Sorry in advance for the giant comment. But this
"Albus Dumbledore was smiling with a strange sad look in his eyes, like someone who has taken one more step toward a foreseen destination."
makes sense of this
"And Minerva made it clear to me that Hogwarts required a competent Defense Professor this year, even if I had to haul Grindelwald out of Nurmengard and prevail on old affections to persuade him to take the position."
which looked like a type 3 foreshadowing. I think Dumbledore expects and intends to die soon. Certainly we're moving in that direction, with the recent talk of McGonagall succeeding him as headmaster. It looks likely to me that Dumbledore is plotting to end his own life at the hands of Grindelwald, whose return as an antagonist to Dumbledore was foreshadowed by the story of Peter and Sirius. This, in turn, reminds me of this
Are you ready? Good. I am going to pretend to cast the Killing Curse on Professor McGonagall - DO NOT REACT, Hermione!
which looks like utter lunacy, but apparently is Dumbledore's idea of inspiration. He means to go out like Gandalf.
Probably. The alternative would be that he just thinks his time as a mysterious old wizard is almost up. Or it'll be gur Cbgvbaf Znfgre again. (Spoilers for the original novels.) But I think it's more likely than not that he'll be the one to give Grindelwald his role in the story, given that Dumbledore names himself as the one to haul him out of Nurmengard and ur ratvarrerq uvf bja qrngu va pnaba. Two birds with one stone.
In any case, in this story, Dumbledore wishes to die to escape a wasting death from advancing senility, not a phefrq unaq. To collect the relevant quotes in one place:
Professor McGonagall looked a little sad at that. "Not on purpose, Miss Granger, but I think... well, it probably is true that sometimes the Headmaster has trouble remembering what it's like to be a child."
Professor McGonagall finally spoke, and she said in a whisper, "I'm so terribly sorry, Miss Granger. I did not think the Headmaster would say such things to you. I think he truly has forgotten what it is like to be a child."
"Maybe you're right, Harry. Maybe I have forgotten over the decades what it's like to be a child."
She swallowed, hard, and said, "Mr. Potter, at thirty hours per day, you'll - get older, you'll age faster -" Like Albus.
Plus the zillion uses of the phrase 'the old wizard', and the dog that didn't bark: the fact that still nothing has been made of the connection between Dementors, Dementation, and dementia. Dementors are named for the death of the mind, both of them eat away at memories and personality, and this has gone entirely unmentioned. Even the author's notes that listed the similarities between Dementors and death left it out.
Oh, and the fact that Dumbledore's really old, and that's what happens to people when they get old.
So there's a suitably heroic reason for Hermione to research the Philosopher's Stone - either to prevent it from happening or to prevent it from ever happening again.
Edited repeatedly for clarity.
BTW, the post says that spoilers from the original canon don't need to be in rot13.
Although, arguably full vampires are not very undead either.
Their hearts stop beating, and they stop needing to breathe during the turning process.
Personally, I'd suggest a pause of at least two weeks or so, perhaps a month, and then a discussion of whether to just start over or do something similar or different.
I plan to keep doing reruns through "Final Words", which will be posted two days from now. After the reruns are done, I have no particular plans to keep going. I had planned to create a post to prompt discussion as to future plans, but I don't plan to personally do another rerun.
"Trying to be happy is like trying to build a machine for which the only specification is that it should run noiselessly." -- (unknown)
To try to be happy is to try to build a machine with no other specification than that it shall run noiselessly. -Robert Oppenheimer, 1929
I think EY just mistakes the mental calculations involved. Who is thinking that they're in a position to bargain with groups of thousands or millions? The org does what it does, and you decide whether you think adding your shoulder to their wheel is the most effective use of your time.
A simpler explanation is that nonconformists don't wish to conform, and would rather do whatever they do their way. Some people value autonomy more than others, are more annoyed with what they see as inefficiencies, and more uncomfortable with a lack of control. On the flip side, some people are more driven to join a group, to belong, and are happy to do what they're told.
I don't think EY actually suggests that people are doing those calculations. He's saying that we're just executing an adaptation that functioned well in groups of a hundred or so, but don't work nearly as well anymore.
Although instrumental rationality is an interesting category, I tend to view it as ultimately boiling down to epistemic rationality. For example, I reason that A leads to B. I wanted B but I didn't want A, and now my motivations start traveling up and down the A -> B causal chain until I reach equilibrium. Or for another example, I notice that if I choose C for reason R, my rational game-partner will likewise choose C for reason R, because of some symmetry in our properties as agents. Now I need to compare the outcome of choices {C, C} to other possibilities, but I can rule out {C, D}, say.
My attraction to various options will change in response to learning these facts. But the role of rationality seems to end with arriving at and facing the facts.
No? Or, beside the point? (But if beside the point, still an interesting new point, I reckon.)
The trouble is that there is nothing in epistemic rationality that corresponds to "motivations" or "goals" or anything like that. Epistemic rationality can tell you that pushing a button will lead to puppies not being tortured, and not pushing it will lead to puppies being tortured, but unless you have an additional system that incorporates desires for puppies to not be tortured, as well as a system for achieving those desires, that's all you can do with epistemic rationality.
I feel like this post is dated by the fact that it came before Pascal's Mugging discussions to the point of being fairly wrong. The problem with Pascal's Wager actually is that the payoffs are really high, so they overwhelm an unbounded utility function (and they don't precisely cancel out, since we do have a little evidence). On the other hand, I suppose the core point that you shouldn't dismiss things out of hand if they have a low (but not tiny) probability and a large payoff is sound.
I think you're confusing Pascal's Wager with Pascal's Mugging. The problem with Pascal's Mugging is that the payoffs are really high. The problem with Pascal's Wager is that it fails to consider any hypotheses other than "there is the christian god" and "there is no god".
In an article proclaiming the transcendent use of complicated, modern statistics in baseball, and in particular, one called "WAR" (wins above replacement):
I'm not a mathematician and I'm not a scientist. I'm a guy who tries to understand baseball with common sense. In this era, that means embracing advanced metrics that I don't really understand. That should make me a little uncomfortable, and it does. WAR is a crisscrossed mess of routes leading toward something that, basically, I have to take on faith.
And faith is irrational and anti-intellectual, right? Faith is for rain dances and sun gods, for spirituality but not science. Actually, no. Faith is how we organize a complicated modern world. Faith is what you have when your doctor walks in with a syringe filled with something that could be anything and tells you that it'll keep you from getting the measles. Unless you're a doctor or a medical scientist, you don't really understand vaccines, and you certainly can't brew one up at home. You have outsourced the intellectual side of your health to people who, your faith reassures you, are smarter than you. Maybe in one way of looking at it you're not as smart as your great-great-great-grandparents were, because they had to take responsibility for cooking their own medicine. But you'll live longer. The complicated nature of WAR, your inability to touch the guts of it, isn't an argument against it. That's just what human advancement looks like in the 21st century. And if you can accept that you can walk into a tube built out of 100 tons of aluminum, fly seven miles off the ground and land safely thousands of miles away, you can accept WAR.
I'm not really sure that counts as faith. Faith usually implies something like "believing something without concern for evidence". And in fact, the evidence I have fairly strongly indicates is that when I step into an airplane, I'm not going to die.
View more: Next
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Harry Potter and the Confirmed Critical, Chapter 6