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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality full review

I opened up a bottle of delicious older-than-me scotch when Terry Pratchett died, and I’ve been enjoying it for much of this afternoon, so this will probably be a mess and cleaned up later.

Out of 5 stars, I’d give HPMOR a 1.5. Now, to the review (this is almost certainly going to be long)

The good

HPMOR contains some legitimately clever reworkings of the canon books to fit with Yudkowsky’s modified world:

A few examples- In HPMOR, the “interdict of Merlin” prevents wizards from writing down powerful spells, so Slytherin put the Basilisk in the chamber of secrets to pass on his magical lore. The prophecy “the dark lord will mark him as his own” was met when Voldemort gave Hariezer the same grade he himself had received.

Yudkowsky is also well read, and the story is peppered with reference to legitimately interesting science. If you google and research every reference, you’ll learn a lot. The problem is that most of the in-story references are incorrect, so if you don’t google around you are likely to pick up dozens of incorrect ideas.

The writing style during action scenes is pretty good. It keeps the pace moving and brisk and can be genuinely fun to read.

The bad

Stilted, repetitive writing

A lot of this story involves conversations that read like ham-fisted attempts at manipulation, filled with overly stilted language. Phrases like “Noble and Most Ancient House,” “General of Sunshine,” “ General of Chaos,”etc are peppered in over and over again. It’s just turgid. It smooths out when events are happening, but things are rarely happening.

Bad ideas

HPMOR is full of ideas I find incredibly suspect- the only character trait worth anything in the story (both implicitly and explicitly) is intelligence, and the primary use of intelligence within the story is manipulation. This leads to cloying levels of a sort of nerd elitism. Ron and Hagrid are basically dismissed out of hand in this story (Ron explicitly as being useless, Hagrid implicitly so) because they aren’t intelligent enough, and Hariezer explicitly draws implicit NPC vs real-people distinctions.

The world itself is constructed to back up these assertions- nothing in the wizarding world makes much sense, and characters often behave in silly ways (”like NPCs”) to be a foil for Hariezer.

The most ridiculous example of this is that the wizarding world justice is based on two cornerstones- poltiicans decide guilt or innocence for all wizard crimes, and the system of blood debts. All of the former death eaters who were pardoned (for claiming to be imperius cursed) apparently owe a blood debt to Hariezer, and so as far as wizarding justice is concerned he is above the law. He uses this to his advantage at a trial for Hermione.

Bad pedagogy

Hariezer routinely flubs the scientific concepts the reader is supposed to be learning. Almost all of the explicit in story science references are incorrect, as well as being overly-jargon filled.

Some of this might be on purpose- Hariezer is supposed to be only 11. However, this is terrible pedagogy. The reader’s guide to rationality is completely unreliable. Even weirder, the main antagonist, Voldemort, is also used as author mouthpiece several times. So the pedagogy is wrong at worst, and completely unreliable at best.

And implicitly, the method Hariezer relies on for the majority of his problem solving is Aristotelian science. He looks at things, thinks real hard, and knows the answer. This is horrifyingly bad implicit pedagogy.

Bad plotting

Over the course of the story, Hariezer moves from pro-active to no-active. At the start of the story he has a legitimate positive agenda- he wants to use science to uncover the secrets of magic. As the story develops, however, he completely loses sight of that goal, and he instead becomes just a passenger in the plot- he competes in Quirrell’s games and goes through school like any other student. When Voldemort starts including Hariezer in his plot, Hariezer floats along in a completely reactive way,etc.

Not until Hermione dies, near the end of the story, does Hariezer pick up a positive goal again (ending death) and he does absolutely nothing to achieve it. He floats along reacting to everything, and Voldemort defeats death and revives Hermione with no real input from Hariezer at all.

For a character who is supposed to be full of agency, he spends very little time exercising it in a proactive way.

Nothing has consequences (boring!)

And this brings me to another problem with the plotting- nothing in this story has any consequences. Nothing that goes wrong has any lasting implications for the story at all, which makes all the evens on hand ultimately boring. Several examples- early in the story Hariezer uses his time turner to solve even the simplest problems. Snape is asking you questions about potions you don’t know? Time travel. Bullies are stealing a meaningless trinket? Time travel,etc. As a result of these rule violations, his time turner is locked down by Professor Mcgonagall. Despite this Hariezer continues to use his time turner to solve all of his problems- the plot introduces another student willing to send a time turner message for a small amount of money via. “slytherin mail” it’s even totally anonymous.

Another egregious example of this is Quirrell’s battle game- the prize for the battle game is handed out by Quirrell in chapter 35 or so, and there are several more battle games after the prize! The reader knows that it doesn’t at all matter who wins these games- the prize is already awarded! What’s the point? The reader knows the prize has been given out, why are they invested in the proceedings at all?

When Hariezer becomes indebted to Luscious Malfoy, it never constrains him in any way. He becomes in debt, Dumbledore tells him it’s bad, he does literally nothing to deal with the problem. Two weeks later, Hermione dies and the debt gets cancelled.

When Hermione DIES Hariezer does nothing, and a few weeks later Voldemort brings her back. Nothing that happens ever matters.

The closest thing to long term repercussions is Hariezer helping Bellatrix Black escape- but we literally never see Bellatrix after that.

Hariezer never acts positively to fix his problems, he just bounces along whining about how humans need to defeat death until his problems get solved for him.

Mystery, dramatic irony and genre savvy

If you’ve read the canon books, you know at all times what is happening in the story. Voldemort has possessed Quirrell, Hariezer is a horcrux, Quirrell wants the philsopher’s stone, etc. There are bits and pieces that are modified, but the shape of the story is exactly canon. So all the mystery is just dramatic irony.

This is fine, as far as it goes, but there is a huge amount of tension because Hariezer is written as “genre savvy” and occasionally says things like “the hero of story such-and-such would do this” or “I understand mysterious prophecies from books.” The story is poking at cliches that the story wholeheartedly embraces. Supposedly Hariezer has read enough books just like this that dramatic irony liked this shouldn’t happen, as the story points out many times,- he should be just as informed as the reader. AND YET…

The author is practically screaming “wouldn’t it be lazy that Harry’s darkside is because he is a horcrux?” And yet, Harry’s darkside is because he is a horcrux.

Even worse, the narration of the book takes lots of swipes at the canon plots while “borrowing” the plot of the books.

Huge tension between the themes/lessons and the setting

The major themes of this book are in major conflict with the setting throughout the story.

One major theme is the need for secretive science to hide dangerous secrets- it’s echoed in the way Hariezer builds his “bayesian conspiracy,” reinforced by Hariezer and Quirrell’s attitudes toward nuclear weapons (and their explicit idea that people smart enough to build atomic weapons wouldn’t use them), and it’s reinforced at the end of the novel when Hariezer’s desire to dissolve some of the secrecy around magic is thwarted by a vow he took to not-end-the-world.

Unfortunately, that same secrecy is portrayed as having stagnated the progress of the wizarding world, and preventing magic from spreading. That same secrecy might well be why the wizarding world hasn’t already ended death and made thousands of philosopher’s stones.

Another major theme is fighting death/no-afterlife. But this is a fantasy story with magic. There are ghosts, a gate to the afterlife, a stone to talk to your dead loved ones,etc. The story tries to lamp shade it a bit, but that fundamental tension doesn’t go away. Some readers even assumed that Hariezer was simply wrong about an afterlife in the story- because they felt the tension and used my point above (unreliable pedagogy) to put the blame on Hariezer. In the story, the character who actually ended death WAS ALSO THE ANTAGONIST. Hariezer’s attempts are portrayed AS SO DANGEROUS THEY COULD END THE WORLD.

And finally- the major theme of this story is the supremacy of Bayesian reasoning. Unfortunately, as nostalgebraist pointed out explicitly, a world with magic is a world where your non-magic based Bayesian prior is worthless. Reasoning time and time again from that prior leads to snap conclusions unlikely to be right- and yet in the story this works time and time again. Once again, the world is fighting the theme of the story in obvious ways.

Let’s talk about Hermoine

The most explicitly feminist arc in this story is the arc where Hermione starts SPHEW, a group dedicated to making more wizarding heroines. The group starts out successful, gets in over their head, and Hariezer has to be called in to save the day (with the help of Quirrell).

At the end of the arc, Hariezer and Dumbledore have a long conversation about whether or not they should have let Hermione and friends play their little bully fighting game- which feels a bit like retroactively removing the characters agency. Sure, the women got to play at their fantasy, but only at the whim of the real heroes.

By the end of the story, Hermione is an indestructible part-unicorn/part-troll immortal. And what is she going to do with this power? Become Hariezer’s lab assistant, more or less. Be sent on quests by him. It just feels like Hermione isn’t really allowed to grow into her own agency in a meaningful way.

This isn’t to say that it’s intentional (pretty much the only character with real, proactive agency in this story is Quirrell) - but it does feel like women get the short end of the stick here.

Sanderson’s law of magic

So I’ve never read Sanderson, but someone point me to his first law of magic

Sanderson’s First Law of Magics: An author’s ability to solve conflict with magic is DIRECTLY PROPORTIONAL to how well the reader understands said magic. The idea here is that if your magic is laid out with clear rules, the author should feel free to solve problems with it- if your magic is mysterious and vague like Gandolf you shouldn’t solve all the conflict with magic, but if you lay out careful rules you can have the characters magic up the occasional solution. I’m not sure I buy into the rule fully, but it does make a good point- if the reader doesn’t understand your magic the solution might feel like it comes out of nowhere.

Yudkowsky never clearly lays out most of the rules of magic, and yet still solves all his problems via magic (and magic mixed with science). We don’t know how brooms work, but apparently if you strap one to a rocket you can actually steer the rocket, you won’t fall off the thing, and you can go way faster than other broomsticks.

This became especially problematic when he posted his final exam- lots of solutions were floated around each of which relied on some previously ill-defined aspect of the magic. Yudkowsky’s own solution relied on previously ill-defined transfiguration.

And when he isn’t solving problems like that, he is relying on the time turner over and over again. Swatting flies with flame throwers over and over again.

Coupled with the world being written as “insane” and it just feels like it’s lazy conflict resolution.

Conclusion

A largely forgettable, overly long nerd power fantasy, with a bit of science (most of it wrong) and a lot of bad ideas. 1.5 stars.

Individual chapter reviews below.

HPMOR 1

While at lunch, I dug into the first chapter of HPMOR. A few notes:

This isn’t nearly as bad as I remember, the writing isn’t amazing but its serviceable.. Either some editing has taken place in the last few years, or I’m less discerning than I once was.

There is this strange bit, where Harry tries to diffuse an argument his parents are having with:

“"Mum,” Harry said. “If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There’s a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. ”

This seems especially out of place, because no one is arguing about what science is.

Otherwise, this is basically an ok little chapter. Harry and Father are skeptical magic could exist, so send a reply letter to Hogwarts asking for a professor to come and show them some magics.

HPMOR 2: in which I remember why I hated this

This chapter had me rolling my eyes so hard that I now I have quite the headache. In this chapter, Professor McGonagall shows up and does some magic, first levitating Harry’s father, and then turning into a cat. Upon seeing the first, Harry drops some Bayes, saying how anticlimatic it was ‘to update on an event of infinitesimal probability,’ upon seeing the second, Hariezer Yudotter greets us with this jargon dump:

“You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That’s not just an arbitrary rule, it’s implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling!”

First, this is obviously atrocious writing. Most readers will get nothing out of this horrific sentence. He even abbreviated faster-than-light as FTL, to keep the density of understandable words to a minimum.

Second, this is horrible physics for the following reasons:

the levitation already violated conservation of energy,which you found anticlimactic fuck you Hariezer

the deep area of physics concerned with conservation of energy is not quantum mechanics, its thermodynamics. Hariezer should have had a jargon dump about perpetual motion machines. To see how levitation violates conservation of energy, imagine taking a generator like the Hoover dam and casting a spell to levitate all the water from the bottom of the dam back up to the top to close the loop. As long as you have wizard to move the water, you can generate power forever. Exercise for the reader- devise a perpetual motion machine powered by shape changers (hint:imagine an elevator system of two carts hanging over a pully. On one side, an elephant, on the other a man. Elephant goes down, man goes up. At the bottom, the elephant turns into a man and at the top the man turns into an elephant. What happens to the pulley over time?) -the deeper area related to conservation of energy is not unitarity, as is implied in the quote. There is a really deep theorem in physics, due to Emmy Noether, that tells us that conservation of energy really means that physics is time translationaly invariant. This means there aren’t special places in time, the laws tomorrow are basically the same as yesterday and today. (tangential aside- this is why we shouldn’t worry about a lack of energy conservation at the big bang, if the beginning of time was a special point, no one would expect energy to be conserved there). Unitarity in quantum mechanics is basically a fancy way of saying probability is conserved. You CAN have unitarity without conservation of energy. Technical aside- its easy to show that if the unitary operator is time-translation invariant, there is an operator that commutes with the unitary operator, usually called the hamiltonian. Without that assumption, we lose the hamiltonian but maintain unitarity. -None of this has much to do at all with faster than light signalling, which would be the least of our concern if we had just discovered a source of infinite energy.

I used to teach undergraduates, and I would often have some enterprising college freshman (who coincidentally was not doing well in basic mechanics) approach me to talk about why string theory was wrong. It always felt like talking to a physics madlibs book. This chapter let me relive those awkward moments.

Sorry to belabor this point so much, but I think it sums up an issue that crops up from time to time in Yudkowsky’s writing, when dabbling in a subject he doesn’t have much grounding in, he ends up giving actual subject matter experts a headache.

Summary of the chapter- McGonagall visits and does some magic, Harry is convinced magic is real, and they are off to go shop for Harry’s books.

I read the comments on an HPMOR chapter, which I recommend strongly against. I wish I could talk to several of the commentators, and gently talk them out of a poor financial decision.

Poor, misguided random internet person- your donation to MIRI/LessWrong will not help save the world. Even if you grant all their (rather silly) assumptions MIRI is a horribly unproductive research institute- in more than a decade, it has published fewer peer reviewed papers than the average physics graduate student does while in grad school. The majority of money you donate to MIRI will go into the generation of blog posts and fan fiction. If you are fine with that, then go ahead and spend your money, but don’t buy into the idea that this money will save the world.

HPMOR 3: uneventful, inoffensive

This chapter is worse than the previous chapters. As Hariezer (I realize this portmanteau isn’t nearly as clever as I seem to think it is, but I will continue to use it) enters diagon alley, he remarks

It was like walking through the magical items section of an Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebook (he didn’t play the game, but he did enjoy reading the rulebooks).

For reasons not entirely clear to me, the line filled me with rage.

As they walk McGonagall tells Hariezer about Voldemort, noting that other countries failed to come to Britain’s aid. This prompts Hariezer to immediately misuse the idea of the Bystander Effect (an exercise left to the reader- do social psychological phenomena that apply to individuals also apply to collective entities, like countries? Are the social-psychological phenomena around failure to act in people likely to also explain failure to act as organizations?)

Thats basically it for this chapter. Uneventful chapter- slightly misused scientific stuff, a short walk through diagon alley, standard Voldemort stuff. The chapter ends with some very heavy handed foreshadowing:

(And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry’s art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.)

If Harry had only attended more CFAR workshops…

HPMOR 4: in which, for the first time, I wanted the author to take things further

So first, I actually like this chapter more than the previous few, because I think its beginning to try to deliver on what I want in the story. And now, my bitching will commence:

A recurring theme of the LessWrong sequences that I find somewhat frustrating is that (apart from the Bayesian Rationalist) the world is insane. This same theme pops up in this MOR chapter, where the world is created insane by Yudkowsky, so that Hariezer can tell you why.

Upon noticing the wizarding world uses coins of silver and gold, Hariezer asks about exchange rates, and asks the bank goblin how much it would cost to get a big chunk of silver turned into coins, the goblin says he’ll check with his superiors, Hariezer asks him to estimate, and the estimate is that the fee is about 5% of the silver.

This prompts Hariezer to realize that he could do the following:

Take gold coins and buy silver with them in the muggle world bring the silver to Gringots and have it turned into coins convert the silver coins to gold coins, ending up with more gold than you started with, start the loop over until the muggle prices make it not profitable

(of course, the in-story explanation is overly-jargon filled as usual)

This is somewhat interesting, and its the first look at what I want in a story like this- the little details of the wizarding world that would never be covered in a children’s story. Stross wrote a whole book exploring money/economics in a far future society (Neptune’s Brood, its only ok), there is a lot of fertile ground for Yudkowsky here.

In a world where wizards can magic wood into gold, how do you keep counterfeiting at bay? Maybe the coins are made of special gold only goblins know how to find (maybe the goblin hordes hoard (wordplay!) this special gold like De beers hoards diamonds).

Maybe the goblins carefully magic money into and out of existence in order to maintain a currency peg. Maybe its the perfect inflation- instead of relying on banks to disperse the coins every and now and then the coins in people’s pockets just multiply at random.

Instead, we get a silly, insane system (don’t blame Rowling either- Yudkowsky is more than willing to go off book, AND the details of this simply aren’t discussed, for good reason, in the genre Rowling wrote the books in), and rationalist Hariezer gets an easy ‘win’. Its not a BAD section, but it feels lazy.

And a brief note on the writing style- its still oddly stilted, and I wonder how good it would be at explaining ideas to someone unfamiliar. For instance, Hariezer gets lost in thought McGonagall says something, Hariezer replies:

“"Hm?” Harry said, his mind elsewhere. “Hold on, I’m doing a Fermi calculation." "A what? ” said Professor McGonagall, sounding somewhat alarmed. “It’s a mathematical thing. Named after Enrico Fermi. A way of getting rough numbers quickly in your head…”“

Maybe it would feel less awkward for Hariezer to say "Hold on, I’m trying to estimate how much gold is in the vault.” And then instead of saying “its a math thing,” we could follow Hariezer’s thoughts as he carefully constructs his estimate (as it is, the estimate is crammed into a hard-to-read paragraph).

Its a nitpick, sure, but the story thus far is loaded with such nits.

Chapter summary- Harry goes to gringots, takes out money.

HPMOR 5: in which the author assures us repeatedly this chapter is funny

This chapter is, again, mostly inoffensive, although there is a weird tonal shift. The bulk of this chapter is played broadly for laughs. There is actually a decent description of the fundamental attribution error, although its introduced with this twerpy bit of dialogue

Harry looked up at the witch-lady’s strict expression beneath her pointed hat, and sighed. “I suppose there’s no chance that if I said fundamental attribution error you’d have any idea what that meant.”

This sort of thing seems like awkward pedagogy. If the reader doesn’t know it, Hariezer is now exasperated with the reader as well as with whoever Yudkowsky is currently using as a foil.

Now, the bulk of this chapter involves Hariezer being left alone to buy robes, where he meets and talks to Draco Malfoy. Hariezer, annoyed at having people say to him “OMG, YOU ARE HARRY POTTER!” upon meeting and learning Malfoy’s name, exclaims “OMG, YOU ARE DRACO MALFOY!”. Malfoy accepts this as a perfectly normal reaction to his imagined fame, and a mildly amusing conversation occurs. Its a fairly clever idea.

Unfortunately, its marred by the literary equivalent of a sitcom laugh track. Worried that the reader isn’t sure if they should be laughing, Yudkowsky interjects phrases like these throughout:

Draco’s attendant emitted a sound like she was strangling but kept on with her work One of the assistants, the one who’d seemed to recognise Harry, made a muffled choking sound. One of Malkin’s assistants had to turn away and face the wall. Madam Malkin looked back silently for four seconds, and then cracked up. She fell against the wall, wheezing out laughter, and that set off both of her assistants, one of whom fell to her hands and knees on the floor, giggling hysterically.

The reader is constantly told that the workers in the shop find it so funny they can barely contain their laughter. It feels like the author constantly yelling GET IT YOU GUYS? THIS IS FUNNY!

As far as the writing goes, the tonal shift to broad comedy feels a bit strange and happens with minimal warning (there is a brief conversation earlier in the chapter thats also played for a laugh), and everything is as stilted as its always been. For example, when McGonagall walks into the robe shop in time to hear Malfoy utter some absurdities, Harry tells her

“He was in a situational context where those actions made internal sense -”

Luckily, Hariezer gets cut off before he starts explaining what a joke is.

Chapter summary- Hariezer buys robes, talks to Malfoy.

HPMOR 6: Yud lets it all hang out

The introduction suggested that the story really gets moving after chapter 5. If this is an example of what “really moving” looks like, I fear I’ll soon stop reading. Apart from my rant about chapter 2, things had been largely light, and inoffensive up until this chapter. Here, I found myself largely recoiling. We shift from the broad comedy of the last chapter to a chapter filled with weirdly dark little rants.

As should be obvious by now, I find the line between Eliezer and Harry to be pretty blurry (hence my annoying use of Hariezer). In this chapter, that line disappears completely as we get passages like this

Harry had always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how far ahead they’d been at age ten. But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history. Because those other geniuses hadn’t gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. They’d never found an important problem.

There are dozens of such passages that could be ripped directly from some of Hariezer’s friendly AI writing and pasted right into MOR. Its a bit disconcerting, in part because its forcing me to face just how much of Eliezer’s other writing of wasted time with.

The chapter begins strongly enough, Hariezer starts doing some experiments with his magic pouch. If he asks for 115 gold coins, it comes, but not if he asks for 90+25 gold coins. He tries using other words for gold in other languages, etc. Unfortunately, it leads him to say this:

“I just falsified every single hypothesis I had! How can it know that ‘bag of 115 Galleons’ is okay but not ‘bag of 90 plus 25 Galleons’? It can count but it can’t add? It can understand nouns, but not some noun phrases that mean the same thing?…The rules seem sorta consistent but they don’t mean anything! I’m not even going to ask how a pouch ends up with voice recognition and natural language understanding when the best Artificial Intelligence programmers can’t get the fastest supercomputers to do it after thirty-five years of hard work,”

So here is the thing- it would be very easy to write a parser that behaves exactly like what Hariezer describes with his bag. You would just have a look-up table with lots of single words for gold in various languages. Nothing fancy at all. Its behaving oddly ENTIRELY BECAUSE ITS NOT DOING NATURAL LANGUAGE. I hope we revisit the pouch in a later chapter to sort this out. I reiterate, its stuff like this that (to me at least) were the whole premise of this story- flesh out the rules of this wacky universe.

Immediately after this, the story takes a truly bizarre turn. Hariezer spots a magic first aid kit, and wants to buy it. In order to be a foil for super-rationalist Harry, McGonagall then immediately becomes immensely stupid, and tries to dissuade him from purchasing it. Note, she doesn’t persuade him by saying “Oh, there are magical first aid kits all over the school,” or “there are wizards watching over the boy who lived who can heal you with spells if something happens” or anything sensible like that, she just starts saying he’d never need it.

This leads Harry to a long description of the planning fallacy, and he says to counter it he always tries to assume the worst possible outcomes. (Note to Harry and the reader: the planning fallacy is a specific thing that occurs when people or organizations plan to accomplish a task. What Harry is trying to overcome is more correctly optimism bias.).

This leads McGonagall to start lightly suggesting (apropos of nothing) that maybe Harry is an abused child. Hariezer responds with this tale:

"There’d been some muggings in our neighborhood, and my mother asked me to return a pan she’d borrowed to a neighbor two streets away, and I said I didn’t want to because I might get mugged, and she said, ‘Harry, don’t say things like that!’ Like thinking about it would make it happen, so if I didn’t talk about it, I would be safe. I tried to explain why I wasn’t reassured, and she made me carry over the pan anyway. I was too young to know how statistically unlikely it was for a mugger to target me, but I was old enough to know that not-thinking about something doesn’t stop it from happening, so I was really scared.” … I know it doesn’t sound like much,” Harry defended. “But it was just one of those critical life moments, you see? … That’s when I realised that everyone who was supposed to protect me was actually crazy, and that they wouldn’t listen to me no matter how much I begged them So we are back to the world is insane, as filtered through this odd little story.

Then McGonagall asks if Harry wants to buy an owl, and Harry says no he’d be too worried he’d forget to feed it or something. Which prompts McGonagall AGAIN to suggest Harry had been abused, which leads Harry into an odd rant about how false accusations of child abuse ruin families (which is true, but seriously, is this the genre for this rant? What the fuck is happening with this chapter?) This ends up with McGonagall implying Harry must have been abused because he is so weird, and maybe some cast a spell to wipe his memory of it (the spell comes up after Harry suggests repressed memories are BS pseudoscience, which again, is true, BUT WHY IS THIS HAPPENING IN THIS STORY?)

Harry uses his ‘rationalist art’ (literally “Harry’s rationalist skills begin to boot up again”) to suggest an alternative explanation

"I’m too smart, Professor. I’ve got nothing to say to normal children. Adults don’t respect me enough to really talk to me. And frankly, even if they did, they wouldn’t sound as smart as Richard Feynman, so I might as well read something Richard Feynman wrote instead. I’m isolated, Professor McGonagall. I’ve been isolated my whole life. Maybe that has some of the same effects as being locked in a cellar. And I’m too intelligent to look up to my parents the way that children are designed to do. My parents love me, but they don’t feel obliged to respond to reason, and sometimes I feel like they’re the children - children who won’t listen and have absolute authority over my whole existence. I try not to be too bitter about it, but I also try to be honest with myself, so, yes, I’m bitter.

After that weird back and forth the chapter moves on, Harry goes and buys a wand, and then from conversation begins to suspect that the Voldemort might still be alive. When McGonagall doesn’t want to tell him more, “a terrible dark clarity descended over his mind, mapping out possible tactics and assessing their consequences with iron realism.”

This leads Hariezer to blackmail McGonagall- he won’t tell people Voldemort is still alive if she tells him about the prophecy. Its another weird bit in a chapter absolutely brimming with weird bits.

Finally they go to buy a trunk, but they are low on gold (note to the reader: here would have been an excellent example of the planning fallacy). But luckily Hariezer had taken extra from the vault. Rather than simply saying “oh, I brought some extra”, he says

So - suppose I had a way to get more Galleons from my vaultwithout us going back to Gringotts, but it involved me violating the role of an obedient child. Would I be able to trust you with that, even though you’d have to step outside your own role as Professor McGonagall to take advantage of it?

So he logic-chops her into submission, or whatever, and they buy the trunk.

This chapter for me was incredibly uncomfortable. McGonagall behaves very strangely so she can act as a foil for all of Hariezer’s rants, and when the line between Hariezer and Eliezer fell away completely, it felt a bit oddly personal.

Oh, right, there was also a conversation about the rule against underage magic

"Ah,” Harry said. “That sounds like a very sensible rule. I’m glad to see the wizarding world takes that sort of thing seriously.”

I can’t help but draw parallels to the precautions Yud wants with AI.

Summary: Harry finished buying school supplies(I hope).

HPMOR 7: Uncomfortable elitism, and rape threats

A brief warning: Like always I’m typing this thing on my phone, so strange spell-check driven typos almost certainly abound. However, I’m also pretty deep in my cups (one of the great privileges of leaving academia is that I can afford to drink Lagavulin more than half my age like its water. The downside is no longer get to teach and so must pour my wisdom out in the form of a critique of a terrible fan fiction, that all of one person is probably reading)

This chapter took the weird tonal shift from the last chapter and just ran with it.

We are finally heading toward Hogwarts,so the chapter opens with the classic platform 9 3/4 bit from the book. And then it takes an uncomfortable elitist tone: Harry asks Ron Weasley to call him “Mr. Spoo” so that he can remain incognito, and Ron, a bit confused says “Sure Harry.” That one slip up allows Hariezer to immediately peg Ron as an idiot. In the short conversation that follows he mentally thinks of Ron as stupid several times and then he tries to explain to Ron why Quidditch is a stupid game.

It is my understanding from a (rather loose reading of the) books, that like cricket, quidditch games last weeks, EVEN MONTHS. In a game lasting literally weeks, one team could conceivably be up by 15 goals. In one of the books, I believe an important match went against the team that caught the snitch in one of the books. This is not to entirely defend quidditch, but it doesn’t HAVE to be an easy target. I think part of the ridicule that quidditch gets is that non-British/non-Indian audiences are perhaps not capable of appreciating that there are sports (cricket) that are played out over weeks that are very high scoring.

Either way, the WAY that Hariezer attacks quidditch is at expense of Ron, and it feels like a nerd sneering at a jock for liking sports. But thats just the lead up to the cloying nerd-elitism. Draco comes over, Hariezer is quick to rekindle that budding friendship, and we get the following conversation about Ron:

If you didn’t like him,” Draco said curiously, “why didn’t you just walk away?” "Um… his mother helped me figure out how to get to this platform from the King’s Cross Station, so it was kind of hard to tell him to get lost. And it’s not that I hate this Ron guy,” Harry said, “I just, just…” Harry searched for words. "Don’t see any reason for him to exist?" offered Draco. "Pretty much.

Just cloying, uncomfortable levels of nerd-elitism.

Now that Hariezer and Draco are paired back up, they can have lot of uncomfortable conversations. First, Draco shares something only slightly personal, which leads to this

"Why are you telling me that? It seems sort of… private…” Draco gave Harry a serious look. “One of my tutors once said that people form close friendships by knowing private things about each other, and the reason most people don’t make close friends is because they’re too embarrassed to share anything really important about themselves.” Draco turned his palms out invitingly. “Your turn?”

Hariezer consider this a masterful use of the social psychology idea of reciprocity (which just says if you do something for someone, they’re likely to do it for you). Anyway, this exchange is just a lead up to this, which feels like shock value for no reason:

"Hey, Draco, you know what I bet is even better for becoming friends than exchanging secrets? Committing murder." "I have a tutor who says that," Draco allowed. He reached inside his robes and scratched himself with an easy, natural motion. "Who’ve you got in mind?" Harry slammed The Quibbler down hard on the picnic table. “The guy who came up with this headline.” Draco groaned. “Not a guy. A girl. A ten-year-old girl, can you believe it? She went nuts after her mother died and her father, who owns this newspaper, is convinced that she’s a seer, so when he doesn’t know he asks Luna Lovegood and believes anything she says.” … Draco snarled. “She has some sort of perverse obsession about the Malfoys, too, and her father is politically opposed to us so he prints every word. As soon as I’m old enough I’m going to rape her.”

So, Hariezer is joking about the murder (its made clear later), but WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING? These escalating friendship-tests feel contrived, reciprocity is effective when you don’t make demands immediately, which is why when you get a free sample at the grocery store the person at the counter doesn’t say “did you like that? Buy this juice or we won’t be friends anymore.” This whole conversation feels ham fisted, Hariezer is consistently telling us about all the manipulative tricks they are both using. Its less a conversation and more people who just sat through a shitty marketing seminar trying to try out what they learned. WITH RAPE.

After that, Draco has a whole spiel about how the legal system of the wizard world is in the pocket of the wealthy, like the Malfoys, which prompts Hariezer to tell us that only countries descended from the enlightenment have law-and-order (and I take it from comments that originally there was some racism somewhere in here that has since been edited out). Note: the wizarding world HAS LITERAL MAGIC TRUTH POTIONS, but we are to believe our enlightenment legal system works better? This seems like an odd, unnecessary narrative choice.

Next, Hariezer tries to recruit Draco to the side of science with this:

Science doesn’t work by waving wands and chanting spells, it works by knowing how the universe works on such a deep level that you know exactly what to do in order to make the universe do what you want. If magic is like casting Imperio on someone to make them do what you want, then science is like knowing them so well that you can convince them it was their own idea all along. It’s a lot more difficult than waving a wand, but it works when wands fail, just like if the Imperiusfailed you could still try persuading a person.

I’m not sure why you’d use persuasion/marketing as a shiny metaphor for science, other than its the theme of this chapter. ”If you know science you can manipulate people as if you were literally in control of them” seems like a broad, and mostly untrue claim. AND IT FOLLOWS IMMEDIATELY AFTER HARRY EXPLAINED THE MOON LANDING TO DRACO. Science can take you to the fucking moon, maybe thats enough.

This chapter also introduces comed-tea, a somewhat clever pun drink. If you open a can, at some point you’ll do a spit-take before finishing it. I’m not sure the point of this new magical introduction, hopefully Hariezer gets around to exploring it (seriously, hopefully Hariezer begins to explore ANYTHING to do with the rules of magic. I’m 7 full chapters in and this fanfic has paid lip service to science without using it to explore magic at all).

Chapter summary: Hariezer makes it to platform 9 3/4, ditches Ron as somehow sub-human. Has a conversation with Draco that is mostly framed as conversation-as-explicit manipulation between Hariezer and Draco, and its very ham-fisted, but luckily Hariezer assures us its actual masterful manipulation, saying things like this, repeatedly:

And Harry couldn’t help but notice how clumsy, awkward, graceless his attempt at resisting manipulation / saving face / showing off had appeared compared to Draco.

Homework for the interested reader: next time you are meeting someone new, share something embarrassingly personal and then ask them immediately to reciprocate, explicitly saying ‘it’ll make us good friends.’ See how that works out for you.

WHAT DO PEOPLE SEE IN THIS? It wouldn’t be so bad, but we are clearly supposed to identify with Hariezer, who looks at Draco as someone he clearly wants on his side, and who instantly dismisses someone (with no “Bayesian updates” whatsoever as basically less than human). I’m honestly surprised that anyone read past this chapter. But I’m willing to trudge on, for posterity. Two more glasses of scotch, and then I start chapter 8. I’m likely to need alcohol to soldier on from here on out.

Side note: I’ve consciously not mentioned all the “take over the world” Hariezer references, but there are probably 3 or 4 per chapter. They seem at first like bad jokes, but they keep getting revisited so much that I think Hariezer’s explicit goal is perhaps not curiosity driven (figure out the rules of magic), but instead power driven (find out the rules of magic in order to take over the world). He assures Draco he really is Ravenclaw, but if he were written with consistency maybe he wouldn’t need to be? Hariezer doesn’t ask questions (like I would imagine a Ravenclaw would), he gives answers. Thus far, he has consistently decided the wizarding world has nothing to teach him. Arithmancy books he finds only go up to trigonometry, etc. He certainly has shown only limited curiosity this far. Its unclear to me why a curiosity driven, scientist character would feel a strong desire to impress, manipulate Draco Malfoy, as written here. This is looking less like a love-song to science, and more a love-song to some weird variant of How to Win Friends and Influence People.

A few Observations Regarding Hariezer Yudotter

After drunkenly reading chapters 8,9 and 10 last night (I’ll get to the posts soon, hopefully), I was flipping channels and somehow settled on an episode of that old TV show with Steve Urkel (bear with me, this will get relevant in a second).

In the episode, the cool kid Eddie gets hustled at billiards, and Urkel comes in and saves the day because his knowledge of trigonometry and geometry makes him a master at the table.

I think perhaps this is a common dream of the science fetishist- if only I knew ALL OF THE SCIENCE I would be unstoppable at everything. Hariezer Yudotter is a sort of wish fulfillment character of that dream. Hariezer isn’t motivated by curiosity at all really, he wants to grow his super-powers by learning more science. Its why we can go 10 fucking chapters without Yudotter really exploring much in the way of the science of magic (so far I count one lazy paragraph exploring what his pouch can do, in 10 chapters). Its why he constantly describes his project as “taking over the world.” And its frustrating, because this obviously isn’t a flaw to be overcome its part of Yudotter’s “awesomeness.”

I have a phd in a science, and it has granted me these real world super-powers:

I fix my own plumbing, do my own home repairs,etc. I made a robot of legos and a raspberry pi that plays connect 4 incredibly well (my robot sidekick, I guess) Via techniques I learned in the sorts of books that in fictional world Hariezer uses to be a master manipulator, I can optimize ads on webpages such that up to 3% of people will click on them (that is, seriously, the power of influence in reality. Not Hannibal Lector but instead advertisers trying to squeeze an extra tenth of a percent on conversions), for which companies sometime pay me If you give me a lot of data, I can make a computer find patterns in it, for which companies sometimes pay me.

Thats basically it. Back when I worked in science, I spent nearly a decade of my life calculating various background processes related to finding a Higgs boson, and I helped design some software theorists now use to calculate new processes quickly. These are the sorts of projects scientists work on, and most days its hard work and total drudgery, and there is no obvious ‘instrumental utility’- BUT I REALLY WANTED TO KNOW IF THERE WAS A HIGGS FIELD.

And thats why I think the Yudotter character doesn’t feel like a scientist- he wants to be stronger, more powerful, take over the world, but he doesn’t seem to care what the answers are. Its all well and good to be driven, but most importantly, you have to be curious.

HPMOR 8: Back to the inoffensive chapters of yesteryear

And a dramatic tonal shift and we are back to a largely inoffensive chapter.

There is another lesson in this chapter, this time the lesson is confirmation bias (though Yudkowsky/Hariezer refer to it as ‘positive bias’), but once again, the pedagogical choices are strange. As Hariezer winds into his lesson to Hermione, she thinks the following:

She was starting to resent the boy’s oh-so-superior tone…but that was secondary to finding out what she’d done wrong.

So Yudkowsky knows his Hariezer has a condescending tone, but he runs with it. So as a reader, if I already know the material I get to be on the side of truth, and righteousness and I can condescend to the simps with Hariezer, OR, I don’t know the material, and then Hermione is my stand in, and I have to swallow being condescended to in order to learn.

Generally, its not a good idea when you want to teach someone something to immediately put them on the defensive- I’ve never stood in front of a class, or tutored someone by saying

"The sad thing is you probably did everything the book told you to do… unless you read the very, very best sort of books, they won’t quite teach you how to do science properly…

And Yudkowsky knows enough that his tone is off-putting to point to it. So I wonder- is this story ACTUALLY teaching people things? Or is it just a way for people who already know some of the material to feel superior to Hariezer’s many foils? Do people go and read the sequences so that they can move from Hariezer-foil, to Hariezer’s point of view? (these are not rhetorical questions, if anyone has ideas on this).

As for the rest of the chapter- its good to see Hermione merits as human, unlike Ron. There is a strange bit in the chapter where Neville asks a Gryffindor prefect to find his frog, and the prefect says no (why? what narrative purpose does this serve?).

Chapter summary: Hariezer meets Neville and Hermione on the train to Hogwarts. Still no actual exploration of magic rules. None of the fun candy of the original story.

HPMOR 9 and 10

EDIT: I made a drunken mistake in this one, see this response. I do think my original point still goes through because the hat responds to the attempted blackmail with:

I know you won’t follow through on a threat to expose my nature, condemning this event to eternal repetition. It goes against the moral part of you too strongly, whatever the short-term needs of the part of you that wants to win the argument.

So the hat doesn’t say “I don’t care about this,” the hat says “you won’t do it.” My point is, however, substantially weakened.

END EDIT

Alright, the lagavulin is flowing, and I’m once more equipped to pontificate.

These chapters are really one chapter split in two. I’m going to use them to argue against Yudkowsky’s friendly AI concept a bit. There is this idea, called ‘orthgonality’ that says that an AIs goals can be completely independent of its intelligence. So you can say ‘increase happiness’ and this uber-optimizer can tile the entire universe with tiny molecular happy faces, because its brilliant at optimizing but incapable of evaluating its goals. Just setting the stage for the next chapter.

In this chapter, Harry gets sorted. When the sorting hat hits his head, Harry wonders if its self-aware, which because of some not-really-explained magical hat property, instantly makes the hat self-aware. The hat finds being self aware uncomfortable, and Hariezer worries that he’ll destroy an intelligent being when the hat is removed. The hat assures us that the hat cares only for sorting children. As Hariezer notes

It [the hat] was still imbued with only its own strange goals…

Even still, Hariezer manages to blackmail the hat- he threatens to tell all the other kids to wonder if the hat is self-aware. The hat concedes to the demand.

So how does becoming self-aware over and over effect the hat’s goals of sorting people? It doesn’t. The blackmail should fail. Yudkowsky imagines that the minute it became self-aware, the hat couldn’t help but pick up some new goals. Even Yudkowsky imagines that becoming self-aware will have some effects on your goals.

This chapter also has some more weirdly personal seeming moments when the line between Yudkowsky’s other writing and HPMOR breaks down completely.

Summary: Harry gets sorted into ravenclaw.

I am immensely frustrated that I’m 10 chapters into this thing, and we still don’t have any experiments regarding the rules of magic.

HPMOR 11

Chapter 11 is “omake.” This is a personal pet-peeve of mine, because I’m a crotchety old man at heart. The anime culture takes Japanese words, for which we have perfectly good english words, and snags them (kawaii/kawaisa is a big one). Omake is another one. I have nothing against Japanese (I’ve been known to speak it), just don’t like unnecessary loaner words in general. I know this is my failing, BUT I WANT SO BAD TO HOLD IT AGAINST THIS FANFIC.

Either way, I’m skipping the extra content, because I can only take so much.

HPMOR 12

Nothing much in this chapter. Dumbledore gives his post-dinner speech.

Harry cracks open a can of comed-tea and does the requisite spit-take when Dumbledore starts his dinner speech with random nonsense. He considers casting a spell to make his sense of humor very specific, and then he can use comed-tea to take over the world.

Chapter summary: dinner is served and eaten

HPMOR 13: Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure

There is a scene in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, toward the end, where they realize their time machine gives them super-human powers. They need to escape a jail, so they agree to get the keys later and travel back in time and hide them, and suddenly there the keys are. After yelling to remember a trash can, they have a trash can to incapacitate a guard with,etc. They can do anything they want.

Anyway, this chapter is that idea, but much longer. The exception is that we don’t know there has been a time machine (actually, I don’t KNOW for sure thats what it is, but the Bill and Ted fan in me says thats what happened this chapter, I won’t find out until next chapter. If I were a Bayesian rationalist, I would say that the odds ratio is pi*10^^^^3 in my favor. ).

Hariezer wakes up and finds a note saying he is part of a game. Everywhere he looks, as if by magic he finds more notes, deducting various game “points,” and some portraits have messages for him. The notes lead him to a pack of bullies beating up some hufflepuffs, and pies myseriously appears for Hariezer to attack with. The final note tells him to go to Mcgonagall’s office, and the chapter ends.

I assume next chapter, Hariezer will recieve his time machine and future Hariezer will use it to set up the “game” as a prank on past Hariezer. Its a clever enough chapter.

This chapter was actually decent, but what the world really needs is Harry Potter/Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure cross over fiction.

HPMOR 14: Lets talk about computability

This chapter has created something in my brain like Mr Burn’s Three Stooges Syndrome. So many things I want to talk about, I don’t know where to start!

First, I was slightly wrong about last chapter. It wasn’t a time machine Hariezer used to accomplish the prank in the last chapter, it was a time machine AND an invisibility cloak. BIll and Ted did not lead me astray.

On to the chapter- Hariezer gets a time machine (Hariezer lives 26 hour days, so he needs he is given a time turner to correct his sleep schedule) this prompts this:

Say, Professor McGonagall, did you know that time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter? Why yes it does! Did you know that one kilogram of antimatter encountering one kilogram of matter will annihilate in an explosion equivalent to 43 million tons of TNT? Do you realise that I myself weigh 41 kilograms and that the resulting blast would leave A GIANT SMOKING CRATER WHERE THERE USED TO BE SCOTLAND?

Credit where credit is due- this is correct physics. In fact, its completely possible (though a bit old-fashioned and unwieldy), to treat quantum field theory such that all anti-matter is simply normal matter moving backward in time. Here is an example, look at this diagram:

If we imagine time moving from the bottom of the diagram toward the top, we see two electrons traveling forward in time, and exchanging a photon and changing directions.

But now imagine time moves left to right in the diagram instead- what we see is one electron and one positron coming together and destroying each other, and then a new pair forming from the photon. BUT, we COULD say that what we are seeing is really an electron moving forward in time, and an electron moving backward in time. The point where they “disappear” is really the point where the forward moving electron changed directions and started moving backward in time.

This is probably very confusing, if anyone wants a longer post about this, I could probably try for it sober. I need to belabor this though- the takeaway point I need you to know- the best theory we have of physics so far can be interpreted as having particles that change direction in time, AND HARIEZER KNOWS THIS AND CORRECTLY NOTES IT.

Why is this important? Because a paragraph later he says this:

You know right up until this moment I had this awful suppressed thought somewhere in the back of my mind that the only remaining answer was that my whole universe was a computer simulation like in the book Simulacron 3 but now even that is ruled out because this little toy ISN’T TURING COMPUTABLE! A Turing machine could simulate going back into a defined moment of the past and computing a different future from there, an oracle machine could rely on the halting behavior of lower-order machines, but what you’re saying is that reality somehow self-consistently computes in one sweep using information that hasn’t… happened… yet..

This is COMPLETE NONSENSE (this is also terrible pedagogy again, either you know what Turing computable means are you drown in jargon). For this discussion, Turing computable means ‘capable of being calculated using a computer’ The best theory of physics we have (a theory Hariezer already knows about) allows the sort of thing that Hariezer is complaining about. Both quantum mechanics and quantum field theory are Turing computable. Thats not to say Hariezer’s time machine won’t require you to change physics a bit- you definitely will have to, but its almost certainly computable.

Now computable does not mean QUICKLY computable (or even feasibly computable). The new universe might not be computable in polynomial time (quantum field theory may not be, at least one problem with in it, the fermion sign problem, is not).

I don’t think the time machine makes P = NP either. Having a time machine will allow you to speed up computations (you could wait until a computation was done, and then send the answer back in time). However, Hariezer’s time machine is limited, it can only be used to move back 6 hours total, and can only be used 3 time in a day, so I don’t think it could generally solve an NP-complete problem in polynomial time (after your 6 hour head start is up, things proceed at the original scaling). If you don’t know anything about computational complexity, I guess if I get enough asks I can explain it in another, non-potter post.

But my point here is- the author here is supposedly an AI theorist. How is he flubbing computability stuff? This should be bread and butter stuff.

I have so much more to say about this chapter. Another post will happen soon.

Edit: I was’t getting the P = NP thing, but I get the argument now (thanks Nostalgebraist), the idea is that you say “I’m going to compute some NP problem and come back with the solution” and then ZIP, out pops another you from the time machine, and hands you a slip of paper with the answer on it. Now you have 6 hours to verify the calculation, and then zip back to give it your former self.

But any problem in NP is checkable in P, so for any problem small enough to be checkable in 6 hours (which is a lot of problems, including much of NP), is now computable in no time at all. Its not a general P = NP, but its much wider in applicability than I was imagining.

HPMOR 14 continued: Comed Tea, Newcomb’s problem, science

One of the odd obsession’s of LessWrong is an old decision theory problem called Newcomb’s Paradox. It goes like this- a super intelligence that consistently predicts correctly challenges you to a game. There are two boxes, A and B. And you are allowed to take one or both boxes.

Inside box A is $10, and inside box B the super intelligence has already put $10,000 IF AND ONLY IF it predicted you will only take box B. What box should you take?

The reason this is a paradox is that one group of people (call them causal people) might decide that because the super intelligence ALREADY made its call, you might as well take both boxes. You can’t alter the past prediction.

Other people (call these LessWrongians) might say, ‘well, the super intelligence is always right, so clearly if I take box B I’ll get more money’. This camp includes LessWrongians. Yudkowsky himself had tried to formalize a decision theory that picks box B, that involved allowing causes to propagate backward in time.

A third group of people (call them ‘su3su2u1 ists’) might say “this problem is ill-posed. The idea of the super-intelligence might well be incoherent, depending on your model of how decisions are made,” Here is why- imagine human decisions can be quite noisy. For instance, what if I flip an unbiased coin to decide which box to take. Now the super-intelligence can only have had a 50/50 chance to successfully predict which box I’d take, which contradicts the premise.

There is another simple way to show the problem is probably ill-posed. Imagine another we take another super-intelligence of the same caliber as the first (call the first 1 and the second 2). 1 offers the same game to 2, and now 2 takes both boxes if it predicts that 1 put the money in box B. It takes only box B if 1 did not put the money in box B. Obviously, either intelligence 1 is wrong, or intelligence 2 is wrong, which contradicts the premise, so the idea must be inconsistent (note, you can turn any person into super-intelligence number 2 by making the boxes transparent).

Anyway, Yudkowsky has a pet decisions theory he has tried to formalize that allows causes to propagate backward in time. He likes this approach because you can get the LessWrongian answer to Newcomb every time. The problem is, his formalism has all sorts of problems with inconsistency because of the issues I raised about the inconsistency of a perfect predictor.

Why do I bring this up? Because Hariezer decides in this chapter that comed-tea MUST work by causing you to drink it right before something spit-take worthy happens. The tea predicts the humor, and then magics you into drinking it. Of course, he does no experiments to test this hypothesis at all (ironic that just a few chapters ago he lecture Hermione about only doing 1 experiment to test her idea).

So unsurprisingly perhaps, the single most used magic item in the story thus far is a manifestation of Yudkowsky’s favorite decision theory problem.

And my final note from this chapter- Hariezer drops this on us, regarding the brain’s ability to understand time travel:

Now, for the first time, he was up against the prospect of a mystery that was threatening to be permanent…. it was entirely possible that his human mind never could understand, because his brain was made of old-fashioned linear-time neurons, and this had turned out to be an impoverished subset of reality.

This seems to misunderstand the nature of mathematics and its relation to science. I can’t visualize a 4 dimensional curved space,certainly not the way I visualize 2 and 3d objects. But that doesn’t stop me from describing it and working with it as a mathematical object.

Time is ALREADY very strange and impossible to visualize. But mathematics allows us to go beyond what our brain can visualize to create notations and languages that let us deal with anything we can formalize and that has consistent rules. Its amazingly powerful.

I never thought I’d see Hariezer Yudotter, who just a few chapters back was claiming science could let us perfectly manipulate and control people (better than an imperio curse, or whatever the spell that lets you control people) argue that science/mathematics couldn’t deal with linear time.

I hope that this is a moment where in later chapters we see growth from Yudotter, and he revisits this last assumption. And I hope he does some experiments to test his comed-tea hypothesis. Right now it seems like experiments are things Hariezer asks people around him to do (so they can see things his way), but for him pure logic is good enough.

Chapter summary: I drink three glasses of scotch. Hariezer gets a time machine.

HPMOR 15: In which, once again, I want more science

I had a long post but the internet ate it earlier this week, so this is try 2. I apologize in advance, this blog post is mostly me speculating about some magi-science.

This chapter begins the long awaited lessons in magic. The topic of today’s lesson consists primarily of one thing, don’t transfigure common objects into food or drink.

Mr. Potter, suppose a student Transfigured a block of wood into a cup of water, and you drank it. What do you imagine might happen to you when the Transfiguration wore off?” There was a pause. “Excuse me, I should not have asked that of you, Mr. Potter, I forgot that you are blessed with an unusually pessimistic imagination -“ "I’m fine," Harry said, swallowing hard. "So the first answer is that I don’t know,” the Professor nodded approvingly, “but I imagine there might be… wood in my stomach, and in my bloodstream, and if any of that water had gotten absorbed into my body’s tissues - would it be wood pulp or solid wood or…” Harry’s grasp of magic failed him. He couldn’t understand how wood mapped into water in the first place, so he couldn’t understand what would happen after the water molecules were scrambled by ordinary thermal motions and the magic wore off and the mapping reversed.

We get a similar warning regarding transfiguring things into any gasses or liquids:

You will absolutely never under any circumstances Transfigure anything into a liquid or a gas. No water, no air. Nothing like water, nothing like air. Even if it is not meant to drink. Liquid evaporates, little bits and pieces of it get into the air.

Unfortunately, once again, I want the author to take it farther. Explore some actual science! What WOULD happen if that wood-water turned back into wood in your system?

So lets take a long walk off a short speculative pier together, and try to guess what might happen. First, we’ll assume magic absorbs any major energy differences and smooths over any issues at the time of transition. Otherwise when you magic in a few wood large wood molecules in place of much smaller water molecules, there will suddenly be lots of energy from the molecules repelling each other (this is called a steric mismatch) which will likely cause all sorts of problems (like a person exploding).

To even begin to answer, we have to pick a rule for the transition. Lets assume each water molecule turns into one “wood molecule” (wood is ill-defined on a molecular scale, its made up lots of shit. However, that shit is mostly long hydrocarbon chains called polysaccharides.)

So you’d drink the water, which gets absorbed pretty quickly by your body (any thats lingering in your gut unabsorbed will just turn into more fiber in your diet). After awhile, it would spread through your body, be taken up by your cells, and then these very diffuse water molecules would turn into polysaccharides. Luckily for you, your body probably knows how to deal with this, polysaccharides are hanging out all over your cells anway. Maybe somewhat surprisingly, you’d probably be fine. I think for lots of organic material, swapping out one organic molecule with another is likely to not harm you much. Of course, if the thing you swap in is poison, thats another story.

Now, I’ve cheated somewhat- I could pick another rule where you’d definitely die. Imagine swapping in a whole splinter of wood for each water molecule. You’d be shredded. The details of magic matter here, so maybe a future chapter will give us the info needed to revisit this.

What if instead of wood, we started with something inorganic like gold? If the water molecules turn into elemental gold (and you don’t explode from steric mismatches mentioned above), you’d be fine as long as the gold didn’t ionize. Elemental gold is remarkably stable, and it takes quite a bit of gold to get any heavy metal poisoning from it.

On the other hand, if it ionizes you’ll probably die. Gold salts (which split into ionic gold + other stuff in your system) have a semi-lethal doses (the dose that kills half of the people who take it) of just a few mg per kg, so a 70 kg person couldn’t survive more than 5g or so of the salt, which is even less ionic gold. So in this case, as soon as the spell wore off you’d start to be poisoned. After a few hours, you’d probably start showing signs of liver failure (jaundice, etc).

Water chemistry/physics is hard, so I have no idea if the gold atoms will actually ionize. Larger gold crystals definitely would not, and they are investigating using gold nanoparticles for medicine, which are also mostly non-toxic. However, individual atoms might still ionize.

What if we don’t drink the water? What if we just get near a liquid evaporating? Nothing much at all, as it turns out. Evaporation is a slow process, as is diffusion.

Diffusion constants are usually a few centimeters^2 per second, and diffusion is a slow process that moves forward with the square root of time (to move twice as far it takes 4 times as much time).

So even if the transformation into water lasts a full hour, a single water molecule that evaporates from the glass will travel less than 100 centimeters! So unless you are standing with your face very close to the glass, you are unlikely to encounter even a single evaporated molecule. Even with your face right near the glass, that one molecule will mostly likely just be breathed in and breathed right back out. You have a lot of anatomic dead-space in your lungs in which no exchange takes place, and the active area is optimized for picking up oxygen.

So how about transfiguring things to a gas? What happens there? Once again, this will depend on how we choose the rules of magic. When you make the gas, does it come in at room temperature and pressure? If so, this sets the density. Then you can either bring in an equal volume of gas to the original object with very few molecules, or you bring in an equal number of molecules, with a very large density.

At an equal number of molecules, you’ll get hundreds of liters of diffuse gas. Your lungs are only hold about 5 liters, so you are going to get a much smaller dose then you’d get from the water (a few percent at best), where all the molecules get taken up by your body. Also, your lungs won’t absorb most of the gas, much will get blown back out, further lowering the dose.

If its equal volume to the original object, then there will be very few gas molecules over a small area, and the diffusion argument applies- unless you get very near where you created the gas you aren’t likely at all to breathe any in.

Thus concludes a bit of speculative magi-science guess work. Sorry if I bored you.

Anyway- this chapter, I admit, intrigued me enough to spend some time thinking about what WOULD happen if something un-transfigured inside you. Not a bad chapter, really, but it again feels a tad lazy. We get some hazy worries about liquids evaporating (SCIENCE!) but no order-of-magnitude estimate about whether or not it matters (does not, unless maybe you boiled the liquid you made). There are lots of scientific ideas the author could play with, but they just get set aside.

As for the rest of the chapter, Hariezer gets shown up by Hermione, who is out-performing him and has already read her school books. A competition for grades is launched.

HPMOR 16: Shades of Ender’s game

I apologize for the longish break from HPMOR, sometimes my real job calls.

This chapter mostly comprises Hariezer’s first defense against the dark arts class. We meet the ultra-competent Quirrel (although I suppose like in the original its really the ultra-competent Voldemort) for the first time.

The lessons open with a bit of surprising anti-academic sentiment- Quirrel gives a long speech about how you needn’t learn to defend yourself against anything specific in the wizarding world because you could either magically run away or just use the instant killing spell, so the entire “Ministry-mandated” course with its “useless” textbooks is unnecessary. Of course, this comes from the mouth of the ostensible bad guy, so its unclear how much we are supposed to be creeped out by this sentiment (though Hariezer applauds).

After this, we get to the lesson. After teaching a light attack spell, Quirrel asks Hermoine (who mastered it fastest) to attack another student. She refuses, so Quirrel moves on to Malfoy who is quick to acquiesce by shooting Hermoine.

Then Quirrel puts Hariezer on the spot and things get sort of strange. When asked for unusual combat uses of everyday items, Hariezer comes up with a laundry list of outlandish ways to kill people, which leads Quirrel to observe that for Hariezer Yudotter nothing is defensive- he settles only for the destruction of his enemy. This feels very Ender’s game (Hariezer WINS, and that makes him dangerous), and sort of a silly moment.

Chapter summary: weirdly anti-academic defense against the dark arts lesson. We once more get magic, but no rules of magic.

HPMOR 17: Introducing Dumbledore, and some retreads on old ideas

This chapter opens with a little experiment with Hariezer trying to use the time turner to verify an NP-complete problem, as we discussed in a previous chapter section. Since its old ground, we won’t retread it.

From here, we move on to the first broomstick lesson, which proceeds much like the book, only with shades of elitism. Hariezer drops this nugget on us:

There couldn’t possibly be anything he could master on the first try which would baffle Hermione, and if there was and it turned out to be broomstick riding instead of anything intellectual, Harry would just die.

Which feels a bit like the complete dismissal of Ron earlier. So the anti-jock Hariezer, who wouldn’t be caught dead being good at broomsticking doesn’t get involved in racing around to try to get Neville’s remember all, instead the entire class ends up in a stand off, wands drawn. So Hariezer challenges the Slytherin who has it to a strange duel. Using his time turner in proper Bill and Ted fashion, he hides a decoy remember all and wins. Its all old stuff at this point, I’m starting to worry there is nothing new under the sun- more time turner, more Hariezer winning (in case we don’t get it, there is a conversation with McGonagall where Hariezer once more realizes he doesn’t even consider NOT winning).

AND THEN we meet Dumbledore, who is written as a lazy man’s version of insane. He’ll say something insightful, drop a Lord of the Ring’s quote and then immediately do something batshit. One moment he is trying to explain that Harry can trust him, the next he is setting a chicken on fire (yes this happens). In one baffling moment, he presents Hariezer with a big rock, and this exchange happens:

So… why do I have to carry this rock exactly?” "I can’t think of a reason, actually," said Dumbledore. "…you can’t." Dumbledore nodded. “But just because I can’t think of a reason doesn’t mean there is no reason.” "Okay," said Harry, "I’m not even sure if I should be saying this, but that is simply not the correct way to deal with our admitted ignorance of how the universe works."

Now, if someone gave you a large heavy rock and said “keep this on you, just in case” how would you begin to tell them they’re wrong? Here is Hariezer’s approach:

How can I put this formally… um… suppose you had a million boxes, and only one of the boxes contained a diamond. And you had a box full of diamond-detectors, and each diamond-detector always went off in the presence of a diamond, and went off half the time on boxes that didn’t have a diamond. If you ran twenty detectors over all the boxes, you’d have, on average, one false candidate and one true candidate left. And then it would just take one or two more detectors before you were left with the one true candidate. The point being that when there are lots of possible answers, most of the evidence you need goes into just locating the true hypothesis out of millions of possibilities - bringing it to your attention in the first place. The amount of evidence you need to judge between two or three plausible candidates is much smaller by comparison. So if you just jump ahead without evidence and promote one particular possibility to the focus of your attention, you’re skipping over most of the work.

Thank God Hariezer was able to use his advanced reasoning skills to make an analogy with diamonds in boxes to explain WHY THE IDEA THAT CARRYING A ROCK AROUND FOR NO REASON IS STUPID. This was the chapter’s rationality idea- seriously, its like Yudkowsky didn’t even try on this one.

Chapter summary: Hariezer sneers at broomstick riding, some (now standard) time turner hijinks, Hariezer meets a more insane than wise Dumbledore

HPMOR 18: What?

I wanted to discuss the weird anti-university/school-system under currents of the last few chapters, but I started into chapter 18 and it broke my brain.

This chapter is absolutely ludicrous. We meet Snape for the first time, and he behaves as you’d expect from the source material. He makes a sarcastic remark and asks Hariezer a bunch of questions Hariezer does not know the answer to.

This leads to Hariezer flipping out:

The class was utterly frozen. "Detention for one month, Potter," Severus said, smiling even more broadly. "I decline to recognize your authority as a teacher and I will not serve any detention you give." People stopped breathing. Severus’s smile vanished. “Then you will be -” his voice stopped short. "Expelled, were you about to say?" Harry, on the other hand, was now smiling thinly. "But then you seemed to doubt your ability to carry out the threat, or fear the consequences if you did. I, on the other hand, neither doubt nor fear the prospect of finding a school with less abusive professors. Or perhaps I should hire private tutors, as is my accustomed practice, and be taught at my full learning speed. I have enough money in my vault. Something about bounties on a Dark Lord I defeated. But there are teachers at Hogwarts who I rather like, so I think it will be easier if I find some way to get rid of you instead.”

Think about this- THE ONLY THINGS SNAPE HAS DONE are make a snide comment and ask Hariezer a series of questions he doesn’t know the answer to.

The situation continues to escalate, until Hariezer locks himself in a closet and uses his invisibility cloak and time turner to escape the classroom.

This leads to a meeting with the headmaster where Hariezer THREATENS TO START A NEWSPAPER CAMPAIGN AGAINST SNAPE (find a newspaper interested in the ‘some students think professor too hard on them, for instance he asked Hariezer Yudotter 3 hard questions in a row’ story)

AND EVERYONE TAKES THIS THREAT SERIOUSLY, AS IF IT COULD DO REAL HARM. HARIEZER REPEATEDLY SAYS HE IS PROTECTING STUDENTS FROM ABUSE. THEY TAKE THIS THREAT SERIOUSLY ENOUGH THAT HARIEZER NEGOTIATES A TRUCE WITH SNAPE AND DUMBLEDORE. Snape agrees to be less demanding of discipline, Hariezer agrees to apologize.

Nowhere in this chapter does Hariezer consider that he deprived other students of the damn potions lesson. In his ruminations about why Snape keeps his job, he never considers that maybe Snape knows a lot about potions/is actually a good potions teacher.

This whole chapter is basically a stupid power struggle that requires literally everyone in the chapter to behave in outrageously silly ways. Hariezer throws a temper tantrum befitting a 2 year old, and everyone else gives him his way.

On the plus side, Mcgonagall locks down Hariezer’s time turner, so hopefully that device will stop making an appearance for awhile, its been the “clever” solution to every problem for several chapters now.

One more chapter this bad and I might have to abort the project.

HPMOR 19: I CAN’T EVEN… WHAT?…

I… this… what…

So there is a lot I COULD say here, about inconsistent characterization, ridiculously contrived events,etc. But fuck it- here is the key event of this chapter: Quirrel, it turns out, is quite the martial artist (because of course he is, who gives a fuck about genre consistency or unnecessary details, PILE IN MORE “AWESOME”). The lesson he claims to have learned from martial arts (at a mysterious dojo, because of course) that Hariezer needs to learn (as evidenced by his encounter with Snape) is how to lose.

How does Quirrel teach Hariezer “how to lose”? He calls Hariezer to the front, insists Hariezer not defend himself, and then has a bunch of slytherins beat the shit out of him.

Thats right- a character who one fucking chapter ago couldn’t handle being asked three hard questions in a row (ITS ABUSE, I’ll CALL THE PAPERS) submits to being literally beaten by a gang at a teacher’s suggestion.

An 11 year old kid, at a teachers suggestion, submits to getting beaten by a bunch of 16 year olds. All of this is portrayed in a positive light.

Ideas around chapter 19

In light of the recent anon, I’m going to attempt to give the people (person?) what they want. Also, I went from not caring if people were reading this, to being a tiny bit anxious I’ll lose the audience I unexpectedly picked up. SELLING OUT.

If we ignore the literal child abuse of the chapter, the core of the idea is still somewhat malignant. Its true throughout that Hariezer DOES have a problem with “knowing how to lose,” but the way you learn to lose is by losing, not by being ordered to take a beating.

Quirrell could have challenged Hariezer to a game of chess, he could have asked questions Hariezer didn’t know the answer to (as Snape did, which prompted the insane chapter 18), etc. But the problem is the author is so invested in Hariezer being the embodiment of awesome that even when he needs to lose for story purposes, to learn a lesson, Yudkowsky doesn’t want to let Hariezer actually lose at something. Instead he gets ordered to lose, and he isn’t ordered to lose at something in his wheel house, but in the “jock-stuff” repeatedly sneered at in the story (physical confrontation)

HPMOR 20: why is this chapter called Bayes Theorem?

A return to what passes for “normal.” No child beating in this chapter, just a long, boring conversation.

This chapter opens with Hariezer ruminating about how much taking that beating sure has changes his life. He knows how to lose now, he isn’t going to become dark lord now! Quirrell quickly takes him down a peg:

"Mr. Potter," he said solemnly, with only a slight grin, "a word of advice. There is such a thing as a performance which is too perfect. Real people who have just been beaten and humiliated for fifteen minutes do not stand up and graciously forgive their enemies. It is the sort of thing you do when you’re trying to convince everyone you’re not Dark, not -“

Hariezer protests, and we get

There is nothing you can do to convince me because I would know that was exactly what you were trying to do. And if we are to be even more precise, then while I suppose it is barely possible that perfectly good people exist even though I have never met one, it is nonetheless improbable that someone would be beaten for fifteen minutes and then stand up and feel a great surge of kindly forgiveness for his attackers. On the other hand it is less improbable that a young child would imagine this as the role to play in order to convince his teacher and classmates that he is not the next Dark Lord. The import of an act lies not in what that act resembles on the surface, Mr. Potter, but in the states of mind which make that act more or less probable

How does Hariezer take this? Does he point out “if no evidence can sway your priors, your priors are too strong?” or some other bit of logic-chop Bayes-judo? Nope, he drops some nonsensical jargon:

Harry blinked. He’d just had the dichotomy between the representativeness heuristic and the Bayesian definition of evidence explained to him by a wizard.

Where is Quirrell using bayesian evidence? He isn’t, he is neglecting all evidence because all evidence fits his hypothesis. Where does the representativeness heuristic come into play? It doesn’t.

The representative heuristic is making estimates based on how typical of a class something is. i.e. show someone a picture of a stereotypical ‘nerd’ and say “is this person more likely an english or a physics grad student?” The representative heuristic says “you should answer physics.” Its a good rule-of-thumb that psychologists think is probably hardwired into us. It also leads to some well-known fallacies I won’t get into here.

Quirrell is of course doing none of that- Quirrell has a hypothesis that fits anything Hariezer could do, so no amount of evidence will dissuade him.

After this, Quirrell and Hariezer have a long talk about science (because of course Quirrell too has a fascination with space travel). This leads to some real Less Wrong stuff.

Quirrell tells us that of course muggle scientists are dangerous because

There are gates you do not open, there are seals you do not breach! The fools who can’t resist meddling are killed by the lesser perils early on, and the survivors all know that there are secrets you do not share with anyone who lacks the intelligence and the discipline to discover them for themselves!

And of course, Hariezer agrees

This was a rather different way of looking at things than Harry had grown up with. It had never occurred to him that nuclear physicists should have formed a conspiracy of silence to keep the secret of nuclear weapons from anyone not smart enough to be a nuclear physicist

Which is a sort of weirdly elitist position- after all lots of nuclear physicists are plenty dangerous. Its not intelligence that makes you less likely to drop a bomb. But this fits the general Yudkowsky/AI fear- an open research community is less important than hiding dangerous secrets. This isn’t necessarily the wrong position, but its a challenging one that merits actual discussion.

Anyone who has done research can tell you how important the open flow of ideas is for progress. I’m of the opinion that the increasing privatization of science is actually slowing us down in a lot of ways by building silos around information. How much do we retard progress in order to keep dangerous ideas out of people’s hands? Who gets to decide what is dangerous? Who decides who gets let into “the conspiracy?” Intelligence alone is no guarantee someone won’t drop a bomb, despite how obvious it seems to Quirrell and Yudotter.

After this digression about nuclear weapons, we learn from Quirrell that he snuck into NASA and enchanted the Pioneer gold plaque that will “make it last a lot longer than it otherwise would.” Its unclear to me what that wear and tear Quirrell is protecting the plaque from. Hariezer suggest that Quirrell might have snuck a magic portrait or a ghost into the plaque, because nothing makes more sense then dooming an (at least semi) sentient being to a near eternity of solitary confinement.

Anyway, partway through this chapter, Dumbledore bursts in angry that Quirrell had Hariezer beaten. Hariezer defends him, etc. The resolution is that its agreed Hariezer will start learning to protect himself from mind readers.

Chapter summary- long, mostly boring conversation, peppered with some existential risk/we need to escape the planet rhetoric. Its also called Bayes theorem despite that theorem making no appearance whatsoever.

And a note on the really weird pedagogy- we now have Quirrell who in the books is possessed by Voldemort acting as a mouthpiece for the author. This seems like a bad choice, because at some point I assume we’ll there will be a reveal, and it will turn out the reader should have trusted Quirrell.

HPMOR 21: secretive science

So this chapter begins quite strangely- Hermione is worried that she is “bad” because she is enjoying being smarter than Hariezer. She then decides that she isn’t “bad”, its a budding romance. Thats the logic she uses. But because she won the book-reading contest against Hariezer (he doesn’t flip out, it must be because he learned “how to lose”), she gets to go on a date with him. The date is skipped over.

Next we find Hariezer meeting Malfoy in a dark basement, discussing how they will go about doing science. Malfoy is written as uncharacteristically stupid, in order to be a foil once more for Hariezer, peppering the conversation with such gems as:

Then I’ll figure out how to make the experimental test say the right answer! "You can always make the answer come out your way,” said Draco. That had been practically the first thing his tutors had taught him. “It’s just a matter of finding the right arguments.”

We get a lot of platitudes from Hariezer about how science humbles you before nature. But then we get the same ideas Quirrell suggested previously, because “science is dangerous”, they are going to run their research program as a conspiracy.

"As you say, we will establish our own Science, a magical Science, and that Science will have smarter traditions from the very start.” The voice grew hard. “The knowledge I share with you will be taught alongside the disciplines of accepting truth, the level of this knowledge will be keyed to your progress in those disciplines, and you will share that knowledge with no one else who has not learned those disciplines. Do you accept this?”

And the name of this secretive scienspiracy?

And standing amid the dusty desks in an unused classroom in the dungeons of Hogwarts, the green-lit silhouette of Harry Potter spread his arms dramatically and said, “This day shall mark the dawn of… the Bayesian Conspiracy.”

Of course. I mentioned in the previous chapter, anyone who has done science knows that its a collaborative process that requires an open exchange of ideas.

And see what I mean about the melding of ideas between Quirrell and Hariezer? Its weird to use them both as author mouthpieces. The Bayesian Conspiracy is obviously an idea Yudkowsky is fond of, and here Hariezer gets the idea largely from Quirrell just one chapter back.

HPMOR 22: science!

This chapter opens strongly enough. Hariezer decides that the entire wizarding world has probably been wrong about magic, and don’t know the first thing about it.

Hermione disagrees, and while she doesn’t outright say “maybe you should read a magical theory book about how spells are created” (such a thing must exist), she is at least somewhat down that path.

To test his ideas, Hariezer creates a single-blind test- he gets spells from a book, changes the words or the wrist motion or what not and gets Hermione to cast them. Surprisingly, Hariezer is proven wrong by this little test. For once, the world isn’t written as insane as a foil for our intrepid hero.

It seemed the universe actually did want you to say ‘Wingardium Leviosa’ and it wanted you to say it in a certain exact way and it didn’t care what you thought the pronunciation should be any more than it cared how you felt about gravity.

There are a few anti-academic snipes, because it wouldn’t be HPMOR without a little snide swipe at academia:

But if my books were worth a carp they would have given me the following important piece of advice…Don’t worry about designing an elaborate course of experiments that would make a grant proposal look impressive to a funding agency.

Weird little potshots about academia (comments like “so many bad teachers, its like 8% as bad as Oxford,” “Harry was doing better in classes now, at least the classes he considered interesting”) have been peppered throughout the chapters since Hariezer arrived at Hogwarts. Oh academia, always trying to make you learn things that might be useful, even if they are a trifle boring. So full of bad teachers, etc. Just constant little comments attacking school and academia.

Anyway, this chapter would be one of the strongest chapters, except there is a second half. In the second half, Hariezer partners with Draco to get to the bottom of wizarding blood purity.

Harry Potter had asked how Draco would go about disproving the blood purist hypothesis that wizards couldn’t do the neat stuff now that they’d done eight centuries ago because they had interbred with Muggleborns and Squibs.

Here is the thing about science, step 0 needs to be make sure you’re trying to explain a real phenomena. Hariezer knows this, he tells the story of N-rays earlier in the chapter, but completely fails to understand the point.

Hariezer and Draco have decided, based on one anecdote (the founders of Hogwarts were the best wizards ever, supposedly) that wizards are weaker today than in the past. The first thing they should do is find out if wizards are actually getting weaker. After all, the two most dangerous dark wizards ever were both recent, Grindelwald and Voldemort. Dumbledore is no slouch. Even four students were able to make the marauders map just one generation before Harry. (Incidentally, this is exactly where neoreactionaries often go wrong- they assume things are getting worse without actually checking, and then create elaborate explanations for non-existent facts).

Anyway, for the purposes of the story, I’m sure it’ll turn out that wizards are getting weaker, because Yudkoswky wrote it. But this would have been a great chance to teach an actually useful lesson, and it would make the N-ray story told earlier a useful example, and not a random factoid.

Anyway, to explain the effect they come up with a few obvious hypotheses:

Magic itself is fading. Wizards are interbreeding with Muggles and Squibs. Knowledge to cast powerful spells is being lost. Wizards are eating the wrong foods as children, or something else besides blood is making them grow up weaker. Muggle technology is interfering with magic. (Since 800 years ago?) Stronger wizards are having fewer children. (Draco = only child? Check if 3 powerful wizards, Quirrell / Dumbledore / Dark Lord, had any children.)

They miss some other obvious ones (there is a finite amount of magic power, so increasing populations = more wizards = less power per wizard, for instance. Try to come up with your own, its easy and fun).

They come up with some ways to collect some evidence- find out what the first year curriculum was throughout Hogwarts history, and do some wizard genealogy by talking to portraits.

Still, finally some science, even if half of it was infuriating.

HPMOR 23: wizarding genetics made (way too) simple

Alright, I need to preface this: I have the average particle physicists knowledge of biology (a few college courses, long ago mostly forgotten). That said, the lagavulin is flowing, so I’m going to pontificate as if I’m obviously right, so please reblog me with corrections if I am wrong.

In this chapter, Hariezer and Draco are going to explore what I think of as the blood hypothesis- that wizardry is carried in the blood, and that intermarriage with non-magical types is diluting wizardry.

Hariezer gives Draco a brief, serviceable enough description of DNA (more like pebbles than water), He lays out two models- there are lots of wizarding genes, and the more wizard genes you have, the more powerful the wizard you are. In this case, Hariezer reasons, as powerful wizards marry less powerful wizards, or non-magical types, the frequency of the magical variant of wizard genes in the general population becomes diluted. In this model, two squibs might rarely manage to have a wizard child, but they are likely to be weaker than wizard-born wizards. Call this model 1.

The other model Hariezer lays out is that magic lies on a single recessive gene. He reasons squibs have one dominant, non-magical version, and one recessive magical version of the gene. So of kids born to squibs, 1/4 will be wizards. In this version, you either have magic or you don’t, so if wizards married the non-magical, wizards themselves could become more rare, but the power of wizards won’t be diluted. Call this model 2.

The proper test between model 1 and 2, suggests Hariezer, is to look at the children born to two squibs. If about one fourth of them are wizards, its evidence of model 2, otherwise, evidence of model 1.

There is a huge problem with this. Do you see it? Here is a hint, What other predictions does model 2 make? While you are thinking about it, read on.

Before I answer the question, I want to point out that Hariezer ignores tons of other plausible models. Here is one I just made up. Imagine, for instance, a single gene that switches magic on and off, and a whole series of other genes that make you a better wizard. Maybe some double-jointed-wrist gene allows you to move your wand in unusually deft ways. Maybe some mouth-shape gene allows you to pronounce magical sounds no one else can. In this case, magical talent can be watered down as in model 1, and wizard inheritance could still look like Mendel would suggest, as in model 2.

Alright, below I’m going to answer my query above. Soon there will be no time to figure it for yourself.

Squibs are, by definition, the non-wizard children of wizard parents. Hariezer’s model 2 predicts that squibs cannot exist. It is already empirically disproven.

Hariezer, of course, does not notice this massive problem with his favored model, and Draco’s collected genealogy suggests about 6 out of 28 squib born children were wizards, so he declares model 2 wins the test.

Draco flips out, because now that he “knows” that magic isn’t being watered down by breeding he can’t join the death eaters and his whole life is ruined,etc. Hariezer is happy that Draco has “awakened as a scientist.” (I hadn’t complained about the stilted language in awhile, just reminding you that its still there), but Draco lashes out and casts a torture spell and locks Hariezer in the dungeon. After some failed escape attempts, he once against resorts to the time turner, because even now that its locked down, its the solution to every problem.

One other thing of note- to investigate the hypothesis that really strong spells can’t be cast anymore, Hariezer tries to look up a strong spell and runs into “the interdict of Merlin” that strong spells can’t be written down, only passed from wizard to wizard.

Its looking marginally possible that it will turn out that this natural secrecy is exactly whats killing off powerful magic- its not open so ideas aren’t flourishing or being passed on. Hariezer will notice that and realize his “Bayesian Conspiracy” won’t be as effective as an open science culture, and I’ll have to take back all of my criticisms around secretive science (it will be a lesson Hariezer learns, and not an idea Hariezer endorses). It seems more likely given the author’s existential risk concerns, however, that this interdict of Merlin will be endorsed.

Some more notes regarding HPMOR

There is a line in the movie Clueless (if you aren’t familiar, Clueless was an older generation’s Mean Girls) where a woman is described as a “Monet”- in that like the painting, it looks good from afar but up close is a mess.

So I’m now nearly 25 chapters into this thing, and I’m starting to think that HPMOR is this sort of a monet- if you let yourself get carried along, it seems ok-enough. It references a lot of things that a niche group of people,myself included, like (physics! computational complexity! genetics! psychology!). But as you stare at it more, you start noticing that it doesn’t actually hang together, its a complete mess.

The hard science references are subtly wrong, and often aren’t actually explained in-story (just a jargon dump to say ‘look, here is a thing you like’).

The social science stuff fairs a bit better (its less wrong ::rimshot::), but even when its explanation is correct, its power is wildly exaggerated- conversations between Quirrell/Malfoy/Potter seem to follow scripts of the form

"Here is an awesome manipulation I’m using against you"

"My, that is an effective manipulation. You are a dangerous man"

"I know, but I also know that you are only flattering me as an attempt to manipulate me." p "My, what an effective use of Bayesian evidence that is!"

Other characters get even worse treatment, either behaving nonsensically to prove how good Harry is at manipulation (as in the chapter where Harry tells off Snape and then tries to blackmail the school because Snape asked him questions he didn’t know), OR acting nonsensically so Harry can explain why its nonsensical (“Carry this rock around for no reason.” “Thats actually the fallacy of privileging the hypothesis.”) The social science/manipulation/marketing psychology stuff is just a flavoring for conversations.

No important event in the story has hinged on any of this rationality- instead basically every conflict thus far is resolved via the time turner.

And if you strip all this out, all the wrongish science-jargon and the conversations that serve no purpose but to prove Malfoy/Quirrell/Harry are “awesome” by having them repeatedly think/tell each other how awesome they are, the story has no real structure. Its just a series of poorly paced (if you strip out the “awesome” conversations, then there are many chapters where nothing happens), disconnected events. There is no there there.

HPMOR 24: evopsych Rorschach test

Evolutionary psychology is a field that famously has a prett