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Zonekeeper posted:Yud's characterization of Transfiguration never really fit to me. While "Turning something into something else and back again" would certainly be considered highly dangerous by anyone scientific, in the main series it's mostly portrayed as harmless up until you get to the advanced stuff, and even then the harmful stuff seemed to be fixable for the most part. The way this fanfic characterizes it, Krum's partial transfiguration into a shark was the single riskiest move made during the triwizard tournament yet that was treated as well thought out but imperfectly done, and a group of teenagers managed to work out becoming animagi all on their own with no apparent ill effects. It's solely so he can set up Harry's bullshit superpower that he ends up killing Voldemort with
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Sep 1, 2015 13:46
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The Shortest Path posted:It's solely so he can set up Harry's bullshit superpower that he ends up killing Voldemort with I am so glad I gave up reading this piece of poo poo halfway through.
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Sep 1, 2015 15:09
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divabot posted:The Reddit thread meltdown continues, on Tumblr. nostalgebraist sums up the problem. Do click on all the "reblogged this from" below with comments, there's a fascinating conversation going on there. (I post here with stuff I said in this thread.) The disappointed cultists are particularly delicious, e.g. this one lamenting that Yudkowsky has strayed from Yudkowsky's path. Want to see a real meltdown? Link this post! CHAPTER 1 No science CHAPTER 2 Conservation of Energy - Bad Science quote:You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! The Hamiltonian and energy conservation - Bad Science quote:You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Unitary and the Hamiltonian - Bad Science quote:Rejecting [the quantum Hamiltonian] destroys unitarity Faster than light signaling - Bad Science quote:and then [rejecting unitarity] you get FTL signalling CHAPTER 3 Bystander effect - Bad Science quote:The Dark Lord had raged upon wizarding Britain like a wilding wolf, tearing and rending at the fabric of their everyday lives. Other countries had wrung their hands but hesitated to intervene, whether out of apathetic selfishness or simple fear, for whichever was first among them to oppose the Dark Lord, their peace would be the next target of his terror. CHAPTER 4 Seigniorage quote:And can anyone coin them, or are they issued by a monopoly that thereby collects seigniorage? Arbitrage and the Efficient Market Hypothesis quote: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. Fermi calculation quote:"It's a mathematical thing. Named after Enrico Fermi. A way of getting rough numbers quickly in your head..." Yes. Defined with example CHAPTER 5 Fundamental Attribution Error - Bad Science quote:"Suppose you come into work and see your colleague kicking his desk. You think, 'what an angry person he must be'. Your colleague is thinking about how someone bumped him into a wall on the way to work and then shouted at him. Anyone would be angry at that, he thinks. When we look at others we see personality traits that explain their behaviour, but when we look at ourselves we see circumstances that explain our behaviour. People's stories make internal sense to them, from the inside, but we don't see people's histories trailing behind them in the air. We only see them in one situation, and we don't see what they would be like in a different situation. So the fundamental attribution error is that we explain by permanent, enduring traits what would be better explained by circumstance and context." CHAPTER 6 Natural language understanding - Bad Science quote:How can [the bag of holding] 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 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 The planning fallacy - Bad Science quote:reality usually delivers results a little worse than the 'worst-case scenario'. It's called the planning fallacy Bayes' Theorem - Bad Science quote:"It is very curious indeed that you should be destined for this wand when its brother why, its brother gave you that scar." CHAPTER 7 Naming schema - Bad Science quote:"I'll call you Mr. Silver." Not actually a naming schema. Reciprocation theory quote:My own books called it reciprocation and they talk about how giving someone a straight gift of two Sickles was found to be twice as effective as offering them twenty Sickles in getting them to do what you want Yes. Defined with example. CHAPTER 8 Quark Names - Bad Science quote:name the six quarks or tell me where to find Hermione Granger. Confirmation bias - Bad Science quote:"What you've just discovered is called 'positive bias'," said the boy. "You had a rule in your mind, and you kept on thinking of triplets that should make the rule say 'Yes'. But you didn't try to test any triplets that should make the rule say 'No'. In fact you didn't get a single 'No', so 'any three numbers' could have just as easily been the rule. Bystander apathy quote:I think there were some people in the crowd who wanted to interfere at first, but bystander apathy held them off at least until they saw what we were doing, and then I think they were all too confused to do anything. Desensitisation therapy - Bad Science quote:[Harry, Fred, and George bullying Neville] Finally he said in this tiny little whisper 'go away' so the three of us all screamed and ran off, shrieking something about the light burning us. Hopefully he won't be as scared of being bullied in the future. That's called desensitisation therapy, by the way. Desensitization therapy is the training of a practiced relaxation response in to a phobic stimulus and gradually increasing the stimulus hierarchy. The point of the therapy is to train a non-panic response to the stimulus. Scaring the crap out of someone isn't useful if they aren't trying to control themselves and train another reaction. Most charitably you might call this a sort of attempted classical conditioning. But really this is just bullying, plain and simple. Consequentialism quote:That's called consequentialism, by the way, it means that whether an act is right or wrong isn't determined by whether it looks bad, or mean, or anything like that, the only question is how it will turn out in the end - what are the consequences CHAPTER 9 Speciation and hybrids - Bad Science quote:You can't just mix two different species together and get viable offspring! It ought to scramble the genetic instructions for every organ that's different between the two species CHAPTER 10 No science. su3su2u1 makes an argument that blackmailing the sorting hat is nonsensical. CHAPTER 11 No Science. Filler chapters CHAPTER 12 Confirmation Bias - Bad Science quote:that meant that as soon as he learned a spell to temporarily alter his own sense of humor, he could make anything happen, by making it so that he would only find that one thing surprising enough to do a spit-take, and then drinking a can of Comed-Tea. CHAPTER 13 No science. Assuming time travel self consistency mechanics to be magical and part of setting. CHAPTER 14 Time-reversal and antimatter - Bad Science quote:time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter The Feynman-Stueckelberg Interpretation does posit that anti-matter can be viewed as time-reversed matter, su3su2u1 has a nice writeup. Generally this due to an underlying CP symmetry. Specifically, time reversal is implied by the underlying charge conjugation parity symmetry--matter and mirror-image (parity reversed) anti-matter should behave identically. CP symmetry appears to hold for the strong force, though exactly WHY remains an open problem. However CP symmetry violations , and therefore time reversal violations, have been experimentally demonstrated in some kaons and mesons, most notably in the Nobel winning work by Cronin and Fitch. The recent BaBar experiments clearly identify time reversal violations in B mesons and anti-B mesons. Given the CP violations at the electroweak scale and the open Strong CP problem, stating 'time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter' appears a pedantic excuse to showoff quantum dynamics and anti-matter explosion trivia is not strictly accurate. Anti-matter explosions - Bad Science quote:one kilogram of antimatter encountering one kilogram of matter will annihilate in an explosion equivalent to 43 million tons of TNT It is true that the energy released from the annihilation of 1kg anti-matter with 1 kg of matter is given by E=mc^2 = 180 petaJoules = 43 megatons TNT equivalent. However, the effect of the actual annihilation explosion will be roughly half the size of 43 million tons TNT exploding, because roughly half of the energy from the anti-matter explosion will be transferred to harmless neutrinos. While electron-positron annihilation does convert the electron/positron mass in gamma rays (well most of the time), most of the mass in the anti-matter consists of anti-neutrons and anti-proton which complicated annihilation reactions producing a delightful variety of subatomic particles and transferring roughly half the annihilation explosion energy to neutrinos, which harmlessly pass through the earth without interacting with anything. A wonderful paper by Borowski examines this in detail analyzing antimatter a potential spaceship fuel. Explosion blast radius - Bad Science quote:I myself weigh 41 kilograms and that the resulting blast [of 41 kg of anti-matter] would leave A GIANT SMOKING CRATER WHERE THERE USED TO BE SCOTLAND Anthropic principle - Bad Science quote:"And it doesn't, say, create a paradox that destroys the universe." Turing Computability - Bad Science quote: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! Confirmation Bias - Bad Science quote:"SO THAT'S HOW THE COMED-TEA WORKS! Of course! The spell doesn't force funny events to happen, it just makes you feel an impulse to drink right before funny things are going to happen anyway Through Chapter 14: 7/27 EDIT: Updates thanks to Cingulate and Turnicate i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 05:18 on Jan 5, 2017 |
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Sep 1, 2015 15:49
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You're too nice on a few of these.quote:the fundamental attribution error is that we explain by permanent, enduring traits what would be better explained by circumstance and context. quote:Bayes's Theorem said that any reasonable hypothesis which made it more likely than a thousand-to-one that he'd end up with the brother to the Dark Lord's wand, was going to have an advantage. Literally: P(H|D) = P(H) * P(D|H) / P(D) You can inform a decision rule via Bayes' Theorem, but much of the actual work is still to be done then (e.g., constructing a loss function). I have no idea about physics. Cingulate fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Sep 1, 2015 |
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Sep 1, 2015 17:28
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Dunno what I'm doing here.quote:"If the Dark Lord survived, then sure, he's the most likely suspect for the Azkaban breakout," Harry said reasonably. "You could even say that the Azkaban breakout is Bayesian evidence for the Dark Lord surviving, because an Azkaban breakout is more likely to happen in worlds where he's alive than worlds where he's dead. But it's not strong Bayesian evidence. It's not something that can't possibly happen unless the Dark Lord is alive. Professor Quirrell, who didn't start from the assumption that You-Know-Who was still around, had no trouble thinking of his own explanation. To him, it was obvious that some powerful wizard might want Bellatrix Black because she knew a secret of the Dark Lord's, like some of his magical knowledge that he'd told to only her. The priors against (I think he means "for" or "on") anyone surviving their body's death are very low, even if it's magically possible. Most times it doesn't happen. So if it's just the Azkaban breakout... I'd have to say formally that it isn't enough Bayesian evidence. The improbability of the evidence assuming that the hypothesis is false, is not commensurate with the prior improbability of the hypothesis." (Consider: evidence in the sense of likelihood is your best guess for the first mention, and the most common meaning of the term in the Bayesian literature. But at the end, evidence has a probability, and is discussed as being conditional on a hypothesis. (Marginal) Likelihood doesn't have a probability. Data does have a probability though. But data doesn't work for the earlier mentions - likelihood and Bayes Factors do. The alternative is that Yud means one thing by evidence, and another thing by Bayesian evidence, in which case, dude, gently caress you.) Also, this is from a chapter on multiple hypothesis testing, but from what I can tell, it does not, in fact, discuss multiple hypothesis testing. I also finally found a bit of brain science. Turns out it's wrong! quote:And the real eraser wasn't like the picture Harry's brain had of it. The idea of the eraser as a solid object was something that existed only inside his own brain, inside the parietal cortex that processed his sense of shape and space. This is a good example of why you should, if science is available, go for science rather than your intuitions, even if you're super smart. quote:And by similar logic: The words a wizard spoke, the wand movements, those weren't complicated enough of themselves to build up the spell effects from scratch - not the way that the three billion base pairs of human DNA actually were complicated enough to build a human body from scratch, not the way that computer programs took up thousands of bytes of data. quote:Harry shook his head at that. "The problem isn't that you're ignorant of specific science things like deoxyribonucleic acid. That wouldn't stop you from being my equal. The problem is that you aren't trained in the methods of rationality, the deeper secret knowledge behind how all those discoveries got made in the first place. I'll try to teach you those, but they're a lot harder to learn. Think of what we did yesterday, Draco. Yes, you did some of the work. But I was the only one in control. You answered some of the questions. I asked all of them. You helped push. I did the steering by myself. And without the methods of rationality, Draco, you can't possibly steer the Conspiracy where it needs to go."
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Sep 1, 2015 19:06
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Cingulate posted:Dunno what I'm doing here. To be completely fair to a story that deserves little fairness, isn't the whole point there that Harry's trying to market science in a way that appeals to a Slytherin? Secret, hidden knowledge is basically catnip to wizards.
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Sep 1, 2015 19:11
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Darth Walrus posted:To be completely fair to a story that deserves little fairness, isn't the whole point there that Harry's trying to market science in a way that appeals to a Slytherin? Secret, hidden knowledge is basically catnip to wizards.
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Sep 1, 2015 19:17
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It's, sadly, also consistent with the constantly emerging image of Yud as a vaguely science-themed cult leader.
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Sep 1, 2015 19:36
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quote:one kilogram of antimatter encountering one kilogram of matter will annihilate in an explosion equivalent to 43 million tons of TNT
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Sep 1, 2015 19:45
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Darth Walrus posted:To be completely fair to a story that deserves little fairness, isn't the whole point there that Harry's trying to market science in a way that appeals to a Slytherin? Secret, hidden knowledge is basically catnip to wizards. Were it not for all his other writings I would give it the benefit of this doubt, but no, Harry is also pretty clear later on this is how science should be done, too. One of the big themes of this story is that intellectual pursuits are A: The only thing that matters at all (and only in STEM-ish fields through a hollywood view) and B: An inherently elite pursuit whose gifted practitioners are the only ones wise enough to use or benefit from, and who must keep these things secret from the foolish morlocks and hufflepuffs who would abuse them.
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Sep 1, 2015 21:16
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Tunicate posted:Doublecheck that - antimatter detonations lose half the energy to neutrinos. Huh. Didn't know that. Cool.
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Sep 1, 2015 21:19
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It comes up now and again in his other writing. Eliezer really loves the idea that science should be a super-secret mystery cult. Apparently it would make everyone respect it much more. (And it wouldn't slow down progress, because apparently a Rationalist Bayes-fu Master could invent relativity in a couple of weeks)
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Sep 1, 2015 22:13
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Qwertycoatl posted:It comes up now and again in his other writing. Eliezer really loves the idea that science should be a super-secret mystery cult. Apparently it would make everyone respect it much more. (And it wouldn't slow down progress, because apparently a Rationalist Bayes-fu Master could invent relativity in a couple of weeks)
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Sep 1, 2015 22:28
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Nessus posted:It's funny isn't it how all these people's visions of society tend to put themselves or people in their fields in charge? A proud philosophical tradition, with roots stretching all the way back to Plato. 
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Sep 1, 2015 22:32
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Y'know, I actually thoroughly enjoyed reading this for a while. Never finished since other stuff came up in life. So it's something of a shock to me to encounter this thread and realize "Holy gently caress, the author was serious." It seemed like such a perfect mockery of... I'm not totally sure, but it never actually occurred to me that it wasn't satire.
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Sep 1, 2015 23:00
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Karia posted:Y'know, I actually thoroughly enjoyed reading this for a while. Never finished since other stuff came up in life. So it's something of a shock to me to encounter this thread and realize "Holy gently caress, the author was serious." It seemed like such a perfect mockery of... I'm not totally sure, but it never actually occurred to me that it wasn't satire. Battlefield Earth felt the same way to me. It wasn't until I first heard about Scientologists that I realized the writer was being serious. You know, there's quite a bit of similarity between Yud and Ron Hubbard. Or, I guess, any other cult of the writer egomaniac.
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Sep 1, 2015 23:29
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my dad posted:Battlefield Earth felt the same way to me. It wasn't until I first heard about Scientologists that I realized the writer was being serious.
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Sep 1, 2015 23:31
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Tunicate posted:
Good catch! You're right, we can't treat that as a simple electron - positron annihilation. A lot of that energy becomes harmless neutrinos. Strictly speaking the energy released is 43 Mtons TNT equivalent, but the actual equivalent explosion effectively halved due to the neutrinos released. https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1v1783/would_matterantimatter_annihilation_be_any/ And a fascinating 100 page paper on the weirdness of N-anti-N annihilation http://arxiv.org/pdf/hep-ex/0501020v1.pdf As before, in the spirit of nitpicking any and all corrections, comments, and criticism is welcome.
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Sep 2, 2015 02:26
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Nessus posted:I dunno, L. Ron nearly started a war with Mexico and was at least a world traveller type. If I had to hang out with one for a day I'd definitely pick Source. On the other hand, there is a small possibility he might decide to free your thetan by administering Process R2-45. Worst Yudkowsky would likely do is try to get you to drink Soylent.
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Sep 2, 2015 02:37
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Cingulate posted:You're too nice on a few of these. Possibly I am being too nice. The section of the fundamental attribution error did give a proper example that I didn't quote even if the definition was wrong. Likewise for Bayes'. The expanded quote has more background that generally makes it somewhat better and explains the '1000 to 1'. It's still not good. But better. I've updated both quotes. I am going through this along with our esteemed guide and host JWKS, so I haven't gotten to the later sections. I do appreciate any and all contributions, but I'll probably refrain from updating the list till the thread gets there. Also I would note there hasn't been any science correctly used since Chapter 8. And there have been zero instances of unambiguously correct hard science in the first 14 chapters. Overall Yud is batting 7/27. i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 03:37 on Sep 2, 2015 |
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Sep 2, 2015 03:10
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Chapter 15: Conscientiousness Part Four quote:
Transfiguration being easy enough to be learned by first-year students and at the same time so highly lethal, is like the equivalent of having everyone in our world of elementary school age and above being able to create IEDs out of anything. Wizards should be far, far more paranoid about everything around them than they’ve been seen to be so far in this story. quote:
Exactly my point. If Transfiguration really worked as described in this chapter, you literally can’t trust anything you eat or drink once it’s been within reach of another wizard. Each wizard should be a lot more isolated and a lot less willing to live, study, travel, work, or otherwise interact with other wizards than they’ve been shown to be in this story.
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Sep 2, 2015 10:03
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Nessus posted:I dunno, L. Ron nearly started a war with Mexico and was at least a world traveller type. If I had to hang out with one for a day I'd definitely pick Source. "Where has all the rum gone?" At least Ron would bring the drink. He had a well-documented and consistent rep as a party dude, particularly if he thought you'd understand why starting Scientology was inherently funny. It's pretty clear Mr Yudkowsky doesn't. divabot fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Sep 2, 2015 |
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Sep 2, 2015 14:32
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Why isn't she using chalk on a blackboard?
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Sep 2, 2015 16:16
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Part of this I actually like, because it looks at magic using magic's rules without getting lost in pseudo-scientific rants about conservation of energy, and comes up with something that's fairly interesting. Plus, McGonagall has a pretty good attitude towards Harry throughout, which is "magic is some serious poo poo, Mr. Potter, so I'll be damned if I'm going to let you waltz in here and gently caress things up because you're too dumb to know better". The danger inherent in kids learning about this stuff so early is pretty much just handwaved away, though.
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Sep 2, 2015 17:59
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Was Transfiguration permanent in the original story? I don't remember Rowling going too in-depth about it.
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Sep 2, 2015 17:59
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JosephWongKS posted:Harry would make a terrible lawyer. Excessive verbiage arouses suspicion in the counterparty and costs everyone time in the search for loopholes arising from such suspicion. Good lawyers only use as many words as necessary – in this case, a “I’m not planning to go through your things” would have sufficed. I know it's from a while back, but I am so loving pissed of by the part that this is referencing that I feel the need to post about it. We have to remember that whenever Harry says anything in this story it is actually Big Yud saying it, and that whenever anybody says anything about Harry it is actually Yud describing himself in ways he wouldn't dare to do so as the narrator. This on itself is hosed up enough. This is like if a novelist made one of the characters in a novel a writer, and then put a chapter in the novel that is something the writer character wrote, and then had every other character say how great it is. It is arrogant and masturbatory. It is singing your own praises by making up an entirely new person to do it for you. You could do that with anything really, make a character that shares an attribute with the writer and then explains how great the character is because of it. Except Big Yud is not a lawyer. All this time we have been giving him poo poo about being a fake scientist and we missed a prime loving opportunity to point out something even sadder: it does not start or end with that. Big Yud has another character point out that Harry could be a great lawyer because he believes he could be a great lawyer. And how could that not be, really? He watched a full episode of law and order once, so he clearly know what he is talking about. And it's not just a coincidence; it's the same pattern. He could be a great lawyer, sure, if he weren't so lazy. And if he had an education, of course, but his superior rational brain makes that completely unnecessary. He does not need to go to school or get prepared to work at a job or at a career in any way, because he can literally do anything because he is smart enought to completely go around the entire system. loving hell I hate Yud so loving much.
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Sep 2, 2015 18:04
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SSNeoman posted:Was Transfiguration permanent in the original story? I don't remember Rowling going too in-depth about it. I think so. It also wasn't anywhere near as dangerous as Yud is making it out to be. And IIRC food and drink was one of three things that couldn't be transfigured into so the whole eating/ drinking something that was originally a tree is something he made up as well.
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Sep 2, 2015 18:27
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Someone suggested that he was making it out to be dangerous to justify his amazing scientific carbon nanotube decapitation loops in the ending, but that has nothing to do with this. I think it's just bad fanon he picked up from reading more fanfiction than actual Rowling. Edit: I forgot, he also uses it to set Harry up as being able to maintain pure rational focus even while he sleeps, just like the characters in his animes.
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Sep 2, 2015 18:30
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EvilTaytoMan posted:I think so. It also wasn't anywhere near as dangerous as Yud is making it out to be. And IIRC food and drink was one of three things that couldn't be transfigured into so the whole eating/ drinking something that was originally a tree is something he made up as well. I don't think that was established until the later books. According to somebody earlier in the thread, Yud decided he was too good to read past book 5 and decided he had read enough HP fanfics that he had a good enough handle on the series' plot to "parody" it. I think even his fans were pissed off when he got details of Snape and Lily's relationship wrong because of this.
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Sep 2, 2015 18:46
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SSNeoman posted:Was Transfiguration permanent in the original story? I don't remember Rowling going too in-depth about it. Sort of? Like, it could be removed, but according to Book 1 the tail Dudley was given had to be removed at a hospital - meaning that Transfiguration can be removed by wizards, making it good for pranks, but it sure as poo poo isn't as dangerous as Yud wants it to be. Who would teach children how to literally murder people by mistake?
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Sep 2, 2015 19:35
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Mazzletoff posted:Sort of? Like, it could be removed, but according to Book 1 the tail Dudley was given had to be removed at a hospital - meaning that Transfiguration can be removed by wizards, making it good for pranks, but it sure as poo poo isn't as dangerous as Yud wants it to be. Who would teach children how to literally murder people by mistake? Well, except for Hagrid, although he's kind of a special case. And then there were some of the plants they encountered in Herbology, which I seem to recall ranging from 'incapacitating' to 'ludicrously deadly'. Some of the failed experiments in the Potions class got pretty spectacular, too - melting cauldrons were something of a running gag. Hogwarts is something of a deathtrap - it's just that Transfiguration is one of the less lethal classes.
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Sep 2, 2015 19:44
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Mazzletoff posted:Sort of? Like, it could be removed, but according to Book 1 the tail Dudley was given had to be removed at a hospital - meaning that Transfiguration can be removed by wizards, making it good for pranks, but it sure as poo poo isn't as dangerous as Yud wants it to be. Who would teach children how to literally murder people by mistake? Snape? I mean he did do exactly that in Half Blood Prince Over at Tor.com they have been doing a Harry Potter reread and one of the points raised is that wizards can repair almost any physical damage and between various charms deal with almost any mental trauma. Which goes a long way towards explaining why they are so comfortable teaching dangerous stuff to kids and so casual about wanton destruction and pain. Fried Chicken fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Sep 2, 2015 |
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Sep 2, 2015 20:28
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To play devil's advocate, maybe transfiguration is like one of those things where if you don't teach kids to be careful with it, they're going to hear about it anyway from older people and then try it out themselves with catastrophic results. I mean, I don't think that's what Yud is going for - the story explicitly says they do it so the kids will reach their full potential using it or whatever - but it makes a little sense, I guess.
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Sep 2, 2015 20:44
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:To play devil's advocate, maybe transfiguration is like one of those things where if you don't teach kids to be careful with it, they're going to hear about it anyway from older people and then try it out themselves with catastrophic results. I mean, I don't think that's what Yud is going for - the story explicitly says they do it so the kids will reach their full potential using it or whatever - but it makes a little sense, I guess. But you could say that for all magic in HP though.
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Sep 2, 2015 22:10
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So this section is frustrating. This is the first real magic-as-science-opportunity in the story! Opportunity to establish and explore rules to examine in interesting ways! But the execution is just so bad. Let's look at the science here, such as it is. Thing are transfigured into other things with roughly the same volume (desk-pig, block of wood-cup of water, canon books) Transfiguring a bunch of loosely packed molecules to tightly packed molecules and vice versa does not result in an explosion or implosion from steric mismatches or other molecular forces Unfortunately we don't have a mapping of how one chunk of anything transfigures into a chunk of anything else. One for one molecule swap? A scaled duplicate copy of the original? A brand new copy each time the transfigured item splits? Of course there's no conservation laws that are being followed that we know of, so the mapping is tricky. Would be fun for an author to explore! Unfortunately, Yud's examples are terrible. Under the assumption that transfiguration replaces molecules one for one, let's look at drinking a glass of something transfigured. Water will be absorbed into your bloodstream within minutes of drinking, and will persist in your body over the course of a couple of weeks. A single 200mL glass of water is a fraction of a percent of the overall water volume of a person and will rapidly diffuse throughout your body and into your cells. So what happens if the water suddenly transformed into wood? Assuming magic smooths over the transition effects, and that the water molecules transform into individual molecules of wood, you will probably be fine. Wood is organic, mostly long chains of polysaccharides that are present in your cells anyway, and can be easily broken down by your cells. How about gold? Again, assuming magic smooths over the transition and you get individual molecular replacement you'll likely be okay. Gold is a noble metal and is inert to most chemical reactions. Atomic gold will not react with the hydrochloric acid in your stomach or with anything else in your digestive system and is a FDA approved safe food additive. Water chemistry is not exactly my specialty, but I'm fairly sure that atomic gold will be more or less ignored by your body in small doses like this. Let's say I'm wrong. Worst case is that the gold somehow ionizes in your body and you now have a bunch of gold ions in your blood. In all likelihood the percursers for the the gold ions were also toxic and liable to kill you (fun stuff like aqua regia, rubidium, cesium, or potassium cyanide). However if your only problem is gold ions (say you drank a solution of ionic gold chloride transfigured into water) you are now poisoned by the gold ions moving in and reacting with your blood/cells and will suffer hyperacute liver and kidney failure in short order. While you will suffer jaundice and skin discoloration, you will also likely NOT be screaming out pain, or suffering overly much from pain at all. If anything you'll be too weak for much screaming. Or in a coma. Since Yud is making up the rules of transfiguration magic, I'm sure there is some way to ensure that drinking a glass of wood or gold could be made to kill you. But there just isn't enough here to actually understand the system to assess this passage. Or make any remarks about science at all. What is there to notate, that water diffuses through your blood into your cells? Of course I'm sure this will be revisited in a later section and be better fleshed out........... i81icu812 fucked around with this message at 04:48 on Sep 4, 2015 |
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Sep 3, 2015 02:46
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Most of the dangers being mentioned involve edibles, and according to the Harry Potter Wiki there are no examples in the books of anyone transfiguring something into an edible/drinkable item. Turning inanimate objects to animals is common, but I'm guessing those revert to their original form upon death, which prevents slaughtering them for meat. It's entirely possible that Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration involves preventing such transfigurations from happening. It's mentioned that food can't be conjured (conjuration being a type of transfiguration, the opposite of vanishing), so the restriction probably extends to transfiguration of things into food in general. While both water and wine get conjured a lot, and I'm sure there are spells to turn one into the other, there are no examples of turning drinkable liquids into anything other than another drinkable liquid. Not that Yud would know any of this as Gamp's Law was first mentioned in Book 7 and he admittedly never read it. Zonekeeper fucked around with this message at 03:17 on Sep 3, 2015 |
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Sep 3, 2015 03:11
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What Yudkowsky, who doesn't know how anything works, imagines to happen, is that all your cells will suddenly be filled with molten gold. Which would be gruesome if it worked, but it doesn't. God dammit SMBC.
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Sep 3, 2015 17:38
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The Arithmancer is so much better at science than HPMOR.
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Sep 4, 2015 00:11
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Chapter 15: Conscientiousness Part Five quote:
If Transfiguration is truly that dangerous in this world, why would you even teach Transfiguration to children? You can give them all the sternly worded warnings you like, but they are still, you know, children. Driving is far less dangerous than Eliezer’s take on Transfiguration but we still don’t let little kids drive. quote:
I’m surprised Eliezarry hasn’t internally noted that this doesn’t prohibit Transfiguring things into a plasma. quote:
Does this include precious metals like gold and silver, or other valuables like gemstones? quote:
McGonagall has just doomed one or more of her students. Chekov’s Gun all but demands that one of them will transfigure himself or herself.
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Sep 4, 2015 09:01
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So what the gently caress can you use this stupid dire doomspell for, then? I mean Jesus.
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Sep 4, 2015 09:06
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