Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

  "Erm," Harry said, "based on only that information, I'm not sure he was the main one who had a problem. I'd have told him not to date someone that incapable of forgiveness. Suppose they'd gotten married, can you imagine life in that household?"

  There was a pause.

  "Oh, but she could forgive," Severus said with amusement in his voice. "Why, afterward, she went off and became the girlfriend of the bully. Tell me, why would she forgive the bully, and not the bullied?"

  Harry shrugged. "At a wild guess, because the bully had hurt someone else very badly, and the bullied had hurt her just a little, and to her that just felt far more unforgivable somehow. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, was the bully handsome? Or for that matter, rich?"

  There was another pause.

  "Yes to both," said Severus.

  "And there you have it," said Harry. "Not that I've ever been through high school myself, but my books give me to understand that there's a certain kind of teenage girl who'll be outraged by a single insult if the boy is plain or poor, yet who can somehow find room in her heart to forgive a rich and handsome boy his bullying. She was shallow, in other words. Tell whoever it was that she wasn't worthy of him and he needs to get over it and move on and next time date girls who are deep instead of pretty."

  Severus stared at Harry in silence, his eyes glittering. The smile had faded, and though Severus's face twitched, it did not return.

  Harry was starting to feel a bit nervous. "Um, not that I've got any experience in the area myself, obviously, but I think that's what a wise adviser from my books would say."

  There was more silence and more glittering.

  It was probably a good time to change the subject.

  "So," Harry said. "Did I pass your test, whatever it was?"

  "I think," Severus said, "that there should be no more conversations between us, Potter, and you would be exceedingly wise never to speak of this one."

  Harry blinked. "Would you mind telling me what I did wrong?"

  "You offended me," said Severus. "And I no longer trust your cunning."

  Harry stared at Severus, taken rather aback.

  "But you have given me well-meant advice," said Severus Snape, "and so I will give you true advice in return." His voice was almost perfectly steady. Like a string stretched almost perfectly horizontal, despite the massive weight hanging from its middle, by a million tons of tension pulling at either end. "You almost died today, Potter. In the future, never share your wisdom with anyone unless you know exactly what you are both talking about."

  Harry's mind finally made the connection.

  "You were that -"

  Harry's mouth snapped shut as the almost died part sank in, two seconds too late.

  "Yes," said Severus, "I was."

  And the terrible tension flooded back into the room like water pressurized at the bottom of the ocean.

  Harry couldn't breathe.

  Lose. Now.

  "I didn't know," Harry whispered. "I'm s-"

  "No," said Severus. Just that one word.

  Harry stood there in silence, his mind frantically searching for options. Severus stood between him and the window, which was a real pity, because a fall from that height wouldn't kill a wizard.

  "Your books betrayed you, Potter," said Severus, still in that voice stretched tight by a million tons of pull. "They did not tell you the one thing you needed to know. You cannot learn from stories what it is like to lose the one you love. That is something you could never understand without feeling it yourself."

  "My father," Harry whispered. It was his best guess, the one thing that might save him. "My father tried to protect you from the bullies."

  A ghastly smile stretched across Severus's face, and the man moved toward Harry.

  And past him.

  "Goodbye, Potter," said Severus, not looking back on his way out. "We shall have little to say to each other from today on."

  And at the corner, the man stopped, and without turning, spoke one final time.

  "Your father was the bully," said Severus Snape, "and what your mother saw in him was something I never did understand until this day."

  He left.

  Harry turned and walked toward the window. His shaking hands went onto the ledge.

  Never give anyone wise advice unless you know exactly what you're both talking about. Got it.

  Harry stared out at the clouds and the light drizzle for a while. The window looked out on the east grounds, and it was afternoon, so if the sun was visible through the clouds at all, Harry couldn't see it.

  His hands had stopped shaking, but there was a tight feeling in Harry's chest, like it was being compressed by metal bands.

  So his father had been a bully.

  And his mother had been shallow.

  Maybe they'd grown up later. Good people like Professor McGonagall did seem to think the world of them, and it might not be only because they were heroic martyrs.

  Of course, that was scant consolation when you were eleven and about to turn into a teenager, and wondering what sort of teenager you might become.

  So very terrible.

  So very sad.

  Such an awful life Harry led.

  Learning that his genetic parents hadn't been perfect, why, he ought to spend awhile moping about that, feeling sorry for himself.

  Maybe he could complain to Lesath Lestrange.

  Harry had read about Dementors. Cold and darkness surrounded them, and fear, they sucked away all your happy thoughts and in that absence all your worst memories rose to the surface.

  He could imagine himself in Lesath's shoes, knowing that his parents were in Azkaban for life, that place from which no one had ever escaped.

  And Lesath would be imagining himself in his mother's place, in the cold and the darkness and the fear, alone with all of her worst memories, even in her dreams, every second of every day.

  For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the happy memories of their love for him. Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shutdown and told him never to imagine that again.

  Was it right to do that to anyone, even the second most evil person in the world?

  No, said the wisdom of Harry's books, not if there's any other way, any other way at all.

  And unless the wizarding justice system was as perfect as their prisons - and that sounded rather improbable, all things considered - somewhere in Azkaban was a person who was entirely innocent, and probably more than one.

  There was a burning sensation in Harry's throat, and moisture gathering in his eyes, and he wanted to teleport all of Azkaban's prisoners to safety and call down fire from the sky and blast that terrible place down to bedrock. But he couldn't, because he wasn't God.

  And Harry remembered what Professor Quirrell had said beneath the starlight: Sometimes, when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been... But the stars are so very, very far away... And I wonder what I would dream about, if I slept for a long, long time.

  Right now this flawed world seemed unusually hateful.

  And Harry couldn't understand Professor Quirrell's words, it might have been an alien that had spoken, or an Artificial Intelligence, something built along such different lines from Harry that his brain couldn't be forced to operate in that mode.

  You couldn't leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban.

  You had to stay and fight.

  Chapter 28: Reductionism

  Whatever can go Rowling will go Rowling.

  This should again go without saying, but views expressed by Severus Snape are not necessarily those of the author.

  "Okay," Harry said, swallowing. "Okay, Hermione, it's enough, you can stop."

  The white sugar pill in front of Hermione still hadn't changed shape or color at all, even though she was concen
trating harder than Harry had ever seen, her eyes squeezed shut, beads of sweat on her forehead, hand trembling as it gripped the wand -

  "Hermione, stop! It's not going to work, Hermione, I don't think we can make things that don't exist yet!"

  Slowly, Hermione's hand relaxed its grasp on the wand.

  "I thought I felt it," she said in a bare whisper. "I thought I felt it start to Transfigure, just for a second."

  There was a lump in Harry's throat. "You were probably imagining it. Hoping too hard."

  "I probably was," she said. She looked like she wanted to cry.

  Slowly, Harry took his mechanical pencil in his hand, and reached over to the sheet of paper with all the items crossed out, and drew a line through the item that said 'ALZHEIMER'S CURE'.

  They couldn't have fed anyone a Transfigured pill. But Transfiguration, at least the kind they could do, didn't enchant the targets - it wouldn't Transfigure a regular broomstick into a flying one. So if Hermione had been able to make a pill at all, it would have been a nonmagical pill, one that worked for ordinary material reasons. They could have secretly made pills for a Muggle science lab, let them study the pills and try to reverse-engineer them before the Transfiguration wore off... no one in either world would need to know that magic had been involved, it would just be another scientific breakthrough...

  It hadn't been the sort of thing a wizard would think of, either. They didn't respect mere patterns of atoms that much, they didn't think of unenchanted material things as objects of power. If it wasn't magical, it wasn't interesting.

  Earlier, Harry had very secretly - he hadn't even told Hermione - tried to Transfigure nanotechnology a la Eric Drexler. (He'd tried to produce a desktop nanofactory, of course, not tiny self-replicating assemblers, Harry wasn't insane.) It would have been godhood in a single shot if it'd worked.

  "That was it for today, right?" said Hermione. She was slumped back in her chair, leaning her head against the back; and her face showed her tiredness, which was very unusual for Hermione. She liked to pretend she was limitless, at least when Harry was around.

  "One more," Harry said cautiously, "but that one's small, plus it might actually work. I saved it for last because I was hoping we could end on an up note. It's real stuff, not like phasers. They've already made it in the laboratory, not like the Alzheimer's cure. And it's a generic substance, not specific like the lost books you tried to Transfigure copies of. I made a diagram of the molecular structure to show you. We just want to make it longer than it's ever been made before, and with all the tubes aligned, and the endpoints embedded in diamond." Harry produced a sheet of graph paper.

  Hermione sat back up, took it, and studied it, frowning. "These are all carbon atoms? And Harry, what's the name? I can't Transfigure it if I don't know what it's called."

  Harry made a disgusted face. He was still having trouble getting used to that sort of thing, it shouldn't matter what something was named if you knew what it was. "They're called buckytubes, or carbon nanotubes. It's a kind of fullerene that was discovered just this year. It's about a hundred times stronger than steel and a sixth of the weight."

  Hermione looked up from the graph paper, her face surprised. "That's real?"

  "Yeah," Harry said, "just hard to make the Muggle way. If we could get enough of the stuff, we could use it to build a space elevator all the way up to geosynchronous orbit or higher, and in terms of delta-v that's halfway to anywhere in the Solar System. Plus we could throw out solar power satellites like confetti."

  Hermione was frowning again. "Is this stuff safe?"

  "I don't see why it wouldn't be," Harry said. "A buckytube is just a graphite sheet wrapped into a circular tube, basically, and graphite is the same stuff used in pencils -"

  "I know what graphite is, Harry," Hermione said. She brushed her hair back absentmindedly, her eyebrows furrowed as she stared at the sheet of paper.

  Harry reached into a pocket of his robes, and produced a white thread tied to two small gray plastic rings at either end. He'd added drops of superglue where the thread met either ring, to make it all a single object that could be Transfigured as a whole. Cyanoacrylate, if Harry remembered correctly, worked by covalent bonds, and that was as close to being a "solid object" as you ever got in a world ultimately composed of tiny individual atoms. "When you're ready," Harry said, "try to Transfigure this into a set of aligned buckytube fibers embedded in two solid diamond rings."

  "All right..." Hermione said slowly. "Harry, I feel like I just missed something."

  Harry shrugged helplessly. Maybe you're just tired. He knew better than to say it out loud, though.

  Hermione laid her wand against one plastic ring, and stared for a while.

  Two small circles of glittering diamond lay on the table, connected by a long black thread.

  "It changed," said Hermione. She sounded like she was trying to be enthusiastic but had run out of energy. "Now what?"

  Harry felt a bit deflated by his research partner's lack of passion, but did his best not to show it; maybe the same process would work in reverse to cheer her up. "Now I test it to see if it holds weight."

  There was an A-frame Harry had rigged up to do an earlier experiment with diamond rods - you could make solid diamond objects easily, using Transfiguration, they just wouldn't last. The earlier experiment had measured whether Transfiguring a long diamond rod into a shorter diamond rod would allow it to lift a suspended heavy weight as it contracted, i.e., could you Transfigure against tension, which you in fact could.

  Harry carefully looped one circle of glittering diamond over the thick metal hook at the top of the rig, then attached a thick metal hanger to the bottom ring, and then started attaching weights to the hanger.

  (Harry had asked the Weasley twins to Transfigure the apparatus for him, and the Weasley twins had given him an incredulous look, like they couldn't figure out what sort of prank he could possibly want that for, but they hadn't asked any questions. And their Transfigurations, according to them, lasted for around three hours, so Harry and Hermione still had a while left.)

  "One hundred kilograms," Harry said about a minute later. "I don't think a steel thread this thin would hold that. It should go up much higher, but that's all the weight I've got."

  There was a further silence.

  Harry straightened up, and went back to their table, and sat down in his chair, and ceremoniously made a check mark next to 'Buckytubes'. "There," Harry said. "That one worked."

  "But it's not really useful, Harry, is it?" Hermione said from where she was sitting with her head resting in her hands. "I mean, even if we gave it to a scientist they couldn't learn how to make lots of buckytubes from studying ours."

  "They might be able to learn something," Harry said. "Hermione, look at it, that little tiny thread holding up all that weight, we just made something that no Muggle laboratory could make -"

  "But any other witch could make it," Hermione said. Her exhaustion was coming into her voice, now. "Harry, I don't think this is working out."

  "You mean our relationship?" Harry said. "Great! Let's break up."

  That got a slight grin out of her. "I mean our research."

  "Oh, Hermione, how could you?"

  "You're sweet when you're mean," she said. "But Harry, this is nuts, I'm twelve, you're eleven, it's silly to think we're going to discover anything that no one's ever figured out before."

  "Are you really saying we should give up on unraveling the secrets of magic after trying for less than one month?" Harry said, trying to put a note of challenge into his voice. Honestly he was feeling some of the same fatigue as Hermione. None of the good ideas ever worked. He'd made just one discovery worth mentioning, the Mendelian pattern, and he couldn't tell Hermione about it without breaking his promise to Draco.

  "No," Hermione said. Her young face was looking very serious and adult. "I'm saying right now we should be studying all the magic that wizards already know, so we can do this sort of thing after we gra
duate from Hogwarts."

  "Um..." Harry said. "Hermione, I hate to put it this way, but imagine we'd decided to hold off on research until later, and the first thing we tried after we graduated was Transfiguring an Alzheimer's cure, and it worked. We'd feel... I don't think the word stupid would adequately describe how we'd feel. What if there's something else like that and it does work?"

  "That's not fair, Harry!" Hermione said. Her voice was trembling like she was on the verge of breaking out crying. "You can't put that on people! It's not our job to do that sort of thing, we're kids!"

  For a moment Harry wondered what would happen if someone told Hermione she had to fight an immortal Dark Lord, if she would turn into one of the whiny self-pitying heroes that Harry could never stand reading about in his books.

  "Anyway," Hermione said. Her voice shook. "I don't want to keep doing this. I don't believe children can do things that grownups can't, that's only in stories."

  There was silence in the classroom.

  Hermione started to look a little scared, and Harry knew that his own expression had gotten colder.

  It might not have hurt so much if the same thought hadn't already come to Harry - that, while thirty might be old for a scientific revolutionary and twenty about right, while there were people who got doctorates when they were seventeen and fourteen-year-old heirs who'd been great kings or generals, there wasn't really anyone who'd made the history books at eleven.

  "All right," Harry said. "Figure out how to do something a grownup can't. Is that your challenge?"

  "I didn't mean it like that," Hermione said, her voice coming out in a frightened whisper.

  With an effort, Harry wrenched his gaze away from Hermione. "I'm not angry at you," Harry said. His voice was cold, despite his best efforts. "I'm angry at, I don't know, everything. But I'm not willing to lose, Hermione. Losing isn't always the right thing to do. I'll figure out how to do something a grown wizard can't do, and then I'll get back to you. How's that?"

  There was more silence.

  "Okay," said Hermione, her voice wavering a little. She pushed herself up out of her chair, and went over to the door of the abandoned classroom they'd been working in. Her hand went onto the doorknob. "We're still friends, right? And if you can't figure out anything -"