HPMoR and the Limits of Rationality
One woman's quest to understand the Harry Potter fanfic that created the modern world.
Interactive transcripts by Regina: https://hpmoralor.sepionics.com/
Email: hpmoralorcast@proton.me
HPMoR and the Limits of Rationality
Ep. 5: How I Learned to Start Worrying ...
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In the first part of chapter 6, Harry enlightens McGonagall about the planning fallacy via an incredibly maladaptive coping mechanism. Elisa, Jake, and Anthea are forced to question the limits of authorial intent and why there are so many alleys in Diagon Alley.
Content warnings: we touch on Alzheimer's; medically assisted suicide, cryonics, and other end of life considerations; suicide; and mortality/death from about 0:50:00 to 1:05:45.
Citations and further reading, part 1
- HPMoR, Chapter 6. Eliezer Yudkowsky. https://hpmor.com/chapter/6
- “Unpublished data from Stanley Milgram’s experiments cast doubt on his claims about obedience,” Eric W. Dolan. PsyPost, 17 Nov 2019. https://www.psypost.org/unpublished-data-from-stanley-milgrams-experiments-casts-doubts-on-his-claims-about-obedience/
- “Deception and Illusion in Milgram's accounts of the Obedience Experiments.” Gina Perry. Theoretical & Applied Ethics, January 2013. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/317914282_Deception_and_Illusion_in_Milgram's_accounts_of_the_Obedience_Experiments
- “Credibility and Incredulity in Milgram’s Obedience Experiments: A Reanalysis of an Unpublished Test,” Gina Perry, Augustine Brannigan, Richard A. Wanner, & Henderikus Stam. Social Psychology Quarterly, March 2020. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0190272519861952
- “Replicating Milgram: Would People Still Obey Today?” Jerry M. Burger. American Psychologist, January 2009. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/amp-64-1-1.pdf
- “Obedience to authority with an authentic victim,” Charles L. Sheridan & Richard G. King, Jr. Proceedings of the 80th Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, 1972. https://web.archive.org/web/20180127071012/http://www.holah.co.uk/files/sheridan_king_1972.pdf
- LessWrong community surveys:
- 2011: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MKsuezdHmrHfbQCqT/p/HAEPbGaMygJq8L59k
- 2016: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FDaYqFW8ExjKNwkqa/2016-lesswrong-diaspora-survey-analysis-part-one-meta-and#Work_Status
- 2024: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/MKsuezdHmrHfbQCqT/p/gpZBWNFxymsqnPB92
- “Sir Terry Pratchett: coroner tribunals should be set up for assisted suicide cases,” Chris Irvine. The Telegraph, 2 Aug 2009. https://web.archive.org/web/20090805175425/http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/5960166/Sir-Terry-Pratchett-coroner-tribunals-should-be-set-up-for-assisted-suicide-cases.html
- Terry Pratchett - Living With Alzheimer’s, BBC. 18 May 2009. https://youtu.be/KmejLjxFmCQ?si=Cze6ANh5zpqV5uA_
- “[LINK] Terry Pratchett is dead,” Baughn. LessWrong, 12 Mar 2015. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NqbSPsAHMTn7BTpFF/link-terry-pratchett-is-dead
- “Yehuda Yudkowsky, 1985-2004,” Eliezer Yudkowsky. 18 Nov 2004. https://www.yudkowsky.net/other/yehuda
- “Normal Cryonics,” Eliezer Yudkowsky. LessWrong, 19 Jan 2010. https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hiDkhLyN5S2MEjrSE/normal-cryonics
- “It’s Embarrassing to Die: The Immortalist Story,” Atrocity Guide. YouTube, 1 Mar 2022. https://youtu.be/IZ2YEESTQUI?si=ik68Zn87acnQ1Fin
- “Be Prepared,” Tom Lehrer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cK75VeDeu_U
- “Planning Fallacy,” the DecisionLab. Accessed 3 June 2026. https://web.archive.org/web/20260531110437/https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/planning-fallacy
- Ministers of Propaganda, Scott M. Coley. William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2024. https://bookshop.org/p/books/ministers-of-propaganda-truth-power-and-the-ideology-of-the-religious-right-scott-m-coley/baf049d942871639
Intro and old business
AntheaEverybody strapid, we don't have time for your bloody blo- Oh my god! Okay, okay, yeah. Stretch it out, warm it up, okay. You guys, welcome to HP More and the Limits of Rationality, a podcast about the Harry Potter fanfic that created our modern world. I'm your host, Anthea. I am joined today by Jake.
SPEAKER_02Hello.
AntheaAnd Elisa. That intro is smooth like butter! Thank you, thank you. Um, how are you guys today?
JakeUh, less tired than you, apparently.
SPEAKER_06I'm good. Today I'm brought to you by Day Drinking. Oh, yes! I have a little um peach wine from Trader Joe's and Elderflower Lemon Soda also from Trader Joe's. That's so classy. It's delicious.
JakeAnd to keep it classy, you know, for the gamers out there, some ASMR, the It's a nice, nice uh Diamond Dew bottle crinkling for you.
SPEAKER_06That feels like for ASMR, I will set off a firecracker.
AntheaWe are also joined today by our uh dog sitting dog Rocky, who hopefully won't be heard on this podcast.
JakeYeah, I think it mostly just means it's gonna be more editing for Anthea this time.
AntheaYeah, yeah.
JakeGet rid of the dog screaming.
AntheaYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06It really just depends on if even one person walks by our house.
AntheaYeah. Ooh, what are the odds? You know? Um, yeah. I feel like I'm gonna I'm gonna keep working on maybe, you know, coming up with more of an intro, but I'm also like, hey guys, you're here. It's episode five. You probably know what's going on by now if you're here. If not, go back to the first episode. And then please do listen to the second episode where I disclaim a bunch of stuff. And then listen to the third and fourth episodes because they're good, and then come back here.
JakeYeah, you're an adult, hopefully. Um you know what the text is.
AntheaIf you're a child, please don't listen to this podcast. Yeah, yeah. There's gonna be some content warnings for this episode uh again. Oh my gosh. Yeah, why are it's not as bad, it's not, there's no fleensing in this one. There's no no skinning.
SPEAKER_06If I have to make a prediction for this episode, I want to say that I predict I'm gonna be nostalgic for the fleensing. I think you might be. But here's what I do know. Yes. Last episode, chapter five, was where it got good.
AntheaYes. Oh yeah.
JakeWas that the the bank last time?
AntheaYes, chapter four was the bank, and chapter five was the was the social manipulation with Draco Malfoy.
JakeOh right.
AntheaAnd thank God we spent a whole chapter in the bank.
SPEAKER_06That was riveting. It was really riveting. Yeah, yeah.
AntheaYeah, yeah. Uh yes. We, yeah, there's a we're we're continuing to hit some points of of comparison to the, you know, some scenes that also happen in the in the original book. Um, one of those happens in here, but entirely off-screen. So, you know, it's not important. You'll you'll see when we get there.
SPEAKER_03Oh boy.
AntheaUm, before we begin, I wanted to touch on two things from the previous episode purely out of my own curiosity and interest. Um, first, Milgram. Uh so last episode, um, Milgram came up, right? We were talking the Milgram compliance experiments. Um, and uh our guest last week, or last time, Ernie, mentioned that in recent years they've been discredited, which was a surprise to me. So I did some digging. Um, and I found that in the 2010s, an Australian science writer named Gina Perry began to dig into the accounts of subjects of the Milgram experiments and raised a number of concerns and questions about their level of belief in the setup of the experiment. So these were the experiments where it was like, you're gonna come in, you're gonna give a shock to someone who is uh answering questions. When every time they get a question wrong, they you give them a shock. There was no actual shock being given. That was the lie. Um so Perry contends several things. One, that Milgram did a deeply unethical job of de hoaxing the subjects at the end of the experiment, which I cannot argue with at all, because apparently, like the the researcher would come in and be like, hello, this was all there were actually no shocks being given. Good job, subject. Here's the here's the guy who that that we said you were giving shocks to.
JakeYeah, here's here's the man you killed.
AntheaYeah, exactly. Exactly. He's okay, he's okay. Anyway, any questions? No? Good. Bye. Exactly as they're staring stunned just like we're uh what? Yeah, yeah, just kind of like a pretty fast like and now we're off. Um because it was the 60s, 70s, I think it was the 70s. Um so yeah, I can't argue with Perry on the fact that the dehoaxing was not well done.
JakeYou'll be compared to Nazis for a century. See you later.
AntheaExactly. Yeah. No, yeah, exact yes. Like um, two, she contends that Milgram didn't publish data that went against his conclusion that people tend to comply with authority. So she she looked at the data and she was like, I think there's data that says that people don't tend to comply with authority, and that Milgram just was like, we're just gonna keep that back here.
SPEAKER_06So that could be what Ernie meant about some of it being falsified.
AntheaRight.
SPEAKER_06Okay.
AntheaAnd three or two A, uh, because it's sort of related. Um Perry contends that a lot of the subjects during the experiment did not think that the shocks were real and continued to push the button because they were like, I think this is fake. Not because they were being obedient to the person telling them you have to keep pushing the button.
JakeThat that kind of tells us something else about people, though, that they're like, I'm pretty sure I'm not shocking someone. I better shock them harder.
SPEAKER_06I think this, I think this'll be fine. Yeah. Right. The stakes seem low because I don't have to deal with it either way. Although, and so did that come from post post-experiment interviews with the subjects? Yes. Okay. Yes. I can also say to Devil's Advocate, like, not that that because I I actually I know we talked about this, but but I this is surprising to me because I forget what we talked about. So this is all crazy. I think my brain is new information. Love that. But I do think, you know, there is, I think, an incentive to s I'm not saying that people are making that up. I think that could very well be the case, especially because like the idea that you can just go around shocking people in polite society, right, even for an experiment. Even in the 60s. Even in the 60s, does see when you could just take a car and invite everyone to bash the shit out of it for fun. Um uh it that I I can understand people, I think there's there's both grounds for people to have had skepticism, and two, there is an incentive for people to say afterwards, oh, I didn't think it was real.
AntheaRight, right.
SPEAKER_06Because they may be ashamed of how far they went.
AntheaSure, yeah. Um, and I haven't been able to read all of the studies that Perry published because they're paywalled. Uh what I have been able to read was kind of a mixed bag of compellingness to me. Um, like, yes, I think she's very she's she's I she seems well supported in saying, like, you know, but there were ethical problems here and there and the data is fuzzier than, you know, then it may have been presented as Milgram had an incentive to be, you know, saying, oh yeah, this data is very, very solid, very solid, um, and it may not have been as solid as he was initially presenting it. That being said, I also found that Milgram's results have been pretty proven to be pretty replicable. Like, it is it is difficult to repeat the original experiments because they do not meet current ethical standards.
SPEAKER_06Um We wish that we could replicate the Milgram experiment, but they won't let us.
AntheaYeah, the board said no.
JakeUm he shocked them.
unknownRight.
AntheaUm not really. Wink wink. Uh but insofar as people have been, you know, people have have done various things to uh deal with the fact that like here's how we can do it more ethically. Um, like not telling people you're gonna kill this guy. Uh although one replication of the experiment that I found uh or saw disgust involved, they were like, well, maybe people are willing to keep delivering these shocks. One, because they think they're fake, two, because they're like, that person will be fine. So they did it where they gave real but non-lethal shocks to a puppy. And people are not very compliant about that.
JakeThat's weird.
SPEAKER_06You just get to do anything in social science, seems like. Um, okay, guys, here's my experiment. So I'm gonna do the Milgram experiment. Yeah. But when people show up, I'm like, you guys, my assistant is dead. It was an accident. I need you to help me bury the body.
JakeMy fingerprints are already all over the scene. I like it. You touched the doorknob when you came in, you implicated. And now this knife, your fingerprints around the knife.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, and then the pretty little liars in. That's just what we're doing. I like this body. Now, what is this experiment trying to prove? I'll work that out when I write the grant application. There we go.
JakeWe have to frame this puppy. It's the only way out.
AntheaYes!
SPEAKER_06All right.
AntheaFraming a puppy. Anyway, for the curious, uh, I would point you towards Jerry M. Berger's paper, Replicating Milgram, in the January 2009 issue of American Psychologist, which I will link in the show notes. Um, yeah, Ernie and I are both right. Uh Milgram did engage in some mythologizing around his results, which are which is worthy of scrutiny, and his results have nevertheless proven fairly reliable. So that's thing one. Thing two, nobody asked, but I wanted to fact-check myself about the assertions I've been putting forward about the demographics of the rationalist community. Oh hell yeah. Uh thankfully, Less Wrong is the kind of nerd community that enjoys studying itself. Um I've mentioned that they do these, uh they've they've been doing like basically a census pretty regularly since like 2012.
JakeI'd say in a lot of ways they're good at self-reporting.
AntheaYeah. Yeah, they do tell on themselves a lot. Um so I went and uh checked out a few demographics in a couple of years. 2024, uh, which I think is the most recent survey because I can't find results for the they've done it, they did one in 2025, but they haven't published results. So 2024, 2016, which I think was the high point for participation, um, and 2011, which was the closest to when HP Moore began publishing.
SPEAKER_06I love this shit.
AntheaI am not a statistician, I don't know what I'm doing. So I'm just gonna tell you the numbers for each year. What percentage of respondents identify as white? In 2011, 86%, in 2016, 85.8%, and in 2024, 77.9%.
SPEAKER_02Lower number than I would have expected.
AntheaYeah. Yeah. But like pretty consistent there, right? Like, like it's gotten a little less white. Way you go, rat rats.
SPEAKER_06Just like the country. So or yeah, so hard to say.
AntheaUh what percentage of respondents identify as cis male? In 2011, male was not broken out into trans and cis. Um, 89% of respondents identified as male. Why? Uh seven, seven respondents total, or 0.6%, identified as transsexual, but the results don't clarify whether that's trans men, trans women, or non-binary. Uh in 2016, 76% identified as cis male, and in 2024, 80.6% identified as cis male. In 2011 and 2016, the survey designers did not ask specific questions about income, but they did ask about careers. In 2011, 32.6% of respondents identified as computer scientists.
SPEAKER_03Oh my god.
AntheaIn 2016, 30.5 worked in computers practical, 3.5 worked in computers AI, and 7% worked in computers other.
JakeSorry, I just like that. AI is not practical.
AntheaNo, not in 2016, it wasn't. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_06Computers imaginary.
AntheaYes, yes. Uh and in 2024, 36.7% worked in computers practical, and 15.4% worked in computers AI. So the the so it's about a third of respondents uh uh in 2011 and 2016 work in computers. Um in 2024, that has jumped. The percentage of people identifying as working in AI has jumped. Um the median income in 2024 was $65,000. Okay. Uh and ScrewTape, who compiled it, user ScrewTape who compiled the data, put together a nice chart that showed that income has increased within the lesser on community since 2012, uh, though there was no sign that he was correcting for inflation. Um I glanced at some earlier years analysis, uh, the mean and median incomes tended to be in that like 50 to 70 K bracket, okay. Uh which surprised me. Um, and because my assumption had been that they would all be much higher paid than that.
JakeWell, I mean, that is like since it is median, it might just be that the tastemakers in the community are, you know.
AntheaI think that's the thing, right? Like, I I think that my, you know, I was making assertions about how uh economists and philosophers and people who write thought experiments are like really coming at it from like an upper middle class perspective. And I think that that remains largely tr oh. Um I think that remains pretty fair to say even if like the the rank and you know, even if the majority of people in the rationalist community are, you know, like standard income. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Um do we know do we know what percentage of Americans, global northerners, whatever? I don't know exactly how you'd want to break that out, but like uh work in computers.
AntheaOh, like how does this reflect the population? Yeah. I don't know. Um yeah, like uh ScrewTape also put it at in some one of these posts as uh uh the less wrong community continues to essentially reflect a computer science PhD program. Yeah. Like that's what it looks like. Yeah.
JakeI I bet more of them work in computers, though. In the computer science PhD program.
AntheaYes. Closer to 100%. Roughly, yeah. Yeah. Um but yeah, so that's an interesting question. Yeah. Um anyway, you know, I am trying to be very, very data-driven about all of this stuff and cite all my sources. So when I say that the rationalist community is a lot of white guys, by God, I have the stats.
JakeI will continue to confidently assert that without statistical backing. Sure, yeah. The backing is now there, but that wasn't gonna stop me either way.
AntheaBut I mean, you're you're a white guy, so you get to.
JakeExactly.
SPEAKER_06I think with the right hammer to the right part of my brain, I can remove that statistic from my memory.
AntheaOkay, good, good.
JakeAnd I think you can also kind of like reshape facial structure a little bit from what I've seen.
AntheaOoh, that's heard about that. That is so great. Yeah.
Intro pt 2
AntheaOkay, so that's old business. New business. This chapter made me sad.
JakeThe other ones weren't?
AntheaUh, this one made me sadder. Oh my gosh. Um, so what happens in chapter six? Harry buys a healing kit, a trunk, and a wand. He learns about a plot twist that is not a plot twist to anyone who has read the original books. The end of the chapter. Uh the chapter is 9,950 words long.
SPEAKER_06Whoa, that's a fifth of a nano.
AntheaYeah. Um, the word counter I plugged it into told me, quote, your text may contain writing issues. The audio version clocks in at an hour and 24 minutes. Oh my god. The last two chapters combined, which took us three hours to record, as you may recall, um, came in at a little over 5,000 words and 45 minutes of audio. This chapter is too long and it sucks.
JakeIs that the part that made you sad?
AntheaNo, I mean partly. Um that made me tired. Uh maybe that's why I'm tired. Maybe it's not the dog. Maybe I've just been thinking about this for too long. Oh my gosh.
JakeYeah, it's it's certainly a well-being tax.
AntheaIt is. It well, that's yeah, so um it is also gonna touch on, it's gonna touch on several topics that I'm gonna give content warnings for. The chapter, uh, the original text mentions child abuse, not graphically. Um, in like a like like actual child abuse, not cleansing of children. Um and my commentary uh is going to talk about uh suicide and dementia, though not graphically. These things also make me sad, um, but not as sad as the amount of time I had to spend with this version of Harry Potter. Um I don't like him. Uh trying to give him and his creator a charitable reading is exhausting. The more time I spend with this fic, and the more time I spend trying to wrap my head around rationality as both an intellectual framework and a social community, the more daunted I feel. I feel like I'm in a Borges story. Like I am in the Garden of Branching Paths, I'm in the Library of Babel. I feel like I have set myself an impossible task by trying to understand a graphomanic dude and trace the things that influenced him and the things he influenced and the graphomanic community he created. And I worry about falling into the abyss of pessimistic myopia that I have seen other snarky analysts of popular works fall. Like Jenny Trout is the person that I don't want to become. Right? Um Jenny Trout did it is a blogger who did uh some really great uh analysis of Fifty Shades of Grey, and then by the end of it was clearly miserable.
JakeI'm sure that won't happen here.
AntheaUh, I mean, like, here's the thing. If I don't, if I don't figure out, if I don't figure my shit out, um, going through this fic at the rate of a chapter or two a month is going to take ten years. So that's I I'm discouraged. My courage is dissed.
JakeOkay. Have has anyone ever gone to therapy t in order to help get through their fanfic podcast before?
AntheaOh. Good question.
JakeAnd would you need to start a podcast about that?
SPEAKER_06Probably. Oh my gosh. I love this. Okay, yeah. Okay, no, no, I hear what you're saying. I hear what you're saying.
AntheaThank you for let's be honest. Safe space with you guys and and all 50 listeners, or whoever, however many there are. Um of whom we know don't like or agree with us. Yeah, some of whom are like really pro-billionaire. Thank you for listening.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, thank you. Thank you, girl.
AntheaYeah.
SPEAKER_06I will say that previously on this podcast, I said that I couldn't imagine anybody who wasn't on the left listening to this podcast. And now I must update my imaginings. Yep. Gotta update your frame.
JakeOn the other hand, I was imagining largely hate listeners from the rationalist community.
SPEAKER_06So Jake yet again doesn't have to change anything.
unknownYeah.
JakeI'll continue to say things confidently and eventually time and social pressure will prove me right.
AntheaYeah, yeah. Amazing how that works. Yes. Anyway. Um, yeah, I wanted to I wanted to be be upfront about that. Yeah. This was a daunting chapter. Yeah. Um and at the very least, I will get to exercise it into your brains as well. Thank you for it. I'm so excited. Thank you for coming on this journey with me.
SPEAKER_06Well, now that the podcast is good and it's or the the fanfic. Oh, now that the fan that's really hit itself. It's hit its stride. Yeah.
JakeI feel like podcast is still pretty made, frankly.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. Well, look, we're working, we're working on it. We just talked about, I mean, pardon me is like, with oh, we're doing more reading of the fanfic house. That would only take you five years. No, we'll figure it out. All right.
AntheaUm, the story so far, we talked about it. Uh tiny rationalist Harry James Potter Evans Veris has been escorted to die again alley. Um he got money out of his vault. He started his school shopping off by getting a bag of holding. Um he has been frequently recognized as the boy who lived by random passerby, though not, interestingly, by Draco Malfoy, um, who he met while getting fitted for robes. In an obvious display of social manipulation, he and Draco did a weird flattery dance with each other for a while. Um, Lucius Malfoy and McGonagall both came in, and Harry and Draco tried to do the weird flattery to them, and it doesn't work, didn't work as well as it did with each other.
JakeThey were basically two bower birds and then some guy walking in.
AntheaAnd then some, yeah, yeah, and they were like, woo!
JakeExactly. That is what they sound like.
SPEAKER_06Just shaking their plumage.
AntheaYeah. Um, also, Harry has been consistently shitty to people who recognize him. Um, charitably, I would say that he's doing this out of discomfort because he's an 11 year old who didn't know that he was anyone important. Let me track that back. Charitably, I will say he is an 11 year old who has. A very high sense of his own importance, but didn't know that anyone else shared it. McGonagall gave him a lore dump about how his parents died, uh who Voldemort is, uh, how graphically violent the death eaters were during the war. Okay, I think that catches us up.
Chapter 6 close reading
AntheaOkay. Chapter 6: The Planning Fallacy. I've been reading the little disclaimers and author's notes up to now. Um I think Yadkowski and I are both getting bored by them, so I'm gonna start skipping them. Heck yeah.
JakeYeah, good call. I Oh, also, I I would like to propose that for both my own sake, and I forgot why I said both, I forgot the second point, but we should we should start calling the author of this work Edub. For EW. It's just so much quicker.
AntheaBut it's why, Yudkowski.
JakeLet's just cut this part. We don't need to keep this in.
AntheaLet's call him EW anyway.
JakeAnd we'll take it again. For the top, I'll do that both bit again and then say, I think we should start calling the author of this book Y Dub. For young wizards.
AntheaYou know what? Very possible. I'll take it under consideration.
SPEAKER_02Perfect.
AntheaExcellent. Um, okay, the epigraph for this is you think your day was surreal. Try mine.
unknownAlright.
SPEAKER_06I'm becoming suspicious and resentful of these little epigraphs. You should be.
AntheaSome children would have waited until after their first trip to Diagon Alley. A bag of element 79, Harry said, and withdrew his hand empty from the Mokeskin pouch.
JakeI'm already exhausted by this kid.
AntheaMost children would have at least waited to get their wands first. A bag of Okone, said Harry, with a 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, A bag of tokens of economic exchange. That time his hand came out empty. Give me back the b bag that I just put in. Out came the bag of gold once more. Harry James Potter Evans Varus had gotten his hands on at least one magical item. Why wait? So Harry has been performing a series of experiments to see what works with this bag's retrieval charm and what does not. Things that work, the word gold in non-English languages and the thing I just put in, things that don't, phrases that accurately describe gold, like L would be 79. Uh, none of it makes any sense to his deep frustration, and he ends up describing something that will sound familiar to anyone who's asked an LLM to produce a piece of writing with an exact word count. 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 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 when the best artificial intelligence programmers can't get the fastest supercomputers to do it after 35 years of hard work. Harry gasped for breath.
JakeBut I'm sure a few more data centers will do it though.
AntheaWhat is going on? Magic, said Professor McGonagall. So I briefly I briefly explored going down a rabbit hole of natural language processing, but it gets very software ease very quickly. Um I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference to what's going on here. I just thought it was great that, like, oh, you did accurately predict that like they can they they can count but not add. Except they can't count either.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, so they can actually neither count nor add.
AntheaYeah, yeah.
JakeYeah, I mean, I just just say there was an anti-pedantry charm put on the bag.
AntheaRight. It makes me I I wonder if Gudkowski actually decided like decided on a set of rules that would make sense to him and then like put it in there, or if he's just like, I think magic is stupid. Like, I genuinely don't know.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, hard to tell at this point.
AntheaYeah.
SPEAKER_06I will point out um a couple things I think are interesting. Yes. One is that um I know that look, if Harry weren't so rational, I would let this go. But he says it understands. That's a that's asserting a fact, not an evidence, which also happens to, we don't know the bag was programmed in a in a sense, right? It's magic. The bag has a charm on it. Um but in saying it understands this and that, um, he's replicating the same fallacy that Yadkowski has about machine learning. Sure. Which it's not to say, uh, whatever, what is sentience, what is consciousness? We've had this argument or this this discussion many times. I'm not necessarily here to say today what the answer is. I am here to say that he doesn't know that and is asserting it as if something definitely is conscious, that he doesn't have that much reason to think is conscious or behaving as if it's conscious. Yeah.
JakeAnd if I know Rowling, the way it works is there's some little like intangible work spirit inside of the bag that just loves waiting and listening and doing what people ask it to do. Right.
SPEAKER_06That's probably true, actually. Probably true. The second point I would like to raise is uh since he gave the exact count of galleons in the bag and McGonagall's there, has he not just blabbed that he self-stole?
AntheaHe's uh that's actually it's so interesting that you bring that up. No, he has not. Um he uh is going to come up the the number of galleons in the bag is going to come up later.
SPEAKER_05Oh thank god.
AntheaI think he's got two bags in there. I think he's got a bag of the of the like uh sanctioned uh gold and then the stuff that he stole. Um yes, that is gonna come up later.
SPEAKER_06Oh god.
AntheaYou're very smart. Uh so Harry, uh so McGonagall says it's magic. And Harry does not like this. With respect, Professor McGonagall, I'm not quite sure you understand what I'm trying to do here. With respect, Mr. Potter, I'm quite sure I don't. Unless this is just a guess, mind. You're trying to take over the world? No! I mean, yes. Well, no! I think I should perhaps be alarmed that you have trouble answering the question. Harry glumly considered the Dartmouth Conference on Artificial Intelligence in 1956. It had been the first conference ever on the topic, the one that had coined the phrase artificial intelligence.
JakeI love glumly considering conferences.
AntheaThey had identified key problems such as making computers understand language, learn, and improve themselves. They had suggested, in perfect seriousness, that significant advances on these problems might be made by ten scientists working together for two months. No, chin up. You're just starting on the problem of unraveling all the secrets of magic. You don't actually know whether it's going to be too difficult to do in two months. And you really haven't heard of other wizards asking these sorts of questions or doing this sort of scientific experimenting? Harry asked again. It just seemed so obvious to him. Then again, it had taken more than 200 years after the invention of the scientific method, before any muggle scientists had thought to systematically investigate which sentences a human four-year-old could or couldn't understand. The developmental psychology of linguistics could have been discovered in the 18th century in principle, but no one had even thought to look until the 20th. So you couldn't really blame the much smaller wizarding world for not investigating the retrieval charm. Yes?
SPEAKER_06Everything in me is saying that's not true in terms of how child development was first investigated. So what's the deal?
AntheaWell, so I yeah, I wish I had an answer for you. Because, like, in the first five chapters or so, uh, Yudkowski was um had had a science page where he was like, this is the science that I'm that I'm mentioning. Um and then he also has a blog of author's notes. Um, but he seems to have stopped updating the science page after chapter five. Oh, for fuck's sake. And the author's notes blog begins at chapter 77. So I have the and So there's a 75-chapter gap, pretty much. Or 70-chapter gap. 72. Yeah.
JakeI mean, I I could maybe believe that because it was it was really only in the last century that we kind of started to treat kids as humans.
AntheaYeah, yeah. I don't have any reason to disbelieve what he's saying. I just can't find where he's getting it. Like, I have a strong suspicion that it's a Noam Chomsky thing, um, because that was great. Right. Like, this is a group of people who obviously would like Noam Chomsky, right? Like, nothing wrong with him, I think, as far as I know. I don't know. Anyway, yeah. I don't know. He's he's a linguist and the and a communist.
SPEAKER_06I guess, I guess for me, the thing that the place that raises alarm bells for me about saying that is making a sweeping statement about the entire intellectual and investigative uh history of the entire world. Yes. Is that like, okay, one thing that comes to mind for me is that Inuit people have like a specific way of disciplining kids that relies on not scolding them or punishing them, but on like telling stories and establishing like mutual understanding. Um, not saying that everybody does that or does it perfectly all the time in those communities, just that that's like a a frame of engaging what happens when this little human doesn't do something that I want them to do.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Um and it just seems uh to beggar belief that in the entire history of like there are things I think that you could say, oh, but they didn't use the scientific method to do X, Y, and Z. Um, which is potentially fair, but that doesn't mean that nobody had any working understanding of how much a four-year-old understand understood before. Or that they had no system. It just means that potentially the systems looked different than they do under this very specific framework that emerged during a very specific time and place in human history.
unknownYeah.
JakeYeah, well, I think that is what's being said. Like I think it is just, you know, the only thing that matters is rationalism, the only thing that matters is the scientific method. And since the scientific method wasn't literally applied and published in a journal, this humans did not do this until this point. Right.
AntheaYeah, there's yeah, like, and I there's a lot in in here where Harry is like, no wizard has ever done science. And I'm like, well, I mean, evidently true insofar as there's not like there's not a like strong scientific understanding of magic, it seems, within this world. Um, but that's but people still do uh experiments, right? Like he he asks like uh uh where am I uh yeah he asks like have you ever seen uh like like no one has ever done science in the wizarding world and and McGonagall is like, well, like muggle-born students try and get stuff to work at Hogwarts, but it doesn't, and people are inventing stuff all the time. Um and he's like, no, no, no, you know, technology is not the same as science. Like, like having technology is not the same as like doing science, which is fair enough.
SPEAKER_06Um Newt's commander is a scientist.
AntheaYeah, right. Like he's a biologist, right? Like, or a zoologist. He's a cryptozoologist, yeah. Like, yeah. And it's it's like alchemists were doing science. They had an an inaccurate understanding of the universe, but they were still in many ways doing science-y stuff.
JakeI mean, a lot of people just kind of have like a like almost worship of the scientific method.
AntheaRight, right.
JakeLike it's, you know, of course, a great thing, and like it is a good way to approach science. Yeah, it is not like it is not a like prescriptive thing. It's not like if it's not this, then it's not science, which I feel like is what's being said here. And like kind of to like, you know, Elisa's point, like this stuff, people were definitely thinking about it and looking into it before.
SPEAKER_06Right, right. You know, it's just that a lot of it, a lot of what people were doing was observation, observation and repetition to see if things work.
AntheaYeah, yeah. And they didn't, they may not have had a fully like like uh uh developed sense of like, oh, I've got to, you know, oh, here's how I falsify a hypo I a hypothesis. Like they may not have had that as like a thing, but they were like, I'm going to try this way to make lead into gold. Nope, didn't work. I'm gonna try this, you know, okay, let's change something and do it again. Like Newton was an alchemist. Like, yeah, no, absolutely.
SPEAKER_06Well, and I think the other thing, okay, a couple things here, too. Yeah, still. Um there, I think are one of the sometimes one of the issues with a hypothesis can be that there is a framing that's not correct. And that's a problem with like a bunch of experiments or a bunch of scientific experiments or studies, is like, ooh, it turns out you were actually asking the wrong question the whole time. Or because like Milton, you had, or Milgram, there we go. Like Milgram, um, you had this idea of what you wanted to prove, which is good in the sense of you had a cogent and you know, hypothesis, but there's a problem in that because it's what you wanted to believe, you found you you manipulated your evidence, not even necessarily consciously to fit the hypothesis. We know what that, you know, we know that that is a thing that everybody does.
SPEAKER_03Right.
SPEAKER_06Um and I think so there is something to be said for just like actually skip the hypothesis, just fuck around and what happens. Um, you know, and there are plenty of there are plenty of people who are scientists who like who uh enjoy doing that kind of thing of just like, I'm just gonna mess around with whatever this is for love of the game and see what happens when these two things interact.
JakeYeah, a lot of breakthroughs are fucking around and finding out, and then the scientific part is the peer review and the verification.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then the second thing is I think it's actually it's also very interesting to note. This is from a, this is more about more about trying to get at Yatkowski as a thinker and see, gosh, where did all these cults come from? Yes. Um, but like one thing that I note that's really interesting about this, um, about the way that he's approaching this, is like, okay, he takes a common frustration. A lot of people, myself included, you know, would read the Harry Potter books and be like, why is they literally like they barely talk about muggles. Why yeah. And um, and uh they never like and there's no these people don't know how to do calculus. Like they, you know, they don't which I don't either, but they tried to teach me, you know, and like they're you know, so like what they're really, really seeming to to be ignorant of a lot of muggle science and like what's happening there. Yes. Um, and also there have been like muggle people or people are born to muggle parents who have magical powers, and people are born to wizards who don't have magical powers. So it's like there's also people who culturally would have every reason, like like rationalist Harry, to be interested in this stuff. So what Tumblr has done with that type of thing is go, imagine an enlightenment era wizard who like comes to Hogwarts and is ready to, you know, enlighten the shit out of some stuff. And they will write fanfic about, okay, well, back in the time period where this would have reasonably happened, let's imagine like what would it be like to have different people doing these types of things that we think uh a more worlds-building conscious and one might say better author would have been able to think of and anticipate. Yeah. Right? So then they build out this world. Yudkowski has decided, uh, also known as Edub, also known as DJ L Yeezy, um, has decided, what if in the time of the Harry Potter books there was one incredibly special person who decides to do this thing. Yes. And like, so for whatever reason, like, that's where his brain goes.
AntheaI'm actually gonna go back to the text for this. Uh, that left two possibilities, really. Possibility one, magic was so incredibly opaque, convoluted, and impenetrable that even though wizards and witches had tried their best to understand, they'd made little or no progress and eventually given up, and Harry would do no better. Or Harry cracked his knuckles in determination, but they only made a quiet sort of clicking sound rather than echoing ominously off the walls of Diagonale. Possibility too, he'd be taking over the world. Eventually. Perhaps not right away. That sort of thing did sometimes take longer than two months. Muggle Science hadn't gone to the moon in the first week after Galileo, but Harry could still couldn't stop the huge smile that was stretching his cheeks so wide they were starting to hurt. Harry had always been frightened of ending up as one of those child prodigies that never amounted to anything and spent the rest of their lives boasting about how far ahead they'd been at age ten. Or making internet communities to But then most adult geniuses never amounted to anything either. There were probably a thousand people as intelligent as Einstein for every actual Einstein in history, because those other geniuses hadn't gotten their hands on the one thing you absolutely needed to achieve greatness. Social media. They'd never found an important problem. What? Hey, I bet I can think of maybe some other reasons why geniuses might not get their hands on something and on greatness. I wonder what other things could stop someone from achieving greatness. Economic deprivation, maybe?
SPEAKER_06I don't think so.
JakeThey weren't they weren't grab grabbing those bootstraps hard enough.
SPEAKER_06Nope. They were expected to pump out eleven babies and then uh sew all day. Could be?
JakeTheir lives were just so cushy that they couldn't identify a cool problem. Think about it.
AntheaYeah. They were probably the only thing.
SPEAKER_06Born into chattel slavery and their children were taken away from them after Christmas one year.
AntheaCould be.
JakeThey got flenched by a bypassing wizard.
SPEAKER_06Ooh, flenched by a wizard. Yeah. Well, those children didn't think of a really important problem like AI governance.
JakeOr anti-flencing charm.
SPEAKER_06Anti-flencing charm. Um, okay, I'm I will say uh on an emotional level, that viscerally disgusts me. Yeah, yeah. Really? It it does. Yeah. Um on an on a literary level, I think I would say, why taking over the world?
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_06Why does insight translate why does special insight so okay, let's already grant Harry has special insight uh given to him by the fact that he's so rational and he's discovered an important problem. Yes. Um, that nobody else has, I guess. Yes. Um, even though okay, fine. Um let's give him all that. Why does insight and specialness grant political authority?
AntheaWhat an injury- Yeah, that's an interesting question I hadn't thought about. I I guess I had always read it as like he I know that Yadkowski thinks that politics is the mind killer. Direct quote. Um, and I guess I had always thought of it somewhere in here, somewhere in this chapter is uh world domination is such an ugly phrase. I could prefer to think of it as world optimization.
SPEAKER_06Oh, that's one of the Easter eggs from a previous chapter.
AntheaYeah, yeah. Which is part of why I find these I am finding these epigraphs increasingly annoying and masturbatory.
SPEAKER_06Well, I think that's actually really interesting if you go the other way around. World optimization is world domination, which is my thesis, which is why, like, which is why I personally think that a lot of this rationalist stuff has no successful off-ramp for people who decide that they need to become world-dominating supervillains for the good of all of us and the people who have yet to be born. Yep.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah.
JakeAnd I this does sound like how I would think as an 11-year-old that suddenly got immense power.
SPEAKER_06Sure. Yes. Like, I don't I'm sorry I said that viscerally disgusted me.
JakeNo, that's fair. I was viscerally disgusting as an 11-year-old. But like, I'm just conflicted of like, do I give the author credit of like, oh yeah, no, this is a pretty accurate way to, you know, depict the situation happening to a child suddenly. Or the more likely, in my heart, I feel like being a author self-insert.
AntheaRight. Right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Well, yeah, all that stuff about as an 11-year-old, he was terrified that he would not go on to do anything except talk about what a brilliant 10-year-old he was. I'm like, hey, Ellie, are you okay, man?
AntheaYeah, there's there's a bit that I that I skipped over where uh Harry is introspecting about how um he had met a bun like he used to do math leads, essentially, he used to do calculus competitions, and how uh all of There's a bitch who knows calculus. Yes, yeah, and all of those kids uh were really good because they knew all of the arithmetic and they knew all of the formulae, but um they didn't think creatively and they didn't read science fiction, and and it does like it does say Harry was something of a sort. Loser, which I appreciate as a level of self-awareness about the character. Um, but yeah, I'm also like, this is this so this happened to you, huh?
SPEAKER_01Like, uh, yeah, yeah.
AntheaUh back to the text. You're mine now, Harry thought of the walls of Diagon Alley. I still like how I took that.
JakeLet me try that again. I don't think it's a good way to take that, but feel free to take another run again.
AntheaYeah, try another one.
SPEAKER_06Umultry.
JakeThat was the problem. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02That's what I was ew.
JakeI appreciate you, Allie.
SPEAKER_06Don't look too closely at those cracks in the cobblestone. You'll see things you can't unsee.
AntheaYou're mine now, Harry thought of the walls of Diagon Alley, and all the shops and items, and all the shopkeepers and customers. Uh no, I was right the first time.
SPEAKER_06No, it's still bad. Yeah.
AntheaAnd all the lands and people of Wizarding Britain, and all the wider wizarding world, and the entire greater universe, of which Muggle scientists understood so much less than they believed. I, Harry James Potter Evans Varys, do now claim this territory in the name of science.
JakeWhat do you say, kid? That sounded that sounded ominous.
AntheaLightning and thunder completely failed to flash and boom in the cloudless skies. What are you smiling about? inquired Professor McDonagal, warily and wearily. McGonagall, drown him.
JakeYeah.
SPEAKER_06Like, I'm sorry, I've had a lot of grace for this child.
JakeAlso, keep in mind what McGonagall looked over and saw is his, you know, arms extended, knuckles failing to crack, joker-wide smile as he is imagining world domination, staring at the walls of an alley.
SPEAKER_06Staring lastigiously at the walls of an alley. So I get McGodigle being like, hey, how's it how's it going? It's been kind of a stressful day. What you thinking about, buddy?
JakeGolden powder.
SPEAKER_06Oh my god, I'm sorry. I know we're gonna we're never we're gonna die here. But um He's being so super villain coded. Absolutely. In a way that I didn't anticipate, especially given the way that people talk about rationalism.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah.
JakeI mean, I assume a swerve is coming where I don't know. Let's I mean Yeah, yeah, please. Except you're again trying to devil's advocate here of like, oh no, it's supposed to be I don't know.
AntheaUh yeah, and that's my job, Jake.
JakeOkay, yes.
AntheaWhat are you smiling about? inquired Professor McGonagall warily and wearily. I'm wondering if there's a spell to make lightning flash in the background whenever I make an ominous resolution, explained Harry, who was carefully memorizing the exact words of his ominous resolution so that future history books would get it right. I have the distinct feeling that I ought to be doing something about this, sighed Professor McGonagall. Ignore it, it'll go away. Ooh, shiny! Harry put his thoughts of world conquest temporarily on hold and skipped over to a shop with an open display, and Professor McGonagall followed.
JakeBad writing.
AntheaWell, okay, so this is not this is not really relevant to anything, but it's gonna send us on uh it's come come with me on this garden path. Um I recently reread Guards Guards, Terry Pratchett, um, and the the Pratchettian influence is really obvious to me in this chapter. Okay. Uh in a little bit we're gonna meet Yadkowski's version of Rince With. Have you read Pratchett? I forget, Jake. I know you have, Alisa.
JakeI've read like one Rimworld book. Or not Rimworld. Wait, what's this? This world, yeah.
AntheaYeah, yeah. Rimworld is something different. Nope.
JakeYeah, two video game pills.
AntheaYep. And then there's Ring World. Everybody's got a world.
JakeYeah, I was like, don't say Ring World, it's not Ring World.
AntheaYeah, that's Larry Niving.
JakeWent the other way with it. Yeah. So I'm familiar with the tone, but not a lot of the content.
AntheaOkay, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um so in a little bit we're gonna meet uh this world's version of Rinzwin's luggage. Um, so that's part of it. But like more to the point, uh Yadkowski is using a kind of juxtaposition that I associate really strongly with Pratchett, um, which is like a paragraph with like heightened language, like bombast or jargon or lyricism, and then a punchline of like lightning and thunder failed to crash, right?
JakeLike the ooh shiny line specifically. That one is bad. I'm not gonna defend that. I fucking hate that.
AntheaYeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_06I think we must consider Whedon while we consider Pratchett.
AntheaThat is a great, a great point. Yes, yes. Um but let's focus on Pratchett for a minute. Uh I don't like making assertions about Yadkowski's inner state, even one as obvious as Yadkowski is influenced by Pratchett without evidence. So to test my hypothesis, I went to Less Wrong and I searched for posts that mentioned Pratchett or Discworld. Um in retrospect, uh I could have gone to his OKCupid profile from 2012.
SPEAKER_03Oh my god.
AntheaUh, which where he says that uh uh he lists everything Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams ever wrote in his favorite books, alongside um uh no Heinlein or Asimov, which shocked me, um, but yes, Jacqueline Carey. This guy loves Kushell's Dart.
SPEAKER_06So fuck him, because that's my fate.
JakeI was gonna say, was he just curating this list for the ladies?
AntheaUh well, that and then he was like, maybe not Highland.
JakeYeah, exactly. Yes. No, like seriously.
AntheaNo, that's a great point.
SPEAKER_06That's a great point.
AntheaThat's a great point.
JakeEspecially because, you know, apparently caught a straight with Elisa here.
AntheaYeah, right, yes. So this also led me to some posts from the wider, less wrong community about Terry Pratchett, and this is where I went down our uh this is where I went down our suicide and dementia rabbit hole. Okay.
JakeSo Okay, Cupid Often leads there, yes.
AntheaUm so Terry Pratchett died in 2015 at the age of 66 from complications of Alzheimer's disease.
SPEAKER_06Gosh, I didn't realize he was only 66.
AntheaHe was only 66, yeah. Oh my gosh. Uh he had been diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's about seven years earlier, specifically a rare form called posterior cortical atrophy. Um so the back part of his brain was atrophying and it disrupted his vision more than his memory. Um, and that's part of why he was able to continue writing and publishing more or less to the end of his life, because he was still fairly cogent, but he couldn't read or write because his vision was fucked up. Um Sarteri did not go gently into the night. In the 2009 BBC documentary he made about living with Alzheimer's, he said, I was enraged. I wanted to make Alzheimer's sorry that it had caught me, which is a wonderfully granny weatherwax way of saying things. It really is. Um in the same year, he said in an article that he would prefer to die a medically assisted death. Quote, I am enjoying my life to the full and hope to continue for quite some time, he told the Mail on Sunday. But I also intend, before the end game looms, to die sitting in a chair in my own garden with a glass of brandy in my hand and Thomas Talus on the iPod. The latter because Thomas's music could lift even an atheist a little bit closer to heaven, and perhaps a second brandy if there is time. Oh, and since this is England, I had better add, if wet in the library. End quote. In the end, he died at home of natural causes with his family and Kat in attendance. Um at least that's how it was reported by his publisher, and if it was different, that is none of my goddamn business.
SPEAKER_06So true.
AntheaUh he seems to have been able to plan for his end thoroughly, including requesting that his unfinished work at the time of his death be destroyed by a steamroller. Which his daughter and friend and assistant did do a few years later. I think it's entirely reasonable to believe that every aspect of his passing, from his publisher's report on his death to the final tweets on his Twitter account, had his own hand in it. Um I tend to take after my mother and deal with the specter of my mortality by ignoring it.
SPEAKER_02Sure.
AntheaBut uh I hope that when the time comes, I can approach it with the grace and thoughtfulness that I see in Sir Terry. Yeah. And that is why I think I found it profoundly unsettling to find less wrong users on the day of Pratchett's death grieving that he didn't choose Cryonics. So the idea that you should sign up to get yourself cryogenically frozen is I I can't tell if it's like really a widely held opinion within rationalism. Like reasonable people are disagreeing reasonably about it.
SPEAKER_06Um are reasonable people disagreeing?
AntheaWell, um rationalist people are disagreeing reasonably about it.
SPEAKER_06There we go.
AntheaUm uh I I think maybe some of them are are, you know, now that it's now that we're more in a machine learning like like time, I think people may be starting to move more towards like uploading your consciousness.
JakeI think Cryonyx has better odds right now. Which is saying a lot.
AntheaI bet Cryonics is way cheaper. Uh yeah, well, it's pretty expensive. I mean, it I uh I just watched the Atrocity Guide uh video on on the Immortalists, which I highly recommend, and I'll link in the show notes if you're interested in like the history of Cryonyx. Um But like in a in general, I think people's end-of-life plans are their own business. Uh if you want to door into summer yourself, cool. Go for it. Um don't speaking of Heinland, don't groom your corrupt business partner's 11-year-old stepdaughter to marry you on your way to the freezer.
SPEAKER_06Oh my gosh.
AntheaI know!
SPEAKER_06I re I read this book when I was so young, and I don't remember any of this. That didn't happen in the moon as a harsh mistress.
AntheaUm, Yatkowski disagrees with me stridently about cryonics. I don't know how he feels about the door in the summer. In a 2010 post called Normal Cryonics, he describes going to a conference of young and old cryonicists. An important piece of context for this post is that in 2004, when Eliezer would have been about 25, his younger brother Yehuda died at the age of 19 in an incident ruled a suicide. Yeah. Uh Eliezer described that loss as the first time I ever lost someone close enough for it to hurt. Um and even in 2004, he was a proponent of cryonics. And come to 2010, he says this about how he thinks signing up for cryonics should be the default norm, not the exception. Those young cryonicists weren't heroes. Most of the older cryonicists were heroes, and of course, there were a couple of other heroes among us young folk, like a former employee of Methuselah who'd left to try to put together a startup slash nonprofit around a bright idea he'd had for curing cancer. Note, even I think this is an acceptable excuse. But most of the younger cryonicists weren't there to fight a desperate battle against death. They were people who'd signed up for cryonics because it was the obvious thing to do. And it tears my heart out because I am a hero, and this was like seeing a ray of sunlight from a normal world, some alternate Everett branch of humanity, where things really were normal instead of crazy all the goddamn time. A world that was everything this world could be and isn't. Then there were the children, some of whom had been signed up for cryonics since the day they were born. It tears my heart out. I'm having trouble remembering to breathe as I write this. My own little brother isn't breathing and never will again. You know what? I'm going to come out and say it. I've been unsure about saying it, but after attending this event and talking to the perfectly ordinary parents who sign their kids up for cryonics like the goddamn sane people do, I'm going to come out and say it. If you don't sign up your kids for cryonics, then you are a lousy parent. End quote. So I guess it's no surprise that five years later, in the libertarian-leaning community he cultivated, I found people whose grief over losing Sir Terry led them to say, if only he'd done something that is the complete practical opposite of everything he expressed wanting to do. Like, there is a man who accepted the idea that he would walk out of life arm in arm with death and would not accept his work being continued without him, and what he should have done is spent his money on avoiding death altogether so he could work in perpetuity. Like, it makes me uncomfortable.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_06Brought the mood down. I was gonna give you first crack at it, Jake.
JakeIt's just like it's so many conceits that have to line up. Like, first it's, you know, first it's like immortality can exist, big conceit. Yeah. Second, immortality is good if it does exist, another big conceit. Yeah. Third, everyone should want to be immortal if it can exist and is good. Yep. Fourth, Cryonics is a root to that, even though it is explicitly a stopgap.
SPEAKER_01Yep.
JakeAnd fifth, like, everyone should do it because some people think it's good.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, right.
JakeLike so so many off-ramps along all those conceits.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah. Yeah, a couple of things that I I think. One thing that's interesting philosophically is that again, this is maybe gently, but this type of idea, um, like you're saying, like, oh, if only he had done something that was the polar opposite of anything he wanted to do. Yeah. Right. Um, uh, as far as we are aware. Sure. Um, based on public statements. Yeah. Um that and the idea of it should, I mean, saying it should be the default doesn't technically mean that people are not allowed to forego cryonics in this world of Yudkowski. Right.
AntheaHe thinks it should be you should have to opt out.
SPEAKER_06Yes. But, and the idea that like if someone that that the idea that if parents are bad parents if they don't sign people up for it, and the idea that like this is just a normal and sane thing that fundamentally everyone should want, to me feels like it's already eroding the concept of consent, which is another problem with optimization. I mean, optimization as a as a value is to say that like okay, you the idea that the idea that, and this is I think another sort of problem with utilitarianism that you can get into is that there's goods and then there's bads. And if you're Terry Pratchett, people have decided that you're good is you producing more work. Um and like so living as long as you possibly can.
AntheaI mean, I assume that they want him to keep writing if he's sure, and clearly he wanted to live as long as he possibly could and wanted to keep writing as long as he possibly could. Yes. But he also had a you know sense of that will become impossible at some point, and I want to maintain control over it when it becomes impossible.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, so it it I I think that I think that rather than so because of that, it puts some it the idea of okay, well, there's a good living is a good. This is the this is an assumption, like Jake was saying, this is something that it's a big assumption. Um, or more life is good. Like there's there's an amount that you get, and having more of that amount would always be better than not having more of that amount. Um then when we get to that point, now we're at a place where this stops, where death, there's less, it stops being a personal decision and starts to be something that society can have an interest in and potentially the state can also have an interest in. Um which I think is super, I think that's just a I think that is not a very good uh ideological road to go down.
JakeLike Yeah, the the natural endpoint is throw him in an Omalas basement so he writes books forever to make the world better.
SPEAKER_06Kinda, yeah. This is why people have rights and not goods. Is because is because like the foundation, I mean, we are in a country, uh the United States, where we've established that people have rights and we still don't give them to them. Right. Yeah, this is a kind of hand wavy that we've established that we wrote it down, but like we wrote it down, but we don't like really do it. Um certainly not pursuit of happiness. Um but I so but so I think that I think that so much more so having for me, this is why utilitarian doesn't jive utilitarianism doesn't jive with me specifically, is like I can't seed any ground that doesn't grant people the full dignity of their humanity, and I think talking about goods over rights is something that uh that already removes the focus from the sort of autonomy of a person. Yeah. So that I mean, and that's like that's not something that I can necessarily defend um because it's an opinion. Sure. Um it and if utilitarianism jibes with you, there's totally ways to make it ethical. I do believe that.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Um, but I I think that I think that that this is one of the many yikes places that you run into when you start thinking about things in this way. Yeah, other thing that I will say that is so mean, this is so mean to Yevkowski. I'm really sorry. I don't if I lost one of my siblings, I would lose my mind. Like I would, it would be awful. I so I can't imagine how terrible it must have been to uh lose his brother. I'm saying this as someone who has attempted suicide and been in the hospital for it, and like I'm not saying this to be like a dick. Cryogenics would not save his brother from suicide.
AntheaNo. No. Sorry to anyone who just heard a Discord notification.
SPEAKER_06I think that was exactly that was a great time.
JakeYeah, so far we've had dog drinking water and background of suicide mention and discord notice and background of suicide mention. So the universe has some comedic timing there.
AntheaWake up, stay alive! Someone sent you a message. No, you are you are correct. Yeah, like uh, yeah, cryogenics cry yeah, would not would not fix that.
JakeYeah, I mean, you you freeze someone's head until they find the cure to suicidal ideation. Like, is that the idea?
AntheaYeah, right, maybe. Yeah. Two actually, okay, so two points uh to to slide us back into back into the chapter. Like butter, I hope. Um point one off of like uh yeah, what you're gonna freeze their head until they can until they come up with a cure for depression. Like um one thing I find very interesting about cryonics.
SPEAKER_06Oh cryonics, there we go.
AntheaYour cryogenics is also fine, I think. Um uh is comparing it to the way people talk about um artificial general intelligence, which is people talk about cryonics as, well, yeah, freezing their body and their brain does damage the cells, but by the time they figure out how to wake them up, they will have figured out how to fix that. Which feels like the same argument as how will AI be profitable? Well, we'll make an AGI and then that will figure out how to be the AGI will be able to figure out how to be profitable. Yeah, I mean it's like it's And for the record, if you think Anthe is making that up, that is Sam Altman.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, I have said it multiple times.
JakeYeah, but like using that same logic, it's like, well, you don't even need to bother with cryonics because eventually science will get so advanced that it will just pull someone back from the past to a channel. I mean, literally, yeah.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, pull my skeleton out of the ground and like use bone dust to make a new me. Yeah.
JakeYeah. But it'll still have all the memories because science is so advanced.
SPEAKER_06Right.
JakeAnd it'll still be all your consciousness because science has advanced so much.
SPEAKER_06This is another one of my problems with the science fictionism of rationalism, is where I'm like, is you know, at one point reading, I told you reading 80,000 hours, which ooh, our bonus episode. I read the 80,000 hours career guidebook that was published as it exists on its website in 2026. Um and at a certain point when they were talking about AI, I was like, imagine X, Y, Z. If you can imagine X, it makes sense to say that Y and then Z. It was like, well, if we're just imagining stuff, then I don't know imagine that everybody has enough houses to live in.
JakeYeah, imagine you have three ponies.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah. Like five, but then where does that get used? Here I am, home alone with no pony. Home alone-y, no pony.
JakeI think that's a subtitle for the fifth home alone movie.
AntheaOh, yeah, yeah. So I was saying about thing too, um, between like if only they had chosen Cryonyx and uh and the very real, like, eventually we'll just be able to resurrect everybody in the glorious utopia, in the glorious digital utopia. Like, it's hard for me not to s hear um evangelical Christians saying, uh, if only they had died saved, and Mormons baptizing your ancestors.
SPEAKER_06Oh, Jesus.
AntheaRight.
SPEAKER_06Yep.
AntheaAnyway. I forgot that Mormons do that.
SPEAKER_06Oh my god, if I find out those Mormons got their mix on my ancestors, I tell you what.
JakeIt's like the normalest thing Mormons do.
AntheaSo I'm just gonna put that out there. Um now I'm furious. None of this has anything to do with where we are in the chapter exactly, but I want you to keep in mind this knowledge of Yidkowski's experience of loss and how he thinks he should deal with it as we continue through the chapter. I think it is useful context. Um so, uh Harry and McGonagall's next stop is a shop selling healing kits. Uh Harry wants to buy a deluxe version that costs five galleons, and McGonagal is extremely suspicious of this. Harry objects that he wants it just in case. Just in case of what? Harry's eyes widened. You think I'm planning to do something dangerous, and that's why I want a medical kit? A look of grim suspicion and ironic disbelief was the answer. Great, Scott! said Harry. This was an expression he'd learned from the mad scientist Doc Brown in Back to the Future. Oh my god.
JakeYeah, I feel like there's a lot of folks in the rationalist community that weren't going to get that reference if it wasn't called out.
AntheaWere you also thinking that when I bought the feather falling potion, the ghillie weed, and the bottle of food and water pills? Fuck you for the feather falling potion. Yes. Harry shook his head in amazement. Just what sort of plan do you think I have going here? I don't know, Professor McGonagall said darkly, but it ends either in you delivering a ton of silver to Gringots or in world domination. World domination is such an ugly phrase. I prefer to call it world optimization. This hilarious joke failed to reassure the witch giving him the look of doom. Ow, Harry said, as he realized that she was serious.
unknownYou really think that?
AntheaYou really think I'm planning to do something dangerous? Yes. Like that's the only reason anyone would ever buy a first aid kit? Don't take this the wrong way, Professor McGonagal, but what sort of crazy children are you used to dealing with? Gryffindors, spat Professor McGonagall. The word carrying a freight of bitterness and despair that fell like an eternal curse on all youthful enthusiasm and high spirits.
JakeWasn't she Gryffindor? She's the head of Gryffindor House.
SPEAKER_06I don't remember the book super well, but No, and I know that she's like very stern, but like legitimately, I am sure the McGonagall got up to some insane shape with you. Like, as my as my father would say when I got up to shenanigans, please, I wrote the book.
JakeYou know, like me and your super hot mom.
SPEAKER_06Uh for everyone listening, my mother is a very beautiful woman. She is.
JakeWe will not get further contact. I'm out of your boat.
SPEAKER_06Hot. Oh, hot, a hot woman. Yeah. Okay, well, now I can never let my parents listen to this podcast.
JakeUm specifically this episode.
SPEAKER_06Just this episode. Hey guys, listen to everything except skip episode five. No big no reason. No reason. No reason. Um okay, wait, the other thing I was gonna say. Also, like on a writing level, I feel like just the phrase world domination and taking over the world has come up like so many times. So many times. And it's not really justified. Mm-hmm. And it I and I don't and I don't really like it. Also, he is gaslighting the shit out of her by now.
JakeSince not 15 minutes ago, he was like, I claim this alleyway in the name of And is this not the not the first time he's said one of his jokes is very funny.
SPEAKER_06Oh yeah. I'm sure that that's like a thing of like Harry's trying to be I I do read that as intentional on Yudkowski's part that it's like Harry's trying to be cute and McDonagh's not having it. McDonald's not having it yet. Because even though she's not as smart as him, she's smarter than that dumb bitch Haggard, and that's why she gets to be in this role in the story. Correct. Um, I think uh though, also like the obvious answer, apart from Gryffindor's, uh, like I babysit Gryffindorse, I exclusively care for the bravest, aka dumbest children uh in Hogwarts. Um there's obvious the obvious answer to the question, like, oh, you think that's the only reason someone would ever want medical supplies? And so she's like, no, but I've known you for like two whole days. Yes. And uh I feel pretty confident in my assessment since I am a uh a tenured educator.
AntheaYes, yeah, yeah, yeah, right? Yes. Um that's gonna yes. Her her uh extensive experience as a tenured educator will be called into question more times in this in this uh chapter um by Harry for no goddamn reason. He's so shitty in this. Well, because he's 11, but I mean, sure, yeah.
SPEAKER_06No book, I'm I am I'm still I'm I'm being fair. I'm being fair to Harry as the child in my imagination. Sure, right? Yes, yeah, yeah. And as the child in my imagination who was ill-served first by J.K. Rowling and now by Judkowski. The only people who are doing right by Harry as far as I'm concerned are the Draco Harry shippers. Yeah. Out there doing God's work. Yeah. Um but uh I yeah, I I think there's some there's some types of little shittery, or like not respecting the fact that she's a teacher who like has seen him before. Yeah. Um uh that I do give grace to. Sure. The shit about like I'm taking over the world and like I'm making all and I'm gonna plan to do a bunch of arbitrage because these dumb fucks don't know like where to even sell their silver. Yeah. Like that part I I'm like, well, fuck off, Yakowski. Like, what what child is actually spending that much time thinking about fucking money?
AntheaYeah, right? Yeah, yeah. Uh Harry objects, I am not going to be in Gryffindor. I am going to be in Ravenclaw. And if you really think that I'm planning to do something dangerous, then honestly, you don't understand me at all. I don't like danger. It is scary. I am being prudent. I am being cautious. I am preparing for unforeseen contingencies. Like my parents used to sing to me. Be prepared, that's the Boy Scouts marching song, be prepared, as through life you march along. Don't be nervous, don't be flustered, don't be scared, be prepared. Harry's parents had in fact only ever sung him those particular lines of that Tom Lair song, and Harry was blissfully unaware of the rest.
JakeAre are the Boy Scouts a thing in England?
AntheaUh, scouts are. Um, I yeah, yeah. But they're not the Boy Scout, like, because like there's there's there's Girl Scouts and there's Boy Scouts.
SPEAKER_06I wish that they had sung him a lullaby about being prepared for unforeseen contingencies. I would have actually been somewhat better than that.
AntheaThis was the point in my first read that I decided that I was, though not uniquely, extremely qualified to take on Yudkowski because I was also the kind of tedious child who knew most of Tom Larry's songs by heart.
SPEAKER_06My god, wait, can I actually I would like to pause and just say, be prepared for a foreseen contingency.
AntheaBe prepared, conduct yourself with stringency. Nice, all right. Nice. Yeah, they could have written, they could have written their own version. It would have been easy. Yeah, yeah. Uh Be Prepared is a great song. Um it is not a it is not childhood appropriate.
JakeYeah, it's one of my favorite like Disney songs for sure.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like when this is Harry. Harry's teeth and their missions are bared because he's gonna take over the goddamn world.
JakePretty appropriate for what Harry's got going on here.
AntheaYes, yes. Uh okay. Uh Professor McGonagall's stance had so slightly softened, though mostly when Harry had said that he was heading for Ravenclaw. What sort of contingency do you imagine this kit might prepare you for, young man? One of my classmates gets bitten by a horrible monster, and as I scrabble frantically in my moakskin pouch for something that could help her, she looks at me sadly and with her last breath says, Why weren't you prepared?
JakeAlso, I love you, you're so strong.
AntheaAnd then she dies, and I know as her eyes closed that she won't ever forgive me. Harry heard the sales girl gasp, and he looked up to see her staring at him with her lips pressed tight. Then the young woman whirled and fled into the deeper recesses of the shop. What? Professor McGonagall reached down and took Harry's hand in hers, gently but firmly, and pulled Harry out of the main street of Diagon Alley, leading him into an alleyway between two shops, which was paved in dirty bricks and dead-ended in a wall of solid black dirt.
SPEAKER_06Why are we in the magical world and the only location that McGonagall can pull him into is more alleys?
JakeYeah, we we have gone into a sub-alley, which I assume will also be conquered shortly.
SPEAKER_06This is the third time, at least!
AntheaThis is just the third time that you're telling us about.
unknownYeah.
AntheaThe tall witch pointed her wand at the main street and spoke. Quietus, she said, and a screen of silence descended around them, blocking out all the street noises.
JakeHarry said, What?
AntheaThat's a good joke.
JakeThank you.
AntheaWhat did I do wrong? Professor McGonagall turned to regard Harry. She didn't have a full adult wrongdoing face, but her expression was flat, controlled. You must remember, Mr. Potter, she said, that there was a war in this country not ten years ago. Everyone has lost someone, and to speak of friends dying in your arms is not done lightly. I I didn't mean to. The inference dropped like a falling stone into Harry's exceptionally vivid imagination. He'd talked about someone breathing their last breath, and then the sales girl had run away, and the war had ended ten years ago, so that girl would have been at most eight or nine years old when when I'm sorry, I didn't mean to. Harry choked up and turned away to run from the older witch's gaze, but there was a wall of dirt blocking his way, and he didn't have his wand yet. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Okay. I don't hate this beat, but I find it pretty strange compared to previous chapters where he was confronted with an old woman telling him that her grandson died in the war. Uh, and he was fine with that. Like, despite being like, he did not, he was not upset by that. Yeah, it didn't really mean anything to it. It didn't mean anything to me. It didn't seem to land, really. Uh he cried when McGonagall told him about how his biological parents died. Um he was told about children getting flayed by Death Eaters. Uh in chapter five, he met an old man who was crying about meeting him uh and trolled him by being like, I don't know, am I Harry Potter? Maybe it's a conspiracy. And McGonagal was like, hey, don't fucking do that. He has had all day to get the idea that people are fucked up about there having been a war, and this is the first time that he has a really big reaction. And I can justify this development in the idea that, like, Harry is 11, he's not a perfectly rational being. Despite his efforts, he's been through a lot. Maybe he has exhausted his emotional reserves. B but none of that is in the text.
SPEAKER_06I have an idea.
AntheaSure.
SPEAKER_06I think that this is the only time that Harry sees that he has done something wrong.
AntheaI think that is I think that's it.
SPEAKER_06So it's not empathy, it's ego.
AntheaYeah. Like he's like, oh, I did that.
SPEAKER_06I fucked up.
AntheaYeah.
JakeYeah, it's it's the only time it's like it is the direct A-to-b consequence of actions. Everything else is at was at least slightly deferred.
SPEAKER_06Yeah. And it's weird too, because like I assumed that that girl gasped and and walked away because she somehow recognized him as Harry Potter, as multiple people have done through this disguise charm.
SPEAKER_01Right, right, right.
JakeLike it's like if I saw George Clooney, I would gasp and run away.
SPEAKER_05Well, you've got to go tell everybody.
unknownSure.
JakeOh, that's fair. Right.
SPEAKER_05Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh, you guys. Harry Potter's in this alley.
SPEAKER_06Um George Clooney's in this alley. Yes, yeah.
JakeThere's an old woman yelling at it, but I can't hear anything.
SPEAKER_06Um, you know, just like you do. Um, so so I as much as like I'm like, I I can see the connective tissue here. I can. It just feels like a little bit of a stretch. Yeah. Um, and that's the only thing I can think that connects those two points.
AntheaIt's sloppy. I don't, I don't like I want I I have to do so much work to give it a reading that is not just Harry feels bad because he has to he's finally confronted with the idea that he did something wrong.
JakeLike I mean, and like and I mean this like as a generous read, it sounds like the first pass of an inexperienced fiction writer.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah.
JakeAnd like that's not a bad thing. It's like, you know, if you haven't written a lot and if you don't revise it a lot, sometimes things are gonna be inconsistent.
SPEAKER_06Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Or you're going to be consistent in ways that you don't realize are important to you.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_06Like, guarantee that Yadkowski doesn't think that, like, would probably say, I don't know, but I would I I'm gonna guess based on my exposure to rationalism so far. Yes. Yodkowski would say, Oh no, it's not about the individual at all. It's about doing the most good, however that happens. And yet here we are.
AntheaIndeed. Yes. Uh so Harry, Harry does um start to ask McGonagall if anything like having a friend die in her arms has ever happened to her, and he does go, oh no, shit, I'm not gonna ask that. Um To answer your question, Mr. Potter, no, nothing like that has ever happened to me. Certainly I've watched a friend breathe their last once or seven times, but not one of them ever cursed me as they died, and I never thought that they wouldn't forgive me. Why would you say such a thing, Mr. Potter? Why would you even think it? I I I Perry swallowed. It's just that I always try to imagine the worst thing that could happen. And maybe he'd also been joking around a little, but he would rather have bitten off his own tongue than say that now. What? said Professor McDonaghal. Why? So I can stop it from happening. Mr. Potter. The older witch's voice trailed off. Then she sighed and knelt down beside him. Mr. Potter, she said gently now, it's not your responsibility to take care of the students at Hogwarts. It's mine. I won't let anything bad happen to you or anyone else. Hogwarts is the safest place for magical children in all the wizarding world, and Madame Pomfrey has a full healer's office. You won't need a healer's kid at all, let alone a five-galleon one. But I do, Harry burst out. Nowhere is perfectly safe. And what if my parents have a heart attack or get in an accident when I go home for Christmas? Madame Pomfrey won't be there. I'll need a healer's kid of my own. What in Merlin's name? Professor McGonagall said. She stood up and looked down at Harry with an expression torn between let me try that again. She stood up and looked down at Harry with an expression torn between annoyance and concern. There's no need to think about such terrible things, Mr. Potter. Harry's expression twisted up into bitterness hearing that. Yes, there is! If you don't think, you don't just get hurt yourself, you end up hurting other people. Professor McGonagall opened her mouth, then closed it. The witch rubbed the bridge of her nose looking thoughtful. Mr. Potter, if I were to offer to listen to you for a while, is there anything you'd like to talk to me about?
JakeDanger, danger.
AntheaAbout what? About why you're convinced you must always be on your guard against terrible things happening to you. So here Harry explains the planning fallacy. Um he uses way more words than are necessary to explain it.
JakeThat's the danger.
AntheaUm our boy. I am not going to read you all of them because they're boring. Um the planning fallacy is the cognitive bias where we tend to underestimate how much time or money things will take us to complete. Time and money being the same thing in business context, right? Um we tend to imagine the best case scenario where everything for a task goes perfectly right, even if we know that when we have done this task previously, things did not all go perfectly right. That's just, it's it's a thing that humans do. I feel like everyone here has experienced this at some point.
SPEAKER_06I feel personally called out by every process sign I've ever made. Right.
AntheaIt's the I know how big words should be and how big letters are.
JakeI've literally never written my name with proper kerning on a name tag. It's always in some corner spaced outside.
AntheaYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, and I think we've all done enough like planning with friends to, or you know, like planning uh uh big projects and at work or with friends or whatever to be like, it always takes twice as long as you think it's gonna take.
JakeYeah, yeah, no, exactly. I always say like figure out the worst possible longest timeline it will take and then literally double it.
AntheaYeah.
JakeYeah.
AntheaYeah. And that's that is what is recommended, right? It's called taking the outside view, and it's basically or there's like one, you can think about like, oh, if you've done this task before, uh, you can say, rather than thinking, how long should it take, say, how long did it take? So you can do that. And two, you uh can just, you know, overestimate. Because it's better to overestimate than underestimate. What does that have to do with catastrophizing? What a great question! Fucking nothing. Okay, great.
JakeIt was it was Yudkowski's you know fallacy of the day he was thinking about.
AntheaYeah, it's it's not this is a terrible example of the planning fallacy. This is not how you deal with that.
JakeClassic e-dup.
AntheaPlanning fallacy is about your classic e-dup to predict the time it takes to do a task. Harry is using it to justify a strategy of pessimism.
SPEAKER_06Like uh Harry is using it to justify Bush's terrorism strategy.
AntheaRight, right. No, it's it's it's wild. Uh it's it's nonsense. It's nonsense. Um so he uh right, he's using it to justify let me go back to the text. Um you're doing something new and you can't do that, you just have to be really, really, really pessimistic. Like so pessimistic that reality actually comes out better than you expected around as often and as much as it comes out worse. It's actually really hard to be so pessimistic that you stand a decent chance of undershooting real life. Like, I make this big effort to be gloomy and I imagine one of my classmates getting bitten. But what actually happens is that the surviving death eaters attacked the whole school to get at me.
JakeWait, were the death eaters biting people?
AntheaThat's how they fleensed people.
JakeOkay, wow.
AntheaYeah, messy, but you know, effective. Stop, said Professor McGonagall. Oh, sorry, let me take that again. Uh the surviving death eaters attacked the whole school to get at me, but on a happier note, stop, said Professor McGonagall. Harry stopped. He had just been about to point out that at least they knew the Dark Lord wouldn't attack since he was dead. I think I might not have made myself clear, the witch said, her precise Scottish voice sounding even more careful. Did anything happen to you personally that frightened you, Mr. Potter? What happened to me personally is only anecdotal evidence, Harry explained. It doesn't carry the same weight as a replicated peer-reviewed journal article about a controlled study with random assignment, many subjects, large effect sizes, and strong statistical significance.
SPEAKER_06I'm gonna need him to shut the fuck up because you because he is talking about the planning fallacy and using it to justify catastrophic thinking. Yes. So that doesn't that does not logic out at all. No. So don't come talking to me about like, oh, I'm just an an I'm just a little anecdote. You're also super bad at reasoning.
unknownYes.
JakeSo why does he keep explaining like a fifth grade reasoning of the scientific method? Like, you don't have to keep reminding literally anyone, A, or specifically your audience, B, what peer review is.
AntheaI get like it is, it's pretty condescending to Professor McGonagall, too, that he has to that he feels that he needs to keep reminding her.
JakeWell, all wizards are dumb fucking idiots. They don't know that science exists, so obviously you gotta.
AntheaRight, yeah. Professor McGonagal pinched the bridge of her nose, inhaled and exhaled. Big same! I would still like to hear about it, she said. Mmm, Harry said. He took a deep breath. There'd been some muggings in our neighborhood, and my mother asked me to return a pan she'd borrowed to a neighbor two streets away, and I said I didn't want to because I might get mugged, and she said, Harry, don't say things like that. Like thinking about it would make it happen, so if I didn't talk about it, I would be safe. I tried to explain why I wasn't reassured, and she made me carry over the pan anyway. I was too young to know how statistically unlikely it was for a mugger to target me, but I was old enough to know that not thinking about something doesn't stop it from happening, so I was really scared. Nothing else, Professor McGonagall said after a pause, when it became clear Harry was done.
SPEAKER_06I mean, his biological parents died when he was a baby.
AntheaHis biological parents died when he was one. Minerva.
JakeWell, that is kind of some wild parenting. It's like, I'm I'm scared that I'm gonna get mugged. It's like, well, I guess immersion therapy, go walk outside.
AntheaYeah, look, I'm not about to defend Petunia's parenting. No. This was like like Petunia sucks across all timelines. Yeah, he describes her laughing at him when he's like, I'm freaked out, and she's like, oh, and she laughs it off. Um, and he says, Oh, hey. Sorry. Like, okay, let me get back into this. Um, uh Jake, what's about to happen to us?
JakeUh I don't know, I can't even speculate.
AntheaShe wouldn't listen. I tried to tell her. I begged her not to send me out, and she laughed it off. Everything I said, she treated like some sort of big joke. Harry forced the black rage back down again. That's when I realized that everyone who was supposed to protect me was actually crazy, and that they wouldn't listen to me no matter how much I begged them, and that I couldn't ever rely on them to get anything right. Sometimes good intentions weren't enough. Sometimes you had to be sane.
JakeYou're so close to having a good point there. Like that that's a legitimately traumatizing thing. That's fair. Sure! But then you kind of made a leap there, perhaps an irrational thing to say. Indeed.
SPEAKER_06I would call it little tea trauma, but it has uh Yeah, okay, okay, okay. So what's very interesting about this is the use of the word sane. Because Yes. That's you're glad you noticed that. Oh, thanks. I'm a I'm a writer, uh, allegedly. Um I it's because that's in the cryonics thing as well, that there is a perspective that's being call referred to as sane. But sanity itself is kind of functioning as a thought terminating cliche because he's not like what he's saying is he's acknowledging in this particular mugging case that it was statistically very unlikely. Nevertheless, he had fears. And Uh and his mom didn't validate his fears. Yes. On an individual level, not having your fears validated is that's it's scary, it's uncomfortable, it's not good for you. Yeah. You know, that that's totally true psychologically, in terms of actually protecting him. Instead of him saying, My mother didn't validate my fears because she was aware of how unlikely muggings actually were on an individual level. That's actually pretty sane, right? That's the reason that she didn't validate him. Right.
AntheaIs because she was like, She was like, This is an eight-year-old boy with a pan.
SPEAKER_06It they're not gonna they're not gonna mug you for your cast iron pan. It's a four-block round trip.
JakeIt's I mean, if it's well-seasoned cast iron, I might take a run of a kid.
SPEAKER_06It's kinda it depends on the mugger. This kid.
JakeYeah. Yeah, for sure. If he's holding nothing, I might take a run of this kid.
SPEAKER_06Uh yeah, very fair. Fair enough. Um I'm mugging for nothing. Um just called assault. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so uh so God, and we haven't even gotten to the child abuse part. Oh boy. So he you could read the same set of circumstances and say, like, that was really detrimental to me. I felt like I wasn't being taken seriously. And that's when I learned that, like, okay, something can be objectively true, but if you don't convince people to feel it, or you don't validate their feelings so that they can move forward and accept the truth, then you're not gonna get anywhere. And people will feel bad, they'll be hurt feelings. Instead, he classifies his mother as insane for not validating and recognizing and taking seriously fears that he himself acknowledges were not grounded in reality. So then what does the word sane mean? It just means agreeing with Eliezer.
JakeThat is exactly what I was going to say. That is a pretty common internet feeling in general, I think, is that, you know, what is like common sense is and sanity is whatever you feel like is true. And someone is insane if they do something that you feel like is irrational.
SPEAKER_06This is actually a very interesting extra special boy version of, because we were talking about evangelicalism beforehand. Um Professor Scott Coley in Ministers of Propaganda writes about common sensism. Yeah, which is basically just um, as Pratchett would say, uh that what Sergeant Cole went to the primary school of My Dad says and then attended college, uh what went to the, I don't know, high school, secondary school of It Stands to Reason, and then graduated at uh Some Bloke in a Pub Told Me. Yes. So like that's what common sensism fundamentally is, right? It's something that's informed by our instincts, which are shaped deeply by our milieu. Yes. Um, and so like I think it's really interesting here that sanity seems to play the role of common sense in conservatism or fundamentalist religion.
AntheaMm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Back to the text. We're gonna take a break in a second here.
SPEAKER_02Woo!
AntheaI want a snack. Yeah, for sure. Uh, but uh let's get let's get through to the end of this section. Um Terry said, can we go get the healers kit now? The witch paused and looked back at him steadily. And if I say no that it is too expensive and you won't need it, then what? Harry's face twisted in bitterness. Exactly what you're thinking, Professor McGonagall. Exactly what you're thinking. I conclude you're another crazy adult I can't talk to, and I start planning how to get my hands on a healer's kit anyway. I am your guardian on this trip, Professor McGonagall said with a tinge of danger. I will not allow you to push me around. I understand, Harry said. He kept Oh, I guess I should try that again. I understand, Harry said. He kept the resentment out of his voice. I don't believe you.
JakeAlso, and then McGonagall said, Watch out, mugger! Gosh, I can't.
AntheaI understand, Harry said. He kept the resentment out of his voice and didn't say any of the other things that came to mind. Professor McGonagall had told him to think before he spoke. He probably wouldn't remember that tomorrow, but he could at least remember it for five minutes. The witch's wand made a slight circle in her hand, and the noises of diagonality came back. Alright, young man, she said, let's go get that healer's kit. Harry's jaw dropped in surprise, and he hurried after, almost stumbling in his sudden rush. So they go get the healer's kit, and Harry apologizes to the shopkeeper for traumatizing her, which I guess is is gross. It's good. Yeah.
JakeAnd that's Did he have to be told to apologize?
AntheaNo, he doesn't write Rocky. That's a right.
SPEAKER_06Rocky doesn't like the methods of rationality.
AntheaNo, Rocky's not a rational thinker at all. Hi, buddy. Hi, buddy. Yeah, I think this is a good a good spot to take a break.
SPEAKER_06Um for those of you, for you audio listeners, uh Which is all of you. 100% of you, uh, the foster dog is licking Anthea's face because he loves her. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
AntheaUm, so he gets the healer's kit, he apologizes to the shopkeeper, and when we return, we will return to Is Harry an Abused Child. Hey, we're going to leave it there and pick back up in part two, dropping very soon, as as soon as it makes sense. With good engagement principles. I don't know what I'm doing, guys. Thanks for listening. Uh, we have a website, it is HPMOR and the limits of rationality. Buzzsprout.com. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, uh, Pocket Casts, other places. Go ahead and leave a five-star review at places that will let you do that. And uh, yeah, tell your friends if you like us, tell your enemies if you don't. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. The Harry Potter universe is copyright to J.K. Rowling, and Harry Potter and the methods of rationality and the sequences are copyright Eliezer Yudkowski. This podcast may contain copyrighted material, the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner, for the purposes of commentary, criticism, and transformation, which are protected under the doctrine of fair use. This podcast is released under a Creative Commons attribution share alike 4.0 international license. The music you heard in this episode is The Watchmaker's Secret by Nikolai Haydlas and Hooksounds.com. Thanks for listening.
