So Dumbledore killed Harry’s pet rock. Best twist ever.
MarkusRamikin
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Why? Did Will ever explain this?
After sleeping on it, I’d like to raise two problems I have with the last double-update, and see what you guys think.
1. That Harry would be able to cast Partial Transfiguration in those circumstances does not seem clearly and unambiguously established by the story so far.
(unless I’m missing something, in which case please point it out to me.)
I’m not saying it’s wrong that he was able to cast it. I’m saying that as a reader, I couldn’t know that in advance, and that’s bad for a story.
First we’re told that you can’t transfigure air. And EY repeatedly insists Harry cannot overcome any limitations of magic in 60 seconds, so that felt like a hint not to look for a spellcasting solution, at least not without regaining some freedom of movement first.
We did get an earlier scene where Harry considers the fact that his wand is showing some minor wear and tear, and seems robust against small loss of wood. So yes, that feels like a hint in the other direction, maybe even fairly strong evidence.
But the thing is, magic in Harry Potter universe is arbitrary in so many ways, like that you have to say “Wingardum Leviosa” and not something else if you want to levitate something. HPMoR draws attention to this fact repeatedly. Indeed, Harry is even thinking about the absurdity of it in that scene where he is considering the minor damage to his wand!
AFAIK, you can only transfigure something you’re touching with your wand. Now, does your wand count as something touching your wand? A gun can’t fire at itself. A square in Conway’s Game of Life does not count itself as “adjacent”. Or for a more in-universe example of “don’t act on yourself”: you can’t levitate yourself with Wingardum Leviosa. So I could easily imagine problems with casting spells on your own wand, too. (Or I could imagine intentionally removing matter from the wand causing it to become defective.)
So should transfiguring a piece of your wand have been possible? Nothing clearly says “no”, but it seems the sort of a thing that we wouldn’t know for sure until we saw Harry test it. And, correct me if I’m wrong, we never saw Harry test it.
(Aside: could you partially-transfigure a piece of your hand? Or do you have to be touching the transfigured object with the business end, and not the grip? Again, I don’t know, that’s the point.)
Easy solution: what if, in ch91, when Harry had noticed the accumulating wear on his wand, he’d remembered that he wants to live forever and “a wand would last through a standard lifetime” didn’t feel like sufficient reassurance. So to protect his wand from further wear, he has it painted/covered in a transparent… what’s the word I’m looking for? Fixative? The sort of a wood paint that you use for the wood’s protection. You know what I mean.
Then in chapter 114 he could just transfigure the fixative, which would be clearly in contact with the tip of his wand.
2. The tone feels wrong.
In ch115, the sense of urgency, of deadly threat, of fear, went out like air from a deflated balloon.
Harry should be in Moody-paranoia mode, not in Far Mode Goodness mode. He should be worrying about what could still go wrong, not about what action would be sufficiently nice from the pov of a hypothetical future civilisation. He should be afraid of Voldemort still somehow winning, of all the consequences if he goofs up now. I said it before, but anything other than ruthless pragmatism in that situation feels insane to me.
Remember proper pessimism?
The Dark Lord is alive. Of course he’s alive. It was an act of utter optimism for me to have even dreamed otherwise. I must have taken leave of my senses, I can’t imagine what I was thinking. Just because someone said that his body was found burned to a crisp, I can’t imagine why I would have thought he was dead.
That’s what we needed more of.
Example: Did Harry even bother to properly check that all the Death Eaters were dead, that he didn’t mess any of that up? He seems to pay them little attention, like he’s read the script and knows that this is the part in the story where he wins, so nothing can go fundamentally wrong.
Voldemort is only incapacitated. Harry should be in a hurry, he should be deadly aware of how much he’s gonna get it, if for whatever reasons something should go wrong now. (He does think the thought about how if Voldie awakens, things will get bad, but it feels robotically logical.)
He should have instantly (I mean literally instantly, with the use of the Time Turner) brought Moody upon the scene. For example to check for anyone Disillusioned that Voldemort might have pre-planted at the scene and who was now about to act. Or for any other unforeseen need that could only be handled by an adult, experienced wizard, not someone with Harry’s level of power.
Even if Harry decides he doesn’t need Moody for Cruciatus purposes, still, once he thought of involving Moody for whatever reason, he should have realized that it would be a really, really smart thing to quickly get him involved and query his greater experience at being pessimistic, to make sure every precaution is taken.
But not to lose the forest for the trees: it’s the overall tone that bugs me. HPJEV always felt at risk of being a bit of a marysue, and this completely went away in chapters 104-113, but 115 is one of the offenders. Keeping a sense of urgency and vulnerability would have been good. Harry’s taking the time to look at stars and think about balance and morality and the “children’s children’s children” feels too leisurely, he’s too much the master of the situation, and too much a saint.
I could see that weeks later, in a final chapter, when he’s finally believing on a gut level that the threat is over (and so does the reader). But not now.
- 's comment on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115 by (4 Mar 2015 21:39 UTC; 2 points)
- 's comment on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115 by (4 Mar 2015 9:08 UTC; 0 points)
I hate TL;DR
Nice try with the sockpuppet, Clippy, you almost convinced us.
I particularly admire the picture meant to make paperclips look appealing.
Wow, I’m blown away by Holden Karnofsky, based on this post alone. His writing is eloquent, non-confrontational and rational. It shows that he spent a lot of time constructing mental models of his audience and anticipated its reaction. Additionally, his intelligence/ego ratio appears to be through the roof.
Agreed. I normally try not to post empty “me-too” replies; the upvote button is there for a reason. But now I feel strongly enough about it that I will: I’m very impressed with the good will and effort and apparent potential for intelligent conversation in HoldenKarnofsky’s post.
Now I’m really curious as to where things will go from here. With how limited my understanding of AI issues is, I doubt a response from me would be worth HoldenKarnofsky’s time to read, so I’ll leave that to my betters instead of adding more noise. But yeah. Seeing SI ideas challenged in such a positive, constructive way really got my attention. Looking forward to the official response, whatever it might be.
Something that bothers me: what do fights involving the Killing Curse look like? What is it that made Voldemort so much more powerful and the conclusion of Lily vs Voldemort so foregone? His ability to pronounce the phrase faster?
Avada Kedavra seems like the Snitch of combat technique; trumps everything most of the time and dumbs the whole thing down.
Of course he will be. Therefore he should consider getting not-terrible at it. Well, I spy with my little eye an xkcd forum post by EY, so let’s see...
Would you guys agree that Harry is being unfair to Minerva regarding his Time-Turner? “But you thought it was your role to shut me down and get in my way.”
At the time she had it locked, she was right: he’d been irresponsible with it and needed to stop abusing his new toy every time a minor problem arose, and there’s not a hint that even Harry disagreed with that. You can’t refrain from such corrective actions on the remote possiblity that limiting your student’s options will do harm. Not-limiting an irresponsible student’s options in the relevant way can also lead to harm.
I’d be concerned if the community failed to explore these sort of topics.
Mere “philosophy” would be kind of empty. Once the idea of instrumental rationality was held up, the idea that rationalists should win, then it’s either start trying to apply it to real problems, or concede that we didn’t really mean it and that we just want to talk about stuff that makes us sound intelligent and sophisticated. That “applied rationality” features prominently here adds enormously to the credibility of LW and especially of the authors who have something to say about it, at least in my eyes.
Perhaps the problem is whether this generates the perception of “self-help” as opposed to “becoming awesome”. The former kinda smacks of low status and might turn some people off, while impressive success is obviously not a problem. Perhaps it’s a presentation issue (I suck at PR so I can’t judge), or perhaps we just haven’t amassed a sufficient wealth of evidence of awesomeness to overcome the negative connotations.
heteronormatizes the content
Seems to reflect the content reasonably well actually, since it’s a man reflecting on his experience with women...
In the spirit of making people flee screaming out of the room, propelled by a bone-deep terror as if Cthulhu had erupted from the podium:
One thing I really enjoy about HPMoR is how it likes to show intelligent people taking unreasonable-seeming ( = actually reasonable) precautions. Amelia Bones in chapter 84, and also in the Azkaban arc, Dumbledore and Snape and even Minerva on various occasions… not quite sure why but I really enjoy reading that sort of a thing.
To me it seemed obvious that Quirrel was just taking the opportunity to isolate Harry from Dumbledore-and-co. He’s always tried to make Harry distrust Dumbledore. Now Harry will find them even more obstructionist to his goals, so he will only have Quirrel to go to with his ideas and plans.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the next thing we see is Quirrel supplying Restricted books to Harry.
If Dumbledore is Harry’s legal guardian and can overrule him, should Harry’s 11-year-old signature be worth anything to Lord Malfoy?
Voldemort could have reasoned that he wanted to kill Harry as quickly as possible. Forcing him to drop his wand would have taken time.
This is silly. He’d taken the time to do exactly that before. And now, if he’s going to give him a full minute just to think...
The whole thing falls to the “plausible excuse” vs “what you’d expect to happen” problem, which Harry explains in Answers and Riddles:
the laws governing what constitutes a good explanation don’t talk about plausible excuses you hear afterward. They talk about the probabilities we assign in advance. That’s why science makes people do advance predictions, instead of trusting explanations people come up with afterward. And I wouldn’t have predicted in advance for you to follow Snape and show up like that. Even if I’d known in advance that you could put a trace on Snape’s wand, I wouldn’t have expected you to do it and follow him just then.
If you only knew up to chapter 108 or 110 or so, and someone told you that Voldemort is going to take every precaution to contain Harry’s threat that he can think of, running a search of the sort that would generate such ideas as “put up elaborate wards, including ones against timelooping”, “keep him naked”, “have 36 Death Eaters point wands at him, some of them with different orders than others”, “murder him very elaborately and thoroughly”, “but first make him take a Vow”, “commit to guarding the place for six hours anyway” etc., would you expect one of those items not to be “disarm him”?
Binarian: A special kind of idiot who believes that all people who hold a different view from oneself have the same views as each other.
That’s something I have to occasionally remind myself not to be, as an atheist.
Listen, blog, if I never see another comment starting with something like “After reading lesswrong.com I believe I have a better understanding of rationality”, I’ll spare this cute innocent kitten I’m holding out the window.
a few seconds pass
Ah, well, I never liked kittens.
Easily.
Realizing far-reaching consequences of an idea is only easy in hindsight, otherwise I think it’s a matter of exceptional intelligence and/or luck. There’s an enormous difference between, on the one hand, noticing some limited selection and utilising it for practical benefits—despite only having a limited, if any, understanding of what you’re doing—and on the other hand realizing how life evolved into complexity from its simple beginnings, in the course of a difficult to grasp period of time. Especially if the idea has to go up against well-entrenched, hostile memes.
I don’t know if this has a name, but there seems to exit a trope where (speaking broadly) superior beings are unable to understand the thinking and errors of less advanced beings. I first noticed it when reading H. Fast’s The First Men, where this exchange between a “Man Plus” child and a normal human occurs:
“Can you do something you disapprove of?” “I am afraid I can. And do.” “I don’t understand. Then why do you do it?”
It’s supposed to be about how the child is so advanced and undivided in her thinking, but to me it just means “well then you don’t understand how the human mind works”.
In short, I find this trope to be a fallacy. I’d expect an advanced civilisation to have a greater, not lesser, understanding of how intelligence works, its limitations, and failure modes in general.
“Attack and absorb the data that attack produces!”
-Tylwyth Waff in Heretics of Dune
(Hi. I’m new.)
You’re allowed to say these things on the public Internet?
I just fell in love with SI.