Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 17, chapter 86

We don't know that Voldemort tried to kill Harry, but Harry has much less reason to doubt it than we do.

An Immortality Defense League sounds much cleverer to me than what we actually see if Voldemort was trying to make Harry into a horcrux, which is a guy making a horcrux out of the infant child of his own enemies. That sounds a lot less tactically sound than willfully perverse; of all the people he could have deliberately made into horcruxes, I don't think he had good reason to single Harry out as being a good choice to ensure his immortality.

The only reason I can think that he would have had to single him out would be the prophecy, and that the sort of information where I would immediately wonder, in his place, if by horcruxing my own prophesied enemy, I would actually end up screwing myself over.

It's been implied elsewhere, but I'm pretty sure that in HPMOR, Voldemort has specific plans for Harry that go beyond merely killing him, which included him deliberately being made into a horcrux.

Some evidence for this: the odd italicized text fragments in the early chapters (which Eliezer has emphasized), Harry wondering many times at the convenience of Voldemort's supposed death, and repetition of the idea that Voldy should have a) known about sacrifice/dark rituals such as are involved in sacrificing yourself for somebody else and b) have had other, better, more guaranteed ways of killing Harry if that's what he had wanted to accomplish.

Actually, further to that, I really think Voldy was intentional with the whole horcrux thing, as shown by the set-up of giving Lily the chance to escape. One possible reason for this is for Snape's loyalty; another, which I consider more probable now, is that if she was going to die anyway it wouldn't have counted as a sacrifice for the purposes of the (horcrux) ritual.

I tend to think any line of action which ends up with Riddle losing his body and having to fall back on his horcruxes, given that he apparently wants his old powers back based on his efforts to get at the ingredients to revive himself and/or the Philosopher's Stone, probably contained some element of accident.

Also, the act of training his prophesied enemy, one of whom is bound to vanquish "all but a remnant" of the other, doesn't sound like a great way to serve his own interests. It's not like he's likely to subvert the prophesy and gain a powerful ally, it's just another avenue to empowering the person who's his greatest threat.

If I were in Quirrell's place, and knew about the prophesy, I would be wondering "in what way can I ensure that whatever person this prophesy refers to will be least likely to be able to defeat me, assuming our conflict is inevitable?" Keeping in mind that if I try too hard to make a candidate into a nonviable threat, the prophesy will probably turn out to be referring to someone else.

Only realised now...

Actually, I see a significant (at least 10%) chance that the person currently known as Quirrel was both the 'Light Lord' and the Dark Lord of the last war. His "Voldemort' persona wasn't actually trying to win, you see, he was just trying to create a situation where people would welcome a savior...

This would neatly explain the confusion Harry noted over how a rational, inventive wizard could have failed to take over England. It leaves open some questions about why he continued his reign of terror after that ploy failed, but there are several obvious possibilities there. The big question would be what actually happened to either A) stop him, or B) make him decide to fake his death and vanish for a decade.

he failed to conquer England because he wasn't cynical enough

That's ... far from certain.

Somehow I don't think Moody would make that mistake.

I don't think an avatar of undiscriminating cynicism spends more than a decade pining for his crush that got away.

Moody has a magical eye. Therefore, Naruto has at some point fought him. QED.

Remember that, in canon, Voldemort does indeed take over the Ministry with a few Imperiuses and a few assassinations.

It should be clear to the reader, anyway, that liberal use of Imperius would NOT be sufficient to take over the government, at least not for any meaningful length of time.

Unless Eliezer has deliberately depowered Imperious - which isn't impossible - or given the Ministry some sort of get-out-of-Imperius-free-card - which is also possible, what with the Ministry being created almost exactly in it's present form by Merlin, a significant change from canon - then liberal use of Imperius cold absolutely take over the government. My theory is that "Voldemort" was deliberately playing the role of the Evil Monster who's about to take over the world, but never does; perhaps in an attempt to have Wizarding Britain unite against him.

Totally unrelated, but I wanted to mention somewhere (and didn't think it worth making a new comment) that I laughed harder at "I once arrested a young Japanese who tried a similar trick. He found out the hard way that his shadow replica technique was no match for this eye of mine." than I have at anything in recent memory. (It is a Naruto reference.)

Considering that Eliezer says in the notes that he "regret[s] that [he] could not come up with any reasonable way to have Harry shout 'Temporal fugue!' or 'Kage bunshin no jutsu!' before attacking", this is almost certainly a Naruto reference.

OK, so there are Moody and Voldemort, but pretty much every other wizard ever is grossly.incompetent.

No — they simply have not chosen to prove themselves to Harry, the viewpoint character.

I expect we'll find, soon, that Harry's model is wildly out of whack — adult wizards are, by and large, competent but flawed, especially the leaders and heroes. They simply do not let on to children everything they can do, nor their level of control over the world. Why? Because gifted children are not really all that rare, and teaching kids more magic than they are responsible enough to cope with is how you get Dark Lords — and dead kids.

Expanding on this — The purpose of magical education (e.g. Hogwarts) is not to teach kids as much magic as possible, to enable them to fix the world as Harry wants to do. The purpose of magical education is to safely and gradually expose them to magic, to maintain the current status quo and certainly to prevent any dumbass kids from destroying the world or killing each other. It also includes giving them chances to prove themselves responsible and skilled enough to wield more, and to put them in touch with adult wizards who might choose to individually teach more. But none of this is served by powerful wizards flaunting their top abilities in blatant and imitable fashion in front of the kiddies.

could run strategic circles around them and kill half of all Dark Lords who ever lived by owling them bombs.

Harry thought he could figure out who the Death Eaters were by checking their arms for the Dark Mark. Turns out it's not that simple.

Now he (and you) still think that you get rid of a dangerous enemy by owling them bombs. Does either of you even have any reason to believe that there isn't a magical precaution against sending dangerous objects through the owl mail system?

kill half of all Dark Lords who ever lived by owling them bombs.

Meh, Minerva mentions that a trained wizard can deal with a gun, I imagine explosive deactivating spells would be a standard part of your self defence/mail checking spells.

What about the other Aurors during TSPE? I thought they did pretty well overall.

Note, the link in your comment is currently a Google link rather than a link directly to the post.

Another one:

Madam Bones's voice continued. "We brought in Arthur Weasley from Misuse of Muggle Artifacts - he knows more about Muggle artifacts than any wizard alive - and gave him the descriptions from the Aurors on the scene, and he cracked it. It was a Muggle artifact called a rocker, and they call it that because you'd have to be off your rocker to ride one. Just six years ago one of their rockers blew up, killed hundreds of Muggles in a flash and almost set fire to the Moon. Weasley says that rockers use a special kind of science called opposite reaction, so the plan is to develop a jinx which will prevent that science from working around Azkaban."

Quiditch, the lack of adequate protection on time turners before Harry gave them the idea put protective shell on them... Seriously, just reread the fic.

Outside the school setting what evidence do we actually have that the wizarding world is incompetent? [Not just operating self interestedly or on different values.]

The possibility of gold-silver arbitrage with the Muggle world and the lack of fractional-reserve banking.

just how cavalier Quirrell is with other people's lives.

Surely Harry already understands that Quirrel places no intrinsic value on other people's lives. Perhaps this understanding is not visceral enough yet, though.

It should already be pretty high though - Harry even points it out at the time (Rule 1 of Unforgivable Curse Safety) and Quirrell equivocates it away by mixing up etiquette rules with safety rules. That might just as easily have ended with "I just shot Bahry in the face" considering how fast the spell must be going - probably <100 ms to recognize he can't dodge in time, and push him away.

"It takes a cracked soul to cast." and "Murder tears the soul." just says that if you've gotten to the point where you could cast it once, that particular pre-requisite is already accomplished, so the work to crack your soul is already put in. It doesn't say anything about removing the requirement of wanting someone dead.

Though, so long as we're looking at evidence, if we take Quirrell at his word, then his ability to cast the spell despite not wanting his opponent dead is pretty strong evidence that the requirement is in fact removed. In fact, we already know that some "requirements" to cast spells are not set in stone: from that same scene, Harry cast the true patronus without the carefully practiced stance and wand twitches, instead merely "one desperate wish that an innocent man should not die -"—but the constant requirement in this case seems to be the thought that accompanies the casting of the spell, which is why I'm hesitant to believe the wish of death is removed from AK's casting requirement.

Killing Curses don't kill wizards, wizards kill wizards!

You don't think you can teach children how to want someone dead for the sake of wanting them dead? Children can be very hateful. (At least, this could be what Quirrell is thinking, and Dumbledore could be thinking or hoping that the children just aren't going to be able to cast it.)

In canon, Moody used the unforgivables on a spider, and given the prevalence of ostensibly non-sentient things-to-fear in the magical world (e.g. boggarts), it's conceivable that they could have found a particular magical creature that even the most PETA-supporting student would have no trouble excising from the world. Also, as far as I can tell, there's nothing in canon to contradict that curses' targets are limited to Kingdom Animalia (see also: Harry's existential crisis about sentient plants), and I seriously doubt there are any 7th level vegans at Hogwarts.

I interpreted the ease of casting the spell as a specific application of scope insensitivity rather than a change in the requirement to cast it. That is, while casting it the second time might be just as difficult (i.e. take as much mental/magical/spiritual energy) as the first, the third and fourth time would together be only as strenuous as the first, as would the collective fifth through eighth time, etc. It is already established in-universe that some form of personal mana depletion exists, and my idea of this difficulty reduction is an extension of that form of energy to the spiritual energy (established in canon w.r.t. horcruxes, dementors, etc.).

FakeSpoiler: Mad Eye actually wears a decoy. The real Eye of Vance is a suppository.

Because it's bright blue, the wrong size, sits in its own special eye socket, and is prone to spinning on its own? It's not like he can play it off as being his own eye, and nobody would believe it's just regular glass. If you want your lies to be credible in future, you can't make obvious ones in the present.

I think part of the point of HPMOR is that rationality is hard.

Like people, phoenixes need high but achievable standards, and I think you're setting yours too high.

How so? So far as I can tell, in this war, nobody has died, and since we don't know it's a war against Voldemort again, we don't know that it's part 2 of a war where a lot of people did. Now, there's a good chance that the war will result in deaths, but "I should go around killing innocents if needed to win the war" is a pretty extraordinary statement, and I won't fault him for requiring fairly ordinary evidence to make it.

The title of the arc is "Taboo Tradeoffs". The phoenix was the original intended ending. I just couldn't get it written in time.

Not really - she could be rescued, while a dead person cannot be.

Probably not - there's just no room for anywhere to put it!

What, as in he made a deal not to hurt Lily, but killing's okay? Snape's messed-up, but I don't think he's quite inhuman enough to treat that as a deal honoured. The earlier part of the events, perhaps, but not the "Lily died without pain, then?".

So I've got an alternate version that includes the important parts of both endings. Feel free to use or modify it if you like it.

The boy stood there on the rooftop, his own eyes locked with two points of fire. The stars might have had time to shift in their constellations while he stood there, agonizing over the decision...

...that wouldn't...

...change.

The boy's eyes flickered once to the stars above; and then he looked at the phoenix.

"No. Not yet," the boy said in a voice hardly audible. "I can do better. I can end death itself, not just Azkaban, if you give me the chance. If I can't stop death, if more have to die while I wait for the right time, then I will. But not yet. I still think I can win this without loss, and I won't...can't!...throw away that chance at a big victory later for a small one tonight."

Without word, without sound, a sphere of fire surrounded the bird's form, crackling and blazing with white and crimson veins as though it meant to consume that which lay within; and when the fire dispersed into grey smoke, no phoenix remained.

There was silence on the top of the Ravenclaw tower. The boy gradually lowered his hands from his ears, pausing only to wipe at his wet cheeks.

I figured it was for plot reasons. And upon rereading, it does make more sense - for some reason, I thought it was Fawkes that was coming, not another phoenix. My original reading was that Fawkes was somehow going to spitefully reject a chance to destroy Azkaban because Harry had missed his chance, which seemed absurd - knowing that Harry was giving up his chance at a phoenix of his own, and not his mission, annoys me much less. I'm still not sure if I like the new 85 more than the old, but it's closer now.

Also, I'm probably being optimistic about how easy the writing of it would be, but my first impression is that it should be possible to make a version of it where Harry's resolution is the rejection.

I don't see the obvious link between those; magical transference seems like it could more easily lead to casting spells together more effectively, not it being a terrible idea to cast spells together. Harry is also biased against presuming causal factors that he can't articulate a motivation for, and so it doesn't seem likely that the character would come across that hypothesis in the first place.

If you need more evidence, vg'f rkcyvpvgyl zragvbarq va rneyl Nhgube'f Abgrf obgu gung Dhveeryy vf Ibyqrzbeg naq gung Ryvrmre jnf trahvaryl fhecevfrq ng ubj ybat vg gbbx crbcyr gb trg guvf. Punyx vg hc gb n pbzovangvba bs crbcyr orvat hasnzvyvne jvgu pnaba, crbcyr nffhzvat Ryvrmre jnf gevpxvat gurz, naq vyyhfvba bs genafcnerapl...

Have you ever read Philosopher's Stone? I hadn't when I first read HPMOR, so I totally missed the Quirrell thing, but it's pretty blatant once you're handed the answer on a canonical platter.

There's a big fat hint in chapter 20. It's compatible with Monroe!Quirrell being an unpleasant person in the same way Voldemort was, but one of those on each side including the supposedly good one is less likely than the big bad playing both sides.

Well, he pretty clearly turned the Pioneer Plaque into a Horcrux, told Harry, then Obliviated him when he reacted badly. Also, at two separate points he claims to have "resolved his family issues" and later states that his family is "long since dead by the Dark Lord's hand." Hardly conclusive, but there are other, similar little hints and Q has after all admitted to "playing a game of lying with truths." Oh, and Voldemort in Canon always wanted to teach at Hogwarts. So there's that.

I was curious about that as well. I suspect they have decided to wait until SI's fundraising drive is finished, for behavioral economic reasons as well as their prioritization, but it passes up the option to determine LWers' relative preferences for SI and CFAR.

Yeah, that's the other side of the same complaint :-) I'm not complaining about Harry's behavior, but about Eliezer putting so much macho posturing (and opportunities for it) into the story.

Just because Harry's learned to keep his claws sheathed doesn't mean he's not still engaging in dominance contests.

He gets the mechanism wrong though. In a real fight, Moody kills him or at the very least takes his toys away if he's needed alive. There wouldn't be any time-turned copies of him in the first place.

Hey, I had a pretty good run of near-daily, 2k-word chapters.

At the moment - the first non-Myou've story I tried breaking the block with foundered and is probably defunct.

However, I'm currently working on another non-Myou've story; and am actually making progress. I've got a skeleton of a plot written out, and over 1500 words of an actual first draft, and am getting feedback and encouragement by writing it in a GoogleDoc I've given a few other people access to. I think I've got a good chance of actually turning this one into a complete story - and once I do, I'm going to try using the momentum I build up by getting back to "Myou've".

This is in fact a major literary reason for the above. :)

In canon, Voldemort has extra "legilimency" style power to know harry's thoughts and influence him due to the scar, even though their connection makes it dangerous for the two to touch (at least while he was in Quirrel). Obviously this isn't great evidence, but I think it's relevant.

There is some time resolution.

Albus said heavily, "A person who looked like Madam McJorgenson told us that a single Legilimens had lightly touched Miss Granger's mind some months ago. That is from January, Harry, when I communicated with Miss Granger about the matter of a certain Dementor. That was expected; but what I did not expect was the rest of what Sophie found."

upvoted for tvtropes warning.

Oh, you mean a bluff using knowledge gained by other means? That's an interesting thought. Quirrell does do that a lot when we know he couldn't be using Legilimency, doesn't he?

Gerald Grice. He was the first person Rorschach killed, and triggered his change. He killed Blair Roche, 6 year old girl, and fed her to his dogs. Both are named dropped by Moody as he discusses the Killing Curse.

You're missing the point that reader objections you can find a way to dismiss as irrational are still reader objections. HP:MOR is explicitly intended as propaganda; so irrational reader objections are particularly important.

Suddenly Quirrell's using it in the duel with Bahry is looking a lot weirder. What happens when he dodges it, does it go straight through the wall and keep on going indefinitely until it hits someone? Isn't that a massive liability since he risks someone seeing it, thereby giving away his presence?

Being able to be blocked by inanimate objects might seem "lame" for an epic forbidden spell, but being able to pass through solid matter like a jet of neutrinos turns it into yet another game-breakingly borkable element like the Bag of Holding. Combined with the Eye of Vance, Moody should mostly be able to avoid dueling in favor of sniping dark wizards through buildings.

This seems like an uncharacteristic failure by EY to think things through.

So if you fire it at the ground, can you kill someone on the other side of the Earth? Not being blocked by inanimate objects is kinda lame too.

This. If not this, Moody is lying, which is possible, as Moody is the type to keep information like that "in reserve", but I actually doubt that is the case, as sooner or later Harry would witness for himself a killing curse being cast, and would find that Moody had been lying.

Like an ordinary muggle missile, KC was designed with a built-in self-destruct mechanism, which is activated when its target is not hit. Thus you die if you block a curse aimed at someone else, but not if the curse misses the target and you happen to be in its path.

A killing curse hits a molecule of nitrgen. The molecule bursts. Yep, doesn't really make sense.

What do you mean, "no, just no"? Here are two extremely competent characters who will inevitably be pitted in full force against each other. They both respect competence in others (and likely relish a bit of a challenge), so they will necessarily admire each other, more and more as they get the measure of their respective power. They're not naive preteens drunk on their first slightly creative idea, they're adults with a lifetime of experience who know exactly how to have a rivalry. They'll never grow tired of playing against each other and they know that perfectly well. You will forgive me for shipping that just a little bit.

It's odd, being reminded that in the mainstream mentioning slash is on the level of potty humor, when in the world I normally inhabit you're supposed, on pain of being called a narrow-minded Philistine, to appreciate a story's literary value whether or not it's angsty porn in a setting based on dogs' social and reproductive habits where men get pregnant.

Some of us are going to need a link explaining this system.

Moody drops all sorts of information, true and false, in his conversations and, when meeting that person again, will see if they recall it.

This is one of the ways he tests for Polyjuice users, animagi, and evil twins.

On the other hand, given his preference for not losing the war against Voldemort he might perhaps avoid dropping too much random false information on a suspiciously skilled young wizard who is credibly alleged to be vital for winning that war.

On the other hand, wouldn't most people already know something like that? It seems like a pretty baldfaced lie, crying out for contradiction.

With the souls of his enemies, muhahaha.

That's ... kind of disturbing, actually.

Doesn't everyone make a big deal about the Unblockable Curse being blocked by Harry in canon, too? Or is that just in HPMOR?

Yes, but he is speaking generally, to students who will (most of them) never be as deadly as he is. He has an excellent means, fully under his own control, of dealing with adult wizards: He is able to take apart a fully-trained Auror without breaking a sweat. He has no equally good means of dealing with a Dementor.

Presumably it wouldn't even affect the Horcruxes if they're hidden where we think they are. It would serve to make them kind of pointless, though. Eternity alone in a hellish wasteland, yay!

OK. I'm thinking of this in terms of Harry being able to see Bellatrix because it's his cloak. Harry should then be able to see the other Harrys because they're also wearing his cloak, unless the Cloak distinguishes between "master" and "time-travelled master", or the "loan" part is significant enough that Harry wouldn't be able to see someone under the cloak if they just pick it up without him expressly loaning it to them. If that counts as "stealing" and transfers ownership then you could "loan" the Cloak to everyone and they'd never be able to take it from you.

There's something unsettling about a cloak that hides you from everyone, except its Master, unless the Master is also you.

I would say a small edit is probably in order, because "as obvious to him as a Thestral" definitely doesn't come across as an ability that requires any concentration.

But I think Karl's explanation is a much better one and should be canonical.

It can be blocked, yes, but this appears to be a fairly major jinx, the equivalent of a lot of capital equipment. Hogwarts is known to be anti-Apparation jinxed, as is Azkaban, but I don't recall any other places where it's mentioned. (Ministry of Magic, perhaps; implied by the workers there commuting in a fairly standard fashion instead of just Apparating from their homes.) It's not clear that it can be installed on an average wizard's home. Anyway, you'd think it would prevent inward, but not outward, Apparation by default; you don't want to be suddenly attacked but you might want to make a quick escape.

Dumbledore captures (in that fanfic by Rowling, that is, not the canon) some Death Eaters by preventing their Apparation, but he has to duel them first, so he might as well have cast AK.

All that aside, she's an experienced combat wizard with a few seconds to spare. If she can't Apparate, she still has the option og grabbing Harry, blowing a hole in the wall, and running. "Accio Broomstick", anyone? Or whatever flight spell Voldemort uses to go up the stairs without footsteps.

Come to think of it, why were they hiding in an apparently average home without special defenses, and relying on mere secrecy? Put them in Hogwarts, with its layers upon layers of magical fortifications. Draco states that Hogwarts is an impregnable fortress, and presumably Voldemort thinks so too since he doesn't attack Dumbledore there and end the war at a stroke.

I wondered whether he had been memory charmed with that memory, but since Harry could see Thestrals afterwards, I assumed it was a real memory.

One of the problems of fiction, and particularly magical fiction, is that all the rules aren't spelled out. If you're memory charmed with the scene of a death, does that allow you to see a thestral?

EDIT: IN Chapter 86, a very strange description as Harry recounts his memory of his parents' death to Snape:

Slowly, like a body floating to the surface of water, Harry returned from wherever he'd been.

Sounds like someone coming out of a memory in a Pensieve. And Dumbledore did race him off to his office, alone, when he got demented.

BUT, at least in the narrative, Harry's remembering occurs before being taken off to the office.

One popular conception, if I've got my pop psychology right, is that [people believe that] memories are stored in brains like they're stored in computers; that is, they're archived at a particular location and are always in principle retrievable, even though it might take a lot of effort to do so. You'll see this popular conception in action if you watch children's cartoons where the plot involves going into a character's brain in some metaphorical way; a less high-tech metaphor might visualize the brain as a giant collection of filing cabinets (I'm thinking of an episode of Spongebob in particular).

You're right, I was confusing the two.

Nonetheless, the memory matches up with the standard story, and something is a bit off with the standard story.

David Monroe was the name of a character from A Black Comedy who (rot13 spoiler for A Black Comedy) jnf ernyyl ibyqrzbeg'f qvnel ubepehk pbcl, ghearq serrqbz svtugre.

"Draco loves nobody and nobody loves Draco" isn't a given, it's a subset of possible "love triangle" conditions which can be ruled out on the basis of their invalidating the love triangle premise. Configurations in which either Harry or Hermione neither love nor are loved by anyone would also be excluded.

I was enjoying the interpretation that each of them gets their own magical world optimized as they see fit, which would be such a lot of fun, though I agree that the "all but a remnant" line shoots that down, unless you want to be really dodgy in your interpretation of it (e.g. Harry's mortal body dies, but he gets uploaded).

Just leaving the Pioneercrux going slowly out to infinity, to possibly have Voldy reform in a galaxy far, far away means that we don't get any actual story in space. (Well, it doesn't necessarily eliminate the possibility, but makes it a whole lot less probable). And my assessment of this fic is that Eliezer really can't resist bringing magic to space for several chapters, because a) he's demonstrate a need to constantly escalate in awesome; b) as a reader, I expect all the hints of magic-in-space to come to something significant; and c) just think of all the references he would include to every SF ever.

I'm pretty sure this is actually just Albus being well aware of Harry's nature, including his curiositiy and inclination to test things.

That seems to apply to actively trying to catch an orb, and succeeding. If you just stand about, any orbs relevant to you will come to you freely, no action required. So Dumbledore can see whether the prophecy speaks of him without having his head explode; but if it doesn't, can't personally check the wording.

I thought of this too, but how about this variant: teaching himself to fight.

Early on, Quirrell says he realized his ambition was to be the greatest fighting wizard of all time. He might have decided that winning the moment he got good enough to win once would cut short his learning too much.

Good point.

Not so much an excuse to stop, but no need to continue after the lesson had been learned. It always indicated to me that for him killing and torturing wasn't a terminal value.

Yeah, there are a number of consistent themes.

Having to support a bad guy to fight a worse bad guy. Then creating fake threats to pretend to be a savior. Being able to project different identities. Taking over the identity of the savior. Then wondering, who is the real bad guy?

I think the resolution is that Voldemort set up his "defeat" by Harry, came back to nurture the Harry legend, will arrange the plan with Harry to have Harry defeat him as a fake(but actually real) Voldemort, but in fact Harry won't be defeating Voldemort, he will only appear to defeat Voldemort, with Voldemort actually taking control of Harry, and ruling the wizarding world as Harry, destroyer of Voldemort.