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Mestroyer comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 28, chapter 99-101 - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: palladias 12 December 2013 05:10AM

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Comment author: kilobug 12 December 2013 11:05:46AM 28 points [-]

I know Harry is just a kid, but his reaction towards unicorns don't seem very rational to me. Remember, Harry became vegetarian for a while when he was afraid animals could be sentient. And now, he speaks about massively killing unicorns, magical creatures whose sentient status isn't very clear (like with phoenix), for a "temporary" stop of death at a cost of "permanent side-effects", without inquiring how temporary temporary is, what are those side-effects, and how sentient unicorns are. Without measuring those three parameters, there is no way to know if utility(killing unicorns in St Mungo) is positive or negative.

Comment author: Mestroyer 12 December 2013 11:53:47AM 7 points [-]

He does at least know that "temporary" is long enough and the side effects are small enough for Quirrel to consider it worthwhile.

Comment author: ygert 13 December 2013 09:40:18AM *  4 points [-]

He also knows that Quirrell is totally amoral: Quirrell himself admits that he does not comprehend the thing that people call morality.

Thus, he knows that Quirrell considering something worthwhile is only evidence about that thing's utility to Quirrell, not its moral validity.

Comment author: gjm 13 December 2013 11:19:44AM 8 points [-]

mortality

I'm not generally in the habit of calling out typos, but that particular one is probably worth fixing. I think Quirrell understands mortality rather well.

Comment author: ygert 13 December 2013 01:59:34PM 2 points [-]

True, very true. Edited.