Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality

I believe that the point of the standard PD, as used in HPMOR, is that if person B cooperates, than it is better for person A to defect, and if person B defects, then it it better for person A to defect. It is better collectively for them both to cooperate, but regardless what person B does, it is in person A's advantage to defect.

I'm a little unsure what the criticism against HPMOR was, since Harry was trying to teach Draco Yudkowski's opinion that person A should cooperate only in the case that he could predict that person B would also cooperate.

edited 19th Apr '15 8:26:30 PM by crazysamaritan

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

That is the standard prisoner's dilemma- when this dissonance is absent, there's no dilemma.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

But if we're splitting hairs and being nit-picky, which the critics are apparently doing, then the research itself included all sorts of scenarios, which Harry would have known about.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

... Sure. And thus... ?

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

And thus this is not a weakness in the story. So it appears that most of the "EY got the science wrong" isnt so much that he got it wrong, as he didnt include enough of the details to satisfy the critics.

"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."

That sounds like a good summary.

Link to TRS threads in project mode here.

A random thought I happened to have the other day - with those ideas about transfiguring antimatter, how would that work out once the transfiguration wears off? Previous examples of transfiguration might possibly work out at a mapping-atoms-to-atoms level (or possibly even "merely" a rearrangement of protons/neutrons/electrons, like the purported Metamorphmagus mechanism except at a finer level - I wish we knew whether Harry tried any experiments on whether mass is preserved by transfiguration), but this is an even finer level. After a proton-antiproton pair gets converted into multiple photons which might then get absorbed by other matter...is there any sensible way to "reverse" the mapping?

Lots of things around the explosion will die horribly in short order.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Protons and electrons aren't real anyway. They're just certain features of quantum fields.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

I don't know what's real anymore!

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Admittedly, sort of true. But usually when we speak of particles as excitations of a field it's at the level of more fundamental particles than protons. And outside of QFT, protons and electrons are usually treated as particles with little trouble.

That would be an interesting factor to take into account when figuring out the blast radius...so, a "roasted to a crisp" zone and a larger "delayed horrible death" zone. Really, when put that way it sounds like a nuclear explosion.

The thing is that as I understand it, changing your frame of reference can actually change the number of particles perceived, which makes it hard to talk about specific particles.

I'm not a physicist though.

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

I haven't heard of that concept before...at least up to the level of second quantisation, I can't think of any scenario that seems consistent with that description. (Second quantisation does formalise the concept of "identical particles" which cannot be distinguished even in principle, but that's not quite the same thing.)

Edit: Hmmm, perhaps there's the Unruh effect...I'm not capable of evaluating the details of that analysis, though.

edited 30th Apr '15 10:03:08 AM by ashnazg

Is there a good list of good fanfics of this fanfic around? I don't read enough fanfic in general to have a good idea where the best 10% of stuff congregates*, and that goes doubly for fanfics of fanfics.

• Yeah, yeah, fanfiction.net, but I'm the kind of sod who is intimidated by the large amount of material there when considering how to find good fanfiction. Gossip and looking at the stories by tropers I like has historically been the way I have found good fanfiction.

Well coincidentally enough, Ginny Weasley and The Sealed Intelligence just finished.

It has its moments, but it also has more than a few problems. HPJEV is OOC, Ginny barely does anything, the climax centers around stuff that happened entirely offscreen, there are several plot threads left hanging, some things are never explained, and the ending is very abrupt. It does have some cool ideas though.

edited 15th May '15 10:57:13 PM by storyyeller

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

If it has cool enough plot, I'm down for it.

I just came up with a block for Avana Kedavra. I dreamt that Quirell, the Professor of Islamic Sins, the Professor of Warm Debates, and Snape, were faced with a baby on a tree stump cursed with seven souls, screaming in agony from it. One of them tried to remove the souls one by one. It looked and felt like flaying the baby alive, it was both delicate and horrifying, and after the ear-splitting agony of the first soul being surgically ripped off and left to shrivel, the baby was still covered in spiritual blood, still covered in layers of souls after that, and suffering a hideous torment.

"Just five more times, I think we... we can do this," says the Professor of Warm Debates.

Quirell gets impatient at the idiocy. Steps in, confident. Even though he's not trusted, almost a prisoner. But they unconsciously fear going through this horror again, so many times. In their hearts, they hope he came up with something clever and drastic. And if anything goes wrong, he'll take the blame...

"Avana Kedavra." What a wonderful phrase. Quirell performed one psychosectomy after another, easily and flawlessly, vaporising each soul like they were a forgotten dream.

As usual, his colleagues were impressed, and yet disgusted on a fundamental level. There was nothing wrong with what Quirell had done, technically. But, somehow, it smacked of dishonour, and of the forbidden.

And that's when it came to me.

The killing curse works on anything with a brain, and stops there.

The solution: living clothing, with a rudimentary brain. Not enough to think, perhaps not even enough to suffer, but enough to live.

I'm sure that, with magic, this is hardly impossible. But what will it look like? A leathery living skin? 'Moisturise me!' Or maybe something like Kill La Kill's Life Fibers?

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Just finished reading this fic. Have to say, I'm a fan. The last time I've read an HP fic was probably when the original book series ended. It felt good being back in that world.

MOR was a fun read in general. I'm a sucker for Dangerously Genre-Savvy characters so that helped me overcome Rational!Harry's jerkiness in the beginning.

Kind of dissapointed that they didn't go further in trying to research the Scientific truth behind magic. I felt that was an interesting element of the story.

Well, do you think living armour (as in, organic), is a good AK-blocker?

Also, don't you love how everything made sense in the end, including Harry's jerkiness?

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

That's actually a clever idea.

The problem, of course, is that it will only work once before you need to shed your living armour and grab another suit.

And yeah, I really liked the massive lamshade that the author hung over the entire series.

The solution to that would be to add multiple layers and/or to use a mesh. Think Beehive Barrier, except each "cell" is one autonomous living being, so when one of them gets hit, you've got a hexagonal "hole"/"patch of dead tissue" in your armour, but you don't need to discard the whole layer.

The trouble when one overthinks fiction is that one can always go deeper, so that, wherever you stop, there will be flaws because you didn't think things out sufficienty, be they exploitable loopholes for munchkins, unfortunate implications, or inferred holocausts.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Eliezer Yudkowsky comments on his facebook profile:

In retrospect, one of the literary problems I ran into with Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is that there was no clear signal until the final chapter of what the story was about. [HIGHLY META SPOILERS AHEAD.]

HPMOR, as the title implies, is about Harry's journey as a rationalist.

It starts when Harry encounters a huge problem and opportunity regarding his previous view of sanity and the world. It develops as Harry tries to apply his art, succeeding and failing and learning along the way.

It ends when Harry's belief in his own capability has been broken, and he first perceives the higher standard which he must meet.

A lot of people thought that HPMOR was about uncovering the laws of magic, or poking fun at J. K. Rowling. And it's hard to blame them, because I didn't even try to solve the problem of making the real plot become an expectation and knowledge of the reader... which actually still seems to me like a *bad* literarily-damaging thing to say up front, which is why I'm only saying this now that the story is over.

I think the technique I was missing is that if the great central arc of a story is hidden until the end, it needs a good decoy central arc, and a clear sense of an overarching progress bar toward the decoy arc which the reader can feel incrementing in a satisfying fashion.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Isn't this what author's notes are for?

Blind Final Fantasy 6 Let's Play

I don't know, but I just wanted to bring this remark to the fore.

Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.

Lets talk about our favorite out of context scenes.

Like that time

Voldemort saved Harry's live by knocking over over 100 school girls,

or when Draco spun saying he wanted to be in Griffindor into ice cream,

or when Voldemort glued a bunch of naked students to the ceiling at Harry's request,

or the "your doing SCIENCE with him scene.