Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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Majin Gojira
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Majin Gojira »

Skgoa wrote:funny how you are equating "this is how I want the setting to work" with "observable evidence". :roll:
Did you just use an appeal to the unknown in your primary argument and then complain that I didn't have any observable evidence to support my claim?

Have you even read the main page? Occams Razor? How to Analyze Sci-Fi?

So, you have a problem with something I claimed? Well, I did back down from the magic motor-car being an exception, but every other factual claim is substantiated. If you want to claim otherwise, point out specifics. Of course, given that your argument hinjes on an appeal to the unknown, that is physically impossible but I'll enjoy watching you flounder anyway.

Given the way you're arguing, though, you're going to try and say "Nuh-uh! You first!"

You really want to argue that Technology doesn't have problems working around Hogwarts?
You really want to argue that Wizard Society is not largely ignorant of Muggle advancements?
You really want to argue that Wizard Society don't have prejudices against Muggles when that was the main villains motivation and one of the main thing the heroes fought against?!
You really want to argue that the role a tank suits on the battlefield does not apply to most Wizard combat situations, which are more akin to house to house skirmishes than open warfare?

The only claim I make is the EMP one, which I only list as "General consensus" and nothing more.

And for the sake of complete-ness, I'll name the two series I initially thought of: Mahou Sensei Negima and Mahou Shojo Lyrical Nanoha.

Japan has a knack for mixing sci-fi and fantasy in ways that make purists.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Majin Gojira »

Majin Gojira wrote:Japan has a knack for mixing sci-fi and fantasy in ways that make purists.
Damnit--that should be "make purists weep."
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Vendetta »

Majin Gojira wrote:
Majin Gojira wrote:Japan has a knack for mixing sci-fi and fantasy in ways that make purists.
Damnit--that should be "make purists weep."
It's not just Japan.

There are plenty of other series where magic and technology, or even just magic and scientific attitudes mix quite happily. It's only in series where the main character is called Harry that there's any kind of problem.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Simon_Jester »

Me, I'm not even trying to talk about "technology doesn't work around magic!" That might or might not be true, I don't much care.
madd0ct0r wrote:I don't see how being in a tank would offer any protection at all to a conjuror.
There do seem to be quite a lot of spells that dissipate when they strike rock or steel plate, and people do try to use cover when spells are flying around. So I believe that being encased in heavy, mobile armor would provide some protection (how much? I don't know) in a wizard duel. That part, I don't question.

But I do question whether any wizards have the technical competence to maintain a tank. And whether there are no spells that might make a tank suddenly nonfunctional, since there's a huge number of spells in the Potter setting and I don't know what all of them do.* And whether there are any situations where a tank would be a practical way for wizards to fight. Their "battles" would be small unit actions by any normal standard, and having tanks around for that seems more trouble than it's worth.

*Again, I'm not saying such a spell exists, I'm saying I have no way of knowing and if one did exist, it would really screw up any attempt to use tanks in battle.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Ford Prefect »

I'm not sure how a whole lot of armour is supposed to block a spell which transmutes the armour into doves.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by madd0ct0r »

or shrinks it, or turns it into custard, makes it grow spikes on the inside, or get red hot...

from the HP wiki: this wll not be a full list of what's available though,

Transfiguration Spells Edit

Arrow-shooting spell - shoots arrows from the wand tip
Avifors — Used to turn a small statue into a bird
Avis - conjures birds from the wand tip
Beetle Buttons - Turns beetles into buttons
Cauldron to Sieve
Draconifors — Used to turn a dragon statue into a real dragon that will breathe fire
Ducklifors — Used to turn an opponent into a duck
Duro — Used to turn objects to stone
Fera Verto — Used to turn an animal into a water goblet
Glass to sand shield - transfigures glass back to sand within a certain radius
Glisseo — Used to make objects slippery
Incarcifors — Used to transfigure an object to capture an opponent
Lapifors — Used to turn a small object or creature into a rabbit
Match to needle - The simplest of all transfigurations that transfigures matches into needles
Melofors — Used to turn an opponent's head into a pumpkin
Mice to Snuffboxes
Pullus — Used to turn opponents into geese
Rock to dog
Tentaclifors — Used to turn a person's head into a tentacle
Scribblifors — Used to turn objects into quills
Smoke to daggers - Coalesces a horde of dagger from smoke
Snufflifors — Used to turn books into mice
Steelclaw — Used to make an animal's claws bigger and made of steel

which is to say turning up in a tank only gives your opponent more to work with.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Revy »

The wizarding world do have their own versions of tanks. They're called dragons.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Simon_Jester »

Dragons have upsides and downsides. Biggest one being they're intelligent and independent-minded: an ally, not a weapon.
Ford Prefect wrote:I'm not sure how a whole lot of armour is supposed to block a spell which transmutes the armour into doves.
It would block some things, but not others. Conceivably it could be enchanted with wards that would stop the obvious counterspells- if there's a "turn steel into strawberry jam" spell everyone knows, ward against that and you've at least made them waste their first shot, and there's a chance they don't know anything useful for the second shot.

It's not that having heavy armor protecting you is inherently a bad idea in a Potter-like magical setting. It's just that it may not be all it's cracked up to be, because it won't stop magic as well as it would stop bullets, on account of magic being more versatile than bullets.

I think the bigger obstacle to the use of large constructed weapons (tanks or tanks equivalent) in Potter-setting wizard wars is that there's nothing to use them on, no great fortresses stuffed full of wizards that need to be assaulted with the magical equivalent of machine guns raining hell into the attacking forces. There's no incentive to create siege weapons except for unusual, one-off actions (say, a magical assault on Hogwarts, as in the books). And even then, it's probably easier to hire a lot of extra muscle (magical creatures that ally with you) than it is to invent a whole new category of weapons, ones which probably have to be warded against counterspells, just for that one battle.

Remember that in real life tanks were invented for a reason, as a response to a kind of threat that just kept emerging over and over. Without a threat like that, the expense and complexity wouldn't have been justified.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Revy »

I honestly can't remember because I haven't read the books in years, but if you train as an animagus, can you choose what animal to become? Because if so I'd have thought wizards the world over would train themselves to transform into dragons rather than dogs, beetles or rats.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Starglider »

Revy wrote:I honestly can't remember because I haven't read the books in years, but if you train as an animagus, can you choose what animal to become?
No. Supposedly it is determined by their 'inner nature'. Considering that we see wizards casually turning people into ferrets etc, the difficulty probably comes from the fact that it's wandless magic (since you can't use a wand to turn yourself back), and to a lesser extent the need to retain a human mind in animal form.
Because if so I'd have thought wizards the world over would train themselves to transform into dragons rather than dogs, beetles or rats.
Even if they had a free choice, creating mass out of nothing (to become a creature two orders of magnitude larger) might be much harder than shrinking.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Chirios »

Skgoa wrote:My claim is that tanks do exist in the Harry Potter setting (this is how it's different from Star Trek) and wizards should be reasonably well expected to have access to them if needed. Thus there must be an in-universe reason why they don't use them. Now, in a realistic or even SciFi setting this would raise legitimate questions. But this is fantasy, so - quite literally - any number of magical reasons will suffice. (once again: applicable to Trek but not to this setting.)
How is it reasonable to expect wizards to have access to tanks? Wizards don't work for muggle governments and they don't join muggle armies; they think themselves superior to muggles in every way and a large proportion of them wouldn't know what a tank was even if they saw one.

The whole: "magic stops technology" thing is a particular pet peeve of mine because it suggests some arbitrary level of complexity that the universe immediately shuts down when it comes into contact with magic.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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Chirios wrote:The whole: "magic stops technology" thing is a particular pet peeve of mine because it suggests some arbitrary level of complexity that the universe immediately shuts down when it comes into contact with magic.
I always just rationalized that as high levels of magic basically causing electromagnetic interference that would mess with modern electronics; anything purely mechanical would work just fine, but you couldn't get a TV to work inside of Hogwarts. WRT to Methods of Rationality, I can't remember if Harry's tried isolating something in a Faraday cage, though that seems like the obvious test to see if that's the case.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Rossum »

Regarding the whole "Technology doesn't work in Hogwarts" thing, I figured that Hogwarts has some kind of security spell built in that messes with tech (either intentionally or otherwise). I mean, it has magic that prevents disaperation and such, it could have some kind of spell that seeks out complex technology and interferes with them to keep muggles from getting pictures of the building or something. Or the protection magic could be sensing the electrical currents and radio waves and mistakes them for some kind of weird spell effect or the result of some kind of magical creature or ghost (maybe will-o-the-wisps emit electricity and radio waves and Hogwarts has wards to keep them out of school grounds).
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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Chirios wrote:How is it reasonable to expect wizards to have access to tanks? Wizards don't work for muggle governments and they don't join muggle armies; they think themselves superior to muggles in every way and a large proportion of them wouldn't know what a tank was even if they saw one.
To back this up, a quote from the British wizards' "national" newspaper:

"While Muggles have been told that Black is carrying a gun (a kind of metal wand that Muggles use to kill each other), the magical community lives in fear of a massacre like that of twelve years ago, when Black murdered thirteen people with a single curse."

What's remarkable is that the paper feels it needs to explain what a gun is to its readership, or at least some of it... and that they aren't aware that it is frighteningly possible for one gunman to massacre thirteen people very quickly.

If they don't know what firearms are and what they're capable of, why would they be any more knowledgeable about tanks?
Scottish Ninja wrote:I always just rationalized that as high levels of magic basically causing electromagnetic interference that would mess with modern electronics; anything purely mechanical would work just fine, but you couldn't get a TV to work inside of Hogwarts. WRT to Methods of Rationality, I can't remember if Harry's tried isolating something in a Faraday cage, though that seems like the obvious test to see if that's the case.
I'm dubious of this, mostly because magic seems to be so... ontological in nature. Magic does what people like Greek philosophers would expect, changing the 'essential form' of a thing without having the side effects that a modern scientist would expect. Turn into a cat and the extra matter doesn't have to go anywhere; change back and it doesn't seem to come from anywhere. Fly on a broomstick and it doesn't seem to follow Newtonian physics, instead responding to its own rules that basically tell it to do whatever the designer wants it to do.

For electronic devices to fail in Hogwarts purely because of an unintended side effect would be somewhat out of character.

EDIT: Actually, that might not be true, at least not in the standard version of the setting. I'm pretty sure it's true in the Methods-version, and Yudkowsky usually tries to stick to a degree of thematic unity. One of the few themes he does stick to is that magic consistently violates a scientist's expectations, by doing what the caster (and/or whoever wrote the spell) intends or expects, and not what a scientist would predict from knowing "it does X" and predicting the side-effects.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by DudeGuyMan »

Yeah, I kinda like that about the story. It's not about Harry finding the secret scientific underpinnings to magic that wizards were all too dumb to notice. It's about him taking a system that doesn't have any meaningful scientific underpinnings as we understand them and analyzing it rationally anyway.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Panzersharkcat »

Well, some do work for muggle governments but only undercover. Kingsley Shacklebolt, for one. They're the exception rather than the rule, though. I don't think Kingsley continued working for the Prime Minister after Voldermort was killed.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Ahriman238 »

DudeGuyMan wrote:I really wish I hadn't googled the name Quirrell, and had gone on thinking he was an invention of the author of this fanfic, because...
Spoiler
I was being bamboozled right alongside Harry, which is an experience I don't think anyone who's an actual serious Harry Potter fan could get from this story. It also impresses me that I could read the entire story to date, not figure out that Quirrell is possessed by goddamn Voldemort, learn as much, and then realize that it made perfect sense all along. I knew his plot to rescue Bellatrix from Azkaban stank to high heaven, but the guy plays a complex enough game that I figured he could have some other, secret, but not necessarily evil motive for it. Instead no, he's just evil. Well shit.
I'm suprised literally anyone who'd heard of the series didn't already know about Quirrell. I've got some bad news about Darth Vader for you...

Anyway, the version of Quirrell in Methods is probably the best villain upgrade since they decided the Terminator should be Arnold Schwarzenegger instead of a mousy and unremarkable middle-aged man. Rowling's Quirrell pretends to be an absolute coward, sturreing all the time and jumping at shadows and sudden noises to hide his true nature. When he's revealed to be the villain, it's still basically impossible to take him seriously. This Quirrell is agressive and daring, far too much so to be a wraith in the stronghold of his greatest enemy "I'm to overt to be Voldemort" as opposed to "I have too little dignity to be Voldemort." Plus, he's actually teaching useful things, something rare in a defense teacher and unheard of for cannon Quirrell.

I'm really getting engrossed in the new (attempted) murder mystery arc.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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I knew there was a nervous little turban guy with Voldemort's face stuck to the back of his head, but I couldn't have told you his name.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Ahriman238 »

Well, the trial scene nicely showed off everything badass and pathetic about Methods Harry all at once. On the plus side, he got what he wanted, and has intimidated/impressed the Wizengamot. On the downside, he's now so deeply in debt to Lucius Malfoy that he may as well have 'bitch' tattooed on his forehead, has an extremely reluctant vassal, most or all of his hard work with Draco is going to be undone, and Hermione will still be traumatized.

Also, was that an implication that Quirrell is not possessed by Voldemort, or was some signifigant before he was possessed? Or that Tom himself tried to play the hero a long itme ago?
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Simon_Jester »

Or that Voldemort successfully possessed a wizard who really was one of his greatest enemies.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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Ahriman238 wrote:Well, the trial scene nicely showed off everything badass and pathetic about Methods Harry all at once. On the plus side, he got what he wanted, and has intimidated/impressed the Wizengamot. On the downside, he's now so deeply in debt to Lucius Malfoy that he may as well have 'bitch' tattooed on his forehead, has an extremely reluctant vassal, most or all of his hard work with Draco is going to be undone, and Hermione will still be traumatized.
My impression is slightly different. His antics at the Wizengamot were good for inspiring a sort of "Fuck yeah, take that you old pricks!" reaction in the reader, but I'm not convinced that they really helped his cause. He might have discouraged certain enemies while causing others to view him as a more serious threat. Antagonizing the senior Malfoy seemed like a particularly bad idea, but then this Harry always has been sort of an angry little troll.

Having an extremely reluctant vassal? I don't expect Harry to take that little vow particularly seriously. If he ever bothers to invoke it at all, it'll be to force a headstrong Hermione to do something for her own good.

As for being in debt, Hermione being traumatized and all that, well, there wasn't much Harry could do about that. He can't be everywhere or protect everyone. Someone executed a very well-devised plan to fuck up his world, and he did well to salvage what little he could. This whole story arc has just been him getting his ass handed to him while he tries to mitigate the damage.

Time to see if he really can exploit precious metal prices to churn out free money, I guess.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Ahriman238 »

DudeGuyMan wrote:
Ahriman238 wrote:Well, the trial scene nicely showed off everything badass and pathetic about Methods Harry all at once. On the plus side, he got what he wanted, and has intimidated/impressed the Wizengamot. On the downside, he's now so deeply in debt to Lucius Malfoy that he may as well have 'bitch' tattooed on his forehead, has an extremely reluctant vassal, most or all of his hard work with Draco is going to be undone, and Hermione will still be traumatized.
My impression is slightly different. His antics at the Wizengamot were good for inspiring a sort of "Fuck yeah, take that you old pricks!" reaction in the reader, but I'm not convinced that they really helped his cause. He might have discouraged certain enemies while causing others to view him as a more serious threat. Antagonizing the senior Malfoy seemed like a particularly bad idea, but then this Harry always has been sort of an angry little troll.

Having an extremely reluctant vassal? I don't expect Harry to take that little vow particularly seriously. If he ever bothers to invoke it at all, it'll be to force a headstrong Hermione to do something for her own good.

As for being in debt, Hermione being traumatized and all that, well, there wasn't much Harry could do about that. He can't be everywhere or protect everyone. Someone executed a very well-devised plan to fuck up his world, and he did well to salvage what little he could. This whole story arc has just been him getting his ass handed to him while he tries to mitigate the damage.

Time to see if he really can exploit precious metal prices to churn out free money, I guess.
Pretty much what I meant. He proved he can frighten dementors yes, he also point-blank threatened the government with the destruction of their prison if he didn't get his way. Okay, so only Dumbledore and Hermione know that he might be able to pull it off, that really just makes him seem childish. Especially as he's almost babbling, throwing out idea after idea to get Hermione off the hook.

I'm a bit distrubed his next, unvoiced option was to feed the opposition to a dementor.

And as Dumbledore pointed out (in a tremendously tactless way) Harry has also shown a weakness, that he will do anything up to and including going into massive debt to a mortal enemy to save his friend.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Simon_Jester »

Ahriman238 wrote:I'm a bit distrubed his next, unvoiced option was to feed the opposition to a dementor.
The aspect of the protagonist that gets called his "dark side" does have a streak of vicious, poetic justice in it. Since the essential, total injustice of Azkaban and the horror and misery it puts people through has been one of the central themes of the last forty chapters... Well. It's disturbing, but not out of line with what an only mostly decent person might think after what Harry's been through.

It is of a piece with wishing the SS leadership could have been locked away in one of their own concentration camps- you can very easily and probably rightly argue that it is morally wrong. But you'd have to be either a lot more moral, or a lot less moral, than anything like "normal human" not to see the appeal of it.
And as Dumbledore pointed out (in a tremendously tactless way) Harry has also shown a weakness, that he will do anything up to and including going into massive debt to a mortal enemy to save his friend.
I will say, in mitigation, that something that tactless may have been the only way to break Harry out of his self-righteousness long enough to get him to think. It only part-worked, but it did at least get his brain running on an adult level about the problem of hostages to fortune.

And if Harry really is bound and determined to play politics by adult rules for adult stakes, and make adult threats to adult politicians... he should be thinking on that level. If it's tactless to tell him so, then that's not Dumbledore's fault.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Revy »

I've just started reading this now. My first thought so far is that the chapter titles sound like episodes of The Big Bang Theory. "The Efficient Market Hypothesis", "The Fundamental Attribution Error", "The Planning Fallacy" ... I just thought that was kinda funny, because I like watching Big Bang Theory. Now I'm picturing Harry as a mini Sheldon Cooper, who in the show built his own MRI machine and nuclear reactor when he was Harry's age.
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Re: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Post by Eternal_Freedom »

Now you mention it, I think that's a pretty good description.
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