Ordinary Bookclub: Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Chapters 36-46)
Okay. Welcome to the Ordinary Bookclub. We’re reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Our kickoff post is here, we review Chapters 1-5 here, we review chapters 6-15 here, we review chapters 16-25 here, and we review chapters 26-35 here.
This week we resolved to read chapters 36-46. (These brief summaries are probably going to miss stuff and put emphasis on the wrong stuff and, probably, miss the point from time to time. When I’m wrong, please call me out in the comments.)
One of the things we have decided that we want to start doing is discussing the various puzzles the chapters throw up for us. When a major piece of information is withheld, it’s (usually) because it’s an opportunity for the reader to do some light detective work and figure out what is REALLY going on (for example, when we were asking “who left Harry the notes in chapter 13?” that was something that was revealed in chapter 14…). It can difficult to discuss some of the puzzles in this story without discussing major events happening in future chapters so if you want to discuss something with a major plot point: please rot13 it. That’s a simple encryption that will allow the folks who want to avoid spoilers (or premature answers to puzzles) to avoid them and allow the people who want to argue them to argue them.
Now that the boilerplate is out of the way, let’s get started.
==============================
Chapter 36: We go home for Christmas and see Muggleworld with new, wizarding eyes. And the Evans-Verresses meet the Grangers. And, as it turns out, parents are parents and kids are kids. Even the smart ones. And Harry is a stand-up guy. I guess. And there was a kissing scene but it was crowbarred in.
Chapter 37: Quirrell shows up and explains that life experience is important. Harry doesn’t believe him because that’s one of the things that you only learn once you get it and why in the heck should you take someone who has it at face value when they tell you how important it is? And they look at the stars.
Chapter 38: The Quibbler is probably the only newspaper worth reading. Harry and Lucius have a conversation. A REAL conversation. And Harry talks to Neville and Grangran.
Chapter 39: Wisdom is weird. If I were to try to paraphrase what wisdom is like, it’s like being tired. “Should we do something?” “Lemme think. Nah. Let’s not do something.” See? Wisdom. Anyway, Harry does stuff. A lot. We learn that Dumbledore has been intercepting Harry’s mail. Harry feels indignant about that for a second but shows a seed of wisdom by agreeing that it’s probably for the best that he had not gotten the letters that got turned away unread. Remember the conversation with Lesath? Man. Letters full of that sort of thing. Every day. Anyway, Quirrell is bringing a Dementor to Hogwarts. Kids can practice casting Patronus charms against The Real Deal. Dumbledore wants to know what mischief could be done with a Dementor on the grounds because Harry is smart enough to see the bones of his friends as potential weapons and that’s something that never would have occurred to Dumbledore in a million years. Oh, and Dumbledore lets on that he knows that Harry has a dark side. Common sense has a lot in common with Legilimency, you know? Anyway, we figure out, if there is mischief in store, what role the Dementor might have in that mischief. Maybe. Because, seriously, Harry’s dark side is pretty good at this. We learn a little bit about Dumbledore and Grindelwald. “Grindelwald was my dark mirror, the man I could so easily have been, had I given in to the temptation to believe that I was a good person, and therefore always in the right.” And we meditate on the problem of evil. Oh, and we learn that Dark Wizards are right to hate death, I guess. And we learn that Dumbledore believes in an Afterlife and Harry doesn’t.
Which, let me digress for a second, is dumb. Harry learned that magic existed, like, 6 months before this conversation. Now he finds that he can’t believe in an Afterlife?
Anyway, Afterlife Theory. Life experience is important.
Chapter 40: Harry then drinks some expensive tea and asks Quirrell about the Afterlife. We get Afterlife Theory from Quirrell’s POV. Quirrell’s theories are a lot more coherent than Dumbledore’s.
Chapter 41: Draco and Hermione are working together in the battles. This results in all sorts of shenanigans. Like gecko gloves and featherfall potions. And we get into some weird theories about whether you should drop someone from the roof in service to the greater good. I mean, if you knew they drank a featherfall potion, it wouldn’t be a problem, right? Well, Harry apologizes anyway.
Chapter 42: Draco drops Harry off the roof because the Ravenclaw girls said so. It goes wrong, kinda. We meet Lupin! And we learn that Harry’s dad liked Quidditch. Which remains dumb. And he was also a bully. Which is one of those things that is hard to dredge up. Why would you want to? And we learn more about Lupin’s circle of friends from those days. Ah, Sirius. Ah, Peter. Sigh.
Chapter 43: Harry has trouble casting the Patronus. Hermione, we’re surprised to find out, has trouble with it too. Something about happy thoughts allows the Patronus charm to be cast… but, sometimes, people who can’t cast a Patronus by themselves are able to cast it in the presence of a Dementor. We learned that Salazar Slytherin could cast a Patronus and Godric Gryffondor couldn’t. We meet our first Dementor and see other students be inspired to cast the Patronus. “Professor Quirrell pointed out that adults had more courage, not less to fear; which thought, I confess, had never occurred to me before.” We learn that Quirrell and Dumbledore had a bet… and Dumbledore lost it. Quirrell will therefore be allowed to teach the killing curse to those who wish to learn it. What could possibly go wrong? We see Hermione try again, and fail again. We see Neville not exactly succeed too. And Harry looks into a Dementor unfiltered and remembers the death of his mother. There were eight patronus charms between Harry and the Dementor and they didn’t break the hold that the Dementor had on Harry. This was kind of a messed up chapter.
Chapter 44: Dementors can do a lot of damage to someone who has the right holes in their defenses. Holes that not even chocolate can fill. Or maybe the nature of reality is something that, once you see it, changes you and not for the better. We have another kissing scene. A better one. Sometimes a kiss can help when chocolate can’t.
Chapter 45: We learn a little bit about Dementors. “They are wounds in the world, and attacking a wound only makes it larger.” That is a very, very good line indeed. Fawkes has a go at the Dementor. Fawkes loses. Harry asks to have another go at the Dementor. He figures out that the “wounds in the world” line came from Godric Gryffondor Himself and, just by thinking about it rationally, Harry figures out how to not only cast a patronus but he is the first wizard in the history of the world to actually kill a Dementor. This was even more irritating than the “figuring out transfiguration” thing. His Patronus is a Human? Ugh.
Chapter 46: “The Patronus Charm. Version 2.0.” Ugh. We learn that it’s not something that you should tell people who know how to cast Patronus spells because they might not be as insightful as Harry is and the knowledge might make them less awesome even as it makes Harry even more awesome. Harry and Quirrell discuss where something that you never want found might be hidden. Quirrell points out a pattern in Harry’s suggestions and comes out and says that it’s a puzzle. So there’s a puzzle! We have kissing theory in the Slytherin dorms. Harry figured out why Hermione couldn’t cast the Patronus charm and he told her that he can’t tell her but he gave her some hints but she shouldn’t read them. Harry has a conversation with Professor McGonagall about the prophecy because he wanted to compare the prophecy with the flashback memory of his mother’s death. And we figure out that, maybe, we decide to ask more people about Dumbledore than merely Dumbledore’s biggest fans.
And that’s our first forty-six chapters.
For next Sunday, I think we should read 18 more chapters and get ourselves up through chapter 64 (though I’m open to arguments that we should only read ten or a dozen if that’s the consensus). Reading 18 will get us through the next major arc and we’ll finish up with a dessert/intermission chapter devoted to fanfic where we apply the Methods of Rationality to other works. Lord of the Rings and the Methods of Rationality! Thundercats and the Methods of Rationality! Moby Dick and the Methods of Rationality! But, before we get to the intermission that gives us a breather, we’ll get to go to Azkaban and help out an old friend.
So… What do you think?
(Featured image is Foucault’s Pendulum by Sylvar. Used under a creative commons license.)
The annoyance that was foreshadowed with the Ender’s Game hat tippery, came through with “the secret to beating a dementor is scientific transhumanism”. Ugh indeed.
My only guess in Quirrell’s hints is that Harry keeps guessing at places to hide things that are very far away and hard to get to – so the places that Harry actually would actually fail to look, and so that wood work for hiding things from him, would be places much closer to hand. Such as his own suppressed memories (?)
I’m still not sure what’s going on with the dementor revealing that it’s here to get Harry. Hermione reveals herself to be much more badass than people have been giving her credit for, which is a nice capture of that character by Yudkowsky.
Also I think having Harry be a total jerk at dinner with the Grangers, and Hermione rescuing things as gracefully as she can, is a good character-revealing scene for both of them.Report
The childish belief that Harry needs to right injustice RIGHT NOW and, indeed, that all injustices are his to right is captured *PERFECTLY*. That’s one of the fun parts of the book to read, even as I feel it hit just a hair too close to home.Report
I note that Yudkowsky did with dementors what you thought he should have done with transfiguration – he made it a riddle other wizards could solve, and in fact did solve. As to why he cant share it – if you know what the lesser patronus is doing, distracting you from the fear of death, it won’t work because deliberating not thinking about something is basically impossible. And that’s why the greater patronus is a human – animals are safe from fear because they don’t understand it, but only a human has the capacity to defeat death on its own terms.
This is Yudkowsky at his most didactic – how well this works depends on how you feel about death and transhumanism, but there is an important point buried in there – to be able to solve a problem you have to be willing to try. If you use your intellect to come with reasons why problems can’t or shouldn’t be solved you will never be able to solve them no matter how smart you are.
Since I do agree with Yudkowsky about death I find this arc to be among the most powerful things I have read. Re-reading it for the 6th or 7th time still brings tears to my eyes.Report
And that’s why the greater patronus is a human – animals are safe from fear because they don’t understand it, but only a human has the capacity to defeat death on its own terms.
I can’t help but remember what happened when a serpent offered that deal the first time.
Oh, this time it’s different because an entity made entirely of light is making it?Report
You have an approximately 0% chance of convincing transhumanists of anything by resorting to Christian myth.Report
You know, I considered writing a short “Harry Potter and the Blood of Christ” in which Harry Potter destroys a Dementor through the Patronus of Faith and how he shares the Faith with his friends and they go on to share great signs and wonders and they convert the unbeliever by showing, and sharing, their Faith Patronus Charms.
I figured that I wouldn’t be able to do it as well as, say, C.S. Lewis would have been able to pull it off, but I like to think that readers would be able to see how irritating the assumptions would be for someone who does not share them.Report
I’ve read the Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the Rings, and the New Testament. Our entire culture is soaking in Christianity. You read one story that challenged your metaphysics and it feels jarring and wrong to you. Imagine what I feel.Report
You read one story that challenged your metaphysics and it feels jarring and wrong to you.
It didn’t “challenge” my metaphysics. It made assertions of standing on moral ground that isn’t there by making appeals to things that didn’t happen.Report
Yeah, for me transhumanism is the TED talk version of the nightmare of vampirism – the wizard so afraid of death that he sentences himself to an eternal inescapable undying half life.
So, as the perfect weapon against dementors it doesn’t do it for me…Report
I like transhumanism. Willem Defoe Meme: “I’m something of a transhumanist myself.”
But it’s not a *MORAL* position.Report
Same. I kind of cringed at his patronus being a human being.Report
Out of curiosity, how long does human life have to get before we hit the magical threshold where living longer crosses over into “half-life”?Report
I think that the thing about the magical threshold is not that there is a number associated with it but that it requires magic to cross it.
Hence the name.Report
It’s not what Faust accomplished, it’s that he sold his soul to Satan to do so.
It’s not longevity that bugs me, it’s the willingness to “transcend” (i.e. lose) one’s mere humanity to achieve it.Report
That is where the ‘Death is the Ultimate Enemy’ thing runs aground. If there is nothing worse than death, then one can justify absolutely anything done to defeat it. Where anything runs the spectrum from self-sacrifice to free others from it all the way to blood rites to perpetually extend one’s own life.
I feel like this Harry’s cold rationality could lead either way at this point.Report
David Rockefeller was an interesting example from a year or so ago. The guy was a billionaire. Lived to 101. Had four heart transplants.
Are there problems with 101 year olds getting a fourth heart?
David Crosby is an example from the 90’s. The famous musician (he was at Woodstock!) got a liver transplant after many decades of hard drinkin’.
While it’s not obvious that any given one of these crossed a threshold, there is a point at which we might be able to say “this guy shouldn’t be at the front of the line”.
“Who should be?”
“I dunno, but it shouldn’t be this guy.”
Adding magic might, kinda, escape some of the ethical problems… fewer scarcity issues… but Health Care has these problems too. (Certainly the American version… but, if you look, you can find problems hidden in the systems of countries where it’s free, free, free.)Report
@dragonfron
I think there are parts of our humanity that matter a great deal, and parts that don’t matter at all. I can certainly agree that we need to consider the trade-offs of any efforts to extend life we come up with.Report
In the specific context of HPMOR
We’re not talking about universal safe drinking water, a political order that avoids war, titanium hip replacements, laser eye surgery, or self-experimentation with putative nootropic drugs.
We’re talking about – I don’t even know what it would take to ‘absolutely reject death as the natural order’.
Emulating the neural networks of our scanned brains in computers so some parody of human consciousness can continue? Vat-growing human bodies with empty brain cases for periodic brain transplants into youthful new flesh-vehicles?
What resources would be required for these things? How many third-world slaves have to give their blood in the rare earth mines to enable one vampire to continue in a Transylvanian data centre above the village?Report
Or maybe we all turn into fleshjob Cylons…
But then we better be putting tons of resources into going out into space – and hope there’s no one else out there – because with no death this planet is going to get unliveably crowded real fast.Report
Emulating the neural networks of our scanned brains in computers so some parody of human consciousness can continue?
As you contemplate this, consider the year you were born. Consider how many programs written the year you were born are still being run. Consider how many operating systems for those systems are still in common use. Like, if you found a tape or disk with a simple program from the year you were born, what would it take to get that thing running?
Now: how confident are you that we’ll be able to maintain your consciousness program?Report
Even discounting the Philosopher’s Stone, the Potter world includes an incantation that will repair a broken bone and the damage to surrounding soft tissue. There is a potion that will neutralize the effects of any poison. Given those two, it would seem reasonable that there are means for a person to live as long as they want to — any damage, including that due to aging, should be reversible. Presumably there are magical means to overcome some of the less common problems with a greatly extended lifespan — like whether the human brain has sufficient storage and indexing capacity to integrate a few hundred years of accumulated knowledge.Report
What you are discussing are legitimate issues with the ways a total elimination of death could be achieved in practice. And to be clear, there is nothing wrong with discussing such things. And I don’t think Yudkowsky is objecting to lines of argument like your either. Note that Harry rejected gaining immortality by horcrux immediately.
What Yudkowsky is talkign about here is simpler moral argument – that death is bad, not just sometimes but always. Even if it can’t be prevented right now, the world would be a better place if we could. That’s what Yudkowsky means by “rejecting death as part of the natural order” – he wants people to accept the idea that we should see death as a problem to be solved, not a neccesary or good part of existence. Once we’ve agreed on that, we can start having necessary and important discussions about how we do that, and what social and economic problems need to be overcome to make it happen.Report
What Yudkowsky is talkign about here is simpler moral argument – that death is bad, not just sometimes but always.
This is one of those things that needs to be more than merely asserted.
I mean, do *I* want to die? Heck no! Would I like to live for another 100 years? Sure! I want to see what happens! There’s a lot of stuff I’d like to experience.
But always is a long time. In both directions. And assertions that the way that the world works is morally wrong and has *ALWAYS* been morally wrong strikes me as… well.
I wouldn’t call it a moral argument.
I’d call it a religious argument. Nothing wrong with religious arguments, of course. I’m a fan of many of them. But there are a lot of unshared priors here.Report
All sorts of natural things are agreed to be bad, including death, outside the context of discussions around Life Extension. When someone dies from a disease we don’t shrug our shoulders and say “well, we can’t consider it bad that they died because their death was natural”.
I wonder if anyone tried to convince Jonas Salk that Polio wasn’t bad because it was part of the natural order.Report
“Bad”? Yes. “Morally Evil”?
That seems to be in a different category than “Cone Snails are bad”.
When someone dies from a disease we don’t shrug our shoulders and say “well, we can’t consider it bad that they died because their death was natural”.
No, we don’t.
I wonder if anyone tried to convince Jonas Salk that Polio wasn’t bad because it was part of the natural order.
I wonder if anyone has used this argument to explain why killing Moaning Myrtle should be re-examined.
She became a ghost, after all, and was able to experience things for decades after her corporeal form passed.Report
What Yudkowsky is talkign about here is simpler moral argument – that death is bad, not just sometimes but always.
This is one of those things that needs to be more than merely asserted.
See, I wasn’t kidding about the nightmare of vampirism. The idea of NEVER dying is a nightmare scenario to me.
I don’t like the idea that I might die tomorrow. If I spend too much time thinking too closely about it and how my loved ones would feel, I get sad. In bad times, that knowledge that my death, whenever it comes, will cause my loved ones and family sadness, and that if I were to die by my own hand their sadness would be much worse – is part of what keeps me going.
But the idea that I might die NEVER? That the ONLY way out would be suicide – is horrifying. An absolutely nightmarish cold-sweats panic concept.
there are a lot of unshared priors here is putting it mildly.Report
I’m going to level with you, that is utterly incomprehensible to me. What is it about (eventually) dying that appeals to you?Report
It’s kind of hard for me to write this, but I’ll write it.
One measure of success I would like to achieve in my life, is successfully holding out long enough that I spare my daughter having her father’s death be by suicide. So far I think I’m likely to achieve this – I’m mostly happy most of the time; most years I have fewer and shorter periods of suicidal thought than the previous year. And of course, each year I have, actuarially, a bit under a year less that I have to make it through to achieve this. As it is, I’ve probably got forty-ish years to success.
But if there were no realistic prospect of my dying by any other means than suicide – no number of years I could hold out and have achieved that success… There’s a good chance “immortality” would shorten my lifespan. Because every single day I’d get up knowing that my daughter would probably see her dad die by suicide – or, if she didn’t, it would probably be because she killed herself first. And I don’t think I could make it another forty years of confronting that every day. Don’t know if I could have made it the forty one I’ve done so far.Report
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m deeply depressed or anything – but at the same time, I’m entering an age bracket where suicide is like the fourth leading cause of death for men.
I’ve seen the hurt and bewilderment of losing someone to suicide. And I want to spare people who attend my funeral that hurt.
And, knowing that release is coming is reassuring. And that reassurance I feel, is part of why I know I can’t just cavalierly assume I won’t be one of those who die by suicide. It’s one reason I’m unwilling to keep a gun or live with someone who does, for example – because of the impact on the suicide risk of everyone in the house, of living with a gun in the house.
I can probably keep waiting, partly because I know I’m not going to have to wait forever.Report
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I’m not sure what to say to that, and I suspect anything I had to say would need more discussion than is feasible in the comments section of a readthrough of Harry Potter fanfic, but at least see where you are coming from now.Report
I got it, myself, I totally do but it still grated something awful. I think it’s because Harry’s tone was almost exactly the same tone that trans-humanists use and that’s a really grating tone.
And I say that as a person who’s got some serious humanist and trans-humanist sympathies.Report
I suspect a lot of that was borne of frustration. I’m almost certain that much of the Harry-Dumbledore discussion was harvested form actual conversations Yudkowsky has had.Report
I recall there was some discussion before we started about Hermione being sorted into Ravenclaw. I note that during this arc, we see that Hermione was offered every house but Slytherin, so it would appear that she holds the virtues of all three of those houses, meaning that which one she got was due to her mood at the time, and not her inherent capacities.Report
He is *not* the first or at least not necessarily the first. He realizes in Chapter 46 that any number of other wizards might have figured it out as well but kept it a secret:
I’m not terribly surprised, but Jay and I had almost completely opposite reactions to the dementor chapters. I found these parts quite moving. I do understand the criticism, and frankly you might be all the more critical if you knew more about Yudkowsky’s writing and philosophy because this was definitely coming. Nevertheless, I found the forty-something chapters to be touching and responsible for a lot of my affection for the whole bookReport
Allow me to amend: The first documented wizard to destroy a dementor.Report
Except he’s not documented, is he? The evidence of his feat has been hidden.Report
We read it.Report
Regarding hints, I’m going to go ahead and not rot13 this one, but this from chapter 46 right after Harry destroys the dementor is retrospectively a neon sign of a hint:
Report
Report
Report
One thing I want to reiterate:
I very, very much enjoyed the story and the twists and turns and new takes on old characters.
I did some old-schooly “one more chapter… one more chapter…” and missing bedtimes because I just had to find out what happened next. I laughed out loud several times as I read the story. I gasped and had my jaw drop several times as I read the story. I learned stuff as I read the story. This story is really, really good. I was delighted to read it and I’m pleased to share it and I want my friends to read it too.
I have some complaints about it, sure. We’ve covered two of the big ones this week and last week. There are a handful more complaints to come. Those complaints shouldn’t be interpreted as me not liking the story or thinking that people shouldn’t read it.
There are a lot of really interesting insights to people, to institutions, to relationships, and to rationality in here. It’s a good story! It’s a story that made me better for having read it!
So, please, don’t interpret me complaining about this or that event in it as a moral judgment against the story on my part. It’s an awesome story. (And, for some reason, if you’re reading this without reading the story with us… I think that you should read the story!)Report
Same! I’ve done a number of “one more chapter” nights too. This has been a really fun read so far, and having this weekly catch-up has been a lot of the fun – hey df, remember this bit you just read, see what others thought of the same section.Report
Agreed, I don’t know many people who have read HPMOR, so its nice to be able to talk about it with people.Report