A Review of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Best read by those who are already relatively familiar with Harry Potter.

Those of you who read my previous post know that I mentioned Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality in passing, and that I described it as "one of the greatest pieces of literature I have ever read." Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (abbreviated from here on out as HPMoR or just MoR) is a piece of fanfiction (cue protests from those of you who haven't taken my previous post to heart that no, it can't possibly be good), written by one Eliezer Yudkowsky, rationalist and AI researcher. Among other changes, the central premise is that Harry's aunt Petunia married a scientist and Oxford teacher, and Harry, a child prodigy in MoR canon, was raised in a loving household and was taught rationality from a young age. This is far from the only departure from canon, and I doubt it is even the most dramatic - among other things, Quirrell is more competent than most of the other teachers at Hogwarts. But I digress.

In the story's beginning, Harry of course receives his Hogwarts letter, and when his father is understandably unconvinced, Harry manages to get a letter to Hogwarts asking someone to come to his home for a demonstration. McGonagall arrives and, as a quick proof, levitates Harry's father for a few moments before letting him down. You are all thinking that what happens next is that both Harry and his father, Scientifically-Minded as they are, immediately construct flimsy rationalizations as to why it was a trick, which McGonagall dispels with a more compelling demonstration, and then they rationalize that one, and so on ad nauseam. That is not at all what happens. Harry establishes beforehand that there is no way McGonagall could be faking it, and when McGonagall successfully levitates Harry's father, he promptly accepts the existence of magic, which under the circumstances is about the right thing to do.

Then McGonagall shows Harry her Animagus transformation, and Harry says this:

"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?"

I can't personally verify any of what he says about quantum mechanics, but it's not exactly an area of expertise, and Yudkowsky assures the reader in the beginning that all mentioned science is accurate. Everything from "cats are complicated" onward strikes me as common sense, though. Particularly striking is Harry's reaction upon fully realizing that most of physics is basically gone now; he doesn't abandon his rationality altogether, but instead realizes that "the March of Reason would just have to start over, that was all; they still had the experimental method and that was the important thing."

This, ladies and gentlemen, is fantasy done right.

It's quickly revealed that MoR-Harry has a disorder in which his sleep cycle is 26 hours long instead of 24, which sounds like a convenient plot device that the author just made up(Harry has not been attending public school for some time because of it), but it turns out that that's a real thing that can actually happen, which quite frankly amazed me when I found out.

One of my favorite of MoR's changes was the considerable fleshing-out of the Houses. Rather than putting all of the protagonists in Gryffindor, Yudkowsky puts them where they belong; Hermione goes to Ravenclaw with the more-rational Harry, and Neville goes to Hufflepuff. Ron, who isn't seen much, still goes to Gryffindor. In addition to this change, the qualities of each house (except Gryffindor) are fleshed out. Ravenclaws are not defined just by intelligence, but by curiosity; Hufflepuffs are known for being a supportive and tightly-knit group of loyal friends; and Slytherins aren't just evil, but cunning and ambitious, which Yudkowsky actually goes to the trouble of distinguishing from evil. Gryffindor basically remains the house of the brave, and MoR-Harry expresses disdain for it early on, though not without reason. His first impression of Gryffindor is that of Gryffindor prefects refusing to help Neville find his toad on the Hogwarts Express. It is, of course, something of a generalization, but Harry calling Gryffindor house the house of "wannabe heroes" is essentially accurate in MoR canon, and probably not to far off the mark in official canon either.

Lastly, Yudkowsky describes MoR as a story for adults, not because it's particularly violent or raunchy (most main characters are around eleven), but because it is intellectual. I didn't really have problems, but I have historically been a horrible judge of how my intellect compares to that of normal teenagers, so teenage readers, I have no idea whether you should expect it to go over your head or not. (And don't worry if you drew a complete blank at Harry's intellectual freakout above; so did I when I read it.) That said, it's a piece of fiction that's well worth reading for more than its entertainment value, and as I said, I'd recommend it as required reading if I didn't fear that that would cause those who read it to perceive it as worse.

And if you really enjoy it, to the extent that you want to start emulating Harry, and it doesn't go over your head, then I recommend checking out the author's profile.

Classic Literature: A Follow-Up Rant

On Tuesday, I discussed our collective love-affair with the wisdom of the ancients, and how all too often we forget that wisdom, being based on accumulated experience, is thus more valuable if it is newer. Today, I wish to address the idea that the same thinking can be applied elsewhere - namely, literature.

A quick rehash: societies like our own accumulate experience at things, which allows them to get better at things - basically common sense. In applying this thinking to wisdom in general, we see that the wisdom of people alive today is, in general, vastly more useful than that of people alive long ago. We can apply this same thinking to the discipline of literature - indeed, creative work in general. I have seen no compelling evidence that a society's collective skill at creative disciplines doesn't increase with its skill at everything else - Charles Dickens could never have written Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is a piece of fan fiction that is, and I say this with no hyperbole, one of the best pieces of literature I have ever read.)

And yet despite all this, high schools and colleges remain enamored of the "classics" - Shakespeare, Dickens, Dante, et cetera. What worries me most is not simply that the classics are held in high regard, but they are actually valued above modern works. But standards rise as time goes on, in literature as in anything else, and I'd be highly suspicious of claims that modern tragedies (Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog, anyone?) don't even stand up to Shakespeare's.

This effect has a noticeable inverse: as classics such as the works of Shakespeare are held in universally high regard, newer works, and works in new media, are presupposed to be worse. This is due in large part to the fact that so much available new media is awful, while the only available classics are the ones that were considered to be really good. This logic is called the "availability heuristic," essentially that people judge the likelihood of an event by how easily they can bring an example to mind; and it's much easier to think of an example of awful fan fiction than awful Victorian literature.

Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. This applies equally to fan fiction and Victorian literature, but no one remembers the bad Victorian literature - and bad enough fan fiction often becomes more famous than good fan fiction (again, I cite My Immortal). Thus, most people assign higher probability to a given, unknown piece of internet literature being bad to an equally unknown piece of Victorian literature being bad, and this is only accurate to the extent that more internet literature than Victorian literature exists. Modern, new-media works aren't guaranteed to be worse than classic literature, and can, in principle, be just as good - frankly, the only reason I don't think Methods of Rationality should be required reading is that forcing people to do something generally makes them enjoy it less.

So, what to do with this advice? Well, in my high school, as well as that of most of my (several) readers, there are seminars held to discuss whatever classic we're reading at the time - perhaps bring up the subject then? Compare whatever work you're studying to modern works with similar themes, and discuss, for example, what of the theme is lost or gained by switching from the classic to the modern work? And as always, don't take my advice on faith. Think about the reasoning, see if it makes sense to you, and if it doesn't, raise some objections. (Preferably on the blog and not in person, however, as I tend to be much more coherent about my opinions in text than in speech.)

Next week's posts will include: a discussion of Egypt, for anyone who isn't informed and wants to be; a post on authority-worship; and, as a bonus post this weekend, a formal review of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

Ancient Wisdom: A Rant

WOAH WHAT THE BLOG IS BACK AGAIN
Okay, first, a bit of news: I'm informally disowning everything on this blog before "Dadaist Baseball," sort-of-except the posts about my life, maybe-except my Twilight rant, and especially "Irreligion."

Second, this blog post is essentially an introduction to a more specific point that I will be making soon.

Finally, I have a rant for you today, this time on the idea of "ancient wisdom."
I'm sure most of you have heard something come recommended because it is the "wisdom of the ancients" or something like that. The thinking seems to go like this: older people who are alive today generally tend to be wiser than younger people who are alive today, so older people who aren't alive today - i.e. the aforementioned "ancients" - must be way wiser than young people alive today!

Those of you who have spotted the problem with this logic already, give yourselves a pat on the back.

The problem with this argument is that the older people who are alive today have accumulated experiences of their own lives, plus accumulated knowledge of all the time that humanity has been alive as a sentient species (insert joke about how old people are all clueless Luddites who aren't likely to draw on this knowledge, blah blah blah). The ancients had all the accumulated knowledge of living their lives, but this is not as good as that of people today for two reasons: one, the vast majority of dead people have lived in a profoundly different culture from today's, and I would posit that all of the people who are cited as dispensing the "wisdom of the ancients" have; and two, everyone who dispenses ancient wisdom has access to less information accumulated by society than we do today.

You can look at literally any aspect of first-world human life today for confirmation of the fact that a more or less enlightened society tends to get better at things the longer that it exists, but for some reason we seem to persist in the belief that this doesn't apply to Deep Wisdom. If you take issue with the idea that knowledge can't accumulate about the kinds of "metaphysical" things that Deep Wisdom likes to talk about - nature of consciousness, nature of intelligence, nature of the universe - well, I would point you in the direction of quantum physics, evolutionary psychology, and rationality in general. All of which didn't exist or were in profoundly worse states around the time the wisdom of the ancients was being doled out. (And yes, I realize it wasn't the wisdom of the ancients then. I'm making a point here.)

So what do you do with this new information? Well, I'll give you some general advice (as in, advice to actually apply, in situations in your life, including but not limited to receiving the wisdom of the ancients) that tends to help: when presented with advice, don't think too much about the source of the advice if the reasoning behind it is in your grasp. Question authority, which gets the same kind of worship as the wisdom of the ancients (and really deserves its own blog posts). And I encourage you to actually think about advice you are given - including this advice - rather than accepting it or rejecting it based on whether or not it is modern. That's the same problem in a different guise.

Up next: applying this advice to English class, an exploration of authority-worship, and a discussion of the situation in Egypt, not necessarily in that order.