Even if that were the case, a Patronus delivers its message in the exact voice of the person who spoke to it, and as far as I know, that can’t be falsified. This means that not only will we find out if it’s Draco (almost certainly is), but we’ll also know if he’s in trouble or under duress (pretty likely; he’s Harry’s second best friend).
OnTheOtherHandle
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“Resurrection” has been taken for 2000 years, but for a few decades there we had a chance with “pro-life.” :(
Quick! Grab the third best word and trademark it!
Seriously though, I think “transhumanism” is too long and jargon-y, not to mention understanding it requires some knowledge of both humanism and Latin roots. The ideology deserves a word that is as pure and simple as the emotions behind it.
I don’t have trouble believing that Harry is Death’s equal, but this doesn’t explain how he was marked by Death as his equal. The Killing Curse bouncing off for whatever reason might be the best explanation. The scar is Death’s mark, not Voldemort’s. That seems a bit...forced, but it does explain why Quirrellmort hasn’t done anything besides kill Rita Skeeter and free Bellatrix Black only to never speak of her again. Death has struck many times, and has been the focus of Harry’s rage and obsession, Voldemort has more than once faded into the background and seemed ambiguously an ally. Another reason to believe that the enemy is Death and not Voldemort is that Voldemort was defeated, as far as we know—he’s not the Lord of anything anymore—while Death most certainly still reigns.
But to look at counterarguments—what if the mark we’re talking about is not the scar at all? If the Dark Lord really is Voldemort, it’s a bit silly to think that Voldemort would acknowledge a baby as his equal. Once Harry came to Hogwarts, Quirrell certainly recognized his rationality and intelligence, and marked him, if only psychologically, as his intellectual equal. “We’re not like the rest of them, you and I...”
I’m still leaning toward the interpretation of Death as the Dark Lord, if only because I have no idea what Voldemort can pull in the next seven to ten chapters that would make him definitively the most important enemy presence in the story.
That was what frustrated me the most—how canon could preach to us about accepting death as inevitable while giving its main character the power to defeat death. It’s sad that the narrative just accepts it as okay that the main character and the subject of the prophecy gets to be resurrected, but for anyone else to seek that would be folly.
No I know—that’s why it would have been interesting to know about the inscription and consider how HJPEV would obviously interpret it differently :)
Sorry, just realized “That was just beautiful” was ambiguous—not the inscription, but Harry’s reaction to it. The inscription could not possibly have had such a humanistic meaning in canon, I know.
This does make me feel better—thanks. I’m just entering college and don’t even have a bank account yet, but your post inspired me to get one fast so I can donate whatever I can afford within the matching window :)
Wow, this was awesome! I wish I had read the canon so I would have had a chance to think about/predict what would happen when Harry read that inscription. This was just beautiful—a reminder of the heritage that transhumanists often forget we have. True, we have precious little tradition or precedent to fall back on—but in every generation in every era in every part of the world, there have been people who knew death for what it was and loathed it.
HPMOR is starting to be one tear jerker after another. I hope we’ll get to see a couple more moments of levity, or—ideally—a moment of euphoria, when Hermione joins millions and millions of others we thought lost to history.
Edit: I really wish the word “pro-life” were available to describe this position.
This seems like a really good concept to keep in mind. I wonder if it could be applied to other fields? Could you make a pot that remains a pot the whole way through, even as you refine it and add detail? Could you write a song that starts off very simple but still pretty, and then gradually layer on the complexity?
Your post inspired me to try this with writing, so thank you. :) We could start with a one-sentence story: “Once upon a time, two lovers overcame vicious prejudice to be together.”
And that could be expanded into a one-paragraph story: “Chanon had known all her life that the blue-haired Northerners were hated enemies, never to be trusted, that she had to keep her red-haired Southern bloodline pure or the world would be overrun by the blue barbarians. But everything was thrown in her face when she met Jasper—his hair was blue, but he was a true crimson-heart, as the saying went. She tried to find every excuse to hate him, but time and time again Jasper showed himself to be a man of honor and integrity, and when he rescued her from those lowlife highway robbers—how could she not fall in love? Her father hated it of course, but even she was shocked at how easily he disowned her, how casually he threw away the bonds of family for the chains of prejudice. She wasn’t happy now, homeless and adrift, but she knew that she could never be happy again in the land she had once called home. Chanon and Jasper set out to unknown lands in the East, where hopefully they could find some acceptance and love for their purple family.”
This could be turned into a one page story, and then a five page story, and so on, never losing the essence of the message. Iterative storytelling might be kind of fun for people who are trying to get into writing something long but don’t know if they can stick it out for months or years.
I’d guess it’s a bit vaguer than that; from what I’ve seen there aren’t sharp distinctions. I can’t speak for the original poster, but in my case, I have a little bit of motivation to improve myself—enough to ask people for suggestions, enough to try things, but I wish I had a lot more motivation. Maybe they percieve themselves as having less motivation than average, but it’s still some motivation (enough to ask for help increasing motivation)?
I’d like to use a prediction book to improve my calibration, but I think I’m failing at a more basic step: how do you find some nice simple things to predict, which will let you accumulate a lot of data points? I’m seeing predictions about sports games and political elections a lot, but I don’t follow sports and political predictions both require a lot of research and are too few and far between to help me. The only other thing I can think of is highly personal predictions, like “There is a 90% chance I will get my homework done by X o’clock”, but what are some good areas to test my prediction abilities on where I don’t have the ability to change the outcome?
Why don’t you try starting with the things you already do? How do you spend your free time, typically? You might read some Less Wrong, you might post some comments on forums, you might play video games. Then maybe think of a tiny, little extension of those activities. When you read Less Wrong, if you normally don’t think too hard about the problems or thought experiments posed, maybe spend five minutes (or two minutes) by the clock trying to work it out yourself. If you typically post short comments, maybe try to write a longer, more detailed post for every two or three short ones. If you think you watch too much TV, maybe try to cut out 20 minutes and spend those 20 minutes doing something low effort but slightly better, like doing some light reading. Try to be patient with yourself and give yourself a gentle, non-intimidating ramp to “bettering yourself”. :)
I think it’s the difference between wanting something and wanting to want something, just as “belief-in-belief” is analogous to belief. I’m reminded of Yvain’s post about the difference between wanting, liking, and approving.
I think I can relate to Jaime’s question, and I’m also thinking the feeling of “I’m lazy” is a disconnect between “approving” and either “wanting” or “liking.” For example, once I get started writing a piece of dialogue or description I usually have fun. But despite years of trying, I have yet to write anything long or substantial, and most projects are abandoned at less than the 10% mark. The issue here is that I want to write random snippets of scenes and abandon them at will, but want to want to write a novel. Or, to put it another way, I want to have written something but it takes a huge activation energy to get me to start, since I won’t reap the benefits until months or years later, if at all.
But here’s something that might help—it helped me with regards to exercising, although not (yet) writing or more complex tasks. Think of your motivation or “laziness” in terms of an interaction between your past, present, and future selves. For a long time, it was Present Me blaming Past Me for not getting anything done. I felt bad about myself, I got mad at myself, and I was basically just yelling at someone (Past Me) who was no longer there to defend herself, while taking a very present-centered perspective.
As far as Present Me is concerned, she is the only one who deserves any benefits. Past Me can be retroactively vilified for not getting anything done, and Future Me can be stuck with the unpleasant task of actually doing something, while I lounge around. What helped me may be something unique to me, but here it is:
I like to think of myself as a very kind, caring person. Whether or not that’s true isn’t as important for our purposes. But the fact of the matter is that my self-identity as a kind, helpful person is much stronger and dearer to me than my self-identity as an intelligent or hard-working or ambitious person, so I tried to think of a way to frame hard work and ambition in terms of kindness. And I hit upon a metaphor that worked for me: I was helping out my other temporal selves. I would be kind to Past Me by forgiving her; she didn’t know any better and I’m older. And I would be kind to Future Me by helping her out.
If I were in a team, my sense of duty and empathy would never allow me to dump the most unpleasant tasks on my other teammates. So I tried to think of myself as teaming up with my future self to get things done, so that I would feel the same shame/indignance if I flaked and gave her more work. It even helped sometimes to think of myself in an inferior position, a servant to my future self, who should, after all, be a better and more deserving person than me. I tried to get myself to love Me From Tomorrow more than Me From Today, visualizing how happy and grateful Tomorrow Me will be to see that I finished up the work she thought she would have to do.
It is all a bit melodramatic, I know, but that’s how I convinced myself to stop procrastinating, and to turn “approve” into “want.” The best way for me, personally, to turn something I approve of but don’t want to do into something I genuinely want to do is to think of it as helping out someone else, and to imagine that person being happy and grateful. It gives me some of the same dopamine rush as actually helping out a real other person. The rhetoric I used might not work for you, but I think the key is to see your past, present, and future selves working as a team, rather than dumping responsibility onto one another.
I hope that helps, but I may just be someone who enjoys having an elaborate fantasy life :)
Oh! Alright, thank you. :) So if you go back and do something one hour in the past, then the loop closes an hour later, when the other version of yourself goes back for the same reasons you did, and now once again you are the only “you” at this moment in time. It’s not A’ that continues on with life leaving A″ off the hook, it is A″ who moves on while A’ must go back. That makes much more sense.
Edit: This means it is always the oldest Harry that we see, right? The one with all the extra waiting around included in his age? Since all the other Harries are stuck in a six hour loop.
I think I get it, but I’m still a bit confused, because both A’ and A″ are moving forward at the same rate, which means since A″ started off older, A’ will never really “catch up to” and become A″, because A″ continues to age. A″ is still three hours older than A’, right, forever and ever?
To consider a weird example, what about a six hour old baby going back in time to witness her own birth? Once the fetus comes out, wouldn’t there just be two babies, one six hours older than the other? Since they’re both there and they’re both experiencing time at a normal forward rate of one second per second, can’t they just both grow up like siblings? If the baby that was just born waited an hour and went back to witness her own birth, she would see her six hour older version there watching her get born, and she would also see the newborn come out, and then there’d be three babies, age 0, age six hours, and age twelve hours, right?
How exactly would the “witnessing your own birth” thing play out with time travel? I think your explanation implies that there will never be multiple copies running around for any length of time, but why does A″ cease to exist once A’ ages three hours? A″ has also aged three hours and become someone else in the meantime, right?
I debated over whether to include this in the HPMOR thread, but it’s not specific to that story, and, well, it is kind of a stupid question.
How does backwards-only time travel work? Specifically, wouldn’t a time traveler end up with dozens of slightly older or younger versions of herself all living at the same time? I guess “Yes” is a perfectly acceptable answer, but I’ve just never really seen the consequences addressed. I mean, given how many times Harry has used the Time Turner in HPMOR (just a convenient example), I’m wondering if there are like 13 or 14 Harries just running around acting independently? Because with backwards-only time travel, how is there a stable loop?
Think about a situation with a six-hour Time Turner and three versions of the same person: A, A’ (three hours older than A), and A″ (three hours older than A’). Let’s say A’ gets to work and realizes he forgot his briefcase. If he had a backwards and forwards time machine, he could pop into his home three hours ago and be back in literally the blink of an eye—and because he knows he could do this, he should then expect to see the briefcase already at his desk. Sure enough, he finds it, and three hours later he becomes A″, and goes back to plant the briefcase before the meeting. This mostly makes sense to me, because A″ would plant the briefcase and then return to his own time, through forwards time travel, rather than the slow path. A″ would never interact with A’, and every version of A to reach the point of the meeting would be locked deterministically to act exactly as A’ and A″ acted.
But I’m really confused about what happens if A has a Time Turner, that can go backwards but not forwards. Then, when A’ realizes he forgot his briefcase, wouldn’t there actually be two ways this could play out?
One, A’ finds the briefcase at his desk, in which case three hours later, he would become A″ and then come back to plant the briefcase. But what does A″ do after he plants the briefcase? Can he do whatever he wants? His one job is over, and there’s another version of him coming through from the past to live out his life—could A″ just get up and move to the Bahamas or become a secret agent or something, knowing that A’ and other past versions would take care of his work and family obligations? Isn’t he a full-blown new person that isn’t locked into any kind of loop?
Two, A’ doesn’t find the briefcase at his desk, in which case he goes back three hours to remind A to take his briefcase—does that violate any time looping laws? A’ never had someone burst in to remind him to take a briefcase, but does that mean he can’t burst in on A now? A’ can’t jump back to the future and experience firsthand the consequences of having the briefcase. If he goes back to talk to A, isn’t this just the equivalent of some other person who looks like you telling you not to forget your briefcase for work? Then A can get the briefcase and go to work, while A’ can just...leave, right? And live whatever life he wants?
Am I missing something really obvious? I must be, because Harry never stops to consider the consequences of dozens of independently operating versions of himself out there in the world, even when there are literally three other versions of him passed out next to his chair. What happens to those three other Harries, and in general what happens with backwards-only time travel? Is there no need for forwards time travel to “close the circuit” and create a loop, instead of a line?
I didn’t cry in “Humanism.” I didn’t cry in “Stanford Prison Experiment.” I didn’t even cry when Hermione died. But this chapter finally did it for me. “If I were the first person in the universe who ever really cared about someone, then I’d be honored to be that person.” That’s the kind of moral stand missing in any number of lectures and parables by supposed moral absolutists. It takes quite a bit of deviation from normal thinking to even really comprehend that emotion, let alone spontaneously describe it.
What I love best about HPMOR is that it could so easily have been a Kid Hero parody fic, and even though it skirts pretty close, especially in the earlier chapters, it is never quite a straight up parody. In fact, for all that Harry snarks about his life being one big fantasy cliche, HPMOR takes the Kid Hero genre deadly seriously and plays almost every trope completely straight. Sure, Harry doesn’t rush headlong into every danger like most kid heroes, but that’s a difference in method, not in spirit. He feels the weight of responsibility just like anyone else who was ever chosen, or chose themselves.
Far more than the science and even the rationality, I love HPMOR because it believes in heroes. Conversations like this one are why I’m not reading a textbook. One day, I’m going to catalog every single discussion about morality, duty, heroism, or wisdom. I genuinely think reading them often will make me a better person, or at least better at being good. So thank you, Eliezer. You really make fiction shine as a teaching medium
You’re right, thank you. I’ll edit the post.
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I personally didn’t find the actual experience at Equestria itself terrifying at all. It was a little disturbing at first, but almost all of that was sheer physical disgust or a knee-jerk sour grapes reaction. But it seems to avoid almost all of the pitfalls of failed Utopias everywhere:
You interact with real, sentient creatures who are independent and have their own values and desires. Thunder is capable of getting hurt, angry, and frustrated with his wife. Limeade is capable of feeling envious of her friend. They are in no way less than any complete human mind, and are given the same moral weight. They satisfy Lavender’s values, but only as an effect of satisfying their own values, not as their primary directive. The love and friendship are real.
You’re not isolated from other uploaded humans. There are only very few shards of Equestria that grow around only one upload; most interact with others from their Earthly lives.
It’s not stagnant—jryy, guvf vf n ovg qrongnoyr, V xabj, orpnhfr bs gur Ybbc Vzzbegnyf, but there are always new things to learn and discover and opportunities for growth and enlightenment if you so choose.
It’s not devoid of pain or sadness; it’s only devoid of arbitrary pain or sadness. It recognizes that to live a fully human life, you need sadness and frustration sometimes; it just makes sure that the pain is, as Paul Graham said, the pain of running a marathon, not the pain of stepping on a nail. Not everything is perfect.
That said, there were moments of genuine horror, mainly stuff people have pointed out before:
Perhaps trillions and trillions of sentient alien species were wiped out to expand Celestia’s empire.
The people left behind, who didn’t upload, are living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Celestia was no doubt capable of arranging for functional societies and amenities for those who chose not to upload, but her primary directive was to satisfy values through friendship and ponies, and making life hell for those who held out made them more likely to upload quickly.
Fridge Logic: One of Siofra’s coworkers said his version of the PonyPad game was like God of War; he brutally slaughtered and tortured ponies as part of Celestia’s palace guard. Well, what would happen to his shard of Equestria when he uploaded? Would he be massacring living minds? Presumably the ponies in Horndog Dan’s version of Equestria truly desired him and satisfied their own values by having sex with him, but the ones who were killed to satisfy the other colleague’s desire for heroism? Presumably his values don’t involve killing ponies who are essentially automata who exist only to be killed; he wants to kill genuinely evil enemy minds, not drones. Also, how does Celestia manage to satisfy the values of sociopaths with “friendship and ponies”?
Harry seems to have been aware of the Peverell brothers and the Deathly Hallows before all of this happened, and now it clicked for him that they made the Hallows in an attempt to defeat Death. But what I don’t understand is, when exactly did Harry learn this story? If he ever heard the full story about the three Hallows, wouldn’t that have been a big deal? He would have thought about it for a while and it would have been a major plot point right? EY has been really good about placing Chekhov’s Guns long in advance of when they’re fired, but I don’t recall when Harry learned about the Peverell brothers for the first time.