Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Quotes

“Wow," the empty air finally said. "Wow. That puts a pretty different perspective on things, I have to say. I'm going to remember this the next time I feel an impulse to blame myself for something. Neville, the term in the literature for this is 'egocentric bias', it means that you experience everything about your own life but you don't get to experience everything else that happens in the world. There was way, way more going on than you running in front of me. You're going to spend weeks remembering that thing you did there for six seconds, I can tell, but nobody else is going to bother thinking about it. Other people spend a lot less time thinking about your past mistakes than you do, just because you're not the center of their worlds. I guarantee to you that nobody except you has even considered blaming Neville Longbottom for what happened to Hermione. Not for a fraction of a second. You are being, if you will pardon the phrase, a silly-dilly. Now shut up and say goodbye.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality. If you're equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

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

You had to stay and fight.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“And you threaten to abandon us to Voldemort if we do not comply with your wishes."

Harry's voice was razor-sharp. "I regret to inform you that you are not the center of the universe. I'm not threatening to walk out on magical Britain. I'm threatening to walk out on you. I am not a meek little Frodo. This is my quest and if you want in you will play by my rules."

Dumbledore's face was still cold. "I am beginning to doubt your suitability as the hero, Mr. Potter."

Harry's return gaze was equally icy. "I am beginning to doubt your suitability as my Gandalf, Mr. Dumbledore. Boromir was at least a plausible mistake. What is this Nazgul doing in my Fellowship?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Reality is always lawful," said Harry, "even if we don't know the law.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Also Harry was in love. It would be a three-way wedding: him, the Time-Turner, and Professor Quirrell.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Frigideiro! " said Hermione again from the desk next to him. Her water was solid ice and there were white crystals forming on the rim of her glass. She seemed to be totally intent on her own work and not at all conscious of the other students staring at her with hateful eyes, which was either (a) dangerously oblivious of her or (b) a perfectly honed performance rising to the level of fine art.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Right. Because he seemed like such a normal kid. And he is a normal kid, he is just what you'd expect a baseline male child to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“That's not interactive, there's no back-and-forth with the other player and how much fun is it to watch someone incredibly good at moving their eyes? And then whichever Seeker gets lucky swoops in and grabs the Snitch and makes everyone else's work moot. It's like someone took a real game and grafted on this pointless extra position so that you could be the Most Important Player without needing to really get involved or learn the rest of it. Who was the first Seeker, the King's idiot son who wanted to play Quidditch but couldn't understand the rules?" Actually, now that Harry thought about it, that seemed like a surprisingly good hypothesis. Put him on a broomstick and tell him to catch the shiny thing...”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You're eleven years old, Mr. Potter!" she said in a harsh whisper.

"And therefore subhuman. Sorry... for a moment there, I forgot.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“He'd met other prodigies in mathematical competitions. In fact he'd been thoroughly trounced by competitors who probably spent literally all day practising maths problems and who'd never read a science-fiction book and who would burn out completely before puberty and never amount to anything in their future lives because they'd just practised known techniques instead of learning to think creatively. (Harry was something of a sore loser.)”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“It's okay to bribe people with books, right?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“And I know that I'd just make myself unhappy by comparing that reality to... something perfect that I built up in my imagination.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You turned into a cat! A SMALL cat! You violated Conservation of Energy! That's not just an arbitrary rule, it's implied by the form of the quantum Hamiltonian! Rejecting it destroys unitarity and then you get FTL signalling! And cats are COMPLICATED! A human mind can't just visualise a whole cat's anatomy and, and all the cat biochemistry, and what about the neurology? How can you go on thinking using a cat-sized brain?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“If you want to win this argument with Dad, look in chapter two of the first book of the Feynman Lectures on Physics. There's a quote there about how philosophers say a great deal about what science absolutely requires, and it is all wrong, because the only rule in science is that the final arbiter is observation - that you just have to look at the world and report what you see. Um... off the top of my head I can't think of where to find something about how it's an ideal of science to settle things by experiment instead of arguments -”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“He wanted to write someone and demand a refund on his dark side which clearly ought to have irresistible magical power but had turned out to be defective.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“To figure out a strange plot, look at what happens, then ask who benefits.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“It wasn't cheating, but it was Science, which was almost as good.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“If the students see that rules are for everyone... for professors too, not just for poor helpless students who get nothing but suffering out of the system... why, the positive effects on school discipline should be tremendous.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Did ghosts not require a salary? Was that it? Or was it literally impossible to fire anyone in Hogwarts even if they died?

Now it seemed that Professor Snape was going about being absolutely awful to everyone who wasn't a Slytherin and it hadn't even occurred to anyone to terminate his contract.

And the Headmaster had set fire to a chicken.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You see, Harry, after you've been through a few adventures you tend to catch the hang of these things. You start to see the pattern, hear the rhythm of the world. You begin to harbour suspicions before the moment of revelation.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You, and you alone, have reported this mysterious sense of doom. You, and you alone, are a chaos magnet the likes of which I have never seen. After our little shopping trip to Diagon Alley, and then the Sorting Hat, and then today's little episode, I can well foresee that I am fated to sit in the Headmaster's office and hear some hilarious tale about Professor Quirrell in which you and you alone play a starring role, after which there will be no choice but to fire him. I am already resigned to it, Mr. Potter. And if this sad event takes place any earlier than the Ides of May, I will string you up by the gates of Hogwarts with your own intestines and pour fire beetles into your nose. Now do you understand me completely?”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Also: seriously, broomsticks? He was going to fly on, basically, a line segment? Wasn't that pretty much the single most unstable shape you could possibly find, short of attempting to hold on to a point marble? Who'd selected that design for a flying device, out of all the possibilities? Harry had been hoping that it was just a figure of speech, but no, they were standing in front of what looked for all the world like ordinary wooden kitchen broomsticks. Had someone just gotten stuck on the idea of broomsticks and failed to consider anything else? It had to be. There was no way that the optimal designs for cleaning kitchens and flying would happen to coincide if you worked them out from scratch.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You have minions! " Harry repeated. "Where do I get minions?"

Draco's smirk grew wider. "I'm afraid, Potter, that the first step is to be Sorted into Slytherin -”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“I wonder how difficult it would be to just make a list of all the top blood purists and kill them.

They'd tried exactly that during the French Revolution, more or less - make a list of all the enemies of Progress and remove everything above the neck - and it hadn't worked out well from what Harry recalled. Maybe he needed to dust off some of those history books his father had bought him, and see if what had gone wrong with the French Revolution was something easy to fix.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Knowing that Draco's hopeful face had probably been drilled into him by months of practice did not make it any less effective, Harry observed. Actually it did make it less effective, but unfortunately not ineffective. The same could be said of Draco's clever use of reciprocation pressure for an unsolicited gift, a technique which Harry had read about in his social psychology books (one experiment had shown that an unconditional gift of $5 was twice as effective as a conditional offer of $50 in getting people to fill out surveys). Draco had made an unsolicited gift of a confidence, and now invited Harry to offer a confidence in return... and the thing was, Harry did feel pressured. Refusal, Harry was certain, would be met with a look of sad disappointment, and maybe a small amount of contempt indicating that Harry had lost points.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“That left two possibilities, really.

Possibility one: Magic was so incredibly opaque, convoluted, and impenetrable, that even though wizards and witches had tried their best to understand, they'd made little or no progress and eventually given up; and Harry would do no better.

Or...

Harry cracked his knuckles in determination, but they only made a quiet sort of clicking sound, rather than echoing ominously off the walls of Diagon Alley.

Possibility two: He'd be taking over the world.

Eventually. Perhaps not right away.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“The whole idea of a unified universe with mathematically regular laws, that was what had been flushed down the toilet; the whole notion of physics. Three thousand years of resolving big complicated things into smaller pieces, discovering that the music of the planets was the same tune as a falling apple, finding that the true laws were perfectly universal and had no exceptions anywhere and took the form of simple maths governing the smallest parts, not to mention that the mind was the brain and the brain was made of neurons, a brain was what a person was -

And then a woman turned into a cat, so much for all that.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“You'd think there'd be some kind of more dramatic mental event associated with updating on an observation of infinitesimal probability -" Harry stopped himself. Mum, the witch, and even his Dad were giving him that look again. "I mean, with finding out that everything I believe is false.”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

“Professor McGonagall, the Headmaster set fire to a chicken!”
"He wha-”
― Eliezer Yudkowsky, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality