Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 117

Voldemort could have reasoned that he wanted to kill Harry as quickly as possible. Forcing him to drop his wand would have taken time.

This is silly. He'd taken the time to do exactly that before. And now, if he's going to give him a full minute just to think...

The whole thing falls to the "plausible excuse" vs "what you'd expect to happen" problem, which Harry explains in Answers and Riddles:

the laws governing what constitutes a good explanation don't talk about plausible excuses you hear afterward. They talk about the probabilities we assign in advance. That's why science makes people do advance predictions, instead of trusting explanations people come up with afterward. And I wouldn't have predicted in advance for you to follow Snape and show up like that. Even if I'd known in advance that you could put a trace on Snape's wand, I wouldn't have expected you to do it and follow him just then.

If you only knew up to chapter 108 or 110 or so, and someone told you that Voldemort is going to take every precaution to contain Harry's threat that he can think of, running a search of the sort that would generate such ideas as "put up elaborate wards, including ones against timelooping", "keep him naked", "have 36 Death Eaters point wands at him, some of them with different orders than others", "murder him very elaborately and thoroughly", "but first make him take a Vow", "commit to guarding the place for six hours anyway" etc., would you expect one of those items not to be "disarm him"?

In story, there was only a few minute or so between the making of the unbreakable vow (which did require Harry to have his wand) and Harry using it to kill the Death Eaters. Voldemort makes the "You have 1 minute to tell me your secrets or you die" offer immediately after the vow, after all.

Not so. At T-20 seconds, Harry starts verbally stalling while he keeps working on the transfiguration.

It also would have shown weakness in front of the Death Eaters.

After he's already given them lengthy and detailed instructions about all the many different kinds of spell they must be ready to cast at this naked 11-year old boy at the first sign of trouble?

And Voldemort probably couldn't imagine anything Harry could have done. He's way too young for any really dangerous magic, despite his skill. Voldemort doesn't know about nano-wires and all that stuff. It's probably unimaginable for him that so little magic could have such a big effect.

He knows that the Harry is a walking extinction event waiting to happen, and that Harry knows secrets powerful enough to be worth learning (potentially even powerful enough to end him - cf. "power he knows not"). Indeed, these are the two facts motivating his actions immediately prior to his defeat.

If he had demanded that Harry drop his wand, and Harry had refused, he would have been forced to kill him without learning any of his secrets.

Why? Surely at least one of his Death Eaters knows Expelliarmus.

And let's not forget that Voldemort is far from perfect. People keep saying "He always plays at one lever higher". But the source of that statement was Voldemort himself!

A fine point. It is amusing how, through the reinforcement from the meme's spreading, people have forgotten the reliability of this statement.

He might have a portable refrigerator set to 4 degrees C in that bag of tricks of his, but that's a little much forward planning even for him. And that still leaves the problem of safely cooling ten times thirty-six pounds of meat down to that temperature without damage.

I talked about just dismembering their arms before the chapter was even posted. I suppose them surviving would mean Harry can't make up a ridiculus story after the fact, though. HJPEV Gotta do an overly complicated plots that cost others more than he realizes at the time or else he just isn't HJPEV. >_>

Right, okay, I'm back, and on further reflection, I think I've actually decided that leaving Harry his wand isn't even that bad of a mistake. So, let's get started on why:

it just doesn't make sense to order 37 death eaters to shoot Harry if he raises his wand, rather than order one Harry to drop the damn wand.

If Harry needed his wand to demonstrate something (which he very plausibly might have), it would have made no sense to take it away. From Voldemort's perspective, the threat from letting Harry keep his wand (as opposed to, say, his Time-Turner or a hidden Portkey on his person) is close to none; with the precautions he took against Harry, Harry would have needed to pull off a wordless, movement-free, multi-targeting, incapacitating, direction-neutral attack, which is a tall order even for most grown wizards, much less a first-year at Hogwarts. If the threat is minimal and the benefit is high (demonstrating a secret spell), simple cost-benefit analysis would tell Voldemort to let Harry keep his wand. And so he did. The fact that Harry had an attack that just happened to fulfill all the aforementioned criteria is pure coincidence (I would have called it authorial fiat, if it weren't so brilliantly foreshadowed), and the outside-view probability of such would have been extremely tiny.

strip Harry naked

Again, hidden Portkeys, Time-Turners, Transfigured threats, etc., are all possibilities, and indeed, given Harry's planning tendencies, probabilities. Stripping him naked isn't ultra-paranoia; it's just common sense. Taking the wand, on the other hand, is ultra-paranoia, especially if Voldemort felt there was a benefit to be gained from letting Harry keep the wand; otherwise he'd basically be Pascal's Mugging himself on the off-chance that Harry developed some never-before-seen magical ability off-camera.

But Eliezer wanted it both ways, both to treat Voldemort as super-ultra-cautious AND let Harry keep his damn wand.

Voldemort wasn't "super-ultra-cautious". He was "just cautious enough to succeed". And had Harry not gone and invented partial Transfiguration from Muggle principles back in Chapter 28, he damn well would have.

And actually, thinking more about this has led me to formulate a reply to this as well (beyond my last reply, that is):

and don't give me the "hindsight bias" crap, people were complaining about that in advance

The commenters knew about partial Transfiguration. Voldemort didn't. Also, they had the opening quote from Chapter 1 to guide them. Again, Voldemort didn't. That's a huge informational advantage, and is not to be underestimated. (To see how enormous of an advantage it really is, just look at all of my above arguments, and count how many of them rely on Voldemort not knowing about partial Transfiguration. Answer: all of them.) Hindsight bias doesn't necessarily just apply when you know the answer for a fact; it also applies when you have a bunch of additional information that makes you reasonably confident in a given answer. So yes, upon further reflection, I will "give [you] the 'hindsight bias' crap", because upon further reflection, it's not actually crap.

I'm not addressing the meat of your comment right now (I may do so later--I'm a bit short on time right now), but this part specifically caught my attention:

and don't give me the "hindsight bias" crap, people were complaining about that in advance.

Ahem. From my original comment:

Apart from the wand thing (which I believe was pointed out by a few commenters before Chapter 114 was posted)

Just sayin'.

Voldemort was powerful enough that he could defeat a couple of fully armed Aurors with wands pointing at him, so the threat of Harry raising his wand and casting a spell at him was negligible, as proved by him dodging a killing curse cast by a much stronger wizard than Harry.

Even if Harry was so powerful to be able to raise his wand, cast a spell quick enough at Voldemort so that he couldn't dodge it, the Death Eaters would have stunned Harry instantly, and even if a spell cast by Harry destroyed the body of Voldemort, he could easily make himself a new one.

Did they? I don't recall seeing any.

I still don't think there was any good reason not to break it to them in private first.

In a perfect world, I completely agree.

In a real world, I can see that McGonagall did not have time before breakfast to talk to all of the orphaned children. I can also see that she might strongly prefer to quench the early rumors and avoid starting new rumors by calling a number of students into her office. (Delegating it to Snape, the Head of Slytherin House, was not an option; and delegating it to any other teacher would have sent a signal of McGonagall not caring enough to do it herself, making this a non-option, too.)

Given all this, I still think she should have delayed the announcement to talk to the children beforehand; but I don’t think it’s a simple choice for her.

The names would have come out over the next few days, anyway. McGonagall’s choice was to either break the news to all the students on her terms, or to have wild rumors appear within hours.

Breaking the news herself gives her the chance to declare her solidarity with the affected students in the clearest possible terms and to quench any schadenfreude immediately. She is proactive, rather than reactive. In fact, compared to the Minerva McGonagall of the very early chapters, she feels a little more grown-up now, in a way. She has developed into a more sophisticated character over the course of the story, and I like this a lot.

Someone in /r/HPMOR mentioned that similar things happened in Muggle schools after 9/11 (That is, a list of names for children whose parents may have died). Generally speaking, educational institutions are completely unprepared for tragedies.

Re-reading the story, I see a lot of evidence that Dumbledore didn't know that Quirrell was Voldemort. For example, Chapter 62:

You are no longer taking lunches in Diagon Alley, even with Professor Quirrell to watch you. Your blood is the second requisite Voldemort needs to rise as strong as before.

He refers to the same issue when talking to Bones. It would make no sense for him to do so if he believed that Voldemort had constant access to Harry and countless opportunities to "accidentally" obtain his blood (as indeed happened with the newspaper).

And Moody can be counted on not to go blabbing to the others, undermining Hermione's status as the new hero, or so on.

I would actually talk to Hermione first, since she’s the one most affected by this untrue explanation. Ask her, whether (and if so, whom) to tell the truth.

If I were Harry, I would probably wait a bit until the emotional chaos (both inside Harry and inside McGonagall) lowers a bit before telling them "hrm, you know, I'm the one who killed the Death Eaters". If I were to even speak about it at all.

Harry seems to want to setup Hermoine as the hero. Taking responsibility for it doesn't help with that goal.

Does EY realize that Alecto and Amycus are siblings? He said that these children lost both parents.

And if Alecto has a child, then either the child is illegitimate, or Alecto kept her last name after marriage, something that no woman does in canon, and that no Witch does in MOR (only the Muggle Evans-Verres couple hyphenates). I don't take Alecto Carrow for a tradition-defying feminist.

So I conclude that this a slip-up.

Indeed. Harry saying that he has the capability to kill everyone present did not frighten Voldemort. Had Harry said he has the capability to incapacitate everyone present, then Voldemort (even if he were almost sure Harry was wrong) would have shot him with his gun instantly.

Especially knowing that Harry almost offered to explain it to him (after Azkaban). Quirrel's answer :

it is too rare that I find a person whom I cannot see through immediately, be they friend or foe. I shall unravel the puzzles about you for myself, in due time.

That's the "sad" ending?

The Disposable Male sacrificing himself for the Greater Good and wept over by the Fair Damsel is the classic "bittersweet", ennobling ending.

The Sad Ending is Voldemort taking over Harry's body and destined to rule Magical Britain, and the world. Or Harry being compelled by his Vow to twist the Universe to some Cthuluic purpose.

Death and suffering can be sad even when its causal consequences are net-positive. And death and suffering can be sad even when it happens to bad people (to say nothing of their families).

Normatively speaking, I don't believe someone can involuntarily 'forfeit their life' in the sense of making it intrinsically OK to kill them. (Though it may be instrumentally necessary.)

Why do people think children have greater moral value than adults, and it's worse to kill a child than a similarly defenseless, innocent adult?

Killing people is horrible. It's why DE are "bad people", because they kill. You can't claim DE to be bad people, and yet rejoice at their death.

Yes, killing DE has Harry did it was a required evil - letting Voldemort win would have let to much, much more suffering. But that doesn't change that killing the DE was sad. They were people, and in their own eyes, they weren't evil. And some of them, like Malfoy, was a loving father, paying political cost to help his son feel better.

And the children of the Death Eaters are just kids. Draco may initially dreamed about raping and killing people, he doesn't know better, but he did help Hermione, too. And his pain at losing his father is as real any other child pain at losing his father - something no 11 years old should ever have to go through.

Denying humanity to people, considering they are better dead than alive, that their death isn't any sad, is exactly what Death Eaters did wrong. Harry, Dumbledore, Hermione, McGonagall know better than the eternal loop of hatred, they know that "an eye for an eye will make the whole world blind", and that a tragedy never undo another tragedy.

Yes, you can kill Death Eaters when they actually threaten you and you need to do it to prevent Voldemort from ruling the world - but that doesn't mean killing Death Eaters isn't sad, or that you should rejoice when a 11 years old kid suddenly loses his loving father.

When refusing would likely result in one's own death, and the painful death and torture of their loved ones, and it isn't clear if refusing personally would have made a difference, this is pretty understandable behavior.

Given what Harry has done up to this point, he hardly qualifies for the "innocent child" special moral dispensation.

In that event, Voldemort survives and finds another host. Maybe not sad in the same sense, but certainly a bad situation.

Hmm, random speculation: does the death mark have the power to resurrect you? (in some, not necessarily preferred or pleasant form). And the Death Eaters cannot talk about it, unless you already suspect this is the case. This would fit Snape's response from ch. 86: :

But as you can see, the Dark Lord was quite cunning." His gaze grew more distant. "Oh," Severus breathed, "he was very cunning indeed..."

Assuming it's her arm, which is plausible given that Harry noticed its thinness but isn't confirmed. In any case, I was mainly just raising the question.

To say that justice matters intrinsically is to say that sometimes, for justice's sake, we should do things that would make people worse off than if justice were not an issue. Or more accurately, there will at least sometimes be policies trading some welfare (or for any other component of utility) for some justice, that are equally as good as policies which do not (according to the enlarged set of concerns containing justice).

That Gryffindor kid isn't distraught over his father's death; that's the difference.

McGonagall has grown since the Roles arc, and is more likely to think about the consequences of her actions, now.

Sure. Doesn't help the victims in any way, Truth and reconciliation are nice, but that is not what is happening here.