This doesn’t warrant one sentence worth of inner dialog? Seriously not buying it. It’s a different Harry hacked together for a different parable and as a plot hack to get rid of the Get Out Of Jail Free Card of Awesomeness +4.
That’s a good reason. So are you saying that Harry actually did do a thorough analysis of his optimal strategy for securing the benefits of time travel for “actually 5 minutes” at some stage but we just don’t hear about it? This would make the situation credible.
This is actually more rational than what you are advocating.
Are you sure you understand what I’m advocating? Your claim here suggests to me that you do not.
The most probable outcome of the thought process I outlined, and I say most probable because this is what my reasoning concluded but Harry is smarter than me, is that he will go and earn enough enough money to buy a time turner just in case. I aren’t advocating the use of the time turner to make reckless experiments or any of the non-authorized uses that Harry had previously used the device for. I actually made it quite clear what I thought of clever experimentation when explaining the note I would send myself. “Arrogant git” was the key phrase if I recall.
What kind of usage is sane? Emergency usage. For example, I would advocate the use of a time turner when locked in a room being tortured and at a high risk of suicide if I do not prevent it. (I liked the touch with the destroying all sharp objects too.) I would also advocate the use for saving lives (including his own depending on circumstances) with minimalist interventions, many of which would be not at all experimental given what he has already safely gotten away with. It would also be extremely valuable in the reduction of risk to have an extra 36 hours available for emergency use. Many threats to Harry’s world optimisation plans will come with some warning. Impending attack of some sort, etc. Having a turner on hand means that he would be able to take more time to make preparations or give th device to McGonnagal in the emergency situation and allow her to prepare. As far as either myself or Harry know she isn’t wise enough to have one on hand herself.
A time turner is a device that is massively useful and it is massively useful even if you use it conservatively and take no risks with it. Having one on hand does not make bad things happen unless you know you will be unable to control your foolish impulses. This is not Harry’s reasoning.
If Harry does not spend at least five minutes thinking through his priorities (let me emphasise that again, spend five minutes) and considering how to acquire (ie. buy) a time turner then both he and the author are making a big mistake. That is not* more rational. It is a rationalization of a decision that was originally made for the purposes of plot balance.
The reasonable solution is clearly for Harry to do is to put “buy time turner” down on his to do list right next to “become ridiculously rich in a week”. It is an obvious smart thing to do but the reader understands why Harry can’t really follow through with these plans for story purposes. Having them judged “not a pressing priority” is a credible explanation.
Timeturner awesomeness for jail escape is pretty much discounted, when jailers know that one has it. And Harry risks being put under constant supervision because of his apparent disability of infancy.
Timeturner awesomeness for jail escape is pretty much discounted, when jailers know that one has it.
It never occurred to me to consider it a literal way to escape from jails. That’s nearly useless. Instead, I consider it, among other things, as a nearly universally more effective med. kit. If someone just fell off the roof would you rather be able to bandage them up a bit or go back and tell them to watch their step?
And Harry risks being put under constant supervision because of his apparent disability of infancy.
… a good reason to not do things that are infantile… and when you do slip up you go back and give yourself a scolding so that you never do the infantile thing in the first place (but still give your past self the scolding note).
Good heavens, Mr. Wedrifid, you can’t change time! Do you think students would be allowed Time-Turners if that was possible? What if someone tried to change their test scores?
Good heavens Mr. Yudkowsky, I thought the inventor of Timeless Decision Theory would have a better grasp on how being the kind of person who would make a certain decision can determine what happens, even when that decision never needs to get made, whether that be with Omega and his boxes or in the stable resolution of time loops.
In all the previous time related events, things worked out how they did because the situation in which Harry did not use the time turner was not stable. If Harry was different (for example, by being Hermione or by not having a Time Turner) then the stable, ‘final version’ given by the universe-time-loop-processor would be the simple one where he doesn’t go mess with stuff. But it wasn’t.
But lets say that for some bizarre reason Harry never found a note warning him about a stumbling risk and he didn’t think to send one back later. At the very least we should find out a few seconds later that the friend fell off the building and landed on a great big padded mat.
Good heavens Mr. Yudkowsky, I thought the inventor of Timeless Decision Theory would have a better grasp on how being the kind of person who would make a certain decision can determine what happens
I do indeed.
I’ve written unpublished fiction about it.
From before TDT was invented, actually.
Harry has not worked all that stuff out yet.
He did work out one important principle so far.
It is called DO NOT MESS WITH TIME.
And considering that he got that result, you seem to have missed some of the implications for how time travel works in that universe which would make it potentially dangerous to try and blackmail reality.
Time travel was the first optimization process I considered which was truly alien enough to deanthropomorphize my thinking; evolutionary biology didn’t do the job, but the unpublished story I was writing about time travel did.
What you’re suggesting is a bit more potentially incredibly dangerous than you seem to think.
What you’re suggesting is a bit more potentially incredibly dangerous than you seem to think.
I think you are mistaking me for straw-wedrifid here. I saw the problem with trying to blackmail reality before he went ahead and actually tried it. But then I’m not eleven and while I am arrogant I am not nearly as arrogant as Harry seems to be.
Exactly. To make certain situations impossible, you have to be the sort of person that makes the correct actions in the impossible situations, the actions making those situations impossible. (This is also at the core of bargaining.) You are not to take the money from two boxes in the Open Box Newcomb’s problem, even if you clearly see that money is there in both of them (and if you have that property, then the situation will never arise).
He was trying to create a stable time loop, which had consequences along the same lines as the Outcome Pump—there’s no way to know which stable time loop you’ll get.
However, if he was using a “being the kind of person” strategy, we might expect he’d avoid being the sort of person who would pass along “DO NOT MESS WITH TIME”.
Yes, to repeat what I said earlier, this seems easy to avoid by replacing his “blank paper” condition with a more general “anything other than a pair of numbers in the given range” condition. I have to suppose Eliezer had him get that specific message because it wouldn’t be good for the story if Harry noticed this fact. Though even if he does take that approach, as with the outcome pump, there’s still other possibilities, because they can screw with Harry’s ability to execute his intended algorithm.
Though even if he does take that approach, as with the outcome pump, there’s still other possibilities, because they can screw with Harry’s ability to execute his intended algorithm.
Yes, like it turning out that he was predetermined to die at the time of the experiment, and never complete it.
He did the same thing every time he used the time turner. I mean every time, even the times when he was being a good boy and using it to manage sleep. the universe doesn’t care whether it is a conversation with McGonnagal, juggling bullies and pies, someone falling off the roof or just bed time.
What does matter to the universe is whether the agent in the time loop is interacting with the time loop in a way that is complex and improbable. That is, factoring large primes should give unpredictable outcomes, long detailed tricks like throwing pies and playing with bullies should be slightly safer, giving yourself a time out simpler again and pre-sheduled study and sleep breaks right down at the bottom of the scale.
I argue that all the instance of time turner differ use differ only in degree. There are many things to do with a time turner that are far, far less disruptive, complex or unstable than what Hermione did when attending multiple classes. Given her interaction with other people who would be encountering her other self there are butterfly effects that would need to be resolved by the system. If Harry set up a smart system to communicate with himself unobtrusively things may be simpler to predict. He could send himself SMS messages (when outside Hogwarts) or use one of those coins to send messages.
What does matter to the universe is whether the agent in the time loop is interacting with the time loop in a way that is complex and improbable. That is, factoring large primes should give unpredictable outcomes, long detailed tricks like throwing pies and playing with bullies should be slightly safer, giving yourself a time out simpler again and pre-scheduled study and sleep breaks right down at the bottom of the scale.
As Eliezer said already, timeturner can’t change the past. One generally can’t even calculate probability of desired outcome of timeturning… Ouch. This is discussed already.
If anyone wants some sf on the subject, I recommend Leiber’s The Big Time and “Try and Change the Past”.
They’re both based on the same premise. The timeline is changeable but highly resistant. Humans can’t change it (that’s the short story) but there are two superhuman sides (called Snakes and Spiders, but never seen onstage) which recruit humans who are willing to be cut out of their timelines just before they die.
I found Vladimir’s utterance (I’m not sure of word’s connotations, I use it in pragmatics sense) incomprehensible on my current level of understanding his intentions and his ways of expressing toughts. So I’ve took literal meaning of his words into current context. However, beside joke part my message points on difficulties in dealing with stable states of closed time loops (the thing).
I found Vladimir’s utterance (I’m not sure of word’s connotations, I use it in pragmatics sense) incomprehensible
This is not an unusual occurrence. V thinks clearly, and thoroughly but presents his conclusions in a way that assumes a similar thinking style and a lot of shared prior knowledge. Petty things like ‘intermediate steps’ are not necessarily included.
Those closed time loops are weird. I considered timeturing before outcome, but, yes, even in that case one can be told by one’s timeturned twin, that all is set up for good outcome. And timeturing after desired outcome… should be done unconditionally, as you can’t know it is not you who caused this outcome. Weird.
Definitely weird. A related consideration is that I would always give reasons for any advice I give my former self. That cuts off a large swath of potential stable loops that consist of me giving myself advice for absolutely no reason at all except that it happens to be stable. The better the reasons I have been given myself the less likely it is that the self perpetuating cycle is a completely arbitrary cycle.
For example, I wouldn’t have sent back “Don’t mess with time”. I would have sent “the universe doesn’t particularly care about your rules and plans you arrogant little git! What’s more likely, guessing your way through 128 bit encryption or something seriously nasty that distracts you from your games, such as ? That’s right. Think.” (Yes, I’d include the ‘arrogant git’ part. That is information I would clearly need to be reminded of!)
Now, not all scary situations give me the chance to write an explanation but a large swath of the probability mass does. While I would still follow the hastily written directive I would also know that to write that particularly message something really bad must be happening. Without having a predetermined policy for giving details I would have no idea whether the message meant something bad almost happened or not. (It also means that I am far less likely to get such a message—I’ll probably get one of the many possible detailed messages.)
The problem is that you aren’t source of advice, you are one of constraints to be satisfied. Any message, that you will reproduce with picometer precision and that will create stable state, will do. Precision isn’t a problem in deterministic world, and maybe in quantum one too (if our neurons are sufficiently classical), but I’m hesitant to estimate influence of one’s preferences on stable state.
The problem is that you aren’t source of advice, you are one of constraints to be satisfied.
I am both. The advice that I will choose to give is determined by the same physics that allows me to breath.
Regarding quantum effects—the uncertainty effects can be amplified based on the elimination of unstable loops. Most obviously when my behavior is determined by a quantum coin. The way that plays out looks seriously when pictured in 4 dimensions.
I read the link and make the same claim I made previously: I am both. The advice that I will choose to give is determined by the same physics that allows me to breath.
Wait a second, you will not choose an advice. You will reproduce the advice (consistency constraint!).
And for the advice to be advice you choose, it must be physically impossible to you to reproduce anything you think is not of your origin. I envy your self-esteem.
Edit: Given condition is sufficient, but not necessary.
I mean that he doesn’t want to deal with the consequences of being known to have stolen a valuable artifact; in other words, he doesn’t to be a fugitive from the wizard police.
I think he doesn’t want to become a criminal by stealing the Time Turner.
This doesn’t warrant one sentence worth of inner dialog? Seriously not buying it. It’s a different Harry hacked together for a different parable and as a plot hack to get rid of the Get Out Of Jail Free Card of Awesomeness +4.
He can’t have inner dialogue during that section, it’s in Minerva’s point of view!
That’s a good reason. So are you saying that Harry actually did do a thorough analysis of his optimal strategy for securing the benefits of time travel for “actually 5 minutes” at some stage but we just don’t hear about it? This would make the situation credible.
No, Harry’s experimental result scared the hell out of him and he decided not to do any more clever experiments until he was fifteen.
This is actually more rational than what you are advocating.
Are you sure you understand what I’m advocating? Your claim here suggests to me that you do not.
The most probable outcome of the thought process I outlined, and I say most probable because this is what my reasoning concluded but Harry is smarter than me, is that he will go and earn enough enough money to buy a time turner just in case. I aren’t advocating the use of the time turner to make reckless experiments or any of the non-authorized uses that Harry had previously used the device for. I actually made it quite clear what I thought of clever experimentation when explaining the note I would send myself. “Arrogant git” was the key phrase if I recall.
What kind of usage is sane? Emergency usage. For example, I would advocate the use of a time turner when locked in a room being tortured and at a high risk of suicide if I do not prevent it. (I liked the touch with the destroying all sharp objects too.) I would also advocate the use for saving lives (including his own depending on circumstances) with minimalist interventions, many of which would be not at all experimental given what he has already safely gotten away with. It would also be extremely valuable in the reduction of risk to have an extra 36 hours available for emergency use. Many threats to Harry’s world optimisation plans will come with some warning. Impending attack of some sort, etc. Having a turner on hand means that he would be able to take more time to make preparations or give th device to McGonnagal in the emergency situation and allow her to prepare. As far as either myself or Harry know she isn’t wise enough to have one on hand herself.
A time turner is a device that is massively useful and it is massively useful even if you use it conservatively and take no risks with it. Having one on hand does not make bad things happen unless you know you will be unable to control your foolish impulses. This is not Harry’s reasoning.
If Harry does not spend at least five minutes thinking through his priorities (let me emphasise that again, spend five minutes) and considering how to acquire (ie. buy) a time turner then both he and the author are making a big mistake. That is not* more rational. It is a rationalization of a decision that was originally made for the purposes of plot balance.
The reasonable solution is clearly for Harry to do is to put “buy time turner” down on his to do list right next to “become ridiculously rich in a week”. It is an obvious smart thing to do but the reader understands why Harry can’t really follow through with these plans for story purposes. Having them judged “not a pressing priority” is a credible explanation.
That’s a good answer.
Timeturner awesomeness for jail escape is pretty much discounted, when jailers know that one has it. And Harry risks being put under constant supervision because of his apparent disability of infancy.
It never occurred to me to consider it a literal way to escape from jails. That’s nearly useless. Instead, I consider it, among other things, as a nearly universally more effective med. kit. If someone just fell off the roof would you rather be able to bandage them up a bit or go back and tell them to watch their step?
… a good reason to not do things that are infantile… and when you do slip up you go back and give yourself a scolding so that you never do the infantile thing in the first place (but still give your past self the scolding note).
Good heavens, Mr. Wedrifid, you can’t change time! Do you think students would be allowed Time-Turners if that was possible? What if someone tried to change their test scores?
Good heavens Mr. Yudkowsky, I thought the inventor of Timeless Decision Theory would have a better grasp on how being the kind of person who would make a certain decision can determine what happens, even when that decision never needs to get made, whether that be with Omega and his boxes or in the stable resolution of time loops.
In all the previous time related events, things worked out how they did because the situation in which Harry did not use the time turner was not stable. If Harry was different (for example, by being Hermione or by not having a Time Turner) then the stable, ‘final version’ given by the universe-time-loop-processor would be the simple one where he doesn’t go mess with stuff. But it wasn’t.
But lets say that for some bizarre reason Harry never found a note warning him about a stumbling risk and he didn’t think to send one back later. At the very least we should find out a few seconds later that the friend fell off the building and landed on a great big padded mat.
I do indeed.
I’ve written unpublished fiction about it.
From before TDT was invented, actually.
Harry has not worked all that stuff out yet.
He did work out one important principle so far.
It is called DO NOT MESS WITH TIME.
And considering that he got that result, you seem to have missed some of the implications for how time travel works in that universe which would make it potentially dangerous to try and blackmail reality.
Time travel was the first optimization process I considered which was truly alien enough to deanthropomorphize my thinking; evolutionary biology didn’t do the job, but the unpublished story I was writing about time travel did.
What you’re suggesting is a bit more potentially incredibly dangerous than you seem to think.
I think you are mistaking me for straw-wedrifid here. I saw the problem with trying to blackmail reality before he went ahead and actually tried it. But then I’m not eleven and while I am arrogant I am not nearly as arrogant as Harry seems to be.
Exactly. To make certain situations impossible, you have to be the sort of person that makes the correct actions in the impossible situations, the actions making those situations impossible. (This is also at the core of bargaining.) You are not to take the money from two boxes in the Open Box Newcomb’s problem, even if you clearly see that money is there in both of them (and if you have that property, then the situation will never arise).
Harry tried “being the kind of person who would make a certain decision” when using the Time Turner. The result was DO NOT MESS WITH TIME.
He was trying to create a stable time loop, which had consequences along the same lines as the Outcome Pump—there’s no way to know which stable time loop you’ll get.
However, if he was using a “being the kind of person” strategy, we might expect he’d avoid being the sort of person who would pass along “DO NOT MESS WITH TIME”.
Yes, to repeat what I said earlier, this seems easy to avoid by replacing his “blank paper” condition with a more general “anything other than a pair of numbers in the given range” condition. I have to suppose Eliezer had him get that specific message because it wouldn’t be good for the story if Harry noticed this fact. Though even if he does take that approach, as with the outcome pump, there’s still other possibilities, because they can screw with Harry’s ability to execute his intended algorithm.
Yes, like it turning out that he was predetermined to die at the time of the experiment, and never complete it.
He did the same thing every time he used the time turner. I mean every time, even the times when he was being a good boy and using it to manage sleep. the universe doesn’t care whether it is a conversation with McGonnagal, juggling bullies and pies, someone falling off the roof or just bed time.
What does matter to the universe is whether the agent in the time loop is interacting with the time loop in a way that is complex and improbable. That is, factoring large primes should give unpredictable outcomes, long detailed tricks like throwing pies and playing with bullies should be slightly safer, giving yourself a time out simpler again and pre-sheduled study and sleep breaks right down at the bottom of the scale.
I argue that all the instance of time turner differ use differ only in degree. There are many things to do with a time turner that are far, far less disruptive, complex or unstable than what Hermione did when attending multiple classes. Given her interaction with other people who would be encountering her other self there are butterfly effects that would need to be resolved by the system. If Harry set up a smart system to communicate with himself unobtrusively things may be simpler to predict. He could send himself SMS messages (when outside Hogwarts) or use one of those coins to send messages.
This “scale” sounds extremely anthropomorphic.
An artifact of human language. The easiest way to describe most things (right down to basic forces) tends to be anthropomorphic.
As Eliezer said already, timeturner can’t change the past. One generally can’t even calculate probability of desired outcome of timeturning… Ouch. This is discussed already.
If anyone wants some sf on the subject, I recommend Leiber’s The Big Time and “Try and Change the Past”.
They’re both based on the same premise. The timeline is changeable but highly resistant. Humans can’t change it (that’s the short story) but there are two superhuman sides (called Snakes and Spiders, but never seen onstage) which recruit humans who are willing to be cut out of their timelines just before they die.
Probability is in the mind. It is the thing that is being calculated.
And the thing is “DO NOT MESS WITH TIME”.
That is a significant quote from the FanFic but I am having difficulty seeing it as relevant to Vladmir’s statement.
I found Vladimir’s utterance (I’m not sure of word’s connotations, I use it in pragmatics sense) incomprehensible on my current level of understanding his intentions and his ways of expressing toughts. So I’ve took literal meaning of his words into current context. However, beside joke part my message points on difficulties in dealing with stable states of closed time loops (the thing).
This is not an unusual occurrence. V thinks clearly, and thoroughly but presents his conclusions in a way that assumes a similar thinking style and a lot of shared prior knowledge. Petty things like ‘intermediate steps’ are not necessarily included.
I disagree with this statement. See earlier discussion of ‘idiot god’ by Richard.
Those closed time loops are weird. I considered timeturing before outcome, but, yes, even in that case one can be told by one’s timeturned twin, that all is set up for good outcome. And timeturing after desired outcome… should be done unconditionally, as you can’t know it is not you who caused this outcome. Weird.
Definitely weird. A related consideration is that I would always give reasons for any advice I give my former self. That cuts off a large swath of potential stable loops that consist of me giving myself advice for absolutely no reason at all except that it happens to be stable. The better the reasons I have been given myself the less likely it is that the self perpetuating cycle is a completely arbitrary cycle.
For example, I wouldn’t have sent back “Don’t mess with time”. I would have sent “the universe doesn’t particularly care about your rules and plans you arrogant little git! What’s more likely, guessing your way through 128 bit encryption or something seriously nasty that distracts you from your games, such as ? That’s right. Think.” (Yes, I’d include the ‘arrogant git’ part. That is information I would clearly need to be reminded of!)
Now, not all scary situations give me the chance to write an explanation but a large swath of the probability mass does. While I would still follow the hastily written directive I would also know that to write that particularly message something really bad must be happening. Without having a predetermined policy for giving details I would have no idea whether the message meant something bad almost happened or not. (It also means that I am far less likely to get such a message—I’ll probably get one of the many possible detailed messages.)
The problem is that you aren’t source of advice, you are one of constraints to be satisfied. Any message, that you will reproduce with picometer precision and that will create stable state, will do. Precision isn’t a problem in deterministic world, and maybe in quantum one too (if our neurons are sufficiently classical), but I’m hesitant to estimate influence of one’s preferences on stable state.
I am both. The advice that I will choose to give is determined by the same physics that allows me to breath.
Regarding quantum effects—the uncertainty effects can be amplified based on the elimination of unstable loops. Most obviously when my behavior is determined by a quantum coin. The way that plays out looks seriously when pictured in 4 dimensions.
Not necessarily.
Self-existing objects and auto-generated information in chronology-violating space-times: A philosophical discussion
I read the link and make the same claim I made previously: I am both. The advice that I will choose to give is determined by the same physics that allows me to breath.
Wait a second, you will not choose an advice. You will reproduce the advice (consistency constraint!).
And for the advice to be advice you choose, it must be physically impossible to you to reproduce anything you think is not of your origin. I envy your self-esteem.
Edit: Given condition is sufficient, but not necessary.
You don’t have to reproduce the advice. And if you don’t, you won’t have to.
That is important special case: the advice = no advice. But that is easy to overlook, thanks.
Well, you’ve convinced me.
I guess you could argue that it wasn’t criminal to do so, but he had no qualms about stealing gold from his bank vault.
I mean that he doesn’t want to deal with the consequences of being known to have stolen a valuable artifact; in other words, he doesn’t to be a fugitive from the wizard police.