I spent twenty minutes reading it in reverse chronological order before I thought to check the header bar for chapter reviews. That was a mistake. Dude spends way too much time responding to anonymous hate; it’s not fun to read and it can’t be fun to write.
Now that I have found the chapter reviews, it’s flowing a lot better (though still not perfectly by a long shot). I can sympathize with a lot of the things su3su2u1 found frustrating; I think there’s a deep tension between HPMOR as a didactic tract and as a commentary on the canon Potterverse and as porn for nerds, among other things Eliezer’s trying to do, and I think the cracks show the most in the early chapters. Similarly for the character of HJPEV himself. Not qualified to comment on the physics, but I did occasionally feel like I was being bullshitted when I was reading the fic.
As to the downvotes, I imagine someone—two someones, judging by karma—thinks you’re concern trolling. Don’t let it bother you.
I didn’t give you a downvote, but I certainly want to downvote the linked site for a header that responds in a particularly nauseating fashion to the scroll wheel.
There are a lot of things about Hariezer in the early chapters that enrage this guy and that also slightly bothered me. Many of them end up justified later, some much later when we learn that Harry was overwritten by Tom Riddle while a baby (not made into a Horcrux). It’s not just that Hariezer has flaws, but that he has them for a reason. (The parallel with Eliezer’s April Fools story are striking.)
I think that this guy has a fair point, however: that Hariezer’s flaws can interfere with the pedagogical purposes of HPMOR.
I wasn’t really concerned with his points against the story, and his points against the story’s didactic purposes felt weak at best. What I found most pertinent in his critiques were the points about HPMoR’s science. I’m no physicist, but from what I could tell, most of it seemed pretty sound (though the thing about the levitation vs. cat transformation in Chapter 1 was, I felt, pretty lazy reading). Any domain experts around here that could chime in, specifically on the physics?
EDIT: Poor wording in the above paragraph. What I meant was that the guy’s critiques seem pretty sound, not that the science in HPMoR seems pretty sound.
Sure, the problems with the physics are right in there with bothersome things that Harry says that you could still justify, starting with the non sequiturs about conservation of energy when McGonogall turns into a cat.
I disagree with su3su2u1 (the tumblr author) about levitation; that doesn’t violate conservation of energy if it’s mediated by a force, and why shouldn’t it be? On the other hand, turning into a cat violates conservation of mass (or would appear to, and that should be easy to check with a bathroom scale), which (via E = mc²) translates into a huge energy violation. But bringing up the quantum Hamiltonian? FTL signalling? Su3su2u1′s analysis is correct.
The justification for this is that Harry is 11 and has only a vague idea about how physics actually works. But then it’s hard to tell what we should learn from Harry and what we should ignore. (For that matter, I don’t even know if Eliezer knows better than Harry or not.)
“But bringing up the quantum Hamiltonian? FTL signalling? Su3su2u1′s analysis is correct.”
Is it? Noether’s theorem implies the Hamiltonian is conserved. The Hamiltonian is the quantum operator that give you the energy of a system. If energy conservation is violated, either the basic equations of quantum mechanics don’t hold, or (magical) physics is not time invariant. I’m not saying Harry is being technically precise but he’s not completely wrong, either.
No, he’s certainly not completely wrong, but he’s bringing up irrelevant complications and missing the main point. Quantum vs classical has nothing to do with it, for example.
The fact that quantum mechanics conserves energy is stronger evidence for the hypothesis that reality conserves energy than the fact that classical mechanics conserves energy. He is saying “our best model of reality conserves energy” which is very relevant.
If quantum mechanics allowed for small violations of energy conservation (which sometimes people even say that it does, on short time periods, although this is not really correct), then McGonagall’s tranformation would still violate physical law as we know it. In physics, you don’t always push everything down to the most fundamental theory, which is a good thing, since we don’t actually have a most fundamental theory of physics. There is no such thing as ‘our best [single] model of reality’; there are some ways in which our quantum models are (so far) worse than our classical ones.
I’m no physicist, but I took that bit to mean that the difference in energy involved in lifting someone is so much smaller than the difference in energy required to convert a 135-pound woman into a 10-pound cat without leaving 125 pounds of squishy McGonagall-bits by the wayside that it’s far more plausible for it to be coming from some non-obvious source.
Which seemed reasonable enough to me at the time. But looking back at it, I’m no longer sure it really holds water. Harry’s family at that point is dealing with a process with almost totally unknown properties; if you can get energy out of the Source of Magic to levitate people with, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that you could also move mass into it and then back out. We don’t e.g. see the floorboards creaking under McGonagall when she lifts stuff with her mind, so there’s no particular reason in context to assume that the interaction has to involve local-ish forces.
Absolutely love it now that I’ve been pointed to it. Had many of the same thoughts myself. Still quite enjoyed geeking out and overanalyzing the story and figuring out what’s going on and the occasional making-some-goddamn-sense of the Potterverse in between my more than occasional facepalms/ranting-at-friends about many of the same things this person complains about (writing and characters and bad science and author tract shoehorned ideology and Harry always just happening to come up with the right answer for no reason and other things they better articulate than I can).
And you’re getting downvoted by the non-majority but most assuredly present personality-cult contingent.
Oh, I agree. HPMoR is entertaining, but it’s not good as a didactic work.
That being said, is HPMoR really meant as a didactic work? It seems to me that Eliezer never really intended it to be a vehicle for teaching; see Chapter 1, in which he links to LessWrong at the very top of the page as a way “to learn everything the main character knows”. To me, anyone really looking to learn rationality should look at the Sequences, not HPMoR—and from EY’s disclaimer in Chapter 1, it looks as though he agrees.
Also, what do you mean by this part?
Harry always just happening to come up with the right answer for no reason
Yes, which could just as easily be an attempt to be faithful to the characters. We know Harry has read quite a bit of cog-sci, and that he likely hasn’t quite internalized it to the degree where he can explain the concepts without the use of the terms themselves, and thus resorts to quoting more-or-less verbatim from the material that he’s read. That’s not to say the novel is intended to teach cog-sci, and in fact there are gaping holes in the cog-sci presented within HPMoR—holes that are not in the Sequences.
The science material is presented to the reader in good faith, by the protagonist, who is only ever shown to be wrong in his attempts to link the science to magic, not the science itself. If it’s attempting to be faithful to the Harry’s youthful hubris, then shouldn’t there be parts when Hermione says “actually Harry, you’ve misunderstood Kahneman and Tversky on X, Y and Z …”, like what happens for magical topics?
There is a section on the site called “science” which reads
All science mentioned in Methods is standard science except where otherwise specified (IIRC, the only two uses of nonstandard theories are Barbour’s timeless physics in Ch. 28 and my own timeless decision theory in Ch. 33). Wherever possible, I have mentioned standard terminology inside the book to make Googling easier. At some future point I may compile a complete list for all the scientific references in Methods, but this has not yet been done.
and if that weren’t enough, Yudkowsky explicitly states that the science material is meant to be didactic.
Furthermore, “but it’s better in the Sequences” is a terrible excuse. How many people are going to read a fun work of fiction, vs a sprawling 888 series of contrarian philosophy essays? A significant fraction of people on this very sitehave not read them, and then imagine what the odds are for the average fanfic reader (of whom there are an order of magnitude or two more than LessWrong users). Thousands of people are reading this story and taking what Yudkowsky says on faith (did you independently Google every science reference in the story? I sure didn’t), so if the science is wrong then that’s thousands of people coming away worse-off than when they started, and Yudkowsky is aware of this possibility..
The ironic thing about those exceptions is that bringing in Barbour’s timeless physics is arguably itself one of the errors. In Harry’s explanation of how he was able to perform partial transfiguration, there’s nothing from Barbour except the phrase ‘timeless physics’; Harry’s explication of that, as enforcing a relationship between separate time slices rather than performing a change, is the standard idea of a block universe, going back at least to 1908.
Well, I was browsing /r/hpmor, and this guy’s blog turned up.
Thoughts?
EDIT: Downvotes? Someone mind telling me if I did something wrong here? Or is just that people don’t like the dude’s blog?
I spent twenty minutes reading it in reverse chronological order before I thought to check the header bar for chapter reviews. That was a mistake. Dude spends way too much time responding to anonymous hate; it’s not fun to read and it can’t be fun to write.
Now that I have found the chapter reviews, it’s flowing a lot better (though still not perfectly by a long shot). I can sympathize with a lot of the things su3su2u1 found frustrating; I think there’s a deep tension between HPMOR as a didactic tract and as a commentary on the canon Potterverse and as porn for nerds, among other things Eliezer’s trying to do, and I think the cracks show the most in the early chapters. Similarly for the character of HJPEV himself. Not qualified to comment on the physics, but I did occasionally feel like I was being bullshitted when I was reading the fic.
As to the downvotes, I imagine someone—two someones, judging by karma—thinks you’re concern trolling. Don’t let it bother you.
I didn’t give you a downvote, but I certainly want to downvote the linked site for a header that responds in a particularly nauseating fashion to the scroll wheel.
I like the name ‘Hariezer’.
There are a lot of things about Hariezer in the early chapters that enrage this guy and that also slightly bothered me. Many of them end up justified later, some much later when we learn that Harry was overwritten by Tom Riddle while a baby (not made into a Horcrux). It’s not just that Hariezer has flaws, but that he has them for a reason. (The parallel with Eliezer’s April Fools story are striking.)
I think that this guy has a fair point, however: that Hariezer’s flaws can interfere with the pedagogical purposes of HPMOR.
I wasn’t really concerned with his points against the story, and his points against the story’s didactic purposes felt weak at best. What I found most pertinent in his critiques were the points about HPMoR’s science. I’m no physicist, but from what I could tell, most of it seemed pretty sound (though the thing about the levitation vs. cat transformation in Chapter 1 was, I felt, pretty lazy reading). Any domain experts around here that could chime in, specifically on the physics?
EDIT: Poor wording in the above paragraph. What I meant was that the guy’s critiques seem pretty sound, not that the science in HPMoR seems pretty sound.
Sure, the problems with the physics are right in there with bothersome things that Harry says that you could still justify, starting with the non sequiturs about conservation of energy when McGonogall turns into a cat.
I disagree with su3su2u1 (the tumblr author) about levitation; that doesn’t violate conservation of energy if it’s mediated by a force, and why shouldn’t it be? On the other hand, turning into a cat violates conservation of mass (or would appear to, and that should be easy to check with a bathroom scale), which (via E = mc²) translates into a huge energy violation. But bringing up the quantum Hamiltonian? FTL signalling? Su3su2u1′s analysis is correct.
The justification for this is that Harry is 11 and has only a vague idea about how physics actually works. But then it’s hard to tell what we should learn from Harry and what we should ignore. (For that matter, I don’t even know if Eliezer knows better than Harry or not.)
“But bringing up the quantum Hamiltonian? FTL signalling? Su3su2u1′s analysis is correct.”
Is it? Noether’s theorem implies the Hamiltonian is conserved. The Hamiltonian is the quantum operator that give you the energy of a system. If energy conservation is violated, either the basic equations of quantum mechanics don’t hold, or (magical) physics is not time invariant. I’m not saying Harry is being technically precise but he’s not completely wrong, either.
No, he’s certainly not completely wrong, but he’s bringing up irrelevant complications and missing the main point. Quantum vs classical has nothing to do with it, for example.
The fact that quantum mechanics conserves energy is stronger evidence for the hypothesis that reality conserves energy than the fact that classical mechanics conserves energy. He is saying “our best model of reality conserves energy” which is very relevant.
If quantum mechanics allowed for small violations of energy conservation (which sometimes people even say that it does, on short time periods, although this is not really correct), then McGonagall’s tranformation would still violate physical law as we know it. In physics, you don’t always push everything down to the most fundamental theory, which is a good thing, since we don’t actually have a most fundamental theory of physics. There is no such thing as ‘our best [single] model of reality’; there are some ways in which our quantum models are (so far) worse than our classical ones.
Lifting someone does work. Where is that energy coming from?
I’m no physicist, but I took that bit to mean that the difference in energy involved in lifting someone is so much smaller than the difference in energy required to convert a 135-pound woman into a 10-pound cat without leaving 125 pounds of squishy McGonagall-bits by the wayside that it’s far more plausible for it to be coming from some non-obvious source.
Which seemed reasonable enough to me at the time. But looking back at it, I’m no longer sure it really holds water. Harry’s family at that point is dealing with a process with almost totally unknown properties; if you can get energy out of the Source of Magic to levitate people with, it’s not too much of a stretch to imagine that you could also move mass into it and then back out. We don’t e.g. see the floorboards creaking under McGonagall when she lifts stuff with her mind, so there’s no particular reason in context to assume that the interaction has to involve local-ish forces.
Absolutely love it now that I’ve been pointed to it. Had many of the same thoughts myself. Still quite enjoyed geeking out and overanalyzing the story and figuring out what’s going on and the occasional making-some-goddamn-sense of the Potterverse in between my more than occasional facepalms/ranting-at-friends about many of the same things this person complains about (writing and characters and bad science and author tract shoehorned ideology and Harry always just happening to come up with the right answer for no reason and other things they better articulate than I can).
And you’re getting downvoted by the non-majority but most assuredly present personality-cult contingent.
Oh, I agree. HPMoR is entertaining, but it’s not good as a didactic work.
That being said, is HPMoR really meant as a didactic work? It seems to me that Eliezer never really intended it to be a vehicle for teaching; see Chapter 1, in which he links to LessWrong at the very top of the page as a way “to learn everything the main character knows”. To me, anyone really looking to learn rationality should look at the Sequences, not HPMoR—and from EY’s disclaimer in Chapter 1, it looks as though he agrees.
Also, what do you mean by this part?
I don’t recall that ever happening.
We are talking about the fanfic where characters routinely block-quote from cogsci textbooks, aren’t we?
Yes, which could just as easily be an attempt to be faithful to the characters. We know Harry has read quite a bit of cog-sci, and that he likely hasn’t quite internalized it to the degree where he can explain the concepts without the use of the terms themselves, and thus resorts to quoting more-or-less verbatim from the material that he’s read. That’s not to say the novel is intended to teach cog-sci, and in fact there are gaping holes in the cog-sci presented within HPMoR—holes that are not in the Sequences.
The science material is presented to the reader in good faith, by the protagonist, who is only ever shown to be wrong in his attempts to link the science to magic, not the science itself. If it’s attempting to be faithful to the Harry’s youthful hubris, then shouldn’t there be parts when Hermione says “actually Harry, you’ve misunderstood Kahneman and Tversky on X, Y and Z …”, like what happens for magical topics?
There is a section on the site called “science” which reads
and if that weren’t enough, Yudkowsky explicitly states that the science material is meant to be didactic.
Furthermore, “but it’s better in the Sequences” is a terrible excuse. How many people are going to read a fun work of fiction, vs a sprawling 888 series of contrarian philosophy essays? A significant fraction of people on this very site have not read them, and then imagine what the odds are for the average fanfic reader (of whom there are an order of magnitude or two more than LessWrong users). Thousands of people are reading this story and taking what Yudkowsky says on faith (did you independently Google every science reference in the story? I sure didn’t), so if the science is wrong then that’s thousands of people coming away worse-off than when they started, and Yudkowsky is aware of this possibility..
The ironic thing about those exceptions is that bringing in Barbour’s timeless physics is arguably itself one of the errors. In Harry’s explanation of how he was able to perform partial transfiguration, there’s nothing from Barbour except the phrase ‘timeless physics’; Harry’s explication of that, as enforcing a relationship between separate time slices rather than performing a change, is the standard idea of a block universe, going back at least to 1908.