Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Harry had been warned, he’d known on some level or the Vow wouldn’t have stopped him, and yet he’d still almost made the wrong choice and destroyed the world. Harry could look back now and see that, yes, the alternate-Harry with no Vow would’ve had trouble accepting the reasoning that said you couldn’t get magical healing to Muggles as fast as possible. If the alternate-Harry had acknowledged the danger at all, he would have rationalized it, tried to figure out some clever way around the problem and refused to accept taking a few years longer to do it, and so the world would have ended. Even after all the warnings Harry had received, it still wouldn’t have worked without the Unbreakable Vow.

One tiny strand of Time, being threaded through a needle’s eye.

Harry didn’t know how to handle this revelation. It wasn’t a sort of situation that human beings had evolved emotions to handle. All Harry could do was stare at how close he had come to disaster, might come again to disaster if that Vow was fated to trigger more than once, and think…

Think…

‘I don’t want that to happen again’ didn’t seem like the right thought. He’d never wanted to destroy the world in the first place. Harry hadn’t lacked for protective feelings about Earth’s sapient population, those protective feelings had been the problem in a way. What Harry had lacked was some element of clear vision, of being willing to consciously acknowledge what he’d already known deep down.

And the whole thing with Harry having spent the last year cozying up to the Defense Professor didn’t speak highly of his intellect either. It seemed to point to the same problem, even. There were things Harry had known or strongly suspected on some level, but never promoted to conscious attention. And so he had failed and nearly died.

I need to raise the level of my game.

That was the thought Harry was looking for. He had to do better than this, become a less stupid person than this.

I need to raise the level of my game, or fail.

Dumbledore had destroyed the recordings in the Hall of Prophecy and arranged for no further recordings to be made. There’d apparently been a prophecy that said Harry mustn’t look upon those prophecies. And the obvious next thought, which might or might not be true, was that saving the world was beyond the reach of prophetic instruction . That winning would take plans that were too complex for seers’ messages, or that Divination couldn’t see somehow. If there’d been some way for Dumbledore to save the world himself, then prophecy would probably have told Dumbledore how to do that. Instead the prophecies had told Dumbledore how to create the preconditions for a particular sort of person existing; a person, maybe, who could unravel a challenge more difficult than prophecy could solve directly. That was why Harry had been placed on his own, to think without prophetic guidance. If all Harry did was follow mysterious orders from prophecies, then he wouldn’t mature into a person who could perform that unknown task.

And right now, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres was still a walking catastrophe who’d needed to be constrained by an Unbreakable Vow to prevent him from immediately setting the Earth on an inevitable course toward destruction when he’d already been warned against it. That had happened literally yesterday, just one day after he’d helped Voldemort almost take over the planet.

A certain line from Tolkien kept running through Harry’s mind, the part where Frodo upon Mount Doom put on the ring, and Sauron suddenly realized what a complete idiot he’d been. ‘And the magnitude of his own folly was at last laid bare’, or however that had gone.

There was a huge gap between who Harry needed to become, and who he was right now.

And Harry didn’t think that time, life experience, and puberty would take care of that automatically, though they might help. Though if Harry could grow into an adult that was to this self what a normal adult was to a normal eleven-year-old, maybe that would be enough to steer through Time’s narrow keyhole…

He had to grow up, somehow, and there was no traditional path laid out before him for accomplishing that.

The thought came then to Harry of another work of fiction, more obscure than Tolkien:

You can only arrive at mastery by practicing the techniques you have learned, facing challenges and apprehending them, using to the fullest the tools you have been taught, until they shatter in your hands and you are left in the midst of wreckage absolute… I cannot create masters. I have never known how to create masters. Go, then, and fail… You have been shaped into something that may emerge from the wreckage, determined to remake your Art. I cannot create masters, but if you had not been taught, your chances would be less. The higher road begins after the

Art seems to fail you; though the reality will be that it was you who failed your Art.

It wasn’t that Harry had gone down the wrong path, it wasn’t that the road to sanity lay somewhere outside of science. But reading science papers hadn’t been enough. All the cognitive psychology papers about known bugs in the human brain and so on had helped, but they hadn’t been sufficient. He’d failed to reach what Harry was starting to realise was a shockingly high standard of being so incredibly, unbelievably rational that you actually started to get things right, as opposed to having a handy language in which to describe afterwards everything you’d just done wrong. Harry could look back now and apply ideas like ‘motivated cognition’ to see where he’d gone astray over the last year. That counted for something, when it came to being saner in the future. That was better than having no idea what he’d done wrong. But that wasn’t yet being the person who could pass through Time’s narrow keyhole, the adult form

whose possibility Dumbledore had been instructed by seers to create.

I need to think faster, grow up faster… How alone am I, how alone will I be? Am I making the same mistake I made during Professor Quirrell’s first battle, when I didn’t realise Hermione had captains? The mistake I made when I didn’t tell Dumbledore about the sense of doom, once I realised Dumbledore probably wasn’t mad or evil?

It would help if Muggles had classes for this sort of thing, but they didn’t. Maybe Harry could recruit Daniel Kahneman, fake his death, rejuvenate him with the Stone, and put him in charge of inventing better training methods…

Harry took the Elder Wand out of his robes, gazed again at the darkgrey wood that Dumbledore had passed down to him. Harry had tried to think faster this time, he’d tried to complete the pattern implied by the Cloak of Invisibility and the Resurrection Stone. The Cloak of Invisibility had possessed the legendary power of hiding the wearer, and the hidden power of allowing the wearer to hide from Death itself in the form of Dementors. The Resurrection Stone had the legendary power of summoning an image of the dead, and then Voldemort had incorporated it into his horcrux system to allow his spirit to move freely. The second Deathly Hallow was a potential component of a system of true immortality that Cadmus Peverell had never completed, maybe due to his having ethics.

And then there was the third Deathly Hallow, the Elder Wand of Antioch Peverell, that legend said passed from wizard to stronger wizard, and made its holder invincible against ordinary attacks; that was the known and overt characteristic…

The Elder Wand that had belonged to Dumbledore, who’d been trying to prevent the Death of the world itself.