And my problem, here, is that “death is bad” cannot be an unqualified truth. “Human death is bad” can be aspirationally true, and I am willing to believe that the unprecedented depth of Harry’s aspiration might be the key that unlocks the power of his Patronus—but it does look like EY means it literally, and that means that Harry should at some point need to distinguish between his ideology and that of, as Edward Abbey puts it, “the ideology of the cancer cell.”
Cranefly
Karma: 4
Well, and here’s where it gets interesting: are there any other places where we see Harry use logic that he knows (or should know) to be unsound in an instrumental fashion? That is, where he makes a tactical choice to argue nonsense, believing it to have a better chance of convincing someone who disagrees with him?
Harry should consider the possibility that he “might actually welcome [death] even just one day after a day when [he] didn’t welcome it”—if he can’t anticipate the possibility of his utility function changing based on an infinity of new evidence, he should stop pretending to be solely rationalist. Which, interestingly, Chapter 82 seems to be hinting at.
Ah! Thanks for that background. Can you explain, though, why you think that statement is meant to be Harry taking the piss? (Within the text, that is—Eliezer does rightly frame it as a joke in those links). Harry’s surrounding statements are sincerely put, and the next paragraph suggests to me that Harry believes that the induction argument should have refuted Dumbledore:
The two cultures stared at each other across a vast gap of incommensurability.
In any case, I do hope that, at some point, Harry has to face down the taboo tradeoffs (to be topical to the current arc) implied by universal immortality.
Oh, dear. I suddenly seem to have acquired the desire to write a HPMOR/Do the Math crossover.
I have a confusion!
Way back in Chapter 39, Harry says:
“I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers.”
This immediately caught my attention, given that Harry talks in earlier chapters about his worldview relying on Bayesian inference. Yet, for induction over an infinite sequence of unknown, informative experiences to hold, he has to have assigned an integral prior. Hijinks!
My first thought was that this was a clue dropped by the author to Harry’s blind spot and potentially tragic flaw—after all, “will you notice your confusion” is right there on the tagline! The subsequent emergence of Harry’s Patronus spell as the True Patronus, based on this very conviction, undermined that theory somewhat, though if you elide the “True” part of it (ascribing the name to Harry’s preteen self-admiration, maybe), the special magnitude of Harry’s Patronus can be handwaved by the enormity of his happy thought and not necessarily the sound logic or underlying reality of it.
This has been on my mind for a while, but the most recent Author’s Notes (“nothing is there to deliberately fool the readers”) seem to confirm that this analysis is far too subtle: that if the narration calls Harry’s Patronus the True Patronus, it is; if Harry’s absolute faith in universal immortality has been given plot support, then it should be taken as axiomatic to the fiction.
Any ideas? Has Harry accidentally arrived at a true conclusion by non-inferential means?
Found this by random clicking around, I expect no one’s still reading this, but maybe we’ll catch each other via Inbox:
How about “optimize the worst case” from in game theory? It settles both the dust speck vs. torture and the the Utility Monster Felix problems neatly.