So, where does she think all this complexity came from?
HonoreDB
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Causality, or whatever way of making it directed and acyclic feels natural. If you have statistical observations but no causal information, you’re best off, e.g., just going from left to right.
There’s an urban legend that this riddle is easier for psychopaths:
A woman meets the man of her dreams at her own mother’s funeral, but doesn’t get his number. A few days later, the woman kills her own sister. Why?
If you find the riddle difficult, it’s because your social mode of analysis is jumping in inappropriately. I could easily imagine that someone who was deficient in that kind of analysis might work it out faster.
They’ll probably just put in a ward preventing large objects from moving faster than a broomstick. That’s what they’re actually worried about, and it’s probably easier.
Orson Scott Card, from whose works my username sort of comes, is a devout Mormon who seems to work a non-religious explanation of why premarital sex is bad into a lot of his stories (often phrased as “like all intelligent people, XX and XY understood that...”). The explanation is completely different each time, and it’s never where the conclusion really comes from, of course. Card can speculate as to why God commanded something, but he doesn’t need the rationalization in order to believe in the commandment.
Orson Scott Card’s arguments (the ones I remember) include:
Breaking taboos means you’re either a “wolf,” who disregards social conventions whenever it suits you, or a “sheep” who can’t restrain your own impulses. Both of these are bad.
Your parents are probably lying to you about sex in some way, which means you might have some dangerous misconceptions. Don’t do it until you can be sure of the consequences.
Unless you’ve had a long courtship and are now married, there’s probably an undetected power imbalance in your relationship, which means any premarital sex is actually rape.
Unless you’ve had a long courtship and are now married, how do you know your significant other isn’t violently insane?
Who’d buy the cow when you’re giving away the milk for free?
I got into an argument recently with an evangelical Christian who was trying to do the same thing, but I don’t think he came up with anything sophisticated enough to be worth repeating.
I recommend Amanda Marcotte for discussions of why these ideas are not only wrong, but actively harmful.
Which suggests that to time-travel further than 6 hours back, you’d just need to completely Obliviate yourself, wiping your mind so clean that a Remembrall in your hands would blaze like a miniature sun. Best to also take the form of an infant, since you’ll be a mental one anyway.
Harry: I don’t know if I’m supposed to say.
Remember, Innocent!Harry has no idea what’s going on.
Harry missed an opportunity to do good with Lesath.
Agreed. I think if Harry had had proper prep time (which he would have if he hadn’t assumed it was a different L.L.) he would most likely have done this. Unless Hermione has succeeded in shaming him into stopping.
As it is, my story-pattern-matching is yelling that Harry is going to be exposed by Lesath trying to help him.
There is a strong similarity to a certain storyline in Death Note, isn’t there? But unlike Mikami, Lesath doesn’t have the power to expose Harry other than by coincidence, because Harry hasn’t trusted him with any information.
There’s certainly a danger of Lesath ridding him of a meddlesome priest, or jumping in front of an Avada Kedavra.
James Halperin’s The Truth Machine long ago converted me to the idea that the best way to deal with this is to abandon privacy and the right to privacy as a societal ideal, and hope that our ability to thwart terrorists races their increase in power. Even an opt-in total surveillance system would help a lot by reducing the number of suspects.
I should probably make the case against privacy in a top-level post at some point, but pretty much everything I’ll say will be taken from that book. For example, I bet Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito are currently cursing the fact that they don’t have a government-timestamped video of themselves at the time of Meredith Kercher’s murder.
Maybe it’s common enough to bury a wizard with his own wand that Moody doesn’t think twice about seeing a wand in a graveyard.
What bothers me is that it seems foolish to have Bellatrix waiting in the decoy graveyard on the night the ritual is to be performed. What’s the point of creating a fake location for your ritual’s ingredients, then storing an actual ingredient there?
He’s heavy-handedly manipulating someone for their own good, in a way that increases his own power and makes him feel superior. He’s treating someone who should be a peer like a trainable dog.
Come to think of it, we may well get to see this exchange. But since we won’t see it for a while, I’ll try to channel it:
“Harry, taking people’s interests into account—being a good guy—requires thinking of them as people. You care a lot about a human, less about a dog, and not at all about a paperclip, right?”
“Right.”
“So when you don’t treat a human like a human—”
“Hold on. You’re equivocating. To ‘treat a human like’ their desires are as important to my utility function as my own is an absolute good. To ‘treat a human like’ convention dictates a human should be treated is a contingent good—it only makes sense when that helps them achieve their desires.”
“No, they’re not the same thing, Harry. But they’re closely linked in your head. You have a cluster of concepts, instincts, and behaviors to do with humans, and each bit reinforces each other bit. You can plainly see how it works: if you spend a year pretending that a toy is a person, you’ll become incredibly reluctant to take it apart for spare parts. Conversely, if you start acting like people are your toys...”
“Now you’re dehumanizing me a bit, Hermione. If I go into an interaction with Padma planning to help her, I’m going to end up doing my best to help her. Because I’m a sentient being who is aware of his own intentions, not a finite state machine that can get accidentally stuck in the mode for dealing with paperclips.”
“Well, Harry, I guess you have more faith in yourself than I do. I think you want your utility function to be different from what it is. I think that, like a lot of people, you’re more selfish than you want to be.”
“That’s incoherent.”
“Exactly. You’re not going to behave in a logically coherent way. It’s okay to aspire to do so, I guess, but please realize that right now, you have to be sure not to—”
“Accidentally train myself to be a bad dog rather than a good dog?”
“Not to drift into Evil while trying to be Good. That’s the human condition.”
Thanks!
I basically agree, although in my mind it doesn’t make Harry’s line technically incorrect. It’s not always another’s desire to be treated as an equal, so in that sense it’s not an absolute good to treat people as one. Whereas it’s always another’s desire to have her desires fulfilled.
It makes the most sense to me too, but it certainly doesn’t have to be true.
How about Gilderoy Lockhart or Horace Slughorn, cynically trying to curry favor with the Boy-Who-Lived? Maybe he sends presents (through a corrupt House Elf?) to all the promising students in Hogwarts.
Farnsworth A: You people and your slight differences disgust me. I’m going home. Where’s that blue box with our universe in it?
Farnsworth 1: Oh, you’d like to get back to your evil universe, wouldn’t you? And destroy your box with our universe inside it.
Farnsworth A: Nonsense! I would never do such a thing unless you were already having been going to do that!
--Futurama
I originally had written that below, but actually I disagree. Lesath doesn’t abase himself because he enjoys it! He does so because that’s how you get Dark Lords to do what you want. It’s reasonable to assume that he’d prefer being treated as an equal—he just has higher priorities than trying to make that happen.
When you’re feeling depressed for no good reason, force yourself to laugh. It triggers happiness almost as well as externally-induced laughter. Eventually, you will noticeably condition yourself to release seratonin (or endorphins, or something) every time you notice that you’re seratonin-deficient.
It’s been effective for me. I started it as a moody teenager and it quickly became self-perpetuating. Google suggests I’m not alone. It’s got a whiff of wire-heading, I admit, but ideally you’re using it to solve a brain chemistry defect, not an external problem.
Just to reiterate, I really do think it’s Sirius! But, devil’s advocate.
Slughorn was on good terms with Lily. If he were researching the Deathly Hallows, he’d have an in.
Lockhart may have already been a celebrity. Maybe he wrote a book about going on a quest through darkest New Jersey for the Resurrection Stone, and James was foolish enough to send him the Cloak for analysis. Lockhart is trying to cozy up to Harry anonymously so that, should he end up stealing his identity, there won’t be a paper trail.
I made the same argument on tvtropes independently. My thought was that Sirius and Peter were human-form animagi of each other, as a wizardry analogue to getting matching tattoos. Although maybe one’s choice of animagus form is involuntary: Peter was completely obsessed with Sirius at the time that the two performed the spell, but not Sirius with Peter, so Peter’s form was Sirius but Sirius, to his surprise, turned into a dog instead. Maybe that’s why they broke up.
I’m not sure the dementors see people the way we do: they certainly don’t in canon. If Peter’s mode-lock wore off in Azkaban, the dementors might not notice or care.
If Fawkes thinks that Peter is innocent, he probably is. But maybe Sirius is too. Maybe Sirius was the only one who knew that Peter was the secret-keeper, so he assumed that Peter betrayed the Potters but he’d never be able to prove it. So he switched identities and faked his own death, and remains ignorant to this day that Voldemort doesn’t need a traitor to find his victims.