I am amazed that Eliezer managed to take Rowling's most corny idea and made it non-corny: "The power that the Dark Lord knows not" is, after all, none other than the power of true love. And it is a mighty power not because of a hokey magical force attached to it, but because someone who feels it in addition to being rational is motivated to reshape the universe. "Power comes from having something to protect."
For those wondering about this:
It has been three hundred and twenty-three years since the country of magical Italy was ruined by one man's folly.
323 years before 1992, this happened:
Etna's most destructive eruption since 122 BC started on 11 March 1669 and produced lava flows that destroyed at least 10 villages on its southern flank before reaching the city walls of the town of Catania five weeks later, on 15 April. The lava was largely diverted by these walls into the sea to the south of the city, filling the harbour of Catania. A small portion of lava eventually broke through a fragile section of the city walls on the western side of Catania and destroyed a few buildings before stopping in the rear of the Benedictine monastery, without reaching the centre of the town.
That's probably also what's referenced later on:
There is much literary wisdom in those stories. It is born of harsh experience and cities of ash.
(though it's pretty likely that in HPMOR-verse, all volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. are caused by Magic Gone Wrong)
(though it's pretty likely that in HPMOR-verse, all volcano eruptions, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc. are caused by Magic Gone Wrong)
I doubt it, since first off, many of them long predate humans, and second, something would have to be seriously wrong with our model of geology for plate tectonics to not sometimes result in volcanoes or earthquakes.
There's a good chance that EY didn't want to allude to any historical event. Maybe his writer's instincts to give concrete examples kicked into gear, and he made up a fictional event about a fictional society.
But suppose he did choose to allude to a specific historical event. Why would he choose this one?
He would not choose this event because it was a great disaster with many casualties. According to the Wikipedia article, there is no historical record of any deaths from this eruption, and the disaster is overshadowed historically by the 1693 Sicilian Earthquake. If EY were going for famous and lethal disasters, he would be very unlikely to choose this one when there are so many more famous ones.
He would not choose this disaster because it is Italian. Italy was not well defined in the 17th century. If you had to choose some place to represent modern day Italy, you would be far more likely to choose a place in Northern Italy (like Florence, where modern Italian comes from) than a city in southern Italy (like Sicily, which was ruled by the Spanish in the 17th century).
The only circumstance under which I think EY would choose specifically to allude to Etna's eruption is if he ...
A while ago Mitchell Porter wrote that Robin Hanson often makes arguments like:
People claim that they want to be smart and would like to be smarter. But if you stand on your head, blood pools in your brain, providing more oxygen, and thus improving your cognitive function. Yet people spend hardly any time standing on their heads. Does this mean that they don't really want to be smarter?
Quirrel is being even more Hansonion than usual in #95, arguing that other people not trying to raise their friends from the dead means they don't care about their friends.
Yup. Very true. That was my thought too when reading the chapter. But on Facebook EY claimed that Quirrell's arguments this chapter where also inspired by Michael Vassar, who, as he puts it, "is basically Professor Quirrell with a phoenix". (Although he admits in the comments that "Robin Hanson is Professor Quirrell as an economist instead of a wizard.")
Updating on my mental model of Michael Vassar to be a bit closer to Robin Hanson, I guess.
I didn't interpret the quote as implying that it would actually work, but rather as implying that (the Author thinks) Hanson's 'people don't actually care' arguments are often quite superficial.
It is, not to put too fine a point on it, false. An excess of oxygen doesn't really help out your brain under ordinary conditions. Try hyperventilating (breathing significantly more quickly and deeply than you need to satisfy your energy requirements) and you're just liable to become dizzy and see spots.
I googled to see if there are any known benefits to doing headstands, and the answer is "maybe, but the only people claiming so are new-agey yoga sources."
An excess of oxygen doesn't really help out your brain under ordinary conditions. Try hyperventilating
Hyperventilation's primary effect is to reduce CO2 levels in your blood, although it also increases oxygen. Decreasing CO2 beyond normal levels makes blood bicarbonate combine with hydrogen ions to form more CO2, which increases blood alkalinity, which makes blood vessels constrict and reduce blood supply to the brain, which makes you lightheaded. So hyperventilation is low-quality evidence about the effects of extra oxygen on your brain.
...Now I kinda want to put Gwern into a hyperbaric chamber and have him record his dual-n-back and math performance for comparison.
Piece of meta info:
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Vg vf bayl ng gur raq bs guvf, Puncgre 95, gung fur unf gubhtug hc gur cbffvovyvgl frevbhfyl.
Znal crbcyr unir orra jbaqrevat jul Uneel unfa'g znqr gur pbaarpgvba, naq V jnagrq gb funer guvf qngn cbvag bs fbzrbar ryfr jub qvqa'g unir gur Jbeq bs Tbq. Bs pbhefr, fur vfa'g Engvbanyvfg!Uneel, ohg gur qngn vf vagrerfgvat.
I didn't cry in "Humanism." I didn't cry in "Stanford Prison Experiment." I didn't even cry when Hermione died. But this chapter finally did it for me. "If I were the first person in the universe who ever really cared about someone, then I'd be honored to be that person." That's the kind of moral stand missing in any number of lectures and parables by supposed moral absolutists. It takes quite a bit of deviation from normal thinking to even really comprehend that emotion, let alone spontaneously describe it.
What I love best about HPMOR is that it could so easily have been a Kid Hero parody fic, and even though it skirts pretty close, especially in the earlier chapters, it is never quite a straight up parody. In fact, for all that Harry snarks about his life being one big fantasy cliche, HPMOR takes the Kid Hero genre deadly seriously and plays almost every trope completely straight. Sure, Harry doesn't rush headlong into every danger like most kid heroes, but that's a difference in method, not in spirit. He feels the weight of responsibility just like anyone else who was ever chosen, or chose themselves.
Far more than the science and even the rationalit...
Some conjectures on the nature of magic, the invention of new spells, etc.:
Whatever makes magic work is basically mechanical but smart enough to be sensitive to human intentions.
It has to do something broadly comparable to simulating the universe.
It is equipped with defensive measures of one or more of the following kinds. (a) Some things -- e.g., certain kinds of escapades involving Time-Turners -- would require excessive, possibly infinite, amounts of computation, and it won't allow that. (b) Some things -- again, including Time-Turner abuse -- actually lead to contradictions. Maybe those are caught in advance and prevented, or maybe those simulations just end when the contradiction is reached. (c) There are deliberate countermeasures against anything that looks like it's trying to marshal too much power, in case it's an attempt at hacking the underlying computational substrate (or whatever it is that makes magic work).
That is one reason why inventing new spells is dangerous. You might accidentally produce a contradiction or an excessively expensive simulation, or you might do something that looks like an attempt at becoming a god, in which case you -- or your laboratory
Professor Quirrell took a small step to the left, a step forward, another to the right. He tilted his head with a look of calculation, and then he walked almost directly towards where Harry stood, halted a few paces off with the sense of doom enflamed to the height of bearability.
Nice, Quirrell is tracking Harry by checking in which direction the sense of doom becomes stronger.
I hereby rechristen "the sense of doom" to "the sensor of doom".
Edit: "But what do Muggles know of true power? It is not them who frightens me now. It is you." Typo, should be 'frighten'.
Edit 2: "I could name a dozen examples in Muggle novels of people driven to resurrect their dead friends. The authors of those stories clearly understood exactly how I feel about Hermione. Though you wouldn't have read them, I guess... maybe Orpheus and Eurydice?" -- Aah, what a lost chance to break the fourth wall and cite HPMOR as an example!
Typo, should be 'frighten'.
And arguably should be 'they' rather than 'them'; Q strikes me as the sort of person who might well choose 'they' rather than 'them'.
what a lost chance
Thank goodness it was lost; let us hope it is never found again.
What an ending that would be: Harry uses the Self-Indication Assumption to conclude that he is most probably a character in a Muggle story about magic, then manages to 'blackmail' the author into granting him godhood in order to stop Harry from committing suicide in a literarily unsatisfying fashion, since the author would prefer the former as an ending over the latter. Someone would object that Harry doesn't have agency? But he does, if the author takes the character seriously and continues with a high-fidelity in-character continuation. If Harry found out he's likely a character in a novel, he'd be right, and there's no reason he shouldn't use that to his advantage.
Talk about writing yourself into a corner! :)
EDIT:
"It's not going to work!" Harry was shouting at the top of his lungs, his wand pointed at his own temple. He gripped it so tightly his knuckles were white. "You wrote me this way, you know there's no going back from this point, you knew I'd find out eventually."
Ominous clouds were forming, a harsh wind picking up, making Harry shiver from where he stood in the Hogwarts central yard. Students stood aghast, staring at the screaming boy pointing the wan...
What an ending that would be: Harry uses the Self-Indication Assumption to conclude that he is most probably a character in a Muggle story about magic, then manages to 'blackmail' the author into granting him godhood in order to stop Harry from committing suicide in a literarily unsatisfying fashion, since the author would prefer the former as an ending over the latter.
Am I the only one who thinks that would be a horrible ending?
In my version he blows his brains out but not before the narration notes him realizing that the pattern of behavior he represents is reproduced with pretty good fidelity in everyone who has read the story. This includes second degree fanfiction authors in whom he can boot up a whole new universe in reaction to the unsatisfying end of this story...
'Quantum' immortality for literary characters, because anyone can always pop up a fanfiction sequel where they somehow didn't die?
I am confused. You know how Dumbledore expresses several times to McGonagall his worry that he might be the Dark Lord Harry will need to face? I mostly thought this was simply guilt from having had to make lots of difficult decisions.
But I’ve been re-reading some older chapters today, and I noticed this (ch. 84):
“Indeed—indeed—that will be necessary and more than necessary, if the Dark Lord that Harry must defeat to come into his power is not Voldemort after all—”
“Not this again!” Minerva said. “Albus, it was You-Know-Who, not you, who marked Harry as his equal. There is no possible way that the prophecy could be talking about you!”
The old wizard nodded, but his eyes still seemed distant, fixed only on the road ahead.
What Minerva says sounds a lot like foreshadowing. More specifically, standard dramatic logic would suggest that it was actually Dumbledore who gave Harry the mark, thus justifying D’s fears and making Minerva’s reasoning exactly wrong on the point she is most sure about. There’s plenty suspicious about the “standard story” of what happened that night to allow it, and nothing else I know about Dumbledore sounds like something that would cause serious Dark-Dumbledore worries.
But that doesn’t seem to make sense at all with the rest of the story. Am I just reading too much because of theories I read here?
That the Death Eaters were bad guys was not in question. The question was whether they were the bad guys; whether there was one villain in the story, or two...
For me it's low confidence and speculative, but t could be foreshadowing. Dumbledore could be bad. Dumbledore and QQ could even be on the same side. The "one villain in the story, or two" at the time and in context was Harry thinking there were 2 sides and both were bad. But as a meta-hint / foreshadowing it could be saying that there was 1 side with 2 villains.
One big piece of evidence for was that Voldemort and Dumbledore fought a war for several years and neither killed the other. Harry initially thought this was evidence for Voldemort being dumb, but by 94 Harry has updated to the enemy being smart. So Voldemort could have wiped out the Order but didn't.
Dumbledore is soft, but he could have killed all the death eaters. Just gone to their houses and killed them, none of them, nor all of them together (excluding Voldie) are going to be on par with Grindelwald + elderwand + blood sacrifice. Dumbledore could have wiped out the death eaters but didn't.
You can explain that with two...
What Lily says when Voldemort comes looks like a clear set up of a dark ritual.
What Lily says is:
"Not Harry, please no, take me, kill me instead!"
But we know that in any ritual, first is named that which is sacrificed, and then is said the use commanded of it. This does, incidentally, match the order that the Dark Lord speaks in ("Yourself to die, and the child to live.") but as Lily got it wrong it seems like she definitely wasn't doing a ritual, and if a ritual happened it was accidental on her part.
On Quirrell's theory of human nature:
It seems to me that in general, his theory yields pretty accurate predictions, and to see what's wrong with it you probably need to know some evolutionary psychology; Eliezer's Adaptation-Executers, not Fitness-Maximizers. Evolution is going to favor genes for convincingly acting like you care about your friends without incurring too many costs for their sake. Yeah, it's also going to favor genes for seeing through easily faked signals, but to the extent that people can get away with it, it's going to favor genes for seeming to care about your friends without incurring the costs that would go along with that. The twist is that evolution while evolution produces behaviors that tend in that direction, it doesn't produce creatures who follow the strategies exactly, or consciously. The result is people who actually care about their friends... even if they very often don't act like it.
I've been working with the idea that Quirrell is a high functioning psychopath, who often believe that other people are also "faking it".
I don't disagree, but I would note that the extent to which people exhibit role-like behavior is probably also somewhat due to cognitive limitations as well as humans not being strategic. You cannot consider every possible scenario or plan, so if you want to be a good friend, a good cook, or a good philosopher, looking at the way that other friends, cooks, or philosophers behave and copying that is generally a pretty good heuristic. It's often better to follow the accumulated wisdom and only make small improvements on that, rather than to try something drastically different that nobody has tried before but which should work in theory, or which at least should if the bullet-swallowers are correct.
Note that this is compatible with Quirrell maintaining that McGonagall wouldn't be enthused with the idea of resurrecting Hermione even if it was pointed out to her: indiscriminately believing in arguments is dangerous, so it would still make sense for her to reject an outlandish argument that she couldn't properly evaluate, like "let's go resurrect Hermione", even if she did genuinely care about Hermione.
Quirrell seems to have been counterfactually mugged by hearing the prophecy of the end of the world...which would mean his decision theory, and psychological commitment to it, are very advanced.
Assume Quirrell believes that the only possible explanation of the prophecy he heard is that the apocalypse is nigh. This makes sense: prophecies don't occur for trivial events like a visitor to Hogwarts destroying books in the library named "Stars in Heaven" and "The World," and the idea of "the end of the world" being a eucatastrophe hasn't occurred to him. Assume Quirrell believes that prophecies are inevitable once spoken. Then why is Quirrell bothering to try to save the world?
Given that he hears the prophecy, Quirrell can either try T or not try ~T to avert it. Given that he tries, Quirrell is either capable C or incapable ~C of averting it. If T and C, by inevitability Quirrell will never hear the prophecy, which means that it is less likely the end of the world will occur (massive events always produce a prophecy that is heard by a wizard, so either Time finds some way to stop the end of the world or someone else hears it but fails to avert it). Say the...
Upvoted because it is an interesting parallel, but this is unlikely to be an explanation of Quirrell's actions. See Chapter 86:
More than the question of whom the prophecy spoke - who was meant to hear it? It is said that fates are spoken to those with the power to cause them or avert them.
Quirrell believes that he can cause or prevent the "end of the world" prophecy, and is gambling that helping Harry increases the chance of "prevent" rather than "cause". A better chance was to dissuade Harry - that would increase the chance of "prevent" even more - but Quirrell's just realized that he can't do that.
I just realized that Harry does not worry about Hermione's body disappearing anywhere I can remember in this chapter, which tells me he either knows exactly what's going on, or he plans to ignore the direct route and just become god, and thus it doesn't matter.
Also, Harry's dark side is "very good at lying." Remember Azkaban? Pretty much every proposition he uttered aloud there was a lie, straight up, and told to pursue a greater goal. If Harry can convincingly pretend, for Bellatrix, to be someone other than who he believes himself to be, convincingly feign innocence and fear when discovered by the auror, and convincingly lie to Minerva about his location, then I think he'd have no problem with this particular deception.
On the other hand, choosing the ring in particular as his hiding target strikes me as somewhat foolish and would require highly conjunctive scenario to be successful. If he has to remain in regular contact with the transfiguration target, though, this may be his best option.
After sitting down and going over everything I know about this fic, I believe I've gotten a substantial way towards solving its puzzles. The long version is at my blog here, but here I'll just state without justification the prediction I've come up with:
Voldemort believes fate won't let him defeat Harry until Harry attains the power to vanquish him, which in this case means becoming powerful enough to destroy all of Voldemort's well-hidden horcruxes. And in fact, Harry will become that powerful, by using the differing conservation laws for magic and science to conduct conservation-law arbitrage. Voldemort's plan is to possess Harry once Harry has attained ultimate power, but Harry will prevent Voldemort from winning through complicated means involving multiple currently yet-to-be-fired Checkov's guns.
Quirrell's dialog in this chapter has me thinking again about what exactly he did wrong, as David Munroe. I wonder if Eliezer thought that through as well as he should have, being a little too eager to show off the character's flawed understanding of human nature. From chapter 34:
...Professor Quirrell leaned forward at the podium, his voice now filled with a grim intensity. His right hand stretched out, fingers open and spread. "Division is weakness," said the Defense Professor. His hand closed into a tight fist. "Unity is strength. The Dark Lord understood that well, whatever his other follies; and he used that understanding to create the one simple invention that made him the most terrible Dark Lord in history. Your parents faced one Dark Lord. And fifty Death Eaters who were perfectly unified, knowing that any breach of their loyalty would be punished by death, that any slack or incompetence would be punished by pain. None could escape the Dark Lord's grasp once they took his Mark. And the Death Eaters agreed to take that terrible Mark because they knew that once they took it, they would be united, facing a divided land. One Dark Lord and fifty Death Eaters would h
Or maybe find a worthy Muggleborn in a country that didn't identify Muggleborn children, and tell them some extensive lies, fake up a surrounding story and corresponding evidence, so that, from the very beginning, they'd have a different idea of what magic could do.
Pretty sure this is Jean-Jacques Rousseau's strategy in Emile. Albeit for social-sexual development, instead of magic.
Oh, I just figured something out:
Voldemort wants to see Harry's science textbooks because based on the prophecy he believes (or at least suspects) that Harry will have the power to destroy even the Pioneer Plaque horcrux, and he needs to figure out how that could possibly be.
Can't believe I didn't get that sooner.
Another question: can we try to nail down Voldemort's body-management strategy (for lack of a better term)?
I've been assuming that Voldemort possessed Quirrell shortly before the beginning of the Hogwarts school year, and the dark magic he used is only good for about a year before it "uses up" the possessed body in some sense. (Killing it, rendering it an un-possessable vegetable, something like that.)
But after thinking about this hard, I'm not so sure about that. Maybe the degredation in that body's condition is due to being in constant close p...
Maybe the degredation in that body's condition is due to being in constant close proximity to Harry Potter, or something.
I thought the clear implication was that Quirrell performed more powerful magics by ritual magic, sacrificing some bit of health with each exertion of power, so that he aged quickly after large exertions.
... Hm.
It seems to me that Quirrell hasn't updated.
Quirrell had no teacher of rationality. Rationality is hard to learn even with a teacher. Therefore Quirrell likely did not need a teacher: he was lucky enough to be born thinking rationally.
Then Quirrell would have been born with the notion that you put effort into things you care about: that extraordinary goals requires extraordinary effort. And when he saw other people not putting in that level of planning, intelligence, and effort, he assumed they simply didn't care as much as they said they did.
He's s...
I'm pretty sure that Quirrell DID just update. This chapter seems to be a pivotal moment in his character arc: a cynic learns that there really is such a thing as love and friendship in the world.
I think probably the latter. His conclusion is "So you really do care" not "So other people aren't rational enough to try to ressurect their loved ones."
Ch 96 initial thoughts (no big spoilers):
I wonder if EY is aware of a couple of things: There are Muggles living in Godric's Hollow (canonically, Hogsmeade is the only all-Wizarding village in Britain, and at least one Muggle resident appears briefly in the books). The Potter family motto was first written by Paul of Tarsus (unless he was quoting somebody else, presumably long lost), the famous early Christian.
It is pretty sad how that quotation is interpreted canonically. Paul's original meaning is much closer to MoR!Harry's; although Paul's interpreta...
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 95. The previous thread has passed 300 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system.
Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: