Whatever theories we may have, most of them contingent on the defense professor being Voldemort and the one behind this plot (a conclusion Harry hasn't yet reached and which, frankly, there isn't enough in-universe or possibly even total evidence to make conclusive), it is NOT "obvious" that noone was meant to die. Draco almost died and if it was anyone except the defense professor behind this he was almost certainly supposed to die. Hermione was, as far as I can tell, being sentenced to life in Azkaban, which I'd rank about the same as killing her. If anything, it's obvious that this was meant to be a lethal plot and sets him pretty firmly on the "defect" side.
Morally he didn't do it, and maybe Quirrel even had a desire to kill her sitting on a back burner before Harry got involved, but her death was caused by her interaction with Harry. It is no stretch to say that there is at least one hypothetical sequence of actions Harry could have taken, even given knowledge at the time (not realizing she worked for Lucius or was an animagus) which would not have resulted in her death. Heck, doing nothing would have resulted in her not death.
That is the level of challenge Harry is taking upon himself. Not just to not kill...
but a single nameless innocent bystander who catches a Cutting Curse
It seems that he promised himself to stop trying to save everyone even if a minor character dies accidentally. In that case it wouldn't matter if he considered himself directly responsible for the death of Rita Skeeter.
You can't do that.
Indeed. I don't see how he could manage not to compromise his 'every human life is precious' principle in a war. He's hesitating between two possible courses of action -- doing the math or playing Ghandi -- and neither seems like a satisfying choice. He really needs to become omnipotent or at least avoid the necessity of making such a choice.
Is it me, or does Harry's solution to this dilemma seem rather... half-assed? Ignoring potential the loss of effectiveness from his resolving to suddenly switch directions the first time things get bad, is he really going to know the first time someone dies as a result of his war? How will he know the difference? He's already gotten someone killed by his actions (Rita Skeeter, who he doesn't even know about) and another person gravely injured (that auror hurt by the rocket, who he doesn't know about but admittedly he thought the whole affair was a mistake ...
He's already gotten someone killed by his actions (Rita Skeeter, who he doesn't even know about)
Not for any realistic sense of the phrase 'by his actions'. Quirrel squished Rita of his own accord for his own purposes and Harry's presence there is damn near irrelevant.
Personally, to me it struck me as something I would try on a group of first graders (provided I knew I wouldn't be sued) but not on a group of adults. They know it's just a game, and treat it as such, but nobody's going to refuse because to me that sounds like a very fun game (approached from the right mindset, anyways, and provided you make sure the audience doesn't take it too far. I'd probably hand pick people to "criticize" and make myself a member of that group so I could step in if another was being problematic). So they all do it, and they...
"Ah!" Harry said suddenly. "I get it now. The first False Memory Charm was cast on Hermione after Professor Snape yelled at her, and showed, say, Draco and Professor Snape plotting to kill her. Then last night that False Memory was removed by Obliviation, leaving behind the memories of her obsessing about Draco for no apparent reason, at the same time she and Draco were given false memories of the duel."
Since that was the last theory Harry proposed before he switched from theories to lines of attack, and nobody fully shot it down (there...
Personally, for anything except comedy I like to read moderately-long bursts rather than short snippets--when I follow works that update daily but have updates that are too small I often stop reading for a while on the assumption that when I start again later I'll have a juicy backlog to trawl through. (Part of me wonders if it's just a matter of how good the author is at finding good stopping points though). HPMOR updates are not that small, but with its plot-heaviness I think I still found that I enjoyed it better when I read entire arcs at once than whe...
Personally my problem with Harry wasn't so much that he immediately assumed there was a trick (shouldn't get a probability of 1.0, no, but certainly a basket worth piling some eggs in) but that he assumed the truth would get her off. He never once stopped and asked Dumbledore and Snape "If it was proven that she had been tricked into doing this with false memories, but still cast the spell willingly and with her own hand, would the Wizengamot still convict her?" I don't even know the answer to that question, but I'd certainly ask before I assumed...
I don't think that "Lucius chose the exact same number as a stab against Dumbledore" is a very complex hypothesis. We already know that he knows part of the story and can reasonably assume he knows the whole story about Aberforth. So of course if the situation already demands that he hold someone on Dumbledore's side (sort of) for ransom for some obscene amount of money, on the assumption that it won't be paid, how could he resist rubbing that bit of salt in his nemesis's wounds?
It's not part of some bigger plan. It's not some fancy maneuver. It's just an emotional attack of opportunity aimed at Dumbledore, probably just for pride's sake.
My interpretation has been more that the 'dark' plans rely primarily on application of force (most often political rather than physical)--threatening, blackmailing, bribing--and trickery. They tend to work in the short run, but in the long run can poison his reputation (people notice how dark he acts over time) and have nasty side effects. For the most part Harry's dark plans are pretty clever, because his dark side is pretty ruthless and very clever.
If you take that definition for the plans his dark side comes up with, he actually started out with a light...
I don't think Harry actually would have taken Dumbledore as an enemy if Dumbledore failed to save Hermione, as he clearly was trying and even using up political capitol. Only having Dumbledore stand in the way of Harry saving her would do that, and when Dumbledore realized just how determined Harry was he had the sense to step aside.
Also I'm not really sure how well "Delegitimized the Wizengamot in the eyes of Magical Britain" would have worked--rest of the world yes, but the papers were certainly doing a hatchet job on her. The question is how ...
I'm not sure it's appropriate to consider the money the average human will accept for a micromort as a value that's actually useful for making rational decisions, because that's a value that's badly skewed by irrational biases. Actions are mentally categorized into those the thinker does and doesn't believe (on a subconscious level) to possibly lead to death. I doubt the average person even considers a "risk" factor at all when driving their car or walking several blocks to the car (just a time factor and a gasoline factor), unless their trip tak...
Sadly, your commitment to this goal is not enough, unless you also have a guarantee that someone will publish your results even if they are statistically insignificant (and thus tell us absolutely nothing). I admit I've never tried to publish something, but I doubt that many journals would actually do that. If they did the result would be a journal rendered almost unreadable by the large percentage of studies it describes with no significant outcome, and would remain unread.
If your study doesn't prove either hypothesis, or possibly even if it proves the nu...
I like the first two, and the chess one's pretty interesting though I can't imagine I'd have an easy time getting someone to stand still long enough to hear the whole thing as an argument. But I don't really like the last one. You've been tricked into accepting his premise, that death lets you create more meaningful art, and trying to regain ground from there. It's that premise itself that you should be arguing against--point out all the great literature and art that isn't about death, and that you could still have all of that once death was gone. Also poi...
Also point out that to someone with cancer today the availability of art is probably less valuable than the availability of a cure would be.
Or to approach the same point from a slightly different direction - Elie Wiesel wrote some pretty awesome stuff, but that doesn't mean we should have more Holocausts.
Oh, I understand now. Even if we don't know how it's distributed, if it's the top among 9 choices with the same variance that puts it in the 80th percentile for specialness, and signal and noise contribute to that equally. So it's likely to be in the 80th percentile of noise.
It might have been clearer if you'd instead made the boxes actually contain coins normally distributed about 40 with variance 15 and B=30, and made an alternative of 50/1, since you'd have been holding yourself to more proper unbiased generation of the numbers and still, in all likelih...
I'm trying to figure out why, from the rules you gave at the start, we can assume that box 60 has more noise than the other boxes with variance of 20. You didn't, at the outset of the problem, say anything about what the values in the boxes actually were. I would not, taking this experiment, have been surprised to see a box labeled "200", with a variance of 20, because the rules didn't say anything about values being close to 50, just close to A. Well, I would've been surprised with you as a test-giver, but it wouldn't have violated what I unders...
The problem is, Dumbledore's not going to tell Harry what the condition is for getting the stone. Why would he? He didn't tell canon Quirrell, who was standing there trying to figure out why he couldn't get it. He didn't even tell canon Harry until after the fact. The mirror as a screening process works even better if the person being screened doesn't know what it's testing for, and thus can't fake it.
And Harry would want to use the stone, make no mistake. The first thing he'd do with it is make himself immortal, to make sure no accident or fluke could sto...
I think you hit on a key point that several are missing--Dumbledore wouldn't want HJEPV to have the stone any more than Quirrell (well, maybe a little more, but certainly less than nobody having it or even than handing it off to, say, some random Hufflepuff). In canon Harry didn't just not want to use it, he didn't want it used--that was his entire motivation for getting it. Rational Harry would, probably quite literally given enough time to think on the situation, kill to use it, and use it repeatedly. And Dumbledore knows this.
Canon Harry was, in fact, a...
Despite having seen you say it in the past, it wasn't until reading this article that in sunk in for me just how little danger we were actually in of Eliezer1997 (or even Eliezer2000) actually making his AI. He had such a poor understanding of the problem, I don't see how he could've gotten there from here without having to answer the question of "Ok, now what do I tell the AI to do?" The danger was in us almost never getting Eliezer2008, or in Eliezer2000 wasting a whole bunch of future-minded peoples' money getting to the point where he realize...
I'm kind of surprised at how complicated everyone is making this, because to me the Bayesian answer jumped out as soon as I finished reading your definition of the problem, even before the first "argument" between one and two boxers. And it's about five sentences long:
Don't choose an amount of money. Choose an expected amount of money--the dollar value multiplied by its probability. One-box gets you >(1,000,000*.99). Two-box gets you <(1,000*1+1,000,000*.01). One-box has superior expected returns. Probability theory doesn't usually encounte...
I think you may be placing too much emphasis on curiosity as a terminal value here rather than a means of acquiring other terminal values--not that I think it has no value in and of itself, but that's not its only use and not its biggest in most respects.
If I know that a light switch/bulb's properties are fully explained by science and nothing else about it, that DOES tell me things I didn't know beforehand. It tells me that it is much less of a priority to figure out how the light bulb works than it would have been if nobody had a clue. If there is any si...
I thought of a possible reason why they wouldn't do this. Basically, you've got two choices with the unbreakable vow ploy: Obtain a class of civil servants willing to give up their own magic to do the job (fat chance), or force the criminals to do it to each other. The natural answer is the latter right? Well yes, except the part where you have to hand a criminal whose crime was severe enough to warrant stripping some of his magic a wand and give him enough mental breathing room to perform a complicated, powerful ritual. Some of them are just gonna go along with it, sure, but you only gotta have one high-profile screwup before that kind of a policy is abolished.