Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113

Gondolinian

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 113.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.

IMPORTANT -- From the end of chapter 113:

This is your final exam.

You have 60 hours.

Your solution must at least allow Harry to evade immediate death,
despite being naked, holding only his wand, facing 36 Death Eaters
plus the fully resurrected Lord Voldemort.

If a viable solution is posted before
*12:01AM Pacific Time* (8:01AM UTC) on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015,
the story will continue to Ch. 121.

Otherwise you will get a shorter and sadder ending.

Keep in mind the following:

1. Harry must succeed via his own efforts. The cavalry is not coming.
Everyone who might want to help Harry thinks he is at a Quidditch game.

2. Harry may only use capabilities the story has already shown him to have;
he cannot develop wordless wandless Legilimency in the next 60 seconds.

3. Voldemort is evil and cannot be persuaded to be good;
the Dark Lord's utility function cannot be changed by talking to him.

4. If Harry raises his wand or speaks in anything except Parseltongue,
the Death Eaters will fire on him immediately.

5. If the simplest timeline is otherwise one where Harry dies -
if Harry cannot reach his Time-Turner without Time-Turned help -
then the Time-Turner will not come into play.

6. It is impossible to tell lies in Parseltongue.

Within these constraints,
Harry is allowed to attain his full potential as a rationalist,
now in this moment or never,
regardless of his previous flaws.

Of course 'the rational solution',
if you are using the word 'rational' correctly,
is just a needlessly fancy way of saying 'the best solution'
or 'the solution I like' or 'the solution I think we should use',
and you should usually say one of the latter instead.
(We only need the word 'rational' to talk about ways of thinking,
considered apart from any particular solutions.)

And by Vinge's Principle,
if you know exactly what a smart mind would do,
you must be at least that smart yourself.
Asking someone "What would an optimal player think is the best move?"
should produce answers no better than "What do you think is best?"

So what I mean in practice,
when I say Harry is allowed to attain his full potential as a rationalist,
is that Harry is allowed to solve this problem
the way YOU would solve it.
If you can tell me exactly how to do something,
Harry is allowed to think of it.

But it does not serve as a solution to say, for example,
"Harry should persuade Voldemort to let him out of the box"
if you can't yourself figure out how.

The rules on Fanfiction dot Net allow at most one review per chapter.
Please submit *ONLY ONE* review of Ch. 113,
to submit one suggested solution.

For the best experience, if you have not already been following
Internet conversations about recent chapters, I suggest not doing so,
trying to complete this exam on your own,
not looking at other reviews,
and waiting for Ch. 114 to see how you did.

I wish you all the best of luck, or rather the best of skill.

Ch. 114 will post at 10AM Pacific (6PM UTC) on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015.

ADDED:

If you have pending exams,
then even though the bystander effect is a thing,
I expect that the collective effect of
'everyone with more urgent life issues stays out of the effort'
shifts the probabilities very little
(because diminishing marginal returns on more eyes
and an already-huge population that is participating).

So if you can't take the time, then please don't.
Like any author, I enjoy the delicious taste of my readers' suffering,
finer than any chocolate; but I don't want to *hurt* you.

Likewise, if you hate hate hate this sort of thing, then don't participate!
Other people ARE enjoying it. Just come back in a few days.
I shouldn't even need to point this out.

I remind you again that you have hours to think.
Use the Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, Luke.

And really truly, I do mean it,
Harry cannot develop any new magical powers
or transcend previously stated constraints on them
in the next sixty seconds.

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 113.

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.

IMPORTANT -- From the end of chapter 113:

This is your final exam.

You have 60 hours.

Your solution must at least allow Harry to evade immediate death,
despite being naked, holding only his wand, facing 36 Death Eaters
plus the fully resurrected Lord Voldemort.

If a viable solution is posted before
*12:01AM Pacific Time* (8:01AM UTC) on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015,
the story will continue to Ch. 121.

Otherwise you will get a shorter and sadder ending.

Keep in mind the following:

1. Harry must succeed via his own efforts. The cavalry is not coming.
Everyone who might want to help Harry thinks he is at a Quidditch game.

2. Harry may only use capabilities the story has already shown him to have;
he cannot develop wordless wandless Legilimency in the next 60 seconds.

3. Voldemort is evil and cannot be persuaded to be good;
the Dark Lord's utility function cannot be changed by talking to him.

4. If Harry raises his wand or speaks in anything except Parseltongue,
the Death Eaters will fire on him immediately.

5. If the simplest timeline is otherwise one where Harry dies -
if Harry cannot reach his Time-Turner without Time-Turned help -
then the Time-Turner will not come into play.

6. It is impossible to tell lies in Parseltongue.

Within these constraints,
Harry is allowed to attain his full potential as a rationalist,
now in this moment or never,
regardless of his previous flaws.

Of course 'the rational solution',
if you are using the word 'rational' correctly,
is just a needlessly fancy way of saying 'the best solution'
or 'the solution I like' or 'the solution I think we should use',
and you should usually say one of the latter instead.
(We only need the word 'rational' to talk about ways of thinking,
considered apart from any particular solutions.)

And by Vinge's Principle,
if you know exactly what a smart mind would do,
you must be at least that smart yourself.
Asking someone "What would an optimal player think is the best move?"
should produce answers no better than "What do you think is best?"

So what I mean in practice,
when I say Harry is allowed to attain his full potential as a rationalist,
is that Harry is allowed to solve this problem
the way YOU would solve it.
If you can tell me exactly how to do something,
Harry is allowed to think of it.

But it does not serve as a solution to say, for example,
"Harry should persuade Voldemort to let him out of the box"
if you can't yourself figure out how.

The rules on Fanfiction dot Net allow at most one review per chapter.
Please submit *ONLY ONE* review of Ch. 113,
to submit one suggested solution.

For the best experience, if you have not already been following
Internet conversations about recent chapters, I suggest not doing so,
trying to complete this exam on your own,
not looking at other reviews,
and waiting for Ch. 114 to see how you did.

I wish you all the best of luck, or rather the best of skill.

Ch. 114 will post at 10AM Pacific (6PM UTC) on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015.

ADDED:

If you have pending exams,
then even though the bystander effect is a thing,
I expect that the collective effect of
'everyone with more urgent life issues stays out of the effort'
shifts the probabilities very little
(because diminishing marginal returns on more eyes
and an already-huge population that is participating).

So if you can't take the time, then please don't.
Like any author, I enjoy the delicious taste of my readers' suffering,
finer than any chocolate; but I don't want to *hurt* you.

Likewise, if you hate hate hate this sort of thing, then don't participate!
Other people ARE enjoying it. Just come back in a few days.
I shouldn't even need to point this out.

I remind you again that you have hours to think.
Use the Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, Luke.

And really truly, I do mean it,
Harry cannot develop any new magical powers
or transcend previously stated constraints on them
in the next sixty seconds.

This is very similar to a solution I published earlier, except that when I first proposed it, I had forgotten that Harry hadn't got his wand at that point in time (but why hasn't he been disarmed now?).

The one plausible power Harry has is transfiguration, seeing as there are no dementors nearby, it seems unlikely that the patronus 2 can be used as an offensive weapon against anything apart from dementors.

Harry should transfigure some exotic matter with density far in excess of normal matter, and use it to slice through all the death eaters and Voldiemort. Since it has been established that you can transfigure against tension, he doesn't even need to move his hand to wield this weapon: the power of transfiguration can move it around in a circle.

I'm guessing this exotic matter will be silver in colour:

Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line... (black robes, falling) ...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word.

As for what type of exotic matter, tau particles, top and bottom quarks are all extremely unstable. This might not matter, because if transfigured into parts of particles, perhaps they would be stable, in the same way that free neutrons are not stable but nuclei are, although a google search seemed to indicate that muonic atoms are stable iff they are electron degenerate. But for that matter, I don't even know if stability applies to objects that are being transfigured.

A second concern is the hypothosis that strange matter is more stable than normal matter, and thus a stranglet would consume the earth. I don't know if this hypothosis was around in 1992, or whether Harry would have heard of it. If this does occur to him, then it might block the use of strange quarks. But I presume charm quarks are ok.

I think transfigureation is silent, and does not involve wand movements, rather the wand has to be kept stationary and in contact with the object, so it will not warn the death eaters and give them a chance to strike. The material to be transfigured could be part of the wand, or an outer layer of Harry's skin.

What are the other possibilities?

Someone else suggested that partial transfigureation could be used as a cutting weapon. I imagine it would be stopped by sheilds, but I suppose its possible.

Transfigured normal matter, including carbon nanotubes, would not be able to penetrate sheilds (in fact, carbon nanotubes have low sheer strength, so they would make very poor cutting implements).

What else is silver? The patronus can be willed to take the form of a sphere, so presumably it could be willed to take the form of a blade. But something powered by life should not be able to kill, even if it could penetrate sheilds. The dark patronus? Fulled by the desire to stop the death of those you love by killing those you hate?

Unicorn's blood? Hermoine the alicorn princess's blood? Doesn't seem like an effective weapon.

Could an extremely thin steel wire penetrate matter by partially transfigureing its way through, and penetrate shields by going underground, and coming up through the feet? Can sheilds defend against attacks from below, or do they cut off at the ground?

EDIT: The exotic matter weapon will be very small so perhaps no death eater will see it. To buy time to think, or for the transfigureation to work, Harry might need to start giving Voldie useful information, such as the patronus, which he can truthfully point out poses no threat to Voldie, because Voldie can't cast patronus v.1. Awaking Hermione, or causing a resonance cascade with Voldie could cause a distraction. Possibly Harry could come back from one hour in the future to help the battle, although we now have a situation where Harry survives, but only if he survives, and I'm not sure about how causial loops are supposed to work. For that matter, future surviving Harry could have brought the cavalry back in time with him, if this wasn't explicitly forbidden.

EDIT 2: Magnetic monoples might be the best shot, although this would be thin enough to be invisible, not silver. http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48630634d2591

1Velorien11y

It can? I don't remember that. But if true, can it be willed to take the form of a sphere around Harry, thereby providing a perfect anti-Killing Curse shield?