I would vote for a time earlier than 7pm, as this would allow European types such as myself to read the update on the same day that it’s published, and comment accordingly. As it stands, I can choose to stay up until 3am or so to wait for the update, or turn up the next day to find that the discussion has progressed a long way before I could join in.
Velorien
Canon!Ron had a lot of time and personal interaction in which to grow to like Hermione. MoR!Ron is in a different house, and much of his interaction with her is informed by her close friendship with Harry, whom he considers Evil. And according to Ron, being friends with Evil is extremely damning in and of itself.
I recall that when Harry discovers curses of unknown effect in the Half-Blood Prince’s book, the first thing he does is go and try them out on Slytherins to see what they do. In fact, Eliezer references this.
In the first place, I realise that you’re probably going for an understatement, but I think it’s worth noting that Rowling’s world-building, in terms of thinking through consequences and implications, is actually atrocious rather than merely inferior. I’ll never forget the moment when I realised that DISINTEGRATING LIVE KITTENS is standard spell practice for schoolchildren in the Potterverse, and no-one bats an eyelid. I sometimes ponder whether Rowling herself places an unnaturally low value on any form of life that can’t speak a human language, or whether the themes evoked in the last books (that wizards are overdue to pay for their appalling record on non-human rights) are deliberately woven into the Potterverse at an extremely deep level.
That aside, could you give some examples of what you would consider such influences? Given that senior wizards in canon need to have guns explained to them, and that Muggle expert Arthur Weasley struggles to even pronounce “electricity”, wizard obliviousness to Muggle society would seem to run so deep that I struggle to imagine one much influencing the other.
Is Hermione’s inability to think that she might have been bespelled part of the spell, or normal psychological reaction? Would fake memories have the same kind and amount of detail as real memories?
I would hypothesise that, to an ordinary person who has not learned about the fallibility of memory in general, the idea that something that feels like a completely real memory would be false is a very challenging one. Thinking “have I been memory-charmed?” is like thinking “I could be wrong about absolutely anything I remember” for the first time. It would be very difficult, and exactly the kind of thought one flinches away from.
From personal experience, I remember recalling a very emotionally charged MSN conversation months later, and thinking about an agreement I’d made with someone in it. But searching through the logs (and I logged everything), I could find no mention of any such agreement ever. It was pretty traumatic to discover that my memory was so fallible on something so important, and I’m not sure I could have accepted it without such firm evidence.
In regard to detail, I’m not sure people ever go through their memories and say “huh, this memory lacks detail so something must be off”. Unless some key feature is missing (say, Hermione being unable to recall the words of the curse she used), I imagine any given detail’s absence could be easily rationalised.
I suspect Voldemort is less likely to produce a true Patronus. The Patronus 2.0 comes from facing death and rejecting it. Voldemort certainly rejects death, but it doesn’t seem like he’s faced it the way Harry has.
Voldemort: “This ‘death’ thing is horrible, get it away from me! I’ll tear apart my very soul if that’s what it takes to escape death!”
Harry: “You dare threaten me and the people I feel responsible for, you pitiful little leftover of the evolutionary process? I will end you if it’s the last thing I do.”
Admittedly, this is based more on a canon portrayal of Voldemort, since MoR!Voldemort’s views on the subject have yet to be made explicit (and he seems altogether more emotionally healthy than the canon version).
- 12 Apr 2012 12:48 UTC; -2 points) 's comment on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 by (
Faint memory: didn’t they have a statue in plate armor?
Yup. For that matter, Sir Cadogan is fairly unambiguously described as a mounted knight.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how this project is to be reliably carried out without knowing what wizards could have invented for themselves—or, indeed, how far back the separation between the two societies goes historically. I’ll give you the train, certainly, but on the other hand:
They celebrate Christmas.
Early Christianity may have existed before Muggle and wizard societies separated. It may have had both wizard and Muggle worshippers (Rowling is silent on the matter of religion, but resurrection would be just as miraculous to wizards). For that matter, Jesus could have existed in the Potterverse, in which case odds of him being a wizard are extremely high.
IIRC, they use the Roman alphabet, or at least I don’t remember British muggle students having to learn a different alphabet.
The Muggle and wizard communities are tightly bound enough to maintain the same language (they share the same geographical territory, and intermarriage is not uncommon). Assuming that, at some point in the past, wizardry emerged from a Muggle population, there’s no reason why the two should not share the same linguistic evolution.
Their spells show an influence from Latin.
Which suggests the existence of Roman wizards, supporting the above point.
Hogwarts resembles a British public school.
Fair point. Although I struggle to come up with a mechanism by which nearly-modern Muggle teaching practices should come to be adopted by a school founded nearly a millennium earlier by wizarding purebloods, and maintained in a highly conservative fashion. If anything, one might speculate that British public schools are influenced by Hogwarts.
They speak English, even if words relating to technology and science are absent.
See above.
They use a train.
No contest. Ditto the printing press. I think our best bet may be to look at technologies which wizards would not have developed on their own (e.g. in that no other standard wizarding form of transport we know remotely resembles a train, or something which could evolve into a train). But that’s a much more limited list.
In one of the middle books, the Transfiguration class is practising Vanishing Charms on mice (I think). Hermione, being Hermione, progresses to practising on kittens by the end of the lesson.
In Book 7, it is explicitly stated that a Vanished object disappears from existence. I guess, strictly speaking “annihilating” is more accurate than “disintegrating”.
Probably not—Parseltongue is an extremely rare gift.
I specify speaking a human language, incidentally, because mandrakes act like humans to a limited but recognisable extent (they throw tantrums when young, become moody and secretive as teenagers, and attempt to move into each other’s pots as young adults), but are still chopped up and used as potion reagents as soon as they achieve maturity. On the other hand, centaurs and goblins are at least recognised as intelligent beings with their own thoughts and feelings to be trampled over.
I don’t think it’s quite eidetic—she says as much herself. It’s just ridiculously good. I think if she had literally perfect recall of all her experiences, rather than merely amazing recall of information she consciously tried to absorb, she would be less of a normal 11-year old girl. For example, she’d have perfect recall of every mistake she’d ever made, and every time anyone had ever hurt her. I imagine she would be much warier of doing anything with the potential to leave traumatic memories.
With that said, it’s worth noting that no-one has ever proved having long-term eidetic memory in repeated scientific tests, so all our speculations on the subject must rely on anecdotal evidence and fictional examples.
I think we had frogs—once—and I opted out of that class. But I imagine those would be already-dead mice? You wouldn’t have to kill them yourself?
Also, maybe it’s just me, but I think that the more intelligent an animal is, the harder it is to objectify and kill. Stepping on insects is easier than killing mice because insects seem alien and thus easier to objectify. Killing mice is easier than killing cats or dogs because the behaviour of cats and dogs is closer to our own in complexity (or seems to be) and thus it is harder to dismiss them as “not really alive the way we are alive”.
To be sure, the taboo on killing kittens is very much culture-dependent—but Hermione, who apparently has no problems with it, comes from “our” Anglo-Saxon culture. in which kittens are beloved household pets as well as common symbols of innocence and various other positive features. Which edges me towards “Rowling doesn’t think” rather than “Rowling is very subtle in showing us the darkness of the Potterverse”.
Actually, he also tests a toenail-growing curse on either Crabbe or Goyle, and at least one other on a different Slytherin.
facepalm at reality
So the upside for Rowling is that Vanished animals presumably don’t suffer (at least for more than an instant). The downside is that the children are practising killing for no higher purpose than to practise killing (in that if they just wanted to learn how to Vanish inanimate objects, they’re much more easily available than animate ones).
I suggest that Voldemort was intentionally turning Harry into a Horcrux.
For the central premise on which your theory is founded, you skip over this without giving any reason to privilege this possibility over others (such as “Voldemort wasn’t intentionally turning Harry into a Horcrux”). It’s hard to take a theory seriously when it skips straight from a central premise to discussing implications, without considering the state of the evidence first.
As an example problem, all other Horcruxes, both in canon and MoR, are nigh-indestructible magical artefacts. In fact, the only other MoR one was chosen for its utter inaccessibility to Voldemort’s enemies. Yet here Voldemort is choosing a baby as guarantor of his immortality.
If Harry contains a copy of Voldemort, then acquiring political power for Harry is, in some sense, acquiring power for Voldemort.
Again, needs justification. If Harry is a Horcrux, this has not given Voldemort any form of control over him (not even the canon mind-link). Acquiring power for Harry only acquires power for Voldemort if Voldemort can control or manipulate Harry—and this he must accomplish without any aid of Harry’s Horcrucicity.
But if he really does want Harry in power, why remove his friends?
In order to forestall their positive influence on his personality and make him more open to his own cynical worldview, and thus his manipulation.
Also, two “l”s in “Quirrell”.
“Where do Vanished objects go?” “Into non-being, which is to say, everything,” replied Professor McGonagall.
Goes into non-being = ceases to exist = dies if previously alive. Possibly worse than that, since in canon the dead do not disappear but go on to an afterlife.
If I said to you “Bob has gone into non-being”, is there even a slight chance that you would interpret this as “Bob has been temporarily teleported to another dimension” rather than a fancy way of saying “Bob has ceased to exist”?
Except accidental magic use in the Potterverse ignores all known rules of magic. It has young children manage things that aren’t possible without extensive study and a wand. But even ignoring this, the facts that accidental magic stops when a child starts learning spellcasting, even in circumstances where it would save their life, and that children stop being able to perform wandless magic without super-advanced training, suggest it’s not properly integrated into the rest of the setting.
Nor do we know that wizards have one. We know that people give each other presents at Christmas. We also know that there is a wizard explanation for the hanging of green and red decorations. Are there any other features of Muggle Christmas that show up in canon?
This would explain why religion never comes up in canon.
Greetings, all. I’ve spent most of my life (being 24 now) longing for the sort of clarity provided by rationalist thought, but only discovered a few months ago that there was such a thing as empirically verifiable truth accessible to me, and that it was possible to build a belief system with solid foundations. I’m still going through the resulting lengthy process of reassessing my beliefs in light of actual evidence.
My partner recently introduced me to this site, and I dived right in—only to hit a concrete wall. My mathematical skills, unused since school, have completely atrophied, to the point that I can’t even follow An Intuitive Explanation of Bayesian Reasoning (my work computer’s refusal to load applets not helping). Since a significant proportion of the Sequences seem to rely on at least a basic understanding of probability theory, I am rather stuck. With this in mind, I’d like to ask for recommendations of material which will help me grasp the essentials necessary to fully understand Less Wrong.
I realise that asking for things I might theoretically find through sufficient Googling sounds lazy, but on the other hand the fine people here might know the best-written and most effective ways of covering the necessary ground.
So: what areas of mathematics and probability theory do I need to cover in order to be able to follow the material on Less Wrong, and do you know of any good sources for learning them, assuming I’m starting from zero?