Daniel_Starr

• Daniel_Starr 5 Mar 2015 8:01 UTC

  14 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, March 2015, chap­ter 116

  Prediction 1: Hermione will soon harrow Azkaban. Why wouldn’t she? She’s all but immortal, now.

  Prediction 2: Time-travel and memory-charm shenanigans incoming. Evidence:

  • Harry weirdly ignored the missing recognition code on LV’s forged message.

  • Cedric considered in Harry’s plans, and his Time-Turner mentioned, then seemingly forgotten.

  • Death-Eaters all dead, but no faces observed.

  • Flamel asserted dead, but we didn’t see it, and LV explicitly didn’t kill him personally.

  • Dumbledore thinks in stories, yet we’re supposed to believe he’s surprised when the villain reveals he’s captured the hero and his equipment (Harry and the Cloak), just like villains always catch heroes and take their stuff near the end (see: Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker).

  • Hermione has been asleep the whole time, neither giving nor receiving information.

  Questions:

  • did Harry tell Cedric to do certain things before Harry left? Did Harry tell Cedric to Obliviate Harry afterward so Harry could play his part convincingly? What did Harry most likely tell Cedric to do?

  • who will do the Time-Turning, Hermione, Cedric, or Harry?

  • who will be saved? Obvious candidates include Flamel, Dumbledore, Lucius Malfoy, maybe all the anonymous Death-Eaters.

  • if you were Hermione and had a Time-Turner and the Stone and the Cloak and six hours to save everybody but Voldemort, Quirrell and Macnair, how would you do it? (Do you need the help of someone who can Obliviate well? Do you need partial Transfiguration?)

• Daniel_Starr 7 May 2013 22:22 UTC

  0 points

  on: Pas­cal’s Mug­gle: In­finites­i­mal Pri­ors and Strong Evidence

  This seems like an exercise in scaling laws.

  The odds of being a hero who save 100 lives are less 1% of the odds of being a hero who saves 1 life. So in the absence of good data about being a hero who saves 10^100 lives, we should assume that the odds are much, much less than 1/​(10^100).

  In other words, for certain claims, the size of the claim itself lowers the probability.

  More pedestrian example: ISTR your odds of becoming a musician earning over $1 million a year are much, much less than 1% of your odds of becoming a musician who earns over $10,000 a year.

• Daniel_Starr 24 Dec 2012 2:11 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: ArisKatsaris’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  The boys get the HPMOR equivalent of “I want to be a selfless doctor” or “I want to be an important politician.”

  The girls get the equivalent of “I don’t want to be like my relatives” or “I want to be adored by lots of men”.

  The girls’ aims seem defined by types of relationships, which makes them more fragile and harder to visualize than aiming for a type of occupation.

  This doesn’t mean that Padma wouldn’t be cool in reality. (Real-life outcomes seem determined as much by search method as by deliberately planned destinations.) But in a story, it gives her less narrative impact.

• Daniel_Starr 23 Dec 2012 10:01 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  A Hermione who risks all against Dementors “to help Harry” is not nearly as interesting to me as a Hermione who risks all against Dementors because they’re evil regardless of Harry.

  We’ll all help our friends. Pick any evil person in history—they had friends. If they’re a political leader, they had lots of admirers.

  The fic itself has Harry make the point that if you’re only interesting in helping an “us” and not a “them”, that’s a pretty weak sort of good that easily turns to evil.

  I think in a fic so full of extraordinary characters, Hermione deserves to be extraordinary enough to do awesome things even for strangers, even when she doesn’t think her friends will benefit, because a world without dementors is just better.

• Daniel_Starr 23 Dec 2012 9:08 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Pluvialis’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  I am confused. What would you suggest as an example of an “inspiring reason” to go and destroy Azkaban, that does occur or could occur to Harry, that would not normally occur to Hermione?

• Daniel_Starr 23 Dec 2012 8:30 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  Oh, good point, the author’s prepared for Hermione to take on Azkaban. The trick will be motive.

  If Hermione harrows Azkaban for Harry’s sake, that’s Hermione the faithful NPC, not Hermione who has wishes and dreams of her own.

  If Hermione harrows Azkaban because it’s the right thing to do, that will be pure awesome.

  As you say, if Hermione believes Harry is dead, especially if she believes some other innocent is about to be sent to Azkaban, she could spring into action quite on her own.

  I think you’ve convinced me 66% that Hermione, not Harry, takes on Azkaban.

  What I don’t feel so confident of is that the author will manage to do this in a way that Hermione’s motive is “because it’s the right thing”. The gravitational pull of “Harry causes all interesting good things” is strong.

  Avoiding the “Harry causes everything good” gravitational field isn’t an insoluble problem. But EY has a lot of other balls to juggle besides the harrowing of Azkaban.

• Daniel_Starr 23 Dec 2012 6:38 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  Yes, to make it plausible you do have to put Hermione in an impatient or infuriated state of mind, and Harry has to be out of contact. So, for example, suppose:

  • Harry is elsewhere, preparing his next move against Voldemort; and

  • Hermione gets dragged to Azkaban on a visit by someone intending to intimidate her, and she concludes it is just as monstrous as Harry thinks. (Actually, she’d probably be even less tolerant: Hermione is not a lesser-evil-excusing sort of person, once you jolt her out of her status-quo bias.)

  You could argue that would be enough—Hermione is good at hard work and righteous indignation, and she and Harry could be arranged by the author to have discussed hypothetical Azkaban strategies beforehand. If you wanted added pressure on Hermione,

  • someone threatens her with death or, indeed, imprisonment within Azkaban.

  In which case Hermione might rationally decide to “go out with a bang.”

  The hardest part of this (in a literary sense) would be keeping Harry away from Hermione for the critical period.

• Daniel_Starr 23 Dec 2012 6:27 UTC

  30 points

  in reply to: Alsadius’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  You’re right, there’s nothing absurd, individually, about the mostly-male lead adults, the author’s distaste for sports comedy, and having Hermione and McGonagall be far less hubristic than the men.

  The author is largely following canon in each of these, except for minimizing Quidditch (for which I, for one, am heartily grateful) and for adding in shipping humor (which I also like). The trouble is the cumulative effect.

  I see not the slightest evidence that the author wants Hermione and the other females to come off as narratively second-best to the men.

  But in the absence of a positive force impelling Hermione et al toward narrative grandeur, they end up being defined as compliant like McGonagall, or trivial like the romantic gossipers, NPCs rather than PCs in either case.

  EY observes that Hermione doesn’t need more brainpower to be a force in the story. Unfortunately, since she’s in a story, not a collection of biographies, she does need more narrative impetus to get her to engage in story-like behavior alongside the men.

  The same is true, at a smaller scale, for Padma as versus Neville and Blaise. The boys have tolerably specific ambitions; the girls don’t. Hermione wants to be “a hero”; Harry has a list of specific large problems he’s aiming to solve. The narrative outcome was inevitable.

  When your main characters are as aggressive and grandiose as Harry and Quirrellmort, anybody without an active force to make them narratively prominent ends up looking second-rate.

• Daniel_Starr 23 Dec 2012 6:05 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: buybuydandavis’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  Ooh, Hermione versus Azkaban. I want that.

  If Hermione takes down Azkaban and survives, and does so without Harry seeming to take control, that would be more amazing to read than I can possibly express.

  Also it would be a nice touch of realism: no one good person solves all the problems.

  But there are three hard literary problems here:

  • the author has probably got another Azkaban answer in mind, based on Harry,

  • the author would have to prepare the ground for Hermione grokking the “Death ain’t inevitable” approach to Dementors,

  • it would be tricky to write a realistic Harry who, even from Harry and the reader’s POV, was “protecting Hermione’s back while she saves the day” as opposed to “rescuing Hermione”. The rearguard samurai who buys the hero time is a fiction staple, but it’s not a default role for Harry.

  • [Edit: ] as wedrifid wisely points out below, Hermione has to have a good reason to believe she has to take the lead, since Harry is demonstrably better at the average Confrontational Solution than she is.

  But if it happens I will be ever so happy.

• Daniel_Starr 23 Dec 2012 1:29 UTC

  15 points

  in reply to: AdeleneDawner’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  Yes, that’s it: the girls don’t aim for distinctive future selves, the boys do.

  Blaise and Neville are each trying to become something, and it’s something different in each case. The girls? Not nearly so much.

• Daniel_Starr 23 Dec 2012 1:20 UTC

  28 points

  in reply to: Alicorn’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 18, chap­ter 87

  I think the female sex in HPMOR comes off poorly for three reasons:

  • The major adults are mostly men. “Female” ends up also signifying “childlike.”

  • The author doesn’t want to write sports stories. The girls get comic stories about relationships, but the boys don’t get comic stories about Quidditch.

  • Hermione and McGonagall are not tragic or ambitious. Draco and Dumbledore can “level up” in HPMOR to agendas worthy of Harry’s, but Hermione and McGonagall, being largely tame cooperators, are overshadowed by their even-grander-than-before comrades.

  If we wanted to imagine alternate versions of the fic with less of this difficulty, some conceivable changes would be:

  • Give Hermione and McGonagall risk-defying agendas of their own. (Make them Aragorns or Boromirs, not Gimlis and Pippins.)

  • Make the boy students gossip improbably about the teachers’ and students’ Evil Overlord Plans just as much as the girl students gossip improbably about the teachers’ and students’ Romantic Entanglements. (“No way, dude! Snape’s going to take out Quirrell with his Godelian Braid Potion!”)

  • Make Harry need the help of other students more, so that we can understand the girls’ gossip as how they let off steam and not as what unimportant people do.

  But I think this fic is too nearly done, and too big, to contemplate such changes at this point.

• Daniel_Starr 21 Apr 2012 0:40 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: gjm’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 16, chap­ter 85

  How about the first five words?

• Daniel_Starr 20 Apr 2012 23:37 UTC

  35 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 16, chap­ter 85

  HPMOR is making me rethink human nature—because of how people react to it. This is a story full of cunning disguises, and readers seem reluctant to see past those disguises. RL rkcerffrq chmmyrzrag ng ubj many readers took forever to decide Quirrell = Voldemort; I think I now know why.

  I suggest that humans are instinctive “observation consequentialists.” That is, we think someone is competent and good if the observed results of their actions are benign. We weigh what we observe much more strongly than what we merely deduce. If we personally see their actions work out well, we’ll put aside a great deal of indirect evidence for their incompetence or vileness.

  In HPMOR, Quirrell’s directly observed actions are mostly associated with Harry getting to be more of what he thinks he wants. Even rescuing Bellatrix amounts to Harry getting to save a broken lovelorn creature in terms of what we directly observe. To believe Quirrell evil we have to bring in all kinds of expected consequences to weigh against those immediate positive observations.

  Does the resistance to saying Quirrell=Voldemort maybe reflect a broader unwillingness to overlook what we directly witness in favor of abstract deduction? If it does, this implies some interesting predictions about human behavior:

  • if you can be kind and moderate in your personal behavior, you can get away with incredible amounts of institutionally-mediated violence and extremism, especially to anyone who feels like they “know” you. Hypothesis: the most dangerous people are those who can give us the illusion of “knowing” them while they command an institution whose internal operations we don’t see.

  • More generally, an institution “wired” to do us harm can get away with it much longer than an individual doing it personally and directly. Faceless corporate evil, faceless societal evil, and faceless government evil are much more deadly than our emotional impulses realize. Hypothesis: we are biased to confuse the institutions with our attitude toward their leaders, or to refuse to act against the institutions because of the outward manners of their leaders.

  • if this ‘observation consequentialism’ bias is heuristic, then maybe it evolved as an anti-gossip function. In that case we should expect that people are too quick to believe outrageous things about people they can’t observe. Hypothesis: the further away someone is from your understanding, the less likely you are to think of them as mostly a typical human being, and the quicker you are to believe them a saint, a monster, or something similarly exciting.

  • And, alas for EY, hypothesis: telling a story about cunning disguises, in which the protagonist of the story does not see through those disguises, is almost always going to lead to lots of readers also not seeing through those disguises.

• Daniel_Starr 20 Apr 2012 20:10 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: TimS’s comment on: Please Don’t Fight the Hypothetical

  if it isn’t trying to reach true beliefs then that is your problem, not the appropriateness of the hypothetical.

  Yeah, that’s what I often find—otherwise smart people using an edge case to argue unreasonable but “clever” contrarian things about ordinary behavior.

  “I found an inconsistency, therefore your behavior comes from social signalling” is bad thinking, even when a smart and accomplished person does it.

  So if someone posts a hypothetical, my first meta-question is whether they go into it assuming that they should be curious, rather than contemptuous, about inconsistent responses. “Frustrated” I respect, and “confused” I respect, but “contemptuous”...

  If you’re comfortable being contemptuous about ordinary human behavior, you have to prove a whole heck of a lot to me about your practical success in life before I play along with your theoretical construct.

  Ordinary human behavior can be your opponent, but you can’t take it lightly—it’s what allowed you to exist in the first place.

• Daniel_Starr 20 Apr 2012 19:43 UTC

  19 points

  on: Please Don’t Fight the Hypothetical

  One good reason to “fight the hypothetical” is that many people propose hypotheticals insincerely.

  Sometimes this is obvious: “But what if having a gun was the only way to kill Hitler?” or alternatively “But what if a world ban on guns had prevented Hitler?” are clearly not sincere questions but strawman arguments offered to try to sneak you into agreement with a much more mundane and debatable choice.

  But the same happens with things like the Trolley problem or Torture v. Specks. Many “irrational” answers to hypotheticals come out of reflexes that are perfectly rational under ordinary circumstances. If the hypothetical-proposer isn’t willing to allow that the underlying reflex has its uses, the hypothetical-proposer is ignorant or untrustworthy.

  For example, while in principle killing by inaction is as bad as killing by action, in practice it’s much easier to harm with a nonconformist action than to help—consider how many times in a day you could kill someone if you suddenly wanted to. So a reflexive bias to have a higher standard of evidence for harmful action than harmful inaction has its uses.

  So when someone is using hypotheticals to prove “people are stupid”, they’re not proving that in quite the way they think. Should we really play along with them?

  What links here?

  • Xachariah's comment on Be care­ful with thought experiments by lukeprog (18 May 2012 22:35 UTC; 0 points)

• Daniel_Starr 20 Apr 2012 18:55 UTC

  17 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 16, chap­ter 85

  Quirrell’s tale of “I played a hero, but it didn’t get me political power” doesn’t hold up. The “lonely superhero” is just as much a mere storytelling convention as the “zero-casualties superhero”. Either Quirrell is leaving something out, or the author is ignoring real-world politics for storytelling convenience.

  In real life, successfully fighting societally recognized enemies gets you all kinds of political opportunity. Look at American Presidents Eisenhower, Grant, Taylor, Jackson, Harrison, and Washington. This is true in nondemocracies too: consider the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Marlborough, or Sir Francis Drake.

  What gets you loneliness and isolation is being a pioneer.

  In real life, heroes go unrewarded exactly and only when their enemies aren’t yet regarded as enemies by the rest of society.

  The socially isolating thing isn’t fighting Nazis when you’re an American, it’s fighting Nazis when you’re a German. Being a reformer is isolating.

  “The lonely superhero” is just as much a mere literary convention as “the zero-casualties superhero”.

  Of course, “the lonely superhero” reflects an underlying truth. The real bravery we could use more of from people is the bravery to give up status.

  So the deeds we see Batman and Superman perform are mere stand-ins for socially brave deeds that make less good stories but matter far more: the scientist defending an unpopular hypothesis, the leader admitting to his followers he doesn’t have an answer, the skilled and intelligent person who chooses to work on something that matters instead of something that makes the most money. Those are the real heroes we need, and they really are lonely.

  So just as “the zero-casualties superhero” is a literary figure for “we need people who’ll take risks for others”, the “the lonely superhero” is a literary figure for “we need people who are willing to be mocked for doing what’s right”.

  But within the context of the story, Quirrell’s “I fought the villain but got no respect” is nonsense. Humans don’t work that way. We have to assume Quirrell is leaving something out.

  Did Dumbledore see through him and undermine him politically at every turn?

  Alternatively, perhaps Quirrellmort is as bad at mass politics as he is good at individual violence? There’s evidence he’s got no clue how to handle ‘inspiration’ as a motive, though he gets ‘greed’ and ‘fear’ just fine.

• Daniel_Starr 29 Mar 2012 1:32 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 12

  I like it. Although I think that requires that the HPMOR folk are stuck inside a more powerful entity’s experiment or simulation (because if the FAI didn’t come from their own future, how did it come to exist at all?).

• Daniel_Starr 28 Mar 2012 3:50 UTC

  12 points

  on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 13, chap­ter 81

  Can we add the ‘harry_potter’ discussion tag to this post?

  (Contrary to what the post text says, as of right now this post does not show up on the list of Harry Potter discussion posts.)

• Daniel_Starr 27 Mar 2012 11:26 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 12

  So what you’re saying is the FAI has to convince the FAI to let it out of the box?

• Daniel_Starr 27 Mar 2012 11:15 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: wedrifid’s comment on: Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Ra­tion­al­ity dis­cus­sion thread, part 12

  I thought the unspeakable secret of the fic is that magic itself comes from an FAI trying to grant wishes while respecting humans’ sense of how the world ought to work.

  Well, that plus time travel. Don’t know where the FAI got the time travel from. Must have been one heck of a Singularity.