You have exhausted all of the examples that I can recall from the entire series. That’s what’s wrong.
The rest of the time Harry thinks up a clever explanation, and once the explanation is clever enough to solve all the odd constraints placed on it, (1) he stops looking for other explanations, and (2) he doesn’t check to see if he is actually right.
Nominally, Harry is supposed to have learned his lesson in his first failed experimentation in magic with Hermoine. But in reality and in relation to the overarching plot, there was very little experimentation and much more “that’s so clever it must be true!” type thinking.
“That’s so clever it must be true!” basically sums up the sequence’s justification for many-worlds, to tie us back to the original complaint in the OP.
The rest of the time Harry thinks up a clever explanation, and once the explanation is clever enough to solve all the odd constraints placed on it, (1) he stops looking for other explanations, and (2) he doesn’t check to see if he is actually right.
Hariezer decides in this chapter that comed-tea MUST work by causing you to drink it right before something spit-take worthy happens. The tea predicts the humor, and then magics you into drinking it. Of course, he does no experiments to test this hypothesis at all (ironic that just a few chapters ago he lecture Hermione about only doing 1 experiment to test her idea).
Here is the thing about science, step 0 needs to be make sure you’re trying to explain a real phenomena. Hariezer knows this, he tells the story of N-rays earlier in the chapter, but completely fails to understand the point.
Hariezer and Draco have decided, based on one anecdote (the founders of Hogwarts were the best wizards ever, supposedly) that wizards are weaker today than in the past. The first thing they should do is find out if wizards are actually getting weaker. After all, the two most dangerous dark wizards ever were both recent, Grindelwald and Voldemort. Dumbledore is no slouch. Even four students were able to make the marauders map just one generation before Harry. (Incidentally, this is exactly where neoreactionaries often go wrong- they assume things are getting worse without actually checking, and then create elaborate explanations for non-existent facts).
Anyway, for the purposes of the story, I’m sure it’ll turn out that wizards are getting weaker, because Yudkoswky wrote it. But this would have been a great chance to teach an actually useful lesson, and it would make the N-ray story told earlier a useful example, and not a random factoid.
Using literally the exact same logic that Intelligent Design proponents use (and doing exactly 0 experiments), Hariezer decides while thinking over breakfast:
Some intelligent engineer, then, had created the Source of Magic, and told it to pay attention to a particular DNA marker.
The obvious next thought was that this had something to do with “Atlantis”.
Here is Hariezer’s response to the gateway to the afterlife:
That doesn’t even sound like an interesting fraud,“ Harry said, his voice calmer now that there was nothing there to make him hope, or make him angry for having hopes dashed. “Someone built a stone archway, made a little black rippling surface between it that Vanished anything it touched, and enchanted it to whisper to people and hypnotize them.”
Do you see how incurious Hariezer is? If someone told me there was a LITERAL GATEWAY TO THE AFTERLIFE I’d want to see it. I’d want to test it, see it. Can we try to record and amplify the whispers? Are things being said?
No surprise, then, that the wizarding world lived in a conceptual universe bounded—not by fundamental laws of magic that nobody even knew—but just by the surface rules of known Charms and enchantments…Even if Harry’s first guess had been mistaken, one way or another it was still inconceivable that the fundamental laws of the universe contained a special case for human lips shaping the phrase ‘Wingardium Leviosa’. …What were theultimate possibilities of invention, if the underlying laws of the universe permitted an eleven-year-old with a stick to violate almost every constraint in the Muggle version of physics?
You know what would be awesome? IF YOU GOT AROUND TO DOING SOME EXPERIMENTS AND EXPLORING THIS IDEA. The absolute essence of science is NOT asking these questions, it’s deciding to try to find out the fucking answers! You can’t be content to just wonder about things, you have to put the work in! Hariezer’s wonderment never gets past the stoned-college-kid wondering aloud and into ACTUAL exploration, and its getting really frustrating.
arry had set the alarm upon his mechanical watch to tell him when it was lunchtime, since he couldn’t actually look at his wrist, being invisible and all that. It raised the question of how his eyeglasses worked while he was wearing the Cloak. For that matter the Law of the Excluded Middle seemed to imply that either the rhodopsin complexes in his retina were absorbing photons and transducing them to neural spikes, or alternatively, those photons were going straight through his body and out the other side, but not both. It really did seem increasingly likely that invisibility cloaks let you see outward while being invisible yourself because, on some fundamental level, that was how the caster had—not wanted—but implicitly believed—that invisibility should work.
This would be an excellent fucking question to explore, maybe via some experiments. But no. I’ve totally given up on this story exploring the magic world in any detail at all. Anyway, Hariezer skips straight from “I wonder how this works” to “it must work this way, how could we exploit it”
Still in the woods, Hariezer encounters a centaur who tries to kill him, because he divines that Hariezer is going to make all the stars die.
There are some standard anti-astrology arguments, which again seems to be fighting the actual situation because the centaurs successfully use astrology to divine things.
We get this:
“Cometary orbits are also set thousands of years in advance so they shouldn’t correlate much to current events. And the light of the stars takes years to travel from the stars to Earth, and the stars don’t move much at all, not visibly. So the obvious hypothesis is that centaurs have a native magical talent for Divination which you just, well, project onto the night sky.”
There are so, so many other hypothesis Hariezer. Maybe starlight has a magical component that waxes and wanes as stars align into different magical symbols or some such. The HPMOR scientific method:
observation → generate 1 hypothesis → assume you are right → it turns out that you are right.
Using literally the exact same logic that Intelligent Design proponents use (and doing exactly 0 experiments), Hariezer decides while thinking over breakfast:
Some intelligent engineer, then, had created the Source of Magic, and told it to pay attention to a particular DNA marker.
The obvious next thought was that this had something to do with “Atlantis”.
How is this ‘literally the exact same logic that ID proponents use?’ Creationists fallacize away the concept of natural selection, but I don’t see how Harry is being unreasonable, given what he knows about the universe.
He’s saying “I don’t understand how magic could have come into being, it must have been invented by somebody.” When in fact there could be dozens of other alternative theories.
I’ll give you one that took me only three seconds to think up: the method for using magic isn’t a delusion of the caster as Harry thought, but a mass delusion of all wizards everywhere. E.g. confounding every wizard in existence, or at least some threshold to think that Fixus Everthingus was a real spell would make it work. Maybe all it would have take to get his experiments with Hermoine to work is to confound himself as well, making it a double-blind experiment as it really should have been.
His argument here really is exactly the same as an intelligent designer: “magic is too complicated and arbitrary to be the result of some physical process.”
His argument here really is exactly the same as an intelligent designer: “magic is too complicated and arbitrary to be the result of some physical process.”
He actually does kind of address that, by pointing out that there are only two known processes that produce purposeful effects:
There were only two known causes of purposeful complexity. Natural selection, which produced things like butterflies. And intelligent engineering, which produced things like cars.
Magic didn’t seem like something that had self-replicated into existence. Spells were purposefully complicated, but not, like a butterfly, complicated for the purpose of making copies of themselves. Spells were complicated for the purpose of serving their user, like a car.
Some intelligent engineer, then, had created the Source of Magic, and told it to pay attention to a particular DNA marker.
So, yeah, I disagree strongly that the two arguments are “exactly the same”. That’s the sort of thing you say more for emphasis than for its being true.
An intelligent designer says “I have exhausted every possible hypothesis, there must be a god creator behind it all” when in fact there was at least one perfectly plausible hypothosis (natural selection) which he failed to thoroughly consider.
Harry says essentially “I have exhausted every possible hypothesis—natural selection and intelligent design—and there must be an Atlantean engineer behind it all” when in fact there were other perfectly plausible arguments such as the coordinated belief of a quorum of wizardkind explanation that I gave.
That doesn’t address the question of why magic exists (not to mention it falls afoul of Occam’s Razor). You seem to be answering a completely different question.
You may be right, but it is still more parsimonious than your idea (which requires some genuinely bizarre mechanism, far more than it being a self-delusion).
Not really. You’ve seen the movie Sphere, or read the book? Magic could be similar: the source of magic is a wish-granting device that makes whatever someone with wizard gene think of, actually happen. Of course this is incredibly dangerous—all I have to do is shout “don’t think of the Apocalypse!” in a room of wizards and watch the world end. So early wizards like Merlin interdicted by using their magic to implant false memories into the entire wizarding population to provide a sort of basic set of safety rules—magic requires wands, enchantments have to be said correctly with the right hand motion, creating new spells requires herculean effort, etc. None of that would be true, but the presence of other wizards in the world thinking it were true would be enough to make the wish-granting device enforce the rules anyway.
I think you’re missing the point of the Many Worlds posts in the Sequences. I’ll link to my response here.
Regarding HPMoR, Eliezer would agree that Harry’s success rate is absurdly unrealistic (even for a story about witchcraft and wizardry). He wrote about this point in the essay “Level 2 Intelligent Characters”:
In the real world, everything is harder than it is for characters in stories; clever insights are less likely to be true and clever strategems are overwhelmingly less likely to work. In real life, I have to try literally ten good ideas before one of them works at all, often putting in years of effort before giving up or succeeding. Yes, I’ve been known to pull off implausible tricks like “Write a Harry Potter fanfiction good enough to recruit International Mathematical Olympiad gold medalists” but that’s not the only implausible-sounding thing I’ve ever tried to do. You just don’t hear as much about the clever ideas that didn’t work, over the many years I’ve been trying weird and nonweird ways to get my task done.
In fiction you as the author can decide that the bright ideas do work, being careful to accompany this by an appropriate amount of sweat and pain and unintended consequence so that the reader feels the character has earned it. You cannot evade the curse of building your story out of clever ideas that would be far less likely to work in real life, not just because you have no way to test the ideas to find the ones that actually work, but because in real life we’re talking about a 10:1 ratio of failures to successes. We get to see Harry fail once in Ch. 22, because I felt like I had to make the point about clever ideas not always working. A more realistic story with eight more failed ideas passing before Harry’s first original discovery in Ch. 28 would not have been fun to read, or write.
I would agree with you, however, that HPMoR lets Harry intuit the right answer on the first guess too much. I would much prefer that the book prioritize pedagogy over literary directness, and in any case I have a taste for stories that meander and hit a lot of dead ends. (Though I’ll grant that this is an idiosyncratic taste on my part.)
As a last resort, I think HPMoR could just have told us, in narration, about a bunch of times Harry failed, before describing in more detail the time he succeeded. A few sentences like this scattered throughout the story could at least reduce the message to system 2 that rationalist plans should consistently succeed, even if the different amounts of vividness mean that it still won’t get through to system 1. But this is a band-aid; the deeper solution is just to find lots of interesting lessons and new developments you can tell about while Harry fails in various ways, so you aren’t just reciting a litany of undifferentiated failures.
There’s a difference between succeeding too often and succeeding despite not testing his ideas. The problem isn’t having too many failed ideas, the problem is that testing is how one rules out a failed idea, so he seems unreasonably lucky in the sense that his refusal to test has unreasonably few consequences.
That’s an anti-example. He had a theory for how time turners could be used in a clever way to perform computation. His first experiment actually confirmed the consistent-timeline theory of time turners, but revealed the problem domain to be much larger than he had considered. Rather than construct a more rigorous and tightly controlled experiment to get at the underlying nature of timeline selection, he got spooked and walked away. It became a lesson in anti-empiricism: some things you just don’t investigate.
Harry get’s things right through being smart.
That’s exactly the problem. Rationalists get things right by relying on reality being consistent, not any particular smartness. You could be a total numbnut but still be good at checking other people’s theories against reality and do better than the smartest guy in the world who thinks his ideas are too clever to be wrong.
So Harry got things right by relying on reality being consistent, until the very end, when reality turned out to be even more consistent than he could have thought. I think it is the most valuable lesson from HPMoR.
Except that it is a piece of fiction. Harry got things right because the author wrote it that way. In reality Harry acting the way Harry did would have been more likely to settle on a clever-sounding theory which he never tested until it was too late and which turned out to be hopelessly wrong and got him killed. But that’s not how Yudkowsky chose to write the story.
You have exhausted all of the examples that I can recall from the entire series. That’s what’s wrong.
The rest of the time Harry thinks up a clever explanation, and once the explanation is clever enough to solve all the odd constraints placed on it, (1) he stops looking for other explanations, and (2) he doesn’t check to see if he is actually right.
Nominally, Harry is supposed to have learned his lesson in his first failed experimentation in magic with Hermoine. But in reality and in relation to the overarching plot, there was very little experimentation and much more “that’s so clever it must be true!” type thinking.
“That’s so clever it must be true!” basically sums up the sequence’s justification for many-worlds, to tie us back to the original complaint in the OP.
Examples:
Comed-tea in ch. 14
Wizards losing their power in chap. 22
Atlantis in chap. 24
Gateway to the after life in chap. 39:
Laws of magic in chap. 85:
Vision and the invisibility cloak in chap. 95:
Centaurs and astrology in chap. 101
How is this ‘literally the exact same logic that ID proponents use?’ Creationists fallacize away the concept of natural selection, but I don’t see how Harry is being unreasonable, given what he knows about the universe.
He’s saying “I don’t understand how magic could have come into being, it must have been invented by somebody.” When in fact there could be dozens of other alternative theories.
I’ll give you one that took me only three seconds to think up: the method for using magic isn’t a delusion of the caster as Harry thought, but a mass delusion of all wizards everywhere. E.g. confounding every wizard in existence, or at least some threshold to think that Fixus Everthingus was a real spell would make it work. Maybe all it would have take to get his experiments with Hermoine to work is to confound himself as well, making it a double-blind experiment as it really should have been.
His argument here really is exactly the same as an intelligent designer: “magic is too complicated and arbitrary to be the result of some physical process.”
He actually does kind of address that, by pointing out that there are only two known processes that produce purposeful effects:
So, yeah, I disagree strongly that the two arguments are “exactly the same”. That’s the sort of thing you say more for emphasis than for its being true.
I stand by my claim that they are the same.
An intelligent designer says “I have exhausted every possible hypothesis, there must be a god creator behind it all” when in fact there was at least one perfectly plausible hypothosis (natural selection) which he failed to thoroughly consider.
Harry says essentially “I have exhausted every possible hypothesis—natural selection and intelligent design—and there must be an Atlantean engineer behind it all” when in fact there were other perfectly plausible arguments such as the coordinated belief of a quorum of wizardkind explanation that I gave.
That doesn’t address the question of why magic exists (not to mention it falls afoul of Occam’s Razor). You seem to be answering a completely different question.
The question in the story and in this thread was “why purposeful complexity?” not “why magic?”
Your proposal is equally complex, if not more. What’s causing the hallucinations?
You may be right, but it is still more parsimonious than your idea (which requires some genuinely bizarre mechanism, far more than it being a self-delusion).
Not really. You’ve seen the movie Sphere, or read the book? Magic could be similar: the source of magic is a wish-granting device that makes whatever someone with wizard gene think of, actually happen. Of course this is incredibly dangerous—all I have to do is shout “don’t think of the Apocalypse!” in a room of wizards and watch the world end. So early wizards like Merlin interdicted by using their magic to implant false memories into the entire wizarding population to provide a sort of basic set of safety rules—magic requires wands, enchantments have to be said correctly with the right hand motion, creating new spells requires herculean effort, etc. None of that would be true, but the presence of other wizards in the world thinking it were true would be enough to make the wish-granting device enforce the rules anyway.
I think you’re missing the point of the Many Worlds posts in the Sequences. I’ll link to my response here.
Regarding HPMoR, Eliezer would agree that Harry’s success rate is absurdly unrealistic (even for a story about witchcraft and wizardry). He wrote about this point in the essay “Level 2 Intelligent Characters”:
I would agree with you, however, that HPMoR lets Harry intuit the right answer on the first guess too much. I would much prefer that the book prioritize pedagogy over literary directness, and in any case I have a taste for stories that meander and hit a lot of dead ends. (Though I’ll grant that this is an idiosyncratic taste on my part.)
As a last resort, I think HPMoR could just have told us, in narration, about a bunch of times Harry failed, before describing in more detail the time he succeeded. A few sentences like this scattered throughout the story could at least reduce the message to system 2 that rationalist plans should consistently succeed, even if the different amounts of vividness mean that it still won’t get through to system 1. But this is a band-aid; the deeper solution is just to find lots of interesting lessons and new developments you can tell about while Harry fails in various ways, so you aren’t just reciting a litany of undifferentiated failures.
There’s a difference between succeeding too often and succeeding despite not testing his ideas. The problem isn’t having too many failed ideas, the problem is that testing is how one rules out a failed idea, so he seems unreasonably lucky in the sense that his refusal to test has unreasonably few consequences.
Without rereading I can recall experiment with time tuners where Harry finds out “Don’t mess with time”.
But what might be missing is a detailed exploration of “learning from mistakes”. Harry get’s things right through being smart.
That’s an anti-example. He had a theory for how time turners could be used in a clever way to perform computation. His first experiment actually confirmed the consistent-timeline theory of time turners, but revealed the problem domain to be much larger than he had considered. Rather than construct a more rigorous and tightly controlled experiment to get at the underlying nature of timeline selection, he got spooked and walked away. It became a lesson in anti-empiricism: some things you just don’t investigate.
That’s exactly the problem. Rationalists get things right by relying on reality being consistent, not any particular smartness. You could be a total numbnut but still be good at checking other people’s theories against reality and do better than the smartest guy in the world who thinks his ideas are too clever to be wrong.
So Harry got things right by relying on reality being consistent, until the very end, when reality turned out to be even more consistent than he could have thought. I think it is the most valuable lesson from HPMoR.
Except that it is a piece of fiction. Harry got things right because the author wrote it that way. In reality Harry acting the way Harry did would have been more likely to settle on a clever-sounding theory which he never tested until it was too late and which turned out to be hopelessly wrong and got him killed. But that’s not how Yudkowsky chose to write the story.
I agree. Still, even if Harry died, my point would still stand.