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. 9: Reciprocity, pt. 3 - Moonlight
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
In the last part of chapter 7, Harry attempts to seduce Draco to the cause of Science via a moon landing picture. Unfortunately, that picture doesn't exist. The crew goes to the Sequences to learn how to actually change their minds.
CONTENT WARNING: this episode touches on eugenics and rape.
- HPMoR Science. https://hpmor.com/science/
- Phlogiston: https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/rise-and-fall-phlogiston-theory-fire
- Nathaniel Branden: https://archive.ph/J8cQD
- Answer to Ayn Rand pt 1: https://www.barbarabranden.com/answer-nathaniel.html
- Twelve Virtues: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/waF2Pomid7YHjfEDt/p/7ZqGiPHTpiDMwqMN2
- “Religion’s Claim to be Non-Disprovable”: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/7gRSERQZbqTuLX5re/p/fAuWLS7RKWD2npBFR
- “Leave a Line of Retreat”: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3XgYbghWruBMrPTAL/leave-a-line-of-retreat
- Belief in angels around 69%, AP-NORC, 2023: https://apnorc.org/projects/belief-in-angels-and-heaven-is-more-common-than-belief-in-the-devil-or-hell/
- Report they’ve personally encountered a spirit, around 30%, Pew, 2023: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2023/12/07/spiritual-experiences/
- US adults who know a trans person around 41%, HRC, 2026: https://hrc-prod-requests.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/files/documents/Trans-Visibility-One-Pager.pdf
- Scott Alexander and HBD: https://reflectivealtruism.com/2024/10/31/human-biodiversity-part-4-astral-codex-ten/
- “Update Yourself Incrementally”: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/GSqFqc646rsRd2oyz/p/627DZcvme7nLDrbZu
- CFAR handbook – I was looking at “Comfort Zone Expansion,” pg 121: https://www.rationality.org/files/CFAR_Handbook_2021-01.pdf
- “The Importance of Saying ‘Oops’”: https://www.lesswrong.com/s/5bZZZJ5psXrrD5BGb/p/wCqfCLs8z5Qw4GbKS
- “What Makes This Song Stink: Try That In A Small Town”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeJXF55HXRI
- Sociopathy and risk taking: https://youtu.be/gpjYtAB9i2w?t=3532&si=G9RTlYH6ieqJ4bTx
- ASPD vs Psychopathy: https://www.simplypsychology.org/psychopathy-vs-sociopathy.html
- Draco is tasked with assassinating Dumbledore because his father failed Voldemort: https://harrypotter.fandom.com/wiki/Plot_to_assassinate_Albus_Dumbledore
Hi, hi, hi! Welcome back to HP More and the Limits of Rationality, a podcast that has gotten away from me. I'm your host, Anthea, and in a moment you will be hearing from my co-hosts, Jake and Elisa. This is part three of three of chapter seven of Harry Potter and the methods of rationality, reciprocity. Wow. Uh thanks for being here. If you skip to the previous episode, or if it's just been a minute, here's a recap. Draco and Harry bought a bunch of cans of comet tea, a soda that is magically guaranteed to make you sick take at something surprising while you're drinking it. This was immediately proven by Harry seeing a tabloid headline declaring that he got Draco Malfoy pregnant. When Harry declared that he intended to murder whoever wrote the article, Draco took him seriously and informed him that the writer is Luna Lovegood. He then declared his own intention to rape her when he got old enough and explained how he'd be able to get away with it. Harry thought to himself that this attitude was the predictable outcome for a rich kid like Draco, quote, in every place and time that didn't descend directly from the Enlightenment, end quote. He told Draco that actually he intends to marry Luna Lovegood, which Draco seemed to interpret as Harry being admirably perverse and was willing to respect. As we return to the text, we are going to get into the question of, hey Draco, what's blood purity anyway? Oh, um, and before we start, I want to call myself out real quick. I use the term sociopathy and sociopath pretty loosely in my commentary in this episode. Um and in preparing the show notes, I learned uh first of all, that's not the recommended term. Um the the clinical term is antisocial personality disorder. So I'm gonna be trying to fix that in the terminology in my brain. Um second thing, I used sociopathy when I was thinking of psychopathy. And while the two terms sometimes describe like the cluster of traits that each term describes can sometimes overlap, they're not interchangeable terms. I do think Yadkowski may have written sociopath when he meant psychopath to describe Draco, but regardless, I made a mistake here, and I'm going to endeavor to be more precise going forward. So I just wanted to note that. Now, on with the pod. Harry gazed up at the sky and at the pale shape of the moon, visible this morning through the cloudless air.
JakeThe same color as Draco's luscious locks.
SPEAKER_00So the world is just as cold and distant. But no less beautiful.
AntheaSo the world is broken and flawed and insane and cruel and bloody and dark. Oh my fucking god, Yadkowski. This is news. You always knew that anyway. You're looking all serious, Draco said. Let me guess, your muggle parents told you that this sort of thing was bad. Harry nodded, not quite trusting his voice. Well, like Father says, there may be four houses, but in the end everyone belongs to either Slytherin or Hufflepuff. And frankly, you're not on the Hufflepuff end. If you decide to side with the Malfoys under the table, our power and your reputation, you could get away with things even I can't do. Want to try it for a while, see what it's like. I feel like I'm giving him too seductive of a voice. It's kinda like last chapter where I was like where Harry was like looking at stuff and at claiming things, and I was like, oh no, this is as like this is as sexy as it sounds as I'm making the sound.
SPEAKER_01If like narratively right now, Draco is like a crossroads demon.
AntheaYeah, yes, yes. And in the grand tradition of supernatural, I'm gonna give him just the the hammiest voice possible.
SPEAKER_01The hammiest, sultriest voice.
AntheaUh Harry thinks, aren't we a clever little serpent? 11 years old and already coaxing your prey from hiding. Yay!
JakeSorry, I made my to pick it up. There's a little Jesus under my breath, too. Um Aren't you a clever little serpent? That's what you say before you hit someone with a crop. Like that's the kind of language we're dealing with here. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yes.
JakeOr whatever, you know, based on this term.
SPEAKER_01Maybe it's like a CNC situation.
AntheaUm okay, I I'm gonna I'm gonna say I am gonna skip over or or like like uh uh summarize a a couple of things here because I wanna Please, thank God. Um so Harry asks Draco uh to explain blood purity to him.
JakeUm What's eugenics, Draco?
SPEAKER_01Hey Nazi, why don't you put some of your ideas on the table? Yeah. I'll consider them.
AntheaYeah. Um and so Draco uh Draco gives him gives him the rundown, uh, which is that uh that blood purists at least believe that um that magic has been getting weaker generation by generation due to interbreeding with muggles. Um and that they used to that uh uh wizards of the past, uh like the founders of Hogwarts were able to do uh like feats of magic that no one can uh can do anymore. Um I can hear her hear her tail hitting the the mic cord. Yeah, yeah. Um uh he says if the taint is not checked, soon our wands will break and all our arts cease. The line of Merlin will end and the blood of Atlantis fail.
JakeYou know, checking your own.
AntheaOur children will be left scratching at the dirt to survive like the mere muggles, and darkness will cover all the world forever. And Harry is like, okay. Interesting. Can I did are you aware that muggles aren't just scratch like that the things have progressed out there? And Draco is like, nah, what what are you talking about? Um and Harry goes into this uh into this thing about uh how science actually has like solved a lot of these problems that they're using magic to solve right now. So if magic dies out, that would be sad. That would no one wants that, but like you're not just gonna like go back to to caveman times.
SPEAKER_00Um I have a quick question.
AntheaYes.
SPEAKER_01Does Harry point out that there are people who are have magical abilities who are born of Muggle parents?
AntheaNot here. I that is gonna come up in in later chapters.
SPEAKER_01I mean, the point that blood purism is incorrect is maybe like second or third down the list of why it's not good, but I just want to throw that out there.
AntheaIt is that uh there's a there's a a whole chapter dedicated in in a while to Ari and Draco investigating this hypothesis of blood purity.
SPEAKER_01That is um also way more time. And here's the thing. Harry seems to be giving, so first of all, Harry seems to be giving more credence to, and Yatkowski is giving more beautiful language to. The idea of blood purity being an idea that needs to be taken seriously and debunked, more of that than the idea that the Chudley Cannons might be a fun sports team. That's a fair point. Yeah, yeah. I just think I don't understand this. Like, this is something that like far lefties will say about about liberals, and I don't find it to be really, in my experience, as true as like for these fucking new atheist, reactionary, centrist, anti-tribalist types. Uh-huh. Because these are the people, in my experience, who seem to be the most likely to say something like, Yeah, I mean, I don't like Nazis, but we have to like hear them out. There's no reason that they think this stuff. They're not just crazy, intellectually lazy, mid-dim people who are furious that they're fueled by grievance. Fueled by grievance. Like, that can't be the explanation. Like, let's go through and debunk it. And I think once we thoughtfully come up with counterpoints, they'll realize that that's a silly position to hold. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not looking, I'm not looking forward to the boy detectives chapter about blood purity.
JakeTo quote my favorite Garfield minus Garfield comic, I dread tomorrow.
AntheaSo Harry uses this opening to tell Draco. So he's like, hey, actually, science has like solved a lot of a lot of things.
SPEAKER_01But yeah, great stuff. You don't have to be a blood purist.
AntheaYou can still access luxuries and comforts in the muggle world if you learn calculus. Uh and Draco was like, that sounds incorrect. That doesn't sound real. And Harry is like, okay, I'll prove it to you. And he pulls out a book. Um, and he because he decides to tell Draco about one of the greatest achievements of science of the 20th century.
SPEAKER_01Going to the moon.
AntheaThe moon landing. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Um I'm very smart.
AntheaHe shows Draco a picture described as.
SPEAKER_01Or I'm very basic.
AntheaThe one with the white, dry, cratered land and the suited people and the blue-white globe hanging over it all. That picture. The picture. If only one picture in all the world were to survive. This is actually the point, this is the part of the podcast that I thought was going to take the longest.
JakeOoh boy.
AntheaI wanted to know what picture this was. Because it sounds like a real picture. I started out looking for iconic lunar surface pictures and was not able to find any that showed a person and the Earth at the same time.
JakeThis sounds like a combination of three pictures.
AntheaThe iconic photos you've seen of the Apollo 11 landing never have Earth in frame with the astronauts.
SPEAKER_00Never. Oh.
AntheaMaybe I wasn't using the right search terms. I started going through the NASA archives on Flickr because every picture that NASA ever took on the moon is on Flickr. It's amazing.
SPEAKER_01Way to go, NASA.
AntheaI realized that was going to take way more time than I had.
SPEAKER_01Way to go, Flicker.
AntheaAnd I thought, theoretically, this is the kind of thing that natural language questions and deep searches that LLMs are supposed to be good at, so I went to Claude. My dad's friend Claude. My dad's friend Claude. Um and uh my initial query with my initial query, Claude actually did point me towards a couple of photo candidates that included a single astronaut and the Earth, all from the Apollo 17 mission. Um Claude did have several inaccuracies. It's not worth going into going into it at length. Um it was about as accurate and useful as a Wikipedia page in 2007. Like it was a a place where I could go and be like, you're not right, but you are close enough that I can go do more research based on what you've told me.
SPEAKER_01Groovy.
AntheaSo then while I was working on this script, I spent several days with my friend Ellie, who spends a l who works with LLMs in her like day job. Um, and so we did a little A B test where she wrote a prompt to ask Claude to find the photograph. Oh fun! Um and uh uh I have a I have a very high degree of confidence in the answers Ellie got from Claude based on on how she prompted it and how like the answers she got were were in line with the ones that I got. And the answer is there is no photo that matches this description. Uh at least not in our world. Um and if Yudkowski's fictional world outside the wizarding world is the same as ours with its Feynman's and Galileo's and Nothers, I think it cannot exist there.
JakeOkay, but how hot is Petunia?
SPEAKER_03I was gonna say in the world!
JakeI mean, could it be retroactively? Yeah, no, I mean, could it be rippling backwards and forwards through time in Yankowski's world? That her being such a fucking smoke joke. I gotta take a picture of like somewhere on this world at some point.
SPEAKER_01No, no, no, no, no, no, no. He's a fool. Here's what happened. Uh Petunia Varus, yes, uh, sacrificed Scabbers the Rat and in so doing made a blood pact that caused this photograph to appear.
AntheaHere's the thing. The reason this photograph doesn't appear is because the earth actually sits really high above the moon's horizon. And because the moon is tidally locked to Earth, Earth does not actually rise and set from most parts of the lunar surface the way the moon rises and sets for us, like going up and down over the horizon.
JakeYeah, you have to be orbiting to get an earthrise. Yes.
AntheaYeah, that and the picture Earthrise that we've that is like one of the pictures, yes, was taken from orbit.
JakeYeah, that's why it's sound like a composition.
AntheaIt's a conflation. It absolutely is.
JakeLike this would be written before that was possible, but this sounds like if you asked an LLM for like, hey, what's a famous picture of the moon? Like, it might generate, you know, these three ones composited together.
AntheaMm-hmm. In the first six lunar landings, oh yeah, but it gets worse. It gets worse. In the first six lunar landings, because of where they were on the surface, it would have been extremely difficult or maybe impossible to get a shot that included people and Earth in the frame because of how high it sits over the horizon. In the Apollo 17 mission, they landed in a different spot, and as a result, the astronauts on the ground, Harrison Schmidt and Eugene Cernan, were able to get pictures that did show Earth in the frame with a person. The best candidate for what Yudkowski is describing as the photo is AS17134-20384, which NASA published with the title A Flag Points Home. It's a very low-angle shot of Schmidt standing next to the US flag with the end of the flag pointing towards a half Earth in the sky. There's also a similar but worse quality shot of of Cernan, um uh, like in, you know, they just swapped places so they could take a picture. Um, and there's also a picture of Cernan with the lunar rover where Earth is visible over the rover's antenna. Now here's the thing: it was not possible for Schmidt and Cernan to get any pictures that showed multiple suited people and Earth, because there were only two people on the moon and they were using chest-mounted cameras. In fact, in all seven landings on the moon, only two people permission ever go to the surface because one has to stay in the command module.
SPEAKER_00Awww.
AntheaTo say that there are photos of the suited people on the white dry cratered land is true very technically, because in the most famous photo from the Apollo 11 landing, Visor, Neil Armstrong can be seen reflected in Buzz Aldrin's visor.
JakeI like that it's literally the three photos I was thinking of are the ones that are.
AntheaAbsolutely, right? Technically, Earth is visible in this shot, also, as a pinprick of light reflected in Buzz Aldrin's visor.
SPEAKER_01This accords with the level of research and bias checking that I associate with Yudkowski.
AntheaThis is the thing. This is why I I was like, this is embarrass- I'm being such a bitch, like, going into this. But the like this is petty. This is I'm and I fully own this is petty for me to do this amount of research. But and and I think that like I think he's conflate- I think he's conflating Earthrise, Visor, and the blue marble, which is the other one that like most people think of, right? Um uh like and maybe any number of pictures of people on the moon. But like I think I think you're absolutely right. He's conflating these things. And it's petty of me to be like this picture is not physically possible. But at the beginning of this chapter, he said that all of the science is real. He sure did. And what he's describing is something that's scientifically impossible. Sure. That is presented with full confidence as if only one picture describing the human race could could it survive, it would be this picture. Well, he doesn't exist.
SPEAKER_01So, in other words, if the thing that he thinks should survive enduringly about the human race is a story that he's telling himself about science. Yeah. Huh.
JakeAlso, if that's one thing that survived, that'd be really confusing to aliens. Be like, I guess that we're on the moon, all the ruins are on Earth, but like, okay, weird.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. No, that's such a great point. Also, the other thing I think is that, like, well, okay, but here's the deal. Also, like, he talked about making your beliefs pay rent, which like, step one, fuck off, I'm not a landlord. Step two, um, step two, uh, actually, I am technically. Oh, we're Jake's landlords. We are landladies. Yeah. Never mind. I take it back. I am a parasite.
unknownSecond of all.
SPEAKER_01Um, but moving on. Uh the um the uh the idea here is like making your beliefs pay rent is like you have to test your beliefs, you have to test your biases, you have to cause yourself to have um crises of faith all the time. Um, people who have cognitive biases don't have them because they think, well, even odds I'm wrong about this, but I'm just gonna move forward. You have cognitive biases because of things that you don't even question. And so he has a memory about what this picture is. But he doesn't even go and look at it to inspire himself before he writes his fucking chapter. He's just like, this is something I'm gonna present as the pinnacle of human achievement and of science, of everything that I believe in slash believe is apparently the thing. Um and he didn't bother to check. And that's exactly the kind of thing that happens when you don't actually do rationalism the way I understand it. Is because you think that finally you don't have to check something. And because you don't think that you have to check it, like if you have a flag that something might be wrong, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. If you have a flag that something might be wrong, that is a sign that is not a that is not a cognitive bias that you have. That's a cognitive ability to self-correct that you have.
JakeYeah, and like this is why like every chapter reinforces more and more. Like, this is a first draft at best. This is like a scratch draft. That was not editing.
AntheaIt was not beta red, it was not fact-checked.
JakeYeah, it is all like all the science is real to the extent that I remember it while I'm writing this.
AntheaActually, quite literally.
JakeUh we keep calling stuff about it.
AntheaFunny you should say that. Um I saw him say he he I think on the on his page about like science, like where where he was briefly keeping notes about the science in the pic, um, he says that when Harry, when he has Harry explain something, like he just he does it without checking. Like he he writes it without checking what that actual thing is, and he just does it from his own memory, and then he goes and he fact checks it. Like to make sure that he's not saying anything truly wrong.
JakeI bet that second step doesn't happen sometimes.
AntheaSometimes. Whereas when Hermione explains a concept, uh, because he has decided she has perfect recall. Oh my god. Uh like she has an idetic memory.
JakeI mean, Petunia was so hot.
AntheaPetony was so hot that it gave Hermione Granger an idetic memory. This checks out like so when uh so when he writes Hermione uh explaining a concept, he will go and like look up the textbook definition of the concept and and just copy-paste it in.
SPEAKER_01It sucks when a character is a girl, so I chose to make her a perfect machine.
AntheaYeah, yeah. That way I didn't have to think as much about but we'll get into that in the next chapter.
JakeYeah, I'm sure there'll be no problems with Hermione.
AntheaDefinitely not! Nope, it's gonna be fine. It's gonna be fine.
JakeThey're not even to the school yet.
AntheaNope. So, uh, so also interesting is that Harry is like, yeah, we went to the moon, and uh and Draco reacts to this news the way you would have expected rationalist Harry to react to the revelation that magic is real. Draco kinda well, to be fair, Draco kind of responds to this the way Harry responded to McGonagall turning into a cat. Okay. In terms of like, what the fuck? Uh something core about my sense of reality has been shook. Okay.
SPEAKER_01He spits out his soda.
AntheaYeah, yeah.
JakeUm I bet wizards could get to the moon. They just haven't bothered. Yeah. What's on the moon?
AntheaI that is kind I mean, what does Draco say? He is like, why would you go to the moon?
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
AntheaYeah. Yeah. How would oh he says you can't apparate to somewhere you've never been, and how would anyone get to the moon in the first place? Oh, well that's different than that. That's different. That's different than why would you go? Yeah. Um he's just like, that is literally impossible. Um And Harry's like, nah, it's it's it's real. Uh back to the text. You're telling the truth, Draco said slowly. You wouldn't fake a whole book just for this. And I can hear it in your voice, but but how? Without wands or magic? It's a long story, Draco. Science doesn't work by waving wands and chanting spells. It works by knowing how the universe works on such a deep level that you know exactly what to do in order to make the universe do what you want. If magic is like casting Imperio on someone to make them do what you want, then science is like knowing them so well that you can convince them it was their own idea all along. It's a lot more difficult than waving a wand, but it works when wands fail. Just like if the Impury has failed, you could still try persuading a person. And science builds from generation to generation. You have to really know what you're doing to do science. And when you really understand something, you can explain it to someone else. The greatest scientists of one century ago, the brightest names that are still spoken with reverence, their powers are as nothing to the greatest scientists of today. There is no equivalent in science of your lost arts that raised Hogwarts. In science, our powers wax by the year. And we are beginning to understand and unravel the secrets of life and inheritance. We'll be able to look at the very blood of which you spoke, and see what makes you a wizard, and in one or two more generations we'll be able to persuade that blood to make all your children powerful wizards too. So you see your problem isn't nearly as bad as it looks, because in a few more decades science will be able to solve it for you.
JakeWe were just five or six years away from advanced general wizardry.
SPEAKER_01Yep. Jesus.
AntheaI was like, I was surprised that that I thought that we were done with it. Sorry.
JakeNo, it's bad. There's kind of like nothing new to say about it there, though.
SPEAKER_01There's nothing new to say. What I will say is something I have said before. Uh, but this is such a hubristic and inquisitive view of the purpose of inquiry.
AntheaI that's one of my notes is like, does science is is the point of science to let you manipulate the universe like into doing like I guess that is that is a thing that happens with science. Like we do we do use science to be like, we want to be able to cure cancer or split the atom.
JakeAnd I mean it's a it's a capitalistic view of it.
AntheaIt is, yeah.
JakeUsually how a scientist feels. A scientist is usually after the pursuit of knowledge.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, the more expert that a scientist gets, usually, the more they're like, I don't know anything. Yes.
JakeLike I really miss when I was younger and I knew so much more.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. Um I would also say that for somebody who's better than tropes and better than religion, the only the only justification that immediately springs to mind for me of this attitude is I give you dominion over the beasts of the earth and the birds of the air. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah. What gives him the fucking right to say that that's how it all works?
AntheaLike, like you I this is not like in a different in another world, I might say that this is Harry trying to appeal to Draco's ambition and clear desire to desire for dominion over others, but it's not. No, it's very much not. Because in the previous chapter, Harry was like, I claim this wizarding world in the name of science.
SPEAKER_01It also, yeah, he's like, eugenics are cool if science does it. Um, it also seems, I mean, so yeah, I feel bad because I feel like I'm not being very fun this episode. What about this episode could be not fun?
JakeI also want to point out how Harry's just straight up wrong about how, like, oh, the scientists of yesterday you're have nothing on the scientists of today. It's like, no, it's way more impressive. Like, if you invented geometry from first principles in Greece, like you made algebra out of togas and lead. Yeah. Like, that's way more impressive than like, you know, Newton centuries later being like, oh, what if we did a little bit more with geometry, and now we have calculus. Like we'll find the first one more impressive.
AntheaThis is what we were talking about earlier. Because Yadkowski has this whole thing where he like is constantly talking, he he uses the he uses phlogiston as like the the phlogiston theory of fire, uh, which was like what the 18th century, 17th century? Something like that. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It was it was late 16th century, and like I said, it didn't last longer than a it didn't last more than a hundred years as a as a thought.
AntheaHe frequently he uses this in the sequences a lot as like a as a as an example of like of inadequate thinking because he's like, these people thought that phlagiston explained fire, uh, and then they just stopped there. Um, like, uh, like, so they were like, what what makes fire? Phlogiston. And off we go. Um and he's like, you can't, yeah, and like he, you know, when when McGonagall says when Harry is like, how does that happen? And McGonagall says, magic. He's like, you might as well just say phlagiston. It's a whole thing in in Yadkowski's writing.
SPEAKER_01The thing is It just so happens that in this book that I was reading called The Fabric of Civilization, um, there's a section about learning about fixatives for dyes where they talk about the person who discovered oxygen. And basically it's because the the theory about phlagiston and the theory for that they had was that it was the same stuff that like affected, you know, fire burning, like the same thing that affected combustion was affecting uh rust, right? But they just didn't know what it was. So this guy eventually, this French guy, there's actually another British guy who at the same time pretty much comes up with the idea. Um, they both discover and name oxygen. So, like, based on specifically phlagiston, some people who agreed with the general idea of it kept asking questions, didn't go, ah, that's settled. And because of that, they discovered oxygen.
JakeWell, and it's literally still happening with modern science. Like, that's just dark energy, that's dark matter. It's we don't really know what this is yet, but we know it's something. We can call it for now. Yeah, right. This is our best explanation right now.
AntheaWe're not gonna say and we don't stop there. Yeah. We say, like, we're gonna keep looking into this, but we need something to call it for the moment. Right.
SPEAKER_01But the Yadkowski of 300 years from now would look at our scientists right now who are actually saying, Well, we don't know what this is, but we know it's something. So placeholder, it's dark matter, and be like, they just called it dark matter and called it a day.
JakeI think truly a dark age of science.
AntheaI think this may actually even be something that comes up in one of his stuff, but I can't remember now. So, like, I don't know.
SPEAKER_01Also, all of this, all of this makes me grumpy. And I think, again, like the idea of like the more that you this is, I would also say, true of like indigenous communities and of park rangers and sea captains. The more that you know about a phenomenon, the more that you have to dis you have to the more that it seems that people come to a conclusion that you can't tame it or manipulate it. You have to respect it and work with and around it.
AntheaRight, right. Yeah. There's no controlling the sea. There isn't! There isn't. And there is no controlling the universe. Yeah, you can make it worse. There's very little controlling ourselves, even. Quite true. Right. Um I was also gonna make a snarky point. Like when I was writing this, I was like, I'm gonna make a point about how we have lost art, actually, and science can't explain Roman concrete. And then I was like, oh, but then I looked into it, and actually we have a pretty good idea about how Roman concrete was made. Oh fun! Yeah, we we like figured we kind of figured it out in 2014 and we made some new breakthroughs about it in 2025.
SPEAKER_01So Well, we lost it for a time.
AntheaAnd we closed it for a long time. But the scientific method allowed us to look at stuff and be so you know, I'll give it to I'll give that one to him.
JakeLike, and and that play was probably basically just Maypalm.
AntheaUh oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah.
JakeBut that's the other go-to example to head that one off in the past. Yeah, and another thing. Whatever. Shut up in the comments.
SPEAKER_01Get in the comments. Get in the comments. Another good thing to remember, which we did bring, we have brought up in recent episodes, but like to bring up that like, yeah, uh the scientific method is great. It's a good thing. It is, it is! Yeah!
JakeIt's a great at solving the things it's good at solving for the thing. Yes.
AntheaYeah, yeah. Uh back to the text. But, Draco said, his voice was trembling. If Muggles have that kind of power, then what are we? No, Draco, that's not it, don't you see? Science taps the power of human understanding to look at the world and figure out how it works. It can't fail without humanity itself failing. Your magic could turn off, and you would hate that, but you would still be you. You would still be alive to regret it. But because science rests upon my human intelligence, it is the power that cannot be removed from me without removing me. Even if the laws of the universe change on me so that all my knowledge is void, I'll just figure out the new laws, as has been done before. It's not a muggle thing, it's a human thing. It just refines and trains the power you use every time you look at something you don't understand and ask why. You're a Slytherin, Draco, don't you see the implication? Draco looked up from the book to Harry. His face showed dawning understanding. Wizards can learn to use this power. Very carefully now. The beta set, now the hook. If you can learn to think of yourself as a human instead of a wizard, then you can train and refine your powers as a human. He goes on to uh say his own training in in uh in science is not complete. Uh that's very humble of him. Yeah.
JakeI I like it's basically like, what if Harry Potter gave Draco Malfoy a gun?
AntheaAs as frequently happens. Uh and Draco says, You think you can master both arts. Add the powers together, and Draco stared at Harry. Make yourself lord of the two worlds? Harry gave an evil laugh. It just seemed to come naturally at that point.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god.
AntheaYou have to realize, Draco, that the whole world you know, all of magical Britain, is just one square on a much larger game board. The game board that includes places like the moon, and the stars in the night sky, which are lights just like the sun, only unimaginably far away, and things like galaxies that are vastly huger than the Earth and Sun. Things so large that only scientists can see them, and you don't even know they exist. But I really am Ravenclaw, you know, not Slytherin. I don't want to rule the universe. I just think it could be more sensibly organized.
JakeHe's repeatedly said he wants to rule the universe, but repeatedly, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Oh god, now he wants to rule the whole goddamn universe. Yeah.
AntheaHarry tells Draco that the cost of learning science is learning to admit that you are wrong, and says that this is a cost so high that most people refuse to pay it.
SPEAKER_00Um my god.
AntheaHe says Keep jacking yourself off, good cows. He says, it doesn't sound like much, but it's so hard that most people can't do science. Always questioning yourself, always taking another look at things you've always taken for granted, and every time you change your mind, you change yourself. Now, this change your mind to change yourself phrasing is so pithy that I was positive that it must be in the sequences, but as far as I can tell, it's not, even though the second book of the core sequences is titled How to Actually Change Your Mind. Uh I I think that it's I think every time you change your mind, you change yourself is a much more digestible catchphrase than that which can be destroyed by the truth should be, which is what rationality usually goes to. Um it really lean I because it really leans into like the self-help aspects of rationality that I think makes it sticky for people, right? That makes people stick.
SPEAKER_01Um I have a quick question that goes back a couple of a couple of paragraphs. Please. Alas, which is um why does Draco have to stop like why does Draco have to alter his self-conception as a wizard in order to learn science?
AntheaInteresting questions. I think I think the point being made is that like Draco is thinking of his magic as his inherent self, and Harry is like, but your your magic could go away and you would still be you, and the thing that is you is your intelligence.
JakeBut he could just relearn magic though, right?
AntheaIf if his magic went away? Yeah. We don't we don't know how magic works.
SPEAKER_01Like Okay, well, if you go to this boarding school and we cut off your hair and change your language, you'll still be you because you can learn new stuff. Spicy. I'm just saying. It's not fair of Harry to say that like this trait that is so important to you. Yeah, I just think I think it's I think that we take or leave it.
AntheaI fucking love that you're like kill the wizard and save the man.
SPEAKER_03That's what he's saying! Holy shit!
JakeIf you just remove this fundamental identity of who you are, like you'll still be you, right? Like, even though you don't have this fundamental part of you, it's still it's the same.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, if you're not gay, you can still fall in love. As long as you're smart, right? Yeah, exactly. Like, and it's like, okay, well, what you've just said is this is a trait that I value that you don't value as much as I do, and you have a trait that you value that I don't value as much as you do, and I just think we should go with my thing.
AntheaYeah, yeah. Jesus. Man. Okay. Sorry, I just looked at the recording and I'm like, we've been here for another two hours. I'm bringing the mood down now. Yeah, let's go! We're professionals!
JakeYeah. We literally aren't.
AntheaI was about to say, why should we get paid? You guys are getting paid?
JakeYeah.
AntheaHmm. Uh, so maybe this is gonna be a three-parter. Um uh I I I str I struggle, I can I struggle with like in the in the service of giving Yadkowski a fair shake, like there are this this chapter has these like big chunks of text where I'm like, well, we're gonna like okay, like Draco is gonna threaten is gonna say I intend to rape Luna Lovegood, and then all of us are are quite reasonably, I think. Like I have an anticipation that leads me to expect, or or I have a belief that leads me to anticipate that Yadkowski is gonna manage this badly. But the ways in which he manages this badly are very specific, and they may not be the ones that we uh anticipate going into it, so I wanna preserve more of the text there to so that we can see what's going on what he's actually saying, and then things get even longer because I'm like, we have to wait, we have to hear this whole text.
SPEAKER_01Totally. I would also say that, like, I mean, honestly, there's nothing that Yadkowski said about rape or barbarism or anything that really surprised me, or I think was out of line with what I predicted. But that having been said, I think it is still appropriate and a good idea to go through as full like to go through the text as fully as possible that treats on this subject because it is so sensitive and people can draw their own conclusions and you know, uh, you know, without it feeling like we were saying trust us, bro.
AntheaRight, right. And when you were saying, like, is he ever going to say that rape is bad? I'm like, well, I, you know, I know, like, at a certain point, Draco is gonna be like, oh, I bet your Muggle parents told you that this was bad, right? And Harry's gonna be like, yeah. Which kind of addresses your point, but I mean you are right to be like you're being such a fucking Libra about this. Like you are, you are extending way more grace than is needed to Yudkowski is not going to explicitly say, by the way, rape is bad because it hurts a person.
JakeYeah, he's choosing where to put the camera and how to frame things. Yeah, that says a lot.
SPEAKER_01He's not even saying rape is bad, like, as far as I know, like in so many words. He's saying Harry's parents told him rape was bad. Yeah. Right. And Harry seems to think that rape is barbaric in some way. But we're kind of unclear on like what exactly it's not even clear to me that Harry is personally disgusted by rape from what you shared.
JakeHe did seem a lot angrier about Draco getting away using the legal system. Like it seemed like That's a really good point. Is a lot of what he wanted to tear down.
AntheaYeah, yeah.
JakeLike it kind of could have been whatever crime there. But it was really the like you know, the fact that it was a feudal system and a noble house and those exploitations. Yeah.
AntheaYeah. No, yeah. Um Yeah. I and I think that's interesting given that, you know, in a previous chapter we it's interesting because in a previous chapter we saw Harry be presented with an economic system, and his first thought was, what are the loopholes here? How can I get a like what what can I do to like work this system to my favor?
SPEAKER_01And then And that's not barbaric, that's actually elevated.
AntheaYes. It's very it's very smart and rational and good and and uh should be uh uh copied, preserved.
JakeYeah, I mean Keynesian economics derive from the Enlightenment, therefore good.
AntheaI mean, yeah, like kinda yeah, basically. Um and uh and then when presented with someone else being like, here's all the loopholes to the legal system. Like it's pretty easy, you know, l magic allows me to do XYZ.
JakeI will tear it down stone by stone.
AntheaYeah, yes, yeah. Atom by atom. Maybe I mean uh genuinely there i there might be a certain amount of Harry hates in others what he hates in himself. Um, but I don't know that that's also not something that I think is ever I I don't tr I don't know, but I don't currently anticipate that that kind of self-reflection is ever going to come across. That like, oh, actually Draco and Harry have very similar mindsets, and I don't know that Harry is ever really going to um get understand and grok like oh the way the way Draco views the world is the same way I view the world, and that is a problem.
SPEAKER_01I would also say that in a pedagogical work, I mean frankly, in anything, yeah. Um, but in a pedagogical work in which you are inviting people to analyze the contradictions between assumption and action or belief and result, anytime that there's a hypocrisy that you don't call attention to, you are training your audience to treat it as not hypocr hypocritical.
AntheaRight. And as we've discussed previously, the the text has all has already previously called out times that Harry is not being rational, that Harry fails to be rational. Yeah. And therefore we have to assume that when it is not called out, the text thinks that Harry is being rational.
SPEAKER_01At least we are invited by the structure of this. I yeah, considering Gutkowski's general patterns from what you've relayed to me of the sequences, um, I would fully believe that he intends to have Harry not be rational at some points, but he's not consistently deploying the device by which he communicates that Harry's not being rational. Yeah. I mean, whatever. Like, how the fuck are we supposed to know the difference? I don't live in his brain, thank God. Um but uh but the other, I think um uh oh no, I I've gotten I've gotten all. Ugh, I think I lost that one. We're so tired. I think I lost that one.
AntheaWhen is pizza? Soon, soon. Anyway, as we roll into the last the last part of this, I too have started drinking. Yeah. So when we left off, um we were talking about changing your mind. Let me let me read back some of this so that we we can get into it. So Harry tells Draco that sorry, sorry, this is gonna be the direct repeat. Harry tells Draco that the cost of learning science is learning to admit that you're wrong, and this is a cost so high that most people refuse to pay it. There's actually a moment that I do kinda like where he's like, but Draco, this power comes at a very high cost. So high that most people aren't willing to pay it. And Draco is like, yeah, that makes sense. Like, yeah, great power comes at a great cost, absolutely. And then Harry is like, it's learning to admit that you're wrong. And Draco is like, nah, what?
JakeI can make a servant admit they're wrong to get this power.
AntheaYeah, right, right. Yeah. Um that's not, I don't hear it. He's like, I don't know why you were making this sound so dramatic. That's not anyway. Um it sound it doesn't sound like much, but it's so hard that most people can't do science. We don't have time to unpack that. Um suffice to say, I hate it. Yeah, yeah. Um uh change your so change your mind. Well, every time you change your mind, you change yourself. So, this feels like a good segue into the section of the sequences called How to Actually Change Your Mind. The title may lead you to think that Eliezer is going to clearly lay out how to change your mind. I I mean I would make no such assumption.
SPEAKER_01Not at this point, you wouldn't. You had if you had used Whiteout to cover the part of your screen where his name appeared and it said how to change your mind, I'd be like, yeah, that's it. Yeah, let's go.
AntheaLet's go. Now I have not yet read all 81 essays in this section. How far are you? I'm not even sure. One thing generally, something kind of cool about the Less Wrong uh uh website is that they've got some little thing set up, like some cookie it's that's storing on the sequences pages where like if you go from the main sequences page to each individual like uh essay and then go back to the main page, it like checks it off. It'll save your progress. Oh, that's nice. You have to log in to like fully save your progress. Okay, but that's like I that's fine.
JakeIt's like a manga piracy website, that's what they do. Oh, is it?
AntheaNice. Yeah, it's a great little feature.
JakeHeck yeah.
AntheaYeah. Um the the thing is that his i his writing is a lot more conceptual than it is practical. Uh and to be fair to E Dub, he acknowledges this failing in the preface to Rationality from AI to Zombies. Quote, It was a mistake that I didn't write my two years of blog posts with the intention of helping people do better in their everyday lives. What the fuck did you write them for? I wrote it with the intention of helping people solve big, difficult, important problems. And I chose impressive sounding abstract problems as my examples. In retrospect, this was the second largest mistake in my approach. It ties into the first largest mistake in my writing, which was that I didn't realize that the big problem in learning this valuable way of thinking was figuring out how to practice it, not knowing the theory. I didn't realize that part was the priority. And in regards to this, I can only say oops and duh.
JakeI wish he could realize how much of his stuff is impressive sounding.
AntheaYeah, yeah.
unknownOkay.
AntheaNow look, I I, Anthea, genuinely appreciate this acknowledgement. I uh, you know, I'm gonna call I'm gonna salute when he is able to be like, I fucked that one up. Like, doesn't happen frequently, so when it happens, I wanna say good job, Yud.
SPEAKER_01Clap, clap, clap.
AntheaClap, clap, clap. Um, I am pretty sure that the lack of practical advice in the sequences is what led to the creation of C Far, of the Center for Applied Rationality. Um CFAR actually, I know so So Ain Rand. Alright!
JakeNot someone who couldn't see far.
AntheaSo Ain Rand wrote all of these like essays, you know, she wrote all her stuff about objectivism and and wrote her books, and um, and it was actually another dude, Nathaniel Brandon, who was like, This is so cool. I love your work. I'm going to actually like shape this into a coherent quote unquote ideology and they and provide a professional infrastructure. And he's the one who started these lecture series and started the offices in New York and started the like like kept the mailing list, and he did he did all of the stuff to like make objectivism into a like into a force, into a movement.
JakeIt seems like a miracle it has not been entirely attributed to him. I feel like that's the first time I've heard of an academia. You've never heard of this guy, right? Well, I mean it's the first time I've heard of an academia, like, not it ended up being like that.
SPEAKER_01And actually a footnote of like, well, actually it was Anne Rand, but like most people just know Part of this might be because uh Is this the guy that she got extremely angry at because he wouldn't fuck her? Yes.
JakeI was I was that's also what I was trying to remember.
AntheaYes, yes, it is. Yeah, um, they had an affair, and uh she was he was much younger than her. Um they had an affair and then uh he then they broke it off, and then after a while she was like, I'd like to pick up that affair again, and he was like, I'm actually really happily married now. And so she trashed his reputation and he left the objectivist movement, which might be part of why he's not like credited with it, you know, because he was like, I'm actually not into that anymore. Goodbye. Um CFAR reminds me really strongly of Nathaniel Brandon. Anyway, here's what I've gotten so far from how to actually change your mind. Uh identify your beliefs, whether they are God is real, or my father loves me, or artificial superintelligence is inevitable. So that's step one. Identify your beliefs. Identify what evidence leads you to those beliefs, and what evidence would lead you away from them.
SPEAKER_00Okay.
AntheaYeah. Evaluate the evidence available, and get comfy with accepting the conclusions the evidence points towards. Which is kind of the hardest part, right?
SPEAKER_01Okay.
AntheaMore succinctly, if not more clearly, embrace empiricism. In the 12 virtues of rationality. Help. Yadkowski write-I gotta read you this part. Yadkowski writes, hang on, let me take a sip of something.
SPEAKER_01Oh my god, thank you. Yes. I'll take a sip of something too. I'm sure I won't spit it out.
AntheaLet me wet my whistle. The third virtue is lightness. Let the winds of evidence blow you about as though you are a leaf with no direction of your own. Beware lest you fight a rearguard retreat against the evidence, begrudgingly conceding each foot of ground only when forced feeling cheated. Surrender to the truth as quickly as you can. Do this the instant you realize what you are resisting, the instant you can see from which quarter the winds of evidence are blowing against you. Be faithless to your cause, and betray it to a stronger enemy. If you regard evidence as a constraint and seek to free yourself, you sell yourself into the chains of your whims.
JakeMy eyes rolled so hard there I detached a retina, I think. This fucking fake pseudo Sun Tzu wannabe haiku writing. Like, Jesus Christ, that sucked.
SPEAKER_01I'm sorry.
JakeThis is really the worst thing I've heard from him, honestly.
SPEAKER_01I know he's so embarrassing.
JakeLike he was typing this with one hand.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Here's the other thing. Again, there's there's 11 more of them.
JakeI have no doubt. I'm so stoked. For anyone who's played Hollow Knight, this is Zote the Mighty type shit right here. Someone just lost their shit hearing that because they know it's exactly right.
SPEAKER_01I bet it was Adam.
JakeHopefully, yeah.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Um, I would also point out, again, this is like a similar problem to the whole concept of like checking biases and things like that. It's like if you aren't convinced that something is good evidence, why shouldn't you fight against accepting it? The idea of like as soon as you recognize the truth, yield to it is like that is how most people operate. It's just that they don't, they they have different thresholds for different types of truth. Oftentimes, like, you know, we have we have um we have biases that are like, well, I want to believe the things that lead to the outcome that I prefer. Um, I want to lead to things that validate the status quo that I prefer, um, various things like that. But like that advice is absolutely useless to like who on earth is I mean, I there are very narrow circumstances, I think, where people are like, ooh, I kind of think the evidence for this might be pretty good, but I don't really want to accept it. I mean, the only people that I can think of who say things like that are anti-trans and race realists.
JakeYeah. And like this being an entirely internal process is completely self-defeating. It's like the step of like examine evidence and see what conclusions are drawn from it. Like that is tainted by your bias. Like if it's just like, oh, what conclusions come from this, your conclusions will be biased by your biases. Right. It needs to be some external at some point in the process for this to really happen. And that's obviously why growth is usually not done entirely by yourself. Like, some some of it can be, sometimes it can be, but not specifically the way he's describing. It is completely self-defeating to do this by yourself.
SPEAKER_01The other point, too, is that like, okay, like to get you know, to get very metaphysical about it. Oh we said like belief in God was one of those. Yes, okay.
AntheaYes, listen, I'm I've got a whole set of we're gonna talk about what we're gonna talk more about.
JakeWe're gonna figure out this God thing.
AntheaWe're gonna figure out this god thing. We are just gonna figure it out. We are getting all the good stuff this time. We're gonna we might end up retreading some of the stuff we were talking about with belief earlier, but this is gonna be the third episode for this chapter, I guess.
JakeSo folks will have already forgotten about the first conversation. It's been hours.
SPEAKER_01We are recording for half as long as the longest game of baseball that was ever played. That's actual that's genuinely accurate.
JakeYeah, we're like ending 15 right now with podcasts.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. Um so, like when I said earlier uh in this recording session that I am like, do I believe in God? I don't know. Like, I think it's for a couple of reasons. One of them is like, do I have the capacity within myself to fully believe, to believe this thing that I can't see? On the other hand, I believe in something. Like, I'll feel the sea air whip past my face, and I feel something that makes me think of things like God. But I don't know that that's a person. I don't know that that's a person the way that I conceive of a person. Does believing in God mean I believe in a sky daddy who's like, or like a distinctive entity that I can have a human relationship with? Well, I don't think that's very likely. That doesn't feel true to me. But so those are kind of the questions. It's like the shape and nature of the belief. The fact that like the belief is something that it is a leap of faith. It is something that you but the reason is that, well, what evidence could convince me that God wasn't real? How do you prove a negative?
JakeLike so Yeah, it's it's inherently uh unscientific. That's the kind of thing you can't prove. And what evidence is a scientific method.
SPEAKER_01Yes, and what evidence would make me think that God was real? Well, if there was evidence, honestly, here's what would happen. If there was evidence that convinced me that God was real, I would stop worship I would stop worshiping God or praising God as uh as a deity and start trying to hold him accountable like a politician.
AntheaYeah. Yeah.
JakeIt worked for Lucifer.
AntheaThat's that's that's angels in America too. Well, there you go. If he ever shows his face around here, you should soothe him.
SPEAKER_01Well, but I think like so so that's like that's just how I feel, right? But it's also like, well, if God were proven to me, he the he, they, she, us would cease to be God in the way that I understand God, and the quality of the quality of my relationship with God would stop being what I call belief. Yeah. So I'd stop believing in God. God would be a fact. Yeah.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_01I don't know what was gonna get metaphysical. But that means that means that, like, okay, so if we go by this thing about like what evidence is there, well, evidence is not the right question. Yeah. Like, this is not, it's not something that's answerable to this type of this type of question. And the reason is that if there were evidence, like Yatkowski will talk about, he talks about in one of his fucking religious sequences, because I did read that one. Um, he talks about like Oh, religions claim to be unfalsifiable. That was right. Okay, well, guess what? You're so fucking arrogant and condescending towards the idea of faith and how weird we can get out here. Like, yeah, have you been to a monastery? You don't even know how strange people can get. Have you heard of Hildegard of Bingen?
AntheaLike, let's go. All my homies love Hildegard. Behind the bastards listeners were like, yeah! Behind the bastards mentioned They talk about Hildegard of Bingen.
SPEAKER_01Um, not enough though.
AntheaYeah, she's not a bastard, so that's true.
SPEAKER_01Margaret, get on it. Cool people who did cool stuff. Anyway, but like, but like he thinks that like the way that I conceive of faith, or the way that somebody conceives of faith, like that if God came down from the mountain and struck people with lightning and stuff, that then like that's the kind of thing that like okay, you would probably like believe in God or like be a Christian then. No, that is only the start of my conversation.
AntheaRight.
SPEAKER_01That's not a conclusion. That opens up a whole bunch of other questions.
AntheaRight, right. Yeah, I I do I would I was gonna say that I would that I would guess that a lot of people who identify as religious Christians in the modern day do not necessarily believe in all of the miracles in the Bible. But then I remembered the pursuit northwest.
JakeYeah, a lot of them do.
AntheaYeah, a lot of them really do believe in like literal physical healings and so on and so forth. They they think that that is like actually happening and that that is evidence of like physical, tangible evidence of God.
JakeYeah, and I have no idea, or I don't know if we can even know what fraction that is in what direction. There's certainly a lot of both.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Uh I mean, there's been there's actually definitely been like polling that that can be.
JakeOh, that makes sense. Yeah. That if it probably is out there.
AntheaUnfortunately, the number is higher than I would like to. There's like a really high number of Americans who believe in angels, right? Yep. Yeah. That's the one I remember. Let's see if I can find a citation for that. For a period of time.
SPEAKER_01There was for a period of time, I don't think this is true anymore, but more Americans believed they had seen a ghost than had met a trans person. Right.
AntheaYes, I believe I have heard that.
JakeThere's all those 90s documentaries like Angels in the Outfield, um, Field of Dreams. Um Angels come from baseball, right? Yes. Yeah, okay.
SPEAKER_01But only if you play for long enough.
JakeYes.
SPEAKER_01Encouraging children to do their best. In the words of Dan Knowledge Fight.
AntheaYes. Um, since we're talking about belief in God, to Yadkowski's credit.
JakeStop saying that.
AntheaHe knows that letting go of the things that you believe and accepting new things is easier said than done, and he offers at least one practical piece of advice. In the post Leave a Line of Retreat, he suggests doing a thought experiment with your most cherished beliefs. What would I do if this belief wasn't true? For example, you might hear a religious person say something along the lines of morality can only be derived from the existence of God. So you ask, hey, person who thinks that, what would you personally do if there was no God? Would you go around doing immoral stuff? Now I think that a higher than we would like percentage of religious people that we've seen in the public sphere would be like, you bet. If there was no God, I would absolutely be be fucking people of the same gender and uh and probably doing a murder.
JakeYeah, and even if they weren't saying it, they would be thinking it very loud.
SPEAKER_01Yes, yes. And that one is one that's like where I know enough about the population to say that there's like two ways of there's that group, and then there's the group of people who are like, well, I wouldn't want to do any of those things, but without God, I wouldn't be able to stop myself. Right. So, which is a little a little fun, a little fun variant on the flavor.
AntheaYeah, but I think for a lot of people, if you press them on it, if you were like, hey, if God, if there if God was not, you know, if God, if God didn't exist, would you want to murder your brother? And he was like, no. Because, you know, Kant was like, hey, morality doesn't have to derive from the existence of the divine, right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, you'd have to set it up right, but but yes. Yeah, the question.
AntheaYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So but I think broadly speaking, sure. Like, so sitting with the thought and and I think that this is an interesting well, okay. Sitting with that thought experiment of what would I, a person who believes in God, do if I found out there was no God, like you were doing just now, is is a form of psychological flexibility. And that's a good healthy thing to have. It's fun to practice. It's good to practice, yeah.
JakeWhat do rationalists feel generally about therapy or counseling or things in that sphere?
AntheaYeah, we know journalists suck, but psychologists. I honestly well, I mean, Scott Alexander is a psychologist.
SPEAKER_01Doesn't he believe in human biodiversity?
AntheaYes, he does.
SPEAKER_01Okay, so he's a shitty psychologist.
AntheaBut he does but like he he has written about like providing therapy on psych wards and stuff. Like he's a therapist. Like he and and I'm I'm going to avoid saying anything I think I you know, I know what you just said, but I'm going to avoid saying anything that I think about that guy's professional qualifications, because I genuinely don't know.
SPEAKER_01It's another argument to be made for healthcare reform.
JakeSo it sounds like it's something that doesn't come up often enough for it to clearly be like rationalists tend to lean towards this way or that way.
AntheaI j I it's really just that I haven't dug into it. Like I I have not gone looking for, you know, something uh fun to that I do sometimes is I go, was it Joe who was saying this? But I like sometimes I just go on to Less Wrong and I like type in a search term to see what they say about things. Um and then I go down that rabbit hole uh and learn, yeah, and that was that was Joe, right?
SPEAKER_01You were talking to Joe when you said it, yeah.
AntheaYeah, yeah, and uh and Joe was like, that sounds like you are rationalizing your psychosis. And I was like, you're not wrong! Yay! Um but I just haven't, I like I haven't not dug into what I I th I genuinely think it would be interesting to go dig into like, hey, cognitive behavioral therapy, what pops up on less wrong about that.
JakeJust type in CBT though, because some other things might come up in the world. I know, I've I've I've made that mistake already.
AntheaYeah, yeah. Um I did, I was poking through the CFAR handbook recently a little bit, and um the exercises that they're doing are again, they're just dialectical behavioral therapy. They're just therapeutic things. And that leads me to think that they're my impression is that the community is not anti-therapy or anti uh you know, psychmeds in the way that like Scientologists are, right? Um, but I don't really have evidence to support any particular conclusion about it right now.
SPEAKER_01Okay. So far I'm hearing a little bit of like the same way they feel about philosophy, which is like it's cool, it's definitely awesome. It's kind of better if we feel like we invented it.
AntheaI think that's a very distinct possibility. I I think that they do, I think that frequently the community comes to conclusions that other therapists and and therapeutic like uh modes came to a long time ago.
JakeThis is 2007, and we thought of this for the first time.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, exactly. I invented the restaurant.
AntheaExactly, exactly, exactly. Well, and and to this point about ther like like psychological flexibility was a really was a really important thing for me to learn at one point in my life, right? Like after I spent a year in a very toxic workplace, I had a belief that I have articulated here as making a mistake means I'm not worthy of having a job and probably deserve punishment, therefore I must grovel to protect myself if I make a mistake. That's what I came out of that workplace with, right?
SPEAKER_01That makes me sad.
AntheaIt was bad. It was bad for me.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
AntheaAnd then part of how I got through that was like kind of doing this thought experiment of like sitting there and being like, okay, let's just take part of that. What if what if making a mistake does not determine my entire employability and worth as a person? What would I do if that were the case? I it's not like I would suddenly be like, I can make as many mistakes as I want. I would still try and not make mistakes because I don't want to make mistakes for other reasons, but I would not like go into fighter flighter fawn to my boss. So you know. So this this thing about like leave yourself a line of the of retreat, sort of pre-prepare yourself for how how would I get out of this belief if evidence came to me that made me need to like examine that. That's a practical piece of advice. Good job. He puts it, it takes way too long to explain, way more words to explain it than he needs to. Um he also suggests that you update yourself incrementally. Uh although elsewhere in an essay called The Importance of Saying Oops, he says it is better to swallow the bitter pill of being wrong all in one go, so I don't know where I'm supposed to land here.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, not very practical.
AntheaBut his his update yourself uh incrementally thing is like, okay, okay. I'm very proud of this, so we're gonna go through it. Like, okay, you've got your you've got your belief and you've got your evidence for your belief set up. So I like to imagine a scale with a couple of pans.
JakeIs that a Libra thing?
AntheaYeah. Um let's use an innocuous but subjective belief like country music sucks. That's my belief. My belief leads me to anticipate that if I hear a twangy song, it's gonna suck. You have strong evidence of God bless the USA and Toby Keith's entire discography in one pan. So your belief is quite strongly supported that country music sucks. When you first encounter counter evidence to your belief, like hearing goodbye Earl for the first time. Yes. Um, that might that is not necessarily going to maybe that's the exception, right? Right. But you should update your belief incrementally. You should say, alright, there's a little bit of evidence that country music doesn't suck. Um, and then maybe you hear The High Women and you're like, that slapped, actually. And then Cowboy Carter is the album that tips you all the way over to actually country music is okay. Um, and then maybe try that if a small town comes out and you have to update, and then and that's really strong evidence that country music sucks, actually. So you update incrementally back in the other direction. Yeah. Like, that's a fine, fine way to like do this, like totally update incrementally. I think that is also practical advice. Good job. Thank you. Side Note. The comments for this post are for the post update yourself incrementally are dominated by a guy coming in and doggedly attempting to get people to take psychic powers seriously. It's incredible. He's like, you have to read this specific book. It's called Irreducible Mind. I will snail mail excerpts to you. Yadkowski, you talk a big game about how you're willing to look at the evidence, but you will look at the evidence in this book that sci powers are real. And everybody's like, please stop. You sound like you're just shilling this book.
JakeYeah, big one-sided rivalry energy there.
AntheaExactly, exactly. I don't even know who you are, man. It's so funny.
SPEAKER_01That's fascinating.
AntheaAnyway, who cares?
SPEAKER_01Yep. Who cares?
AntheaHarry offers to share his knowledge of science with Draco, and there is just one condition. Back to the text. I just want you to know. I'm offering to share some of my knowledge. If you want. There's just one condition. Uh-huh. Draco said. You know, father says that whenever someone says that to you, it is never a good sign, ever. Harry nodded. Now, don't mistake me and think that I'm trying to drive a wedge between you and your father. It's not about that. It's just about me wanting to deal with someone my own age, rather than having this be between me and Lucius. I think your father would be okay with that too. He knows you have to grow up sometime. But your moves in our game have to be your own. That's my condition. That I'm dealing with you, Draco, not your father. I've got to go, Draco said. He stood off. Stood up. I've got to go off and think about this. Take your time, Harry said. The sounds of the train platform changed from blurs into murmurs as Draco wandered off. Harry slowly exhaled the air he'd been holding in without quite realizing it, and then looked at the watch on his wrist, a simple mechanical model that his father had bought him in hope it would work in Magic's presence. The second hand was still ticking, and if the minute hand was right, then it wasn't quite eleven just yet. He probably ought to get on the train soon and start looking for a what's her face. But it seemed worth taking a few minutes for us to do some breathing exercises and see if his blood warmed up again. But when Harry looked up from his watch, he saw two figures approaching, looking utterly ridiculous with their faces cloaked by winter scarves. Hello, Mr. Bronze, said one of the masked figures. Can we interest you in joining the Order of Chaos?
SPEAKER_01I hope that's Fred and George.
AntheaYou're so smart.
JakeI'm assuming it is. Yeah, you guys are so smart. It's two people, so that means that means it's a little bit more.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. And they're looking kooky. Um, so yes. Uh I think also, okay, so his blood has to warm up, so he went into logic robot mode.
AntheaMm-hmm. Um I actually genuinely, because there's no like explicit thing about why his blood is cold, I genuinely don't know how to read that. Okay, fair enough. So he may not have gone into uh like I I it very well could be that his blood is running cold because he's dealing with a psychopath that he thinks is not a psychopath.
JakeYeah, and that's how I read it, is that he was chilled by Draco's. Yeah, yeah. Like more Draco's demeanor than anything.
AntheaYeah, but that would be interesting. Also, in the last chapter, every time we talked about blood running cold, it was because he was going into angry robot mode. So, like, right, so I'm like, what do I do with this?
JakeOh, I think it's lazy writing.
AntheaYeah. Yes, absolutely no, 100%.
JakeUsing the same phrasing in different situations. Like I don't like I think again, you as a writer and editor, clocked as like, wait, you're saying the same thing again. I think you're giving him too much credit.
SPEAKER_01Yes. No, something that I think is actually that could that could be genuinely good writing but isn't, um, is the idea that like um Harry is convincing himself, rationalizing one might say, that Draco is just the kind of kid who just shows up in a society like this. He's not exceptionally psych psychopathic or he's not a monster. Oh, yeah. Sorry, you finished your thought. And yet interacting with him freaks him the fuck out and his blood runs cold. Yeah. I remember I this is not gonna take a long time, but I remember that I was at a hostel with some guys, um, and like we got along well. I would come down and drink, and I was at writing poetry, and they were drinking also, and we just talked about a bunch of stuff, and they mentioned that there was this one guy who had gotten like who had put his hand on someone's throat. And they described this as like it freaked them out, right? And um, but when I pushed, like that guy sounds dangerous. They were like, Well, he was drinking. And I said, Well, you guys were drinking. And like, there's something, there's something about him that's making you realize that like this was not okay. And I think like those types of things, again, because of rape culture, because of a violent ambient culture, because of like the way that we talk about what it means to be a man. Like, these guys simultaneously were not okay with what he had this guy had done, but they were unable to think of it as deviating from the norm of masculinity.
AntheaMm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
JakeYeah, baseline male.
AntheaBaseline male. Um, I also want to point out that Harry knows enough about Harry apparently knows enough about human psychology to know Okay. Harry knows enough about human psychology to be like, uh, this is just the baseline male. Is people are all like this. People it's very specific I do want to say very specifically, I think what he's what Gudkowski is trying to say is that uh is that the baseline human condition is to think of your enemies as not people. Not necessarily to think that rape is the thing that you should do. Sure. But regardless. Um but he doesn't know enough about human psychology to know that one of the hallmarks of sociopathy is glib, charming, superf or is superficial charm.
JakeLike Yeah, well, because I think it's, you know, it's another symptom of Harry always vacillating wildly and without like any way to identify when is this the written character and when is it Edub insert?
SPEAKER_03Right, right.
JakeSometimes he knows everything Yadkowski does, and sometimes he is a child.
AntheaRight.
JakeAnd it's rarely an indication to tell when he is in what mode.
AntheaWell, right, and then I'm under, does Yadkowski not know that like glib that's that like superficial charm is created like all narco-sociopathy?
JakeIt's no trust environment. Like the way it's been established is like there is you shouldn't be giving a benefit of a doubt because like the doubt has been established as reasonable.
SPEAKER_03Right.
JakeSo there should not be any mixed terminology.
SPEAKER_01No, I got I got I think it's all. And to complicate it slightly, sociopathy, if Draco Malfoy is a sociopath, that doesn't make him a monster. It makes him a it means he has a different personality type that we usually identify as being abnormal or non-ideal for reasons, some of which are good and some of which are bad. Because, like, for instance, there's like a tendency towards risk taking and various things like that can put the individual at risk. Indeed. Um, in ways that other people don't, but also like anyway, so there's thank you. That's a good redirect. Yeah, no, I remember, oh gosh, I wish I could find it, but there was a really cool YouTube video where somebody who like cares for people who like who have that diagnosis were talking about like here's some stuff that people don't understand about living with this condition. And one of them was that like actually a lot of the time there's self-harming behaviors that come up because of like risk calibration, risk taking impulsivity, etc. Sure.
AntheaAnyway, it is once again that thing where like people who are mentally ill are more at are at higher risk for harm to themselves one way or another, yeah than at risk of harming others.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, and um, and so and like I don't even know that this is like it is a a mental illness qua mental illness, so much as like I mean, yeah, it so much as like a just a subset of like kind of personality arrangements of personality traits. Anyway, blah blah blah. Um justice for sociopaths. And um hot take. Hot take. Uh second is um is uh I also think again, I have I'm now just reading Draco as Phaedra no Delaney. Um I love this. Uh because like I think that the idea, like the idea that Harry comes out with here, from what you've read to us, it feels like it kind of comes from out of left field. And the only way that it really makes sense is if you are mapping on this idea of somebody who has been trained from infancy to be his family's tool in acquiring information and influence.
JakeAnd that's that kind of describes scions of noble houses.
SPEAKER_01Like, not directly, but Yeah, but it's kind of at least the trope of that.
JakeYes, that that's maybe a better way to say it.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah. But so it's kind of weird that like all that he's like that that from this, he's like, the important thing, Draco, is that I need to be dealing with you and not your father.
SPEAKER_03Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01Like it's a little I find it a little strange and discordant, and it only to me, it makes a lot more sense when you put your decoder lens of Cushiel's dart onto it.
AntheaI love that. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I wonder if anything in this final coda where we in the in the aftermath section where we spend some time in Draco's point of view will uh uh confirm that or not.
JakeIt's love to be in this guy's head.
AntheaI want to kiss Harry on the mouth. Oh yeah. Also, I I can't help but read the whole like uh but they're but we're both but but we're too young, but boys can't get pregnant. But there's nothing between us really as like a dig at shippers. Oh yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah, okay, okay. I'm glad we're all on the same page.
SPEAKER_01Those people are totally crazy. They didn't even have the cognitive flexibility to imagine Petunia as hot.
AntheaExactly. So ends Harry's time on platform nine and three-quarters. This chapter ends with a color. The train hasn't left? No! Oh my god! Ah, they're not even on the train yet. That was ex- that was explicit there. I know, but he said platform and I was like, that can't be right.
SPEAKER_01They must be on the train by now.
AntheaOkay. Um uh so the aftermath finds Draco in his private room in Slytherin House after the sorting and everything else. He starts writing a letter to Lucius and finds himself stymied by what exactly to say. Uh, from the text. Draco wasn't stupid. He was young, but his tutors had trained him well. Draco knew that Potter probably felt a lot more sympathy towards Dumbledore's faction than Potter was letting on, though Draco did think Potter could be tempted. But it was crystal clear that Potter was trying to tempt Draco, just as Draco was trying to tempt him. And it was also clear that Potter was brilliant, and a whole lot more than just slightly mad, and playing a vast game that Potter himself mostly didn't understand, improvised at top speed with the subtlety of a rampanging noundu. But Potter had managed to choose a tactic that Draco couldn't just walk away from. He had offered Draco a part of his own power, gambling that Draco couldn't use it without becoming more like him. His father had called this an advanced technique, and had warned Draco that it often didn't work. Draco knew he hadn't understood everything that had happened. But Potter had offered him the chance to play, and right now it was his. And if he blurted the whole thing out, it would become father's. So he thinks about this, and he decides that this is that he finally has secrets to keep, and he's going to keep it a secret. But he wrote Draco wrote out the one question that really had gnawed at him about the whole affair. The part that it seemed he ought to understand, but he didn't, not at all. Dear father. Suppose I dear papa! Suppose I told you that I met a student at Hogwarts, not already part of our circle of acquaintances, who called you a flawless instrument of Was this Harry Potter?
JakeAre you talking about Harry Potter?
SPEAKER_01Stop trying to set your dad up with Harry Potter.
AntheaSorry, sorry. Think about what that would do to your mother! Suppose I told you that I met a student at Hogwarts, not already part of our circle of acquaintances, who called you a flawless instrument of death and said that I was your one weak point. What would you say about him? It didn't take long after that for the family owl to bring the reply. I have questions about that as well, but we are never gonna get the answers to that.
SPEAKER_01So the owl took some flu powder and went into a chimney. Genuinely, I'm like, that's the only thing that makes sense. The owl actually knows how to operate. Maybe. Quick stop by the moon, and then it headed to Malvoy Manor or whatever the fuck.
AntheaI don't remember if I picked a voice for Lucius. It's probably really similar to the voice I've been using for Draco. So my beloved son. I would say that you would have been so fortunate as to meet someone who enjoys the intimate confidence of our friend and valuable ally, Severus Snape. Draco stared at the letter for a while and finally threw it into the fire. And that's the end of the chapter. Um, okay, I've done you guys get anything out of that? I have thoughts, but like, did anything did you get anything out of any of that besides that Draco was trying to set Lucius up with Harry?
JakeYeah, I don't know. It seemed to just kind of recap a bunch of stuff that was already blatantly like super text. Like it seemed like it was treating things as subtext that needed to be unpacked that did not need to be.
SPEAKER_01Harry is so smart and cool and smart and cool. Yes.
AntheaYeah, yeah. I mean, yes, that's a very important part of it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Every single, every single little coda so far has been about multiple, one or more character, multiple characters, actually, because it's always in or there's so far it's been McGonigal and Dumbledore, and now it's uh Lucius and Draco talking to each other about how brilliant and overwhelming uh and vivacious and dynamic Harry is. Right.
JakeFather, it's okay to kiss a boy if he's amazing enough.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Exactly. I don't even really think of him as a boy, more like a genius. More like an algernon. Exactly.
AntheaUm I think the other thing is that yet again I'm like Gitkowski doesn't didn't used to not like being identified as a teenage boy.
unknownOkay.
AntheaThat's why I made that joke. I have to explain the joke because there's a lot of context that I know you guys don't have.
JakeI was just thinking that Algernon guy was smart in the flowers book, so you nailed it. Oh, really?
SPEAKER_01Alright, great. Um I think the other thing that I c that comes to mind for me again is just the idea of like, God, this Draco is so not supported by canon.
AntheaSay more. He's if you have any more.
SPEAKER_01He's a lot smarter and more emotionally aware. Like, this is a Draco who's a chess master. And like maybe he's a baby chess master, but he's still like thinking about like Draco in the books is a fucking bully. He has two meathead enforcers. He's not interested in actual game playing in any way that like makes any sense. He gets roped into agreeing to assassinate Dumbledore for reasons that make it seem like Isn't that something like like it's like some kind of weird trick.
AntheaSomeone's got like a like a blood debt or something. Yeah, I genuinely don't remember.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, no, and it's like a thing where like then Snape does it, and part of that like proves that he's really a true Death Eater, like after all the double agenting. I don't remember. Yeah, triple agenting, but like he very he falls, he's he ends up getting used as a total pawn in this in this game, and that's when he's older. Um so the idea of this as like in as I uh thinking about uh you know, I was like, where am I getting this? And I realized it's from I am not a serial killer. Um the idea of what does he do that he doesn't have to do? What does Yadkowski do that he doesn't have to do? What does he do that is a departure from the original text? And what does that tell us about what Yatkowski thinks is important? It's so important that Draco be this brilliant little manipulator who's been trained from infancy in the subtle arts of emotional. He doesn't do emotional manipulation, he doesn't do subtlety in the book. He throws racial slurs. Yes.
JakeYeah, no, he is on the receiving end of that. Yeah, like he is the one being emotionally manipulated.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
JakeLike he is just like if anyone has played Life is Strange, like he is just Nathan Prescott from that game, like through and through, cut and dry.
SPEAKER_01As I recall, it's that he agrees to this thing, and then Narcissa is like, holy fucking shit, that's not gonna I'm that's not gonna work for me. Right. And then she gets Severus to say that he'll do it, I believe.
AntheaYeah, I think that's right. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I could be wrong about that, but that's my recollection. Check the show notes. Um so yeah, that's more or less what I have to have to say. And like I don't know entirely what that might mean yet, but I think again, we see Draco's being chosen instead of Ron. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Draco, Draco is so much more preferable to Ron.
JakeBecause he is crueler, therefore smarter.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. I mean, his cruelty is kind of the only thing that we I guess like his little like improv thing. But again, to your point, like Anthea, like he's not that much better at improvising about Harry's disguise than Ron. No. Um, he's both of them are pretty willing to roll with it. Um, the only thing that he won't let go of is being cruel. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And Harry sort of plays a bit of a role, like, certainly he does like de-escalate that situation, but it seems like it's more because he wants to avoid a scene and he doesn't feel like it would reflect well on him than because he is upset that Draco is on purpose, since the start of the conversation, poking at things that hurt Ron.
AntheaYeah, yeah. Yeah, and yeah, like like he does not go on to call Draco out for having been cruel. You know, he he just is like, yeah, I I don't hate that guy.
SPEAKER_01It's giving me discourtesy is unspeakably ugly to me, except that even Hannibal Lecter has the decency to actually find it unspeakably ugly rather than, ooh, kind of a gaff. Yeah. So I think that that's so like what does he do that he doesn't have to do? He's made Draco really, really cool and really competent. He has not in any way adjusted Draco's cruelty, and he has made that something that Harry prefers by a mile to run.
AntheaRight, right. Even and and yes, because to your like, even though Harry is horrified by the way Draco is even though he's horrified by Draco's cruelty and by Draco's barbar, you know, like like blithe acceptance of barbarism, um he is willing to say this makes perfect s like this kid is acting in a way that is logical for a kid who was raised in these circumstances. He's he's working really hard to avoid his own bias of the fundamental attribution error when it comes to Draco.
JakeYeah, he's using a lot of words to say boys will be boys for Draco.
AntheaKind of, kind of, yeah. Like, I'll push back on that a little bit to say, like, he's saying culture has made this boy into the kind of boy he is.
JakeYes, like it is, it is beyond Draco's will to act differently.
AntheaYes.
JakeHe's just been shaped this way. Yes. It's out of his control.
AntheaYes, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Um he does not extend any grace to any any similar, like maybe Ron is into sports because he was raised in a sports-loving family, or because sports are important to the culture of the wizarding of wizarding Britain.
JakeYeah, and also maybe Quidditch rules. You haven't watched it yet. You don't know, yeah.
AntheaLike, maybe it's I didn't know. Wait, I did say JK JK Rowling was like, I did find a quote from her where she was like, I actually got really tired of writing Quidditch seats. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01I kind of regretted introducing it. Yeah. Um, Ron also, um, of things that we see, just things in the text. Ron also is able to explain the rules of Quidditch. He has at his just in his brain, he has a certain amount of uh statistics about what types of points are scored. Yeah. And here you have to think, God, somebody who can keep all that stuff in his head, if only I could get him interested in science. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what the fuck, Yatkowski? Yeah. What the like that, I actually, again, worried that I'm not being fun. But like, I try to think of myself as kind of a cool girl. Um, no, but like, it actually, like, when you when you put it in those terms of like the things that Harry could think about Draco, could say to Draco, doesn't, the things that he does think about Ron and the things, and also the things that like he doesn't think about Ron. He doesn't think Ron is worth, he doesn't, he doesn't, he looks at Ron and he makes the estimation that like Ron is not contributing anything. There's no point in his existing. Um, there's no point to Ron. Um that's honestly like I think if I had to pick between what is worse in this chapter, I think that that is worse than I'm gonna rape Luna Lovegood. There's something that's just so fundamentally and totally cruel and dismissive about that.
AntheaI kind of agree. I I tend to agree. Like, I the the the rape threat is so shocking that I I think it's appropriate we spend as much time as we did. Talking about it like it's fucked up. It's fucked up. And and when you well I have seen other people be like, what the fuck was this? Like when they're reading the fic. Like, holy shit, what the fuck?
SPEAKER_01Um Chapter five is where it really gets good. Chapter 7 is where it backslides. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
JakeYou know, that it's almost the equivalent of like sending someone a like style project link or whatever a modern equivalent is, like a shock content link.
unknownYeah.
JakeWhile the something like that. Um but like the Ron thing seems just like an earnestly said thing. Yeah, exactly. This wasn't said for the purpose of like, oh my god, the vapors. Right.
AntheaLike it seems to just be like, no, this is because he doesn't he doesn't unpack it at all. Like Harry just says, or Draco says, there's no reason for her to exist, right? And Harry agrees, and then they move on. Harry objects to the idea that rape is an okay thing to do. Like a or like a like a fun thing to do. Like, and the text spends time going, no, no, no, that's very bad. Very, very bad, and we should destroy the legal system that allows such things. Um, without talking at all about whether that continues to happen in America and Britain.
SPEAKER_01Um, I can also see uh a hypothetical listener saying, Alisa, your brain has just been warped by the woke mind virus. Sure. And I mean, probably. And you're not thinking about the fact that this is actually a really clever tongue-in-cheek reference to the fact that Ron is a redundant character in the narrative. Like, there's no reason for him to exist because J.K. Rowling's not a good writer and Yakowski is fixing it. But to them, I would continue to ask the question why does he decide that what we need is a character like Draco? Why is Draco in the wrong spot?
AntheaMm-hmm.
SPEAKER_01I also want to Because Draco is a less good Harry Potter, like also in this in this universe. He's he's rational, but he's not as rational. He's he's got these like subtle arts of manipulation that Harry manages to outmaneuver him in all of these conversations anyway. Right at the moment.
JakeIs it a common take that Ron's a pointless character?
SPEAKER_01Well, so this is what I was gonna say. I'm just saying that if you are interpreting, if you're interpreting, if you want to say, no, no, no, no, this is not saying anything about the worth of the human being, Ron. This so what could it possibly say instead? That's the only thing I can think of. I just wasn't sure.
JakeI was checking to make sure I wasn't missing something in common Harry Potter conception.
AntheaI think I think that there is a thing though, because like I would I I my theory is that Yadkowski is heavily and and and this is not just a Yadkowski problem, this is a Harry Potter fandom thing, I think. Is that the movies ended up heavily influencing how people thought of the characters, and because the movies have so much to compress into like because they have a compressed amount of story space, Ron Ron got flanderized into more of a comic relief character. Um now, admittedly, I only watched the first four movies, I haven't seen the the last four, so I don't know how much that continues into like the end of the series. Because I know that I remember that in the books, as the series goes on, like Ron joins the Quidditch team, and uh he like again he's he's not the smart he's like he kinda he has to work really hard to get good grades, but like he does fine. Um he's a good he's good on the Quidditch team, so's Ginny. Like all the Weasleys are all really good at Quidditch. They're jocks. They're jocks. Fred and George are are on the Gryffindor team. Um Ginny's on the team. Ron gets onto the team.
SPEAKER_01So like the whole family is athletic and good at Quidditch. Ron has a son and like Bill, isn't it Bill? One of them works at Gringotts and one of them trains dragons or whatever.
AntheaI can't remember which Bill and Charlie. I can't remember. Yeah, yeah. Percy is uh Percy is a real like like he's the dweeb of the family. He's the smart one. Um and he goes to work at the ministry. But like, point being like Ron in the in the movies I know that Ron got kind of sidelined into this uh into the this like goofy, like Shaggy, he's he's shaggy and Scooby-Doo.
SPEAKER_01In the later movies, he definitely gives Harry some much needed reality checks. Okay. About like just about, um, for instance, like, and also strategically minded, like, um, because when we were visiting my cousin in the hospital, my cousin was just in the hospital. Um, but when we were visiting him He's out of the hospital. He's out of the hospital, he's he's he's good, he's safe at home. Um uh when we were in there, there was uh Harry Potter half marathon where they were only showing the latter couple of movies over and over.
JakeOh, I thought you say just the second half of every movie. It's like that's insane.
SPEAKER_01But like after so after like the thing where like they all are um they take Poly G's potions, so there's a bunch of decoy Harries and they all set off and they get attacked. Um Harry wants to go off immediately, right? And like fight fight them. Um the Death Eaters. Fight the Death Eaters. And Ron is like, hey, that's exactly what he wants you to do. Um, and also there's a lot of other people who've invested a lot in this, and it's not gonna be fair to them if you throw it all away, just playing into his hands, basically. That's how I read it. So, like, he definitely like the that idea of like that sort of core of like he has a good strategic mind when he gets out of his own way um is still there.
AntheaYeah, okay, okay.
JakeYeah, he seems a lot like the Sokka of Harry Potter, like the driver's. Oh yes!
AntheaAbsolutely. No, that's a great poll. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. Um so so but I but I think yes, very, very, very that's so so great. And I think that that is so he but I do think the movies had this like like tendency to make him the comic relief because he is he can be kind of bumbling, and like Hermione can't be bumbling, she's too competent, and Harry can't be bumbling, he's our hair our hero.
SPEAKER_01So he can sort of bumble a little bit if it's charming.
AntheaYeah, yeah. And in the original books, he's the one you know, he's he is the one who like is throwing up slugs for a while and all that kind of stuff. So that's data point one. Data point two, Tom Felton is hot, who played Draco Melody.
SPEAKER_01Oh yeah.
AntheaAnd I think that that like that, but I guess we're gonna be able to think of a child, so we're also bad. Um, and I think that he and I and I think that the uh the adaptational attractiveness of Tom Felton playing Draco made a lot of people go, oh, Draco must have something redeeming. Look how hot he is. A lot of fans, right? And I think Yydkowski has just fallen into this same thing that Cassandra Clare fell into. As you you know, you brought up Draco in leather pants and the Draco trilogy earlier. I think it's exactly the same fandom thing because Yudkowski is not above tropes. And he's not above falling in. So I think that's the thing.
JakeI think he read the beginning part. He said he's he's above tropes. Oh fuck, you're right. I forgot. We gotta roll this back up because I'm gonna do that.
SPEAKER_01I just feel like hearing that that makes sense, but I'm like, that's not my problem. He's the one who's saying he's a rationalist. Like, it's not my problem if he looks at something and sees something that isn't there, doesn't check, and then puts that into his fucking fan.
AntheaThat's what I'm saying. I think that his biases are making him make these plot choices.
SPEAKER_03Oh yeah, don't worry.
AntheaLike, about because here's another thing. Like, like, uh uh why not why not make Neville the next the other character? Right?
JakeYeah, because he's nice. I mean that's why.
AntheaAnd because he's even more useless than everybody else. And the only person who's ever going to give Neville his flowers is a different cult leader uh by the name of Andy Blake, but we'll get into that some other time.
SPEAKER_00Oh my god.
SPEAKER_01Um Yeah, no, again, what does he do that he doesn't need to do? Instead of focusing on like there's even something to the idea of like the other prophecy kid, you know, that has something, you know. Yeah, yeah.
AntheaHarry has figured out that there is a prophecy. By sure by sheer luck, he was just like, don't tell me there's a prophecy. Oh my god, there's a prophecy. He could have been like, McGonagall, tell me about the prophecy. Um she probably wouldn't have told him about Neville though. She's she's got a little more self-control than that. Um is it a problem that we talk about these characters like they're real people?
JakeWell I feel like we're talking about them like they're characters. Okay. Like this is how I feel people discuss characters.
AntheaSometimes I get worried because I'm like, I'm so defensive of these characters as if they are real people who are being slandered, and then I'm like, all of them are fake. Every version of them is fake.
JakeYeah, let me tell you about a game called Claire's gear. Um, but I think it's like I feel like there is an implied in front of like, if this character was written consistency then. Or written consistently, then McGonical would react this way. But like I feel like we just don't say that because that would make conversations take care of it.
AntheaYeah, yeah, yeah. It's okay. Thank you for I just needed that.
SPEAKER_01I'm not invested in defending the Ronness of Ron or whatever. I'm I am. Well, I'm I'm invested in like the idea of okay, if like with what rationalism is presented to be about like checking your biases and not making assumptions and blah blah blah blah blah. And like, and and Ron is presented to Harry, not as a character, but within the world of the fiction, this is just a kid he doesn't know. What does it mean when he responds to this kid he doesn't know in that way? Now, the fact that this is a fictional child doesn't really mean anything for what I'm trying to analyze.
AntheaYeah, yeah, yeah. No, yeah, yeah, yeah.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
AntheaNo, I'm with you. I'm totally with you. I was just like, I got self-conscious for a second.
SPEAKER_01Oh no, it's okay, buddy. And I like I think a question of are we fandom inflected? Certainly.
AntheaYeah, well, and that's part of why why we're here, right?
JakeI mean, if we're asking the question like, are we approaching media maybe too intensely? That's a question we should have asked before we got six hours into this podcast. I think we have accepted episodes ago, frankly. Yeah, we might be a little more intense than this, frankly, merits. Then it means the thesis.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, even if we haven't been able to outline what I'm trying to achieve through my approach to media analysis of Harry Potter characters, just having it ready to roll says something bad about me. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
AntheaWe're none of us are free from sin. No, we're all nerds here. Um, my so my take uh it was about uh was about Lucius. Um because I like I've read this chapter several times at this point, right? Um so Draco asks, uh, what if I met a student who doesn't know us who called you a flawless instrument of death and said that I was your one weak point, and that's all the information that Lucius has. And Lucius says, I think you've met someone who knows Snape.
JakeWe should keep trusting Snape based on this.
AntheaI guess. I mean, that's a fair, yeah, like I will continue to keep Snape in my confidence. Snape seems like he's keeping keeping secrets real well. But the conclusion that I drew is that Lucius is actually narrow-minded in a way that would be problematic for him to be as good at what he does as they as we think that he is. Like the to hear, like, okay, a random person uh called you a flawless instrument called Lucius a flawless instrument of death. Actually, a random person did. Harry got that information from a random person he grabbed and died in alley. Apparently, that's common knowledge, or at least a common editorialization of who is Lucius Malfoy. So is this random person like rubbing a locket fondly with a picture of I R I mean like here I will say here's here's if I were gonna if I were gonna write the fanfic of this fanfic, it would be Harry grabbing a person and being like, excuse me, sir, can you tell me about Lucius Malfoy? And that person being like, You mean that piece of shit who killed a bunch of people during the war?
JakeAre you telling me you haven't started writing this fanfic yet?
AntheaAnd Harry goes, Oh, a flawless instrument of death.
JakeYeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. They're like, yeah, he got away with war crimes, and Harry's like, wow.
AntheaWow, wow, cool.
JakeFlawless victory.
AntheaSo I don't think you need to be on intimate terms with Snape to know that, apparently.
SPEAKER_01Wait, I have a question. Yes. Why does Harry think it's so bad and terrible that um Draco might be able might seize himself as being able to commit rape with impunity because he can work loopholes in the legal system, but he doesn't think that about Lucius about when we're doing war crimes.
AntheaLucius claimed he was under that he was coerced into doing all of this. Lucius said I was just following orders, and everyone said, okay. Except that many people said, no K.
SPEAKER_01I don't believe that. That's what the random bystanders said. Yeah, yeah. Um, so like that is not cause to tear down this society.
AntheaYeah, wild.
SPEAKER_01Fucking wild. Okay. No, that's a great point. Um two.
AntheaUh okay. Deducing that Draco is Lucius's quote, one weak point is maybe a little more interesting because maybe it's not common knowledge that Lucius missed that vote to go be with his son.
SPEAKER_01Um And maybe it's not common knowledge that he's not in love with his wife anymore.
AntheaFuck. One weak point! Right, right. Um, but here's the here's like, okay, because like I'm like, okay, I I was writing this and I was like, do I know of any senators off the top of my head who missed a vote because they had to go be with their kid? Uh and I was like, no, but you know what? Hunter Biden is Joe Biden's weak point because Biden's family died in a car crash. Yep. And everybody knows that. Yeah. And then his older son died of brain cancer. And then and so now Hunter Biden is his weak point because he loves his family. I don't have to know anybody who knows Joe Biden intimately to come to that conclusion.
SPEAKER_01You must be in the confidence of Nancy Pelosi.
AntheaA flawless instrument of death. Yes.
JakeAlso, why are you so such close friends with people who routinely recognize your one weak point?
unknownYeah.
JakeLike, that's what I was getting at before. Like your friends. Maybe you're trying to hang out the stage too much of me spending this time identifying your weak point.
AntheaYour game theory seems really bad. Keep your friends close. Your enemies closely.
JakeThat's the only reason.
AntheaYeah, because he's a white hat hacker.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
AntheaDefinitely.
SPEAKER_01Uh, your frenemy's closest of all.
AntheaYeah. So anyway, I just I found that the the aftermath I I is just weird. It's just a weird little thing.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
AntheaAnd that brings us to the end of this chapter. Oh my god. Are you sure there's not a little bit more?
JakeAre you positive it's recording? Fuck you, Jake! I've learned how to give podcasters panic attacks.
AntheaHell yeah! I'll throw myself out this window. Do we have any closing thoughts? Rape's bad. Yeah. Don't do it.
JakeYeah.
AntheaUm, eugenics also bad. Don't do that either.
SPEAKER_01Um, I would say that like another this is this is my closing thought. My last thought. Is um the last thought in my brain before it all just flickers out. Um is that another thing that doesn't seem to respond super easily to this idea of like updating your beliefs or like doing it, you know, embracing the truth like a leaf on the wind or what the fuck ever. Yeah. Um, is uh my belief is that all human beings are self-originating sources of claims with intrinsic worth. How would I behave if that weren't true? There's no way the how Oh yeah.
AntheaI I like when I read that, I was like, alright, what is my most cherished belief? I have and and the one I came up with was the was was feminism. Like I one of my most cherished beliefs and like core beliefs is that people who are not men are have equal dignity and ability as people who are men, and that law and that society should reflect that. And I tried to think about like what would I do if I received evidence that that was not true, and I I think that what I would do is that I would try and make it true. Yeah, like maybe and maybe that's maybe that's just not a useful one to like try and use as an example, but for me it's like kind of like intrinsic worth and being self-originating sources of claims, which basically means like you can you want you can want things for yourself that have validity because you want them.
SPEAKER_01It's kind of like the the sort of I mean this is not a great definition of it, sorry, but but um uh I think John Rolls is where I'm getting this from. Uh but um you know it's it's part and parcel of an argument about consent, right? Is like a thing that a person wants or does not want for themselves, within themselves has inherent value. How do you make how does that how do you say that that's not true? If somebody has inherent worth, well, what does that mean? It's not something you can measure, it's not something that the inherent worth does not derive from their IQ, it doesn't derive from their skills um or how hot they are or anything like that.
AntheaOr how flawless an instrument of death I am.
SPEAKER_01Or how flawless an instrument of death they are. Though if there was one thing that I would say would sort of point in that direction, it would be that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you already said hot. It's the same, it's the same thing, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So true. Sorry, Jake, I cut you off. What were you gonna say?
JakeI forgot which thing I was responding to. I think it's just gonna be a quip anyway. That's your own. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I do think, like, summing up like my takeaways, like, I'm worried, like, as you read more things, like the the 12 epithets of rationality or whatever it was. Um, I'm worried that this fanfic is the best thing Gitkowski has written. Oh I hear something else, I'm like, fuck the sky. And at least with a fanfic, it's like, okay, cool. You can't use weird interest and like even make a joke sometimes. That's cool. But now it's like Sun Tzu said, keep your righteousness at your back and flow with uh blah blah blah blah blah.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm.
unknownYeah.
AntheaYou don't know how accurate you are.
SPEAKER_01Oh my god.
JakeI'm getting the sense of it.
AntheaYeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, right, there comes a point where where, you know, as with as with Knowledge Fight, we start this this podcast off with me knowing lots and you guys knowing very little, but it actually doesn't take that long for you guys to be like, I got the measure of this guy. I can predict this with a high level of accuracy.
JakeOh, me when I was 15? Cool, got it. Yeah.
AntheaOh man. Well, okay. Thank you for this was I I really did not think this was gonna take this long. Thank you for sticking with it. Thank you for listening. You can hear a dog.
JakeMaybe do another clean dog looking at the time. I think this is the right time.
AntheaOur website is hpmore and the limits of rationality dot buzz spout buzzsprout.com. You can find us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Podcasts, and other places. Probably, if you like the podcast, tell your friends. If you don't like this podcast, uh holy shit, this was a long series of episodes for you to get to this point.
JakeBut still tell your friends, we like the hate listens.
AntheaYeah, yeah. Or tell your enemies. Uh leave us five-star rating or review in places that let you do that. And we will see you next time when we are on the Hogwarts Express, and we meet one Hermione Granger.
JakeI fear for tomorrow.
AntheaHave fun on your boat.
JakeFun on your boat.
AntheaThe Harry Potter universe is copyright to J.K. Rowling, and Harry Potter and the methods of rationality and the sequences are copyright Eliezer Yodkowski. 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 Sharealike 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.
