Honestly, Harry is placing far too little weight on the hypothesis that Hermione actually did do exactly what she confessed to under Veritaserum.
Story-logic would indicate that she is indeed innocent, and we as readers have evidence that someone has indeed been messing with her mind, but Harry doesn’t know what we as readers know. And, to be honest, in a similar situation in the real world, I’d also conclude that the 11 year old probably did indeed do exactly what she is accused of doing.
Story-logic would indicate that she is indeed innocent, and we as readers have evidence that someone has indeed been messing with her mind, but Harry doesn’t know what we as readers know.
Harry’s had 7 months to know that Hermione isn’t a sociopath or a psychopath, that she’s a very kind and moral and ethical person instead.
What’s the prior probability he should therefore assign to this person, out of all of Hogwarts, to be the one to commit a cold-blooded murder on another 11-year-old kid? I think he’s giving the hypothesis of her actual guilt pretty much all the weight that it deserves—effectively zero.
Outside view: when someone in a similar situations does do something horrible, all of his friends and family insist that they “have no idea how he could have done something like this”.
I wonder how much of that is a “don’t speak bad of the dead” reflex, or “nobody could have seen it, so it’s not my fault I didn’t”, or even just “I’m such a good & loving friend/relative I didn’t see anything wrong with him”.
I’m sure there are cases that really came out of the blue, but I also have a nagging feeling that if you could interview the same people before the something horrible, and do it from an insider point of view (i.e., a question asked by another friend of the interviewee rather than by a reporter), a lot of answers would be of the “he’s kind of a weirdo” type.
Now update on the amount of people who call somebody “a weirdo” who does not end up murdering anyone. And add the negative halo effect, and fundamental attribution fallacy, from knowing in hindsight that the person you’re talking about has recently murdered someone.
As I said, I don’t really have any real evidence, and I believe it’d be very hard to collect. That said:
Now update on the amount of people who call somebody “a weirdo” who does not end up murdering anyone.
I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean by this. Let H=(did something horrible), S=(really suspicious), W=(just a bit creepy, weird, etc.).
I suspect that (H & S) > (H & W & !S) > (H & !W & !S) and that 1 > H/S >> H/(W & !S) >> H/(!W & !S). All fractions are low, but I’m not sure what you mean to say by that.
And add the negative halo effect, and fundamental attribution fallacy, from knowing in hindsight that the person you’re talking about has recently murdered someone.
I’m pretty sure such effects are not linearly additive. Especially when there’s a conflict (friend/non-hated-family, did something bad), I don’t think you can determine the result just by logic, you have to see what people actually do.
Notice how media narratives tend to become either “I always knew he was up to no good” or “I’d never have thought he would do something like that”, but you almost never hear something in the middle. I’m even having trouble finding a concise wording for a middle case other than “meh”.
I’m sure the media has a lot to do with that, showing just the witnesses with the most “interesting” story, but I’m almost sure people also do this more-or-less automatically in their heads.
I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean by this.
You said,
if you could interview the same people before the something horrible [...] a lot of answers would be of the “he’s kind of a weirdo” type.
What I meant was: you should also consider the amount of cases where people said the same “he’s kind of a weirdo”, but that person did not go on to do something horrible. And also the amount of cases where people did not say it, and yet the person did something horrible. All three are necessary to calculating the strength of the evidence “people say he’s kind of a weirdo” in favor of the hypothesis “he will do something horrible”.
There’s a common fallacy, which you may not have committed, but which your comment as written seemed to me to evoke. Logically it’s equivalent to base rate neglect. In conversation, it’s often triggered like this: a nontrivial value for P(A|B) is given, but the probability P(A|~B) is not mentioned. The listener doesn’t have a good estimation of P(A) or P(B), and he doesn’t think to ask; instead the high value of P(A|B) makes him think B is a good predictor of A, which is a fallacy. (Here, A=be called a weirdo, B=commit horrible deed.)
I’m pretty sure such effects are not linearly additive.
I’m not saying they’re linear or otherwise well-behaved, but I’m pretty sure they are all generally additive in the sense that in any given combination, if you increase any of the factors, the total also increases.
Notice how media narratives tend to become either “I always knew he was up to no good” or “I’d never have thought he would do something like that”, but you almost never hear something in the middle. I’m even having trouble finding a concise wording for a middle case other than “meh”.
It may also be that “I’d never have thought he’d do that” is the middle, the default way in which people think of anyone they have no reason to specially suspect. After all, I don’t expect a random stranger on the street to suddenly commit a horrible deed; why should I expect it more of an acquaintance unless there are concrete warning signs, which would make me say “I always knew he was up to no good”.
The true opposite of “I always knew...” would on this view be like Harry’s reaction to Hermione confessing attempted murder: “I don’t believe she did it, it’s a priori so improbable there must be another explanation or very special circumstances”. However, when the media has concluded someone has committed a horrible deed and is morally culpable, of course you won’t hear many people saying this to the media, even if they think so privately.
you should also consider the amount of cases where people said the same “he’s kind of a weirdo”, but that person did not go on to do something horrible. And also the amount of cases where people did not say it, and yet the person did something horrible. All three are necessary to calculating the strength of the evidence “people say he’s kind of a weirdo” in favor of the hypothesis “he will do something horrible”
Well, yeah, I agree, but I wasn’t trying to do that. At least I don’t think I was, and if it’s an implied assumption in what I said I don’t see it.
My original comment just said that I suspect many of the “I had no suspicion” after-crime statements are false (consciously or not), and was based mostly on how I suspect people’s brains might react, not on the rates of horrible acts.
My second comment I think said the same thing your quote above does, except adding that I also suspect a certain ordering of rates. But as I said in my first comment, I don’t have the actual rates and I believe they’re hard to obtain, so it’s just a suspicion.
After all, I don’t expect a random stranger on the street to suddenly commit a horrible deed; why should I expect it more of an acquaintance unless there are concrete warning signs, which would make me say “I always knew he was up to no good”.
The true opposite of “I always knew...” would on this view be like Harry’s reaction to Hermione confessing attempted murder: “I don’t believe she did it, it’s a priori so improbable there must be another explanation or very special circumstances”.
That’s true. I guess there are just very few people with this kind of reasoning (à la the Wizengamot); once they heard it happened, most probably take it for granted it was so, and they have only the “knew it all the time”/“didn’t see it coming” alternatives.
After all, I don’t expect a random stranger on the street to suddenly commit a horrible deed; why should I expect it more of an acquaintance unless there are concrete warning signs, which would make me say “I always knew he was up to no good”.
For a random stranger you have only the base rate to go on, you’ve got no other evidence. (Though for specific strangers you might have stuff like “he looks like a mobster” or “I’m in a dangerous neighborhood”, or maybe “he’s black and wears a hoodie”, which are a bit different as signs go.)
My claim is not quite that “weird people murder more often”. Instead, I suspect that “of the people who murder, a big majority were not stable/calm enough before and did give signs before”, and many if not most of the cases of people claiming there were no signs are because they just forget or ignore those signs.
(The two sentences are different if it so happens that there are very few people that give no signs, enough so that the fraction of them who do horrible things is less than the fraction of those who did give signs. Which I believe unlikely but not quite impossible.)
In some cases, people who commit major violence have a history of minor violence.
However, another possibility is that even people who commit major violence have people they like and/or want to please, and behave better in some contexts than in others.
This could easily be face-saving. You can’t well publicly say, “You know, I thought he might have been a dangerous criminal, but I didn’t bother trying to prevent any crimes.”
And you’re ignoring the many more cases where people expected a person to be a murderer and he wasn’t.
I was pretty sure that “prior probability of a normal girl just hauling off and murdering someone in cold blood” was a Knox allusion. I wonder if Ms. Knox herself has read it.
Well, sure, but it’s also an allegory for everyone sent to prison for using marijuana by politicians who somehow manage to care more about other things than about smashing the life of some nice person who never hurt anyone; and an allegory for the public response to 9/11/2001. Et cetera. If story events only allegorized one insanity at a time, the story would have to be three times as long to make the same set of points.
Harry had read the Daily Prophet that morning. The headline had been “MAD MUGGLEBORN TRIES TO END ANCIENT LINE” and the rest of the paper had been the same. When Harry was nine years old the IRA had blown up a British barracks, and he’d watched on TV as all the politicians contested to see who could be the most loudly outraged. And the thought had occurred to Harry—even then, before he’d known much about psychology—that it looked like everyone was competing to see who could be most angry, and nobody would’ve been allowed to suggest that anyone was being too angry, even if they’d just proposed the saturation nuclear bombing of Ireland. He’d been struck, even then, by an essential emptiness in the indignation of politicians—though he hadn’t had the words to describe it, at that age—a sense that they were trying to score cheap points by hitting at the same safe target as everyone else.
As for the following:
And I disagree, it’s not much of a marijuana allegory. Marijuana users aren’t even accused of harming people.
It’s not an Amanda Knox allegory either, then, as the person that Knox was accused of killing wasn’t the last scion of an aristocratic house.
I think you’re perhaps misusing the word “allegory” to mean “applicability”, the thing that Tolkien also complained about in regards to people reading things into his work… Allegory pretty much demands pretty much everything to be a 1-to-1 mapping to something else, like the events and characters of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Applicability just means that you can apply the lessons of the story to real world events...
9/11: Honestly, the response to 9/11 was astoundingly restrained, all things considered. I didn’t get that vibe from it at all. The war was fought in surprisingly subtle fashion, and most of the commentary was about things like “Let’s not blame Islam for this”.
Marijuana: I meant that line to be somewhat snarky ;)
9/11: Honestly, the response to 9/11 was astoundingly restrained, all things considered.
The response was two major wars that lasted a decade, and atleast one of them against a country completely unconnected to the 9/11 attacks.
If that was restrained, then so was the Noble Houses’ response to the attempted attack by a mudblood against House Malfoy. After all they could have been launching counterattacks against anyone who ever befriended Hermione, or against Hermione’s family.
Indeed at least Malfoy thought Hermione involved. The people who excused the Iraq war by referring to 9/11 don’t even have as much an excuse.
Iraq was hardly a “response to 9/11”. It’d been a festering sore of American foreign policy for over a decade, and(idiotic public perception aside) it wasn’t sold as a response to 9/11.
That’s untrue. I quote from the Iraq Resolution, the document passed by Congress declaring war:
Whereas members of al Qaida, an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens, and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, are known to be in Iraq;
Whereas Iraq’s demonstrated capability and willingness to use weapons of mass destruction, the risk that the current Iraqi regime will either employ those weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so, and the extreme magnitude of harm that would result to the United States and its citizens from such an attack, combine to justify action by the United States to defend itself;
Whereas the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001, underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations;
Whereas the United States is determined to prosecute the war on terrorism and Iraq’s ongoing support for international terrorist groups combined with its development of weapons of mass destruction in direct violation of its obligations under the 1991 cease-fire and other United Nations Security Council resolutions make clear that it is in the national security interests of the United States and in furtherance of the war on terrorism that all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions be enforced, including through the use of force if necessary;
Whereas Congress has taken steps to pursue vigorously the war on terrorism through the provision of authorities and funding requested by the President to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;
Whereas the President and Congress are determined to continue to take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations;
Whereas the President has authority under the Constitution to take action in order to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States, as Congress recognized in the joint resolution on Authorization for Use of Military Force (Public Law 107-40); and
I estimate that around half of the clauses in the preamble, which were official justifications given by the US for the war, deal with international terrorism, of which around a half mention al-Qaeda or 9/11.
Also, more broadly, do you really think we would have invaded Iraq without the hyper-jinoistic atmosphere caused by 9/11? (Remember, Bush campaigned in 1999 as an isolationist, who wanted to end Clintonian nationbuilding.)
“At the outset of the war, the U.S. Congress and public opinion supported the notion that the Iraq War was part of the global war on terror. The 2002 Congressional resolution authorising military force against Iraq cited the U.S. determination to “prosecute the war on terrorism”, and in April 2003, one month after the invasion, a poll found that 77% of Americans agreed that the Iraq War was part of the War on Terror”
So, yeah, the war on Iraq was very much a response to 9/11, in the sense of being sold as being part of the same “global war on terror” that was supposedly launched in response to 9/11.
The 9/11 reference makes more sense if you’ve read “when none dare urge restraint.” It’s about how people constantly said we should be stronger against terror (punish hermione) and nobody suggested that we just rebuild and not go to war.
The marajuana is a reference to Amanda Knox. She was convicted based on the theory that she killed her roommate in a fit of REEFER MADNESS. Less Wrong, armed with some logic and the sword of Bayes, made a write up called Amanda Knox, how an hour on the internet beats a year in the courtroom, and figured out the likelyhood for her guilt. We had a you be the jury and later a post mortem, and mostly considered her innocent when the court (and world) said she was guilty.
They’re both strong inspirations for the recent arc.
Quirrell didn’t say he caught her. He did not claim to observe Hermione at or departing the duel. Time-travelling Dumbledore did not claim to have observed Hermione at or departing the duel.
We are meant to learn from Rita’s Folly that memories are not worth trust.
What’s the prior one would assign to this person, out of all of Hogwarts, to be the one to commit a cold-blooded murder on another 11-year-old kid?
Pretty small—but not that much smaller than any other random 11 year old trying to kill someone. And in a place like Hogwarts, you’ve got a whole lot of 11-year-olds running around with what can be used as lethal weapons.
Pretty small—but not that much smaller than any other random 11 year old trying to kill someone
I’m sure that Harry’s suspicions won’t be primarily focused on other 11-year olds either. Snape/Quirrel/Voldemort’s ghost would be his prime suspects. If and after he’s eliminated them, he’ll probably move to other professors, and then to upper-classmen students.
If he’s in the end reduced to investigating 11-year old suspects, he’d probably still be first considering people like Zabini, or Crabbe, or Padma first. And now that i think of it, Susan Bones too, since who knows whether her double-witch powers are in reality a hint of some dark power possessing her or whatever.
“effectively zero”, meaning “so small as to be utterly negligible”, is however.
Confusing the difference between utterly negligible non-zero probability and small non-zero probability that’s enough to pay attention to is an annoying but common fallacy. There should be a name for it already, does anyone know what it is?
I’m having a hard time thinking of evidence that would be stronger than the evidence against Hermione. Even if Harry saw her hex Malfoy with his own eyes, I wouldn’t put it past him to suspect he was memory charmed. It doesn’t seem like Harry is seriously considering the possibility that Hermione is actually guilty. Can you think of evidence that would cause him to raise the probability, not even to 50%, but to 5%?
And why does Harry believe in the innocence of Hermione? Take the outside view. It is the first crush of a child. Natural selection did not spit out such a thing as pure innocents.
There could be multiple witnesses, Harry could have seen it himself, there could be indications of premeditated anger at Malfoy (older than what the court legilimens found), or some reason why she would be extra angry at him.
Hermione knocks on the door of the Headmaster’s office, while Harry and Dumbledore are having a chat. “I thought you’d like to know,” she says, “I’m going to kill Draco Malfoy.” She then turns around and leaves. Harry laughs nervously, but Dumbledore looks worried. “We probably ought to follow her.”
They arrive at the trophy room just in time to see Hermione stun Malfoy and cast the blood-cooling charm on him. She turns around and sees Harry, and smiles. “Well, now you’re safe, Harry.”
The subsequent investigation reveals that, as a protest against Binn’s teaching, she’d been submitting plans of ways to kill Malfoy as her homework for months now, and then stopped a week ago, with the last one involving the blood-cooling charm.
What’s Harry’s probability that Hermione was the hand behind the dagger? (Or, to put it another way, is there enough evidence out there that’s stronger evidence for “Hermione did it of her own free will” than “Hermione was the pawn in someone else’s game” that could put Harry up to even 5% probaiblity that Hermione did it herself?)
Rabid defenders of the H.M.S. Harmony, I’d guess. Some of them thought Harry and Hermione were married in 81 in a creepy D/s ceremony.
EY has attracted them because there’s a ship tease or toy ship or whatever. And because maybe he’s a bit of a Harmonizer himself, as he had said he couldn’t get into the later books.
The downvotes are leaking away, though. So that’s something.
You’re using TVTropes here to generalize from fictional evidence. Normally you can apply this effectively to other works of fiction, but I think Methods is written largely with the aim of avoiding conventional ‘story-logic’ in favor of logic that could actually work in the real world.
I’m sorry? Dog-latin magic that runs on Aristotelian physics and enables non-Turing-computable time travel is “logic that could actually work in the real word”?
No matter how much Eliezer may want to avoid story-logic, to actually do it would require completely contradicting canon every other sentence. Logic that works in HP, even HPMOR, is not the same logic that works for us.
The fact that we as readers can divide the story into elements where we apply magic-logic and elements where we apply real-world-logic is exactly evidence that the story as a whole runs on story logic and TVTropes. Story logic allows such compartmentalization, because humans tend to think that way. Real world logic doesn’t.
Dog-latin magic that runs on Aristotelian physics and enables non-Turing-computable time travel is “logic that could actually work in the real world”?
No, it’s a set of premises which happen not to be true in the real world. Logic consists of starting with a set of premises and making conclusions. Obviously Harry Potter is going to arrive at different conclusions about his world, than we will arrive at about ours. That doesn’t mean that he is using a special kind of logic called “magic-logic”.
If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you’re going to die. So they’ll talk. They’ll gloat. They’ll watch you squirm. They’ll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.
Also, you are suggesting that Hermione was convinced that killing Draco was the right thing to do. That’s probably incorrect: she was described as saying she stunned Draco in a “fit of anger” and felt horrible afterward.
(The only reason I say “probably” is because the court Legilimens did, in fact, find her fantasizing about how she thought Draco might cause harm to her or Harry.)
Well, the non-fictional relevance of the quote is that it represents the views of the author, who may or may not be basing his opinion on fictional evidence.
Also, you are suggesting that Hermione was convinced that killing Draco was the right thing to do. That’s probably incorrect: she was described as saying she stunned Draco in a “fit of anger” and felt horrible afterward.
(The only reason I say “probably” is because the court Legilimens did, in fact, find her fantasizing about how she thought Draco might cause harm to her or Harry.)
Well, the non-fictional relevance of the quote is that it represents the views of the author,
Can we even assert as much? I think we just know that Terry Pratchett just thought it good for his book to speak this idea through the narrator. Probably because it lets him (rot13 spoilers for “Guards! Guards!”) unir Pneebg xvyy gur ivyynva dhvpxyl va pbyq oybbq, jvgubhg gur ernqrefuvc fhqqrayl srryvat nf vs gurl bhtug gb guvax gung ur’f n cflpubcnguvp zbafgre.
Actually, based on the Legilimens finding all the fantasies about Draco and Snape conspiring to hurt Harry and her, I’ve adjusted my probability estimate that Hermione actually did it significantly upward.
Hermione has been having paranoid fantasies about her friends being harmed by Draco → Draco attacks her, she weakens Draco → Hermione is suddenly in a position of power over someone she views as a threat to her friends → Hermione temporarily goes crazy and tries to eliminate Draco.
However, my probability that she did this without mind control being the deciding factor is still virtually zero.
My belief is and has always been that she did it, and was not given false memories, nor Imperiused or controlled in any way beyond the Groundhog Day attack. Eliezer believes that humans are hackable (cf. AI box experiments) and this Hermione storyline is showcasing it. Hat-and-Cloak had to find the right hack by proof and error, but once he found it, it was just ordinary words and no magic which influenced Hermione to “freely” decide to murder Draco (just like the AI gatekeepers who “freely” let the AI escape).
ETA: by “proof and error” I meant “trial and error”. I guess the reason for the mental typo is the Spanish equivalent “prueba y error”.
In that case: she knew when she awakened next morning that it should have killed him. If she had known that the night before, then after disabling Draco with the charm, she should alerted a teacher, or maybe woken him up and stunned him the usual way. If she didn’t do any of that, she was knowingly leaving him to die.
Personally my problem with Harry wasn’t so much that he immediately assumed there was a trick (shouldn’t get a probability of 1.0, no, but certainly a basket worth piling some eggs in) but that he assumed the truth would get her off. He never once stopped and asked Dumbledore and Snape “If it was proven that she had been tricked into doing this with false memories, but still cast the spell willingly and with her own hand, would the Wizengamot still convict her?” I don’t even know the answer to that question, but I’d certainly ask before I assumed it was “no”.
Especially considering how draconian the law is and how one of the two most important members of the judge/jury is not only the victim’s father but someone already predisposed to dislike her (for what amounts to unapologetic and on-record racial discrimination). In advance I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a show trial that blatantly ignored the evidence to get a conviction, though Dumbledore’s faction was a bit too vocal for me to expect that with my current knowledge.
He never once stopped and asked Dumbledore and Snape “If it was proven that she had been tricked into doing this with false memories, but still cast the spell willingly and with her own hand, would the Wizengamot still convict her?”
Harry doesn’t know about the GHD attack and so his working hypothesis is that her memory of attempting to kill Draco is false.
“Ah!” Harry said suddenly. “I get it now. The first False Memory Charm was cast on Hermione after Professor Snape yelled at her, and showed, say, Draco and Professor Snape plotting to kill her. Then last night that False Memory was removed by Obliviation, leaving behind the memories of her obsessing about Draco for no apparent reason, at the same time she and Draco were given false memories of the duel.”
Since that was the last theory Harry proposed before he switched from theories to lines of attack, and nobody fully shot it down (there was an objection, but the objection was just that it’d be difficult), I have to assume that was his working theory when he left the room. And I would not automatically assume that this scenario, which we know to be very close to the correct one, would count as “innocent” in front of a wizengamot led by the angry, racist father of the victim.
We know for a fact that Hermione has been manipulated because we’ve seen the scene with Hat and Cloak. That may bias us in favor of thinking the evidence is clearer than it really is. Yet Harry knows that in this universe memories can be tampered with. The prior probability of a morally upstanding little girl trying to murder someone is much less than the prior probability of someone else trying the memory-charm plot, especially given that Hermione is friends with Harry and Harry’s status as the Boy Who Lived makes him a target.
Now, I might put a probability of something like 0.2 on the possibility of Hermione casting the charm after someone messed with her mind. But if you’re the plotter, it’s so much easier to do a false memory charm to make her remember casting the charm, than to do all the delicate manipulation to get her to actually cast it. So more likely than not, Hermione didn’t cast the charm.
Harry is making a subtle mistake here, though: he’s over-confident about his ideas about the details of what was done to Hermione. For example, he thinks a false-memory charm was used to cause Hermione to start obsessing over Draco, when in fact that was based on true memories of a conversation (albeit one involving lies and some kind of shape-shifting/illusion magic). Feminist bank tellers and all that.
Anybody believing Hermione was meddled with ought to be asking who will be next. The mentioned mistake has Harry assuming Hermione didn’t go undetected for six months, so he is far less alarmed than he should be.
Neville is the most likely next target for an attack intended to separate Harry from his allies. Voldemort is probably too clever to try the same trick twice, though.
On the last point: Hermione almost certainly was false memory charmed twice; H&C would have removed the memory of their final conversation and replaced with with something innocuous at the same time as he implanted the false memory of casting the blood-cooling charm, so as to not leave a suspicious gap. He might also have implanted false memories immediately after the groundhog day attack, either to cover up the time gap or to not have Hermione wandering around with an extremely suspicious memory in her head (If Dumbledore or Snape had seen the memory of H&C, or his less-creepy disguise, they probably would have been fairly suspicious).
Honestly, Harry is placing far too little weight on the hypothesis that Hermione actually did do exactly what she confessed to under Veritaserum.
Story-logic would indicate that she is indeed innocent, and we as readers have evidence that someone has indeed been messing with her mind, but Harry doesn’t know what we as readers know. And, to be honest, in a similar situation in the real world, I’d also conclude that the 11 year old probably did indeed do exactly what she is accused of doing.
Harry’s had 7 months to know that Hermione isn’t a sociopath or a psychopath, that she’s a very kind and moral and ethical person instead.
What’s the prior probability he should therefore assign to this person, out of all of Hogwarts, to be the one to commit a cold-blooded murder on another 11-year-old kid? I think he’s giving the hypothesis of her actual guilt pretty much all the weight that it deserves—effectively zero.
Outside view: when someone in a similar situations does do something horrible, all of his friends and family insist that they “have no idea how he could have done something like this”.
I wonder how much of that is a “don’t speak bad of the dead” reflex, or “nobody could have seen it, so it’s not my fault I didn’t”, or even just “I’m such a good & loving friend/relative I didn’t see anything wrong with him”.
I’m sure there are cases that really came out of the blue, but I also have a nagging feeling that if you could interview the same people before the something horrible, and do it from an insider point of view (i.e., a question asked by another friend of the interviewee rather than by a reporter), a lot of answers would be of the “he’s kind of a weirdo” type.
Now update on the amount of people who call somebody “a weirdo” who does not end up murdering anyone. And add the negative halo effect, and fundamental attribution fallacy, from knowing in hindsight that the person you’re talking about has recently murdered someone.
As I said, I don’t really have any real evidence, and I believe it’d be very hard to collect. That said:
I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean by this. Let H=(did something horrible), S=(really suspicious), W=(just a bit creepy, weird, etc.).
I suspect that (H & S) > (H & W & !S) > (H & !W & !S) and that 1 > H/S >> H/(W & !S) >> H/(!W & !S). All fractions are low, but I’m not sure what you mean to say by that.
I’m pretty sure such effects are not linearly additive. Especially when there’s a conflict (friend/non-hated-family, did something bad), I don’t think you can determine the result just by logic, you have to see what people actually do.
Notice how media narratives tend to become either “I always knew he was up to no good” or “I’d never have thought he would do something like that”, but you almost never hear something in the middle. I’m even having trouble finding a concise wording for a middle case other than “meh”.
I’m sure the media has a lot to do with that, showing just the witnesses with the most “interesting” story, but I’m almost sure people also do this more-or-less automatically in their heads.
You said,
What I meant was: you should also consider the amount of cases where people said the same “he’s kind of a weirdo”, but that person did not go on to do something horrible. And also the amount of cases where people did not say it, and yet the person did something horrible. All three are necessary to calculating the strength of the evidence “people say he’s kind of a weirdo” in favor of the hypothesis “he will do something horrible”.
There’s a common fallacy, which you may not have committed, but which your comment as written seemed to me to evoke. Logically it’s equivalent to base rate neglect. In conversation, it’s often triggered like this: a nontrivial value for P(A|B) is given, but the probability P(A|~B) is not mentioned. The listener doesn’t have a good estimation of P(A) or P(B), and he doesn’t think to ask; instead the high value of P(A|B) makes him think B is a good predictor of A, which is a fallacy. (Here, A=be called a weirdo, B=commit horrible deed.)
I’m not saying they’re linear or otherwise well-behaved, but I’m pretty sure they are all generally additive in the sense that in any given combination, if you increase any of the factors, the total also increases.
It may also be that “I’d never have thought he’d do that” is the middle, the default way in which people think of anyone they have no reason to specially suspect. After all, I don’t expect a random stranger on the street to suddenly commit a horrible deed; why should I expect it more of an acquaintance unless there are concrete warning signs, which would make me say “I always knew he was up to no good”.
The true opposite of “I always knew...” would on this view be like Harry’s reaction to Hermione confessing attempted murder: “I don’t believe she did it, it’s a priori so improbable there must be another explanation or very special circumstances”. However, when the media has concluded someone has committed a horrible deed and is morally culpable, of course you won’t hear many people saying this to the media, even if they think so privately.
Well, yeah, I agree, but I wasn’t trying to do that. At least I don’t think I was, and if it’s an implied assumption in what I said I don’t see it.
My original comment just said that I suspect many of the “I had no suspicion” after-crime statements are false (consciously or not), and was based mostly on how I suspect people’s brains might react, not on the rates of horrible acts.
My second comment I think said the same thing your quote above does, except adding that I also suspect a certain ordering of rates. But as I said in my first comment, I don’t have the actual rates and I believe they’re hard to obtain, so it’s just a suspicion.
That’s true. I guess there are just very few people with this kind of reasoning (à la the Wizengamot); once they heard it happened, most probably take it for granted it was so, and they have only the “knew it all the time”/“didn’t see it coming” alternatives.
For a random stranger you have only the base rate to go on, you’ve got no other evidence. (Though for specific strangers you might have stuff like “he looks like a mobster” or “I’m in a dangerous neighborhood”, or maybe “he’s black and wears a hoodie”, which are a bit different as signs go.)
My claim is not quite that “weird people murder more often”. Instead, I suspect that “of the people who murder, a big majority were not stable/calm enough before and did give signs before”, and many if not most of the cases of people claiming there were no signs are because they just forget or ignore those signs.
(The two sentences are different if it so happens that there are very few people that give no signs, enough so that the fraction of them who do horrible things is less than the fraction of those who did give signs. Which I believe unlikely but not quite impossible.)
In some cases, people who commit major violence have a history of minor violence.
However, another possibility is that even people who commit major violence have people they like and/or want to please, and behave better in some contexts than in others.
This could easily be face-saving. You can’t well publicly say, “You know, I thought he might have been a dangerous criminal, but I didn’t bother trying to prevent any crimes.”
And you’re ignoring the many more cases where people expected a person to be a murderer and he wasn’t.
See also: Amanda Knox.
Who, it may be noted, was eventually found innocent.
I was pretty sure that “prior probability of a normal girl just hauling off and murdering someone in cold blood” was a Knox allusion. I wonder if Ms. Knox herself has read it.
Yeah, this set of chapters started making a lot more sense when I realized it was a gigantic Amanda Knox allegory.
Well, sure, but it’s also an allegory for everyone sent to prison for using marijuana by politicians who somehow manage to care more about other things than about smashing the life of some nice person who never hurt anyone; and an allegory for the public response to 9/11/2001. Et cetera. If story events only allegorized one insanity at a time, the story would have to be three times as long to make the same set of points.
Which public response to 9/11 would that be? I’d wager you’re not referring to the “outpouring of grief, sympathy, and CNN ratings” thing here.
And I disagree, it’s not much of a marijuana allegory. Marijuana users aren’t even accused of harming people.
Something like the following?
As for the following:
It’s not an Amanda Knox allegory either, then, as the person that Knox was accused of killing wasn’t the last scion of an aristocratic house.
I think you’re perhaps misusing the word “allegory” to mean “applicability”, the thing that Tolkien also complained about in regards to people reading things into his work… Allegory pretty much demands pretty much everything to be a 1-to-1 mapping to something else, like the events and characters of Orwell’s “Animal Farm”. Applicability just means that you can apply the lessons of the story to real world events...
Was that an accurate description of the British reaction?
9/11: Honestly, the response to 9/11 was astoundingly restrained, all things considered. I didn’t get that vibe from it at all. The war was fought in surprisingly subtle fashion, and most of the commentary was about things like “Let’s not blame Islam for this”.
Marijuana: I meant that line to be somewhat snarky ;)
The response was two major wars that lasted a decade, and atleast one of them against a country completely unconnected to the 9/11 attacks.
If that was restrained, then so was the Noble Houses’ response to the attempted attack by a mudblood against House Malfoy. After all they could have been launching counterattacks against anyone who ever befriended Hermione, or against Hermione’s family.
Indeed at least Malfoy thought Hermione involved. The people who excused the Iraq war by referring to 9/11 don’t even have as much an excuse.
Iraq was hardly a “response to 9/11”. It’d been a festering sore of American foreign policy for over a decade, and(idiotic public perception aside) it wasn’t sold as a response to 9/11.
That’s untrue. I quote from the Iraq Resolution, the document passed by Congress declaring war:
I estimate that around half of the clauses in the preamble, which were official justifications given by the US for the war, deal with international terrorism, of which around a half mention al-Qaeda or 9/11.
Also, more broadly, do you really think we would have invaded Iraq without the hyper-jinoistic atmosphere caused by 9/11? (Remember, Bush campaigned in 1999 as an isolationist, who wanted to end Clintonian nationbuilding.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_War_and_U.S._Global_War_on_Terror
“At the outset of the war, the U.S. Congress and public opinion supported the notion that the Iraq War was part of the global war on terror. The 2002 Congressional resolution authorising military force against Iraq cited the U.S. determination to “prosecute the war on terrorism”, and in April 2003, one month after the invasion, a poll found that 77% of Americans agreed that the Iraq War was part of the War on Terror”
So, yeah, the war on Iraq was very much a response to 9/11, in the sense of being sold as being part of the same “global war on terror” that was supposedly launched in response to 9/11.
The 9/11 reference makes more sense if you’ve read “when none dare urge restraint.” It’s about how people constantly said we should be stronger against terror (punish hermione) and nobody suggested that we just rebuild and not go to war.
The marajuana is a reference to Amanda Knox. She was convicted based on the theory that she killed her roommate in a fit of REEFER MADNESS. Less Wrong, armed with some logic and the sword of Bayes, made a write up called Amanda Knox, how an hour on the internet beats a year in the courtroom, and figured out the likelyhood for her guilt. We had a you be the jury and later a post mortem, and mostly considered her innocent when the court (and world) said she was guilty.
They’re both strong inspirations for the recent arc.
Well, then condition on the fact that Querril caught her and she has memories of doing it.
Quirrell didn’t say he caught her. He did not claim to observe Hermione at or departing the duel. Time-travelling Dumbledore did not claim to have observed Hermione at or departing the duel.
We are meant to learn from Rita’s Folly that memories are not worth trust.
Just what condition is your condition in?
Pretty small—but not that much smaller than any other random 11 year old trying to kill someone. And in a place like Hogwarts, you’ve got a whole lot of 11-year-olds running around with what can be used as lethal weapons.
I’m sure that Harry’s suspicions won’t be primarily focused on other 11-year olds either. Snape/Quirrel/Voldemort’s ghost would be his prime suspects. If and after he’s eliminated them, he’ll probably move to other professors, and then to upper-classmen students.
If he’s in the end reduced to investigating 11-year old suspects, he’d probably still be first considering people like Zabini, or Crabbe, or Padma first. And now that i think of it, Susan Bones too, since who knows whether her double-witch powers are in reality a hint of some dark power possessing her or whatever.
0 is not a sensible probability.
“effectively zero”, meaning “so small as to be utterly negligible”, is however.
Confusing the difference between utterly negligible non-zero probability and small non-zero probability that’s enough to pay attention to is an annoying but common fallacy. There should be a name for it already, does anyone know what it is?
I’m having a hard time thinking of evidence that would be stronger than the evidence against Hermione. Even if Harry saw her hex Malfoy with his own eyes, I wouldn’t put it past him to suspect he was memory charmed. It doesn’t seem like Harry is seriously considering the possibility that Hermione is actually guilty. Can you think of evidence that would cause him to raise the probability, not even to 50%, but to 5%?
And why does Harry believe in the innocence of Hermione? Take the outside view. It is the first crush of a child. Natural selection did not spit out such a thing as pure innocents.
There could be multiple witnesses, Harry could have seen it himself, there could be indications of premeditated anger at Malfoy (older than what the court legilimens found), or some reason why she would be extra angry at him.
Okay.
Hermione knocks on the door of the Headmaster’s office, while Harry and Dumbledore are having a chat. “I thought you’d like to know,” she says, “I’m going to kill Draco Malfoy.” She then turns around and leaves. Harry laughs nervously, but Dumbledore looks worried. “We probably ought to follow her.”
They arrive at the trophy room just in time to see Hermione stun Malfoy and cast the blood-cooling charm on him. She turns around and sees Harry, and smiles. “Well, now you’re safe, Harry.”
The subsequent investigation reveals that, as a protest against Binn’s teaching, she’d been submitting plans of ways to kill Malfoy as her homework for months now, and then stopped a week ago, with the last one involving the blood-cooling charm.
What’s Harry’s probability that Hermione was the hand behind the dagger? (Or, to put it another way, is there enough evidence out there that’s stronger evidence for “Hermione did it of her own free will” than “Hermione was the pawn in someone else’s game” that could put Harry up to even 5% probaiblity that Hermione did it herself?)
If I remember correctly, one of the reasons Harry has a crush on her is that he’s impressed by her moral good sense.
What crush? Can you link a passage that shows that EY means us to understand that Harry has a crush on anyone other than his Time Tuner and Quirrell?
What in the world are all these downvotes for?
Rabid defenders of the H.M.S. Harmony, I’d guess. Some of them thought Harry and Hermione were married in 81 in a creepy D/s ceremony.
EY has attracted them because there’s a ship tease or toy ship or whatever. And because maybe he’s a bit of a Harmonizer himself, as he had said he couldn’t get into the later books.
The downvotes are leaking away, though. So that’s something.
To be fair, there isn’t much difference between the amount of evidence needed for 5% confidence and 50% confidence.
All the more reason to wonder what she’s capable of.
You’re using TVTropes here to generalize from fictional evidence. Normally you can apply this effectively to other works of fiction, but I think Methods is written largely with the aim of avoiding conventional ‘story-logic’ in favor of logic that could actually work in the real world.
I’m sorry? Dog-latin magic that runs on Aristotelian physics and enables non-Turing-computable time travel is “logic that could actually work in the real word”?
No matter how much Eliezer may want to avoid story-logic, to actually do it would require completely contradicting canon every other sentence. Logic that works in HP, even HPMOR, is not the same logic that works for us.
The fact that we as readers can divide the story into elements where we apply magic-logic and elements where we apply real-world-logic is exactly evidence that the story as a whole runs on story logic and TVTropes. Story logic allows such compartmentalization, because humans tend to think that way. Real world logic doesn’t.
No, it’s a set of premises which happen not to be true in the real world. Logic consists of starting with a set of premises and making conclusions. Obviously Harry Potter is going to arrive at different conclusions about his world, than we will arrive at about ours. That doesn’t mean that he is using a special kind of logic called “magic-logic”.
— Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
That’s what happens when you convince a very kind and moral person that there’s someone who needs to be killed.
You’re still using entirely fictional evidence.
Also, you are suggesting that Hermione was convinced that killing Draco was the right thing to do. That’s probably incorrect: she was described as saying she stunned Draco in a “fit of anger” and felt horrible afterward.
(The only reason I say “probably” is because the court Legilimens did, in fact, find her fantasizing about how she thought Draco might cause harm to her or Harry.)
Well, the non-fictional relevance of the quote is that it represents the views of the author, who may or may not be basing his opinion on fictional evidence.
Yeah, you’re probably right about this.
Can we even assert as much? I think we just know that Terry Pratchett just thought it good for his book to speak this idea through the narrator. Probably because it lets him (rot13 spoilers for “Guards! Guards!”) unir Pneebg xvyy gur ivyynva dhvpxyl va pbyq oybbq, jvgubhg gur ernqrefuvc fhqqrayl srryvat nf vs gurl bhtug gb guvax gung ur’f n cflpubcnguvp zbafgre.
...even though appearances can be misleading, they’re usually not.
Although, Draco was beginning to realize, when he and Harry and Professor Quirrell had dismissed Miss Granger as having as much intent to kill as a bowl of wet grapes, they’d never seen her angry.
Actually, based on the Legilimens finding all the fantasies about Draco and Snape conspiring to hurt Harry and her, I’ve adjusted my probability estimate that Hermione actually did it significantly upward.
Hermione has been having paranoid fantasies about her friends being harmed by Draco → Draco attacks her, she weakens Draco → Hermione is suddenly in a position of power over someone she views as a threat to her friends → Hermione temporarily goes crazy and tries to eliminate Draco.
However, my probability that she did this without mind control being the deciding factor is still virtually zero.
My belief is and has always been that she did it, and was not given false memories, nor Imperiused or controlled in any way beyond the Groundhog Day attack. Eliezer believes that humans are hackable (cf. AI box experiments) and this Hermione storyline is showcasing it. Hat-and-Cloak had to find the right hack by proof and error, but once he found it, it was just ordinary words and no magic which influenced Hermione to “freely” decide to murder Draco (just like the AI gatekeepers who “freely” let the AI escape).
ETA: by “proof and error” I meant “trial and error”. I guess the reason for the mental typo is the Spanish equivalent “prueba y error”.
What about the possibility that Draco attacked Hermione with sufficient force that the blood-cooling spell was plausibly self-defense?
A “blood-cooling charm” doesn’t sound like it would have had enough stopping power to be effective in self-defense.
In that case: she knew when she awakened next morning that it should have killed him. If she had known that the night before, then after disabling Draco with the charm, she should alerted a teacher, or maybe woken him up and stunned him the usual way. If she didn’t do any of that, she was knowingly leaving him to die.
Personally my problem with Harry wasn’t so much that he immediately assumed there was a trick (shouldn’t get a probability of 1.0, no, but certainly a basket worth piling some eggs in) but that he assumed the truth would get her off. He never once stopped and asked Dumbledore and Snape “If it was proven that she had been tricked into doing this with false memories, but still cast the spell willingly and with her own hand, would the Wizengamot still convict her?” I don’t even know the answer to that question, but I’d certainly ask before I assumed it was “no”.
Especially considering how draconian the law is and how one of the two most important members of the judge/jury is not only the victim’s father but someone already predisposed to dislike her (for what amounts to unapologetic and on-record racial discrimination). In advance I wouldn’t have been surprised to see a show trial that blatantly ignored the evidence to get a conviction, though Dumbledore’s faction was a bit too vocal for me to expect that with my current knowledge.
Harry doesn’t know about the GHD attack and so his working hypothesis is that her memory of attempting to kill Draco is false.
“Ah!” Harry said suddenly. “I get it now. The first False Memory Charm was cast on Hermione after Professor Snape yelled at her, and showed, say, Draco and Professor Snape plotting to kill her. Then last night that False Memory was removed by Obliviation, leaving behind the memories of her obsessing about Draco for no apparent reason, at the same time she and Draco were given false memories of the duel.”
Since that was the last theory Harry proposed before he switched from theories to lines of attack, and nobody fully shot it down (there was an objection, but the objection was just that it’d be difficult), I have to assume that was his working theory when he left the room. And I would not automatically assume that this scenario, which we know to be very close to the correct one, would count as “innocent” in front of a wizengamot led by the angry, racist father of the victim.
This is a really interesting point.
We know for a fact that Hermione has been manipulated because we’ve seen the scene with Hat and Cloak. That may bias us in favor of thinking the evidence is clearer than it really is. Yet Harry knows that in this universe memories can be tampered with. The prior probability of a morally upstanding little girl trying to murder someone is much less than the prior probability of someone else trying the memory-charm plot, especially given that Hermione is friends with Harry and Harry’s status as the Boy Who Lived makes him a target.
Now, I might put a probability of something like 0.2 on the possibility of Hermione casting the charm after someone messed with her mind. But if you’re the plotter, it’s so much easier to do a false memory charm to make her remember casting the charm, than to do all the delicate manipulation to get her to actually cast it. So more likely than not, Hermione didn’t cast the charm.
Harry is making a subtle mistake here, though: he’s over-confident about his ideas about the details of what was done to Hermione. For example, he thinks a false-memory charm was used to cause Hermione to start obsessing over Draco, when in fact that was based on true memories of a conversation (albeit one involving lies and some kind of shape-shifting/illusion magic). Feminist bank tellers and all that.
Anybody believing Hermione was meddled with ought to be asking who will be next. The mentioned mistake has Harry assuming Hermione didn’t go undetected for six months, so he is far less alarmed than he should be.
Neville is the most likely next target for an attack intended to separate Harry from his allies. Voldemort is probably too clever to try the same trick twice, though.
On the last point: Hermione almost certainly was false memory charmed twice; H&C would have removed the memory of their final conversation and replaced with with something innocuous at the same time as he implanted the false memory of casting the blood-cooling charm, so as to not leave a suspicious gap. He might also have implanted false memories immediately after the groundhog day attack, either to cover up the time gap or to not have Hermione wandering around with an extremely suspicious memory in her head (If Dumbledore or Snape had seen the memory of H&C, or his less-creepy disguise, they probably would have been fairly suspicious).