Heh, I know. I chose that phrase to express despair more than to describe objective reality.
75th
Karma: 981
Here’s a blog post about how everyone hates each other over politics more than before. Eliezer commented on it on Facebook, hypothesizing that it’s a slow-growing effect of the Internet.
I cursed aloud when I read that comment, because I’ve had that exact idea and an accompanying sick feeling for a while now, and this is the first time I’ve seen it repeated.
(it’s never a good sign when Eliezer Yudkowsky is the one to express your deepest fears about why everything’s and everyone’s brokenness is unstoppably accelerating)
I wish to read more about the “The Internet Is Why We Can’t Have Even The Few Nice Things We Almost Kind Of Once Had” phenomenon — hopefully from someone who thinks there’s a way easier than developing Friendly AI to put even one evil back in Pandora’s Box, but that’s probably wishful thinking, and I want to read about it in any case.
(Note: I’m aware that the entire LW-affiliated rationalist community writes about how things are broken, and desires to teach people to be less broken. But right now I’m looking specifically for things about how the Internet’s massive boon to free speech is way more double-edged than was anticipated.)
Anyone have any good links?
I’m not sure how much influence Narcissa’s going to have on him, since Draco’s already 12. Maybe if Narcissa eschews blood purism and actively tries to teach Draco, perhaps, but I think she’s going to be busy running around screaming “BLECH! ECH! POISON MUGGLE LIPS!” for a while if she had any blood purist inclinations before the memory charm.
Dammit dammit dammit.
I vote no on this theory. “All the good martial artists live” in Asia, so that may be the reason this combat instructor was said to be Asian, but if he was trying to get a random Muggle in, (1) Quirrellmort would have said “Muggle instructor”, and (2) there would have been more legitimate resistance than just a smugly smiling clerk.
“My life is yours, my Lord, and my death as well.”
I like this.
That would pretty much DELETE ALL THE PEOPLE AFFECTED and REPLACE THEM WITH DIFFERENT VERSIONS, so I don’t think Harry would do that.
That may even be the reason he has, as he said, changed his mind about teaching Harry any magical secrets.
Definitely this.
I think there’s a bonus feature to having two hops in the middle. If the sender finds that the recipient never received the message, he immediately distrusts his first hop and perhaps publishes the knowledge. If the first hop wasn’t the culprit, he either publishes the second hop’s unreliability or takes horrible devious Slytheriny vengeance on them.
So, due to mutually assured destruction, neither hop wants to defect and risk losing a nice income source permanently.
So your hypothesis is that Harry will win by doing the thing he already tried and failed to do, and got a stern warning from the Universe for trying. The one thing that he can’t do, that’s the thing he’ll do.
Okay, except you’ve not done the work. If Eliezer puts a huge road block in front of an obvious solution to the story — “NOPE, can’t do that, sorry” — and your hypothesis is “No he’ll do it anyway”, then the actual work is not just saying he’ll do it (since the story explicitly states the insane power Harry would have if it did work; it’s not like that’s a big discovery itself) but rather saying how we get from our current state of impossibility to the state where Harry pulls it off.
“If Harry can figure out how to bypass the limitations of the time turner” — that dismissive ‘If’ is the entire problem you should be trying to solve.
In many cases hatred would peter out into indifference
Perhaps, but this is not likely to happen in the middle of a battle where you’re trying to kill each other. And even if you felt indifference, you would still have to think of trying to cast Avada Kedavra from your indifference, not from your hate, which is how you learned to cast AK in the first place and never questioned. You would have to force a new mindset of calm emptiness upon yourself, which would take practice. Even the worst Death Eaters are not likely to have taken an analytical approach to battle, realized the possibility, and then practiced killing people in their spare time with indifference to make sure it was reliable in the (other guy’s) heat of the moment.
Merlin created the Interdict because he believed, based on prophecy, that this would prevent the otherwise inevitable end of the world and its magic.
He hoped it would, but he didn’t live to ask the remaining seers if it actually worked.
If resolved!Harry is “the end of the world”, as per Trelawney’s prophecy, then whatever he is going to do must therefore involve bypassing the Interdict of Merlin.
This doesn’t really make sense, or is irrelevant, or is sort of a tautology, or something. The Interdict of Merlin is not a magical universe-saving spell. If it were, as you sort of imply, then you would basically be saying “If Harry can destroy the universe, then it follows that he will not not be able to destroy the universe”. But the Interdict is not that, nor does it limit what magic a person can use; it simply limits the transfer of the most powerful magics to only occur between two living minds. Merlin hoped that would be enough to save the universe because he counted on magical knowledge waning permanently.
The only way we presently know to do that is Salazar’s basilisk-transmitted lore
Patently and obviously false. We’ve known since Chapter 77 that Nicolas Flamel has a whole bunch of knowledge he might someday share, and the whole point of Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres since Chapter 28 is that he can figure out magic that’s long-lost or never-known. And the Interdict imposes no limitation on figuring out powerful magic on your own.
Apparently word of god is that there is going to be no AI.
I was thinking about this recently, and I realized that maybe it should be kind of obvious why he doesn’t usually do fiction about AI: because (he believes, at least, that) the first strong AI is either an instant win condition or instant failure condition for the entire universe, and neither immutable utopia nor irrecoverable catastrophe make for very interesting stories. So anything interesting or uncertain or suspenseful about AI has to be written about disguised as other topics, where things can go wrong but then realistically be set right.
“Tor” stands for “The Onion Router”, and I could have sworn that Harry explicitly thought of the Slytherin System as “onion routing” at one point but I can’t seem to find it.
the current time/reality in which Hermione is irrevocably dead will be destroyed as a result of Harry deciding to change the fact.
Harry himself appears to be pretty firmly set against that:
“And while I hate to get all PHILOSOPHICAL,” Harry desperately tried to lower his voice to something under a shriek, “has anyone thought about the IMPLICATIONS of going back six hours and doing something that changes time which would pretty much DELETE ALL THE PEOPLE AFFECTED and REPLACE THEM WITH DIFFERENT VERSIONS—”
So I wouldn’t say never, but I think it would take something extraordinary, considerably more so even than Hermione’s death, to drive him to that.
I cannot think realistically what Harry can do to threaten his ‘modified’ interstellar probe at present time unless he can prevent it being modified (horcruxed?) to start with, i.e. go back in time.
At the time Quirrell begins his freakout, he doesn’t know what form it will take, either. He just heard that “HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD” and that’s all he needs to know. He may get clued in a bit more later on, when he overhears Firenze talking to Harry. Clearly, Harry is going to acquire a massive amount of power he doesn’t already have, but I don’t see any particular reason to promote the option of super-duper-time-travel to the fore.
First, it seems improbable that Salazar entrusted all his magical knowledge to the basilisk, if only because that would have been a ridiculous amount of magical knowledge.
Well, it’s not like he had to teach the Basilisk a full Hogwarts curriculum; he only had to teach it what he knew that triggered the Interdict of Merlin, which is only the top whateverth percentile of his repertoire.
Salazar wouldn’t have known which pieces of knowledge from his time were going to become lost,
Sure he could have. All he had to do was write down the most powerful stuff he knew in descending order until he got to the point where someone else started understanding what they were reading.
Also, there’s no reason to believe that basilisks have perfect memories
The Basilisk may not have a perfect memory as an animal, but it “would be huge flaw in sscheme” if Salazar’s magical Parseltongue knowledge was corruptible by the limitations of any old snake’s brain.
Salazar was only responsible for part of Hogwarts. We don’t know that he was at all responsible for the wards, only that he had admin access to them…. We also don’t know that Godric didn’t revoke said admin access after Salazar betrayed him and left
I think you’re extending your computer analogy too far. Salazar didn’t have a revocable password to the wards, he knew the magic that created them, and the rest of the Founders certainly did not have the power to revoke spells from the Source of Magic.
Don’t get me wrong, I think we’re meant to understand that Quirrell did smuggle in the troll as a small transfigured object that Dumbledore drew his circle around. But nevertheless, I think we should also assume until further notice that
he knowswhoever got the basilisk’s knowledge got the most powerful magic that Slytherin knew.EDIT: Hedged my last sentence, since Chapter 102′s horcrux information introduces potential ambiguity as to how Tom Riddle’s knowledge has been propagated amongst his alter egos’ bodies.
We definitely don’t know enough specifics about HPMoR-alchemy to come to any firm conclusions.
Does the “alchemical circle” that has to be so precise refer to just the containing circle itself, or to all the runes inside it, too? If the former, then the circle could be a permanent part of the room, while the runes are drawn (the earlier passage does say the Transfiguration studio’s diagram was “drawn”) slightly more crudely in some way that’s erasable. If the latter, then,
Are there different runes for different alchemies, or is it always the same “board” that you perform different processes on top of? If the latter, then the whole room could be ready to go; if the former, then yeah, Harry may be out of luck.
I did some Googling about the history of alchemy, and the diagram I saw associated with the Philosopher’s Stone in several places was a circle-inscribed-in-a-square-inscribed-in-a-triangle-inscribed-in-the-Circle. If Eliezer is consistent with that, then Harry’s probably going to have to draw at least the runes on his own.
I do think that it makes more sense literarily for Harry to have to go through the trapped third-floor corridor to the room with the “magic mirror” rather than skipping it altogether. But as others have pointed out, if it is the Mirror of Erised and Dumbledore’s scheme is the same as in canon, HPMoR-Harry probably won’t qualify to receive the Stone, since he totally does want to use it, and (I hope) can’t somehow make himself not want to use it in a way that satisfies Dumbledore’s spell.
So maybe he’ll get to the mirror, find himself flummoxed, and then proceed to go make one. I don’t know.
/u/solipsist, in another comment on this thread:
Do not try to obtain Sstone yoursself. I forbid.
This was said by Quirrell in Parseltongue. If you can only tell the truth in Parseltongue, then Quirrell was really forbidding Harry from obtaining the stone himself.
If Quirrell can’t lie in Parseltongue (and not just Harry, since Harry’s speaking as a standard Parselmouth but Quirrell is speaking as a sentient snake), and if that prohibition enforces the sincerity of imperative commands and not just declarative statements, then clearly what Quirrell is saying is that Harry should try to make his own Philosopher’s Stone.
“It’s not a secret.” Hermione flipped the page, showing Harry the diagrams. “The instructions are right on the next page. It’s just so difficult that only Nicholas Flamel’s done it.”
“Well, it can’t work,” Hermione said. She’d flown across the library to look up the only book on alchemy that wasn’t in the Restricted Section. And then—she remembered the crushing letdown, all the sudden hope dissipating like mist. “Because all alchemical circles have to be drawn ‘to the fineness of a child’s hair’, it isn’t any finer for some alchemies than others. And wizards have Omnioculars, and I haven’t heard of any spells where you use Omnioculars to magnify things and do them exactly.
So the first thing Hermione mentions as a limitation of doing alchemy is the insane precision of the circle you have to draw. But what if there were already an acceptable, permanent alchemy setup just lying around somewhere where Harry could get to it?
The three of them stood within the Headmaster’s private Transfiguration workroom, where the shining phoenix of Dumbledore’s Patronus had told her to bring Harry, moments after her own Patronus had reached him. Light shone down through the skylights and illuminated the great seven-pointed alchemical diagram drawn in the center of the circular room, showing it to be a little dusty, which saddened Minerva. Transfiguration research was one of Dumbledore’s great enjoyments, and she’d known how pressed for time he’d been lately, but not that he was this pressed.
I don’t think any of it fits. “Tiny fragment” and “fraction of a line” don’t sound like blood spatters, or anything liquid. The sound of black robes falling doesn’t sound like bodies hitting the ground, and if this were the fulfillment of the Chapter 1 epigraph, I would expect there to be at least a mention of their robes.
This whole scene doesn’t seem significant enough to be such a heavily anticipated revelation. I’m going with “No” on this one.
You’re referring to the problem with people being mean to each other within a given online community. I’m thinking more of people hating each other more in real life because the Internet lets them seek out unfiltered outrage from people with similar beliefs, with nothing tempered by gatekeepers as in the days before the Internet and the rise of cable news.