TylerJay comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Here's another object-level tactic I haven't seen mentioned yet. (Assume LV will not just kill Harry for speaking of non-magical powers. I have a way of increasing the likelihood of this assumption being true)
Harry could explain the Power of Expected Utility Calculations and subtly attempt a Pascal's Mugging on LV, convincing him that LV can't possibly assign a probability of less than one in twenty that killing Harry will indeed avert the prophecy, or for that matter cause it, and that the rational action to take is to not kill Harry. He can present it as a "power" to stop the timer and buy a life, regardless of if LV accepts the conclusion, since it is a valuable tool for the future and was probably not in the books Harry gave him to read.
Harry can also explain the Power of Bayesian Probability Updates, both to buy a life and to provide a framework within which to argue that the probability that LV killing Harry backfires is much higher than he previously expected. If the Mugging alone doesn't work, then Harry can combine this with EV calculations to construct a valid argument that LV shouldn't kill him.
I'm starting to develop a way to chain this with some other arguments and strategies into a cohesive strategy and I'm starting to feel pretty good about it. Thoughts?
Yeah, this is basically the route I'd do. Except I added one more ingredient. Here, I'll just quote my review.
Nice. I like it.
I expanded my previous post in a full solution (very long) with a pretty thorough line of reasoning. In the end, I convinced myself that Voldemort is not acting in his self-interest by killing Harry and that he's dangerously overconfident in his understanding of the Prophecy and his ability to avert it. Here are the relevant excerpts from my solution:
Also can not assign less than 1/20 probability that keeping him alive will destroy the world. So...?
This is new as far as I can tell. Please write up a review based around this, and based on a cursory read through of Reddit, it might be best not to do this in prose, it takes even longer to evaluate apparently and Eliezer's plan has backfired
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoneHorriblyRight (look at last entry in "Fan Works" tab)
I submitted it. Here's the link to my whole solution (It's long, with backup plans and a few unique mechanics) if you're interested. I'm pretty proud of it, given the time constraints.