But "pessimistic" wasn't the correct word to describe Professor Quirrell's problem - if a problem it truly was, and not the superior wisdom of experience. But to Harry it looked like Professor Quirrell was constantly interpreting everything in the worst possible light. If you handed Professor Quirrell a glass that was 90% full, he'd tell you that the 10% empty part proved that no one really cared about water.
Well. That settles it for me - Quirrel is based off Robin Hanson.
EDIT: It saddens me a little that this is my most-upvoted comment ever.
Harry missed an opportunity to do good with Lesath. He should have given him orders that would make him behave in a way that might make him happier. Like:
"Acquire friends. Acquire power. Acquire happiness. Try to publicly join a faction, if any will have you, so that you aren't a loner associated with the one Death Eater that even other Death Eaters repudiate, but are instead associated with respectable Slytherins. If Slytherins won't have you because you're worthless as an ally, try moving to Hufflepuff. Note that Neville was willing to defend you from bullies; make him and others like him like you. Publicly repudiate your mother if plausible."
And even more importantly:
"Do not ever try to act on my, the Dark Lord Harry's, behalf, or to help me, without explicit orders from me. Not if you're sure you'd be helping me greatly. Not if you're sure I'd approve afterwards. Not if you're among Death Eaters. Not even if you come face-to-face with your mother. Not if you think I ordered it but you can't be sure because I wasn't talking literally. Not if you get mailed orders from me and you know they're from me because they appear under your pillow while you're sleeping and everybody knows only I can do the impossible. Not ever. If I want you to do something, you'll know."
As it is, my story-pattern-matching is yelling that Harry is going to be exposed by Lesath trying to help him.
Dumbledore is an r-strategist.
He tells Harry to carry around a random object purely on the theory that "it is wiser to do than not", and he tells Blaise that it's important to have multiple plots going at once. His basic strategy is to try as many things as possible, in the hopes that a few of them will work.
Furthermore, he's in pretty much the ideal situation for r-strategy: a highly chaotic environment, and few to no direct rivals or real peers.
62
Has anybody unscrambled Harry's secret message?
(To avoid spoilers, please give your answer in rot13.)
thx!
On a slightly more serious note....
Flitwick: "Yes, Harry, what is the matter?"
Harry: "I have been instructed to deliver a message to you, Professor. "Silver on the tree"."
Flitwick: "I... see. May I ask who sends this message, Harry?
Harry: *pause*
Flitwick:"...the Headmaster? Prof. McGonagall? Prof. Snape?"
Harry's inner Hufflepuff: Next time maybe let's not be so lazy with doing a few extra Caesar shifts, eh?
Chapter 63: The last chapter was very satisfying. I was afraid it might be something along the lines of "and then Harry went to Ravenclaw dorm and glanced at Hermione sadly and then when to bed, the end." Instead I got not one but TWO good Hermione scenes,as well as a nice resolution for literally every character. While I look forward to the next act, I think I can spend the next month in relative peace. So thank you.
One thing that's been concerning me is Harry's view of Hermione. I'm assuming/hoping that you intend to delve into this further, because idolizing someone to the degree that Harry does Hermione is not healthy. I had a friend/romantic-interest (who did not return my affections in that way) that I put on a pedestal. And unlike Hermione, she really HAD been dedicating her life to helping people. I looked at her as a beacon of hope for what humanity could be like. And she knew that's how I looked at her, and it was hella awkward and it (along with other factors) caused us to drift apart for a while.
By now I've successfully split my "beacon of human salvation" mental construct and the "replica of my friend" mental construct into two separate t...
There's a substantial fraction of the total people who know me who believe I'm a beacon of human salvation, and even though that's exactly who I try to be, it still weirds me out.
I just wanted to note that people take everything you write very seriously and tend to up vote everything. They only go berserk and punish you heavily if you contradict your earlier self from the sequences. Which is funny if you think about it, shouldn't they assume that your.more recent position is the better one?
Anycase, I've thought up of an experiment that might interest you. Try posting all your regular interaction, except the stuff where your represent SingInst or do sort-of-moderator-like stuff, with a sock puppet account for 3 months. I wonder how your experience of LW would change. It would give you some information about how your status influences how people treat you here. Or perhaps you may be better off not knowing...
Of course maybe you've already tried this - if so, can you tell us the results? With graphs if you have them. Mainly I like graphs, but if you don't want to you don't have to.
In regards to the nearly empty vial left in Bellatrix's cell:
Back when we first saw the flask, I remember there being confusion over the point of leaving something foreign behind what was supposed to be "the perfect crime." It definitely came in handy once they were found out, but it didn't make sense to leave it behind when there was a serious possibility that they could have gotten away with it. I was thinking about the arc the other day when it (belatedly) occurred to me just what Quirrell might have been thinking.
Just before this point, we are told that in the MOR-verse, a prisoner stays in Azkaban until their sentence is up, even if they die. For those with life sentences, their corpse stays there until they need the cell. Furthermore, snake!Quirrell confirms that she's alone, and thus is the only live prisoner in her particular area. Therefore, it would be reasonable to say that after Bellatrix died, the Aurors would stop frequenting that particular area until the next time someone who does "worse than murder" needs to be locked up. Even then, it's possible that there are other empty cells, or (more likely) that the guards dispose of the older corpses firs...
Ch. 63, writing as I read:
I wonder what's the Death Eaters' opinion of phoenixes. If they agree that they're a force for good, seeing one of them in Dumbledore's retinue should make them ask themselves a few questions (a generic problem whenever you put a public, physical moral compass in any world, really - it becomes much harder for the villains to delude themselves into thinking they're heroes). Perhaps they think they're just creepy, winged endorphine peddlers.
Cool that Hogwarts has invented onion routing seven years in advance. Although I don't think it's a big improvement in security when the three messengers are so close to each other, and so much more likely to (occasionally) conspire to piece together the connection.
For the couple of seconds I considered Harry's guess on LL, I brightened up considerably. I dearly hope you don't plan for the fic to finish before you get a chance to write Methods!Luna.
Lesath... you know, I always hate pathetic characters in fiction, they make me cringe whenever they show up and I smile when they disappear from the story, but Lesath made me realise that MoR didn't have a truly pathetic character, Neville having "leveled up" extremel...
It has only just occurred to me that the fact that Harry ultimately proved unable to forgive Quirrell for casting Avada Kedavra is kind of brilliant.
Chapter 65:
I thought the way chapter dealt with Hagrid was very appropriate. The fact is Hagrid wouldn't have much to add to the story and Harry wouldn't be able to interact with him well, but that fact IS a little sad. If Harry had been the POV character at the time we might have gotten a little sense of that sadness, but having us experience it through McGonnagal helps remind us that there are real social consequences to the way Harry thinks about things.
I understand, intellectually, why Harry is still working with Quirrel. It's not necessarily rational, but it makes sense for emotional reasons that I can buy. But the fact is there's only so far I can go along with this before the reader-character disconnect becomes too great. Yes, we have information Harry doesn't, but what started out as interesting irony is becoming really frustrating, to the point that I just won't be able to root for Harry if he continues down this path.
On a related note, if Harry is becoming increasingly hard I think the story will need alternate sources of the warmth and humor that defined it in the beginning, to help break up the sheer bleakness. On top of that, I'd already been hoping to see more chapters from the POV of Padme, Hermione and various other secondary characters. The small exchange between them in chapter 65 has me hoping we'll get some of that soon.
how much fun would Moby Dick have been if Ahab had just said "Eh, it's a dumb whale, shit happens" and got on with life?
Congratulations, you just wrote "Moby Dick and the Methods of Rationality".
"I don't have much to gain from hanging out with Hagrid" and "I don't care about Hagrid's well-being" are radically different statements, and the former doesn't imply the latter.
Harry believes that he is unusually capable of improving the world. That means his time is valuable, and shutting up and multiplying suggests that he should avoid entanglements unless they are expected to improve his chances of success. Harry is acting cold but not evil.
In practical terms, though, he's in danger of losing his anchors to people - going cackling, to use Pratchett's term. He's failing to avoid being so sharp he cuts himself. He's smart, but he's eleven. It'll be interesting to see how this plays out.
"Harry doesn't value real friendship enough" is a legitimate concern. But the solution is not "be friends with Ron and Hagrid and the other people that canon-Harry liked." The solution is to make better friends with Padme and Anthony and Blaise and Neville and various other people who actually share interests with him. (I'd also like to see some chapters that showcased him actually hanging out with the Weasely twins instead of referring to other times when they hung out. If Harry feels bad about teasing Neville I'm not sure what kind of pranks they pull that he doesn't feel bad about).
Would it benefit Harry to try and be friends with people who aren't interesting to him from the get-go? Well, yeah. But seriously, that's a lot of work. Just making friends with people you start off liking can be a lot of work.
Now, right now none of that is even really an option, because the whole point is that Harry feels incredibly isolated. He isn't sure he can trust Dumbledore, he's pretty sure he can't trust Quirrel about most things, he doesn't want to burden his existing friends with the stuff he's going through, on top of it simply not being safe to tell anyone. And he doesn't want to risk getting close to new people right now because it wouldn't be safe for them either.
Which is exactly where Quirrel wants him. And that's bad, and he needs to get out of this situation. But if you were up against Quirrel, you'd probably be exactly where he wanted you to be too.
If I think of Harry as a real person in a real situation, I basically agree with you.
Indeed, I asked the question a couple of months ago of whether the rational thing to do would be to stop Harry then, before it was too late, though I had a different mechanism for his corruption in mind. Mechanism aside, it was pretty clear at that point that he had placed himself firmly on the isolate's path; we're just reading about his first stumbling steps on that path now.
But the thing is, Harry is the main character in a rationalist bildungsroman, and we've already seen that literary tropes have power in his world.
And given the author's stated-at-length beliefs about the relationship between rationality and moral behavior, I expect that -- whether it's true of the real world or not -- a constraining principle of this bildungsroman will be that a sufficiently powerful optimizer can preserve morality (in the human sense) given an adequate commitment to rationality, even in the absence of social entanglement.
And the related (and true in the real world) general principle that social entanglement works just as well to enforce immoral-but-conventional ideas as for moral ones (and is therefore u...
I'm sorry, but "Hagrid is lonely" is not a concern worth five seconds of thought when Harry could be working on getting rid of dementors or Azkaban or Death Eaters or death.
Harry trusts Quirrell less now than ever before, and he spent much of the chapter before this one rhapsodizing about Hermione's exceptional moral behavior, which definitely sounds to me like it could be his something to protect.
What would he have to do to convince you that he's on the road to hell?
Anything evil? I'm still a little dubious of Harry's judgment of late (though it seems to be recovering), but I'm really surprised you're worried about his intentions.
Harry trusts Quirrell less now than ever before,
Pish posh. That's what Harry tells himself, but what do his actions say? He's doubled down in favor of Quirrell. His self-reported unease is meaningless because the stakes are on the table and Quirrell is setting up the next round. Harry's resistance to bailing on one of his plans is proportional to the difficulty faced, and so next time around he will be even more in Quirrell's camp then he is now.
I'm still a little dubious of Harry's judgment of late (though it seems to be recovering), but I'm really surprised you're worried about his intentions.
I'm worried about his intentions because they suggest his morality is ill-tuned to the problems he faces. They will allow him to excuse himself all the way down to the bottom.
It and the Ron thing make the elitism increasingly distasteful
Is it really elitist to not make friends with people you don't like (Ron) or people you might not have time for (Hagrid)? I never befriended any of the janitors at any of my schools (have you?), even if they might have really enjoyed my friendship, and I don't consider myself elitist for that.
for him to make the choices he's made means he's in full Dark Lord mode. Harry's lost, and it's a question of whether or not he'll be redeemed, not whether or not he'll resist
I think the term "Dark Lord" is suffering from Sword of Good symptom. If "losing" means deciding to make the world a better place, eliminating Azkaban and/or death, and preventing future atrocities then I'm all for this sort of loss. Call it "becoming a Dark Lord" if you want, it's much better than any alternative.
I suggest that the clock that Dumbledore gave to Trelawney contains at least one recording spell, to make sure that if she has another prophesy, Dumbledore will find out about it.
I further submit that he has placed similar spells on various objects of hers, so that he as this assurance even when she isn't near the clock.
Thoughts?
Warning, big swath of text coming through.
I've recently been rereading the story from the beginning. By now the whole thing has a bit of a halo effect and judging things without bias is getting tricky. So kudos on accomplishing that... but there are a few issues that I think harm the piece overall. They didn't hurt my enjoyment of it, but they end up limiting it to a smaller audience. There's a lot of smart people who would love this fic if there weren't certain things that turned them off to it.
The main problem is that Harry too absurdly intelligent to believable at first glance. In the first few chapters people tend to assume that the "primary change" is simply that Petunia married someone different, which isn't enough to justify him not only being saner but being genuinely smarter than the original Harry was. My sister was particularly annoyed by this. I'm not sure how much of that had do with her reading it before you updated the intro-text to say "multiple points of departure." But by now she's internalized Harry as a creepily overintelligent jerk and I can't get her to give it a second chance, despite the clues you've dropped more recently about why he is ...
On first reading of Ch.1, I got the impression that Harry was giving too much credit to the possibility of magic being real, since the prior must be such that even taking the effort to make the test would be incorrect. But now it's blatantly obvious that the whole cognitive distortion event was caused by magic!
But this bizarre certainty... Harry was finding himself just expecting that, yes, a Hogwarts professor would show up and wave a wand and magic would come out. The strange certainty was making no effort to guard itself against falsification - wasn't making excuses in advance for why there wouldn't be a professor, or the professor would only be able to bend spoons.
Where do you come from, strange little prediction?
(Notice a reference to belief in belief, distinguishing true anticipation.)
The probability of magic is still vanishingly vanishingly low, but given how useful magic would be it might still be worth Harry's time to test for it.
I hereby dub this class of argument Pascal's Muggle
A prominent academic receiving a letter that claims the existence of magic is less strong evidence than an elementary school aged kid receiving such a letter. In the absence of real magic, a prominent academic is quite likely to receive such letters from crackpots, whereas an elementary school aged kid is not.
if you combined it with Petunia's seemingly earnest insistence at having personally witnessed magic, it probably would
As far as simply testing the nature of reality, I'd still say no. However, Harry cares about his mother and wants his parents to stop fighting. This is what justifies the test, IMO.
"And before you ask, it must be the original grave, the place of first burial, the bone removed during the ritual and not before. Thus he cannot have retrieved it earlier; and also there is no point in substituting the skeleton of a weaker ancestor. He would notice it had lost all potency."
I wonder how long a ritual can last. If it was started ten years ago but never finished, would that be a loophole?
Ch. 62-63: I think I found a plot hole. Not as big as the one with eagles in LOTR, but close.
Why didn't anyone ask Harry to drop his occlumency shields and check his memories? There are three people who can propose it:
1) Dumbledore: should have done it immediately upon picking up Harry in Mary's Place, because he still suspected him then. Also the Animagus potion isn't evidence that Harry is innocent, why does everyone think it is?
2) Snape: knows about the existence of the covert message-passing network, knows about the Time-Turners given to students, knows about McGonagall's woefully inadequate method of testing Harry's Time-Turner (just giving Harry a tricky task instead of confiscating the device and checking it), knows Harry had a motive for the crime. A natural first step would be to read the minds of all students with Time-Turners to see if they conveyed suspicious messages on that time/day. He may even stumble upon that accidentally while reading students' minds later.
3) Moody: an order of magnitude smarter and more paranoid than Dumbledore. Should suggest inspecting Harry's memories immediately upon learning the details of the story, e.g. the use of Muggle artifacts in the jailbreak.
Final note: unlike the Time-Turner test, this one can be carried out at any later time unless Harry Obliviates himself or something. It took me three days to get the idea, in-universe characters should be smarter and more motivated than me, so I give them three days of story time and then I will officially declare them stupid.
The obvious test I noticed they failed to perform involves Dumbledore asking Harry to summon his patronus.
Ch 62. Holy crap! Dumbledore killed Narcissa in response to the kidnapping and murder of Aberforth?! That doesn't sound right. For one thing, how can he still own the Bird of Good, then?
Nobody trusts anyone to be perfectly honest. In my view, the best time to lie is once you've built up a misleading reputation for being bad at lying.
Thinking about ch63 (which is among my favorite chapters to read so far)...
I am, of course, curious to see what the implications are of Harry's formally declaring opposition to Death.
But more than that, I am curious about the implications of his epistemology.
Ultimately Harry breaks his connection to Quirrell because he realizes Quirrell can maintain a surface appearance that is radically distinct from his deep structure, and consequently Harry can't know what Quirrell "truly" is. As distinct from, say, Hermione or Draco, who (Harry believes) can be read on the surface.
That seems to suggest that Harry has entirely given up on the idea of judging people by what they do... at least, when it comes to Quirrell.
Well, and Hermione. After all, this is precisely Harry's criticism of Fawkes: Fawkes only judges her based on what she has done, rather than on "the notion of there being something that a person is".
Now, in the real world, I know a lot of people who have more or less this attitude; who judge people based on their apprehension of some kind of core self, and believe that core is what really matters, and that judgments based on people's actions are inadequate by comparison. But those people don't describe themselves as rationalists. Indeed, most of them talk about that "core self" in language that soi-disant rationalists dismiss out of hand. Presumably Harry isn't going that route.
I will be interested to see what route he goes instead.
If only he'd shut up and calculate, he'd realize that to prevent the largest amount of suffering he should dedicate his life to researching magical means of granting immortality to everyone, like the Philosopher's Stone.
Granting immortality is not the same as preventing suffering. Maximizing life span may in fact maximize the opportunities for suffering.
Future suffering or death must be discounted to provide a present value. It is more valuable to save a life now than to save a life a year from now, all else being equal.
Harry would also have to consider opportunity costs and the likelihood of success. He knows that dementors can be killed now. Finding an acceptable magical approach to immortality is less certain, and may actually take more time to develop than a non-magical approach. Harry's optimal approach may be to kill dementors now, research the nature of magic, and to wait for muggle science to find immortality.
62: Huh, somehow (nearly?) everyone who speculated how Harry would get out of that one forgot that they hand out time machines to children so they can attend more classes.
Including Dumbledore and Snape and McGonnagal! Who really should know better. They speculate that Harry was forced to use his Time-Turner for the Dark Lord, but they don't even think to check up on all the other children who have one? For shame.
I think the missing insight was that there were students who would be willing to convey messages back in time with no explanation and keep their mouths shut.
Harry picked up the message in the empty class room while invisible, decoded it and told Flitwick the message. He was already waiting there because Quirrel had anticipated that he would be subjected to a test of this sort. It's all in the chapter.
That is an oddity. However, note that they don't have computers, and setting up a schedule properly for everyone who's signed up for whatever classes seems like it might well be incredibly difficult without same. It could be that someone saw this and said 'F* it, just give them time machines.' That would certainly fit with the level of sense shown so far in magical Britain.
It could be that someone saw this and said 'F* it, just give them time machines.'
I now declare this MoR!canon.
The rules are not that simple. School timetabling is NP-hard and even stimulated annealing is unlikely to get it completely correct.
I should probably have been clearer: the reason classes are often scheduled at the same time is because it's impossible not to. You have some amount of staff, each of whom have to teach some amount of lower level and/or elective classes, and then you have a couple hundred students each of whom pick 5-7 (or whatever it is, I haven't read the books recently) electives in whatever combination most appeals to them. The chances of not having a collision anywhere in the whole timetable are pretty damn low. Non-magical schools deal with collisions by forcing students with unpopular combinations to change one of their options (which is what my school did), or by offering a an extra class during lunch or outside regular school hours (which I've heard of other schools doing)
Harry has decided, I'm sure correctly, that Quirrell's ability to flawlessly adopt any persona and simulate any intention for long stretches of time while simultaneously furthering his own (true) goals makes him impossible to trust. But if Harry buys into Quirrell's claims, Harry is equally capable of perpetual, undetectable duplicity and therefore equally unworthy of trust. And if he believes that's the case, it's just going to isolate him further, since he'll conclude that anyone who wants to be his friend is either irrational or overlooking the factors that make him an untrustworthy person. So Quirrell may have just convinced Harry that literally all of his relationships, present or future, are tantamount to a sort of deception. Good job!
Oddly enough, salvation here might come from Draco, with his arguments that influence/manipulation/persuasion is, far from being evil, actually a good thing and you can't have healthy relationships without it.
I am very interested in what the effect of magics to nullify "opposite reaction science" will be. Biochemistry cannot work in such a regime, and unless the witch actively puts in something to account for this, you're going to get a lot of dead Aurors and prisoners; although I suppose they'll learn this as they experiment with the jinx. Even if it does work in the sense of not instantly killing everyone in the area of effect, there will be much weirdness; whatever humans expect when they start to consciously think about physics, our reflexes have to be tuned for Newtonian mechanics. I will look forward to seeing how plausibly weird this can get.
On another note, I wonder if we can create a repository of links to other Internet discussion of the fic? I'll start with this thread on Orson Scott Card's discussion site.
Should we maybe add a prominent note to the prior threads that current discussion is here? New users who aren't aware of the discussion sections may have trouble locating the new thread.
I was bothered by the irrationality preceding the whole prison sequence. Harry thinks of himself as one of the first people able to adequately investigate an entire branch of previously unknown human capabilities. capabilities so powerful that they have the promise of significantly speeding up human progress toward nullifying existential threats and eliminating vast swaths of needless suffering. and then he puts himself in personal danger of death to save one innocent person.
now from a story telling perspective it was great. I even regard it as a worthy trade off since we got some choice anti-democracy bits out of it.
In his author's notes, Eliezer said that MoR was the 5th or 6th most reviewed HP fanfic (or something like that). How does he know? Is there a list of top-reviewed fanfics somewhere?
An inconsistency (handing Harry an unnecessary Idiot Ball).
In Ch. 61, Harry uses the following as an impostor recognition precaution:
M: What did the hat tell me to tell you?
- H
"Ah," Minerva said aloud in surprise, her mind taking a moment to place the question, it wasn't the sort of thing you'd forget but she hadn't been thinking in that mode, really - "I'm an impudent youngster and I should get off its lawn."
But in Ch. 12, Harry announced this fact publicly, thus making the weight of evidence of the correct response lower than...
I finally realized what all this slithering reminds me of! If you want to experience the same emotions as Harry and the other kids when they weave Slytherin-style plots, lying to X about Y and to Y about X, brilliantly escaping from detection... just try juggling two or three concurrent girlfriends or boyfriends.
Or if you want to do it in a way that isn't unethical, you can play Illuminati or Diplomacy or The "A Game of Thrones" Boardgame.
just try juggling two or three concurrent girlfriends or boyfriends.
I'm actually rather curious as to what that would be like, specifically how difficult it would be to keep the intrigue from exploding. I'm actually thinking that these days Facebook would be most irritating hurdle.
Honest N-way relationships involve less plotting, lying, and escaping from detection than dishonest ones, which was my point. But, agreed, they still involve work.
Chapter 62.
Well, that was interesting.
I'm wondering whether the general opinion of Harry as dark is going to change as a result of a freaking phoenix following him around.
Incidentally, I've honestly got mixed feelings about this issue. Dumbledore is completely correct in his "it's not that simple" sentiment but Dementors are evil.
I'm actually wondering whether Wizards in general agree with Azkaban torture or if they just feel that Dementors have to be dealt with somehow. Since everyone 'knows' they're invulnerable, they decided to deal with them...
Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.
After 61 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and 5 discussion threads with over 500 comments each, HPMOR discussion has graduated from the main page and moved into the Less Wrong discussion section (which seems like a more appropriate location). You can post all of your insights, speculation, and, well, discussion about Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic here.
Previous threads are available under the harry_potter tag on the main page (or: one, two, three, four, five); this and future threads will be found under the discussion section tag (since there is a separate tag system for the discussion section). See also the author page for (almost) all things HPMOR, and AdeleneDawner's Author's Notes archive for one thing that the author page is missing.
As a reminder, it's useful to indicate at the start of your comment which chapter you are commenting on. Time passes but your comment stays the same.
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: