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solipsist comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94 - Less Wrong Discussion
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In chapter 94, Harry knows about Important Things that we haven't seen him learn.
Harry to Dumbledore:
From Harry's internal monolog:
Harry has never been told about Horcruxes, nor the Marauder's Map. How does he know about them?
Has Harry been busy offscreen?
Or, is this exposition cut from Chapter 86?
(Also, isn't Horcrux capitalized in canon?)
EDIT: Chapter 94 was edited to remove Horcrux references.
Ah, there it is!
Harry time-turned to just before the troll attack. (In the one-and-a-half minutes when he went into Hermione's room.) This is probably pretty clear -- he's been keeping everyone else out of that room, and the centrality of the time-turner in this story more or less demands that Harry do so. Harry would have done this even if he couldn't come up with a plan in his previous six hours, just so he'd have another six hours to think, or do what he deemed needful to preserve Hermione's body.
Somewhere in there, he talked to the twins, and poorly obliviated them. Evidence:
Besides, it'll be a narratively nice, dark moment when Harry uses a spell whose existence he abhors on two of his best remaining friends and allies...
... and prevents them from helping him find Hermione. You think he went back in time to become responsible for one of the circumstantial reasons for his failure?
Sunk cost. Someone has taken the Marauder's Map; might as well be him.
That would not be wise: He should retroactively precommit to not steal the Marauders Map regardless of whether the Map is stolen, just as one should one-box on Newcombs problem.
This isn't quite Newcomb's Problem, though.
Consider this: You have essentially the same set up, and you're a one-boxer, so you walk up and take your million dollars out of box B.
And then Omega comes back and says, "Oh, by the way, want to open Box A too?"
And you say, "Um. Okay?" And open Box A, and get a thousand dollars. Or not. Doesn't really matter - you already have your million dollars, so you have nothing to lose by opening Box A.
This differs from the traditional two-boxing argument in one very important respect: you get new information in the middle of the experiment. Your single Omega-predictable algorithm doesn't have to "change its mind" in the middle, it gets interrupted.
This is essentially what (might be) happening here. Harry has opened Box B and found a dead Hermione inside. That's set and done. Assuming that he has reason to be believe that Box A will help him more than it will hurt him on average (and won't contain, say, a dead/mindless/insane Fred and George), he has no reason not to open Box A.
A more perfectly isomorphic variant of Newcomb's problem is the following. Both boxes are transparent, and Omega acts according to the following rule: if you two-box when box B is empty, then box B is always empty, while if you one-box, box B is empty with a 50% chance.
If you one-box in this variant, you win half a million dollars in expectation. If you intend to two-box should you see that box B is empty, then you only win a thousand dollars.
... Perhaps, but that's no longer isomorphic to the actual problem. We are past the point of Omega's influence; in Newcomb's problem, it'd be as if Omega grabbed your mind state, ran it forward until it confirmed that you would not initially two-box, and then stopped. Omega itself has been removed from the problem, and you're left with one empty box that you've already claimed a million dollars from (or negative one million, in this case) and one closed box.
Near as we can tell, history can't change in the MoRverse: what's done is done, so Harry might as well exploit it.
On the contrary, you should precommit to being responsible for all apparently bad occurrences if you happen to gain the ability to travel through time because if you can trust anyone to try to fix them while making them seem like they were bad to you it will be you.
This has the potential to produce many more self-sustaining "not quite as bad as it looks" bad events. Is this necessarily wise?
Suppose my best friend loses her cell phone, gets lost in the woods, and dies. I could pre-commit to not travel back in time and steal her cell phone. It would be easy commitment to make, because Time-Turners are fictional. Would making that commitment help save my friend?
(Your friend is less likely to die if you make that commitment) iff timeturners are not fictional. Avert all scenarios in which you doom your friend for a cellphone.
((I feel that neither this post nor its father have contributed to the point grandfather was making. Should I have downvoted father? Maybe I have misunderstood fathers question, was that a rhetorical question supposed to be "answered" by "Of course not!"?))
Yes, it was supposed to be a rhetorical question answered by "of course not".
Here's a Newcomb-like algorithm for getting a pony in my yard.
This algorithm works because the only stable time loops are the ones where I get a pony. You can get magically nice results by pre-commiting to create a paradox in unwanted timelines, if you can to commit to do something unpleasant in those timelines.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you want to pull this trick with Hermione's death. You're trying to make the only stable time loop be one where the Weaslys have the Marauder's Map.
Your suggestion would work if Harry had good cause to believe that the only person who could possibly steal the Marauder's Map was a future version of himself. Even if the map had already been stolen, deciding not to go back in time and steal the map would create a paradox. The only stable time loops would be ones where the map is not stolen.
Does that situation apply? No, not at all. There are many stable time loops where the Wheaslys lose the map. Quirrell could have done it. Dumbledore could have done it. Some dark force unknown could have done it. There is little reason to believe that eliminating future Harry as the map thief will lead to a nicer distribution of stable time loops. By contrast, the stable time loops where Harry is the map thief seem much more likely to be pleasant.
Ah, I believe you have misunderstood me. Lets say that in Yudcanon, either Dumbledore stole the map or Quirrel stole the map or Harry stole the map or Hat&Cloak stole the map or Mr. X stole the map. If Harry makes sure that Harry never steals the map, there is one less person who might have had a reason to steal the map, and the probability of the map being stolen versus it not being stolen goes down, even though he already knows that the map was stolen when he makes that decision; just like when Omega presents you the two boxes, you should retroactively precommit to one-box to receive a million, even though the content of the boxes is already determined.
Imagine Harry saw that the map was stolen, and thinks immediately of stealing it himself so as to acquire it. Naturally, he then plans to precommit to invisibility-cloak deposit it right behind Fred and George in 5 seconds. He might then go further and precommit instead to never having stolen it in the first place, so that it never leaves the grasp of the Weasley twins and Harry doesn't have to go to the effort of stealing it. Therefore, he now knows that the map was stolen by someone else, and that the probablity of the map being stolen in the first place has lessened, which is a good thing.
This is the point that I think is escaping many people in this thread. The options aren't as simple as A/A+B in Newcomb.
The map has been stolen. Everything we know about how Time Travel works in this universe indicates that this is a fixed fact that cannot be altered. Who took the map however is an unknown, and while it cannot be 'altered' either, the Effect can in this case precede the Cause. 'Map has been taken' can happen before 'Harry takes map because someone had to' such that B causes A and A leads to B. If Harry doesn't commit to it, B is still true, and so the Map is lost to him. His choices are (Map is Gone, I have it.) or (Map is gone.) The choice 'Map is still here and Hermione lives' is not a valid choice and should be discounted. So, his choices are to benefit or not benefit from the Map being gone.
The interesting question is, if the Twins forgot the Map entirely, how did they remember 'Deligitor Prodi'? Admittedly not perfectly.
It seems to me that your proposal is equivalent to the "malicious genie has granted you a wish" problem. There are so many ways to construct stable time loops which don't involve getting a pony that you've exceedingly unlikely to get one. You can precommit to whatever you want, but the answer may be as simple as being unable to achieve your committed goal due to bad information.
I completely agree. For the question at hand, committing to not steal the Marauders Map will not magically cause the Marauders Map to not be stolen. There are too many other ways to make a stable time loops -- too many "wishes gone wrong" -- for that sort of Newcomb-like pre-committing to work the way you want it to.
If you need more than 6 hours to learn Obliviation, you can use this method. Bonus: in addition to giving you more time to study, this method summons an army of hundreds of invisible Harry Potters (all with a single twist of the time-turner).
I would have tried this method, but I my narrative sense tells me that Harry did not.
http://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/1i3y86/quick_question_about_chapter_94/cb0trf7 some new word of god spoilers you may or may not want concerning this
Looks like this has been corrected to "the Dark Lord is supposed to have made his lich-phylactery-thingy".
Somewhere in between, it was called his lich-prophylactery-thingy.
There's a thought. Has anyone written about the lich equivalent of a Dhampir?
Too bad that got edited out, it was a hilarious bit of humor in an otherwise pretty dark section.
I did not recognise the term "lich phylactery", so did a quick Google. It is basically exactly the same as a horcrux, as defined in Dungeons and Dragons. Did JK Rowling pinch the idea from D+D, or did they both get it from a common source?
This wikipedia article) contains some rather interesting quotes:
Hmm... The mysterious ritual at the start of Chapter 1 takes place by moonlight...
Very interesting... but can it fool the Hogwarts wards as well?
The idea of a creature which can preserve its soul or life in an object is very old, and has appeared both in mythological sources and fantasy for a long time. For example, the Chronicles of Prydain were published in the 1960s and had at one point a villain with a similar situation. To a lesser extent, Sauron's relationship to his Ring has aspects of the same idea.
A much older example is the myth of Koschei who kept his soul hidden in a needle, inside an egg, inside a duck, inside an iron chest on a specific island. (Some versions of the story modify the exact details of the nesting and protection.) The oldest documented version of the Koschei story we have is from 1890, but it is likely that the story is much older. So it is hard to say where Rowling got the idea from since so many old versions of this have been floating around.
Thanks for this... I thought somebody would know of previous examples. Now that you mention it, Lord of the Rings is quite an obvious one.
for Horcrux, Moody lets the word slip in Multiple Hypothesis Testing and Dumbledore had described the concept without the word previously
as for the map....?
Harry has been told that Voldemort's immortality came at the cost of Myrtle's life, that no student had died in Hogwarts for 50 years, and has reason to believe that the Chamber of Secrets was involved and that Voldemort did it. He has enough information to piece together that much of the Horcrux plot.
The map, though, I do not remember him learning about.
The previous time we read the word "Horcrux" it was:
In canon, Tom Riddle found Horcrux research difficult and had to ask Professor Slughorn. Harry might suspect something Horcrux-like exists, but I don't see how he could be confident in the name.
Horcruxes are important for Harry to learn about, because Harry already suspects that (1) Quirrell did something Horcruxy to Pioneer 11 in 1973. (2) Quirrell asks about hiding important artifacts, in a winking sort of way. I expected learning about Horcruxes to visibly change Harry's opinion of Quirrell -- it changed my opinion of Quirrell.
Harry is very good friends with the twins. The information is not unlikely to have simply passed along naturally.
Maybe information started to leak through the Harry-Quirrel connection.