Ordinary vices discusses some more destructive states: cruelty, hypocrisy, snobbery, betrayal, and misanthropy.

I'm intrigued by the point that if you hate cruelty, you pretty much end up hating the human race.

Here is my best attempt at a delaying tactic, after sleeping on it. Please tear apart/suggest better ways in which LV might tear apart, to replace the poor placeholder responses he has here.

--

"Agree that I musst die, if it ssavess world. But thiss iss not besst way to kill me. Ssee how you can benefit more, given your goalss."

"Explain."

"Believe power you know not doess refer to power to desstroy life-eaterss. Life-eaterss will find you eventually, teacher. Know you. Will hunt you down, ssomeday. Eat all of you, all of world and magic, in the end."

"Sso you will give that magic to me, now."

"You can never reach needed sstate of mind - incompatible with deadly indifference. Sschoolmasster could never casst - incompatible with acceptance of death. Majority cannot casst, and in the tessting, sstandard defence againsst life-eaterss iss ssacrificed. Will weaken your alliess greatly, should I randomly try to teach."

"What do you proposse, then?"

"Take me to life-eater prisson. Allow me to pour out my life and magic there, eradicate them wholly. How I wisshed to do sso, during the resscue! You called me back, then."

"..."

"Many advantagess to you in thiss. Can decimate your final enemy, wipe out their greatesst colony, certainly buy you yearss. Removess them before Wizengamot'ss death throess can releasse them againsst you. Freess your remaining alliess, ass thosse here failed to do. And I am utterly desstroyed - can leave no ghosst behind me. Nothing to fuel ssecret devices of Sschoolmasster's. Presumably, reduced rissk that your great creation will recognisse my spirit - for I doubt you have tessted that."

"You will not desstroy all of them, and sso I will have to find another ssolution anyway."

"Ssolution iss girl-child. Sshe iss closse to learning sspell, and now immortal. My death could drive her to hunt life-eaterss forever; thiss iss not beyond your sskillss at manipulation. You know sshe wantss to be a hero."

Regardless of other differences in utility function, Harry and Voldemort both want the world to not be destroyed, and consider this of the utmost priority.

Aumann's agreement theorem means that as they are both rationalists, they should be able to come to the same opinion on what the best course of action is to prevent that. Harry was willing to sacrifice himself earlier to save others.

Harry is allowed to convince voldy to keep him in a coma to kill later. He just has to "evade immediate death", even if there is no hope of survival afterwards

How about simply telling Voldemort that he doesn't have a complete model of time, and give him a bunch of examples of things until one is found which voldy wouldn't have predicted. Suggest to voldemort that he should keep harry in a coma until he has done more experiments with Time to derive its nature, and then kill Harry without waking him up.

Can the unbreakable vow be leveraged for unbreakable pre commitments?

Isn't this its only use?

Thoughts:

• Can the unbreakable vow be leveraged for unbreakable pre commitments?
• Harry knows that the horcruxes will eventually be destroyed through heat death of the universe if nothing else and could use this to tell Voldemort something like "if you kill me you will die" in parseltongue

I just read a description of that lottery. I see its expected value is a divergent series. If both games you compare have their expected values defined this way then I think you can subtract one series from the other. i think this is the approach you mentioned, and I would do it.

Also, I'm not an expert on infinity, but I think there are different kinds of infinity. If one game gives you, on average, a dollar for each natural number, and one gives you, on average, one dollar for each pair of natural numbers that exists, then the second game gives you infinitely as much expected value as the first one.

I was reading about the St. Petersburg paradox

I was wondering how you compare two games with infinite expected value. The obvious way would seem to be to take the limit of the difference of their expected value, as one tolerates less and less likely outcomes.

Is there any existing research on this?

Anthropics would be one way of reading it, yes. Think of it as saying, in addition to wanting all of our Turing machines to add up to 1, we also want all of the computational elements inside our Turing machines to add up to 1 because we're trying to guess which computational element 'we' might be. This might seem badly motivated in the sense that we can only say "Because our probabilities have to add up to 1 for us to think!" rather than being able to explain why magical reality fluid ought to work that way a priori, but the justification for a simplicity prior isn't much different - we have to be able to add up all the Turing machines in their entirety to 1 in order to think. So Turing machines that use lots of tape get penalties to the probability of your being any particular or special element inside them. Being able to affect lots of other elements is a kind of specialness.