Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

[laconicsax]

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/1/Harry_Potter_and_the_Methods_of_Rationality

"It's only a Transfiguration," said McGonagall. "An Animagus transformation, to be exact."

"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 signaling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualize a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?"

...

Some people would have waited until after their first trip to Diagon Alley.

"Bag of element 79," Harry said, and withdrew his hand, empty, from the mokeskin pouch.

Most people would have at least waited to get their wands first.

"Bag of okane," said Harry. The heavy bag of gold popped up into his hand.

Harry withdrew the bag, then plunged it again into the mokeskin pouch. He took out his hand, put it back in, and said, "Bag of tokens of economic exchange." That time his hand came out empty.

Harry Potter had gotten his hands on at least one magical item. Why wait?

"Professor McGonagall," Harry said to the bemused witch strolling beside him, "can you give me two words, one word for gold, and one word for something else that isn't money, in a language that I wouldn't know? But don't tell me which is which."

"Ahava and zahav," said McGonagall. "That's Hebrew, and the other word means love."

"Thank you, Professor. Bag of ahava." Empty.

"Bag of zahav." And it popped up into his hand.

"Zahav is gold?" Harry questioned, and McGonagall nodded.

Harry thought over his collected experimental data. It was only the most crude and preliminary sort of effort, but it was enough to support at least one conclusion:

"Aaaaaaarrrgh this doesn't make any sense!"

The witch beside him lifted a lofty eyebrow. "Problems, Mr. Potter?"

"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 noun phrases that mean the same thing? The person who made this probably didn't speak Japanese and I don't speak any Hebrew, so it's not using their knowledge, and it's not using my knowledge -" Harry waved a hand helplessly. "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," Harry gasped for breath, "but what is going on?"

"Magic," said Professor McGonagall. She shrugged.

"That's just a word! Even after you tell me that, I can't make any new predictions! It's exactly like saying 'phlogiston' or 'elan vital' or 'emergence' or 'complexity'!"

[lazarus]

1. I like the Potter books

Magic explains everything. :hi: It was fun to turn off the skeptic side of my brain.

[laconicsax]

2. Alas, that's something I cannot do.

Aside from the ongoing incredulity along the lines of "What? How does that even work?" One of my most persistent thoughts on the series has been, "Wait...no one in the entire wizarding world receives an actual education?

At best, the muggle-born students get five or six years of schooling before delving into the world of magic. If they're born into a magical family, then the best they could realistically get is the equivalent number of years of home schooling by parents who never made it past grade five or six. After a couple generations, no one will have any kind of useful education. No wonder Hermione is one of the smartest students at Hogwarts--she's probably the only one who has any sort of education...and no wonder no one in the wizarding world seems to be able to think critically and most problem-solving consists of panic/drooling until Hermione figures it out or someone stumbles across a solution."

One of the more entertaining parts of the fanfic is the times when Harry (age 11) casually outsmarts everyone around him and an instance of making Malfoy shit bricks by showing him that we dumb muggles have been to the moon--something believed impossible, even with magic.

When laconicspouse and I watch any of the movies, a usual quip passing from my lips is, "Well, what do you expect from a group with zero high school graduates?"

[lazarus]

3. I know

but it's good fantasy, so I'm willing to give it a pass. I read it more for the characters, anyway.

Hell, I even like King's The Stand, and that's as anti-science a book as you can get.

[onager]

18. The Stank?

I liked most of the plot. But the CHARACTERS! Good grief, they might as well have been named Goodman, Badman, etc. etc. I thought that even by King's standards they were cut from purest cardboard and moved thru the story like little automata.

Naturally, with my worldview, I especially hated Mother (Effing) Abigail. "Oh, let's go strolling across the desert with no food or water BECAUSE SOME IGNORANT OLD RELIGIOUS FANATIC TOLD US TO!"

G-r-r-r.

However...NOBODY can rile me up (and not in a good way) like Anne Rice. Horrible writer. I'll never forget that "Mummy" book, where Our Heroine is watching as the mummy's wrappings fall off, he starts to get up...

...and the first thing she notices is his big beautiful eyes.

WTF? If I'm looking at a 5,000 year old being who starts walking around, the LAST thing I will notice is its eyes. I'll be too busy running.

Reminds me of the joke about the snake-handling churches where I grew up:

"Where's the back door of this church?"

"This church doesn't have a back door."

"Well, where do you want one?"

[lazarus]

19. strangely

the characterizations got better in the unedited version.

I'm not even trying Anne Rice.

[trotsky]

4. lmao

"no wonder no one in the wizarding world seems to be able to think critically and most problem-solving consists of panic/drooling until Hermione figures it out or someone stumbles across a solution."

I hadn't realized until just now how well this covers the plot of every single book. :rofl:

[realisticphish]

6. The education thing

I have always had a problem with that. Oh, you know what to feed and care for a gallumphing hephalump, but you don't know how the cell works. Or how to do algebra.

But Hermione has the same non-magical education as Harry, really. I guess she might have read more, or gone to a private school for early education. I wonder if all this has something to do with our need for things to "just go" instead of having to actually know how they work.

Oh, and another thing. Candles? Fucking candles? Quill and ink? Come on, that's not even a magic issue. I'm surprised they aren't using cuneiform tablets.

[laconicsax]

8. Forget the lack of electricity, the damn library doesn't even have a card catalog. n/t

[realisticphish]

9. !

I'm embarrassed for having missed that. Plus, I despise the librarian in HP. She should be helping the children not running around shrieking. Anyway, who gives a shit if someone spills something on a book? "Crappo awayo" or "graffito reducto" and everything's fine

[Silent3]

14. If you need a rationale for suspension of disbelief, try this.

It's certainly possible that the universe we perceive is nothing more than something like a computer simulation. There are even arguments (not that I'm sure I'm ready to buy into them) that living in a simulation is more likely than living in a "real" world (whatever "real" would mean in that context).

If the universe simulation we live in were created by an eccentric enough designer, that which we'd call "magic" could simply be a way to override the ordinary automatic parameters of the simulation. Any sort of weird arbitrary requirements could be established by the designer of the simulation -- saying certain words, lighting candles, having some eye of newt, etc. -- for evoking particular effects and outcomes. "Spells" could not only be evoked by these physically, chemically nonsensical requirements, but they could intelligently parse human language and even read the minds of the spellcasters -- the state of mind of a spellcaster simply being part of the data set of the simulation.

Even if we don't live in a world like that, someday our own technology might be advanced enough to create it. If we can create complex, self-aware intelligences via technological means, there might well be some big ethical questions to creating those minds inside simulated worlds, especially if you're going to subject them to horrific as well as pleasurable experiences, but I doubt those ethical questions would hold every single person back for very long. If the Harry Potter stories remain known and popular if and when such technology is available, there's a good chance that a world, or many worlds, patterned after the world Harry Potter will become "real".

I rather doubt that in my lifetime (another 40-50 years if I have long but not terribly unusually long life span) technology will get that far, but who knows? Some of us might get to actually experience living in a Harry Potter world -- in a far more convincing, immersive and realistic way than any current video game.

[laconicsax]

16. It's more the little things.

Like when a movie develops a sudden plot hole that you only notice if you think about it.

I'm perfectly willing to suspend my disbelief when reading fantasy or sci-fi until enough little things don't make sense that the rational part of my mind starts screaming "None of this makes sense!!!!" and I'm now back in the real world trying to evaluate a fictional universe on our universe's terms.

The only real problem I have with the Harry Potter series is that the use of magic isn't always internally consistent...that and Quidditch.

My problem with Quidditch is actually voiced in the fanfic linked in the OP--if the snitch is 150 points and ends the match, what's the point of the rest of the team? Suppose Gryffindor doesn't play any offense or defense against Hufflepuff, leading Hufflepuff to score 140 points in short order. Harry Potter then catches the Snitch, the Gryffindor gets 150 points and wins the match. If one seeker catches the snitch 30 seconds into the match, what was the point of anyone else playing?

Replace the snitch with a clock. Two periods, 30 minutes each, high score wins, successive 5 minute overtime periods in the event of a tie.

[realisticphish]

17. oh, yes

hell, even keep the snitch, but make it worth, say, 20 points. That way there's still strategy involved, rather than "whoever finds it wins"

[TZ]

5. Hmmm. Suspension of disbelief anyone?

Love Harry Potter. And there are actually a lot of very skeptical themes in the books...Fraudulent psychics etc. But its at heart a children's book and I don't feel the need to judge its logic. No more than any other sci-fi or fantasy epic I enjoy.

[realisticphish]

7. that's funny

and I have always had nitpicks with the HP universe. But for the most part, I totally ignore that stuff. I mean, I also read sci-fi stuff, which is hardly better. It just uses technobabble instead of "magic." Saying "it's magic" works to a certain extent in fiction. Not so much in real life...


Out of curiosity, have you ever read the Majyk books by Esther Friesner (hilarious serious, best humorous fantasy I've ever read)? In them, "majyk" is a sort of substance that a wizard collects. It's kind of a zero-sum thing, where when a wizard dies, his majyk is released into the world around him; usually, he hands it out to a bunch of people like inheritance, though at the beginning of the first book that's NOT what happens. Majyk is sort of semi-intelligent. You "ask" it to do things, and you work with it to figure out how to do it.

Or the Dragon Knight series, by Gordon R. Dickson. In that universe, you cast magic by drawing what you want to happen inside your head, like you're picturing a chalkboard

[lazarus]

10. try the Mordant's Need books

by Stephen R Donaldson. (The Mirror of Her Dreams and A Man Rides Through.) The magic is done with mirrors.

Really, with mirrors. It's a fascinating world he creates there.

[realisticphish]

11. sounds interesting

i haven't read fantasy since I gave up on Terry Goodkind a few years ago... might have to try it

[lazarus]

13. my favourite bit about the books (no spoilers)

is that it ends at two. No open-ended sequel hunt. It's exactly as long as it needs to be.

Huge cliff hanger between books one and two. I had to wait 2 years for that one to be resolved. I don't think I've recovered yet.

[realisticphish]

15. I like close-ended series, sometimes

Majyk is three books long, and has a nice three-part story arc in terms of mood, etc. HHGTTG ended when it should have. Some series, like the Sword of Truth, or Richard Sharpe, or Xanth go on WAY longer than they should. If there's no overall story arc, each book starts feeling empty. It's like a bad TV show in that way, too. If there's no goalpost, then there's never any real resolution. I say, resolve the main arc, then start a NEW arc with the same characters. The books can then continue to be written, but you don't have a bunch of deus ex machina keeping the story going

[realisticphish]

12. Ok, this is seriously awesome

I'm up to chapter 7, and this is some of the best fan fiction I've ever read. Good story, good science, funny... all in all, A+

[iris27]

20. Yeah, the Harry is rather out of character, but the humor and logic more than

make up for it. This cracked me up:

"Are these coins the pure metal?" Harry said finally.

...

"Of course," said Griphook.

"And can anyone coin them, or are they issued by a monopoly that thereby collects seigniorage?"

"What?" said McGonagall blankly.

Griphook grinned, showing very sharp teeth. "Only a fool would trust any but goblin coin!"

"In other words," Harry said, "the coins aren't supposed to be worth any more than the metal making them up?"

Griphook stared at Harry. McGonagall looked bemused.

"I mean, suppose I came in here with a ton of silver. Could I get a ton of Sickles made from it?" ... "So... how much would you charge in fees, as a fraction of the whole weight?"

Griphook's eyes were intent. "I would have to consult my superiors..."

"Give me a wild guess. I won't hold Gringotts to it."

"A twentieth part of the metal would well pay for the coining."

Harry nodded. "Thank you very much, Mr. Griphook."

So not only is the wizarding economy almost completely decoupled from the Muggle economy, no one here has ever heard of arbitrage. The larger Muggle economy had a fluctuating trading range of gold to silver, so every time the Muggle gold-to-silver ratio got more than 5% away from the weight of seventeen Sickles to one Galleon, either gold or silver should have drained from the wizarding economy until it became impossible to maintain the exchange rate. Bring in a ton of silver, change to Sickles (and pay 5%), change the Sickles for Galleons, take the gold to the Muggle world, exchange it for more silver than you started with, and repeat.

Wasn't the Muggle gold to silver ratio somewhere around fifty to one? Harry didn't think it was seventeen, anyway. And it looked like the silver coins were actually smaller than the gold coins.

Then again, Harry was standing in a bank that literally stored your money in vaults full of gold coins guarded by dragons, where you had to go in and take out coins out of your vault whenever you wanted to spend money. The finer points of arbitraging away market inefficiencies might well be lost on them. He'd been tempted to make some sort of snide remark about the crudity of their financial system...

But the sad thing is, their way is probably better.

On the other hand, one competent hedge fundie could probably own the whole wizarding world within a week. Harry filed away this notion in case he ever ran out of money, or had a week free.

[realisticphish]

21. i will say though

the writer seemed to lose a lot of his (or her) humor in places. It was just a treatise on logic... which is fine, but not brisk reading material