Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102
New chapter!
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 102.
There is 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.)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
Loading…
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (370)
What's the deal with spells and age? If Harry is really so far ahead of his class and can already cast spells nobody else can, why is it just now that he can cast "second-year" spells effortlessly?
Canon or not, this reminds me too much of the public school system of a certain country where kids are verboten to use words "they shouldn't know yet".
I would speculate that there's some physiological component involved in spellcasting ability that grows with age, in much the same way that older children are often more coordinated and stronger than younger children. I have no evidence to back this up other than the repeated mentions of 'age matters with spells', however.
It is practice. Why is, pardon, why was Hermione so much better in spells then others? Because of practice. Other children do not practice as much as Harry, or as much as Hermione did... It was somewhat suggested in part where Harry and Draco talk about muggle-borns, pure-bloods and magic.
Harry completely started using magic when he went to Hogwarts. If he has basically learned year one and year two in one year I think that's okay.
Link?
Not a public school, but in 5th grade I wrote a short paper about Ferdinand Magellan and used the word "circumnavigate." My teacher accused me of copying, and I had to rewrite the paper using smaller words.
There's a stupid teacher.
In this case it seems very much like the decision of an individual teacher and not broad educational policy.
Every strategy for plagiarism detection is also going to have false positives.
The word "circumnavigate" is always used with Magellan - it may as well be his middle name. It's used in the first two sentences on Magellan's page at La Wik.
My guess is the teacher didn't know know the word, found out it was a real one, and found it emotionally satisfying to punish a child for assaulting his status by demonstrating his ignorance, however unintentionally.
Some people feel very threatened by "big words" they don't know, and see use of language as a status play.
Years ago, one guy at work, who I actually consider very sharp, if not educated to the degree his intelligence allowed, stormed off in a huff with a parting shot saying I was "using big words to show I was better than he was." ?????
That was a very poor reading of me, but a huge window into his own motivations and insecurities. I think that weirdness is actually common in some poorer and less educated subcultures.
If the student in question uses the word not because it was in his usual vocabulary but because it appeared in the article about Magellan, the teacher has a valid point. A five grade student who reads an article about Magellan might copy the word without understanding it.
A teacher who wants to check whether the students actually understand is going to want that the student expresses his ideas within their own vocabulary and not simply copy words of an article they read.
I personally had teachers not understand a point I made because of not understanding that strategy and tactics are two different words with different meaning but I hadn't an issue with teacher complaining that I'm not speaking in my own vocabulary when writing essays.
One of the points of being a student is to expand your vocabulary. You see a word used, you use it yourself. "Circumnavigation" is not a complicated concept. If you use it incorrectly, then the teacher should correct you. But don't tell a student to stay away from the big scary word.
??? Words become your vocabulary by you using them, and that's all the more true when you're young and still developing your vocabulary.
There such a thing as "guessing the teachers" password. It's a failure condition.
It's a frequent exercise to read a text and rephrase it in your own words to show that you understood the text. It creates mental connections between the new information to which you are exposed and to what you already know. Essay writing is about "transfer" at least it was what I was taught in school.
Not really. I'm sure "circumnavigate" wasn't in my usual vocabulary but its meaning is simple enough to determine from context. I don't think its reasonable to penalize someone for using a word they would pretty much have to pick up when learning about a topic.
The other thing about this educational strategy is that, all other effects aside, it discourages students from using more sophisticated vocabulary. If you try to use a complicated word and get it wrong, you will be punished. If you get it right but the teacher doesn't believe you did so deliberately, you will also be punished. That's a terrible lesson to teach children (or anyone else).
These seem to be the relevant quotes:
and
-both hpmor ch.78
So from this it seems magic power increases with age, spells cast and time since first getting your wand (though the third could simply be due to the second)
So the reason Harry can only just now cast second year spells, is that he has only recently become sufficiently powerful. His partial transfiguration and patronous v2.0 don't actually require a lot of spell power they only require you to do clever things.
I've always modeled it as a physiological "mana capacity" aspect akin to muscle mass -- something that grows both naturally as a developing body matures, and as a result of exercise.
Sorry, but I'm not a fan of this part - its not like Britain has immigration policies that ban certain races or religions, so I can only assume EY is arguing in favour of totally unrestricted immigration. But the UK has only a certain amount of room, and there are non-xenophobic economic arguments against unrestricted immigration, e.g. putting too much strain on the NHS. But regardless of the arguments for and against, arguing against immigration is not the same as being indifferent to the lives of everyone who lives in a different country.
I did enjoy the rest of the chapter however. Quirrel's statements about horcruxes were initially surprising - if he is telling the truth, then how is he still alive? If not, then wouldn't he want Harry experimenting with horcruxes in order to turn him to the dark side?
The most plausible possibility is that he wants Harry's help to get the philosopher's stone, and his initial prohibition is reverse psychology. This does help turn Harry against Dumbledoor, but no more than experimenting with horcruxes. Given this, it seems likely that he needs Harry's invisibility cloak / planning ability / human patronus / possibly partial transfiguration to capture the stone.
Still, Quirrel seems to be leaving this too late. Surely it would have been better to move against the stone very soon after the unicorn incident - by which time, Harry's anti-death ideology was very obvious, and emotionally driving. Moving against the stone when comparitivly healthy must increase the chances of success, and if it all goes wrong Quirrel could still have tried to fight his way out...
Unless Quirrel isn't actually as ill as he looks. He seems to have got a lot worse between May 13th and June 3rd.
Edit: I am not arguing that all immigration is bad and everyone should live in neoreactionary ethno-nationalist states. I'm saying that its possible to want to prevent certain people who e.g. have a record of violent criminal behaviour from immigrating to where you live, while still recognising that these people are still human.
I was surprised by that passage. If anything, it seems magical Britain is more exclusivist. Magical Britain only invited Hermione in because she's a British witch. The 99.9% of people who are born muggle are excluded completely. I also don't get the impression that foreign born wizards/witches are automatically invited to Hogwarts. So they are magic-nationalists as well.
They even forbid beneficial muggle-wizard trade, which probably results in the deaths of millions of muggles.
I found it surprising because magical Britain seems much less utilitarian, in terms of excluding people from their moral concern - being indifferent. That's surely more of the fundamental issue than border control.
Insofar as everyone dies eventually, and thus the purpose of medicine in general may be thought of as life extension rather than death prevention, and magical healing vastly increases wizard lifespans, it may be said that forbidding beneficial muggle-wizard trade results in the deaths of billions of muggles. Every single muggle who dies of old age, magically-treatable illness or non-instantly-fatal injury is a muggle who would have lived significantly longer if not for the ban.
The wizard population is very small compared to the muggle population, and I don't think there's much in the way of reducing the amount of time wizards need to put into healing magic. (Compare this to the efficiencies gained from vaccination and antibiotics.)
The lack of wizard healing makes some difference, but probably more like tens or hundreds of thousands of muggles who don't get healed.
On the other hand, if wizards were public about their abilities, a higher proportion of wizards (even low-powered wizards) in the muggle population would be identified and trained, and there would presumably be knowledge of methods for integrating wizard and muggle medicine. The results still wouldn't be all muggles having access to the best of wizard healing magic.
I don't find it surprising from a combination of EY's libertarianism and utilitarianism. Many libertarians are this way, and utilitarianism only adds more support for the argument.
I'm not convinced utilitarianism actually adds support. At the very least Bryan Caplan's arguments rely on freely switching between deontology and consequentialism, frequently in the same argument, to work.
How many billion people would be better off if allowed to immigrate to GB?
Utilitarianism is about counting everyone's utility the same. "Shut up and multiply" - where multiply is the number of people, not a weighting factor for how much you give a shit about them. That weighting factor should be 1 for all.
Not that I'm a utilitarian. But a libertarian utilitarian would have his work cut out for him to overcome the basic tenets of non initiation of force and weighing everyone's utility equally to justify limiting immigration.
It's just the flip side of the utilitarian idea that you have to give everything you own to charity (except for the money you need to keep making more money to give to charity). Pretty much nobody actually does this, but utilitarianism demands it.
Except in this case, it's not about reducing your utility to increase other people's utility by a greater amount, it's about reducing the utility of everyone in the country to increase other people's utility by a greater amount. It's always easier robbing Peter to pay Paul if you are not Peter.
Or for another comparison, taxation. We could let in lots of immigrants, decreasing the utility of people already in the country for a greater increase in the utility of other people. We could also tax people in the country and use it to buy foreigners a whole series of things starting with malaria nets, again reducing the utility of people already in the country for a greater increase in the utility of other people. Yet taxing locals for the benefit of outsiders is something we only do to a very limited extent, and mostly when giving things to outsiders also brings us some benefit.
(And before you say libertarians don't believe in initiation of force, most libertarians are not anarchocapitalists and do think there is some role for government.)
Just wondering, why not do it the other way round? Make the immigrants pay higher taxes. (Only the first generation; because their children are already born in this country.) For the immigrants, it is presumably still a big improvement over living in their country of origin. For the local people, it removes the "but we would have to pay higher taxes" argument.
In order to do that the immigrants would have to pay enough in taxes to make up for the loss in utility by the preexisting residents. Some groups of immigrants, such as immigrants resembling the current Mexican illegals, may not be able to pay that. Furthermore, the same political groups who want more immigrants would oppose such a plan to the point where it won't be feasible.
And the fact that they have children in this country is part of what decreases utility for the people already in the country.
Immigrants to the UK pay, on average, more taxes than native Brits.
That's quite interesting, and does refute a lot of the people who argue against all immigration. But the UK does have some forms of boarder control.
The biggest problem with the headline is that it assumes "immigrants" are a homogenous group. There could be some groups that are good for the country and some which are not, in which case you could still justify keeping the second group out. If you read the article it even says "However the report highlights that not all groups of migrants make a positive fiscal contribution to the UK and in some cases migrants can represent a burden for public finances."
Also, this doesn't count losses in utility that happen to locals because of immigrants but don't involve collecting benefits, such as increases in crime rates or unemployment rates.
What? If an employer is willing to hire the immigrant, this means that his labour is more valuable to her than her money, and if a grocer is willing to sell him food, this means that his money is more valuable to her than her food, so it'd seem like the immigrant is providing positive net value to the original population of the country, isn't him?
If immigrants generally reduce utility for everyone in the country, would the same apply for the children of citizens?
People intrinsically care about their children.
There is a middle ground between 'all immigration is generally bad' and 'there should be no boarder controls whatsoever'.
The UK, like pretty much every other country in the world, does not run on a pure capitalist economy.
It means the immigrant is producing positive net value to a member of the country, but it can still reduce the average utility for every member of the country.
But if it reduces the averages by raising every individual's utility and simply moving people from the "outside" group to the "inside" group who started with low utility, we can hardly call that bad.
(This is known as Will Rogers phenomenon BTW.)
Thanks. I knew there was a name for it, just couldn't remember what it was.
This is just another version of the utilitarian argument for redistributive taxation and has a similar problem. Hint: consider what it is about GB that makes it such a more desirable place then the immigrants' home countries and how that difference comes about.
Yes, that's my point. Open borders in general is supported by utilitarianism.
No need to try to convince me that utilitarianism has it's failings, I've been on board that ship for a long time.
My point is that a libertarian utilitarian can see the flaws in the naive utilitarian argument for redistribution. The naive utilitarian argument for open borders has similar flaws.
...
You can't fit billions of people in the UK. ( I guess that's not what you meant, but that's what it sounds like)
Well, an absolute libertarian could of course not justify the state doing anything. And a utilitarian could come up with arguments against unrestricted immigration - for one thing, perhaps it would be better to maintain at least some border controls but increase foreign aid? I'm not suggesting this is a good idea, it just doesn't seem immediatly ridiculous.
But it cuts against the grain of the fundamental premises of both ideologies. That's what I'm saying. The zero order application of both ideologies leads to open borders.
Not true. A state could always justly protect people willing to be protected from initiation of force.
Fair enough.
Yes, I agree that open boarders is the most obvious policy for a libertarian utilitarian, although more from the libertarian POV. Utilitarianism requires thinking long-term - redistribution of wealth by tax is clearly a utilitarian good in the short term, but in the longer term it might become harder to incentivise useful work and so the issue is not so clear cut. This is why its possible to be libertarian utilitarian, rather than a communist utilitarian.
In the same manner, the long-term effects of absolute open boarders might be quite negative.
The gain in quality of life from moving to the UK would gradually diminish as the island became overcrowded, until there was no net utility gain from people moving there anymore. Unrestricted immigration is not the same thing as inviting all seven billion humans to the UK. People will only keep immigrating until the average quality of life is the same in the UK as it is anywhere else; then there will be an equilibrium.
That quality will be substantially less than it is in the UK right now. That is why the current population of the UK, and any other developed country (i.e. any country with a standard of living much higher than the world average), does not want unrestricted immigration.
Yes, of course. But the net average quality of life is increased overall. Please examine the posts that I'm replying to here, for the context of the point I am making. For convenience I've copied it below:
If you are entering the argument with a claim that the UK's current inhabitants can be utilitarian and simultaneously weigh their own utility higher than those of other humans, then you should be directing your argument toward buybuydanddavis' post, since ze's the one who said "That weighting factor should be 1 for all". I am merely noting that not being able to fit billions of people in the UK is not a valid counterargument; net utility will still be increased by such a policy no matter what the UK's population carrying capacity is.
If that is an argument for doing it, it's also an argument for managing one's own home the same way. That ended badly for George Price.
I don't recognise an obligation to give my stuff away so long as anyone has less than I do, and I take the same attitude at every scale. There's nothing wrong with anyone trying to emigrate to a better place than they are in; but nothing wrong with No Entry signs either.
That's fine. Do you consider yourself a utilitarian? Many people do not.
For that matter, following Illano's line of thought, it's not clear that the amount that poor people would appreciate receiving all of my possessions is greater than the amount of sadness I would suffer from losing everything I own. (Although if I was giving it away out of a feeling of moral inclination to do so, I would presumably be happy with my choice). I'm not sure what George Price was thinking exactly.
I'm not sure this necessarily holds true. In very broad strokes, if the quality of life is increased by X for a single immigrant, but having that immigrant present in the country decreases the quality of life for the existing population by more than X/population, then even if a specific immigrants quality of life is improved, it doesn't mean that the net average quality of life is increased overall.
Yes..... you may be right, and it is a compelling reason, for example, not to admit terrorists into a country.
I suppose that if a particular individual's admission into the country would depress the entire country by a sufficient amount, then that's a fair reason to keep them out, without worrying about valuing different peoples' utilities unequally.
People would only immigrate to GB until there was no further utility involved in doing so. It's highly unlikely you'd end up with even one billion people there, even assuming that they could all fit.
Perhaps the phrase should not be 'shut up and multiply', but rather 'shut up and integrate'.
That was expressed better in Snow Crash:
"...once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity..."
If immigration is open, it doesn't just benefit the people who move to the UK. It also benefits family members who stay behind-- the immigrant will probably send money home.
I'm not an economist, but doesn't that in turn harm the people who are still in the UK, because money is being moved out of the country rather than being reinvested in the UK economy?
That EY is in favour of unrestricted immigration I don't find too surprising, or objectionable, not that I would take his word on this - he's not an economist.
What I object to is the implication that British people think foreigners are not even worth spitting on.
And incidentally, don't people get banned from LW? Even people who mass downvote are, it was said, as human as anyone else; who were said to be sapient beings, worth more than any mere unicorn. But who nonetheless wouldn't be allowed to post in LW.
Edit: On more sober reflection, the last paragraph is not the most intelligent thing I have ever written. It seems to equate banning/exile with preventing immigration in the first place, and I suppose there are reasons why you might want a website to have powers a nation-state doesn't anyway.
... so? The only ways I see that this provides an argument at all are so strained I feel like I have to be not grasping the reason you mentioned it.
Hmm, you might be right - I was unsure about this sentence when I posted it, but, well, politics is the mindkiller. Edited. The reason I mentioned it is because it seems to me that there are perfectly good utilitarian reasons for banning people from places without denying their worth as a person.
Any community, whether a website or a country, requires people with a shared set of norms (I probably what a more general word but I can't think of one). To maintain this it needs some combination of training/indoctrination of newcomers and excluding people who don't, won't, or can't accept them.
These two things are far enough apart that arguing for one does not do much to argue for the other.
Yes, but the principal I stated is pretty general. Care to explain why you think it doesn't apply in the case of countries.
1) Countries are really big. There are multiple layers of sub-community, providing for much more diversity even in a country that isn't about diversity. LW is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than Britain even with lurkers counted, and if we only count the regulars, the same can be said of magical Britain.
2) Countries don't have a specific purpose. Websites often do (including this one, used in the example). On a website, simply going off-topic badly can be a bannable offense (not here, yes). A country trying to do that is farcical.
3) The example given above, that I was responding to, was about someone who was let in to LW, did some bad things, and was banned. This is the equivalent of exile. It was targeted and in response to an existing wrong. It was not done proactively for a broad category of people who had not done anything wrong.
4) Speaking of those people not doing anything wrong, "don't, won't, or can't accept [the community's norms]" might be a legitimate reason, but it was not the criterion applied in the example, even approximately.
Yes, but you still need standards for said sub-communities to be able to coexist.
Depends on the website and the situation. Hacker News, for example, temporarily disables creating new accounts whenever it is linked to by a mainstream source. Also if a bunch of people from 4chan decided to show up here, I suspect you'd support proactive measures.
What example were you thinking of? In the example of immigration to the GB, if you listen to the complaints of the people against immigration, many of them amount to the above criterion.
Perhaps he is a Horcrux transfer (as long speculated) but a failed one; introspecting about how different he is from his memories of 'himself', he would realize 'he' hadn't survived and all that was left was a weird mishmash of Monroe's personality and Voldemort's memories, and this was entirely worthless as immortality.
What argument could be more convincing to Quirrel than personally embodying the failure of horcruxes as an immortality strategy?
I've also been thinking along these lines, anyone remember this part from the opening ceremony?
It seems to imply that becoming the second victim of a Horcrux might not necessarily create a mishmash of personalities, but instead have them competing as separate (maybe "partially mixed"?) identities. This would also explain why Harry consider his "dark side" different from himself.
Yes, that often came up in past discussions. The problem is that the dual persona part seemed to get dropped early on and it changed to one of energy - Quirrel going into zombie-mode, not shy-Quirinius-mode. Presumably when he was up there on the podium, he was trying to summon up the energy for his speech.
If Monroe was a hero, then Monroe's personality really doesn't fit with some of Quirrel's actions. But there are times when it seems like Quirrel is developing some affection for Harry, for instance the Christmas present.
I have long been wondering if there is a possibility of Harry redeeming Quirrelmort, and if there is actually any part of Quirrel still in there, it makes this idea a lot more plausible. I had thought that after the redemption, Harry would deduce that Quirrel is Voldemort. But I think there is not enough time left in the story for this to play out.
We aren't told enough about Monroe during the war to really know. Maybe Quirrel really is what an embittered Monroe personality plus murdered family plus Voldemort memories plus amnesia plus terminal disease from sacrifices would look like.
I'm not either. It lands with such a clunk. Maybe Magical Britain lets anyone in, but it's clear that muggles have few rights that Wizards feel they need to respect.
And that last line - ugh:
It doesn't even make sense. You "have a right to look someone in the eye" based on the totality of who you are versus what they are. Selecting out one point on which you are in error and they aren't really invalidates the metaphor.
Given all that Harry finds objectionable and even barbaric about Magical Britain, how much indifference they have to the suffering of others, and how his allegiance is more to a scientific culture with rule of law, that last line seems largely just false to Harry's character. Whatever faults he sees in muggle Britain, he sees as many of more in Magical Britain.
And why is universalist Harry all of a sudden in a twist over muggle Britain, especially?
It seems much more like the line is a gratuitous crack of the riding crop to one of the author's favorite hobby horses. All pissed off about UKIP's recent strong showing in elections?
I find open borders consistent with Harry in general, but making that a particular outrage, and particularly aimed at Muggle Britain as compared to Wizards, really doesn't work for the story or for making the moral point.
Agreed - it's a complete non-sequitur, crowbarred in with a tenuous link. And the wizards are far more intolerant.
I doubt Muggle Britain lets everyone in - for one thing, it has approximately the same ethnic composition as muggle Britain, for another, I seem to remember that Hogwarts is one of the best magic schools in the world, in which case parents would move to Britain, increasing class sizes until Hogwarts was approximately the same standard as other schools.
Incidentally, do Wizards in third-world countries have the same standard of living as first-world wizards? If so, they see no problem in letting muggles starve on their doorsteps.
This may be a slight tangent but I'm amazed (edit: amazed is the wrong word. I'm disappointed) at how the UKIP's performance has made many people lose all sense of proportion, and become thoroughly mindkilled. About half the discussion seems to be 'one UKIP supporter said something rasist/sexist/homophobic'. UKIP has 37 000 members. This isn't just an adhomen attack, its an utterly statistically insignificant adhomen attack.
Worse, a friend of mine who is a lecturer in sociology endorsed a plan to send bricks to the UKIP's freepost address, thus wasting their money. But if the UKIP supporters then send bricks to the left-wing parties, then all parties lose money and the postal system slows down. I would have thought a lecturer in sociology would understand about not defecting and keeping the moral high ground, but apparently I was wrong.
I bet the mindkilling predated UKIP's victory, and only afforded an impetus to action for those already mindkilled.
Why do you find this surprising? That's the standard attack. It's simply background music.
In Western democracies, the Left fights for power and is serious about it. Any means available.
When does the opposition to the Left ever respond with a little tit for tat? In the US, there are all sorts of people mouthing off big words about fighting government tyranny, while meekly standing by while their children are sexually assaulted by the TSA purportedly looking for nuclear weapons in their underwear.
What he understands that you don't is that his enemies won't fight back. If your enemies are fundamentally pacifists toward your aggression, why ever stop?
I'd agree, it has at most increased the mindkill.
"Amazed" was the wrong word, used in a sloppy rhetorical sense. 'Disappointed' might be better.
Well, of course UKIP didn't respond in kind, including when the prank escalated to sending blood and shit. And of course, it's UKIP who are the fascists, so let's hit them with sticks!
Thing is, I do understand this, but maybe I've haven't fully internalised the fact an intelligent person can think that they are 'fighting the power' (he argues that UKIP are extremely similar to Nazis) while crushing anyone who dares to utter a contradictory opinion. I would say I can't understand this behaviour, but that would be purely rhetorical, because I do know what compartmentalisation is.
And when you have an iron grip on the moral high ground because anyone who disagrees with you is racist, then I suppose you can afford to defect constantly.
It's interesting, especially given that no one seems to care that the current EU head is a not-quite-repentant former soviet apologist.
I think he was never dead or diminished. That Quirrell would not take precautions against "The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord" strikes me as crazy talk. Even if there were no "sense of doom" back then, why take chances? Have Bella wring it's neck. The end.
He faked his death, set up Harry as a savior, took a vacation, and returned as Quirrell when Harry became old enough to use magic.
Only a very paranoid person would assume this power applied when Harry was a baby. What if he sent Bella, and she couldn't bring herself too kill a baby? I know this seems unlikely, but not as unlikely as a baby being the only person to ever survive AK.
'Professor Quirrell's voice sounded a bit sharp for some reason' is a hint that he is Voldemort, and that he did not fake his own death.
This is why I'm not buying the otherwise fairly plausible 'Voldemort faked his own death' theories
Possible reasons include:
The argument isn't about immigration to Britain, it's about a trade embargo between the whole Wizarding World and everyone else. There's one drinking fountain for wizards and another for muggles, only instead of both having water the wizarding one is full of healing potions.
Harry seems to have forgotten the fact that he rescued Bellatrix from Azkaban. It one of those things he should ask about when asked for unsaid stuff between the two. Given Harry's knowledge of wizard medicine Quirrell could simply die the next week and take all the knowledge about Bellatrix with him to his grave.
This chapter confirms earlier speculations that horcruxes work by making backup copies of brain states (with the caveat that actually using the horcrux will merge its memories and personality with those of its host body, resulting in a hybrid entity). The theory that Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres is an instance of Tom Riddle (or, rather, a hybrid of Tom Riddle and the original Harry Potter) now seems very, very probable. It explains why Harry is as smart as Tom's other instances (the original Riddle/Monroe/Voldemort and the Quirrell/Riddle hybrid), and why the remember-ball glowed like the sun (Harry forgot Riddle's memories because he was too young to remember them).
Parseltongue has a word for "horcrux"?
Voldemort used horcruxes, obviously (that's what the five hidden items in the elemental pattern are), but between the missing memories and the hybridization Quirrellmort doesn't consider them to be worth the trouble. Keep in mind that there is a nice theory about not being able to lie in parseltongue.
I suppose open borders and unrestricted immigration are in-keeping with Harry's character as a utilitarian who tries to assign equal value to each and every human life.
Also, won't Quirrell die of transfiguration sickness if he drinks the blood of transfigured Rarity?
No, the unicorn will, but by the time Quirrell drinks it blood it won't be transfigured any more, so he will be fine.
From chapter 100:
Quirrell doesn't have a very large window in which to drink the blood.
More to the point, wouldn't particulate matter, other fluids, other bits of the unicorn pollute the blood as a result of the transfiguration? I could see the blood itself fixing that issue, but in the case of another fluid in a similar situation, I could see the drinker getting sick (if not to the degree that the animal did).
I may not be understanding how transfiguration sickness works exactly.
EDIT: formatting
According to this he should have plenty of time:
From the transfiguration rules:
This presumably means don't transfigure anything into food. However it could also be interpreted to mean, don't transfigure food into anything. I am somewhat disappointed in McGonagall for not catching that ambiguity.
Also Quirrell is not a recognized transfiguration authority:
However since Quirrells past is unknown (as far as Hogwarts is concerned) he could be one of the best transfigures in the world and he wouldn't be recognized as an authority. Also I don't see Quirrell neglecting something as useful and versatile as transfiguration, so I would expect him to know how dangerous eating formerly transfigured food is.
I think McGonagall doubts Quirrell's goodness more than his knowledge.
Transfiguration sickness isn't because things turn into poison. Your body goes into a transfigured state, minor changes occur, and when you come back from that state things are different. It'd be tiny things. Huge problems would cause you to die instantly, but little transcription errors would kill you in the timeframe described.
Eg, your veins wouldn't match up right. The DNA in your cells would be just a little bit off and you'd get spontaneous cancer in your entire body. Some small percent of neurotransmitters and hormones would be transformed into slightly different ones... etc. None of that would be contagious or even harmful to somebody consuming it. But to the animal itself it'd be devastating.
Also remember that once the transfiguration reverts and you're back to yourself, you're in a stable state. The only issue is that you're not back together perfectly. Quirrell would only get sick if he drank the blood while it was transfigured and then it changed form while inside of him.
If Salazar Slytherin did indeed created Parseltongue, it's not that unlikely. Slytherin knew various powerful Dark Magics.
Other words you wouldn't expect snakes to use: ritual, schoolmaster, spell, sacrifice, world, meaningless, murder, obscuration, device, continuity, Merlin's freaking Interdict...
yeah.
But most of those you'd expect Salazar Slytherin to use when talking to, say, an ancient snake guarding all his dark secrets.
Right. These are further evidence that the language was constructed or at least heavily influenced by humans, and is not snakes' original natural language.
What's that theory?
And yet, Hogwarts won't take in Muggleborn from outside Britain. And an early chapter mentioned "lands where Muggleborn children received no letters" (quoting from memory).
These threads. At this point I'm pretty much convinced that the theory is correct.
Also, Magical Britain keeps Muggles out, going so far as to enforce this by not even allowing Muggles to know that Magical Britain exists. I highly doubt that Muggle Britain would do that to potential illegal immigrants even if it did have the technology...
I'm not convinced of the theory. Very tenuous and circumstantial, and not part of canon, AFAIK.
I expect anything Quirrell says to be a mix of half truths.
That much seems true.
I would hesitate to call this "obviously". Certainly, there's the Pioneer plaque, but as for the elemental pattern, all we actually have is Quirrell remarking on the fact that Harry's ideas have an elemental pattern, and Harry himself failing to realise it. There's nary a hint that Harry's guesses correspond to anything that actually happened.
It's still not a lie.
He considered it long ago and then he did it. He doesn't want to try it again because he's already got some and/or they wouldn't fix his current situation. Literally truthful but appropriately misleading.
In reference to:
If you wondered why the book explicitly calls out that Harry knows the word Horcrux in Parseltongue, here's some background.
Harry has not learned the English word for Horcrux. He knows that unnamed Horcrux-like things exist, and he has heard the word "Horcrux" and made a mental note to look it up, but he hasn't connected the concept to the English name.
How can you write about Horcruxes in third person limited if Harry does not know the word? If you just use the raw word Horcrux without explanation, persnickety readers will concoct elaborate theories about Harry researching Horcruxes off-camera. Calling out that Harry knows the word Horcrux in parseltongue -- and by implication not in English -- may keep persnickety readers at bay.
That doesn't make any sense. If Harry didn't think he knew the word in English, he wouldn't start 'It is called...' and then break off as the Parseltongue word comes to mind and he doesn't have to lapse back into English. He would say something like 'I'm not sure what exactly the ritual is called -'
Yes, elaborate theories based on Harry doing what he said he would do in chapter 86:
Hardly a stretch that he encountered a few hints in books and went 'oh, the dark ritual which confers immortality and something bad Moody thinks Voldemort made while he was alive are the same thing', even if he'd never read about Koschei the Deathless or D&D's liches.
There are few ways the word Horcrux could come out of Harry's mouth that I would not take as evidence for Harry doing outside research. It would take non-trivial circumlocutions to indicate that Harry doesn't know what the English word Horcrux means. Such circumlocutions appear in the text. The best reason I can think of for those circumlocutions to appear in the text is to prevent people like me from inferring too much from Harry's vocabulary choice. There are alternatives explanations, like hinting that Salazar invented Horcruxes, but they seem less likely to me.
And what circumlocutions are those, exactly? Because in the passage quoted, I see a straightforward explanation of the ritual and a naming in English (with the unexpected result that he knew the English word's equivalent in Parseltongue too).
I hope you are right.
I don't know where else to post this, but I've been entertaining a hypothesis about HPMOR's version of magic. Has anyone already made the connection between magic and Outcome Pumps? During the first chapters in Hogwarts, Harry talks a lot about expectations, and about magic being able to match them, and it ocurred to me that HPMOR's magic was a mechanism to force your universe to branch into one that matches your expectation. Then I read somewhere, in old threads, that EY was at one point in the past planning to write a story about a device to "squeeze the future," and I realized that HPMOR was it. Your wand is the device that squeezes the future and ensures you end up in the world you expected. Has this been discussed already?
The first experiments Harry did, where he told Hermione what the spells did but gave her wrong pronunciations, tested for this theory. If your idea is correct, the spells should have worked anyway. But they didn't.
If Harry did not expect them to work, that might have been enough to make them not work. Was this study double blind?
e.g. Harry should have written down two pronunciations, left the room, and let Hermione randomly choose and cast one.
I don't think that setup completely removes expectations. There nothing you can do to get rid of expecations if you live in a magical world where they have direct effects.
Harry totally expected them to work. The idea that the universe should actually care about the way you pronounce oogely-boogely is absurd. He planned out a nice long series of experiments, and then had to scrap them after the first one falsified his theory.
If this is the case, I imagine that the story will be darn-near not understandable towards the end, when Harry finds this out.
I mean, what do you expect to happen when you expect reality to fit your expectations? When the territory starts to match to the map?!
Edit: a Added the words 'you expect' and changed nearby words to be grammatically appropriate.
I've been writing a story based on this premise. Spoiler: crazy shit happens.
Sounds like the ending of Anathem.
It also reminds me of Friedman's Coldfire books.
Well, if the "expects" operator starts acting like a "proves" operator, that sounds like Lob's theorem.
Lets see: Data and implications, assuming Quirrelmort is keeping up his habit of only rarely telling direct lies: Dark and sacrificial magic tends to kill you in the end, and neither the original Voldemort, nor Quirrelmort had a fix for this. The horcrux spell forks your identity, imperfectly, and also carries wholly unacceptable costs to anyone moral. So, you know, nothing voldy cares about.
Theory: Facing his own inevitable demise from accumulated sacrifice damage, Voldy attempted to fix the flaws in the horcrux process - First he attempted to bypass the loss of knowledge by targeting a strong wizard as the possession target - heck, that might have been part of the point of the campaign of terror - to draw out wizards with real power from obscurity. And so he ended up fighting both sides of that war, because he took Monroe's body while still remaining Voldemort full time. The personality divergence from imprinting himself on a mind that strong, however, was more than Voldemort considered acceptable, and thus he targeted Harry. At a guess, he worked out how to remove the carrier object from the spell so that the death of Harry's mother would copy him directly into the mind of baby Harry - who being a baby, would have very little in the way of a personality. The change to the rite also involved torching his then-current body. Heck, maybe all he did was use himself as the horcrux- but this was acceptable, because it was falling apart from sacrifice damage anyway. All of which worked fine, except babies forget just about everything that happens before the fifth year of life so the immaculate transfer of Voldemort's entire mind got wiped by infant amnesia.
Lets see: Stone theories: "True power isn't what people say it is". Gold is not wealth - that is a wizard and goblin misconception, and youth isn't a mystical quality, it is a body functioning correctly.
I am sticking with my theory that the alchemist stone is simply the second level version of the Reparo spell. The one that works on people. - It grants great wealth because it works on everything, which turns second hand and broken magical items, art, ect, into a trivial source of income, and it makes you immortal because age is just damage. Heck, it will likely raise the dead as long as their remains are still recognizably "a broken person".
If the philosopher's stone is nearly as good at healing as you suggest, then it's a source of income because it's good at healing. What else do you need?
A source of income you can use without attracting attention to your only source of income. (Otherwise, you risk losing it.) Such as, repairing objects when no one else is looking. If you buy a broken or damaged object from one person, fix it, and sell it to another person, no one needs to know you repaired it. But even if they know you repaired it, they don't have to know you repaired it using a magical artifact.
I assumed that babies just didn't store long-term memories in the first place, but I've looked it up on Wikipedia and it sounds like I was mistaken. Huh.
I'd say that it tends to kill your host meat sack. Not a problem if you can hop to a new one.
The problem being the lack of continuity,
Which would be avoided if your current host body dies in the transfer.
I don't think that is necessary:
If the burst is channeled into a living person instead of a device, then Merlin's Interdict is avoided.
He transfers to a powerful wizard because that's the good place to be. Better than a rat.
I think that's true. The war was not about taking over as the Dark Lord, it was about taking over as the Savior from the Dark Lord, as it is planned to be again with Harry.
See my top level post for a more fleshed out version of how I think Quirrell is preparing to upload to Harry.
I don't think that's how continuity of self works. Suppose I, Velorien A, cast the horcrux spell. I continue to exist, and now I have created a Velorien B, an imperfect copy in a younger, healthier body. When Velorien A dies, whether instantly or in a number of years, I die. Velorien B will continue to exist. From an external perspective, yes, there was one old/ill Velorien, and now there is one young/healthy Velorien. From the perspective of Velorien B, he is Velorien A but in a younger, healthier body. But from my perspective... well, I don't have a perspective, because I'm dead.
You can see it that way, and I largely do too, but that was not how Harry and Quirrell identified the problem.
The issue, the reasons for the issue.
If we avoid those reasons, which dying in the transfer does, then the issue is resolved.
I think you've got it the wrong way round. The first part is the problem. The second part is how the problem manifests itself.
Let's take the full quote.
The problem is continuity of consciousness. What Quirrell is saying is that because there is no continuity of consciousness, when you die, you die, no matter that you made a horcrux first.
I certainly don't believe that Quirrell, who has probably spent much of his life considering the problem, would be so naive as to think that destroying the original somehow gives the copy continuity of consciousness with the original.
I feel extremely confident that the Philosopher's Stone is not Reductionist Reparo, though the idea did help me figure out part of the ending. First, the reductionist extension of transfiguration required a level of scientific knowledge that (I think) very few wizards before now could have possessed. And second, Reparo can't even fix Lupin's robe. You would need something to enhance the spell -- e.g, some artifact known to do so in canon. Fvapr Uneel unf yvxryl hfrq gur Pybnx nyernql gb uryc uvz genafsvther Urezvbar'f obql sbe fnsrxrrcvat, V cerqvpg ur'yy hfr gur Erfheerpgvba Fgbar gb trg nqivpr sebz ure (be sebz fvz!Urezvbar, nf ur jbhyq frr vg) nobhg ubj gb erfheerpg ure hfvat gur Ryqre Jnaq. Gubhtu vg pbhyq or fbzr bgure qrnq crefba jvgu xabjyrqtr bs gur Qrnguyl Unyybjf yrtraq/cebcurpl.
I feel much less confident about rejecting the rest. But remember that nobody saw "Voldemort" die. While the Professor could perhaps be lying about V killing the basilisk -- it seems like a useful way to recover one's magical knowledge post-Horcrux -- I think he's still using his original body and just following the rules ("whatever my true vulnerability is, I will fake a different one.")
I don't think rot13 is necessary here, as you're posting speculation.
The Resurrection Stone, if Quirrell is to be believed, cannot provide the user with any new information. It is thus useless to Harry unless it has as-yet unrevealed additional special functions when combined with other Deathly Hallows.
Also, do you have any evidence for your first sentence?
Harry is the one who brought up the Resurrection Stone with the assumption that it behaved like other devices, in the aptly named chapter, "Pretending to be Wise, Pt 2". The Defense Professor is the one who reacted as if shocked to the news that - if his genealogy search went the way Voldemort's did in canon - he already had the artifact:
This being Quirrell, while his reaction may indicate shock, it is also exactly how he would react if he did not have the artefact and/or believed it to be worthless in any case. There isn't enough information there to make any assumptions either way.
Also, in Chapter 90, Quirrell visibly fails to refute Harry's assumption:
I think we're seeing the set up of the end game of the upload of Quirrellmort to Harry.
David Monroe, last descendant of a Noble House, family killed by Voldemort, the great champion to save Magical Britain against Voldemort. But instead of having the mass of Magical Britain rally around him, they generally make his difficult. When that plan of being a savior fails.
He then disappears. Poof.
Where is our champion now?
And poof! Harry Potter, last descendant of a Noble House, family killed by Voldemort, miraculously ends Voldemort rampage.
Years later, Monroe reappears as Quirrell, just in time to be the Defense Professor and mentor for this miraculous Harry Potter, who in fact is miraculous, for his age, or really any age. With a secret Dark Side that gives him great power. With so many similarities to Quirrell in personality and intelligence. With such a natural bond.
But if the victim is already very similar, perhaps more to his taste?
David Monroe, 2.0. Prepared as a baby to be a host. Prepared with a better history to be Savior of Magical Britain, prepared to be so similar to Quirrell.
We've got Harry bringing up Horcruxes, Quirrell going beyond his usual psycho smirk to burst out laughing, Quirrell explaining that a Horcrux is a ritual that transfers intelligence to an object, but woe is me,
If only there were objects that weren't not alive that the intelligence can pass into, then they'd get all the powerful spells too.
Oh, and by the way, I was going to teach you all my powerful spells, but you never asked, and now there is no time, no time.
If only there were a quick way to pass all my knowledge to you, but alas,...
Quirrell has Harry begging for this lost knowledge. Perhaps he'd also be begging to be part of a ritual to pass Quirrell's intelligence into him?
Other things.
Why forbid Harry from bringing him unicorns? For that matter, why didn't Quirrell feast on unicorns again and again to keep his strength up? Why doesn't he have a herd of them up in a ranch in the mountains somewhere?
The Sense of Doom is diminishing. Perhaps this is what would allow their magic to interact, and thereby complete the ritual? Perhaps that's why Quirrell isn't more effectively fighting his failing health. Or is that only to motivate Harry to look into methods or fighting death with some desperation?
EDIT
On the "uploading to a new body" idea, see Quirrell rubbing their noses in their ignorance:
Quirrell is too smart not to do this. I think he's pretending to be weaker than he really is, in order to manipulate Harry.
That's a good possibility I hadn't thought of. Too busy confirming my pet theory.
Quirrell's apparent weakness, feigned or actual, serves to manipulate Harry.
His actual weakness weakens the Sense of Doom, and thereby may allow their magic to interact. This is why I think actual weakness is still likely, despite the manifest downside. My pet theory is some variation on Quirrell uploading into Harry, and this is supported by a bunch of evidence I won't go into again. But if this is the goal, being able to interact with Harry, magically or physically, would be an important enabling factor.
This was said by Quirrell in Parseltongue. If you can only tell the truth in Parseltongue, then Quirrell was really forbidding Harry from obtaining the stone himself.
Harry trying to obtain the stone by himself would be like Harry sneaking into Akazaban by himself. Harry developing a plan, and coming to Quirrel for assistance OTOH...
Indeed, Harry would not search for the stone alone. The twins participated in Hermione's Last Stand to level up for the final arc, and the Lestrange open bracket has yet to be closed.
Well. Technically the statement only describes the act of speaking itself. There is no explicit information conveyed about Quirrell actually wishing or intending Harry to follow his injunction.
Rereading chapter 100 reminds me of the Twilight Sparkle lookalike among the unicorns.
it added nothing but confusion and awkwardness. If it were cut, no one who hadn't been told would ever realize that something had once been there. And now with this chapter we've got some pretty good confirmation that they're not sapient, so any inferences one might have drawn from it were false.
I was under the impression the unicorn was Alicorn's cameo. Alicorn asked for a cameo as a unicorn, Eliezer agreed and even promised to make it plot relevant. I'm not sure what actually happened was quite what Alicorn had in mind.
There were two, one was Alicorn and the other was Twilight Sparkle (unnamed).
So this is why this forum is dying, EY casting AK v2.0.
What exactly is this supposed to mean? (Besides being a joke, obviously.) Is it Eliezer's public duty to keep writing new Sequences for the rest of his life? Or what other specific duties on LW is he neglecting?
Eliezer is not a superhuman Friendly AI. He is merely trying to build one. Most of things that Eliezer could do here, someone else could do, too. Or we can all choose to sit and eat popcorn, and complain when we are bored.
EDIT: I guess you already heard something about reinforcement. From that perspective, is this a helpful reaction to publishing a new chapter of HP? It's as if someone gives you a cookie, and you spit on him, and then you complain about why he doesn't bring you cookies more often.
RETRACTED FOR DERAILING THE THREAD.
A true EY fact!
Eliezer recently deleted posts from LW but on the other hand doesn't write very much on LW. That's behavior that's not healthy for this community.
If this community depends on Eliezer writing, that would be a huge failure. I think we were supposed to become stronger, try harder, and cooperate. We had enough time to do that. If a group of people cannot replace one person, then either we don't care enough, or we failed to learn our lessons.
But actually, I think we are doing it quite well. (By "we" I mean the whole community; I specifically haven't contributed an article yet.) When Eliezer was writing the Sequences, he wrote one article per day. We have on average maybe three articles per day. If this is not enough, then how much would be enough? Five? Ten? Twenty? Are we trying to replace Reddit's output? I know I would like to see twenty new articles on LW every day, but that's just my inner procrastinator speaking. If I were more effective in real life and spent less time on internet, I would be barely able to read three articles (and their discussions) every day.
Having more content on LW can be a lost purpose. To some degree it reflects the health of the community. For example, if we were doing many cool things, and writing reports about them on LW, there would be many cool articles on LW. I'd like to see us being more awesome. But it doesn't work the other way round: by increasing the number of articles we can't increase our awesomeness in the real life.
I didn't mind the deleted article, but I also didn't mind that it was deleted. It was a shiny thing for procrastination, with no other value besides signalling author's smartness and contrarianism -- something this specific author does very frequently. This is a thing we shouldn't reward. I certainly would hate if other people started writing similar stuff. Or if the same author started doing it more often. (And unfortunately, this specific author seems to have some creepy mind-controlling powers he's using to get a lot of upvotes here, so the standard moderation fails. I don't fully understand his strategy, but it includes writing obscure comments which seem as if the author has something very interesting to say, but he just never says it. And then he rewards people for trying to guess what he meant, or simply for giving him attention. Everything he writes serves the ultimate purpose of drawing attention to his person, and he is doing it quite well. It's trolling 2.0 optimized for LessWrong. E.g. read this, although he lost a lot of karma there.)
It was more than one article. There are events that are more recent than the Will_Newsome episode.
I know I'm not the first person to say this, but in case any of the moderators and people generally in charge are listening: as a peripheral member of Less Wrong at best, this is a significant factor in my reluctance to become further involved with the site and its community. When I come here and see extremely typical forum drama like the Will_Newsome debacle, it greatly reduces my confidence that this is a good place to learn rationality and find suitable role models for its practice.
I realise that's an irrational judgment in many ways, but that's sort of the point. I come here to learn to think rationally, I see poor behaviour from the people who are supposed to possess the fruits of that learning effort, and my gut instinct is to go away again (rather than learn the skills that would allow me to override that gut instinct and seek maximum benefit from Less Wrong in spite of its flaws).
This is reminding me of Heinlein's "Gulf", which describes intelligence/rationality training, and then testing it under stress.
There are also the teams in HPMOR.
However, (aside from that I'm citing fictional evidence) there may be an important difference between maintaining rationality under physical stress vs. maintaining rationality while sitting comfortably at a keyboard under social stress.
What were the more recent events?
To cite a facebook post from last Wednesday by XiXiDu (LW-name):
1) I think we can hardly criticize him for not writing enough, given that he's about to spend a month writing a book for free for all of us.
2) It'd be pretty sad if having a moderator in place of a member was an active harm to the community.
Sad? I'd say quite the opposite. If the best contribution to the community is that of normal members, and the contribution of moderators is a lesser one, that's well and good.
Moderation is about leadership. If you do it from the shadows it's not as effective.
Leadership is not the essential purpose of moderation. The purpose is to raise the tone of the debate and make the community adhere to norms. If the active membership is pretty good at adhering to norms, and you just need to take out occasional trash, shadowy moderation works fine. LW has a dedicated core with extremely strong norms, and I suspect that even if Eliezer went into a coma for the next year and the site was completely unmoderated that wouldn't change.
Uh, this was meant as a half-joke, and apparently it wasn't very successful. Anyway, this is a wrong thread to discuss the health of the forum. And no, I don't think that Eliezer has any public duty to the forum readers, if you were wondering. I was simply commenting on his disengagement, quite likely for very good reasons (like that he has a lot more useful feedback on FB).
I apologize for my too strong reaction and for derailing the thread.
This problem could be fixed, in principle:
You need two cooperating Dark Wizards. (I know, much easier said than done.) They share knowledge of all spells. One of them makes a horcrux, the other teaches him all the spells again. Then the other makes a horcrux, and the former teaches him.
Or maybe you just need one Dark Wizard, and one loyal servant, willing to make the Unbreakable Vow. Servant makes a vow to teach the reborn Dark Wizard all his spells, but never use them for himself or tell them to anyone else.
Or Quirrell focuses Quirrell's death burst into Harry?
Harry think's he's gaining knowledge, but it's actually Quirrell uploading into Harry and taking over.
Bellatrix?
Harry seems to have neglected the possibility that the Philosopher's Stone is a general-purpose transmutation device, thus explaining why it would be able to produce both gold and the elixir of life.
And since Fullmetal Alchemist was plagiarized from wizard lore, you'd think this would be a reasonably common hypothesis.
I may be pointing out the obvious, but...
This is how the troll was smuggled into Hogwarts without the wards going off. In all likelihood, Quirrell had the transfigured troll on his person when Dumbledore identified to the Hogwarts wards "The Defense Professor stands within this circle". Trolls self-transfigure as a form of regeneration, so the transfiguration would not kill the troll or be detectable.
Speculative:
Quirrell couldn't have made the troll sun resistant, since Harry touched the troll and he can't touch Quirrell magic. Explanations include:
Alternatively there are some magic portions that can be used to make the troll sun resistant.
Do we know this, or is it speculation based on our knowledge of potions in general?
Also, is it safe to assume that potions work on trolls, given that trolls are constantly transfiguring into themselves (and thus automatically flushing out changes to their physical state)?
Hmm... Trolls are rocks (sort-of), the Philosopher's Stone is a rock, can the Philosopher's Stone turn you into a troll?
(This is probably a stupid theory, but maybe it's related to something more workable.)
I don't think that Eliezer's trolls are rocks.
Quirrell states that sunlight freezes them in place, rather than that it petrifies them.
Quirrell states that a troll is constantly transfiguring itself into its own body, which means that the (apparently organic) form it's normally in is its true form.
The troll Harry kills doesn't turn to stone.
Thanks. I was getting them confused with Middle Earth trolls.
That is a nice theory.
So, people did not think this was obvious?
Screw that. I am willing to bet $50 US (1:1) that Mr. Hat & Cloak is Baba Yaga.
I would take you up on that, but in my memory palace one of the walls is occupied by a large chalkboard covered with lines of "I will not underestimate Eliezer Yudkowsky".
How do you go from the old Quirrel troll-in-pocket theory to Hat & Cloak == Baba Yaga? And which Hat & Cloak?
I updated on the probability that something could seem strikingly obvious on a first reading, escape the notice of hundreds of very smart people, have little direct evidence, and still be true.
I didn't realize that there were multiple Hat & Cloaks. I meant the ones that appeared to Blaize Zabini and to Hermione, if that limits them.
Why Baba Yaga?
I've suspected Baba Yaga would be dramatically revealed since the sentence I read her name. Since then there's been no shortage of evidence which can be somehow contorted to confirm my theory.
She's mentioned in at least three chapters. In chapter 12 Quirrell describes her as the "quote undying unquote Baba Yaga". (To my knowledge she's not mentioned at all by Rowling.) The Law of Conservation of Detail tells us that she is going to be plot-relevant somehow.
I can never see references to her without amusement. Bear in mind that the "canonical" Baba Yaga of Russian folklore is a cantankerous old witch who hobbles around with one leg made of bone, lives in a hut on chicken legs, and uses a giant mortar and pestle as her transport of choice. Such a character would make the likes of Hagrid and Moody seem wholly pedestrian.
Eliezer's re-imagining of her as a Dark Lady, meanwhile, just summons the most fantastic mental images.
I'll add "The Massacre of Albania in the Fifteenth Century", a book title which triggered my brain's foreshadowing alarm in chapter 26.
The "undying" Witch Formerly Known As Baba Yaga has gone by many names, including Nicholas Flamel.
I'm interested in taking you up on this. Could you give a more explicit definition? How will the bet be resolved?
I'm not picky on definitions. "The entity Hermione called 'Mister Incredibly Suspicious Person' has Baba Yaga's memories." That definition is looser than it needs to be, but I'm giving you generous odds.
Resolution would be informal, with us PMing payment instructions to each other. The payment information I would send you would be cheap, non-sketchy, and anonymous for me. We might agree to call the bet off by February 28th 2014 if the bet is not resolved by then. If there's somehow a definitional dispute, we work it out, possibly with someone else on the forum arbitrating. Default option is to cancel the bet.
If I lose the bet I will laugh it off. You probably should not accept unless you would do the same.
Edits: I meant February 28th 2015.
Are you betting that in a future chapter of HPMOR there will the explicit statement that Mr. Hat & Cloak is Baba Yaga? What happens to the bet if HPMOR ends without it being revealed who Mr.Hat&Cloak happens to be?
So you aren't really up for betting?
-
-
-
I believe he(?) means he will laugh off the loss of the money, in the sense of treating it as not a big deal.
I think Yudkowsky is enough of a non-asshole that if that's the case, he'll consent to say whether Baba Yaga had anything to do with Hat & Cloak. Remember, he endorses betting on beliefs.
No, I am up for betting. If unforeseen plot developments make the resolution of the bet unclear, I want determining the winner to be casual and non-adversarial. I will not argue technicalities even if they could cause me to win.
That really depends. If the identity of Mr. Hat & Cloak remains unclear but Harry finds a black hat in Snape's trunk and a black cloak in Dumbledore's office, I would probably lose. If Harry figures out that Nicholas Flamel is really Baba Yaga and she's been hiding in Hogwarts all year, I would probably win. I'd be happy to let a mutual chosen third party arbitrate.
I think the most likely scenario is that we'll hear no more about either of them. So I want to win that case; if the two are unrelated then I doubt we'll hear anything explicit to that effect.
Rather than worry about what's "cheap" let's just say the loser pays $50 gross, any payment fees or the like can come out of the winnings. And I'll stipulate that anything bitcoiny qualifies as sketchy.
And yeah, $50 is an amount that I can comfortably toss for online entertainment without checking my bank balance.
How about this stipulation: if the name Baba Yaga does not appear in the book again, and Eliezer Yudkowsky does not Word of God that Mr. Hat & Cloak is Baba Yaga, you win. I'm expecting Baba Yaga to be important, and if she's not mentioned again or only mentioned offhandedly I will likely concede.
We are on the same page about payments.
I'll take that bet, if it's still open. Though please see the possible spoiler in my previous comment if you're basing this on your interpretation of Eliezer's motives.
This suggests that the troll was known to Hogwarts as "The Defense Professor", and so explains what the wards reported:
I'm not sure he'd needed to do that. Until we hear otherwise, he has access to all the knowledge of Salazar, who knew enough to build Hogwarts. Which also means the source code to the wards and the means to change them.
Can you even transfigure something that transfigures itself back? Of course Quirrell can do it if it's possible, but is it possible?
So here's an obvious way to fix all known problems of the horcrux spell. You need a variant that kills the caster and moves their ghost into the victim's body. To avoid personality conflicts, the victim should be a baby who doesn't have much of a personality yet. And since the spell doesn't use an intermediate item, knowledge is not lost. Sounds like what happened to baby Harry, right?
Almost. Harry still grew up as a baby/child, and not as a genius wizard.
The first horcrux was off of Lily's death burst, passing some personality traits of Quirrell into Harry. The next death burst will be Quirrell's, which will transfer his intelligence into Harry.
Quirrell casts his own death burst into Harry?
Of course, that rule does not apply if the artifact was hidden by a man who thinks in story plots.
Chapter 12:
Chapter 17:
Chapter 27:
That's an interesting reflection of our recent discussion about the value of the term consciousness (http://lesswrong.com/lw/ki1/confused_as_to_usefulness_of_consciousness_as_a/) and how some languages probably don't have it.
Any ideas on what the Philosopher's Stone does? My favorite idea so far, seen in the fanfiction.net reviews, is that it's a device for making transfiguration permanent. That would account for both gold and healing powers.
We learn a number of very interesting things in this chapter. I'll focus on one area
So it's confirmed it exists and that it isn't what people think and that it's power / mechanism isn't what people think.
This is important because thinking back to Harry's early experiments with Hermione, he discovered that if you don't know what a spell does or have been told something completely in the wrong space the spell doesn't work at all. If you know generally what it does, it still works as long as you pronounce it correctly. (The later is also confirmed by the 'for enemies' spell).
In the library Hermione told Harry that the spell is published but no one has been able to actually perform it (nominally due to difficulty). If they all think it does something other than what it actually does, that explains it and is consistent with the book's theory of magic.
Also worth noting, Hermione was killed shortly after she began looking into the stone in earnest.
This part also seems very important. We get a new "major player". This player is powerful enough that QQ couldn't just take the stone and also powerful enough to have taught Dumbeldore many things (and Dumbeldore is thought to be the most powerful wizard in centuries). So here is a behind the scenes power on par or stronger than either major player in the last war.
Nick Flamel seems to just be the most recent alias for this other player, who has probably been around for a long time. For my money, I predict NF is really Baba Yaga ("the undying"). She's been named dropped too often to not make an appearance, and her being NF allows her to have been around all along instead of being an unsatisfying last chapter walk on.
This depends very much on how people conceptualise the philosopher's stone. If they go "by following these instructions, I will create a stone that produces the elixir of life and is also capable of permanently transmuting base metal into gold", and the philosopher's stone does not in fact do these things, then yes, they will fail.
On the other hand, if the wizard in question is aware that they have no idea how such an artefact is supposed to produce the elixir of life (or indeed what the elixir of life is beyond its expected function), or how it's supposed to transmute things, then their thought will surely be more like "by following these instructions, I will create an artefact that will deliver great benefits unto me, its possessor". Which ought to be sufficient to succeed if "for enemies" is.
If so, surely at least one of the many wizards to attempt the philosopher's stone ritual(?) must have been contemplating a sufficiently broad possibility space to succeed. And yet this does not appear to have been the case.
For further evidence, consider how frequently people learn and cast the Patronus Charm despite the fact that they are completely ignorant of how it really works.
Although people are ignorant of why it works, people casting the patronus charm know exactly what it does. It makes a silver colored animal that makes fear go away and can chase dementors.
As to conceptualization, you may well be right that it could be done without understanding the mechanism but with correct conceptualization. But, I bet most wizards don't have the right conceptualization. And worse, I bet most wizards investigating the philosophers stone have a Theory. And their theory is probably directly wrong which blocks them from being able to do it.
This does sound very likely. Although it's worth noting that there are at least a few powerful wizards who are, if not rational, at least capable of processing evidence without leaping to conclusions - we hear them described at the conclusion of Hermione's trial.
I've been under the impression through the whole story that Harry's father's rock is the philosopher's stone. Is Quirrel just referring to Harry here?
The Harry we know wasn't "born to the name now used", or really born at all, because his current self comes from a merger of the original Harry and Voldemort.
Harry is the repository of much lore about science.
Harry has taught Dumbledore many "secrets" about muggle science and rationality. (hasn't he? I can't remember any specifics because I haven't done a reread in a long time)
Even assuming that all this is accurate, why would Quirrell give Harry a third-person description of Harry, framed as if he was describing a third party?
Apart from the standalone ridiculousness of such behaviour, if Quirrell believed that Harry already had the stone, and knew that Harry was willing to use the stone for his benefit, then this sort of obfuscation would be the last thing he'd do.
Unless Quirrell isn't interested in the stone primarily here, but in tricking Harry into doing something else trying to get the stone.
No. It would be stupid for Dumbledore to hand out the philosopher's stone that way. It doesn't make it protected.
Hmm I hadn't thought the rock was the stone. That would be a great twist, but I doubt it because Dumbeldore said it was not magical to his knowledge when Harry asked him.
Also even if it is the stone, I don't think QQ knows this.
Also, we have what seems like a sufficient explanation for the rock - assuming Albus knew that the Defense Professor mentioned trolls while he was subtly encouraging Harry to learn the Killing Curse.
Oh, I guess I can post this then: V jnf ng n jrqqvat cnegl guvat n srj lrnef onpx jurer Ryvrmre pbasvezrq gung lbh pna'g yvr va Cnefrygbathr; gur engvbanyr tvira jnf gung Fnynmne jvfurq gb sbfgre pbbeqvangvba orgjrra uvf urvef. V'z abg 100% fher V'z erzrzorevat pbeerpgyl ohg V'z cerggl fher.
/u/solipsist, in another comment on this thread:
If Quirrell can't lie in Parseltongue (and not just Harry, since Harry's speaking as a standard Parselmouth but Quirrell is speaking as a sentient snake), and if that prohibition enforces the sincerity of imperative commands and not just declarative statements, then clearly what Quirrell is saying is that Harry should try to make his own Philosopher's Stone.
So the first thing Hermione mentions as a limitation of doing alchemy is the insane precision of the circle you have to draw. But what if there were already an acceptable, permanent alchemy setup just lying around somewhere where Harry could get to it?
On the other hand,
strongly implies that different alchemical procedures require different circles. What are the odds that Dumbledore just happens to have the right circle for philosopher's stone creation ready, given that he has no desire for immortality, no special need for gold, and access to an existing philosopher's stone anyway?
We definitely don't know enough specifics about HPMoR-alchemy to come to any firm conclusions.
Does the "alchemical circle" that has to be so precise refer to just the containing circle itself, or to all the runes inside it, too? If the former, then the circle could be a permanent part of the room, while the runes are drawn (the earlier passage does say the Transfiguration studio's diagram was "drawn") slightly more crudely in some way that's erasable. If the latter, then,
Are there different runes for different alchemies, or is it always the same "board" that you perform different processes on top of? If the latter, then the whole room could be ready to go; if the former, then yeah, Harry may be out of luck.
I did some Googling about the history of alchemy, and the diagram I saw associated with the Philosopher's Stone in several places was a circle-inscribed-in-a-square-inscribed-in-a-triangle-inscribed-in-the-Circle. If Eliezer is consistent with that, then Harry's probably going to have to draw at least the runes on his own.
I do think that it makes more sense literarily for Harry to have to go through the trapped third-floor corridor to the room with the "magic mirror" rather than skipping it altogether. But as others have pointed out, if it is the Mirror of Erised and Dumbledore's scheme is the same as in canon, HPMoR-Harry probably won't qualify to receive the Stone, since he totally does want to use it, and (I hope) can't somehow make himself not want to use it in a way that satisfies Dumbledore's spell.
So maybe he'll get to the mirror, find himself flummoxed, and then proceed to go make one. I don't know.