You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

DanArmak comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113 - Less Wrong Discussion

8 Post author: Gondolinian 28 February 2015 08:23PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (503)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: DanArmak 02 March 2015 11:08:17PM 0 points [-]

It doesn't sound like he has a clear idea of what to do with the world after he achieves domination of it.

No-one's ever asked. He might have lots of plans.

And while he claims he doesn't enjoy things (other than killing idiots), and so it could be argued he only acts to prevent bad things but has no positive ambitions, I think this is false. He was visibly, emotionally proud about his Great Invention. He enjoyed fighting the Wizarding War so much he postponed winning, and he laughed when he defeated Dumbledore. I put a high probability on him having lots of concrete ideas for two days from now.

If Harry can't quite say in Parseltongue that the Dark Lord has no ambition, he can nevertheless be confident that the particular ambition of discovering the magical theory of everything is unique to HJPEV.

On the contrary, when Harry asked Quirrel about the nature of magic, Quirrel said there was dozens of non-secret theories. Which means lots of wizards spent time inventing them. Which means many wizards shared this ambition - which seems very natural.

So it certainly isn't an ambition LV doens't know about. And I don't think you can call an ambition LV knows about and has seen in many people, but doesn't happen to share, a power he knows not.