Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

[Wolfgang of Borg]

"You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signaling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualize a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?"

OMG, you know that story about meta-ethical relativism i'm always linking to? Written by AI researcher and singularitarian Eliezer Yudkowsky? Well he also writes fan fic!

The premise being that aunt Petunia married a science professor, and Harry grew up to be a bookish Less Wrong-style rationalist:

Harry considered the question. /Was/ he really Harry Potter? "I only know what other people have told me," Harry said. "It's not like I remember being born." His hand brushed his forehead. "I've had this scar as long as I remember, and I've been told my name was Harry Potter as long as I remember. But," Harry said thoughtfully, "if there's already sufficient cause to postulate a conspiracy, there's no reason why they wouldn't just find another wizarding orphan and raise him to believe that /he/ was Harry Potter -"

Squee! I may have to make another crappy userbar.

[Rys]

I have a great many other things clamoring for my time, but upon reading this I immediately made a note of the address. Thank you very much for bringing this to my attention.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

Just wanted to add that this piece of brilliance now has an RSS feed, so you no longer have to register at fanfiction.net for chapter updates, u can get them in your feed reader now.

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I'm happy you found it interesting Rys! I learned about it from drhoz's LJ.

Um, i'd be interested if you have any thoughts on the second half of Chapter 19 (when Quirrell has Harry beaten to 'teach him how to lose')? I found that whole section really really bizarre -- obviously Quirrell may just be a manipulative sadist enjoying himself, but what exactly did Harry think he was learning, given that he's already a self-proclaimed pessimist? I didn't understand what was going on there at all.

[Rys]

I'm afraid I haven't gotten very far in it yet. I made a note of the address as I said I would, but since then a great many other things have appeared and demanded portions of my finite free time. I hope to read much more of it soon, but then again that has been the state of things for some time. Perhaps this will provide the needed extra bit of motivation, though.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

No worries, just curious if you had any insights. Imho this thing is definitely worth making time for, probably even for non-Rowling-fans.. the bit about prime factorisation is hilarious!

[Rys]

I'm about to begin section nine, and I must say that I have been enjoying the experience immensely; I find it absolutely brilliant in both senses. Again I thank you for recommending it.

[Rys]

I have finished chapter 19, and, happily, I believe that I may be able to take some action against your confusion. Harry is a pessimist, but he is a pessimist so that he can, he thinks, plan and prepare for the worst and so overcome it. He feels that he has to win, whatever form winning may take, at whatever he does that he considers important (and if he does not consider something important he does not do it for very long, as we saw with the broomsticks), because if he loses he will become worse than ordinary, someone who had great potential but failed to live up to it. This is so deeply ingrained into him that he refuses to lose even small, relatively inconsequential battles, and to avoid small losses he is willing to risk far greater losses in his pursuit of victory. What he was learning was that sometimes the best course of action is to lose (or at least look like you have lost). This seems obvious, but Harry had both an intense drive to win at everything and the intellect to achieve victory in situations others would have considered hopeless.

As for Quirrell...his motivations interest me greatly; he appears to me to be genuinely trying, not without success, to help Harry, but I am not yet sure why.

I could be entirely wrong, of course, but that is my interpretation; I hope that it helped.

[Wolfgang of Borg]

This thing has just gone on hiatus (until sometime in January) after a climactic set of chapters (beginning here), so now might be a good time for ya'll to read it if u haven't already. Which you totally should: the setting is as good as the Rowling version, but the characters are actually smart in this one.

(And even if you don't like Harry Potter it is still quite a fascinating read, in that fanfic often places the neuroses of the author in sharp relief, and the author of this fic is a transhumanist -- one of the most interesting intellectual movements in play today imho.)

Oh, and Mad-Eye Moody just turned up again:

When Alastor Moody had lost his eye, he had commandeered the services of a most erudite Ravenclaw, Samuel H. Lyall, whom Moody mistrusted slightly less than average because Moody had refrained from reporting him as an unregistered werewolf; and he had paid Lyall to compile a list of every known magical eye, and every known hint to their location.

When Moody had gotten the list back, he hadn't bothered reading most of it; because at the top of the list was the Eye of Vance, dating back to an era before Hogwarts, and currently in the possession of a powerful Dark Wizard ruling over some tiny forgotten hellhole that wasn't in Britain or anywhere else he'd have to worry about silly rules.

That was how Alastor Moody had lost his left foot and acquired the Eye of Vance, and how the oppressed souls of Urulat had been liberated for a period of around two weeks before another Dark Wizard moved in on the power vacuum.

He'd considered going after the Left Foot of Vance next, but had decided against it after he realized that would be /just what they were expecting/.

I ♥ PARANOIDS!!

(Erm, and plus a bit in the latest chapter (again) puzzled me: when Harry is thinking about the Milgram Experiment, and how only 7.5% of the population are (like Hermione) able to stand up against authority figures enough to refuse to electroshock an innocent person, he seems to believe that such a capacity represents an extra ability on their part, rather than a failure of the (apparently common, and therefore possibly evolutionarily advantageous) "obey your elders" mental module. ... Why?)

Anyway: it's a great read, and i'm gonna be very busy trying to catch up on even just a few of the many many awesome references that it's thrown out thus far before it starts up again... first stop: Cialadini's Influence (.pdf).

[Rys]

As I understood it, he pessimistically proposed that idea but then rejected it because, if I remember correctly, it's improbable that the necessary structures could be passed on unless they were a in the general design, so to speak. Doesn't he then think that this is a good thing because it means that the others can likely be taught? I'm on a bit of a tight schedule at the moment, so I can't go check, but I seem to recall that that was it.