Tropical rain forests, bizarrely, are the products of prisoner’s dilemmas. The trees that grow in them spend the great majority of their energy growing upwards towards the sky, rather than reproducing. If they could come to a pact with their competitors to outlaw all tree trunks and respect a maximum tree height of ten feet, every tree would be better off. But they cannot.
Matt Ridley, in The Origins of Virtue
perhaps the better advice, then, is “when things aren’t working, consider the possibility that it’s because your efforts are not going into what matters, rather than assuming it is because you need to work harder on the issues you’re already focusing on”
I’ve seen a few variations on “why does Lucius prefer vengeance to maintaining/expanding his political power?” First of all, for someone like Lucius, what’s the point of power if you can’t get stuff you want, like vengeance for your family members? Like how it’s pointless to save if you’re never going to spend.
And second, something that’s on my mind because I just finished The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley. Emotions like vengeance evolved for a reason. Harry sees it as a weakness of Lucius’s that he would give up anything politically to avenge his son. And it’s true, that can be manipulated by people who want to see him lose his political power. However, it is also a powerful deterrent to his enemies. If Lucius is publically known as someone who would stop at nothing to avenge his family, then those that would provoke him will be few and far between, and he will probably not have to make the sacrifices that his vengefulness commits him to.
When he accused Dumbledore in public of the murder of his wife, even at political cost, I’m sure everyone got the message: “if I hurt Malfoy’s family, even if I make sure it would be very politically costly for him to pursue me for it, he will pursue me for it anyway.” And this was a protection to his family.
Malfoy never got his vengeance for Narcissa, but Dumbledore is the most powerful wizard alive; everyone knows that they could not get away with what Dumbledore did (I’m describing this from Lucius’s perspective; I’m not committing to a judgment on Dumbledore’s guilt). But if he let Hermione Granger get away with an attack on his family, that’s a different thing entirely. If Hermione Granger, a child and, by birth, a second-class citizen in wizard society, can get away with an attack on Malfoy’s family because of all the benefits you pointed out to taking Harry’s deal, then maybe I can get away with an attack on Malfoy’s family because of something like that. Lucius is making sure that the class of people who can get away with attacking his family is very, very small; whatever it costs him is an investment in a reputation as someone not to be messed with.
You’re implicitly modeling difficulty as a single number, and ability as another single number that determines the maximum difficulty of the problems you can solve.
However, according to Feynman, you can sometimes solve problems that smarter people can’t by having “a different box of tools”. The quote:
That book also showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign—it’s a certain operation. It turns out that’s not taught very much in the universities; they don’t emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that one damn tool again and again. So because I was self-taught using that book, I had peculiar methods of doing integrals.
The result was, when guys at MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was because they couldn’t do it with the standard methods they had learned in school. If it was contour integration, they would have found it; if it was a simple series expansion, they would have found it. Then I come along and try differentiating under the integral sign, and often it worked. So I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else’s, and they had tried all their tools on it before giving the problem to me.
I don’t think this changes the picture very much, though. You just divide the people in the field according to their box of tools. Pick the group with the box of tools that can solve the problem, and your model applies to them.
There’s a genetic marker that the Source of Magic recognizes. The gene is still there, but the magic may not be. What wizards believe to be the soul leaving might be the Source of Magic withdrawing its power.
Even if he knew, saying that would be a good way to try to get Harry to reveal something. What he would have heard from Draco is that Harry has a super-bright Patronus whose form he keeps secret; he would be curious. So I don’t think this quote is strong evidence that Lucius hasn’t heard about the Patronus from Draco, since it is pretty likely that he would say something like this even if he has.
EDIT: Actually, since he believes Harry is Voldemort, he probably thinks the Patronus light he showed Draco was an illusion, and not useful for getting out of Azkaban at all. If he thinks Harry is Voldemort he’s unlikely, then, to pry for information about it in this way.
Colin Howson, talking about how Cox’s theorem bears the mark of Cox’s training as a physicist (source):
An alternative approach is to start immediately with a quantitative notion and think of general principles that any acceptable numerical measure of uncertainty should obey. R.T. Cox and I.J. Good, working independently in the mid nineteen-forties, showed how strikingly little in the way of constraints on a numerical measure yield the finitely additive probability functions as canonical representations. It is not just the generality of the assumptions that makes the Cox–Good result so significant: unlike some of those which have to be imposed on a qualitative probability ordering, the assumptions used by Cox and to a somewhat lesser extent Good seem to have the property of being uniformly self-evidently analytic principles of numerical epistemic probability whatever particular scale it might be measured in. Cox was a working physicist and his point of departure was a typical one: to look for invariant principles:
To consider first … what principles of probable inference will hold however probability is measured. Such principles, if there are any, will play in the theory of probable inference a part like that of Carnot’s principle in thermodynamics, which holds for all possible scales of temperature, or like the parts played in mechanics by the equations of Lagrange and Hamilton, which have the same form no matter what system of coordinates is used in the description of motion. [Cox 1961]
I think HPMoR has colored my thinking about scholarship and I’m really happy about this. Recently I have been reading the literature on mathematics education, and I find myself thinking of what I read as books that can give me power, like uncovering principles of magic and becoming capable of greater battle magic. I’m basically doing what Dumbledore and Riddle did and it works in real life.
A related Sherlock Holmes quote:
“Beyond the obvious facts that he has at some time done manual labour, that he takes snuff, that he is a Freemason, that he has been in China, and that he has done a considerable amount of writing lately, I can deduce nothing else.”
Mr. Jabez Wilson started up in his chair, with his forefinger upon the paper, but his eyes upon my companion.
“How, in the name of good-fortune, did you know all that, Mr. Holmes?” he asked. “How did you know, for example, that I did manual labour. It’s as true as gospel, for I began as a ship’s carpenter.”
“Your hands, my dear sir. Your right hand is quite a size larger than your left. You have worked with it, and the muscles are more developed.”
“Well, the snuff, then, and the Freemasonry?”
“I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you how I read that, especially as, rather against the strict rules of your order, you use an arc-and-compass breastpin.”
“Ah, of course, I forgot that. But the writing?”
“What else can be indicated by that right cuff so very shiny for five inches, and the left one with the smooth patch near the elbow where you rest it upon the desk?”
“Well, but China?”
“The fish that you have tattooed immediately above your right wrist could only have been done in China. I have made a small study of tattoo marks and have even contributed to the literature of the subject. That trick of staining the fishes’ scales of a delicate pink is quite peculiar to China. When, in addition, I see a Chinese coin hanging from your watch-chain, the matter becomes even more simple.”
Mr. Jabez Wilson laughed heavily. “Well, I never!” said he. “I thought at first that you had done something clever, but I see that there was nothing in it after all.”
“I begin to think, Watson,” said Holmes, “that I make a mistake in explaining. ‘Omne ignotum pro magnifico,’ you know, and my poor little reputation, such as it is, will suffer shipwreck if I am so candid.”
That’s from The Red-Headed League.
There’s another benefit: you remove a motivation to lie to yourself. If you think that a contingent fact will get you out of a hard choice, you might believe it. But you probably won’t if it doesn’t get you out of the hard choice anyway.
I like this post, I like the example, I like the point that science is newer than debate and so we’re probably more naturally inclined to debate. I don’t like the apparently baseless storytelling.
In the jungle of our evolutionary childhood, humanity formed groups to survive. In these groups there was a hierachy of importance, status and power. Predators, starvation, rival groups and disease all took the weak on a regular basis, but the groups afforded a partial protection. However, a violent or unpleasant death still remained a constant threat. It was of particular threat to the lowest and weakest members of the group. Sometimes these individuals were weak because they were physically weak. However, over time groups that allowed and rewarded things other than physical strength became more successful. In these groups, discussion played a much greater role in power and status. The truely strong individuals, the winners in this new arena were one’s that could direct converstation in their favour—conversations about who will do what, about who got what, and about who would be punished for what. Debates were fought with words, but they could end in death all the same.
I don’t know much about the environment of evolutionary adaptation, but it sounds like you don’t either. Jungle? Didn’t we live on the savannah? And forming groups for survival, it seems just as plausible that we formed groups for availability of mates.
If you don’t know what the EEA was like, why use it as an example? All you really know is about the modern world. I think reasoning about the modern world makes your point quite well in fact. There are still plenty of people living and dying dependent on their persuasive ability. For example, Adolf Hitler lived while Ernst Rohm died. And we can guess that it’s been like this since the beginning of humanity and that this has bred us to have certain behaviors.
I think this reasoning is a lot more reliable, in fact, than imagining what the EEA was like without any education in the subject.
Maybe I’m being pedantic—the middle of the post is structured as a story, a chronology. It definitely reads nicely that way.
“I am smarter than you. I think faster than you. I am more experienced than you. But the gap between the two of us is not the same as the gap between us and them. If you can miss something, then so can I.”
Did somebody just get marked as an equal here is that it?
He disarmed the trap by goading Lily into attacking him.
Unnecessary detail, may or may not be the case. If he was aware of the trap, it would not matter whether this disarmed it; he just needed to not cast Avada Kedavra on Harry. Harry’s memory of the event does not end with Voldemort casting the Killing Curse on him.
Like how in the GHD iteration we saw, she revealed that she was susceptible to believing that Snape is a Death Eater, and that it’d be hard to convince her that Harry would betray her. And, in fact, she was led to believe bad things about Snape, but not Harry:
She has been thinking of how Mr. Malfoy might be in league with Professor Snape, how he might be planning to harm her and harm Harry—imagining it for hours every day
(Dumbledore in Ch79)
Of my two friends who I talk the most math with, I explain to one of them with examples and the other with general statements. I don’t know why it helps, I just know from experience that I have to give examples to one and general statements to the other.
It reminds me of the witch powers from Alicorn’s Twilight fanfic. Some witches have power over the same thing, experienced through different senses.
Such witches were especially powerful working in pairs. I wonder if there’s anything special about collaborations between example thinkers and general thinkers? I’m an example thinker, and with my general thinker friend, a common pattern is that he’ll conjecture, and I’ll search for counterexamples.
John Perry, introduction to Identity, Personal Identity, and the Self