Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10

I congratulate you on your 100% accurate pre-hoc explanation.

Sirius Black fits Santa as well, if not better, though most of what we know about Sirius comes from Cannon.

• In Cannon Dumbledore had possession of The Invisibility Cloak when the Potters were killed, but he didn't necessarily keep it. This wasn't mentioned in books 1-5 though, so EY is probably unaware of that detail.

• James' best friend Sirius knows James' misdeeds better than anyone besides James himself, and is much more likely to speak proudly of them than Dumbledore.

• The Portkey doesn't have to have been made by Santa - it could have been made by anyone at the Salem Witches' Institute. And it doesn't work on the Hogwarts grounds.

• Santa Claus claimed Dumbledore would keep The Invisibility Cloak if he ever got his hands on it, which was completely wrong, and a rather insane thing to say if it's Dumbledore (which doesn't prevent it from being Dumbledore, but still...)

• Sirius wouldn't know anything about Quirrell. Dumbledore presumably researched him before offering him the DA job. Neither would trust him.

• As Harry's godfather, Sirius would care a great deal about Harry.

One thing i Just wanted to point out, Mr. Hat&Cloak (or, as Hermione calls him, Mr. Extremely Shifty Guy) appears to shape-shift when talking to her. Has anyone considered that he could be a manifestation of Tonks? Thats a bit far fetched, but whoever he is, he either can shape-shift, OR create illusions to make it look like he does.

But why would Dumbledore give Harry a Portkey in the first place? What reason could he have for giving Harry a route out of Hogwarts?

Might explain all those Nazi book-burnings. Grindelwald's human allies weren't just providing human sacrifices.

My intuition, my sense of fairness, says that you can't get back the work required to create information without sacrificing an appreciable fraction of the number of extant copies of that information.

I would guess that Magic and the Mind Projection Fallacy are sittin' in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.

You can make copies of books and of software CDs very cheaply. Given a law of conservation, it can't be the case that destroying (sacrificing) a cheap copy would gain you powerful results, or else you could generate infinite resources very quickly (and wizards would realize this).

Maybe destroying the last extant copy of a software would achieve the effect. One wonders what great magic was fueled by the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

Another thought: write down a description of a complex magical principle that you understand, but that the interdict of merlin would prevent someone else who was reading it from understanding. Use the parchment you wrote on as an ingredient in a potion to make a potion with the mental work needed to discover/comprehend that principle.

Poof, Interdict of Merlin loses its teeth entirely. :)

Another thought that occurred to me: Felix Felicis. No wonder it's hard to brew. Only way you could brew it is if you literally got lucky in the process of brewing it, by chance, so that you can take that "chance" and put it into the potion.

(hrm... might be able to automate the process of making Felix: Have a machine that keeps mixing the ingredients many times in parallel, ie, many "potential potions", and in the process does something like for each potential potion, has a coin (or some random bit source which can then be physically placed in the potion) which it flips a 100 times. It also tracks the results, and when one of the coins comes up all heads, it drops it into the candidate potion then calls up the wizard to complete the potion.)

Oh, and MoR!Snape did claim you could brew fame and stuff. That was one of the things MoR!Harry challenged him on, saying something like "How does that work anyways? You drink it and turn into a celebrity?"

Or, wait, an even more recursive version of your science power potion:

Make a clever potion. Use that potion as an ingredient in a potion to extract the mental work of creating a clever potion.

Use that potion as an ingredient... repeat. :)

This thread is a little silly, even by local standards. First of all, the fact that a potion can be no stronger than its ingredients doesn't imply that a potion will always be as strong as its ingredients -- there are probably all kinds of other restrictions on what can be effectively brewed. By way of analogy, most Volvo engines don't run at Carnot efficiencies and most split pea soups don't run at more than 0.01 efficiency.

Second, all of the canon/fanon magical ingredients are non-copiable...a feather or a squished animal is not like a CD or a video game or a piece of parchment. Perhaps you could use the original of a piece of parchment if you didn't keep a spare copy, but EV drops lots of clues -- potion conservation was apparently designed by someone who thought the universe was fair, potion brewing is a substitute for a small, safe sacrifice, etc. -- everyone who's trying to figure out how to make a potion out of costless intellectual property is playing a different game than the one Harry's playing.

Third, advanced electronics tend to malfunction in proximity to strong magical auras -- so far the most advanced Muggle artifact that's been successfully used to interact with wizards are a car battery and a solid-fuel rocket -- both of which basically just discharged their stored energy, without any controls more subtle than an "on" button.

Fourth, would it really be fun if Harry put Science into a cauldron and took out a flask full of Win? A major theme in the fanon so far is the importance of working together in teams and coalitions. Harry already has enough power to singlehandedly overcome most casual bands of students. He destroys Dementors, outwits Headmasters, is fabulously wealthy, incredibly famous, has above-average magical strength, bloody single-minded discipline & determination, and of course an excellent background in basic cognitive science. If he suddenly became an expert programmer, researcher, etc. and broke Merlin's Interdict, he'd have enough power to singlehandedly overwhelm adult powerhouses like Lucius or Flitwick...I don't buy it. I predict that Harry will be prompted to learn how to play politics on a national scale, just as Harry has recently learned how to lead teams on a school-wide scale.

As I interpreted it, potions are doubly bound. The ingredients only 'remember' as much of an affect (light, luck, heat, strength) as was put into them, but they're also constrained by magic. Everything is bound by Magic In, Magic Out. Hence the talk of potions requiring magical ingredients.

Under this interpretation, it means that potions act only as a coiled spring or temporary battery. Sacrificing software would only be useful if you needed intelligence right then and couldn't afford the magic at the time; if you just wanted to be generally smarter, you would just continually cast intellect charms on yourself (or perform a ritual). This also fits in cannonically, with many of the most powerful potions (Polyjuice, Felix Felicis, Veritaserum) taking months to brew and providing short duration benefits.

Speculation on the Slytherin/Ravenclaw issue: Quirrell is a double impostor. He's Voldemort possessing a Slytherin (name unknown) and pretending to be that Slytherin pretending to be a Ravenclaw named Quirinus Quirrell. Dumbledore knows about one level of the masquerade, and accepts the explanation that the Slytherin of unknown name is a private person. Quirinus Quirrell may be an entirely constructed identity, although that would make it less likely for him to have failed to remember some of the details of it under interrogation.

The line about having been sorted into Ravenclaw could be as fake as the Fuyuki City thing, Scrimgeour's play. Quirrell's apparent failure could just be a way of getting temporarily detained, while Dumbedore's looking for Riddle and Harry wants his help. His cover could actually be pretty solid, so he'd just shrug off Scrimgeour's suspicions once it's time to go.

I don't think he's worried by the Marauder's Map. If he knew it could expose him he'd have already taken it from Fred and George.

Of course, there is no possible way that he does not have his exit from Hogwarts entirely planned out. But it's still April, so I don't think he plans on leaving quite yet.

But no doubt Dumbledore will hold on to the map for when Quirrell returns. But seeing as he may well be (intentionally) blowing his cover, that may not be for some time.

My reading of the visa thing was that the Auror made it up on the spot to confirm that Quirrell had no idea of what trips he had taken in the past, and is therefore an impostor. Although I don't understand why Quirrell, if impersonating someone, would fail to look up these simple facts.

I believe Dumbledore would have been a professor of the real Quirrell, so he must know it's an imposter he's hired. I suspect Quirrell fed him some convincing lie or another about his true identity.

If the latter, why would Dumbledore hire him?

Because Q is someone very good at what he is about to teach who does not want to have his identity public. Dumblodore wants a decent teacher - as has been pointed out many times - and is willing to put up with a lot to get him. Now weather Dumbledore knows the true identity of Q is a different question.

The magical world is a small world, Hogwarts is a small school, at least some parents of current Hogwarts students would have remembered that Quirrell was in Ravenclaw not Slytherin. I'm guessing this is an inadvertent mistake by Eliezer.

There are more goodies there than just that.

Quirrell wins a bet against Dumbledore with an unknown prize

The prize was that Quirrell gets to teach students the killing curse.

How about Three Worlds Collide?

Success!

What it doesn't explain - why cheat codes are in latinised English.

It seems possible to me that MoR spells work a bit like the URLs for TvTropes pages. When a new spell is created, it is attached to an arbitrary incantation of the casters choosing. From then on, that incantation recalls that same set of effects no matter who performs it, like entering a URL into TvTropes to retrieve a page that someone else wrote, when just yesterday that URL led to a blank page.

What I want to know is whether Atlantis was the origin of the system or merely the last society to have edit privileges. (Maybe they abused the system and destroyed themselves so whatever's running the simulation brought the banhammer down on the inhabitants of the MoR verse, and thus began the decline of magic?)

You're almost right.

The actual explanation is that they're all fictional characters in a Harry Potter fanfic. Dumbledore knows this, or at least knows they're in a story. The purpose is indeed to make a good story, and one that teaches Methods of Rationality.

What it doesn't explain - why cheat codes are in latinised English.

Because it's a Harry Potter fanfic, and in the original Harry Potter series, the spells were in Latinized English, probably because Latin has an ancient mystical aura for readers in fantasy tradition.

From chapter 14

"Turning into a cat doesn't even BEGIN to compare to this. You know right up until this moment I had this awful suppressed thought somewhere in the back of my mind that the only remaining answer was that my whole universe was a computer simulation like in the book Simulacron 3 but now even that is ruled out because this little toy ISN'T TURING COMPUTABLE! A Turing machine could simulate going back into a defined moment of the past and computing a different future from there, an oracle machine could rely on the halting behavior of lower-order machines, but what you're saying is that reality somehow self-consistently computes in one sweep using information that hasn't... happened... yet..."

To quote Harry Potter: "This doesn't seem to be Lucius' style."

Lucius is evil and has reason to foster distrust of Dumbledore, two points in favor of H&C being him, but his taste in plotting seems to run far more to the political style, manipulating the press, using flattery and favors to gain control, than to weird, secretive manipulation.

I concur that H&C is Lucius Malfoy. It seems very plain if you look at the proximate results instead assuming every character belongs in the cast of Death Note. A plan that requires that many conditionals is bound to fail.

-H&C succeeds in causing a 3 way tie: The school nearly riots.

-H&C gets Zabini to lie to Quirrell and Harry: Quirrell and Harry trust Dumbledore less.

-H&C messes with Hermoine so that she hates Draco: Draco and Hermoine stop being friends.

Not everyone has to be playing Xanatos Roulette. Some people can just use influence and get back solid and predictable returns from their actions. Lucious Malfoy makes good and predictable gains with each of these plans.

Hat and Cloak told Hermione "you are a Muggleborn and yet you possess a power of wizardry greater than any pureblood."

Lucius can't believe that. He can't even afford for that belief to exist, so I don't see him uttering it, even as flattery he "knows" to be false.

It would simply be bad writing to set up a mysterious and malevolent figure like Hat and Cloak and then reveal him as one of the story's established villains. It's redundant, a wasted move, to reveal that the villain was secretly a villain. It drains tension from the story to reveal that the heroes were only facing one opponent, not two. I would rule out the possibility just by assuming a competent author.

A point in favor of Hat and Cloak being Grindelwald: the playing card he chose to represent Dumbledore was the King of Hearts. ♥

What evidence is there that H&C isn't just Quirrell wrapped in an illusion?

There's no need for Hermione to have cast the lethal hex. She wins the duel, then the real perpetrator stuns both of them, hexes Draco, and then memory charms Hermione into thinking she did it. However, if that's the case, unless the perpetrator then used Hermione's wand to cast the hex, checking what spells her wand had cast would reveal something fishy.

Why are we proposing the H&C is not clever and powerful?

If Voldemort's possession ability worked like that, though, why wouldn't he just use Quirrel's body for that? You'd think that he would make sure to use his smartest host for anything requiring puzzle solving or careful manipulation.

When H&C drops the disguise, Hermoine recognizes him/her. I don't think it is particularly likely that ghost-Voldemort looks anything like any picture of him from a history book. So how would Hermoine recognize him?

Transfigure a one-atom line of antimatter through the earth's crust all the way to the Wizengamot or Malfoy Manor, and then a small bubble there. His wand is then touching the item to be transformed, and it will work.

Ten points to Slytherin for creativity. Minus ten bajillion points for holy shit, are you suicidal?!

Bribery, Trade, or Begging

Harry could offer to pay Lucius Malfoy something in restitution. It couldn't just be money or an incredible favor. As the original 'Taboo Tradeoffs' paper mentions, people only get more angry when you try to do that. Harry would need an accurate model of Lucius suspecting him as Harrymort and be able to trade him something that Harrymort would consider sacred.

• Trade his invisibility cloak to Lucius for Hermione's freedom. Make sure to play up that it is 1/3rd of the Deathly Hallows and thus something Harrymort considers sacred/invaluable.

• Trade Lucius a blood debt from the House of Potter.

• Make an unbreakable vow to protect Draco or otherwise help Lucius (or some other ritual).

• (Assuming Roger Bacon's diary is indeed the diary Horcrux and Harry manages to discover that) Trade Lucius a piece of Voldemort's soul as apology.

None of the trades seem particularly smart or likely, but Harry might consider a few of them if he got really desperate. They seem to be of sufficient value to Lucius (or rather, to Harry's model of Lucius' model of Harrymort) to prove that Harry is genuinely sorry and be worth Hermione's life/magic/future.

He consults professor Quirrell, accuses him of setting this all up to rob him of friends, and demands that he free Hermione in order to prove his innocence and good-will.

Quirrell disappears, reappears, and informs Harry that Lucius had a change of heart and is dropping all charges.

Stealth - not only he must transfer cloak to Hermione - he must also get Hermione out of court, and she must be in cloak at all times to prevent tracking magic, and Harry must have the cloak with himself, when Dumbledore will want to see it, when tracking magic will stop working (and there's spell that detects if cloak is nearby).

One way to do this - duplicate cloak using time turner for the moment Dumbledore will want to check it.

Scheme:

• Harry takes cloak, mokesking pouch, and time turner with himself to the court

• Harry waits for Hermione to disappear

• Harry puts his mokeskin poach under the table or somewhere and not look at it

• Hermione disappears

• Dumbledore try to track Hermione and fails - so he checks if cloak is near - it is, so he asks Harry about it - Harry shows cloak to Dumbledore and it's empty

• Harry goes back wearing cloak just before the moment Hemrione should disappear, takes the mokeskin poach that he left under the table, somehow makes everybody look elsewhere and put Hermione into his own mokeskin poach which he keeps under the duplicated cloak (may need to use potion or sth that will turn Hermione into animal or thing or sth that he can put into poach - like with Quirrell as a snake).

• Harry in the past waits for Dumbledore to check the cloak that Harry in the present has with himself, waits for everybody to get out, and somehow passes the poach back to himself without looking at himself. Harry in the present puts poach into the cloak.

Possible failures - Dumbledore can keep the cloak, making it impossible to hide Hermione after the time turner is used up. I think Dumbledore won't do this - he didn't wanted to keep cloak to himself, he wants Harry to have cloak just in case, and even if he see throught this plot, he can let it slip, because he probably don't want Hermione to have wand snapped. But it's one failure mode.

Also Harry must be prepared to "prove" he didn't used up his TimeTurner, like he did after Azkaban Breaking.

I probbly missed something, and this won't work.

Transfigure a one-atom line of antimatter through the earth's crust all the way to the Wizengamot or Malfoy Manor, and then a small bubble there. His wand is then touching the item to be transformed, and it will work.

Items aren't held in stasis while in mid-transfiguration as far as I am aware.

I'm not sure he even needs a line anyway.

The transfiguration idea is very clever, but I suspect that the Wizengamot and Malfoy Manor would both have powerful defenses which would block harmful transfigurations. It also isn't clear what the range is on transfiguration.

Go to Azkaban and round up a few hundred dementors.

Harry would never use dementors as his army.

Bringing Hermione under the aegis of a noble house

Adoption or marriage

Problem one, Dumbledore is Harry's legal guardian and would need to approve such acts. Problem two, there is then a blood debt from House Potter to House Malfoy, so maybe Harry has his wand snapped instead of Hermione, and how is that any better?

The first thing I noticed is that the list contains the Santa Claus messages and H&C appearances (14, 21, 35, 63, 77). Presumably all chapters that contain strong and deliberate hints at H&C's identity are on the list. I notice that neither the chapter where Remus talks about Sirius and Peter, nor the chapter where a prisoner is mumbling "I'm not serious [Sirius]" are on the list, so H&C is unlikely to be Sirius. On the other hand 65 which has Quirrel explain that the port key Santa Claus sent had a misleading description attached is not on the list either, so that may not be definite.

Ha! Or maybe Eliezer has been rolling his eyes at us (or, rather, y'all), and gave us a blatant hint with the contrast of competent Quirrell interrogating sneaky Snape and less experienced H&C working on naive Hermione. I think you're just clinging to your one beautiful idea, instead of examining other possibilities - like, say, H&C is taking instructions from Quirrell, maybe?

See? Two can play that game.

I think Eliezer probably meant us to know that Quirrell was H&C the very first time he appeared.

I disagree with this at least as strongly as you believe it. I'm pretty sure he meant Hat and Cloak to be a giant question mark. Hence the elaborate descriptions of the broad hat, the dark mist, and the gender-concealing cloak, all drawing your attention to the mystery of his identity. There have been hints, but they don't all point in the same direction the way they do for Quirrell and Voldemort. Some are red herrings. I conclude that we're not meant to be certain of who he is. We're meant to wonder and doubt.

I'm not sure why almost everyone assumes that the first and the second H&C is the same person. Is there any reason to think so, beside their appearance?

Same appearance is a clue to the two H&C-s being related, but not necessarily to identity. For example, a hat and a cloak may be a uniform in a secret society, to be worn in special circumstances. Or, maybe two of them were friends and did pranks like that in their youth. Or, one of them saw the other do this trick once long ago, was impressed, and remembered it. Etc etc.

What I'm leading to is the possibility of the first H&C being Quirrell, and the second being Lucius.

The problem I have with this is that it's unnecessary from Quirrel's point of view.

If Quirrell wanted a 3 way tie, he could have managed that himself as the organizer.

If Quirrell wanted Blaise to testify about Dumbledore, he could have pulled the same trick Kingsley did in book 5 at far less risk.

If Quirrell wanted to convince Hermoine of something, he wouldn't have needed multiple tries reset with Obliviate.

Quirrell being H&C is superfluous frow Quirrell's point of view. He could have achieved all of those by himself.

What really throws this for me is that Quirrell is said to go down the hallway in the same direction as Zabini, and then in the next section Zabini meets H&C. That is so blatant that I actually consider it an anti-clue. It's like someone pretending to steal something and whistling nonchalantly to draw attention to their jest-theft. Contrast to Quirrell trying to permanently Dement Harry during the Humanism arc, which was subtle enough that I completely missed it in the first reading (tho didn't hurt that I was very biased by my adoration of Quirrell at that point).

Or she's predicting a very imminent war.

I quite doubt Lucius is upset with Harry at the moment. He's not stupid, and Harry is not to blame for what happened to his son.

And I'm quite confident Quirrell is not H&C, as the Defense Professor would have been considerably better at brain-washing Hermione. Besides, Harry will know that Hermione truly going dark is far more unlikely than interference via mind-magic or blackmail. He is going to stay on her side and investigate what happened, and Quirrell would anticipate this and not expect Harry to fall into darkness.

Quirrell storming into the trial when the majority of the audience believes him to be the one behind everything sounds quite like this story's style.

The trouble with this theory is that the arc is confirmed to last until chapter 84, and Quirrell being suddenly released from custody would be far too short of a resolution.

I suspect Harry and Co will come up with some sort of last-ditch effort during the trial, leading to some sort of awesome event like the previously suggested Trial-By-Combat (though obviously not that). I suspect Quirrell will play some part in the end, though.

Oh, and I'd like to predict that we find out H&C's identity during this arc.

Intermittent one is either people using time-turners, Weasley's don;t know about time-turners, so they think it's showing one person in two places or If it showed two names for the same person, that might be an intermittent bug too, ie Quirrel/Riddle based on who he is at the moment.

Permanent bug might be someone floating in the castle who they know shouldn't be there, perhaps Pettigrew, or Sirius, or someone who should be there but isn't - ie Quirrell being unplottable.

Dumbledore & Snape are known Occlumens, but they show up on the map just fine.

In canon, the bug that Harry saw was Pettigrew on the map but he wasn't actually there in reality.

I think it's likely that Harry is one of those errors. We he goes dark-side his name might change.

My guess is, the intermittent one is H&C taking the appearance (and name, on the map) of students who are elsewhere to walk among the children, listening to rumours, maybe even talking to them. I'm going to assume he can disappear as well as change shape when out of sight, otherwise it would be too easy to track him down; plus, that's why it's 'intermittent'.

Dumbledore just can know about Snape's schemes, and also want him to believe, that he doesn't know. If he consider Snape's game mostly harmless...

The twins didn't brainwash Rita, they paid somebody to do it for them.

Harry leaps to that conclusion before hearing from Dumbledore how difficult they are to create. Even if that was the method, there is still the question of how they managed to accomplish it.

My hypothesis — as of several chapters ago — is that Dumbledore assisted in the Rita prank. He certainly had the motive, since he's playing the game against Lucius and Rita was Lucius's pawn. He also had the means (being incredibly powerful). Why hadn't he acted against her earlier? Because he hadn't been clever enough to think up a good way to get at her without inviting retaliation.

So how did he ever get included in the twins' plan?

Easy: he's in the habit of routinely reading their mind. Evidence for this lies in chapter 63: "It wasn't that the Headmaster had popped up out of nowhere and was staring at them with a stern expression. Dumbledore was always doing that." There's also weak evidence in chapter 12, where Dumbledore knows Harry wants to reformulate Quidditch (he could know via F&G via Ron). And in chapter 79, where he knows about the map.

So: The twins are walking around thinking about how to implement their plan against Rita, Dumbledore pops up out of nowhere looking for some good gossip, sees their plans, seizes the opportunity. The exact implementation could either be a memory charm (maybe trap her when she shows up at Mary's room looking for gossip about Amelia Bones, Dumbledore's ally), or else Dumbledore could actually pull off the acts Quirrell calls impossible.

was it worth it to make such a hubbub with such a supremely, well, boring answer?

Yes. That was the point of the whole incident.

Very Interesting. Are we certain he doesn't just mean that Hogwarts only detects student's spells? Probably not.

Do you think individuals who were professors in the past but are no longer might not be detected?

Oh, and I suspect that the Sorting Hat Summoning is going to happen during the trial, perhaps as a means of impartial mind-reading.

Will you do that before or after taking the SATs?

As a new lesswrongER, perhaps the most exciting thing about this community is the ability to reference Douglas Adams un-cited and assume that people will know exactly what I'm talking about.

What's the eve of the SAT?

Lucius would obey a direct order from Voldemort, I should think. Maybe not from Harrymort, but if Quirrell could reveal himself...

It's also mentioned in Circular Altruism.

This matches research showing that there are "sacred values", like human lives, and "unsacred values", like money. When you try to trade off a sacred value against an unsacred value, subjects express great indignation (sometimes they want to punish the person who made the suggestion).

My favorite anecdote along these lines - though my books are packed at the moment, so no citation for now - comes from a team of researchers who evaluated the effectiveness of a certain project, calculating the cost per life saved, and recommended to the government that the project be implemented because it was cost-effective. The governmental agency rejected the report because, they said, you couldn't put a dollar value on human life. After rejecting the report, the agency decided not to implement the measure.

Trading off a sacred value (like refraining from torture) against an unsacred value (like dust specks) feels really awful. To merely multiply utilities would be too cold-blooded - it would be following rationality off a cliff...

I'm sure there's a hint in there, but I don't know what it is.

This seems like it could offer some excellent hints. I'm going to try to read it later. If anyone scientifically-literate wants to summarize it for the rest of us, we'd be quite gratefully.

I think the point of this arc is not to leave you wanting for complicated answers to obvious-seeming questions, but simply to keep you on the edge of your seat waiting to see how things play out. It's about knocking down dominoes, not setting them up.

Harry isn't stupid, he has to realize that getting Hermione and Draco out of the way obviously benefits the defense professor. And Quirrell would know this, and not want to make Harry think he's someone who would ruin an innocent 12-year-old girl's life. Their next conversation is going to be interesting.

Prediction: Dumbledore is pretending to lose, probably to Lucius. The Auror trio is personally loyal to Dumbledore, and Amelia Bones either doesn't know this or can plausibly deny knowing this.

Confidence for conjunction of all events above: 15%.

I don't think it'll come completely out of the blue. Come to think of it, perhaps the reason they need so many aurors is that they suspect Hermione of being more than she appears? Accusing a muggleborn of beating up your son is shameful, accusing a secret evil double-witch isn't. Maybe they'll accuse her of being an adult in disguise or something.

Perhaps I'm just overly simple here, but it seems to me that Draco decided to do the murder setup when he was writing the letter. I understand that it could be a lot more complex than that - but not everything -has- to be complex.

My prediction: Draco dueled with intent to frame Hermione for attempted murder. Hermione sat next to HP because she knows she's screwed and there's nothing she can do about it, and she wanted to be near him when the inevitable caught up to her.

This prediction creates what I'd consider an extremely messy political problem for HP, one that quite frankly I don't see an easy magical or non-magical solution to. That may be the point.

That is a good point. I would love for it to turn out that Eliezer reversed what Rowling did with Snape. I don't think that you can abuse generations of children, for any reason, and still come out the other side of it a good guy.

It would be just like Eliezer to add another level to Cannon Snape's deception. Bad pretending to be good pretending to be bad. shudder

Further evidence for this theory is that H&C is not great at modelling people, and Snape isn't good at mental models of others either.

If you think H&C2 is the same as H&C1 (I do, for conservation-of-detail reasons), Snape is a plausible candidate for competent plotter who isn't Quirrell or Dumbledore. Which isn't to say that there a clear motive in that case either.

Premise: I've studied latin for about 5 years, so I'm not going to use gTranslate for Latin :)

my dictionary sounds better for this scope.

• Verb:

The verb prodeo [pro-eo] is the best I could think.

• the particle pro- means something like in front of, even between (me) and something, or near (me): this last one is peculiar and happens only sometimes.

• eo is the most common and even one of the ancient verbs (that's why is defective/irregular) that means simply go.

So when Cicero (Br. 39) said :

prodire in lucem

he probably meant something like

come out from dark in the light.

Other times is used, like in Caesar (Bg):

in proelium prodire

that should sound like

come out and go to the battle.

OT:
(If you need for other occasion for a "incantation" in a more militar situation , a good one could be subject in ablative case+ proelium proditu (prò-e-li-um prò-di-tu), but that's another topic :) )

Even flowers prodent and in a figurative way, even

lacrimae de gaudio prodeunt

(Apuleio)

tears of joy appeared/came out of (him)

but this sense doesn't matter that much for our problem, i guess.

• Subject:

Since you don't use "Hat" for the Sorting Hat, but it seems to me that you want to stress the fact that this "entity" is that important because is a Sorter I would guess

Deligitor

would be the best.

Also Eligitor would be nice there is a subtle difference: the last one means "the one who choose what he prefears". Deligo[de-lego -> de-eligo] means choose what (or who) is more apt to a peculiar aim.

A Cicero's quote:

ex civitate in senatum delecti

meant something like

choosen among the cives/citizens to form the senate(to be senators)

Deligitor is the noun formed by the verb, means "who choose, who looks for the fittest men (or stuff) for a task and choose them for that task"

• The spell: JKR spells are really more naive, but that's not the point: they are not meant to be real Latin, but they are meant to sound like "Ancient powerful spell with complicated and forgotten words", imho.

• The best grammatical looking phrase would be:

Deligitor prodi

that means "Chooser, be present"

because the verb is in the imperative mode, second person singular: prod-i. But that doesn't sound that good, imho.

A more free construction could be

Deligitor prode

That literally means "(the)Chooser has come to be present here."

and could be quite nice (not too far from Latin, not too boring for a fan-fic).

Or dozen of combination of this ones: deligit[or;-us,-um] prod[i,it,es,

oh! that could be nice also:

deligitor prodeas

is exhortative(or exhorting, i don't know) conjunctive, that simply means:

please, do this or would you mind doing this or it could be perfect/awesome if you bother to do this

that would sound like Chooser, please come here asap , or Sorting hat, come here since we need you

I'll stop here, waiting for some feedback, because otherwise my mind would be lost in this long trip.

Pervenit Judex translates to "Here Comes the Judge".

What's wrong with "Accio Sorting Hat"?

pileum dictionis, affluere!

It would make Vergilius turn over in his grave, but it roughly means "(felt)hat (of the) talking, flow (to me) (i.e. appear)"

took the liberty to base it on the german translation of the sorting hat, which is "talking hat"

Edit: Adtendite Ordinarium means something like "mind the order". google really sucks at latin ;)

Wait, you mean you wrote so condescendingly about JKRs use of fake Latin while you don't know any Latin yourself? That's disappointing.

That aside, shouldn't you contact someone who actually does speak Latin to think up some spells for you from the ground up instead of sort of reverse-engineering them from English? Because that's exactly what Rowling did and look how that worked out...

Plus, if you do ever need to translate Latin, screw Google, Whitaker is your best friend. http://archives.nd.edu/words.html

Why, in this theory, did Voldemort abandon his quite successful campaign, become the lame Quirrel, and begin fiercely criticizing his former self and attempting to reform magical Britain's children into tools that would defeat his former self?

I'd like to point out that after Azkaban, when Quirrell tries to talk Harry into his next plot, Harry refuses by citing what Hermione and Draco would say. Quirrell sits there and thinks for a really long time, and asks if Harry really cares about what they think. My guess is that right then and there is when Quirrell decides to take them out.

So... Quirrel made that near-slip of "time travel" and "I'm going to go back in time and try again" in the Groundhog Day Attack? I'm afraid I'm not really buying it.

I think that's a stretch. It's just another poke at canon.

(To Eliezer: if you're ever worried about the legal status of MoR, parody is the most obvious way to protect yourself under fair use doctrine, and these pokes at canon will be a main part of your case. I suggest not going light on them to the extent possible.)

Remember how the professors made a big deal about Harry not discussing his discovery about potions?

Perhaps school manuals are picked to contain only potions with magic ingredients, as a misdirection for people not wise enough (students) to try to figure out the "well-known secret", the same way Harry was at first.

But Harry's potion didn't release a lot of magic, it only released light (note that in the coin example, it was the non-magical coin that furnished the "heat"), so probably Harry used a bit of magic (like in Potions class) to "rearrange" the light without need of magical ingredients.

(Also, why wouldn't "wizard hair" count as a magical ingredient?)

I think that if this were truly an original discovery it would have been a bigger deal. There are probably quite a few potions using only ingredients muggles know of, but I bet Harry will be able to invent quite a few more of them.

My theory is that potions which don't involve magical ingredients are obscure because they're usually less powerful and because they require a greater investment of energy from the creator to do the reshaping (explaining why Harry doesn't do very much in that battle). Given that Flitwick and McGonagal had suggestions of books to make at all after hearing what Harry wanted, it seems very likely that such potions do exist, just not in the standard textbooks. It seems very likely that Harry got his potion out of a book, because potions research is dangerous and presumably very time consuming, and because Harry with the ability to invent potions would be powerful enough to wreck the story.

There's a PDF link on the front page of hpmor.com that's actively maintained, and thankfully doesn't require dealing with MediaFire. I would link directly, but the URL changes with each update.

Quirrel can turn Harry instantly and permanently against Dumbledore (edit: though not Wizarding society in general), any day he likes, by telling him that the Philosopher's stone exists and Dumbledore is allowing Flamel to hoard it (and the method for creating more) for himself.

No stronger method is needed. Harry would declare Dumbledore his enemy on the spot.

I wonder if it might rather be a move to turn Harry (even more) against Wizarding society by exposing the massive flaws of their justice system.

End of Chapter 80: This result has come about.

I'm fairly certain that could be accomplished just by giving him a book on wizarding law. So probably not a factor in H&C's plotting.

It is highly unlikely that Hermione would agree to the duel considering her reaction to whatever H&C convinced her of, and Draco saw attacking her on the spot as a forced move. So, Hermione declined Draco's duel and Draco attacked her on the spot.

I think Hermione fought it life-or-death and did Draco serious damage.

Edit: Actually she should not have been able to do him serious damage if the wards actually work as they are alleged to work. Maybe she tried to do him serious damage, the wards did... whatever they do and Dumbledore felt compelled to report the attempt? I'm not sure any more.

My first thought is this: Hermione beat Draco to a pulp, and Lucius reported it. He was definitely intending to do something, and would have been monitoring his son.

My own immediate reaction was 'this in no way serves Hermione or Draco's plans, so it must be a third party, and Lucius just stormed out of the battle'. Except how could Lucius know, and what exactly good does prosecuting Hermione do? It's implied he can't be monitoring Draco in real time by his ignorance and the letter-writing, and it also runs afoul of the Hogwarts magical defenses - so what happened, Draco got beaten, crawled to his room, wrote a letter to Lucius, got it delivered, and Lucius roused the law which rushed to arrest Hermione, all in the <~8 hours after the duel? And while Lucius may have influence in the courts and so risks little by this tactic, it makes Draco's reputation hugely worse to basically everyone (either because he looks extremely weak and dependent on his father or because he's attacking an innocent or because he's using outrageously disproportionate retaliation), and I don't see how it helps Lucius or Draco very much. Dumbledore being imprisoned would be one thing, but Hermione?

Hermione beat Draco in a duel; he is trying a Xanatos gambit: I win? I trumpet the win loudly, purebloods rule! You win? The evil mudblood broke the rules (that she probably didn't know) and tried to kill me.

Personally, I'm worried about how Harry will react. He's not going to take this well, certainly.

Now, the question here is how intelligent Hermione was. If she left the letter somewhere Harry can find it - or would know to look - then Harry would at least know what happened. Probably couldn't be used as evidence, but it would help.

I don't think they're at that stage in their relationship yet, do you?

Rot13 so people don't anchor.

V tvir nebhaq friragl creprag punapr ur trgf ure bss sbe zheqre ol gur raq bs gur nep. Vg frrzf yvxr vg jbhyq or n tbbq jnl gb vapernfr grafvba, fgnxrf naq punenpgre zbgvingvba vs Urezvbar vf haqre qherff.

Presumably, Hermione has just been the subject of a Groundhog Day Attack, and is now believing whatever the mysterious figure wants her to believe. Said figure is presumably new to the concept, as he almost slipped several times. So Hermione thinks Draco is plotting something to exploit her mysterious destiny.

Hermione hasn't been talking to Harry for awhile, I believe.

Hat & Cloak is almost definitely going to play a part in whatever happens to Hermione now. Come to think of it, he/she might have somehow been involved in Draco's injuries. Or might even be the one who arranged for Hermione's arrest, since it isn't obvious how that helps Lucius.

Are you truly confused about these?

Yes, this is happening after the Groundhog-day attack. Obviously so.
We don't know yet what Hermione thinks Draco is plotting.
We don't know what exactly happened to make Hermione so upset.

What is there to be confused about? Don't misuse the word to merely signify lack of knowledge.

Halving the Bayesian Conspiracy would only be a setback.

What else do you predict Lucius would do?

This is a Harry Potter fic, not a crossover. It's a Shout Out, not an actual reference.

I admit, however, that if the dates were right I would totally be supporting one of the H&Cs being Heroic Spirit POTTER.

agonist disorder

Doesn't look like there was an outbreak in Fuyuki. Besides, it's made clear that Quirrell never actually visited the place.

The 5th Holy Grail War takes place around 2003, with the 4th 10 years before during 1993

Which means that either (a) Kayneth Archibald el-Melloi will be replaced by Lucius Malfoy or (b) the dates need to be moved around.

I also find it impossible to believe that Hermione lost to Malfoy, she just beat him fair & square in battle. That certainly sounds like a false memory.

They were pretty evenly matched during the Chapter 78 battle, and Draco was a bit drained from charming all the gloves, so it's by no means impossible that Draco beat Hermoine. I expect if they had 10 duels, each would win at least a few.

But it is true that our only sources regarding the outcome of the duel are Draco and Hermoine's memories along with Quirrell's testimony. If those memories were placed by Hat and Cloak, and if Hat and Cloak is Quirrel, then all of our information about what happened between midnight and 6.33am is based on what Quirrell wants us to know. The only bit that is confirmed by another party is that Draco was indeed at some point unconscious in the trophy room.