This is an excellent plan. Excellent writing, organization, thought. This is a rally-point for implementation.
It makes me uneasy when I see competent missionaries. I don’t know if I have the energy to compete against them.
jasonmcdowell
Karma: 335
I liked your choice of the complicated freeway image.
Yeah, this.
I think that when you choose the part to quote for the trailer, you should make sure to leave the viewer wanting more. The viewer should be thinking “what’s next?” and then go looking for it.
“Bag of element 79,” Harry said, and withdrew his hand, empty, from the mokeskin pouch.
Most people would have at least waited to get their wands first.
“Bag of okane,” said Harry. The heavy bag of gold popped up into his hand.
Harry withdrew the bag, then plunged it again into the mokeskin pouch. He took out his hand, put it back in, and said, “Bag of tokens of economic exchange.” That time his hand came out empty.
Harry Potter had gotten his hands on at least one magical item. Why wait?
“Professor McGonagall,” Harry said to the bemused witch strolling beside him, “can you give me two words, one word for gold, and one word for something else that isn’t money, in a language that I wouldn’t know? But don’t tell me which is which.”
“Ahava and zahav,” said McGonagall. “That’s Hebrew, and the other word means love.”
“Thank you, Professor. Bag of ahava.” Empty.
“Bag of zahav.” And it popped up into his hand.
“Zahav is gold?” Harry questioned, and McGonagall nodded.
Harry thought over his collected experimental data. It was only the most crude and preliminary sort of effort, but it was enough to support at least one conclusion:
“Aaaaaaarrrgh this doesn’t make any sense!”
The witch beside him lifted a lofty eyebrow. “Problems, Mr. Potter?”
“I just falsified every single hypothesis I had! How can it know that ‘bag of 115 Galleons’ is okay but not ‘bag of 90 plus 25 Galleons’? It can count but it can’t add? It can understand nouns, but not noun phrases that mean the same thing? The person who made this probably didn’t speak Japanese and I don’t speak any Hebrew, so it’s not using their knowledge, and it’s not using my knowledge—” Harry waved a hand helplessly. “The rules seem sorta consistent but they don’t mean anything! I’m not even going to ask how a pouch ends up with voice recognition and natural language understanding when the best Artificial Intelligence programmers can’t get the fastest supercomputers to do it after thirty-five years of hard work,” Harry gasped for breath, “but what is going on?”
“Magic,” said Professor McGonagall. She shrugged.
“That’s just a word! Even after you tell me that, I can’t make any new predictions! It’s exactly like saying ‘phlogiston’ or ‘elan vital’ or ‘emergence’ or ‘complexity’!”
Professor McGonagall laughed aloud. “But it is magic, Mr. Potter.”
Harry slumped over a little. “With respect, Professor McGonagall, I’m not quite sure you understand what I’m trying to do here.”
Here is a really good encapsulated chunk near the beginning of chapter 6:
It has the setup for Harry’s background, the basis for what makes this version of Harry different (science), a dramatic challenge, and finally promises of epicness and wry humor.
The Muggle world had a population of six billion and counting. If you were one in a million, there were twelve of you in New York and a thousand more in China. It was inevitable that the Muggle world would produce some eleven-year-olds who could do calculus—Harry knew he wasn’t the only one. He’d met other prodigies in math competitions. In fact he’d been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably spent literally all day practicing math problems and who’d never read a science-fiction book and who would burn out completely before puberty and never amount to anything in their future lives because they’d just practiced known techniques instead of learning to think creatively. (Harry was something of a sore loser.)
But… in the wizarding world...
Ten Muggle-raised children per year, who’d all ended their Muggle educations at the age of eleven? And McGonagall might be biased, but she had claimed that Hogwarts was the largest and most eminent wizarding school in the world… and it only educated up to the age of seventeen.
Professor McGonagall undoubtedly knew every last detail of how you went about turning into a cat. But she seemed to have literally never heard of the scientific method. To her it was just Muggle magic. And she didn’t even seem curious about what secrets might be hiding behind the natural language understanding of the Retrieval Charm.
That left two possibilities, really.
Possibility one: Magic was so incredibly opaque, convoluted, and impenetrable, that even though wizards and witches had tried their best to understand, they’d made little or no progress and eventually given up; and Harry would do no better.
Or...
Harry cracked his knuckles in determination, but they only made a quiet sort of clicking sound, rather than echoing ominously off the walls of Diagon Alley.
Possibility two: He’d be taking over the world.
From the very end of Chapter 4:
“That’s the spirit! And does a ‘mokeskin pouch’ do what I think it does?”
“It can’t do as much as a trunk,” McGonagall said reluctantly, “but a mokeskin pouch with a Retrieval Charm and Undetectable Extension Charm can hold a number of items until they are called forth by the one who emplaced them.”
“Yes, I definitely need one of those too. It’s like the super beltpack of ultimate awesomeness! Batman’s utility belt of holding! Never mind a swiss army knife, you could just carry a whole tool set in there! Or other magic items! Or books! I could have the top three books I was reading on me at all times, and just pull one out anywhere! I’ll never have to waste another minute of my life! What do you say, Professor McGonagall? It’s in the best of all possible causes.”
“Fine. You may add another ten Galleons.”
Griphook was favoring Harry with a gaze of frank respect, possibly even outright admiration.
“And a little spending money, like you mentioned earlier. I think I can remember seeing one or two other things I might want to store in that pouch.”
“Don’t push it, Mr. Potter.”
“But oh, Professor McGonagall, why rain on my parade? Surely this is a happy day, when I discover all things wizarding for the first time! Why act the part of the grumpy grownup when instead you could smile and remember your own innocent childhood, watching the look of delight upon my young face as I buy a few toys using an insignificant fraction of the wealth that I earned by defeating the most terrible wizard Britain has ever known, not that I’m accusing you of being ungrateful or anything, but still, what are a few toys compared to that?”
“You,” McGonagall growled. There was a look on her face so fearsome and terrible that Harry squeaked and stepped back, knocking over a whole pile of gold coins with a great jingling noise and sprawling backward into a heap of money. Griphook sighed and put a palm over his face. “I would be doing a great service to wizarding Britain, Mr. Potter, and perhaps the entire world, if I locked you in this vault and left you here.”
And they left without any more trouble.
The bit in Chapter 4 about taking advantage of the wizarding world’s financial system was pretty fun too.
My favorite bits are when we learn about the physics of magic. Hints of how their universe must actually work
Absolutely.
Only minor drama of course, but it definitely was not a cohesive group. Sometimes I heard the terms “blue badges” or “green badges” used pejoratively to refer to the different groups generically.
I like seeing these numbers. Transparency + people organizing the information is great. Seeing this presented here (on Less Wrong) where I am likely to see it makes me more likely to donate. Thanks!
Therefore it is written: “If you do not seek perfection you will halt before taking your first steps.”
But if you seek to take the perfect first step, you may delay your journey such that you never take a second step.
Where are we going versus how do we get there, etc.
I almost never have anything that seems worth saying, so I say nothing. The internet has been mostly read-only for me.
I’ve decided to make an effort to comment more on the SEQ RERUN posts for the purpose of participating. I think discussions will pick up soon.
I’ll be following along with the Reruns, whether or not I end up continuing to say anything.
I was inspired by the later scenes in A Beautiful Mind, where Nash was still hallucinating as he went about his day but he chose to just ignore his visions of people he knew were not real.
At one of my first jobs, the employees in my department wore either blue or green ID badges around our necks.
The blue badges were for the permanent employees (actually employed by the company) and the green badges were for contractors (actually employed by a staffing firm). The permanent employees had health insurance, higher status, company perks and worked on a salary. The contractors were paid by the hour, had lower status, used a time card, had more supervision, and had less flexible scheduling.
At the time, I hadn’t heard the story of the Blue and Green Romans, but in undergrad we learned about a psychology experiment on ingroups and outgroups where they divided subjects into Blues and Greens. I found it hilarious that the company had decided to literally label their employees blue and green, as if setting the stage for an us-versus-them experiment.
I watched the trailer. The first thing I thought after I saw the other Earth in the sky next to the moon: “Uh oh. Is that going to screw up the orbits of the planets and kill everyone??”
I think you should sign up for cryonics yourself first. Having you as an example may help persuade.
Also, make sure to shoot down any discomfort about “wasting your inheritance”. You’d much rather they use their money on this procedure that has an unknown probability of success than any other use. If you have siblings, they might need to be onboard. Some people feel strongly about using their money on themselves. They might not admit to it and still feel that way.
The conversation went something like:
Me: “Hey, how about I give you $2 every day I don’t finish all my homework?”
Him: “And what do I have to give you if you finish it?”
Me: “Nothing...”
Him: “Sweet!”
After a little while it felt pointless, because I was giving away all my money, and not doing my homework. It still seems like a good thing to try though.
I tried something like this with a friend of mine in 10th grade.
I was making $2 a day working at a lunch cart. I ended up giving him $2 a day for a week or two, as a failed incentive to do my homework.
Sex, explosions, taboo things, swearing, illegal things, and how-tos for most of those.
I skimmed the paper’s section on randomness and random number generators. I don’t think they’re making mistakes there.
I am especially interested in this question.