While I like that Hermione is getting her own story-arc, there's something about the "Self-Actualization" arc that really doesn't work for me.
It's increasingly seemed as if "bullies" are being portrayed as an interest group or even a subculture: In MoR, it seems like bullies think of themselves as bullies, and stand up for the common interests of their group by perpetuating bullying as a social institution and singling out for attack those who have challenged other bullies. Even if those other bullies are of a different House, year, or social circle.
This makes Hogwarts' bullies out to be an Evil League of Evil, a cross-House union of Bad Guys who know they're Bad Guys. But at the same time we're expected as readers to take Hogwarts bullying to be some kind of mirror of ordinary real-world school bullying, which doesn't exactly work that way.
The idea of bullies standing up for bullying as an institution, or even thinking of themselves as bullies, reminds me too much of the scene in one of Kevin Smith's movies in which it is revealed that streetcorner drug dealers are unionized.
Yeah, the I've enjoyed the arc well enough, and there were some great bits in this chapter, but it's been a bit small-potatoes compared to some of what's come before, and there's definitely a sense of "just how many bullies are there at Hogwarts, anyway?". It's almost like SPHEW is literally grinding bullies for XP.
I can agree with your sentiment but there's plenty of evidence from canon that bullying is seriously endemic to Hogwarts, not to mention the Morcanon point of view where slytherins have found themselves gaining status predominantly from racism against and bullying of mudbloods/hufflepuffs. The entire hogwarts system could almost seem to be DESIGNED to generate ingroup/outgroup hostility in huge amounts to layer on top of the basic cliquishness and age-based splitting of regular school.
also, it's strongly implied in this chapter that the enemies hermione is making now are NOT fighting her because they think of themselves as bullies, but because they view themselves as proud slytherins/griffyndors, and see hermione insulting their entire houses.
I just realized how Wizard negotiations are so far ahead of their muggle counterparts. They accidentally stumbled upon the best possible decision theory.
Take the prisoner's dilemma, except this time add in time tuners. Defection will immediately be punished by defection. The only stable time-loops that can exist are cooperate-cooperate or defect-defect. Actors with mutual access to time tuners will literally have to choose as though controlling the logical output of the abstract computation they implement, includes the output of all other instantiations and simulations of that computation. You don't need to be able to perfectly predict the other person's actions when you can actually observe them and change your own answers to match before negotiations happen.
Two nations going into negotiations will have the Prime Minister wake up, read a note saying "cooperate - agree to concession and gain concession " then go into negotiations and finish in ten minutes. This seems well within the purview of normal time travel and not too far into calculating prime factors with a time-tuner. Although, I'm not sure if Robin Hanson's pie problem would result in "Everybody co...
This is contradicted, at least slightly, within MOR if not in cannon. McGonagall mentions in her internal narrative that wizards never invented clocks or any form of magical time-keeping, and only starting using them after muggles invented them. There may will be many other such cases, certainly the extent to which a lot of magical objects superficially resemble their muggle counterparts is quite suspicious.
Ok. The Tonks thing was really clever. And the bit about double-witches was brilliant. It definitely drives home the whole issue of taking joy in the merely real. It is a clever, original, and highly plausible interpretation of what people would likely do if they grew up taking some sort of secret magic for granted.
Yep, double magic is fantastic. Gonna use that when I hear someone wishing they had magical powers.
Double magic may be a reference to Grossman's The Magicians. Warning: While there are many good things in the book, the viewpoint character is depressed and (in my experience) depressing.
I don't know whether Grossman has read HP:MOR, but he heads it off at the beginning of the book. Everyone at the magic school is a good bit smarter than average, but there's no one who's qualitatively smarter than that, and it's stated that enough unproductive research has been done into the roots of magic that it's generally considered to be a dead end.
From the Author's Notes:
Update for Ch. 75: Yes, I know this wasn't quite as good as Ch. 74. They can't all be as good as Ch. 74. Also, at some point you have to choose between abandoning the sick baby or spending another three goddamned months trying to rewrite it. I do think I learned something from the experience, anyway.
I strongly preferred Chapter 75, incidentally. Chapter 74 seemed to be another "need a way to top previous chapters" experience, like the underwater battle in Chapter 33. The talky chapters, like 75, are the real soul of the fic; the CMOA, after all, was the casting of a single Patronus, but the long inner narrative made it what it was.
Anyway, I think it's amusing that authors' favorites rarely correlate positively with readers' favorites.
To whichever Less Wrong reader has decided to defend Eliezer's honor by trolling the DarkLordPotter forums: Please stop. I know you mean well, but they as a forum are best ignored. Picking a fight with them, creating multiple accounts to avoid bans, etc., is immature and accomplishes nothing positive.
When I first saw chapter 74, it ended with this line:
You don't have permission to access on this server.
Until that disappeared, I thought maybe Snape's response to the previous line had broken reality.
At the secret inner double-witch school, everyone's most concerned with figuring out who the top-secret super-inner triple-witches are.
The thought had occurred to me. And if you were a double witch, wouldn't you think it was pretty darned plausible that there were triple witches?
Yes, ZFC is quite enough to imply the existence of the first uncountable ordinal.
On the other hand, I don't see what's unbelievable about such a thing; it's just (the order type of) the set of all countable ordinals, and I don't see why it's unbelievable that there is such a set. (That is, if you're going to accept uncountable sets in the first place; and if you don't want that, then you can criticise ZFC on far more basic grounds than anything about ordinals.)
Perhaps this is math's revenge for you having tiled a hall in Hogwarts with pentagons. :)
But he didn't say regular pentagons. Pentagon tiles shown here. Also, he did say that Hogwarts has non-Euclidean geometry.
"The Axiom of Choice is obviously true, the well-ordering principle obviously false, and who can tell about Zorn's lemma?"
— Jerry Bona
I think you are stating these things too confidently.
Most mathematicians could not state the axioms of ZFC from memory. My suspicion is that AC skepticism is highest among mathematicians who can.
One piece of evidence that AC skepticism is not low-status is that papers and textbooks will often emphasize when a proof uses AC, or when a result is equivalent to AC. People find such things interesting.
You could make a stronger case that skepticism about infinity is regarded as low-status.
But what do status considerations have to do with whether Yudkowsky's beliefs and hunches are justified?
77: I didn't read the title in full before I read the chapter. I must admit that "Sunk Costs" weren't a lesson that sprung to my mind as I read. Since sunk costs are such an important lesson to convey I rather hope there is another chapter on the subject. It strikes me as something that is easy to contrive scenarios to illustrate.
Has there yet been any Word of God on firearms in the Methods of Rationality? I know that the other Word of God has the famous quote, "In a fight between a Muggle with a shotgun and a wizard with a wand, the Muggle will win." I'm curious if this sort of thing still holds for MoR.
Hogwarts, being a school, wouldn't have narrative need to involve any guns directly. Fights between bullies and students rarely end with gunshots even in the real world afterall. But the mere existence of such objects casts ripples on everything else. Just like modern warfare is dominated by the existence of nuclear weapons even when not deployed, guns remaining effective would dominate the shape of all wizard conflicts. Home invasions go from safe for the better wizards to potentially lethal any time. Public takeover (as in Deathly Hallows) becomes impossible. Support from demihuman races become pointless if open battlefields are impossible. Hell, all the death eaters in total seem almost comically weak against a single battalion of trained soldiers loaned from a friendly country and supported by a wizard or two. Death Eaters might be an effective terrorist organization, but could not b...
Since magic in the HP universe has the property of not having to make sense, one could imagine a spell that simply makes guns not work, or that makes all projectiles move slowly, or that causes everyone within the area to miss what they aim at.
The ending battle of Deathly Hallows pretty much treats wands as if they were guns. You could edit the film to replace all the wands with guns and have very few instances where anything looked wrong. So far HP:MoR has made the magic feel more magical than that.
A gun might top a wand for a lethal quickdraw, but magic has a ludicrous number of tactical advantages. A home invader with a gun, for instance, is no longer a threat when you can use charms to make it impossible for them to be aware of the existence of your house.
But still, knowing that you can pull off an assassination at literally zero risk to yourself at any time (Invisibility Cloak + Sniper Rifle + Portkey + Time Turner) has to do something to an actor's willingness to compromise with rivals.
The sniper rifle doesn't make this much easier; it's loud (although it might be quieted magically) and Avada Kedavra is a surer kill. Anti apparation spells probably cover portkeys, or if they don't, there are probably other spells to deal with them. Plus, you can't pull it off "at any time" given that it can be stopped by a standing anti-apparation spell and a closed door, which are pretty minimal precautions for a high profile political leader.
If you're really creative, you could probably assassinate just about anyone, but this is more or less true in real life, and prevented largely by the extremely small overlap between people with that kind of creativity and people who want to pull off assassinations.
I was considering more a wizard vs wizard+technology situation. Presumably wizards already figure out ways into charmed houses; the addition of guns just make it easier once you've already located it.
The benefit of a sniper rifle is the range. Harry Potter magic seems to be effective at about a dozen yards at most. The longest confirmed sniper kill is over one and a half miles without any aid of aiming magic; the sound of the bullet arrives about 5 seconds after you're already dead. That should leave you well outside of the range of any anti-apparition wards, and require knowledge of ballistics to even track you to your shooting spot. Lee Harvey Oswald would have gotten away easily if he could apparate or portkey; as it was he was able to walk around for an hour until police were tipped off to his suspicious activity. Voldemort specifically seems to have an odd thing for meeting in the outdoors, and Dumbledore is fond of watching Quiddich. It's not like there would never be an opportunity.
I'm thinking McGonnagal could set up a decent nuclear defense system too. Charms that detect incoming airborne objects and transmogrify then into pigs seem right up her alley.
In general it seems that magic gives far more defensive options than technological weaponry. These days our defensive options are pretty much MORE ATTACK! But magic has invisibility, shields, teleport, (extra) secrecy and flipping time turners!
Right after the Azkaban mission, McGonagall, Snape and Dumbledore hold council together. I remember that after Dumbledore shows terror at the idea of a Harry vs. Voldemort war fought with Muggle weapons (he's thinking of nukes), McGonagall thinks something like "firearms aren't that dangerous for a prepared witch".
Part of the time when I was reading Deathly Hallows, and all of the time I was reading MoR I always expected Harry or at least SOMEONE else to act like Kiritsugu from Fate/Zero. Imagine: Enchanted portkeys with no destination yet programmed in attached to home made bombs, flash-bang grenades as a staple in wizarding duels to disrupt aiming/concentration, to say nothing of the videogameesque ability to actually carry around an entire armory with you or heal yourself much quicker EVEN IF YOU DON'T USE MAGIC.
(For those of you who don't know, Kiritsugu is a mage assassin who takes advantage of the Magic Association's technophobia and uses weapons as a regular part of the kit: Mages aren't going to defend against you if you're a mile off with a sniper rifle and they aren't going to defend against landmines if they don't know they exist!)
Edit: Actually, scratch the Kiritsugu idea I just want Neville to cast a shield charm of some sort at his feet so he can rocket jump from staircase to staircase at some point. Pity Quake 2 is five years in the future.
See "Secrecy and Openness". I directly contradicted Rowling in that chapter for exactly that reason. Roughly, a good wizard or witch who knows what's coming can easily raise a shield against bullets. Bombs are more difficult, although e.g. the Castle Hogwarts would just shrug them off. And there are ancient devices and certain old structures that could stand up to point-blank nuclear weapons, but they're rare.
One could get around that by having a gun type fission bomb with something other than explosives to launch the bullet (say compressed gas).
You're making this too complicated. As evidenced by the levitate-slowly-to-the-ground spell, they've already got magics in-universe that impede the maximum kinetic energy of an object.
Just surround the entire area with a field that inhibits maximum relative velocities to something an arrow could achieve. No more guns, no more bombs, no more nukes. Problem solved.
HP:MoR does imply however that one needs extra-special power to destroy artifacts -- e.g. the FiendFyre which in canon is one of the few things that can destroy a Horcrux, is also mentioned (not by name, but implicitly as a type of cursed fire) in HP:MOR by Quirrel as what would be used to destroy an artifact like the Sorting Hat.
So I don't think Harry just snapping the Elder Wand in two could happen in the 'verse of HP:MoR.
It really shouldn't have been allowed even in the movie. (NB: I haven't seen the movie; I'm only relying on CronoDAS's description.)
The most recent update would suggest that fairly standard shielding charms can stop blunt impact.
"Daphne could hardly see the movement as Susan seemed to hit the corridor wall and then bounce off it like she was a rubber ball and her legs smashed into Jugson's face, it didn't go through the shield but the sixth-year went sprawling backward with the impact"
There appears to be conservation of momentum, but the momentum from typical firearms spread out over your entire body isn't even going to leave a bruise, assuming said charms are up to dealing with something with as much sectional density and velocity as a bullet.
IMO a good model for wizard duels vis a vis muggle innovations and creative thinking is the ritualized warfare practiced in the Americas in pre-Columbian times. Lot's of punches pulled, lots of unstated mutual agreements not to escalate, and a general low-intensity level of aggression that doesn't get too many people killed.
Hm. In Chapter 74, we learn that all ritual magic requires a sacrifice, and Harry muses about all the pulled punches in wizard warfare. Iiinteresting.
Especially since Quirrell/Voldemort specifically mentions that it is possible to sacrifice "a portion" of one's own magical power -- permanently -- to achieve 'great effects'. I imagine a nefarious individual could conceive of a rite whereby the sacrifice of another wizard's life -- and by extension, his magic -- would cause at least some portion of that magic to be transferred to yourself.
Perhaps older wizards were more powerful because... they had more power? One could easily conceive of Godric Griffindor using this method of execution upon potential Dark Lords in order to combat more-powerful ones.
That seems like an effective method of imprisonment. Force the wizard to expend their power permanently in rituals (or just one powerful ritual). Such a prison would be significantly safer than Azkaban, since any wizards which escape would be effectively useless. They would be permanently helpless; some might consider it an even worse fate than dementors.
On further thought, perhaps that is why the public accepts dementors. Imagine what the prison system could have been before dementors were harnessed for prison work. The state would have an incentive to label people as criminals, so that it could burn their magic. The entire situation would degrade into an ever worsening police state. The discovery of dementors for prison use would be a humanitarian breakthrough akin to the abolishing of Capital Punishment.
Also, many parents in the holocaust were forced to either leave there children or die. Many were forced to sacrifce themselves for their significant other or watch them both die. Consent (as wormtail shows) can be based on a wide variety of factors that might not involve you being truly aligned with how you feel about the ritual itself. A muggle might walk into the gas chamber willingly to save his/her spouses life but the harry potter verse never deals with "how much consent is consent".
Possible in-universe explanation: I would guess people suspect that barring emergencies double-wizards keep their abilities secret. So Susan can use her double-wizard abilities just that once when she really needs to. A double-wizard would get in trouble for using their abilities all the time just as a wizard would get in trouble if they used magic around Muggles all the time. Also, what Harry does is so weird that it doesn't even fit what they think a double-wizard might do.
Probable actual explanation: Eliezer didn't think of the double-wizard initially.
"What's your name?"
The black cloak rotated slightly, back and forth, it didn't look like shoulders shrugging, but it conveyed a shrug. "That is the riddle, young Ravenclaw. Until you solve it, you may call me whatever you wish."
The ... riddle, eh? Hmm. What with that, and the "Tell them I ate it" describing an avatar of Death earlier, I can't help thinking that Tom has failed to pay full attention to that Evil Overlord list of his.
(Assuming, at least for the sake of argument and perhaps for other reasons of which I shall not speak here, that both Quirrell and Hat&Cloak are Voldemort.)
This may have been pointed out before, but not where Google and I could find it.
Harry, speculating in Chapter 25:
Some intelligent engineer, then, had created the Source of Magic, and told it to pay attention to a particular DNA marker.
The obvious next thought was that this had something to do with "Atlantis".
Harry had asked Hermione about that earlier - on the train to Hogwarts, after hearing Draco say it - and so far as she knew, nothing more was known than the word itself.
It might have been pure legend. But it was also plausible enough that a civilization of magic-users, especially one from before the Interdict of Merlin, would have managed to blow itself up.
The line of reasoning continued: Atlantis had been an isolated civilization that had somehow brought into being the Source of Magic, and told it to serve only people with the Atlantean genetic marker, the blood of Atlantis.
"Worse than any peril I know," said Albus. "But probably not worse than whatever erased Atlantis from Time."
The Friendly AI Critical Failure Table:
...34: The programmers and anyone else capable of explaining subsequent events are sent into temporal stasis, or
There seems to be an inverse correlation between how much Eliezer likes his chapters and how much I like them. (My favorite chapter is 47)I thought 75 was great. No, it wasn't as funny. It was chapter 74's job to be funny, and chapter 75's job to touch on some serious issues, and that doesn't make it worse.
I really liked Hermione and Harry sitting and talking through their issues in an adult manner. Literature could use more of than and less indignant yelling like the fourth-year-girls recommend.
(In general I also like chapters with lots of dialog. I feel like we get the most character-development-per-pound that way.)
I just like how often not communicating is used in fiction as a false way of creating conflict, but Eliezer shows that you can still have a story (with conflict!) when people try and understand each other.
This is something I hadn't realized explicitly until you pointed it out. But yes, lazy authors don't bother to give their characters conflicting goals or personalities or deep beliefs, so they give them conflicting surface beliefs and then come up with bad excuses for them not to communicate.
But people do hold conflicting surface beliefs and refuse to communicate...
Certain kinds of stupidity may be common and yet too stupid to be a source of interesting conflict in fiction.
I could have sworn that somewhere I saw a comment expressing surprise or disappointment at Snape being taken down so easily -- but I now can't locate the comment.
In case it was someone from here: It seems clear to me that it was Quirrel who both chose to reveal Snape's location, and of course he'd have also contributed to the volley of spells that quickly took down Snape's shield as well. It seems that Quirrel really didn't want Snape getting the situation back under control - and his presence was what Snape didn't anticipate.
Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.
The hiatus is over with today's publication of chapter 73, and the previous thread is approaching the 500-comment threshold, so let's start a new Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread. This is the place to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic and anything related to it.
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: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven. The fanfiction.net author page is the central location for information about updates and links to HPMOR-related goodies, and AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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: