Desrtopa comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (592)
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.
To reuse the argument from silence which everyone is using on the pensieves: we don't see the wizards produce 3D sound and audio via illusions for educational purposes despite the obvious utility in such classes as History of Magic, therefore they cannot.
We can produce 3D images now, and we don't use them for education even in well funded private schools. Why would we? I disagree that there's obvious utility in using such methods, I don't think it's very likely to improve students' educations.
Our 3D images cost a fortune to program, for starters, but I can weaken the argument: they don't produce any 2D images with sound either, and we certainly do that a ton.