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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

I may be missing something here, but the way Voldemort is acting doesn't make sense to me. He's demonstrated that he thinks there's things Harry knows that he would like to learn. It also seems reasonable that he'd expect Harry to continue to learn useful things that Harry could teach Voldemort. So is giving Harry 60 seconds to do this really the most use he could get out of Harry? Indeed Voldemort might know this and be bluffing.

Playing this card may buy Harry time, maybe a lot of time. With this time, I see a variety of possible outs:

Hopefully the muggles will develop FAI one day, which will have the power to finally destroy Voldemort. To increase the likelihood of this happening, I'd think that Harry a) has to communicate to the muggle scientists to keep this secret so Voldemort doesn't find out about it and stop it. And b) could try to distract Voldemort and lead him towards doubting the usefulness of muggle science. b) unfortunately diminishes the usefulness that Harry provides which may end up in Voldemort deciding to kill him, but this may not be a horrible outcome to Harry given the circumstances and his utility function.
Make people more rational. It seems that Voldemort enjoys harming people because their stupidity frustrates him. There isn't anyone in the world who Voldemort thinks is actually smart, and thus there isn't someone he actually respects. Harry has been the closest thing to someone who matches his intelligence, and thus he has demonstrated some respect (in a way) for Harry, and has demonstrated deriving some happiness from mentoring Harry. Additionally, in a more general sense, he seems to take pleasure in making stupid people smarter. Perhaps Harry could accelerate the process of making society smarter. Maybe he could use a combination of magic and drugs to make people smarter. (as an alternative, maybe Harry could use the 60 seconds to propose that Voldemort tries making people smarter and seeing if that makes him happy)
Continue to contemplate how magic really works. There seems to be incredibly potential power there, far beyond what Voldemort's current powers are. Harry already figured out partial transfiguration and how to kill death eaters at the age of 11(?) and within a year of figuring out that magic exists. Perhaps he'd continue to make discoveries like this and might eventually gain enough power to fight Voldemort. This very well may even happen quickly after one insight. Alternatively, maybe he could figure out the secrets of happiness and propose that Voldemort spends eternity in a magical version of wireheading (Voldie's terminal goal does seem to be happiness, not power or chaos). Granted, Voldemort probably is smart enough to monitor Harry to make sure there isn't anything useful that Harry knows that he doesn't. I'm not sure how to get around this. Making him think you're stupid would make him less likely to monitor you closely, but that also would make him not want to keep you around.