A couple of recentcomments have prompted me to consider my impressions of the cold, dark side of Harry. In particular how it differs from an ‘evil, bad side’ and why it seems to me to go hand in hand with being ‘super rational’.
Someone complained elsewhere (I think it was in the other thread) about Harry being the Boy-who-Lived and having a prophecy and having a cold dark side and being super-rational.
Given that I know Harry to be super-rational and also that he is functional and has a credible ability to achieve goals I would actually be somewhat surprised if he didn’t also have a colddarkside. Partly because I am generalising from a sample of me and partly because that cold practicality is required if you are going to maintain rational beliefs about yourself and also function.
Also, from the descriptions it looks like he was fighting this battle in ColdDarkLordHarry mode, so in addition to the above, he might even have been worrying that his Dark Side had subconsciously arranged things (such as a Potions failure, or just the situation of random danger with the Feather Fall potion as a false guarantor of safety) in a way that would bring his Intent To Kill to bear. It might even be revealed later that, for just a moment, his Dark Side produced a desire that she actually die, and that’s what’s making him feel so guilty.
A caricature of the non hyper-rational person suggests that they have the ability to act in an effective approximately instrumentally rational manner in most typical situations while simultaneously presenting a warm front. The ‘dark side’ is denied but also harnessed. It ‘subconsciously’ arranges things to achieve pragmatic ends while maintaining plausible deniability even to yourself.
When you are super-rational you don’t have that luxury. The ‘cold, dark’ instincts must ally themselves with the rational side and the conscious awareness. You don’t ‘accidentally’ kill someone or screw them over with unconscious passive aggression. If you need to kill someone you kill them. If you need to hurt them, you hurt them. The colddark may prompt you to lie but it need not call you to lie to yourself.
The Intent To Kill is somewhat similar. It isn’t a a sadistic part of you that secretly wants people dead. It isn’t malicious. It is ruthless and practical. If you must fight, it says, then don’t fight fair and don’t fight half heartedly. If you have a goal then the actions you take should be about achieving the goal rather than adopting the persona of a person who has a goal.
The Intent To Kill is somewhat similar. It isn’t a a sadistic part of you that secretly wants people dead. It isn’t malicious. It is ruthless and practical. If you must fight, it says, then don’t fight fair and don’t fight half heartedly.
While in most types of fights killing is usually easier and safer than disabling, it is neither ruthless nor practical but simply short-sighted to lose track of why you are fighting.
There are plenty of situations where killing your enemy bears great costs. Maybe it would expose you to revenge from someone more powerful; maybe it would lead you to waste years of your life in court if not prison. Maybe it would be a massive PR victory for those who oppose you, undermining the entire plan that brought you into a fight in the first place (sounds familiar?). Maybe it would prevent you from obtaining critical help or information from the defeated enemy; the list could go on.
Of course preserving your own life has tremendous value (I heard there’s a saying among some policemen: “an ugly trial is better than a beautiful funeral”), but it is not an absolutely incommensurable value. For a certain subset of X and Y in ]0,1[², you would accept an X chance of losing your life to a not-quite-dead enemy in exchange for a Y chance of not wasting decades of life (arguably), or (certainly) of not dying later on to unstoppable revenge.
All of the above being pretty much a very long-winded way of rephrasing Prof. Quirrell’s dismissal that “there is a time and place to take your enemy alive, and a Hogwarts classroom is usually one of those”.
While in most types of fights killing is usually easier and safer than disabling, it is neither ruthless nor practical but simply short-sighted to lose track of why you are fighting.
I never got the impression that Harry’s “Intent To Kill” thing included any tendency whatsoever to forget why he was fighting. The lesson here is completely distinct from being gratuitously stupid.
I never got the impression that Harry’s “Intent To Kill” thing included any tendency whatsoever to forget why he was fighting.
I disagree.
First, Quirrell very clearly asked Harry to think of combat uses for items in the classroom; that his thinking automatically restricted itself to lethal uses shows a serious flaw in his on-the-spot strategic abilities. This particular example is a good one, since his killing ideas quickly became worthless, but had he considered other aspects of combat he would have come up with a lot of much more useful options, such as using desks as barricades.
Secondly, Quirrell’s quiz test is closely followed by two entire chapters devoted to Harry’s highly dangerous tendency to escalate fights beyond the point where he could expect the best reward-to-risk ratio (George Patton once said: “Don’t fight a battle if you don’t gain anything by winning”). Deciding from the start that the enemy must die, without even fleetingly considering if other options may be preferrable, is clearly part of this problem.
I realise, as I write this, that there is a possibility we may be talking about two distinct things. As I read it in the text, by “intent to kill” Quirrell referred to Harry’s reflexive interpretation of any fight as a fight to the death. If you are, instead, using the phrase to refer to the willingness and psychological ability to kill (whereas most regular people would find themselves instinctively aiming their knives away from vital points, and so on), then I have no disagreemen.
Also note that in the lesson “intent to kill” is not presented by Quirrel as purely good thing, nor is Harry called the most capable warrior or the best kid to have your back in the fight but the most dangerous student, an epithet that could well apply to the cadet with the worst trigger discipline. It appears that intent to kill goes along with a lack of squeamishness about violence, and it may be easier to teach Harry about the proper uses of violence than to train Draco to be unaffected by it, but that does not mean that intent to kill is itself a good thing
I realise, as I write this, that there is a possibility we may be talking about two distinct things. As I read it in the text, by “intent to kill” Quirrell referred to Harry’s reflexive interpretation of any fight as a fight to the death. If you are, instead, using the phrase to refer to the willingness and psychological ability to kill (whereas most regular people would find themselves instinctively aiming their knives away from vital points, and so on), then I have no disagreemen.
I’m actually speaking of neither of those things. Instead I speak of the things I allude to in my initial comment. Similar language is used to express related concepts fairly often in books on strategy as well as Eliezer’s document on the virtues of rationality. I have also specifically asserted that I am not referring to the somewhat distinct concept on picking idiotic fights.
A couple of recent comments have prompted me to consider my impressions of the cold, dark side of Harry. In particular how it differs from an ‘evil, bad side’ and why it seems to me to go hand in hand with being ‘super rational’.
Given that I know Harry to be super-rational and also that he is functional and has a credible ability to achieve goals I would actually be somewhat surprised if he didn’t also have a colddarkside. Partly because I am generalising from a sample of me and partly because that cold practicality is required if you are going to maintain rational beliefs about yourself and also function.
A caricature of the non hyper-rational person suggests that they have the ability to act in an effective approximately instrumentally rational manner in most typical situations while simultaneously presenting a warm front. The ‘dark side’ is denied but also harnessed. It ‘subconsciously’ arranges things to achieve pragmatic ends while maintaining plausible deniability even to yourself.
When you are super-rational you don’t have that luxury. The ‘cold, dark’ instincts must ally themselves with the rational side and the conscious awareness. You don’t ‘accidentally’ kill someone or screw them over with unconscious passive aggression. If you need to kill someone you kill them. If you need to hurt them, you hurt them. The colddark may prompt you to lie but it need not call you to lie to yourself.
The Intent To Kill is somewhat similar. It isn’t a a sadistic part of you that secretly wants people dead. It isn’t malicious. It is ruthless and practical. If you must fight, it says, then don’t fight fair and don’t fight half heartedly. If you have a goal then the actions you take should be about achieving the goal rather than adopting the persona of a person who has a goal.
While in most types of fights killing is usually easier and safer than disabling, it is neither ruthless nor practical but simply short-sighted to lose track of why you are fighting.
There are plenty of situations where killing your enemy bears great costs. Maybe it would expose you to revenge from someone more powerful; maybe it would lead you to waste years of your life in court if not prison. Maybe it would be a massive PR victory for those who oppose you, undermining the entire plan that brought you into a fight in the first place (sounds familiar?). Maybe it would prevent you from obtaining critical help or information from the defeated enemy; the list could go on.
Of course preserving your own life has tremendous value (I heard there’s a saying among some policemen: “an ugly trial is better than a beautiful funeral”), but it is not an absolutely incommensurable value. For a certain subset of X and Y in ]0,1[², you would accept an X chance of losing your life to a not-quite-dead enemy in exchange for a Y chance of not wasting decades of life (arguably), or (certainly) of not dying later on to unstoppable revenge.
All of the above being pretty much a very long-winded way of rephrasing Prof. Quirrell’s dismissal that “there is a time and place to take your enemy alive, and a Hogwarts classroom is usually one of those”.
I never got the impression that Harry’s “Intent To Kill” thing included any tendency whatsoever to forget why he was fighting. The lesson here is completely distinct from being gratuitously stupid.
I disagree.
First, Quirrell very clearly asked Harry to think of combat uses for items in the classroom; that his thinking automatically restricted itself to lethal uses shows a serious flaw in his on-the-spot strategic abilities. This particular example is a good one, since his killing ideas quickly became worthless, but had he considered other aspects of combat he would have come up with a lot of much more useful options, such as using desks as barricades.
Secondly, Quirrell’s quiz test is closely followed by two entire chapters devoted to Harry’s highly dangerous tendency to escalate fights beyond the point where he could expect the best reward-to-risk ratio (George Patton once said: “Don’t fight a battle if you don’t gain anything by winning”). Deciding from the start that the enemy must die, without even fleetingly considering if other options may be preferrable, is clearly part of this problem.
I realise, as I write this, that there is a possibility we may be talking about two distinct things. As I read it in the text, by “intent to kill” Quirrell referred to Harry’s reflexive interpretation of any fight as a fight to the death. If you are, instead, using the phrase to refer to the willingness and psychological ability to kill (whereas most regular people would find themselves instinctively aiming their knives away from vital points, and so on), then I have no disagreemen.
Also note that in the lesson “intent to kill” is not presented by Quirrel as purely good thing, nor is Harry called the most capable warrior or the best kid to have your back in the fight but the most dangerous student, an epithet that could well apply to the cadet with the worst trigger discipline. It appears that intent to kill goes along with a lack of squeamishness about violence, and it may be easier to teach Harry about the proper uses of violence than to train Draco to be unaffected by it, but that does not mean that intent to kill is itself a good thing
I’m actually speaking of neither of those things. Instead I speak of the things I allude to in my initial comment. Similar language is used to express related concepts fairly often in books on strategy as well as Eliezer’s document on the virtues of rationality. I have also specifically asserted that I am not referring to the somewhat distinct concept on picking idiotic fights.