Ah! Thanks for that background. Can you explain, though, why you think that statement is meant to be Harry taking the piss? (Within the text, that is—Eliezer does rightly frame it as a joke in those links). Harry’s surrounding statements are sincerely put, and the next paragraph suggests to me that Harry believes that the induction argument should have refuted Dumbledore:
The two cultures stared at each other across a vast gap of incommensurability.
In any case, I do hope that, at some point, Harry has to face down the taboo tradeoffs (to be topical to the current arc) implied by universal immortality.
Oh, dear. I suddenly seem to have acquired the desire to write a HPMOR/Do the Math crossover.
I don’t think Harry is actually taking the piss, and nor does he see it as a literal proof. It helps to remember who he’s talking to. He’s trying to get Dumbledore to consider not just death, sometime in the far abstract future, but a thing that you might actually welcome even just one day after a day when you didn’t welcome it. Not a proof but a rhetorical device.
Well, and here’s where it gets interesting: are there any other places where we see Harry use logic that he knows (or should know) to be unsound in an instrumental fashion? That is, where he makes a tactical choice to argue nonsense, believing it to have a better chance of convincing someone who disagrees with him?
Harry should consider the possibility that he “might actually welcome [death] even just one day after a day when [he] didn’t welcome it”—if he can’t anticipate the possibility of his utility function changing based on an infinity of new evidence, he should stop pretending to be solely rationalist. Which, interestingly, Chapter 82 seems to be hinting at.
Ah! Thanks for that background. Can you explain, though, why you think that statement is meant to be Harry taking the piss? (Within the text, that is—Eliezer does rightly frame it as a joke in those links). Harry’s surrounding statements are sincerely put, and the next paragraph suggests to me that Harry believes that the induction argument should have refuted Dumbledore:
In any case, I do hope that, at some point, Harry has to face down the taboo tradeoffs (to be topical to the current arc) implied by universal immortality.
Oh, dear. I suddenly seem to have acquired the desire to write a HPMOR/Do the Math crossover.
I don’t think Harry is actually taking the piss, and nor does he see it as a literal proof. It helps to remember who he’s talking to. He’s trying to get Dumbledore to consider not just death, sometime in the far abstract future, but a thing that you might actually welcome even just one day after a day when you didn’t welcome it. Not a proof but a rhetorical device.
Well, and here’s where it gets interesting: are there any other places where we see Harry use logic that he knows (or should know) to be unsound in an instrumental fashion? That is, where he makes a tactical choice to argue nonsense, believing it to have a better chance of convincing someone who disagrees with him?
Harry should consider the possibility that he “might actually welcome [death] even just one day after a day when [he] didn’t welcome it”—if he can’t anticipate the possibility of his utility function changing based on an infinity of new evidence, he should stop pretending to be solely rationalist. Which, interestingly, Chapter 82 seems to be hinting at.