take the smartest and most skilled student, have them learn something, extract the memory, and mass produce that. Amortize it over thousands of students for indefinite decades... Sounds much better than video.
As far as I recall, we are given no indication that such an advantage over video is present.
The argument from silence works both ways.
Except, we know that they aren't in fact used for education.
In fiction, if something is not foreshadowed, it can be true, but it shouldn't play any role in what follows, and in this sense it could be said to not belong to the fictional setting.
We have no evidence that it's possible to reproduce memories extracted from a pensieve. It may be that the only way to do so is manually, i.e. casting memory charms that exactly replicate the content of the memory from the pensieve. That would mean a whole lot of man-hours to mass produce a memory.
It's a whole lot of man-hours to produce education the old-fashioned way too - think of how much of the economy education makes up.
That's true, but when you put in all that time to produce a memory, you're making something that can only be used by one person at a time, albeit an indefinite number of times. A video takes less time and money to reproduce, and can be watched by many people simultaneously.
I don't think viewing a pensieve memory guarantees understanding of the contents. In canon, when Harry first viewed one, his reaction was essentially "what the hell is this?" A star pupil who puts their memories of their classes into a pensieve may not produce something that confers any more comprehension than a video of the lecture. You can't ask a pensieve memory or a video questions when you're confused.
So you have multiple Pensieves and each student does a different memory at a time, and when they get confused they ask another student No different than books or 'flipped' classrooms.
If the pensieve memories don't confer greater understanding though, why not just use books instead? They're cheaper.
Faster (at least in the movies, wasn't a time-speedup implied?), 3D sound & audio, literally immersive, forced attention...
I don't know, I've only watched a couple of them, but I'm pretty sure that it wasn't in the books.
I think wizards can probably produce 3d sound and audio via illusions without needing pensieves anyway.
A pensieve puts you in the memory, so you can't focus on something outside it, but I don't think there's anything that prevents you from zoning out or dozing off in someone else's memory. Of course, in the books, everyone perusing a pensieve memory had enough reason to pay rapt attention that it wasn't an issue.
A memory is not a skill... Watching someone cast a spell or make a potion, while helpful, no more makes you a better caster or a potion maker than watching a food network show makes you a better cook. In other words, it would be good for learning history (or apparently arithmancy), marginal to useless for learning charms or transfiguration.
Skills are memories as much as anything else is. Consider the research into experts where much of it is just a large chunk of long-term memory. The question is whether experiencing Pensieve memories is as good as a natural memory.
Skills are partly memories, but memories are not skills. You don't learn to ride a bike just by watching someone else do it and simply remembering it later (EDIT: though it helps, thanks to mirror neurons). I'd guess that procedural and other implicit memory is not pensievable.
EDIT: while looking stuff up, I came across this fascinating study on off-line memory consolidation.
Watching a bike merely forms a particular subset of memories, and does not show that 'memories are not skills'.
Yes, that rather is the question: how far does the Pensieve go? Is it merely a game-breaker for the kind of declarative knowledge schools spend so much time on, or a game-breaker for pretty much everything they might teach?
Not sure what your point is. If there were a way to use a potion, a spell, a charm or a human sacrifice to master the school curriculum without spending years in Hogwarts, surely there would be some students who did just that.
Which could be said of the Felix potion as well.
Procedural memory is "a type of long-term memory and, more specifically, a type of implicit memory." The term "memory" is too large in scope when you're basically only meaning episodic memory, if that.
I haven't read MoR in a while, but do we see anyone use Pensieves on a large scale like that? If not, another possibility is that there are unpleasant side-effects to using them on a large scale. For example, perhaps they overwrite elements of the recipient's own cognitive function, which isn't too big a deal in small doses because the recipient's brain/mind reroutes, but in larger doses resembles the effects of a brain aneurysm.
Of course not. I'm pointing that out.
A rather post hoc assertion to make...
Sorry, I'm being unclear. I understand you're pointing out that it isn't being done on a large scale in terms of populations, I wasn't sure if it was also never being done on a large scale in terms of individuals (e.g., if we never see Quirrell using Pensieves as a private training tool, or something).
And, sure, it's totally a post hoc assertion. Though so is the assertion that they are rare and expensive as the result of a deliberate program of deprivation. All we know from the text is that they don't seem to be used as an educational tool, apparently not even by the rich and powerful.
As far as I know, the only suggested or shown uses of Pensieve in canon or MoR are (extrapolating a bit from Draco in MoR, and Dumbledore in both):
The second suggests that the memories upon reviewing are just as good as a 'real' memory; the first suggests that they are convincing (otherwise why bother); and the fourth suggests that they are intellectually useful even if they were useless from a learning or skill perspective.