Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 14, chapter 82

There's reasons besides unfalsifiability for downvoting. Like poor logic, or asserting p=1, or writing so melodramatically that my eyes glazed over.

Edit: I stand by my downvote, for the last two reasons, but I'll give him props for a correct prediction.

Thanks for having my back, but I have to ask if I've missed the boat on some Less Wrong policies or unspoken understandings somewhere. What I said may have been a testable prediction, but I wasn't aware that people's posts had to be testable predictions to deserve upvotes. Am I required to list all my supporting evidence every time I make a future-looking statement? If I don't, or even if I do, must I disclaim them the way corporations do on quarterly earnings conference calls?

gwern said above that (s)he'd "be happy to record" my prediction. I had no idea my predictions were being recorded at all. I thought this was just a discussion forum. Is Less Wrong actually a simulation of the prediction markets from Three Worlds Collide? Is Less Wrong a subsidiary of Intrade? Do I have cash or prizes waiting for me somewhere thanks to one of my earlier correct predictions?

I can also make the testable prediction "The universe will cease to exist on May 19th, 2034 at 10:03:09PM", but unless I had some truly excellent supporting evidence which I posted along with that prediction, I would not expect people to think well of my statement (particularly if I made it in a rambling, melodramatic way that made it difficult to determine the purpose of the post).

"Record this"? What? Did I, like, fail to perceive some unwritten rule that every future-looking statement on lesswrong.com has to be a formal prediction written in academic prose with explicitly enumerated premises?

I just thought this last chapter represented Quirrell's final decision to kill Hermione, and I posted as though I was eulogizing her, to try to prepare myself for the darkness I believe is coming. I think it's all about to hit the fan, and I was expressing how I felt about it, not trying to score points in some game I didn't know existed.

Melodramatic

Well duh, that's what I was going for. It was supposed to be ridiculously over-the-top to the point where someone somewhere might be amused by it. I guess that prediction was foolish.

and without support.

Given the conversation we just read, and the imagery thereabout (lit by soft light at the beginning of the conversation, silhouetted as a black outline at the end), I hardly think it's without support. I think everything Hermione thought in that scene was absolutely correct. Quirrell was behind the plot, he did want her out of the way of his plans for Harry, and he will try to absolutely eliminate her next time.

Some actual tragedy in this story is far overdue, and Hermione's going to be the one to pay it.

I'd earlier made this point. The key

And the reason it is easy for you to forgive such fools and think well of them, Mr. Potter, is that you yourself have not been sorely hurt. You will think less fondly of commonplace idiots after the first time their folly costs you something dear.

In the Wizengamut:

But by then he'd (Harry) already declared war on the country of magical Britain, and the idea of other people calling him a Dark Lord no longer seemed important one way or another.

When their idiocy threatened something dear to Harry, he declared war on them. Mission accomplished. I've been wondering if Harry is ever going to remember that conversation. It's just so obvious. All that's missing is the "told ya so" speech from Quirrell.

This occurred to me, but in retrospect I tend to think Quirrellmort must have realized he couldn't have accomplished so much with one plot. And where does Bellatrix fit into all this?

Now that I think about it, it's odd that he stated that with such certainty. It's not like Voldemort or Dumbledore used that strategy - maybe he's thinking of Grindelwald? Apparently his motto was "for the greater good"...

Yet that's not exactly what happened as a result of Harry's actions. The "afterword" of the trial suggests that any members of Lucius' faction who follow story-book logic will see Harry as a dangerous enemy, as will members of Dumbledore's faction who have "walked the path of a powerful wizard."

Though that actually raises an interesting question--what happens when, say, Alastor Moody goes to Dumbledore and says, "Albus, I think Harry is Voldemort"? Does Dumbledore tell Alastor he's wrong, and convince Alastor that there is a better explanation for Harry's actions? Or does Dumbledore say, "dear God, Alastor, you're right!"

On a related note, what does Dumbledore know about horcruxes? Dumbledore's dialog has suggested that Voldemort may have gone around destroying a lot of information on horcruxes, so Dumbledore may know less in this story than he did in canon. Hmmm...

EDIT: See also JenniferRM's comment below.

Scaring the Dementor may have saved his bacon. Blackmailing someone is a positive utility move. Blackmailing someone who seriously believes they can destroy hundreds of unkillable soul-eating monsters, and backs that up is a move with totally unknown utility, possibly very, very negative.

He almost died for his trouble,

There doesn't seem to be any causal connection in anyone's mind (other than Harry & Dumbledore) between their friendship and Draco's attempted murder.

What he really needs to do is save draco in the same way

Being Harry's friend already made you a target, hence what happened to Draco and Hermione.

Very good point. Will be looking for evidence of this theory in the future.

It sounded to me like he was speaking far more broadly about their interactions than just the one after the "trial."

Or, instead of your mind being distributed across multiple processors, a horcrux is a copy. And if you're killed, you survive not as a ghost, but by virtue of the fact that there's still a copy of you extant and functioning in the world. The same way uploading counts as survival.

Which means that by filling the world with horcruxes, Voldemort is executing the Hansonian strategy of flooding the labor market with EMs.

ETA: Hey, would Voldemort care what happened to a copy of himself? Perhaps the "power Voldemort knows not" is TDT. :)

I think it's more likely that the Horcruxes are static copies, like system backups, and Quirrel's zombie periods are because the original Quirrel is, in fact, still present in some lobotomized form, and Voldemort is merely imposing his soul / brain state onto the tissue by force of magic. While he can maintain it, it is costly, and he conserves strength by letting the damaged brain run the body most of the time. It might also be the case that this is to preserve the livespan of the possession, since Voldemort's presence in Quirrel's body appears to be slowly killing him.

Would his mind function better when he's near Harry?

I don't think we've seen any evidence of that; in fact, we have seen the opposite, since Harry (and possibly Quirrel as well) experiences an overwhelming sense of doom whenever they're in close proximity,

That's interesting. Are Harry and Quirrell sharing the Dark Side module in Harry's head, so that only one can use it at a time?

That makes sense.. but immediately afterward both Harry and McGonnagal thought it was unusual how bright the remembrall shined; neither seemed to think it was solely due to the use of the Time Turner:

"The Remembrall was glowing bright red in his hand, blazing like a miniature sun that cast shadows on the ground in broad daylight."

and

""More importantly, why did the Remembrall go off like that?" Harry said. "Does it mean I've been Obliviated?"

"That puzzles me as well," Professor McGonagall said slowly. "If it were that simple, I would think that the courts would use Remembralls, and they do not. I shall look into it, Mr. Potter.""

And then of course she doesn't. Perhaps the courts simply don't use Remembralls because they would never definitively prove obliviation - only that something was forgotten. Harry's remembrall "blazing like a miniature sun" may be due to an overwhelmingly large obliviation - like an entire life as a Dark Lord? Obliviating a day or week may just produce a normal glow...

That would make sense, except that it was really bright, I was under the impression that McGonnagal was puzzled about it.

What Obliviation?

you would probably enjoy the Read or Die OVA, which is one of the few instances I've seen on super heroes using their power instinctually (as they would if they'd had them from birth) rather than intentionally.

If anyone knows of anything else in this vein do share, I find it enjoyable.

In canon I believe it requires actual hatred for the target

In HPMoR too: Chapter 25: "Who'd been silly enough to build in a spell for Avada Kedavra that could only be cast using hatred?"

It doesn't seem to fit comfortably into the fic's themes.

Perhaps update your model on what the fic's themes are?

If anything, HPMoR makes a person's mind-state even more significant than in canon. It buffs up the Patronus charm, it affects pretty much anything having to do with Dementors (how they look like, whether you can hear them, how much they affect you, even how they act like or whether they'll obey you), it directly affects how the Sorting Hat will behave towards you (as it borrows intelligence from your own mind), spells don't work if you only know the incantation and nothing else about them, "knowledge" can't pass backwards more than 6 hours, knowledge of powerful charms can't pass through books at all as it requires person-to-person communication...

Harry may need to make another wish...

Sounds like Harry might need to make another wish...

It would be nice if the disruptive effect they have on the rest of my life was more localized.

I think exactly like that.

I vote up to have them released all at once.

To that end, I also think it would be a good idea to occasionally update the story at some other time of the day than the usual 7 PM Pacific Time

This. In particular.

But faking her death (and even the type of death) doesn’t really match the rest of the story. There’s no obvious reason not to return her after he thought Voldemort was gone, or at least to let Lucius know what happened in case she’s alive and didn’t want to return—which is unlikely, we had no indication that she was really unhappy or didn’t wish to be a part of her son’s life—or if she died in some much-less-objectionable way (he could give Lucius the memory).

But he never thought Voldemort was permanently gone in the first place. The Hogwarts inner circle knew Voldemort was still around as of the beginning of the story. And in any case, he's still maneuvering against Lucius, so he has an incentive to uphold the notion that he will not cooperate with blackmailers and that he will resort to equal retaliation, even while his greater enemy is absent.

I'm not saying I think Narcissa is alive, but...

There’s no obvious reason not to return her after he thought Voldemort was gone

Except that Narcissa could then testify in front of the Wizengamot that Dumbledore kidnapped her.

or at least to let Lucius know what happened in case she’s alive and didn’t want to return

Dumbledore believes Voldemort will return. This would limit his ability to threaten Death Eaters in the next war.

I don't think Dumbledore would risk leaving her as a loose end, what I suspect is that he really did kill her, but only appeared to burn her alive.

Minus two points! Shocking! I guess I should have explained myself:

• Amelia Bones thinks "Someone would burn for this" as her default revenge scenario.
• Narcissa Malfoy's sister killed Amelia Bones's brother.
• Amelia Bones was the one to tell Dumbledore during the Wizengamot session not two chapters ago that he couldn't tell Lucius what he knew about Narcissa's death.

Three solid clues all pointing the same direction. Thus I deem it "obvious".

The avadra did backfire.

It almost certainly did not.

Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line... (black robes, falling) ...blood spills out in liters, and someone screams a word.

AK sheds no blood. Of course, this could have been referring to another incident, but we'be been given no clues for what that incident might be.

The Killing Curse is formed of pure hate, and strikes directly at the soul, severing it from the body.

It leaves no marks, either.

The Killing Curse reflected and rebounded and struck the Dark Lord, leaving only the burnt hulk of his body and a scar on your forehead.

It never burns anything.

(And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry's art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.)

And Harry should have noticed the discrepancy right away, but he was all weepy and shit. I suppose you or anyone else could have the same excuse. It is, after all, well written.

Well we know that the protection exists, because Harry is still alive.

We don't even know that Voldemort attempted to kill Harry that day. I've made a prediction at http://predictionbook.com/predictions/3237 against that idea.

Well we know that the protection exists, because Harry is still alive.

We don’t know he had to have been protected from something. People in-universe thinks that Voldie cast AK and it rebounded, but in MoR we’re not told of any witnesses other than Harry and Voldie, the body found was burned, and his Dementor-triggered memory ended when Voldie locked eyes with him. It’s not a given that the canon scenario really happened in MoR.

I don't think that "Lucius chose the exact same number as a stab against Dumbledore" is a very complex hypothesis. We already know that he knows part of the story and can reasonably assume he knows the whole story about Aberforth. So of course if the situation already demands that he hold someone on Dumbledore's side (sort of) for ransom for some obscene amount of money, on the assumption that it won't be paid, how could he resist rubbing that bit of salt in his nemesis's wounds?

It's not part of some bigger plan. It's not some fancy maneuver. It's just an emotional attack of opportunity aimed at Dumbledore, probably just for pride's sake.

Even if he was influenced by Aberforth's ransom, it might just have been to the extent that the amount Aberforth was ransomed for was the first to pop into his head.

And a whiff of the law of narrative causality.

I read it more as forgetting that he had sacrificed Harry's own parents so he had no right to lecture Harry about the costs of sacrifice. Harry has lived with those costs his whole life.

If true, it makes me curious how Sirius was involved in the betrayal, if at all.

"I - I'm sorry, Harry - I -" The old wizard pressed his hands to his face, and Harry saw that Albus Dumbledore was weeping. "I should not have said, such things to you - I should not, have resented, your innocence -"

I must have read it after it was removed because I don't remember it there.

Whups. Yes. So that makes Harry entirely ignorant of Flamel and also the stone.

Unfortunately, Harry has just shown that he is both able and willing to overcome Dumbledore's refusal to offer concessions.

Outside view: when someone in a similar situations does do something horrible, all of his friends and family insist that they "have no idea how he could have done something like this".

See also: Amanda Knox.

Well, then condition on the fact that Querril caught her and she has memories of doing it.

What's the prior one would assign to this person, out of all of Hogwarts, to be the one to commit a cold-blooded murder on another 11-year-old kid?

Pretty small - but not that much smaller than any other random 11 year old trying to kill someone. And in a place like Hogwarts, you've got a whole lot of 11-year-olds running around with what can be used as lethal weapons.

I think he's giving the hypothesis of her actual guilt pretty much all the weight that it deserves - effectively zero.

0 is not a sensible probability.

Harry's had 7 months to know that Hermione isn't a sociopath or a psychopath, that she's a very kind and moral person instead.

All the more reason to wonder what she's capable of.

My belief is and has always been that she did it, and was not given false memories, nor Imperiused or controlled in any way beyond the Groundhog Day attack. Eliezer believes that humans are hackable (cf. AI box experiments) and this Hermione storyline is showcasing it. Hat-and-Cloak had to find the right hack by proof and error, but once he found it, it was just ordinary words and no magic which influenced Hermione to "freely" decide to murder Draco (just like the AI gatekeepers who "freely" let the AI escape).

ETA: by "proof and error" I meant "trial and error". I guess the reason for the mental typo is the Spanish equivalent "prueba y error".

He never once stopped and asked Dumbledore and Snape "If it was proven that she had been tricked into doing this with false memories, but still cast the spell willingly and with her own hand, would the Wizengamot still convict her?"

Harry doesn't know about the GHD attack and so his working hypothesis is that her memory of attempting to kill Draco is false.

Anybody believing Hermione was meddled with ought to be asking who will be next. The mentioned mistake has Harry assuming Hermione didn't go undetected for six months, so he is far less alarmed than he should be.

On the last point: Hermione almost certainly was false memory charmed twice; H&C would have removed the memory of their final conversation and replaced with with something innocuous at the same time as he implanted the false memory of casting the blood-cooling charm, so as to not leave a suspicious gap. He might also have implanted false memories immediately after the groundhog day attack, either to cover up the time gap or to not have Hermione wandering around with an extremely suspicious memory in her head (If Dumbledore or Snape had seen the memory of H&C, or his less-creepy disguise, they probably would have been fairly suspicious).

Yes, those are 2011 numbers, but far lower salaries suffice to carry the argument. (If Hermione lives for another 170 years, she has to pay Harry just $20K/year to repay him.) Also, this plan does have her working in finance in 2011 (when she's ~22, she can't start that much earlier.)

It does set a bad precedent, but I wasn't talking about that - and this exact situation (completely legal, Harry doesn't want to destroy Lucius) is unlikely to ever come up again. (Future challenges of this kind could plausibly be met by having a Dementor eat the kidnapper, optionally after paying the ransom.)

The present debate is not how he can fulfill his obligation. They are arguing specifically if Harry made a justified investment by paying such a high price to save Hermione's life. It seems conclusive that the pure monetary investment is actually sound, he can directly gain the money he invested back at a decent rate even besides the additional benefits of rescuing her.

Dumbledore says her mind wouldn't take the strain. To be entirely honest, I doubt he's exaggerating. If Hermione came out of Azkaban alive (yes, if), I'd put her chances of still being sane or curably insane at <10%.

If the 'How did you come to find less wrong' thread is accurate, a lot of people came here through HPMoR. I'm not sure how many would have come if the HPMoR forums were elsewhere, but it seems like a non-negligible fraction of the community.

I read a couple of the Sequences as a result of these discussion threads, FWIW. I've been familiar with EY's work for some years, but this brought me back in.

"The first rule of the Bayesian Conspiracy is that you don't talk about the Bayesian Conspiracy. To laypeople, I mean."

"The nth rule of the Bayesian Conspiracy may be deduced from the (n-1)th rule."

Never seen Fightclub, so hard to evaluate. But I meant more "influence". Whenever the story says Harry's "blood goes cold" I would evaluate that as control.

That is really interesting. But I can't help but feel like I'm violating his privacy when I read that:

"Likewise, please do not mirror or duplicate this page."

In light of that, it's difficult for me to feel OK reading it on WayBack Machine...

This is everything I've wanted to know about Eliezer.

Thanks, I didn't realize that was a real thing.

Harry's sleep schedule wasn't on the red herring list. Further investigation warranted.

I knew it was a real disorder, but the probability of having it is so low as to bother me - why does he need a disorder and why locate that disorder in all of diseasespace? And if it's based on EY, I don't believe he has that disorder, unless I've missed something.

My interpretation is that there was no time limit for sessions during the time of the 88th Wizengamot, and one session went on so long that some of the lords and ladies starved to death — or died of old age. I don't know which is funnier.

I just read it as a throwaway gag; Rowling's style often has funny little background references to violence or bizarre happenings. I took this as being something similar to Rowling specifying the Quidditch match that caused the rule banning broadswords to be introduced.

I thought that too, basically. Like, maybe in the past there were strict rules of order about when you could adjourn a session, so even the Chief Warlock couldn't adjourn until the formalities were concluded, and that in the 88th Wizengamot a war broke out in the chamber before the formalities were done.

And there is no problem with that if it's restricted to non-blackmail interactions (except perhaps to the degree it's mistaken by others to also apply to blackmail). Not responding to blackmail as a principled position and not valuing the life of the hostage highly enough for the amount asked for are completely different things.

Otherwise it would have made sense for Voldemort (who wouldn't care about Death Eater families) to keep taking family members hostage and ask for lower and lower amounts until hitting the sum they are valued at. Either that sum would have been low enough to devastate the morale of the Order members (e. g, 100 galleons and Voldemort asks for 101 the next time) or it would be high enough to drain their funds.

A refusal to respond to blackmail needs to be unconditional.

The fact that Harry proceeded to scare Lucius afterwards is probably to his advantage in this case though. In his position, I would probably make it a priority to get Lucius to forgive the debt, which not only saves him the money, it sends the message "you can try to blackmail me, but I'll make the consequences of forcing me to pay out worse than letting me walk."

Except Lucius doesn't know that, because he thinks this was part of some inscrutable plot by Harrymort!

Be careful when describing negative-expected-value vengeance as irrational. "I will precommit to be the kind of person who takes vengeance, even after it's too late for that to have positive expected value" is almost just a sub-case of "I one-box".

It's interesting in part because Harry is right that the behavior is unusual. Historically, the group that (1) is led by a strong leader who encourages personality cults, (2) doesn't believe in the rule of law, and (3) resorts to violence at the slightest excuse is not the group that unilaterally ends dynamics like hostage taking and hostage killing.

I don't agree with your inferences about Voldemort's intentions.

First, I tend to think that Lucius was in fact Imperioused, so his will to vengeance was not a concern. And the undesirability of an all out war from Dumbledore's side was obvious - Dumbledore's side had the numbers. In a Total War of attrition, Voldemort was bound to lose, as Quirrell spelled out in his speech.

His goal is a political one. He has the Great Leader view of politics, and wants all of Britain resolved to follow the Great Leader. How to achieve that? Attack magical Britain with a ruthless enemy, to make them more ruthless in kind, and more ready to follow a ruthless Great Leader. Then create his own Ruthless Leader to fill that position. Who better to fill that role than the one who defeats the first Dark Lord? Twice? And has been prophesied as his enemy? And then he uploads into Harry when Harry supposedly defeats him again.

Dumbledore got his power by defeating Grindelwald. Harrymort will get his power by defeating Voldemort.

Downvoted for massive violation of Lucius' Law.

Considering that he was winning the war before making his untimely exit in the early 80s, this strategy seems overly complicated.

I'd propose that he has a slightly different plan. I'm going to give you my pet theory here so hold onto your hats.

I think Quirrellmort probably decided at one point in the past that it would be way easier to take over magical Britain if everyone thought he'd already failed at doing so. I think he's probably going for control of both sides. Imagine if Darth Vader had created the rebel alliance in order to funnel potential opponents into a harmless straw-opposition: he could let them attempt the occasional coup, always avoiding any real cost to himself and throw them the occasional minor victory to keep them on the hook.

To quote the chapter Contagious Lies:

"Yess," Harry hissed dryly, "very amussing, I am ssure. Except now am sstuck in Hogwartss for next ssix years, for ssafety! I have decided that I will, indeed, sseek power; and confinement iss not helpful for that. Musst convince sschoolmasster that Dark Lord iss not yet awakened, that esscape was work of ssome other power -"

Again the rapid flickering of the snake's tongue; the snakish laughter was stronger, dryer, this time. "Amateur foolisshnesss."

"Pardon?" hissed Harry.

"You ssee misstake, think of undoing, ssetting time back to sstart. Yet not even with hourglasss can time be undone. Musst move forward insstead. You think of convincing otherss they are misstaken. Far eassier to convince them they are right. Sso conssider, boy: what new happensstance would make schoolmasster decide you were ssafe once more, ssimultaneoussly advance your other agendass?"

Harry stared at the snake, puzzled. His mind tried to comprehend and unravel the riddle -

"Iss it not obviouss?" hissed the snake. Again the tongue flickered sardonic laughter. "To free yoursself, to gain power in Britain, you musst again be sseen to defeat the Dark Lord."

That's obviously not the same plan I'm talking about, but we can see that Quirrell has at least been thinking along similar lines to me. I can see a number of different ways he could have formulated this plan, but the simplest one seems to be:

• Set up evil organisation and make an attempt at taking the country over. Allow everyone to gauge your intelligence from your actions, and to form the strongest alliance they are capable of forming against you. Everyone's gauge of your intelligence will in fact be off by several points, since this isn't really your big ploy - it's actually a feint and you intend it to fail.
• Fake your own defeat, simultaneously creating a (young, impressionable) hero for your opponents and removing yourself from all further suspicion, since almost everyone will think you're dead.
• Become a role model to the aforementioned young hero and mould him to your will. The kid is in the perfect position to take over the leadership of your opposition, so you now effectively have control of both major players in the game.
• Win.

This is also foregrounded in Coordination Problems 2 and 3. Quirrell wants Harry to bind the population together under him and Harry makes a short speech about the dangers of group thinking. Quirrell's reaction is one of anger - obviously he can't have Harry breaking the monopoly that the Order of the Phoenix has on do-gooding, because that opens the field up for thousands of free-agent challengers to Quirrell's power. It also mirrors Harry and Draco's plan to play the two sides off against each other, except obviously Harry is aiming for world optimisation, not domination.

Finally, Dumbledore seems to think Voldemort is still alive, but he's either pretending to have irrational justifications for this or he really does. I think it's waaaay more likely that Dumbledore is just playing dumb, since he's definitely smarter than he lets on, as evidenced by his and Snape's big discussion about the Bellatrix thing, but I'm not entirely sure how much Dumbly knows for sure. Quirrell knows Dumbledore acts as though he thinks Voldemort is still alive. The real wildcard is Harry, because Quirrell probably wasn't expecting him to be such a major agent in all this, he's almost certainly playing Xanatos chess at this point trying to keep ahead of Harry and keep his plan alive.

Or at least that's my theory.

You got downvoted for a request for an elaboration? I just don't know what people are thinking sometimes with their downvotes.

I found it interesting because it was out of character for the usual Evil Dark Overlord, who is generally portrayed as wanting violence for the sake of violence and terror, or at least willing to match you death for death.

It's almost as if his goal was to push Dumbledore's side into doing/supporting something horrible. Having accomplished that with minimal losses, he stopped. I can see that as making a lot of strategic sense. It would solidify the resolve of his side - and Malfoy in particular - but wouldn't get into an escalation that he was sure to lose, given the numbers on Dumbledore's side.

Interesting also that much the same happened to Harry. Malfoy was after revenge against Hermione, not capitulation to blackmail from Harry. But from Harry's perspective with respect to the magical government and Dumbledore, it would have been much the same result if Harry hadn't paid off Malfoy. Instead of Narcissa tortured to death by the forces of "Good", it would have been Hermione.

He does have the ability to turn the world into a lake of fire, true. All powerful wizards have this ability and it is implied that every magical power in the world would turn against him if he tried anything that foolish. He has a giant hammer which he dare not use, if only because he's not evil. Also, he is still amazingly vulnerable to almost any adult wizard who wishes him ill - powerful weaponry doesn't imply a powerful defense. He might have been able to assassinate every member of the Wizengamot, but I doubt he would have survived the attempt. If it comes to open warfare he's toast, and his stunt made it much more likely that someone would decide he had stepped over the threshold of open warfare. He's safe for now at Hogwarts, but it was still stupid.

The first item was "I will not go around provoking strong, vicious enemies"

Good advice, and advice Harry failed to follow.

A lethal dose of botulinum toxin is indeed tiny; using it as an Ultimate Weapon, though, requires a delivery system.

What's the total probability that Harry will apologize, then?

Dumbledore is the strongest piece the Light has, bar Potter himself(and he's higher only due to prophecy). Emptying the vaults for Albus would probably be a good trade.

Just back from reading the new chapter, and assumed it without a second thought when I read that scene.

[Editing rest of comment to put it in rot13, because I don't want to spoil chapter 84 for anyone who hasn't read it. May be unnecessary, but I'm erring on the side of caution.]

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But Harry's memory didn't include Voldemort casting Avada Kedavra on Harry. That memory is neutral WRT the "rebounded Avada Kedavra" hypothesis.

Also, no part of a rebuttal to your comment, but re-reading the scene, what's with this line?:

And the boy in the crib saw it, the eyes, those two crimson eyes, seeming to glow bright red, to blaze like miniature suns, filling Harry's whole vision as they locked to his own -

Did Dumbledore do a FMC on baby Harry?

A FMC is described as completely envisioned and controlled by the caster, putting as much time into it as the memory covers; so Dumbledore in FMCing a baby Harry is choosing every detail of the scene. Given that... why would Dumbledore direct a scene like Harry recollects? It has several oddities which reduce its value as a 'you killed my parents! In the name of the Moon, I will punish you!' memory.

This memory?

Into the vacuum rose the memory, the worst memory, something forgotten so long ago that the neural patterns shouldn't have still existed.

"The Dark Lord came to Godric's Hollow," said McGonagall in a whisper. "You should have been hidden, but you were betrayed. The Dark Lord killed James, and he killed Lily, and he came in the end to you, to your crib. He cast the Killing Curse at you. And that was where it ended. The Killing Curse is formed of pure hate, and strikes directly at the soul, severing it from the body. It cannot be blocked. The only defense is not to be there. But you survived. You are the only person ever to survive. The Killing Curse reflected and rebounded and struck the Dark Lord, leaving only the burnt hulk of his body and a scar on your forehead. That was the end of the terror, and we were free. That, Harry Potter, is why people want to see the scar on your forehead, and why they want to shake your hand."

The storm of weeping that had washed through Harry had used up all his tears; he could not cry again, he was done.

(And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry's art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it.)

I actually think the clearest clue here is probably the "but how does anyone know that's what happened?" problem. Other problems: reference to souls, bizarre behavior of the killing curse, total lack of explanation for why a totally reliable spell backfired so spectacularly. But Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story.

An experienced mage making an unforced error of that magnitude sounds an awful lot like the Idiot Ball to me.

Why would (how would) the Basilisk transfer its secrets with a Dark Ritual rather than just, you know, talking?

Also, in canon Harry wasn't a Parselmouth until after that Halloween, and stopped being one when the Horcrux was destroyed.

When the book is done I'm going for the former, but the rules call for the book to be complete, I believe.