Liquid Communism posted:

You've just encountered praxeology in motion, my friend. Do not engage with people who are willing to deny the existence of their own subjective consciousness on pure conjecture assumed as fact.

Phenotype posted:

I don't know how someone can in good faith argue that they don't have a train of thought going on in their own head while they debate you.

Phenotype posted:

Or that a second body who thinks like you do has essentially no value.

Tiggum posted:

I never said anything even close to that.

Or this. Where did "value" come into it?

Phenotype posted:

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

It was parchment instead of the Muggle paper that Harry would have expected, but the writing on it was his own handwriting, if done with a quill instead of a pen. The parchment said:

Beware the constellation,
and help the watcher of stars.

Pass unseen by the life-eaters' confederates,
and by the wise and the well-meaning.

Six, and seven in a square,
in the place that is prohibited and bloody stupid.

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

'The place that is prohibited' would ordinarily mean the Forbidden Forest; that was probably what someone intercepting the message was meant to think. But the Forbidden Forest was huge, and there was more than one distinguished location inside it. No obvious Schelling Point at which to rendezvous, or find some event that needed intervention.

But when you added the 'bloody stupid' modifier, there was only one prohibited place in Hogwarts that fit.

And so Harry set forth on that outlawed path where, if rumor spoke true, all the first-year Gryffindors had gone before. The third-floor corridor, on the right-hand side. A mysterious door leading to a series of rooms filled with dangerous and potentially lethal traps that nobody could possibly get through, especially if they were only in their first year.

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

Harry was frantically trying to work out who was pretending to be what. Since Professor Quirrell wasn't in on Dumbledore's conspiracy, Severus was pretending to be the evil Potions Master of Hogwarts, who'd been sent here by the Headmaster... and might or might not have actually been sent here by Dumbledore... but Professor Quirrell either thought, or was pretending to think, that someone needed to keep an eye on Professor Snape... and Harry himself had been sent here by future-Harry and had no idea why... and why were they all standing outside the Headmaster's forbidden door in the first place?

And then...

From behind where Harry stood...

Came the growing sound of another set of footsteps, rapid and manyfold.

Elizer Yudkkowsky posted:

"We're going to take the whole mirror and send it back to Flamel," said Theodore Nott. "It's not like we want the Stone for ourselves, we just need to stop Dumbledore from stealing it."

Professor Snape nodded, as though confirming something, and turned his head to look at the other students. "Tell me, have any of you noticed one of the others behaving in an unusual fashion? Especially if there is a peculiar object that they have in their possession, or they can use spells a first-year should not know?" Professor Snape's right hand now pointed his wand at Susan Bones. "I see that Miss Greengrass and Miss Davis are trying not to look at you, Miss Bones. If there is a mundane explanation, you would be wise to offer it immediately."

Susan Bones's hair turned bright red, though her face didn't change. "I suppose there's not much point keeping it mum any longer," she said, "since I'm graduating in two days anyway."

"Double witches get to graduate six years early?" said Tracey Davis. "That's not fair!"

"Bones is a double witch?" cried Theodore.

"No, she is Nymphadora Tonks, a Metamorphmagus," Professor Snape said. "Masquerading as another student is extremely against regulation, as you are well aware, Miss Tonks. It is not too late to expel you from Hogwarts two days before your graduation, which would be a dreadful tragedy - from your perspective, that is. From my perspective it would be hilarious. Now tell me what exactly you are doing here."

"That explains it," said Daphne Greengrass. "Um, is there actually a Susan Bones, or is the House dying out so they had you secretly -"

The red-haired form of Susan Bones had a palm to her face. "Yes, Miss Greengrass, there's a real Susan Bones. She only sends me in when you lot are about to get into ridiculous amounts of trouble. Professor Snape, the reason I'm here is because Draco Malfoy was missing, and this lot insisted on trying to find him instead of calling the Aurors. For reasons the real Miss Bones said there was no time to explain to me, which I now realize were stupid. But young students must never go alone, and must be accompanied by a sixth or seventh year at all times. And now we found Draco Malfoy and we can all go back. Please? Before this gets any more ridiculous?"

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

"Malfoy..." said the pink-haired form of Susan, still gasping for breath. "Draco Malfoy, where are you? Are you there? Call the Aurors already! Merlin drat it - Homenum Revelio! "

And Harry found himself visible again, staring in his mirror at the form of Draco Malfoy half-visible beneath a shimmering cloak, standing behind not-Susan, pointing his wand at a gap in not-Susan's blue haze.

Harry's mind moved in flashes of insight, too slow and yet too fast; even as Harry's mouth opened and he inhaled in preparation to shout.

beware the constellation
there was a constellation named Draco
if you could control a Professor you could control a student

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

Slowly, Harry turned around.

Professor Quirrell was standing upright and smiling.

In the Defense Professor's hand was a shape of black metal pointed at Harry's wand arm, held with the sure grip of someone who knew exactly how to use a semiautomatic handgun.

Harry's mouth was dry, even his lips were trembling with adrenaline, but he managed to speak. "Hello, Lord Voldemort."

Professor Quirrell inclined his head in acknowledgement, and said, "Hello, Tom Riddle."

Added Space posted:

This chapter is an anti-twist. Some folks were expecting something besides the Quirrel = Voldemort reveal, despite all the very obvious signs. Nope, the obviously evil person was evil, go figure.

Added Space posted:

The confusion is deliberate, since Quirrelmort is trying to hide his movements of going after the Philosophers Stone.

Voldemort posted:

You have already vanquished the Dark Lord, the one and only time that you will ever do so. I have already destroyed all but a remnant of Harry Potter, eliminating the difference between our spirits and enabling us to reside in the same world.

Voldemort posted:

When Salazar Slytherin invoked the Parselmouth curse upon himself and all his children, his true plan was to ensure his descendants could trust one another's words, whatever plots they wove against outsiders. Occlumency cannot fool the Parselmouth curse as it can fool Veritaserum, and you may put that to the trial also.

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

The Defense Professor walked over to the three-headed corpse and placed his wand against it. He began a Latin-sounding incantation that was accompanied by a sense of rising apprehension, the Boy-Who-Lived feeling the Dark Lord's power as he always had.

The last word spoken was "Inferius" and it was accompanied by a final surge of STOP, DON'T.

And the three-headed dog rose to a stand, its six eyes dull and blank, turning to watch the door once more.

Harry stared at the huge Inferius with a horrible sinking sensation in his stomach, the third-worst feeling he'd ever felt in his life.

He knew then that he'd seen and sensed this procedure before, only without the spoken Latin.

The centaur who'd confronted him in the Forbidden Forest was dead. The Defense Professor had hit it with a real Avada Kedavra, not a fake one.

Milkfred E. Moore posted:

the prose is appalling

Earlier this week Yud posted:

I'd consider this as another known bug in HPMOR that resulted from my vastly underestimating the Transparency Illusion and the salience to other people of explanations I didn't have in mind myself. Just like it never occurred to me that my age-reverted Tom Riddle expy might be taken as an author avatar of some author who was very bad at writing original-flavor Harry Potter, and it definitely never occurred to me that it would be the least bit nontransparent that the Defense Professor was Voldemort (again). So too, it didn't occur to me that so many people would come in with a strong hypothesis that this story was going to be about "Harry Potter is already rational and so discovers amazing scientific explanations for magic!" and not "Harry Potter grows up and discovers the true meaning of rationality which he does not already know at the start of the story".

It did occur to me that some readers might expect too much scientific progress too fast, so I tried explicitly to signal they shouldn't get their hopes up, like by having Harry say to Hermione on the train that it would of course take thirty-five years to solve magic. But I didn't then realize the extent to which passing paragraphs like this one tend to be just plain overlooked, and of course it can be read in other ways too, like establishing a high challenge bar.

Being myself, as I am, it also seemed too "obvious" to me that of course the story couldn't be about finding nanomachines underneath all the magic or some fool midichlorians like that. For I know that unless you have designed a bitstring to be compressible it will almost always not be compressible; and Rowling didn't design her magic to be scientifically explicable, so it almost certainly can't be compressed by any in-story explanation as a matter of information theory. The only way you can get a magic system with a genuinely amazing secret behind it is to start from the secret and generate the magic system. In one or two cases I fiddled with the rules to allow their surface appearances to reflect a hidden secret, and boy did some people complain about those.

The existence of Potterverse magic itself cannot have a genuinely amazing explanation. It can have clever-sounding explanations that make Rowlingverse magic sound more plausible without predicting all the details, but those are not beautiful enough to support the grand arc of a science story. It is perhaps difficult to convey the extent to which that is obvious at a wordless glance if you are simultaneously fluent in fiction-writing and algorithmic complexity. So it was just not very prominent in my mind as a possible misinterpretation that people would think they were reading the story of Harry Potter and the Science of Magic.

So I'm sorry about the way I signaled the wrong expectations about the story. I was learning a lot about writing as I went. But by the time I got to the end of the story, there was only one set of closing parentheses that corresponded to all the opening parentheses I had carefully laid down, and they involved "Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line", even though if I'd been replanning from scratch I would have been able to construct a better final battle than that.

quote:

it didn't occur to me that so many people would come in with a strong hypothesis that this story was going to be about "Harry Potter is already rational and so discovers amazing scientific explanations for magic!"

quote:

It is perhaps difficult to convey the extent to which that is obvious at a wordless glance if you are simultaneously fluent in fiction-writing and algorithmic complexity. 

divabot posted:

THIS WAS LITERALLY YOUR loving PUBLICITY HOOK YOU

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

The Defense Professor raised that wand, and traced in the air a flaming rune that was all jagged edges and malevolence; Harry took another instinctive step back. Then Professor Quirrell spoke. "Az-reth. Az-reth. Az-reth."

The flaming rune began pouring out fire that was... twisted, as though the jagged edges of the rune had become the nature of the fire itself. The fire was blazing crimson, shaded further red than blood, glowing as searingly intense as an arc-welder. That brilliance in that shade seemed wrong in its own right, like nothing shaded so far red should give off that much light; and the searing crimson was shot through with veins of black that seemed to suck the light from the fire. Within the blackened fire, outlined in the interplay of crimson and darkness, animal shapes twisted wildly from one predator to another, cobra to hyena to scorpion.

"Az-reth. Az-reth. Az-reth." When Professor Quirrell had repeated the word six times, as much black-crimson fire had poured out as the volume of a small bush.

The cursed fire slowed in its changes as Professor Quirrell locked eyes upon it, taking on a single form, the form of a blackened blood-burning phoenix.

And something told Harry with a terrible certainty that if that black burning phoenix met Fawkes, the true phoenix would die and never be reborn.

Tiggum posted:

I feel like it's a reference to something but I don't know what, so I'm guessing anime.

Tiggum posted:

I don't remember if wizards not being able to fly under their own power was a thing from the books, but it is here and Harry is the first person to ever figure out how he did it, obviously.

Tiggum posted:

They also have a brief chat about how Voldemort is able to fly, which is by having the same enchantment that makes broomsticks work cast on his own bones (because the enchanted object must be long and thin like a broom). I don't remember if wizards not being able to fly under their own power was a thing from the books, but it is here and Harry is the first person to ever figure out how he did it, obviously.

The Iron Rose posted:

I always appreciated Voldemort flying because man what a fantastic way to demonstrate how skilled the character is, without needing to shoehorn in some ridiculously lethal spell that kills a billion people or whatever. Unaided flight! Now that's really something remarkable, that neither Dumbledore or Grindewald ever did.

Cavelcade posted:

Doesn't he teach Snape how to do it and it's a big spooky moment confirming Snape is definitely 100% bad guy because otherwise Voldemort wouldn't trust him with the secret?

The Iron Rose posted:

Nope, not as far as I'm aware. Even other death eaters had to use brooms - see the whole chase scene with seven Harrys back in book 7.

quote:

“Unlike Dumbledore, he was still carrying a wand...and he seems to have learned a few tricks from his master.”
With a tingle of horror, Harry saw in the distance a huge, batlike shape flying through the darkness toward the perimeter wall.

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

"Trelawney's prophecy," Professor Quirrell said. His hand tapped a bellflower with a strip of copper before dropping it in. "I spent long days pondering it, after Snape brought the prophecy to me. Prophecies are never trivial things. And how shall I put this in a way that does not make you think stupid things... well, I shall say it, and if you are stupid I shall be annoyed. I was fascinated by the prophecy's assertion that someone would be my equal, because it might mean that person could hold up the other end of an intelligent conversation. After fifty years of being surrounded by gibbering stupidity, I no longer cared whether my reaction might be considered a literary cliche. I was not about to pass up on that opportunity without thinking about it first. And then, you see, I had a clever idea." Professor Quirrell sighed. "It occurred to me how I might fulfill the Prophecy my own way, to my own benefit. I would mark the baby as my equal by casting the old horcrux spell in such fashion as to imprint my own spirit onto the baby's blank slate; it would be a purer copy of myself, since there would be no old self to mix with the new. In some years, when I had become bored with ruling Britain and moved on to other things, I would arrange with the other Tom Riddle that he should appear to vanquish me, and he would rule over the Britain he had saved. We would play the game against each other forever, keeping our lives interesting amid a world of fools. I knew a dramatist would predict that the two of us would end by destroying each other; but I pondered long upon it, and decided that both of us would simply decline to play out the drama. That was my decision and I was confident that it would remain so; both Tom Riddles, I thought, would be too intelligent to truly go down that road. The prophecy seemed to hint that if I destroyed all but a remnant of Harry Potter, then our spirits would not be so different, and we could exist in the same world."

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

"My remaining hope was the horcruxes I had hidden in the hopeless idiocy of my youth. Imbuing them into ancient lockets, instead of anonymous pebbles; guarding them beneath wells of poison in the center of a lake of Inferi, instead of portkeying them into the sea. If someone found one of those, and penetrated their ridiculous protections... but that seemed like a distant hope. I was not sure I would ever be embodied again. Yet at least I was immortal. The worst of all fates had been averted, my great creation had done that much. I had little left to hope for, and little left to fear. I decided that I would not go insane, since there seemed to be no advantage in it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

You, boy, you brought that about, you freed my spirit to fly where it pleases and seduce the most opportune victim, by being too casual with your secrets. It is a catastrophe for any who oppose me, and you wrought it with one finger drawing wetness on a tea-saucer.

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

"What gave me away at the last, in the corridor outside these chambers?"

Harry put aside other emotions to weigh up the cost and benefit of answering honestly, came to the conclusion that the Defense Professor was giving away far more information than he was getting (why?) and that it was best not to give the appearance of reticence. "The main thing," Harry said, "was that it was too improbable that everyone had arrived in Dumbledore's corridor at the same time. I tried running with the hypothesis that everyone who arrived had to be coordinated, including you."

"But I had said that I was following Snape," the Defense Professor said. "Was that not plausible?"

"It was, but..." Harry said. "Um. The laws governing what constitutes a good explanation don't talk about plausible excuses you hear afterward. They talk about the probabilities we assign in advance. That's why science makes people do advance predictions, instead of trusting explanations people come up with afterward. And I wouldn't have predicted in advance for you to follow Snape and show up like that. Even if I'd known in advance that you could put a trace on Snape's wand, I wouldn't have expected you to do it and follow him just then. Since your explanation didn't make me feel like I would have predicted the outcome in advance, it remained an improbability. I started to wonder if Sprout's mastermind might have arranged for you to show up, too. And then I realised the note to myself hadn't really come from future-me, and that gave it away completely."

Tiggum posted:

I can't remember what that's about. I'm not going to go back and try to find it, but if anyone remembers what Harry drew then please remind me.

Tiggum posted:

The Voldemort persona was supposed to be a trial run for his real plan, but people are just so dumb and so goddamn crazy that he ended up being ridiculously successful and had to move his plans forward. And Voldemort kept winning because of how dumb everyone else is.

Tiggum posted:

The Trump persona was supposed to be a trial run for the cthonic reptile empire’s true plan, but people are just so dumb and so goddamn crazy that Trump ended up being ridiculously successful and so our reptilian overlords had to move their plans forward. Trump kept winning! because of how dumb everyone else is.

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

"How old is this Mirror?" Harry said in almost a whisper.

"Nobody knows, Mr. Potter." The Defense Professor reached out his fingers toward the runes, a look of something like reverence on his face; but his fingers did not touch the gold. "But my guess is the same as yours, I think. It is said, in certain legends that may or may not be fabrications, that this Mirror reflects itself perfectly and therefore its existence is absolutely stable. So stable that the Mirror was able to survive when every other effect of Atlantis was undone, all its consequences severed from Time. You can see why I was amused when you suggested Fiendfyre." The Defense Professor let his hand fall.

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

Harry was still concentrating. "Do you think Dumbledore suspects that I am, in his terms, a horcrux of Lord Voldemort, or more generally, that some aspects of my personality were copied off Lord Voldemort?" Even as Harry asked this aloud, he realized what a dumb question it was, and how much completely blatant evidence he'd already seen that -

"Dumbledore cannot possibly have missed it," said Professor Quirrell. "It is not exactly subtle. What else is Dumbledore to think, that you are an actor in a play whose stupid author has never met a real eleven-year-old? Only a gibbering dullard would believe that - ah, never mind."

Eliezer Yudkowsky posted:

"Arguendo," Harry said. "We're not sure what's necessary to retrieve the Stone. But a sufficient condition should involve Albus Dumbledore, or maybe someone else, in a state of mind where they believe that the Dark Lord has been defeated, that the threat is over, and that it is time to take out the Stone and give it back to Nicholas Flamel. We aren't sure which part of that person's state of mind, let's say Dumbledore's, will be the necessary part that he thinks Lord Voldemort can't understand or duplicate; but under those conditions Dumbledore's entire state of mind will be sufficient."

"Reasonable," said Professor Quirrell. "So?"

"The corresponding strategy," Harry said carefully, "is to mimic Dumbledore's state of mind under those conditions, in as much detail as possible, while standing in front of the mirror. And this state of mind must have been produced by internal forces, not external ones."

"But how are we to get that without Legilimency or the Confundus Charm, both of which would certainly be external - ha. I see." Professor Quirrell's ice-pale eyes were suddenly piercing. "You suggest that I Confund myself, as you cast that hex upon yourself during your first day in Battle Magic. So that it is an internal force and not an external one, a state of mind that comes about through only my own choices.

DACK FAYDEN posted:

In a very minor defense of Big Yud, this part right here makes complete sense.

Voldemort is dumb as gently caress and should not have had half the success he had, etc.

Liquid Communism posted:

Much like current day British (and US) politics, all it took was one dumb, crazy fucker whose only lust is for power and loving people over therewith and a ton of monied aristocrats eager to line up behind anyone who would keep their dwindling inbred houses at the top of the social order.