Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5

I congratulate you on noticing your own confusion. Yes, I thought of that.

Canon Voldemort killed his own father. Since he was already planning to make the horcruxes anyway (or perhaps that was how he started? I forget.) what I would have done in his place was secure some of his bone at that time so I would have it available I case I ever had need to revive myself.

Of course, I would also have had Bellatrix donate some flesh, which I would keep frozen somewhere inconspicuous, unless the recipe actually requires that it be fresh.

I had assumed that Dumbledore had destroyed the remains but posted a guard at the grave in case someone showed up.

Another question is: would the most immediate or the most distant ancestor possible count as the best option for Voldemort? If the most distant, then he'll probably be wanting Salazar Slytherin's bones. If their location is known.

A hominid fossil might have no living descendants at all.

even so, an MoR-worthy solution would be for Voldemort to grab a sufficiently old hominid from a museum and assume it was common ancestor to everyone

That would not be a safe assumption; most of what we dig up are our auncles, not our parents. Still, it's worth a try.

...giving him a multi-barelled surname to boot! Though I'm not sure if that's a stereotype in the US?

I'm not sure what stereotype you're referring to, but the length of Harry's surname reads to me as almost a parody of the inclination to signal egalitarianism. I take it as evidence that his adopted parents (particularly the father) are Very Liberal, but that's all.

Class, Americanization

I hadn't actually noticed that particular issue before, but now that it's been pointed out, it seems to me more like a LessWrong-related bias than an American one. We like to focus on big, progressive, constructive issues, and upper-class people are in a better position to do so meaningfully; stories with disenfranchised characters are more likely to deal with apartment cows like 'how can I keep my abusive stepfather from attacking me' and 'how can I afford to replace my broken wand', which we don't generally like to think about.

Good point about narrowing of the range of classes-- now that you mention it, the effect is a little claustrophobic for me compared to canon.

I think not having Hagrid has somewhat of the same effect-- he comes off as a something of a low-status outsider, even before we find out he's half giant.

I'll be curious to see if you find patterns about class in American fanfic, but it's worth remembering that it's a non-random sample and probably won't give you a complete view of how Americans think about class.

I don't understand what "little englanders" means in this context, since it seems to refer to an attitude rather than an economic class as such. IIRC, Mr. Dursley owned a moderate-sized business. Wikipedia says he "is also the director of a drill-making firm, Grunnings, and seems to be quite successful in his career."

Though I'm not sure if that's a stereotype in the US?

It is.

My feeling is that the more obvious UFAI-alike in MoR is Quirrelmort. Consider: Inhumanly fast (newspaper reading; duel with Bahry). Inhumanly intelligent (passim). Very powerful in part because of being inhumanly fast and intelligent. Interested -- supposing him to be Voldemort, on which topic I shall say no more -- in defeating death (just the sort of thing someone might ask a superintelligent AI to find ways to do).

Speaking of which: "Tell them I ate it", says Quirrell concerning the destroyed Dementor. Dementors in MoR are a symbol of death, even if many wizards don't quite grasp that. Dumbledore doesn't, but Harry surely does. Is Quirrell really not concerned that Harry may get the message: "I am a death-eater"?

So it seems reasonable to ask the question: is Harry Friendly?

Perhaps the purpose of the entire narrative will be to gut-punch the readers with a lesson in Friendly AI, by showing Harry acting determinedly and rationally to ensure his own Friendliness, but failing anyway.

To me, the most likely candidate for the role of an allegory of AI in MoR currently seems to be the Source of [Atlantean] Magic, assuming that Harry's speculation wasn't completely off the mark.

(My Wild Mass Guess on the matter would be that Harry will eventually discover that the Source was the Atlanteans' equivalent of a moderately unFriendly AI, which didn't destroy the world but did wipe away Atlantis. Eliezer will then be sorely tempted to go on an all-out Author Filibuster (TVTropes) on the subject, but will manage to restrain himself to a couple of paragraphs in the Author's Notes.)

I mean, obviously he avoids the Vast majority of unFriendly design space, simply by virtue of being human. He isn't going to tile the galaxy with paperclips or anything like that.

We don't know much about how stable human values are under recursive self-modification. It's entirely possible (albeit seemingly unlikely) that humans even tend towards tiling the galaxy with paperclips in particular.

I'd expect that Quirrell would ask Harry his opinion on death some time before the test. Otherwise, it could just be that Harry is unusually afraid of death.

I'd say Quirrel was trying to kill Harry with the dementor. He only warned about the wand after Hermione was about to go before the dementor and discover it anyway.

Sense of doom comes from 2 voldemorts(or horcruxes) being dangerously in sync. (Voldy marked harry as his equal ie made him Voldemort)

loooong stretch, low probability

Sense of doom/magic incompatibility explains Voldemort dying in the first place (in MoR).

A related nitpick: I was wondering why McGonagall's Patronus found this Harry if there are multiple Harrys around at this time because of his use of the Time-Turner. It seems likely that either the earlier Harry is still around at this time, or the later Harry has come back and is around at this time, or both. Is it because this Harry is using his Patronus?

(A similar issue about communicating with people who have time traveled naq oebhtug gurve pryy cubarf came up in another work of fiction, but I won't say anything more about that to avoid spoilers.)

I hadn't thought of that, but (in canon) only members of the Order of the Phoenix can use their Patronuses that way.

It seems that messenger Patroni don't have quite the anti-dementor effects that a local Patronus does. This would make sense both for the reason people go into Azkaban and for the reason that Harry didn't feel any different from the sending being around.

Normal patroni can be identified, tracked, and presumably dispelled, so there's not much of a reduction in risk.

I want to propose two more possible solutions.

First, as I initially assumed, wards that Quirrel cast at Mary's are rendering them undetectable to patronus communication. That way, if there were no second Harry in Azkaban and third Harry on the way back, McGonagall's patronus wouldn't be able to contact him at all.

Second, for all we know about patronus' methods of travel, it might get autonomously dispatched directly to target's location, which is normally unique. There are no conservation laws that prohibit patronus splitting into two independent messengers, as there are no conservation laws preventing you from having two mirror reflections, or two acoustic echoes at the same time; and reflections and echoes can be interacted with in magical ways in Potterverse. That means that all two or three copies of Harry can get the same message, give non-conflicting answers, and McGonagall won't suspect anything.

IIRC, The method for sending messages using a Patronus was developed in canon by either DA or OoTP, and is not common knowledge. In MoR, Harry develops it himself but it presumably has been used in the war games by now.

ETA: Chapter 28, it's mentioned that Minerva's cat patronus contacted Harry, so that's probably where he got the idea.

"Is this not sufficient information transfer in and of itself to prevent Dumbledore traveling backwards?"

Obviously it is not. I'm sure that Harry would find it ludicrous that such a rule exists permitting the transfer of this one bit of information but not the rest of it... but neither Amelia nor Dumbledore think in terms of "bits".

Btw this "6-hours" window? Though I don't expect it, it'd be hilarious if in-story this had anything to do with the infamous "TimeCube" ramblings. Something like "Gene Ray was once an Unspeakable that went insane trying to figure out the mysteries underpinning the 6-hours rule.".

I think the info was sent to Bones rather than her finding it and going back, but your point may still stand. Perhaps "somebody sent something back to Amelia Bones" is vague enough to slip past the filter. There must be some nonzero cutoff, because otherwise the info would affect the whole future (from the point of receiving the info) light come of anyone who got time-traveled info, and the whole earth would be interdicted whenever somebody went back.

If I'm wrong about that, it's possible that either Bones or Dumbledore wasn't thinking, or Dumbledore realized that he was already blocked and that's part of why he decided he wanted the info.

I imagine there are many ways in which it can be inconvenient to have information about things that have, from your own perspective, not happened yet. Your own actions could become constrained on pain of paradox when previously they had not been.

Debatable.

Sirius Black, and then Hagrid, rode a flying, roaring motorbike.

This was wizarding propulsion on a Muggle vehicle, rather than the reverse, but it makes a rocket broomstick quite a bit more believable.

"Isn't that like having a coitus fetish?" And of course Harry heard his parents die at the hands of someone who wanted to kill him, after which he arguably suppressed the memory.

Sure, canon!Harry doesn't fear death as much, but the Sorting Hat told MoR!Harry that going to Gryffindor or Hufflepuff would change him. The best evidence here for your theory lies in the fact that he managed to give himself that kind of acceptance and friendship.

I wonder if Harry's dark side (assuming it's part of Voldermort) knows it's part of Voldermort. If it doesn't, what will happen to it when it/Harry finds out? Obviously Harry considers Voldermort an enemy. Will he try to destroy it?

Thanks. Fixed.

I think I can actually deflect this one by appeal to Actual Reality. (Some familiarity with quantum mechanics required.) Note that photons, by virtue of their momentum, have gravitational pull; yet in the quantum double-slit experiment, the gravitational pull of the photons is not enough to "collapse the waveform" as to which path they have taken. This seems to me to be exactly the same sort of "prohibited information" as in the fic. The best explanation I'm aware of for this is that the uncertainty in the quantities involved is high enough that, even though the photons' gravitational pull could in theory transmit information, in practice the resolution of the universe is simply not high enough for that to happen. The same thing could be at work here.

I feel like I just used a sledgehammer to kill a fly.

I think a pretty straightforward answer is that for it to be information, an intelligent being has to perceive it as such. I don't think there's a loophole - if you would successfully send information farther back in time using any means, Time Gets Mad, and things somehow work out so that you don't. And even if you get around that, unspeakably bad things probably happen.

However, I suspect that the six hours is an artificial safeguard built into the spell. You could PROBABLY create a new time travel spell that can go seven or eight hours without breaking things. I doubt the 6 hour limit is actually the snapping point. It's just the limit to what you can do before you start to deal damage to reality. Going farther once might work, but if everyone did it then Very Bad Things happen. If the payoff matrix for "everyone defects" is that the universe stops existing, you should probably cooperate.

Edit: NVM, reread the end of the chapter, and it seems like if there's any way to go more than six hours, period, it's such a well kept secret that no one thinks its possible. Then again, this would not be the first time Eliezer has employed the "powerful weapon being an amazingly well kept secret" thing, and it was somewhat foreshadowed when Harry mused that maybe scientists had come up with things worse than nuclear weapons.

This only makes sense if it means information that humans would regard as information because magic works like that.

This is what I figured.

The same thing applies to prohibiting time travel in Azkaban, or allowing one person to tell another person (while giving them access to who knows what subtle face expressions) to talk to a person that the first one can't communicate with.

I wonder if, given the nature of their relationship, Harry's blood will not actually be useful for Voldemort's spell?

Perhaps that means that Dumbledore's blood is required instead.

I'm a bit miffed about Dumbledore apparently knowing about the requirements for Voldemort to cast the spell to restore his body. That wasn't part of the prophesy, that was, in the original canon, magic of Voldemort's own creation. Even if Dumbledore knows Voldemort to be capable of such a thing, he shouldn't know how. One difficulty of compressing plot elements from a series that takes place over seven years into a one year space is that you have to be extra careful that people don't suddenly start knowing things they shouldn't know.

I would expect this would be a well-known spell to anyone who knows about horcruxes (at least, knows about it to the point of either actually using them, or opposing someone who does). Am I forgetting some reason why it wouldn't be?

EDIT: Oops, I guess this comment is obsolete - I misread the "old piece of dark magic" edit.

I made the same argument on tvtropes independently. My thought was that Sirius and Peter were human-form animagi of each other, as a wizardry analogue to getting matching tattoos. Although maybe one's choice of animagus form is involuntary: Peter was completely obsessed with Sirius at the time that the two performed the spell, but not Sirius with Peter, so Peter's form was Sirius but Sirius, to his surprise, turned into a dog instead. Maybe that's why they broke up.

I'm not sure the dementors see people the way we do: they certainly don't in canon. If Peter's mode-lock wore off in Azkaban, the dementors might not notice or care.

If Fawkes thinks that Peter is innocent, he probably is. But maybe Sirius is too. Maybe Sirius was the only one who knew that Peter was the secret-keeper, so he assumed that Peter betrayed the Potters but he'd never be able to prove it. So he switched identities and faked his own death, and remains ignorant to this day that Voldemort doesn't need a traitor to find his victims.

If Sirius is innocent, and Dumbledore knew it but couldn't prove it, then the swap could have been done by Dumbledore, replacing some other Deatheater (not necessarily Peter) with him.

Goblet of Fire (and Barty Crouch Jr's escape after swapping with his mother) shows us that Dementors are okay with you bringing in a fresh victim to trade for a less fresh one.

As per a comment by Pavitra in an earlier thread, I think it might be that he's a copy of Voldemort, without (most of?) Voldie's memories - hence the single soul under the hat, the red remembrall, and various insinuations by Quirrelmort.

I think I second the intention of this post. Clearly a lot of people here are interested in discussing MOR, but that shouldn't dominate LW.

Proposal: why not move the MOR discussion threads to the discussion section, where they won't clog up the "recent comments" for those who aren't interested in the story.

But the Harry Potter stuff is dominating the recent comments thread

That will fade away once it is finished.

The most Stanford-prison we can expect from Harry is that in having a useful, cringing, unquestioning minion, he may start to more-than-pretend to treat her like one.

Hypothesis: Quirrel staged this entire rescue mission simply because it would force Harry to pretend to be a Dark Lord, specifically the same one he's a horcrux of. He may also have believed that interacting with his most useful minion would be beneficial to his dark side reclaiming its memories and taking over Harry.

And he is in fact beginning to make use of her.

Personally, I found it very useful when Eliezer posted when we could expect the next update in his author's notes. The RSS feed is cool but doesn't seem to update right away, so I still find myself checking ff.net compulsively so I can read the new chapter the moment is goes up.

There's a brilliant bit of speculation in the reviews on FF that it's actually "I'm not Sirius". Makes sense to me, I was trying to imagine what "worst memory" would prompt "I'm not serious". Although now that you mention it, a guy like the Joker might end up that way.

Gosh golly gee whiz, that's me! I'm blushing with gratitude!

I'd like to second how awesome that was. I'm almost tempted to do a full color version of the idea.

Poll:

Vote this comment up if you think that future MOR threads should continue to be posted here on the main page, not in the discussion section.

vote discussion section, reason for this poll, karma balance

Poll:

Vote this comment up if you think that future MOR threads should be posted in the discussion section instead of here on the main page.

vote main page, reason for this poll, karma balance

The poll is evenly split (tied 13-13 now), which I see as support for moving to the discussion section, considering that the poll is located in the middle of the MOR comments.

I was leaning in that direction anyways. Most of the MOR discussion is about the story, not that closely related to rationality or that interesting to people who aren't reading MOR. And these discussion threads do clutter up the site, especially for people trying to follow the site via the Recent Comments. We've had over 3200 MOR comments over the past 6 months (over 17 comments/day). Plus another 600 Luminosity comments over the past 3 months. Having so much fiction discussion on the main page also doesn't accurately reflect what LW is about.

One disadvantage of switching is that it's a bit inconvenient. For one thing, the tags are separated - a main page tag only shows main page articles, and a discussion section tag only shows discussion section articles - so you won't be able to get all the MOR discussion threads just by clicking on one tag. Also, the MOR thread might help get people who found LW via MOR to stick around, and that won't work as well if it's hidden away in the discussion section. But I don't see those as strong enough reasons to stay on the main page, especially since it seems like the story still has a ways to go.

This thread is already over 500 comments. I plan on posting Part 6 in the discussion section later tonight, but first I'll wait a few more hours to allow for disagreement and debate.

Poll:

Vote this comment down for karma balance.

vote main page, vote discussion section, reason for this poll

Given it's already longer than the first three books of canon, the second seems to make more sense.

This will, of course, miss one thing that is nice about the canonical books: they show Harry change through adolescence.

I'm pretty sure that the first two paragraphs of the current version are new or changed. I haven't found any other differences so far.

If you're quick, the PDF version is still the older one.

I have an early version, but I'm not sure how to send it.

2 isn't a plot hole. Severus saw Harry make the comparison. That's what matters to the analysis.

Lesath addressed Harry as his (Dark/Light) Lord, and didn't stick around to hear Harry "compare" himself to God

Snape was pointing out that Lesath unknowingly prayed to Harry.

I have always had the impression that, in real life, people treat very small probabilities of being caught as zero, however severe the punishment. Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right torturing criminals isn't a good strategy.

Azkaban was not created, in-canon, in order to specifically deter potential Dark Lords. Its history is never stated, but it seems likely that it is a fairly old arrangement between the wizards and the dementors. It was created, instead, as a prison for ordinary criminals (viz. the woman Harry hears pleading while in Azkaban, who is forced to keep reliving the moment of her presumably accidental murder). The Dark Lord and his followers were indeed put in Azkaban when the opportunity arose, but this was for their crimes in the way of murder and such, not for their intention to take over magical Britain. Dark Lords are not very common (the only marginally-modern ones mentioned are Voldemort and Grindelwald, and Grindelwald is not even put in Azkaban, nor ever really messes with Britain except with the Muggle side, aka World War II). With this in mind, I think it becomes very obvious that Azkaban is vastly, awe-inspiringly overkill in the SP.

It's also useful, if you're going to do this kind of equation, to decide ahead of time how many innocents tortured for how many years you're willing to exchange for a reduced chance of political insurrection... and to develop as realistic a sense as you can of how reliable your courts are, so you don't fool yourself into thinking the quantity is lower than it is.

I believe Harry considers some punishments completely out of bounds, too severe for anyone. Certainly I do. The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice). Some possible punishments may have such negative utility for you that a course of action which avoids such increases, but which almost certainly leads to your death, would still have positive utility. Azkaban seems like a good candidate for such a punishment.

Doesn't that assume people are rational?

I believe that Quirrel, being the overeducated ruthless genius that he is, has already understood Harry's revelation, but has his own obstacles to casting human patronus, some that are not so easily overcome. For one, he may already be a bit too dead.

Hmm. Also, it's another big coincidence that the Boy Who Lived grows up a transhumanist (at least, his light side does).

Explanations for events in MoR may differ from explanations in canon...

He should be able to deduce the nature of the dementors from Harry's invisibility cloak being able to hide the wearer from them (which should be readily apparent from Harry's summary of events and the fact that Bella was wearing it). Other things like what you point out or Harry's parselmouth description as life-eaters could help, but the cloak thing by itself should be quite sufficient given Quirrel's previously displayed deductive abilities. I don't think he will be able to cast a true patronus, though.

A Patronus (incorporeal!) intercepting an Avada Kedavra spell is bizarre and ridiculous. Anything less ridiculous would not have been able to interfere. With hindsight, sure, he should have known, but he doesn't have hindsight, we do. Before the event, he couldn't have possibly planned for Harry interfering like this, and we can see he already planned for any more probable level of interference - making Harry lie down on the steps far away, ordering him not to get involved, etc. If you really honestly think he should have expected a smart eleven-year-old boy possessed of a stronger-than-usual Patronus charm to be able to deflect the undeflectable curse, then he also should have planned for some equally bizarre event such as Dumbledore breaking the Apparation wards on Azkaban in order to teleport in front of the Avada Kedavra spell, and just taking it on chin because he's invincible.

Honestly. Quirrell would have to be holding either the Idiot Ball or Batman's belt in order to prepare for this.

A big weakness in Quirrell's plan (assuming he wanted a successful prison break) was counting on Harry to maintain a stable Patronus. Harry is young, inexperienced at casting Patronus, and in a place liable to cause extreme emotional reactions, and he must maintain a Patronus strong enough to keep them hidden from Dementors but not so strong that it starts destroying Dementors or attracting attention.

The trouble started when Harry's escalating Patronus attracted the Aurors' attention, which was a foreseeable (and foreseen) risk. And it doesn't seem all that surprising that Harry's Patronus would go out when he saw Quirrell cast Avada Kedavra (although it is very surprising that it would block the spell).

Hiding under the cloak would put him in physical contact, or nearly so, with Quirrell. Though I guess he could also have had Bellatrix put him in his pouch.

Dumbledore has one. :) My theory is that the message from McGonagall to Flitwick is going to pass through many hands (or pockets), including Dumbledore, Snape, Quirrell, several versions of Harry, and at least one use of Harry's patronus.

You gotta understand, this is Eliezer doing the plotting here.

Of course, a different trick that could be used, if necessary, would be to bring a fresh time-turner (or several) back from the next day. I'm sure Harry has already experimented with what happens when you carry a time-turner back from just after midnight, and then hand that freshly recharged time-turner to an earlier version of yourself. Can a time-turner be transfered back in time? I'll bet Harry knows. Harry is already familiar with puzzles involving trucks leaving caches of gasoline cans in the desert. The Ministry of Magic is not.

In any case, Harry can pass the test without breaking any laws of Time if he can find someone else with a time-turner.

I expect he may bypass the test a different way. I could be wrong about the timeline, but it seems to me that McGonagall's patronus is about to show up in the warehouse where Harry and Quirrell are having their little chat...

It certainly does seem to be both. However it's possible that the personal limit per time turner is specific to the construction of the time turners and is not an iron law of time travel. If they were constructed to have personal daily limit equal to the absolute limit ("Who would ever need to go back in time more than 6 hours in a single day?") that would explain it.

Alternatively, the characters are just very confused, but I would expect they have enough experience with time turners that they are familiar with their operating limits (in "ordinary" situations, anyway).

Harry's idea of dealing with McGonagall involves using the Time-Turner again. This means a version of Harry must leave Mary's Place before Harry and Quirrell begin their elaborate precautions in Mary's Room, and maybe before they even order their food (Ch. 51). Whoops.

Harry's response is correct, assuming McGonagall's Patronus visited after they activated Time-Turner the first time. It means that they can Time-Turn again (somewhere hidden), enter the room before it's sealed by their first versions, wait hidden in the room for first versions to travel in the past (disappear from timeline), then open the room and let Harry meet McGonagall.

As long as an object exists you can transfigure something to it. You don't need to know everything about a device to transfigure a duplicate.

To be fair, building a solid-fuel rocket from memory wouldn't be too hard as it's all of 2 materials and rather simple in shape. Depending on how much knowledge of the subject free transfiguration takes he won't need anything more than his making of buckystring.

McGonagall (or people from the Ministry) successfully detected the use of a Time-Turner before, in Ch. 18.

Did they? IIRC, it was all indirect evidence.

I've been thinking of Patronuses as only being able to bring back one bit of information: "delivered message" vs "couldn't deliver message".

Though I'm sure there are counterexamples in both canon and MoR.

I sort of agree, but I think 61 was better than recent chapters. It's entertaining to see smart people reason and make clever true deductions, but get some things wrong.

I see a few flaws in the fic myself, but: 1- Harry is not portrayed as totally rational. 2- He probably sees a "Light Lord" as not interfering with democracy.

Agreed that it doesn't mesh well with establishing scientific conspiracies.

Mm, good question. Will it be ice or water that falls from the sky? To put it another way, to what extend do thermodynamic changes whilst an object is Transfigured persist after the spell wears off? We know that the 2nd Law can be violated, for example, but we don't know if it is as a matter of course.

The reason being?

Make sure you're logged out first, otherwise your search results are tuned according to your search history.

It's also among the first-page results for "rationality".

It's also the ninth Google search result for "rationality" (and yudkowsky.net/rational is #4). Cool.

Most people know what the placebo effect is, but have never heard the word "nocebo". The current version is strictly wrong, but probably better for most readers. If we're going to pick these kinds of nits, I'd assign a rather higher priority to replacing "sentient" with "sapient".

I'm guessing it's that Albus's own father was committed to and died in Azkaban.

Yes, despite his famous speech, Chamberlain knew that he had only delayed war while Britain rearmed, leaving only the hope of averting it entirely later. He may not have acted wisely, but he wasn't as Confunded as all that.

I take the reference to Chamberlain as a joke and don't worry too much about it.

Hogwarts interferes with electrical devices, but brains still work.

There certainly seems to be a common thread in many magic worlds that "physics doesn't work, but all the stuff physics causes that most people intuitively EXPECT to happen, still happen"

They'll probably just put in a ward preventing large objects from moving faster than a broomstick. That's what they're actually worried about, and it's probably easier.

That's what they plan to do, based on what little information they have, but that doesn't mean such a thing is actually doable.

Heh, I just thought they'd find themselves unable to walk but that's just horrific. Then I realised that they wouldn't fall as gravity is just the opposite reaction of their pull on the earth, so it's okay. Then I realised that the electromagnetic forces of the chemical bonds within their bodies all rely on opposite reaction, and it went back to horrific. Still, despite the tragic deaths that would result hopefully it would be made up for by all the prisoners who presumably would get somewhat better treatment after Azkaban mysteriously disappeared.

They'll just check with somebody who knows what they're talking about (such as Dumbledore, or whoever he recommends) when they get around to the real work.

I loved the Weasleyisms in this chapter.

I suppose it triggers off your brain to see if you learnt that trick in a Muggle physics or chemistry class. Same way "it" triggers off your brain to see if you have at least a vague idea of what a spell does before making the magical bats appear.

I'm reminded of the Mage: The Ascension tabletop RPG. In that setting, Paradox forces inflicted very painful backlash on mages who performed magic that a watching "muggle" would find hard or impossible to believe in - so a lot of the game revolved around finding a way for your spells to look like plausible accidents. Cast fireballs near something that could have exploded on its own, give heart attacks preferrably to elderly or overweight targets, and so on.

The Hogwarts anti-tech jinx could be the inverted, less vicious version of it. If Harry gets around to seriously tackle it, perhaps he'll find the solution to be as simple as passing his tricks off as magical artifacts or Charms.

They're idiots.

He doesn't have a Time-Turner. The thought that he could turn into a snake Animagus in Harry's pouch is not in their hypothesis space.

Without having given it too much thought, I like to think that it's just the anthropic principle on really good crack. Any Everett branch containing a paradox simply ceases to exist / ceased to exist / has never existed (I think time-travel science fiction should adopt as its official idiom one of those East Asian languages that do not employ verb tenses).

Done.

Clicking on the harry_potter tag is the easiest way to find the latest thread, since it auto-updates as long as the new post includes the tag.

Perhaps, "This is my (rocket powered) broomstick"?

Don't the Dementors obey the Aurors' orders?

MoR!Dumbledore is clearly set up as Genre Savvy rather than rational- part of the interest of this work is the way it distinguishes the two.

A degree of realism is selected for by the process of wizarding wars against dark lords. He's not awesome on purpose, as far as we know.

I don't recall Snape being said to be the most accomplished occlumens in the world. He's good enough to prevent Voldemort from reading his mind, but unless there's some indication otherwise that I've forgotten about, I think there's supposed to be a number of perfect occlumens, who are good enough that nobody is capable of performing leglimency on them.

I highly doubt that Snape is capable of performing leglimency on Voldemort. Not only does Voldemort have tremendous incentive to become a perfect occlumens, but if Snape could read his mind and not have his mind read in turn, he could probably have ended the war himself.