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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 24, chapter 95
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 95. The previous thread has passed 300 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.
Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
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Comments (304)
... Hm.
It seems to me that Quirrell hasn't updated.
Quirrell had no teacher of rationality. Rationality is hard to learn even with a teacher. Therefore Quirrell likely did not need a teacher: he was lucky enough to be born thinking rationally.
Then Quirrell would have been born with the notion that you put effort into things you care about: that extraordinary goals requires extraordinary effort. And when he saw other people not putting in that level of planning, intelligence, and effort, he assumed they simply didn't care as much as they said they did.
He's since gained evidence that people simply aren't as intelligent, or as rational, as he is, which makes it significantly more likely that people do, in fact, care. But he hasn't updated on that yet.
I wonder what happens if Harry manages to make him update...
I'm pretty sure that Quirrell DID just update. This chapter seems to be a pivotal moment in his character arc: a cynic learns that there really is such a thing as love and friendship in the world.
Did he update on humanity in general, or Harry in particular?
I think probably the latter. His conclusion is "So you really do care" not "So other people aren't rational enough to try to ressurect their loved ones."
From "So you do really care" and his well-established view that most people are painfully stupid, he should deduce also the latter, as it is more unlikely that Harry is both exceptionally rational and exceptionally caring unless he has a reason to believe that the former causes or at least strongly correlates with the latter.
Then again, someone who has a low opinion of others' intelligence should already believe that others are not rational enough to seek resurrection, even if they cared to want it.
Or else he found it expedient to give Harry the impression that he now believes there are such things as love and friendship in the world.
(Let us suppose for the sake of argument that Q was and still is Voldemort. For H to bring him into all his plans for research might be a very, very, very bad idea.)
That would be my interpretation.
If he thought Harry was a threat to destroy the world, why not just crush him? Sentimentality?
More likely Q concludes that Harry may do something he hadn't planned on, and wants in on the planning. He also likely sees Harry's resolve as a lever that could move the newly determined Harry in ways a less determined Harry could not be moved.
My heart broke during the litany of "magical world fairy tales." So much tragic death.
Calls this theory to mind...
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bto/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/6gow?context=4#comments
The decrease in sense-of-doom does seem like evidence for this. However:
The other thing is, quirrel...is passed out. remember the azkaban fight? it decreased a bit when quirrel passed out.
it is, at best, rather weak evidence for a truly fundamental change in Quirrelmort's view. enough to tip the scale over the 50% mark? maybe.
I started typing a comment on Eliezer's Facebook post about people not believing in their future selves, and was hartily distracted, and it turned into an HPMoR comment, so instead, I'm posting it here.
Judging by the downvotes, the last sentence was indeed correct.
Absurd stylings aside, I do wonder if the sorting hat doesn't have the ability to circumvent the interdict of Merlin, and whether or not Harry's exposure to the spell Fred Weasley used to summon it is sufficient that he could replicate it and ask it for those secrets he missed out on in chapter 10. He did ask Dumbledore about the sword (and the heir of Gryffendore and such), so I'm not sure if this falls into the category of resources he hasn't considered, or resources he has decided not worth pursuing.
Didn't the Hat demand never to be put on Harry again?
That sounds right. Also, the hat observed that Harry is highly unlikely to consider it ethical to risk providing the hat with self awareness again, which is to say, he'd probably be reluctant to try it before exhausting other avenues first.
Harry has changed a lot though, and is potentially more brutally consequentialist.
I wonder if he could use some kind of mind magic to prevent himself from thinking about self awareness while wearing it?
Pretty sure this is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's strategy in Emile. Albeit for social-sexual development, instead of magic.
Harry fits many of those attributes. Quirrelmort could have set this whole situation up to enable Harry to create new spells, and/or defeat death.
I doubt QM had "defeating death" for anyone but himself as a goal. He also claims to have seen muggle science as being mostly valueless in the past.
Doesn't look too good for Quirrell.
We are nearing the end of the school year, after all.
Edit for clarity: referring to the curse on the Defense Against the Dark Arts teaching position.
I just realized that Harry does not worry about Hermione's body disappearing anywhere I can remember in this chapter, which tells me he either knows exactly what's going on, or he plans to ignore the direct route and just become god, and thus it doesn't matter.
I don't think he would just give up on Hermione's body like that. There are many intermediate levels of power he could achieve quicker and easier then straight out becoming a god, and he would hardly want to make it harder on himself to resurrect Hermione.
Here is a predictionbook link.
I think Harry transformed her body into the gold ring. Then if Dumbledore were to search Harry for transmuted things (as he did), he would find the stone. Harry carefully set the ring and gem far apart, so when Dumbledore undid the transmutation on the stone it did not affect the ring. The brown color was to make the stone more attention seeking. The rest of Harry was carefully checked for magical things, but the ring itself was never checked for magic other than in combination with the stone.
Standard stage magician trick - make people look at something else.
Harry has shown a remarkable aversion to actually lying in past, so doing so here seems unlikely, and I don't see any loopholes in those answers. An interesting theory, but if it's true it implies some things about Harry's character growth.
He has lied directly before, about his role in the Azkaban escape.
A loophole would be noticed by Dumbledore. My money's on him simply lying directly now. (I mean that literally, I have made a bet that depends on it. :-)
Granted, and it's certainly conceivable. I just think it says interesting things if it's true.
I find this interesting, considering that non-magical Italy didn't exist as a unified nation until 1861. It seems odd that the magical political map so closely mirrors the non-magical.
Edit: It seems that Transylvania has its own national Quidditch team seperate from Romania, though this does not neccesarily mean that they are independant -- Scotland, after all, has its own Quidditch team, despite being governed by the Ministry in London
He may be referring to a subarea that was roughly what is modern day Italy. Out of universe what is there's a more likely set of explanations: Transylvania is a natural spooky/magical thing (hence Rowling's decision to include it as separate), and Eliezer doesn't know much history, so things like the unification of Italy aren't on his radar screen.
Eliezer not knowing stuff is generally low on my list of possibilities. Italian unification isn't terribly obscure. And Italy was always a unified geographic and cultural area, even in the period where it was politically disjoint.
History is very far from his areas of expertise, and it is an area where he's demonstrated gaps before (in particular, when talking about phlogiston as an example of a theory that didn't pay rent, and when using heliocentricism/geocentricism as an example). This isn't a very high priority area for him.
Well, “Italy” was unified before, in the form of the Roman Empire. The magical sub-section of the world could simply have had very different history than the muggle one. Given that wizard population is so small and concerned with blood lines, it’s a likely hypothesis that they’d form and maintain more-or-less unitary communities bounded by language and the like, even if the muggle societies they’re overlaid on are fragmented into city-states.
This hypothesis would predict political unity between US and Canadian Wizards (same language, similar culture, divided by an arbitrary line drawn by muggles as a result of a series of conflicts that wizards probably don't care about). Does anyone remember hearing anything in Rowling!canon or MoR!canon about an independent magical Canada existing?
Edit: on further consideration, what it would actually predict would be unity between US and anglophone Canadian; if I recall my history right, the union of French and English speaking Canadians was also a result of muggle conflicts that wizards wouldn't care about.
British, US, and Canadian wizards?
On the other hand, in the modern world where wizards want to manage governments, muggle boundaries matter to some extent.
Hmmm. So, I suspect that Quirrelmort is back to regular Quirrel, though whether that is temporary or permanent remains to be seen. (Rereading it, from the dialogue it looks temporary.)
I get the impression from the Defense Professor's dialog that it probably isn't permanent, but the way he hesitated before saying good day makes me wonder if even he is unsure about that after that last star spell.
I was also pleased to see that ZOMBIE! Quirrel still has the cognitive capacity necessary to crawl back toward the castle from the depths of the permitted forest. Although that's probably not that great; it'll probably suck to be the real Quirinus Quirrell very soon, and if he's had to be aware of all the further suckitude over the past year, that would probably have a net negative in utility.
For the past week or so, I've been occasionally imagining Harry running off after some important Voldemort event, and stumbling across the dead or dying Quirrell, just before coming across Voldy's new body, and being all concerned/confused in the few seconds it takes for him to figure out what's been going on. Considering that Quirrellmort is not an idiot, I kinda doubt this would play out like this (I'm imagining it at a graveyard, even), but it seems like we're close to the real Quirrell making some appearances, such as the one in this chapter.
Appearances by the real Quirrell? My impression is that the crawling zombie is the real Quirrell. Early in the story, Quirrell's non-Voldemort mode is a weirdo, but passable as a normal human. Since then, things have gotten steadily worse. My guess is that the dark magic Voldemort is using to possess Quirrell's body takes a heavy toll on the victim of the possession, with damage accumulating over time, and by the end of the Hogwarts school year, Voldemort will no longer be able to use the body and the real Quirrell will be dead or at least a vegetable.
Agreed (I get the impression this was how it was supposed to work in canon as well, with the chief difference being that Voldemort was much weaker and avoided taking direct control, so Quirrell was still capable of attempting wandless magic by the end of the year). I'm actually a little curious as to whether or not the unicorn blood detail has any relevance to HPMoR, but it hasn't been mentioned yet that I remember, so probably not.
it MIGHT be the glint of silver in chapter 1. maybe. :shrugs:
So MoR might be a meta-fantasy of the wizarding world as The Sword of Good is a meta-fantasy of the muggle world. Or at least, MoR!Harry might make the same impression to a wizard reading one fic as Hirou does to a muggle reading the other.
Although my instinct is still that Harry fails at the end.
As long as he's alive, he'll keep trying, so either he dies, or he succeeds, or something very unexpected happens. Otherwise there will be no closure to the story.
A while ago Mitchell Porter wrote that Robin Hanson often makes arguments like:
Quirrel is being even more Hansonion than usual in #95, arguing that other people not trying to raise their friends from the dead means they don't care about their friends.
Since I had no idea about the stand-on-head thing, could somebody give me some sources please? I'm curious. Most importantly, are the benefits long term or short term?
I didn't interpret the quote as implying that it would actually work, but rather as implying that (the Author thinks) Hanson's 'people don't actually care' arguments are often quite superficial.
It is, not to put too fine a point on it, false. An excess of oxygen doesn't really help out your brain under ordinary conditions. Try hyperventilating (breathing significantly more quickly and deeply than you need to satisfy your energy requirements) and you're just liable to become dizzy and see spots.
I googled to see if there are any known benefits to doing headstands, and the answer is "maybe, but the only people claiming so are new-agey yoga sources."
Hyperventilation's primary effect is to reduce CO2 levels in your blood, although it also increases oxygen. Decreasing CO2 beyond normal levels makes blood bicarbonate combine with hydrogen ions to form more CO2, which increases blood alkalinity, which makes blood vessels constrict and reduce blood supply to the brain, which makes you lightheaded. So hyperventilation is low-quality evidence about the effects of extra oxygen on your brain.
...Now I kinda want to put Gwern into a hyperbaric chamber and have him record his dual-n-back and math performance for comparison.
Yup. Was about to make a similar comment. Hyperventillation will not hyper-oxygenate the brain.
That said, the "hyper-oxygenated brain -> brain function" hypothesis has been raised to the level of our attention for a very bad reason. We should let it die.
Hum, in my own experience, going down to the sea level after spending time in high altitude does a similar dizziness than hyperventilating, I always assumed it was hyper-oxygenated brain in both cases. Any explanation for the "reverse altitude sickness" ? Placebo effect (well, nocebo effect) ?
I don't think that's necessary. Besides oxygen being poisonous and dangerous, it's been studied before, and it seems to be less oxygen that matters after a point than carbon dioxide. This was discussed somewhere on Greg Cochrane's blog.
Yup. Very true. That was my thought too when reading the chapter. But on Facebook EY claimed that Quirrell's arguments this chapter where also inspired by Michael Vassar, who, as he puts it, "is basically Professor Quirrell with a phoenix". (Although he admits in the comments that "Robin Hanson is Professor Quirrell as an economist instead of a wizard.")
Updating on my mental model of Michael Vassar to be a bit closer to Robin Hanson, I guess.
As someone points out on the thread, that makes Vassar a wizard with a phoenix... Like Dumbledore? Huh, funny.
On Quirrell's theory of human nature:
It seems to me that in general, his theory yields pretty accurate predictions, and to see what's wrong with it you probably need to know some evolutionary psychology; Eliezer's Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers. Evolution is going to favor genes for convincingly acting like you care about your friends without incurring too many costs for their sake. Yeah, it's also going to favor genes for seeing through easily faked signals, but to the extent that people can get away with it, it's going to favor genes for seeming to care about your friends without incurring the costs that would go along with that. The twist is that evolution while evolution produces behaviors that tend in that direction, it doesn't produce creatures who follow the strategies exactly, or consciously. The result is people who actually care about their friends... even if they very often don't act like it.
I've been working with the idea that Quirrell is a high functioning psychopath, who often believe that other people are also "faking it".
That seems like a really obvious descriptor of Voldemort.
Or maybe Voldemort is pretending to be a psychopath. pretending to be a cynic who uses masks.
It's interesting to view these friend roles that Quirrelmort keeps referring to as products of evolution, which Harry is purposefully seeking an escape from by seeking to conquer death itself. It's this perspective that allows him to be willing to disregard the evolutionary shaped roles that Quirrelmort keeps trying to remind him of.
I don't disagree, but I would note that the extent to which people exhibit role-like behavior is probably also somewhat due to cognitive limitations as well as humans not being strategic. You cannot consider every possible scenario or plan, so if you want to be a good friend, a good cook, or a good philosopher, looking at the way that other friends, cooks, or philosophers behave and copying that is generally a pretty good heuristic. It's often better to follow the accumulated wisdom and only make small improvements on that, rather than to try something drastically different that nobody has tried before but which should work in theory, or which at least should if the bullet-swallowers are correct.
Note that this is compatible with Quirrell maintaining that McGonagall wouldn't be enthused with the idea of resurrecting Hermione even if it was pointed out to her: indiscriminately believing in arguments is dangerous, so it would still make sense for her to reject an outlandish argument that she couldn't properly evaluate, like "let's go resurrect Hermione", even if she did genuinely care about Hermione.
(I find it ironic that, as I check this page, this comment was right below a thread claiming that Quirrells arguments are superficial.)
On Voldemort's plan:
I'm surprised. Why does he want Harry to show him his books? He could have read those books without Harry's help. Is he afraid that if he studied muggle science without a guide, he'd be at too great a risk of accidentally destroying the world? Or is he hoping that Harry will tip his hand regarding the power Voldemort knows not?
Edit: it's also possible this is a fake out and just one more step in the process of manipulating Harry into something.
He might be afraid that he'd waste a lot of time if he doesn't have a guide to at least point him at the good stuff.
Ah. True. He may have been studying muggle science for awhile, but suspects Harry can direct him to things whose importance he hadn't realized.
Also, brilliant he may be, but there's a limit to how fast you can learn without a teacher.
Remember that story about the dojo? Quirrell isn't too proud to learn.
Or rather, he simply want to know what Harry knows so he can produce an even better model of Harry and improve his influence over him.
Quirrell wants to know what Harry's plans are. The books Harry is reading and/or familiar with help Quirrell understand what Harry is thinking or likely to try.
I think he just wants to keep himself in the loop. (Which is probably the same reason he offered to teach him any spell he can.)
If he refuses to help, Harry will just do everything in secret, which is dangerous. Quirell probably reasons that his best chance of exerting influence is to be near, preferably a part of, Harry’s plans.
Nice, Quirrell is tracking Harry by checking in which direction the sense of doom becomes stronger.
I hereby rechristen "the sense of doom" to "the sensor of doom".
Edit: "But what do Muggles know of true power? It is not them who frightens me now. It is you." Typo, should be 'frighten'.
Edit 2: "I could name a dozen examples in Muggle novels of people driven to resurrect their dead friends. The authors of those stories clearly understood exactly how I feel about Hermione. Though you wouldn't have read them, I guess... maybe Orpheus and Eurydice?" -- Aah, what a lost chance to break the fourth wall and cite HPMOR as an example!
And arguably should be 'they' rather than 'them'; Q strikes me as the sort of person who might well choose 'they' rather than 'them'.
Thank goodness it was lost; let us hope it is never found again.
What an ending that would be: Harry uses the Self-Indication Assumption to conclude that he is most probably a character in a Muggle story about magic, then manages to 'blackmail' the author into granting him godhood in order to stop Harry from committing suicide in a literarily unsatisfying fashion, since the author would prefer the former as an ending over the latter. Someone would object that Harry doesn't have agency? But he does, if the author takes the character seriously and continues with a high-fidelity in-character continuation. If Harry found out he's likely a character in a novel, he'd be right, and there's no reason he shouldn't use that to his advantage.
Talk about writing yourself into a corner! :)
EDIT:
"It's not going to work!" Harry was shouting at the top of his lungs, his wand pointed at his own temple. He gripped it so tightly his knuckles were white. "You wrote me this way, you know there's no going back from this point, you knew I'd find out eventually."
Ominous clouds were forming, a harsh wind picking up, making Harry shiver from where he stood in the Hogwarts central yard. Students stood aghast, staring at the screaming boy pointing the wand at himself.
"And you can stop with the weather charade, if I do this -- and I will, your book will be ruined, those little touches of drama aren't going to fool anyone!"
"Harry." The cold voice of the Defense Professor carried over the noise of the wind effortlessly, yet seemed spoken with little effort. "I have new ... " Quirrell pointedly glanced at the students present. "... information regarding your quest. I don't know what you are trying to achieve with this, but it may be best we go inside and ..."
Harry scoffed -- actually scoffed at his mysterious ancient wizard. "Silence, Mr. Intriguing-Plot-Point! I shouldn't even be talking to you, not any more! I won't be distracted, this ends now, one way or another. Which ending will you be writing, Mr. Not-Quite-Omniscient Author? None of your characters will make me back out of doing what's right! If you write this novel, I will make sure it's an utopia, or I'll ruin it!"
"Harry!" A wide-eyed Dumbledore appeared as if out of nowhere next to Quirrell. "Harry, my dear boy! Stop this madness! This is not what the hero is supposed to -" "You know, Headmaster, I don't blame you for your failures, for not seeing the obvious. That, too was part of the plot. You see," Harry's voice was dripping with condescension. "You weren't supposed to be endowed with enough agency, or to be taken seriously enough, to actually come to the right conclusion, and to cut your own strings. You remain the puppet ... with all due respect."
"Harry Potter. You and I have unfinished business!" Draco Malfoy, his father's spitting image, strut upon the courtyard. Harry didn't even look at him. Draco stared incredulously as Harry looked up at the sky, and continued to shout against the wind. "That must be some sort of movie allusion. Getting desperate, Mr. Author, aren't we? You won't salvage this ending, no matter how hard you contrive to. This show is over, no more diversions. It's time to end this!"
The wind stopped abruptly. Harry turned around, to find the courtyard empty. Only a certain twitch of his eyes betrayed that he had come to a decision, that he was preparing to act. The wand pressed ever harder against his temple, he opened his mouth to speak the final words. Had he overreached with his precommitment? I can only go forward, if I stop, I'm lost.
"Harry, oh Harry." A soft female voice said from behind him.
He knew that voice.
In my version he blows his brains out but not before the narration notes him realizing that the pattern of behavior he represents is reproduced with pretty good fidelity in everyone who has read the story. This includes second degree fanfiction authors in whom he can boot up a whole new universe in reaction to the unsatisfying end of this story...
'Quantum' immortality for literary characters, because anyone can always pop up a fanfiction sequel where they somehow didn't die?
Ugh. I hope EY doesn't go "many worlds" with this.
It's a fanfic - I think it's a bit late for that.
Aka Sophie's World http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie%27s_World
See, this would work if the fic was trying to steelman Number Of The Beast.
Am I the only one who thinks that would be a horrible ending?
Brings to mind the Hunger Games, personally.
Could make a fun Omake?
I discussed this on a previous thread. I wasn't a fan
Can't, it won't be written for another 20 years
That didn't stop Harry from citing Critch!
Good point; so perhaps Eliezer will also have published early in the MoRverse.
For those wondering about this:
323 years before 1992, this happened:
That's probably also what's referenced later on:
(though it's pretty likely that in HPMOR-verse, all volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. are caused by Magic Gone Wrong)
I doubt it, since first off, many of them long predate humans, and second, something would have to be seriously wrong with our model of geology for plate tectonics to not sometimes result in volcanoes or earthquakes.
No, 323 years.
Sorry, it confused me for about ten seconds.
:D Whoops! Fixed, thanks.
For a moment I was afraid that I got my calculations wrong and the actual date referenced was 1769...
There's a good chance that EY didn't want to allude to any historical event. Maybe his writer's instincts to give concrete examples kicked into gear, and he made up a fictional event about a fictional society.
But suppose he did choose to allude to a specific historical event. Why would he choose this one?
He would not choose this event because it was a great disaster with many casualties. According to the Wikipedia article, there is no historical record of any deaths from this eruption, and the disaster is overshadowed historically by the 1693 Sicilian Earthquake. If EY were going for famous and lethal disasters, he would be very unlikely to choose this one when there are so many more famous ones.
He would not choose this disaster because it is Italian. Italy was not well defined in the 17th century. If you had to choose some place to represent modern day Italy, you would be far more likely to choose a place in Northern Italy (like Florence, where modern Italian comes from) than a city in southern Italy (like Sicily, which was ruled by the Spanish in the 17th century).
The only circumstance under which I think EY would choose specifically to allude to Etna's eruption is if he needed to refer to a volcano. If EY needed to refer to a volcanic eruption, it's probably about Horcruxes.
Quirrell could be smiling because someone else put a Horcrux in Etna, but given his history with Pioneer I think it is more likely that Quirrell himself did the deed.
So (finally), after this long inference chance, I have slightly raise my belief that Quirrell is hundreds of years old.
But would Quirrell refer to someone placing a horcrux in Etna as "folly", given that it is apparently one of the best things you can do with a horcrux? And would he choose to allude to something like this in front of Harry when, unlike with the Pioneer Plaque, he doesn't stand to benefit from revealing the information?
If Quirrell alluded to Etna's eruption in Chapter 95, then Quirrell likely was thinking about Etna's eruption when wearing a very odd smile in Chapter 46. I'm advancing only the implication, not the antecedent.
Quirrell seems to have been counterfactually mugged by hearing the prophecy of the end of the world...which would mean his decision theory, and psychological commitment to it, are very advanced.
Assume Quirrell believes that the only possible explanation of the prophecy he heard is that the apocalypse is nigh. This makes sense: prophecies don't occur for trivial events like a visitor to Hogwarts destroying books in the library named "Stars in Heaven" and "The World," and the idea of "the end of the world" being a eucatastrophe hasn't occurred to him. Assume Quirrell believes that prophecies are inevitable once spoken. Then why is Quirrell bothering to try to save the world?
Given that he hears the prophecy, Quirrell can either try T or not try ~T to avert it. Given that he tries, Quirrell is either capable C or incapable ~C of averting it. If T and C, by inevitability Quirrell will never hear the prophecy, which means that it is less likely the end of the world will occur (massive events always produce a prophecy that is heard by a wizard, so either Time finds some way to stop the end of the world or someone else hears it but fails to avert it). Say the end of the world causes -100 utility to Quirrell, and trying to stop it causes -1 utility. Then if C, a Quirrell that would try never hears the prophecy, so he never loses any utility, while a Quirrell that would not try hears the prophecy, goes out in a blaze of hedonism rather than fighting the inevitable, and loses 100 utility from the end of the world. Unfortunately, the actual world is the ~C world, where T brings -101 utility and ~T brings -100. So T looks like an irrational choice, but actually maximizes Quirrell's utility across counterfactuals.
This isn't the only explanation for Quirrell's actions; he could just prefer to go out fighting, or be betting on the slim chance that prophecies actually can be averted, or just trying to delay the end of the world as long as possible, or acting on other, weirder motives. But it's an interesting illustration of how alien a being that has truly internalized a really sophisticated decision theory might be.
Upvoted because it is an interesting parallel, but this is unlikely to be an explanation of Quirrell's actions. See Chapter 86:
Quirrell believes that he can cause or prevent the "end of the world" prophecy, and is gambling that helping Harry increases the chance of "prevent" rather than "cause". A better chance was to dissuade Harry - that would increase the chance of "prevent" even more - but Quirrell's just realized that he can't do that.
If his goal was really to prevent Harry from destroying the world, he would just crush Harry like a bug and be done with it. He's killed people for much less.
Only if Harry has no other value to him that would make him worth preserving, in which case the entire story would be completely different. We know that Quirrell values Harry, instrumentally and possibly emotionally, and has great plans for him. He will not sacrifice all of that unless he has no other choice.
That's my point. Quirrell has plans for Harry. Any worry about what Harry will do is better explained by worry that Quirrell's plans will be thwarted by what Harry does, not by some supposed worry of Quirrell's that Harry will destroy the world. And more likely than any worry is just the opportunity presented by Harry's resolve to bring back Hermione by any means necessary.
Best guess is that Harry is a horcrux. He can't be killed, except with very powerful magic (Avada Kedavra or equivalent), and Quirrell can't use magic against him. Further, his last attempt at killing Harry was a total disaster. Chapter 65:
This does cast some light on how Voldemort got blown up in the first place. The fatal interaction of magic stems from Harry being a horcrux; but Harry's only a horcrux because Voldemort made him one. Further, the horcruxing most likely happened because of the weird interaction of magic which caused Voldie to blow up (and his soul-explosion, or whatever, then anchored itself to the infant Harry). It looks like there was some sort of trick with a Time Turner involved in Godric's Hollow to set this up. I suspect Dumbledore...
P.S. If Quirrell gets really desperate, he could of course try to persuade someone else to do the AK on Harry. Will be amazing if he can persuade Dumbledore to do it...
Your quote could be just making fun of canon though.
Upvoted for the word 'eucatastrophe'.
I am amazed that Eliezer managed to take Rowling's most corny idea and made it non-corny: "The power that the Dark Lord knows not" is, after all, none other than the power of true love. And it is a mighty power not because of a hokey magical force attached to it, but because someone who feels it in addition to being rational is motivated to reshape the universe. "Power comes from having something to protect."
Ok, my head hurts, what is going on with Quirrell?
We have been prepared for the idea that Quirrell has any number of identities, multiple times.
Chapter 59:
Chapter 86:
I am all for the different masks, but that when a person makes many people out of himself. Here we have Tom Riddle who is definitely was born and David Monroe who was born(*), and Q.Q. who was born, and Harry's teacher could be only one of those three (or someone else entirely), but not the three at once.
(*)I mean a boy, a baby, not the "returned from Albania" one.
It is very strongly implied that the Pioneer plaque is a horcrux, in which case Voldemort will not die unless the plaque is destroyed (extremely unlikely) or his connection to it is severed by some means unseen in canon and unhinted at in HPMOR. If we assume that QQ = Voldemort, which is also fairly safe, then no, his time should not be up.
One thing I forgot to mention in my comments last night, about Quirrellmort's theory of psychology: he seems to have a rational fear that Harry attempting to resurrect Hermione will destroy the world. Does he not realize that Dumbledore and McGonagall might also refuse to help Harry out of that same rational fear? Or is he refraining from mentioning it as part of manipulating Harry?
I think he's a lot more convinced of Harry's capabilities than they are.
Moreover, he knows something about the source of Harry's unusualness that they don't know that he knows, and he needs to keep it that way.
Another question: can we try to nail down Voldemort's body-management strategy (for lack of a better term)?
I've been assuming that Voldemort possessed Quirrell shortly before the beginning of the Hogwarts school year, and the dark magic he used is only good for about a year before it "uses up" the possessed body in some sense. (Killing it, rendering it an un-possessable vegetable, something like that.)
But after thinking about this hard, I'm not so sure about that. Maybe the degredation in that body's condition is due to being in constant close proximity to Harry Potter, or something. Also, that may not even be Quirrell's body, Quirrell may be long dead and this is just some poor schmuck Voldemort decided he could pass off as Quirrell.
I assume Voldemort has a backup plan, in case his plans for Harry do not come to fruition this year.
Going back in time, what was going on when Voldemort was also, simultaneously, David Munroe? It seems he was planning on using the Munroe persona for many years, so he can't have used the same method he used for the Quirrell-body. What if the Munroe body was his original body, and he was just counting on years of aging to prevent people who knew him as Tom Riddle from recognizing him?
We may safely assume Voldemort used different facial features for Voldemort and Munroe. I don't know if it's been explicitly stated in HPMOR if Voldemort (as Voldemort) was disfigured as he was in canon, but it seems likely. However, I doubt the disfigurement was an unintentional side-effect of dark rituals, as in canon, because Voldemort had no trouble appearing as Munroe. More likely, it was a deliberate choice, to make the villain he set up for himself to defeat as Munroe as evil-looking as possible. One possibility is that this was not a second body, but the same body as the Munroe body, shape-shifted.
I assume what happened on the night of Harry's parents' death went exactly as planned for Voldemort. While Voldemort could have been betting on his ability to resurrect via horcruxes, it's not clear what going there would accomplish. More likely, he either (1) did not die (2) sort of died, but already had a second body ready to go so he wouldn't have to waste time gathering his power to resurrect.
If he had two different bodies for the Voldemort and Munroe identities, it's possible he kept the Munroe body in reserve upon retiring that identity, deliberately disposed of the Voldemort body shortly after or as part of whatever he did to Harry, and then went back to using the Munroe body secretly as he prepared for Stage 2 (to be executed when Harry became old enough to attend Hogwarts.) I wonder if the place he goes when he leaves the Quirrell body is back to the Munroe body.
One idea I like is that his problem lies in having his soul bound to an object a cosmic distance away from him, which makes the body-soul connection increasingly difficult to maintain.
In canon, Quirrell's identity was relevant because he had been the Hogwarts Muggle Studies teacher before being possessed by Voldemort. Since this is not the case in HMOR, Quirinus Quirrell basically is "some poor shmuck" - there is no reason why anybody would wish to falsely assume his identity. Had Voldemort possessed, say, John Smith, he would simply enter Hogwarts as John Smith.
Blaming the Pioneer Plaque for the progressive degredation sounds like it makes sense at first, but the point of the Pioneer Plaque thing is that this Voldemort is supposed to be smarter than canon Voldemort, and a Pioneer Plaque horcrux superior. That theory makes the Pioneer Plaque horcrux inferior. Also I'm pretty sure Voldemort has other horcruxes, including Roger Bacon's diary and quite possibly ones hidden in the other locations Harry suggested when discussing how to get rid of a Dementor.
I wouldn't necessarily assume that. Quirrel seems to like the idea of being out among the peaceful pure stars; a strategy which dooms his earthly vessel is not necessarily such an issue. And while he's slowly slipping away, he can fulfill a few last regrets - such as finally becoming Battle Magic Professor at Hogwarts.
He may like being out among the stars, but that's no reason to cut his fun on Earth short unnecessarily. Like, if the Earth were to be destroyed, and all the horcruxes hidden there with it, he'd regard having the Pioneer horcrux left as vastly superior to nonexistence, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't like to continue hanging out on Earth.
Edit: Also, if he's afraid that someone like Harry could accidentally explode the Sun, taking the Pioneer Plaque with it, he has reason to stick around to stop that from happening. Also, if Bacon's diary wasn't a horcrux, how do you account for Voldemort telling Harry it's nearly indestructible?
That isn't necessarily the same level of indestructibility as a horcrux. It could just be a standard charm placed on rare books.
We don't know of any such charms, and why would Voldemort settle for a less degree of protection, when he has so few qualms about killing? My guess is he murdered the owner to make the horcrux.
Canon Voldemort chose his horcruxes for symbolic value. HPMOR!Voldemort presumably chose the plaque for its indestructibility by human hands (though it might have symbolic value too). On the other hand, Bacon's diary has nothing to commend it in terms of material (it is just a book), and Voldemort has no special attachment to Muggle science as a whole - indeed he is inimical to much of it.
There's a couple potential advantages to having a horcrux in Harry's possession: Harry's then guarding it, and it might be used to possess Harry later on. Though that's less helpful if, as in canon, Harry is a horcrux. But even then, I'd hardly be shocked to see Voldemort creating an additional horcrux on a whim.
I’m not arguing, but how do we know that? IIRC we’ve never seen exactly what was in there, and Harry never got around to reading it. And it doesn’t sound like Quirrell to just make a gift just because it’s an "old rare item”, especially since he doesn’t quite like science and Bacon’s relevance to Harry is not that he had magic, but that he was a (proto-)scientist.
Does a Dementor count as a material object? If so, the (now-disproven) fact of their indestructibility would have made them seem to be ideal Horcruxes.
Or, since they are "wounds in the world", are they simply places where space isn't?
Or would they simply "eat" the Horcrux? A dementor is no fun place to be when you have just, like, died (as in "lost a body").
Smart people still overlook things. A lightspeed delay problem in horcrux syncing would not have come up ever before, so it could have been easily overlooked even by a very smart person, especially one that is not scientifically oriented. If he had been more scientifically oriented and been otherwise interested in Muggle space programs, this possibility might have occured to him and he could have tested it with the moon missions, if he had come up with a way to detect anticipated problems.
No data could ever have existed in past for the effect of Horcruxes at interplanetary distances. He may well simply be a victim of unknown unknowns.
I thought the clear implication was that Quirrell performed more powerful magics by ritual magic, sacrificing some bit of health with each exertion of power, so that he aged quickly after large exertions.
Yet all his uses of powerful magic either have no visible effect on him whatsoever, or cause him to revert to pretty much the same zombielike form for varying periods of time. It's strongly implied that different dark rituals require entirely different kinds of sacrifice.
I can't remember whether it was after the "war" that stuck people to the roof, or after Bellatrixes rescue, but there was visible aging to Quirrell.
Huh, hadn't thought of that. Which raises the disturbing possibility that he uses body-snatching as a way to cheat on the costs of dark rituals. But what do the rituals do that he's been using do, beyond the fiendfyre?
Yeah, I think he takes bodies and burns them out, then moves to new ones.
Can't say what exactly Quirrell did, but he seems to be aging quickly. Search for "bald" and you'll find rapid balding in Quirrelll, where early on he may have been balding, to increasing indications of baldness. After Azkaban, as Quirrell recovers in the infirmary, Harry notes:
Could this be a result of very frequent time-turning?
Not unless Quirrel is using some sort of super-Timeturner. 6 hours per day over an entire school year of ~180 days is still only
(180 * 6) / 24 = 45days. Most people don't age visibly over just 45 days - unless, of course, there were some sort of massive ordeal & trauma.I don't see the increased again being accounted for just by increased hours of living through time turning either.
If the argument is that too frequent time turning has a damaging effect in itself, I can't see them giving out such a potentially health damaging item to children without at least warning of that specific effect. Also, if EY is keeping the same basic timelines for Dumbledore, he is holding up better than average for his chronological age despite his time turning adventures.
Meanwhile, Quirrell explicitly talked about the advantages of ritual magic, and how it allows greater power than otherwise possible. He has greater power. He is aging rapidly. And by many indications, he is traveling host to host over time. If you could do that, the natural thing would be to use up the host and travel to a new one when you use it up, since your supply of bodies is in effect infinite, while it's a finite resource of 1 body for everyone else.
Dumbledore gets the map from the twins, doesn't give it back and the twins don't remember about it anymore. So, we know who'd obliviated the twins. However, we don't know the results of D's "find Tom Riddle" order... Also, the twins must've known about Harry's time travels by way of the map?
I brought this up in a previous discussion thread, but the majority opinion seemed to be that it was more likely to be Quirrell who obliviated the twins.
The twins already believed that the map had glitches, so they might think that duplicate footprints were another glitch. Or, they might have heard and believed the "spontaneous duplication" cover story.
Piece of meta info:
V'ir vagebqhprq n grrantr sevraq gb UCZBE. Ure cevbe ernqvat sbphf fheebhaqf Qvpxraf naq Nhfgra naq gur yvxr. Fur unfa'g ernq YJ lrg. Fur'f whfg ernq gur arj puncgre. Univat abg ernq gur bayvar qvfphffvbaf be Nhgube'f Abgrf jungfbrire, fur qbrf abg xabj nobhg Ibyqrzbeg.
Vg vf bayl ng gur raq bs guvf, Puncgre 95, gung fur unf gubhtug hc gur cbffvovyvgl frevbhfyl.
Znal crbcyr unir orra jbaqrevat jul Uneel unfa'g znqr gur pbaarpgvba, naq V jnagrq gb funer guvf qngn cbvag bs fbzrbar ryfr jub qvqa'g unir gur Jbeq bs Tbq. Bs pbhefr, fur vfa'g Engvbanyvfg!Uneel, ohg gur qngn vf vagrerfgvat.
Has she read the original books?
Yes.
Fb fur'f ernq Ebjyvat'f obbxf, naq qvqa'g pyhr va gung Dhveeryy=Ibyqrzbeg? Ubj ba rnegu? Vg'f rkcyvpvgyl fgngrq va gur svefg obbx. Nz V zvfvagrecergvat lbh?
V guvax fur ernyvfrq gung guvatf jrer dhvgr qvssrerag va gur ZBE!Havirefr, naq fb qvqa'g rkcrpg eryl ba guvatf orvat gur fnzr. Jura V nfxrq ure yngre zber nobhg gur vqrn, ng ab cbvag qvq fur fnl 'jryy, vg jnf va gur pnaba', ohg gnyxrq bayl bs va-havirefr guvatf. V guvax fur frr'f gur Zrgubqf nf orvat ragveryl qvfgvapg.
This is essentially why I didn't figure it out until halfway through the fic. Fanfictions depart from canon in unpredictable ways, so there's no point in saying "well it's like this in canon" when you already have major departures.
Huh, noted. FWIW, I went in having not read the originals before, so when I went back through and read the originals, around Ch. 30, it seemed like a lightbulb going off when I saw how things were set up in the original.
Still, you'd think "it was in the original" would result in at least a high prior probability.
"Don't turn into a giant snake. That never helps."
Typo: "to away from him". (Same typo at hpmor.com and fanfiction.net.)
Haven't we already had Quirrell all but explicitly invert this? He's admitted to reading the Evil Overlord List, and his comment on the Animagus transformation is "all sensible people do, if can. Thus very rare."
"become animagus" is a bit more general than "turn into a giant snake". The original evil-overloard rule is about how turning into a snake lets the hero kill you without losing alignment points, which is why it's such a bad idea.
that ISN'T what quirrel does. He uses it to slip into harry's pouch instead and reduce the sense of doom. much smarter than Jafar.
I am confused. You know how Dumbledore expresses several times to McGonagall his worry that he might be the Dark Lord Harry will need to face? I mostly thought this was simply guilt from having had to make lots of difficult decisions.
But I’ve been re-reading some older chapters today, and I noticed this (ch. 84):
What Minerva says sounds a lot like foreshadowing. More specifically, standard dramatic logic would suggest that it was actually Dumbledore who gave Harry the mark, thus justifying D’s fears and making Minerva’s reasoning exactly wrong on the point she is most sure about. There’s plenty suspicious about the “standard story” of what happened that night to allow it, and nothing else I know about Dumbledore sounds like something that would cause serious Dark-Dumbledore worries.
But that doesn’t seem to make sense at all with the rest of the story. Am I just reading too much because of theories I read here?
Well, this would make sense if the power that the Dark Lord knows not could be rational thinking. Since Voldemort appears to be much more rational than in canon, that ability makes sense. And Eliezer did something pretty similar already in Gur Fjbeq bs Tbbq.
I agree that Dumbledore does not look like a paragon of rationality, but IMO he wins much too often for Eliezer to set him up as that kind of example.
Why? Non-rational people or people who aren't very rational win all the time. Sometimes they get lucky or sometimes they are just rational enough in the right things. If the only way to win was to be highly rational the world would look very different than it does.
I was thinking more in terms of what Eliezer wants to portray rather than our world. “Rationalists should win” is one of Eliezer’s maxims, and setting up someone as “the guy who didn’t know the power of rationality” to win most of the time would dilute that lesson.
Also, MoR!Dumbledore is simply not irrational enough. Little of his success can be attributed simply to luck, and while he is not rational on a level with Harry, it seems at least that quite a bit of his success can be attributed to making hard decisions instead of just following instinct. For example, regardless of what really happened with Draco’s mum, Dumbledore’s behavior on this subject is indicative of cold calculation rather than wishful thinking. The same can be said on the subject of his brother, especially since he was so conflicted about it. Note also how much of his arguing with Harry is more about morality rather than reasoning.
For me it's low confidence and speculative, but t could be foreshadowing. Dumbledore could be bad. Dumbledore and QQ could even be on the same side. The "one villain in the story, or two" at the time and in context was Harry thinking there were 2 sides and both were bad. But as a meta-hint / foreshadowing it could be saying that there was 1 side with 2 villains.
One big piece of evidence for was that Voldemort and Dumbledore fought a war for several years and neither killed the other. Harry initially thought this was evidence for Voldemort being dumb, but by 94 Harry has updated to the enemy being smart. So Voldemort could have wiped out the Order but didn't.
Dumbledore is soft, but he could have killed all the death eaters. Just gone to their houses and killed them, none of them, nor all of them together (excluding Voldie) are going to be on par with Grindelwald + elderwand + blood sacrifice. Dumbledore could have wiped out the death eaters but didn't.
You can explain that with two factors each handicapping one of them, Dumbledore is soft and Voldemort has a cunning plan. But you can also explain it with coordination. Coordination certainly fits some of the facts better.
Weighing against this of course, is that it really doesn't seem like Dumbledore's style.
I have greater than 5% confidence that Voldemort is three characters: Quirrell (via possession), Harry (via soul-copying ritual) and Dumbledore (via improved Imperius).
Why would Quirrell try to undermine Dumbledore in Harry's eyes, then?
Not saying that I subscribe to that particular theory, but if it were so it would probably be for more-or-less the same reason he made Voldie evil in everyone’s eyes, to set up a contrast for bonding.
By my inference, both Dumbledore and Voldemort purposely put Harry in the position that left him marked. Dumbledore conspired with Lily to set up a dark ritual which would defeat Voldemort, while Voldemort marked Harry to make it appear he had defeated Voldemort. With both being part of the causal chain, both could be said to have marked Harry.
Evidence, please? Lily's actions in Harry's memory of her encounter with Voldemort certainly don't seem pre-planned, and if you're suggesting that the "dark ritual" was her sacrificing herself for Harry, this is no reason for her to let James die as well. If Lily had known Voldemort was coming, she could have had James go visit a friend for the week or something, thus making sure her beloved husband survived and Harry at least had a father.
Obviously Voldemort wouldn't announce when he was coming, so they wouldn't know that James would take it first.
There are multiple pieces of evidence, that when combined, make a consistent case. Dumbledore talks about being responsible for all that has happened to Harry. Dumbledore includes Lily in a very short list of heroines in recent times. It seems clear that Dumbledore arranged for Snape, and thereby Voldemort, to learn of a "prophecy" that led Voldemort to try to kill Harry. What Lily says when Voldemort comes looks like a clear set up of a dark ritual.
What Lily says is:
But we know that in any ritual, first is named that which is sacrificed, and then is said the use commanded of it. This does, incidentally, match the order that the Dark Lord speaks in ("Yourself to die, and the child to live.") but as Lily got it wrong it seems like she definitely wasn't doing a ritual, and if a ritual happened it was accidental on her part.
Both of them described a dark ritual in terms of what the other gave up, then what the other got.
Per what Lily says, Voldemort gives up killing Harry, in exchange for Lily's life.
Per what Voldemort says, Lily gives up her life, in exchange for Harry's life.
Does this mean there were two different rituals proposed? The same one from two perspectives? I don't think we have enough of the theory of dark rituals to distinguish the two. Did Lily "get it wrong"? Under one possible interpretation, yes, and under another, no.
And then Lily may or may not have balked at the terms, and tried to kill Voldemort, and Voldemort may or may not have tried to kill Harry.
Harry really should have been investigating the details of Voldemort's death a lot more than he has, starting with an interrogation of Dumbledore.
Fair enough; I didn't think of the "sacrifice the chance to kill Harry in order to obtain the death of Lily" interpretation. Which I still think is inelegant but I have no good argument against it, so it has a right to exist.
Wouldn't both V and Lily be experienced enough not to perform a dark ritual by accident?
It is still unclear how horcruxes would fit into the HPMOR universe given the premise that souls do not exist. Here are some thoughts and conjectures revolving around the postulate that horcruxes are complete memory/personality backups:
To recreate one's identity, there has to be more than just replication of memories. There also has to be a way to replicate the 'software' that governs our thought processes. Removing the limitations and shortcuts that our physical brain has in place would undoubtedly remove lots of mental biases (making us hyper-rational) but also raise the question of whether the resulting entity will really be 'us' or just well approximated copies of us (a well explored topic in the transcendent pony fic).
The very possibility of possession (as evidenced in the zombie Quirrell) gives evidence in favor of the possibility to project one's mind outside one's original body and still be able to retain the capacity to not only have semblance of life (a la magical portraits and ghosts), but to also be able to learn new information and retain it (i.e. grow) and interact meaningfully with the environment.
Assuming away the whole issue of whether one's identity can be virtually encapsulated independent of our biological hardware, this would require careful copy control (lest there be multiple versions of you running around, raising the question of which one is the 'real' you, explored comedically in one of robst's fanfics). Is Harry an incomplete horcrux, retaining Voldemort's post-transcendent software (hyper-rationality), but not his memories, i.e. a failure of copy control? (He clearly didn't inherit his rationality from biological parents?)
Magic in potterverse directly interacts with mind. So magic is capable of storing information, including memories, software, etc?
Since Voldemort has already gone through the process, he already knows what's involved.
Do you mean that this is the premise of your analysis, or a premise of the HPMOR universe? Because if I understand correctly, all we have to show for the non-existence of souls is Harry's (entirely rational) belief, which may yet be challenged by future observations.
For this post, I meant premise of my analysis. More generally, my priors tell me that is the author's viewpoint of the world, though I wouldn't presume to guess.
Why should the author's viewpoint of the world determine the author's viewpoint of the HPMoR world? Presumably the author also believes that magic does not exist.
Because it seems likely that someone like Eliezer would write a magic system of the sufficiently-advanced-technology-is-indistinguishable-from-magic sense rather than the waves hands-because-magic!-waves hands sense.
Further, if souls existed, Harry would have no reason to want people to not die, which kind of breaks the story (unless I suppose there's some mechanism to kill souls, which I admit would be interesting)
Isn't AK supposed to destroy the soul?
No. The Dementor's Kiss destroys the soul; but the Killing Curse strikes at it, severing it from the body.
If AK/Dementors actually did destroy the soul, how would anyone know without direct access to the afterlife?
If souls exist, but the afterlife doesn't exist or is just really bad/boring, then Harry would have a good reason, to either not let people die or to bring them back once they do.
It seems to me that that belief has already been challenged twice, and Harry is being obtuse in still dismissing them so easily. I am sort of expecting Eliezer to use this as a lesson in updating on evidence. It seems to me Harry is acting like Twilight Sparkle in 'Feeling Pinkie Keen' by refusing to explore the existence of souls more closely.
It's not Harry's observations; it's everybody's observations of the world. People don't act like souls exist. If Dumbledore really thought that people just go on to another great adventure when they die, he wouldn't have a bunch of pedestals of broken wands.
Nobody in HPMOR believes in souls or acts like they exist. That's why Harry can decisively conclude that they don't exist.
Even if souls exist and everyone knows this, evolution would probably still select for humans who feel grief after their loved ones die.
Given the general transhumanist affinity for "uploading", it seems a lot easier to me.
Also, given all the references to "being in a story", "things working like they would in a story", etc, being in a virtual environment where code can be copied from a to b in a flash seems an obvious idea. McGongall's mind still works in a cat's brain.
My suspicion is that this premise is flawed. Harry has already been shown to have one of his premises invalidated by experiment, and from my view the reader has seen enough experimental results to seriously question the premise that souls don't exist (in the HPMORverse).
On the 'starfield' spell:
Are we seeing the stars from the perspective of the Voyager probe?
This is a common speculation.
I'm getting that another common speculation is that HPMOR!Voldemort has to 'synchronize' himself to all of his Horcruxes.
If so, what are the chances that part of the motivation of drawing Harry into the spell, is that he can synchronize himself to the plaque and Harry at the same time?
Incremental synchronizations are interesting -- if Horcruxes can get out of sync, then the "soul" recovered from each may develop conflicting objectives.
In 1992, I think Voyager 2 was still closer to the sun than Pluto. Wouldn't the sun still be the brightest star in the sky?
The spell hides current environment, except for a floor/ground "disk." It could be oriented so that the sun is down and thus out of sight.
From Pluto, the sun looks like 'the brightest star in the sky', not like an actual solar body. Not sure about halfway point.
Quirrell's dialog in this chapter has me thinking again about what exactly he did wrong, as David Munroe. I wonder if Eliezer thought that through as well as he should have, being a little too eager to show off the character's flawed understanding of human nature. From chapter 34:
Amelia Bones' later dialog suggests he was giving similar speeches as David Munroe.
Now the thing to notice here is that Voldemort's policies for troop discipline were really not all that exceptional. Lots of armies have had a policy of executing traitors and deserters. A policy of using torture to punish any slack may be hard to find, at least in the modern world, but I think if you go back a couple centuries you'd find militaries using flogging to punish minor infractions. The way the Dark Mark is described here suggests it works slightly different than canon, in that it acts as a magical tracking device whether the bearer deliberately signals Voldemort or not. Obviously no real world military does that, but if it were possible to cheaply put magical tracking spells on soldiers in the real world, it wouldn't be surprising to see militaries using them to discourage desertion. (In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if there were already a proposal floating around DARPA to put tracking implants in soldiers. For their own good, ya know, so they can be rescued if they go missing.)
Insofar as we can give a sensible account of what "Munroe" did wrong, we might attribute it to bad marketing: pitching it as, "hey let's do what the Death Eaters are doing!" rather than, "we need to do what any country would do in wartime." Even a cynic should be able to understand people's aversion to the appearance of imitating like Death Eaters, and respond by providing would-be followers with rationalizations for why they're totally different than the Death Earters. Also, from later chapters it sounds like "Munroe" may have been angling to be made magical dictator for life right away. A more sensible approach would have been to first ask to be made temporary dictator, like the original Roman dictators, and then find a way to make the crisis permanent, justifying a permanent dictatorship.
We don't know anything about what Monroe's sales pitch was like (or even if he had one). However, given that "People began to speak of him as the next Dumbledore, it was thought that he might become Minister of Magic after the Dark Lord fell" it probably wasn't as terrible as you're suggesting.
Quirrell's conversation with Hermione seems to imply that for the most part, Monroe focused on action rather than speeches, though it may well have been action calculated to look as heroic as possible in order to win public support.
Amelia Bones:
So it's not totally clear from that if "Munroe" specifically proposed a Light Mark, or just made similar speeches advocating unity or what. But whatever the case, it seems that, while yes people were talking about him as the next Dumbledore, saying he could become the next Minster of Magic, etc., they were not uniting behind him to his satisfaction.
So, what do you all think is Voldemort's goal here? In canon, he was a power hungry sadist, so conquering the world while torturing his minions made sense. But MOR!Voldemort seems to find people tiresome and is happiest as an immortal in lifeless space. In that case, why not Horcrux Pioneer 11, kill his earthly body and be done with it?
At the moment, he has a plausible motivation -- provoke Harry into discovering a better form of immortality than Horcruxes, and use it for himself. But it seems implausible that this was his goal until Harry came to Hogwarts this year since he had no reason to expect that his murder of James and Lilly would lead to a combined scientific genius/wizard. What was he trying to accomplish before that?
Conventional wisdom around here, as I understand it: He wanted to unify Magical Britain under a strong leader (namely himself, in the persona of David Monroe) and wipe out, or neutralize, or otherwise remove the danger posed by, the muggles. He wanted to do this because he was very, very frightened of dying, and he thought nuclear weapons (and potentially other things you might classify as "scientific overreaching") were likely to produce more destruction than he could escape. And probably also because he wanted power.
My goal had I access to magic:
instantiate self in immortal form
build experience machine
make 1 and 2 unreachable by launching them out of the solar system
He did say he was worried about morons...I mean Harry destroying the probe. So all his efforts could be merely to ensure his survival. But that would make for a rather lackluster villain/ending.
I think Quirrelmort enjoys many aspects of life on Earth (he is shown to enjoy fancy foods and intricate plots, etc.) He enjoys outer space as an occasional respite from human nonsense, but that doesn't mean he would enjoy a billion years of staring at the stars.
I'm repeatedly seeing 'Monroe' spelled as 'Munroe'. Is this due to a disagreement about how the name should be spelled, a common spelling error that has perpetuated in these forums, or is it a shorthand reference to some prior discussions or concepts which I'm thus missing in my reading on these discussions?
Well, it's probably supposed to be spelled "Momroe" as in "David Troll Momroe". :)
It's spelled "Monroe" in Chapter 86, and there's a "Most Ancient House of Monroe". Personally, I never get these names right either, but I keep a text file handy with all the names, and hard to spell spells like Legilimency Occlumency Occlumens, and Legilimens. Then it's just a simple matter of cut and paste.
I suspect this. The author of xkcd is named Randall Munroe, which may explain its larger availability in the minds of typers.
Some conjectures on the nature of magic, the invention of new spells, etc.:
Whatever makes magic work is basically mechanical but smart enough to be sensitive to human intentions.
It has to do something broadly comparable to simulating the universe.
It is equipped with defensive measures of one or more of the following kinds. (a) Some things -- e.g., certain kinds of escapades involving Time-Turners -- would require excessive, possibly infinite, amounts of computation, and it won't allow that. (b) Some things -- again, including Time-Turner abuse -- actually lead to contradictions. Maybe those are caught in advance and prevented, or maybe those simulations just end when the contradiction is reached. (c) There are deliberate countermeasures against anything that looks like it's trying to marshal too much power, in case it's an attempt at hacking the underlying computational substrate (or whatever it is that makes magic work).
That is one reason why inventing new spells is dangerous. You might accidentally produce a contradiction or an excessively expensive simulation, or you might do something that looks like an attempt at becoming a god, in which case you -- or your laboratory -- or your country -- or your universe -- is terminated with extreme prejudice.
It is also why the most powerful magics -- the rituals -- require permanent sacrifices: something that involves a permanent sacrifice is harder to apply recursively in some weird way that turns it into a Become God spell. (It's like the way that the class of functions you can compute using only loops whose number of iterations is bounded in advance is smaller and easier to prove things about than the class of all functions you can compute.)
Whatever-makes-magic-work wasn't programmed in advance with any particular spells, potions, etc.; it's a general-purpose magic substrate. All the specific things have been brought into being by human beings -- it's a gigantic game of Nomic. That is why, e.g., all the spells have names that were obviously thought up by humans.
The words, gestures, etc., are likewise basically under the control of the inventors. That is why they can be stupid things like "Wingardium Leviosa", or require you to say "Oogely boogely" with just the right timing. (Perhaps the precision required is up to the inventor, or perhaps whatever-makes-magic-work decides how much precision to require on the basis of how powerful the magic is.)
Bringing a new magic into being isn't fundamentally difficult [EDITED to add: that would explain why there is such a thing as "the usual evasions" when someone asks precocious questions about spell creation]; perhaps it just requires forming a certain sort of intention and then demonstrating what actions (etc.) are required to bring about the desired effect. The difficulty and danger come (a) from the protective measures already mentioned, (b) from the risk that when you tell whatever-makes-magic-happen what you want you might fail to be specific enough and get something that meets your stated spec but is disastrous, and (c) from restrictions like one I mention below.
Maybe the heritability of access to magic is itself a thing that was decided by (a much earlier generation of) humans, perhaps as a deliberate measure to limit the number and increase the cohesion of those designing new magics.
How would this sort of general-purpose Everything Machine likely be set up, so as not to produce a universe of total chaos as everyone starts inventing their own new spells? (Even assuming no one is able to do anything too destructive or internally inconsistent, on account of the sort of restrictions I already mentioned.) Probably by having a requirement that new spells be consistent with existing ones, in some rather broad sense of "consistent". That would be another reason why inventing new magic is difficult. It might also give another reason for things like the Interdict of Merlin: an opportunity for old magic to be "garbage-collected", freeing up regions of possible-magic-space for new generations to explore.
I don't assign a super-high probability to any of these, but I find each more plausible than any other similarly-specific alternative I've thought of.
(This pertains to an earlier chapter, but discussion in its thread seems to have died down. Anyone got strong opinions on the proper etiquette in that situation?)
In chapter 91, we are told
Now, given the circumstances, it's not that surprising that either of them had trouble with that particular charm. But isn't it odd that Harry didn't just try again? And we're told that for McGonagall "[i]t wasn't the first time she'd done it so, but she seemed to have lost some of the knack".
Are we to infer that there's some special Patronus-related weirdness going on? Or is it just ordinary grief and upset?
[EDITED to fix a trivial and tangential mistake.]
She's getting more Harry and Godric like, but lacks Harry's vision of a possible future defeating death to allow for an improved Patronus?
Harry's Patronus can't possibly work here. His "happy thought" is about facing death and destroying it rather than hiding from it; recall that he couldn't cast Patronus v1.0 because it required thinking happy thoughts about something else rather than facing death, and Harry couldn't do this. But the reason he's casting the spell is to convince himself that maybe there's a chance Hermione isn't dead after all, which is pretty much exactly the not-think-about-the-bad-thing mindset that didn't work for him then.
On the other hand, McGonagall is probably suffering from the typical problem of normal-Patronus casters: if your spell involves thinking about happy thoughts about something else other than death, then having evidence of death right in front of you is going to be a problem.
It's possible that the "lost some of the knack" thing implies that prolonged exposure to Harry Potter is wearing away at McGonagall's ability to think about something else. Of all the adult characters, McGonagall is probably the one most seriously thinking about Harry's ideas.
I didn't cry in "Humanism." I didn't cry in "Stanford Prison Experiment." I didn't even cry when Hermione died. But this chapter finally did it for me. "If I were the first person in the universe who ever really cared about someone, then I'd be honored to be that person." That's the kind of moral stand missing in any number of lectures and parables by supposed moral absolutists. It takes quite a bit of deviation from normal thinking to even really comprehend that emotion, let alone spontaneously describe it.
What I love best about HPMOR is that it could so easily have been a Kid Hero parody fic, and even though it skirts pretty close, especially in the earlier chapters, it is never quite a straight up parody. In fact, for all that Harry snarks about his life being one big fantasy cliche, HPMOR takes the Kid Hero genre deadly seriously and plays almost every trope completely straight. Sure, Harry doesn't rush headlong into every danger like most kid heroes, but that's a difference in method, not in spirit. He feels the weight of responsibility just like anyone else who was ever chosen, or chose themselves.
Far more than the science and even the rationality, I love HPMOR because it believes in heroes. Conversations like this one are why I'm not reading a textbook. One day, I'm going to catalog every single discussion about morality, duty, heroism, or wisdom. I genuinely think reading them often will make me a better person, or at least better at being good. So thank you, Eliezer. You really make fiction shine as a teaching medium
Foreshadowing patrol.
Quirrell:
Since Harry wants to defeat Death, and has a glowy counterspell to destroy him, he'd have some use for this.
Strangely enough, Harry:
If this bit of obscure bit foreshadowing comes true, I update for the probability of Harry living in some simulation or story to 1.
This is so contrived as to be almost silly, but I just realized that if you squint hard enough Sybill’s original prophecy might have referred to Harry as the Dark Lord and Quirrell as the one who “approaches”.
The “Defense Professor” is a persona, and in chatting with Harry Quirrell basically claims that he becomes whoever he’s playing the role of. The prophecy could interpret the creation of that persona as “birth”. “Mark” is ambiguous enough (in English it could just mean “notice”), and besides, the prophecy doesn’t say when he will be marked. And he certainly has powers Harry knows not; his weird doomy link with Harry (which we just learned gives him partial access to Harry’s mind) being only the most obvious example, and remarkable from the fact that Harry doesn’t seem to ever think about it.
Again, it’s quite contrived, but it could be a nice twist to pull on your readers, though I assign a very low probability that Eliezer would do that given his statements.
Did I miss something, or do we still have very little idea about what the word substitution in Snape's remembrance of the prophecy means?
versus
I thought "SPELLETS" and "VULD" are just Seer-y ways of saying "spirits" and "world" respectively.
It's an impersonation of an accent (maybe Eastern European?) Spellets = spirits, Vuld = world.