Ten Years after HPMOR
About ten years ago, I read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR) as a middle schooler. There were many concepts in it that have become like water in my life, and I am often surprised when other people do not know them.
Fundamental Attribution Error
Suppose you come into work and see your colleague kicking his desk. You think, ‘what an angry person he must be’. Your colleague is thinking about how someone bumped him into a wall on the way to work and then shouted at him. Anyone would be angry at that, he thinks. When we look at others we see personality traits that explain their behaviour, but when we look at ourselves we see circumstances that explain our behaviour. People’s stories make internal sense to them, from the inside, but we don’t see people’s histories trailing behind them in the air. We only see them in one situation, and we don’t see what they would be like in a different situation. So the fundamental attribution error is that we explain by permanent, enduring traits what would be better explained by circumstance and context.
- Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, Chapter 5
The Fundamental Attribution Error is empathy and giving people the benefit of the doubt. Whenever I hear myself or others complaining about other people, it feels misplaced. For instance, I remember in middle school, seeing some guy walking quickly and accidentally bumping into a girl, and the girl saying “asshole” under her breath. He may have been late to class, he may have been worrying a lot about some unpleasant event in his life, such that his spatial awareness had contracted. What makes him an “asshole”?
But the FAE is a weak version of a deeper principle. Even when people consciously choose to cause harm and suffering to others, there is an internal reason for it. The reason might be as cliche as “others have wronged me, so I must wrong them back!”, or it might be something more unsettling like “I was just bored”. But people did not choose their brain architecture and their life experiences, which led to these thoughts. If you had been born to the same circumstances, it is not unlikely that you would end up making the same choices. This is the principle behind Universal Love from Mohism and Buddhism, behind “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” from Christianity.
This doesn’t mean you need to tolerate whatever people do. Laws with actual punishments are good because they disincentivize bad behavior and makes things better for everyone. But it does mean that if you go around the world labelling people as good and bad, and telling the bad people they are bad and should be punished, this does not seem very productive. Bad people don’t often see themselves as bad. You will not reform them this way.
Anti-Deathism
Dumbledore: “Dark Wizards are not eager to live. They fear death. They do not reach up toward the sun’s light, but flee the coming of night into infinitely darker caverns of their own making, without moon or stars. It is not life they desire, but immortality; and they are so driven to grasp at it that they will sacrifice their very souls! Do you want to live forever, Harry?”
Harry: “Yes, and so do you. I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers. If you don’t want to die, it means you want to live forever. If you don’t want to live forever, it means you want to die. You’ve got to do one or the other… I’m not getting through here, am I.”
- Chapter 39, Pretending to be Wise, Pt 1
Death is bad. Death is bad. Death is really fucking bad. Death is hard to stare in the eye, so we create stories about why death is acceptable. There is nothing wrong with these stories, except, are they your true preference? If you were immortal and everyone else was, would you choose to make everyone mortal? When I first read the anti-death content in HPMOR, I felt an allergic reaction to it. It was because, compared to the science and psychology lectures in the rest of the book, this felt more like a religious orientation and the author was converting me to his value system. But it is a simple perspective that reminds me of how I would think as a child. Death is bad, therefore, we should eradicate death. In the end, it seems I have adopted this orientation toward death as well.
But there are multiple ways you can be an Anti-Deathist. You can be an Anti-Deathist where your relation with death is defined by fear. I was once so afraid of growing up and death, that for months every happy moment was ruined because I would remember that I am mortal. But you can also be an Anti-Deathist where you are drawn instead to all the things life has to offer. Just as the visakanv saying (paraphrased) goes: Focus more on what you want to see, not on what you don’t want to see.
The Zhuangzi is largely stories about the acceptance of death, among other happenings in the natural order. Zhuangzi sings songs cheerily after his wife dies: not in celebration, to be clear, but in irreverence for death. He is not afraid of it, and does not have to avert his gaze. He feels spiritually like rational!Dumbledore. This feels like a potentially healthy orientation toward death as well, especially in eras where death is inevitable.
But we live in an era where it seems evitable.
True Friendship
“Tell me this,” said the soft voice. “Why does that girl matter to you so much?”
“Because she is my friend.”
“In the English language as it is customarily used, Mr. Potter, the word ‘friend’ is not associated with a desperate effort to raise the dead. Are you under the impression that she is your true love, or some such?”
“Oh, not you too,” Harry said wearily. “Not you of all people, Professor. Fine, we’re best friends, but that’s all, okay? That’s enough. Friends don’t let friends stay dead.”
- Chapter 95, Roles Pt 6
To me, this seemed like an ideal friendship. I thought that it was be awesome to have friendships like this one day, where you would make Serious Efforts on each other’s behalves to better each other’s lives. This was True Friendship! It sounds really appealing, to be able to through your own affectuation save someone you care about.
I have close friends and feel I could do better to apply effort or habits around these friendships.
I have not been intentional about maintaining friendships and looking for ways to better my friends’ lives. Many of my friends live far away and I feel less affinity towards people that I haven’t interacted with for a while. It sounds boring but scheduling recurring calls with people automatically would help maintain friendships better.
It is hard to remember facts about people. Or, sometimes you remember if you meet them, but otherwise the facts are many associative steps away and you wouldn’t remember it if you saw something related to it in real life. You could keep a list of things people are working on or interested in, and then whenever I run into things that might help I could send it to them.
Lovingkindness practice involves saying good wishes to people in your head. “May you be happy.” “May you be free from suffering.” But, what if you actually set a five minute timer and thought about ways to make someone happier? You could lick their face (if you think they’d be ok with it) which would be funny. You could create a new food and name it after them and post it on reddit and get downvoted and send them the post. You could give them money. You could install very bright lights in their apartment. You could - There are many many ideas you could come up with.
I also am not sure whether, if the time comes, I really would be able to make Serious Efforts or Serious Sacrifices to help my friends. One time I had an internet friend who, due to serious illness, would be visiting a hospital in my city. She asked if I wanted to meet her in person. I made an excuse to not meet her because I was afraid it would be awkward. I was afraid that, I was not good at talking to girls and that I would look awkward and not speak or behave smoothly and then they would not want to talk to me anymore. First, that fear was social anxiety brain making things up, but accepting this fear as valid, it is wrong to not meet someone in their hardest moments to avoid personal discomfort. That was a failure where I could’ve made that person feel a bit better by being there. I still think about this event.
There was another time when I would stay up very late helping review my friend’s college application essays. I thought I was being virtuous in proportion to my sacrifice, paid in sleep health. But I could have found a way to help them by moving other things in my life around or spending less time on unimportant homework. However, pain is not the unit of effort, and sacrifice is not a terminal value. The point is to help others and yourself; if you do things that harm yourself and your ability to help others, you have failed to be your own friend.
There’s a saying for agency that, if you want to determine the most agentic person you know, imagine you are put in jail in a remote developing country for no reason and can call one person to save you. Who would you call? Would I be able to help someone in that situation? Probably not yet. But I can become Stronger!
Set a 5 Minute Timer and Generalizations
You never called any question impossible, said Harry, until you had taken an actual clock and thought about it for five minutes, by the motion of the minute hand. Not five minutes metaphorically, five minutes by a physical clock.
And furthermore, Harry said, his voice emphatic and his right hand thumping hard on the floor, you did not start out immediately looking for solutions.
- Chapter 25: Hold Off on Proposing Solutions
The five minute timer idea struck me not just as a thinking trick, but as the general idea that you can just establish new social rules or shape a social interaction in a particular way. You don’t have to stick to the bounds of “normal, regular behavior”. There are massive gains in {communication bandwidth, enjoyment, insight, etc.} to be had if you are willing to be a bit unusual.
THINK FOR LONGER AND TALK FOR LONGER. You and your friend are figuring out a problem. Neither of you know an immediate solution. A lot of people give up, but you can literally just THINK FOR LONGER and TALK FOR LONGER. There are problems where thinking more about it can hurt, but most real world problems are not like this. It is insane how people seem so reluctant to use simple tools or techniques to think better. This is not even the stronger version that HPMOR mentions, which is to first hold off on proposing solutions so that you don’t poison your discussion with wrong preconceptions from lack of deliberation.
USE PENCIL AND PAPER. I see people having conversations at work or parties that are fairly complex. Some of them involve math. Instead of straining your working memory, you can just get out a sheet of paper and start writing things down! This does not have to be whole sentences. You can just jot down single words as stores of meaning. You can use it to keep track of conversation threads, which would make backtracking or pausing/resuming threads easier.
TAKE BREAKS IN CONVERSATIONS. I get fatigued and start thinking more slowly, sometimes even failing to parse things that people are saying after a conversation goes on for a while. Sometimes even half an hour in I am starting to zone out. Take a 3 minute break. Maybe you don’t want to say you are tired because then the other person might think you got bored. You can make a plausible excuse, like, “Can we take a 3 minute break from talking? My voice is a bit tired. I’ll set a timer.”
AVOID EYE CONTACT. Some people don’t like making eye contact but feel pressured to do so. This can sap mental energy away from the content of the discussion to the physical movements to maintaining eye contact. Give people (and yourself) social permission to not make eye contact! You can just say, “I find eye contact intense and it makes it hard to focus.” Or “Sorry I’m a bit tired and eye contact uses up social battery.”
REPEAT THE SAME THING. Everyone is always trying to say new things. But when you’re reading books and trying to understand things, you often reread the same part many times to understand it. Some genres of conversations are like interactive book reading except you are the books. Say: “Sorry, I didn’t understand, can you repeat…?” “Sorry, I zoned out, can you explain again?” “Sorry, I zoned out a 3rd time. I understood X, Y, Z, please explain what’s missing?”
More Memorable Quotes
Sufficiently Pessmistic
But when you’re doing something new and can’t do that, you just have to be really, really, really pessimistic. Like, so pessimistic that reality actually comes out better than you expected around as often and as much as it comes out worse. It’s actually really hard to be so pessimistic that you stand a decent chance of undershooting real life. Like I make this big effort to be gloomy and I imagine one of my classmates getting bitten, but what actually happens is that the surviving Death Eaters attack the whole school to get at me.
- Harry Potter, Chapter 6
Things can go bad. If you can pay a small cost to avert bad outcomes, do it!
Indifference is the Opposite of Love
Harry had read once, somewhere, that the opposite of happiness wasn’t sadness, but boredom; and the author had gone on to say that to find happiness in life you asked yourself not what would make you happy, but what would excite you. And by the same reasoning, hatred wasn’t the true opposite of love. Even hatred was a kind of respect that you could give to someone’s existence. If you cared about someone enough to prefer their dying to their living, it meant you were thinking about them. […] What is deadlier than hate, and flows without limit?
“Indifference,” Harry whispered aloud, the secret of a spell he would never be able to cast.
Hessitation is alwayss eassy
Hessitation iss alwayss eassy, rarely usseful.
- Professor Quirrell, Chapter 66: Self-Actualization Part 1
The Rule of Three
That was when Father had told Draco about the Rule of Three, which was that any plot which required more than three different things to happen would never work in real life.
Father had further explained that since only a fool would attempt a plot that was as complicated as possible, the real limit was two.
- Chapter 24: Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis
Keep your plans simple, and do not worship complexity in an of itself!
Ambition
“Although you are ambitious, you have no ambition.”
[…]
“You were Sorted into Slytherin, Miss Davis, and I expect that you will grasp at any opportunity for advancement which falls into your hands. But there is no great ambition that you are driven to accomplish, and you will not make your opportunities. At best you will grasp your way upward into Minister of Magic, or some other high position of unimportance, never breaking the bounds of your existence.”
- Professor Quirrell, Chapter 70: Self Actualization, Pt 5
An army of Yudcruxes
It occurred to me how I might fulfill the Prophecy my own way, to my own benefit. I would mark the baby as my equal by casting the old horcrux spell in such fashion as to imprint my own spirit onto the baby’s blank slate; it would be a purer copy of myself, since there would be no old self to mix with the new. In some years, when I had become bored with ruling Britain and moved on to other things, I would arrange with the other Tom Riddle that he should appear to vanquish me, and he would rule over the Britain he had saved. We would play the game against each other forever, keeping our lives interesting amid a world of fools. I knew a dramatist would predict that the two of us would end by destroying each other; but I pondered long upon it, and decided that both of us would simply decline to play out the drama. That was my decision and I was confident that it would remain so; both Tom Riddles, I thought, would be too intelligent to truly go down that road. The prophecy seemed to hint that if I destroyed all but a remnant of Harry Potter, then our spirits would not be so different, and we could exist in the same world.
The Horcrux 1.0 did not really create true backups of your soul. It would overwrite people’s personalities partially with yours. Tom Riddle did this to a lot of people, including Harry.
Harry refers often to his unintegrated Dark Side, which offered unconventionally effective solutions to problems, with an aesthetic of cold and unscrupulousness. After I read HPMOR, I remember being, in hindsight, very insufferable in trying to act like Harry Potter James-Evans-Verres all the time. I remember in English class, in some group project presentation, saying out loud the very words, “World domination is an ugly phrase, let’s call it world optimization.” I would talk about cognitive biases to dunk on people’s arguments. I would go on internet chatrooms and talk like HPJEV and troll people, as if I myself were a Chaos Legionaire. One time that I still endorse, however, was in a government class when the teacher asked, imagine someone murdered someone you knew. Would you want the death penalty on them? I was surprised when I was the only one who did not raise my hand. My actual logic was only part anti-deathism though, it was more…atheism? If they are in life long jail this is clearly more suffering than being executed, if you do not believe in a Hell.
It wasn’t until many years later when I was reading people’s reviews of HPMOR that I realized rational!Harry Potter was not a character meant for people to emulate. He was a phase that rationalists passed through, making all the young aspiring rationalist mistakes, such as failing to notice that your favorite professor is actually Lord Voldemort until the very end of the story.
When LLMs train on a piece of text, they are updated to generate more text like it. If they read enough text written by an author, they might even birth within them some core generator that existed in the author. People, when reading books, also do this. Many of us have read HPMOR and the Sequences, and inherited fragments and wholes of this writer’s worldview, like mundane horcruxes.
By direct analogy, as we reach the singularity and possibly our end, is it our turn to realize that Eliezer Yudkowsky is secretly an evil dark lord?