Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81

Highly unlikely for something like this to happen in the actual HPMOR -- but I actually enjoyed it, so I thank you for posting it.

The next time Eliezer puts up an omake page, he definitely needs to include this.

I love it!

Especially the last paragraph.

and he excused himself to go to the bathroom, where he spun his time turner twice.

So, you didn't explain how he could do that. Last time it took a spell from Quirrel to hold the shell in place. I'm guessing it's not as simple as holding the shell with one hand and spinning the hourglass inside it.

Also, Harry can't clone (loop) himself four times during the trial if he goes back two hours. That would result in looping himself four times for the time period from 2 to 1 hours before present. To loop himself four times (or he could make it five) during the trial itself, he should go back only one hour.

I love it. I didn't realize you could write fiction so well!

Thanks for writing that, I enjoyed it.

There's a tiny problem with it: Patronuses speak with the voice of the one who cast them, and the members of the Wizengamot have already heard Harry talking, so they'd notice there's something wrong with the Merlin connection.

I think that taking advantage of muggles in lots of ways is against the law, so imperiusing or memory charming a billionaire would be forbidden. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people have thought of and maybe tried using time turners to cheat the muggle lottery, so I'd give fair odds that's illegal too. When it comes to arbitrage though, remember that while wizards in general may not be tremendously stupid, they tend to be incredibly clueless about the muggle world; remember that Arthur Weasley can pass as a premier expert on muggle artifacts. The fact that the values of gold and silver in the muggle world are totally divorced from their value in the wizarding world is likely to be very little known, and the concept of arbitrage may be completely foreign to them as well (look how primitive their whole financial system appears to be.)

The fact that Mr. Bester, Harry's occlumency instructor, said he wished he could remember "That trick with the gold and silver" implies that a) the idea is not obvious to most wizards, and b) he thinks he would at least stand a chance of getting away with it.

First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market.

Neither of which are known to the Wizarding world, as evidenced by the Occlumency teacher's reaction to his discovery of it. (and his discovery of it, and his discovery of it... :) )

Something doesn't add up.

Your assessment of the Wizarding World's evaluation of the Muggle world. To the supermajority of Wizards, science is a total unknown. Economic and sociopolitical theory are terms they've simply never heard of.

They are isolated and effectively are like the apocryphal Chinese Emperor who burned his fleets because there was nothing left to discover; or the equally apocryphal Patent Office official who wanted to close the Patent Office in the 1800's because there was nothing left to invent.

So basically what you're seeing is what's called "hindsight bias". It is obvious to you, who knows what "Muggles" have, that the Wizards are vastly disadvantaged here -- insanely so -- but remember that as further demonstrated by Draco's total ignorance of Man's visit to the Moon, Wizards believe Muggles are "wallowing in the mud". The idea that they might LEARN from Muggles is actively suppressed by a concerted political campain by a powerful and long-standing major political faction.

The people who would do this are not on the Wizengamot: Maybe this does happen. Perhaps all the muggle-born realize how easy it is to live a life of luxury in the muggle world and do exactly that, and only venture into the magical world when the want to go shopping. They have the best conveniences of both worlds and none of the dangers of either. This... actually sounds kinda plausible. Plus, there isn't a great job market for muggle-born.

Like going off to live in a poor country if you have a first-world income to live on. I believe it's already been remarked that this is about how magical Britain views muggle Britain.

Some counter-evidence for getting gold being difficult: In chapter 27, Mister Bester (the Legilimens who trained Harry) said:

Though I do wish I could remember that trick with the gold and silver.

Implying that it was at least somewhat practical as a means for getting rich quickly.

Theres also a psychological dimension to consider. To most wizards, and especially the rich pure bloods who this would be most relevant to, muggles, muggle-borns and anything associated with them are incredibly low status. Mere knowledge of muggles is seen as a major social negative (see treatment of Arthur Weasley). As such they would have a strong incentive not to investigate muggle knowledge, and if you suggested to Lucius that he made his fortune and power from dealing with Muggles his brain might actually explode from shame.

Remember, most of wizarding Britain is either people who were taken out of the muggle world at age 10-11 and don't come back, or people who never lived there at all. How many of them are actually going to understand finance well enough to have a sense of how to exploit it? And the ones who actually have money at Gringott's are almost by definition the ones who never even spent those 11 years in the muggle world, so they may well not have any idea that finance exists. And even if they do, the ignorance and prejudice is rather overpowering, and may well prevent proper use of it. Someone who has both seed capital and the knowledge of how to exploit the crap out of it is going to be rare, and the DMLE is likely going to step on anyone who gets too egregious about using wizarding advantages to do so.

(Edited first sentence for accuracy)

Let's quote the current author's notes:

One thing I did notice was that many readers (a) neglected simple solutions in favor of complex ones, (b) neglected obvious solutions in favor of nonobvious ones, and (c) suggested that the correct hints had been put there for deliberately deceptive purposes.

General announcement: I do not lie to my readers. Almost everything in HPMOR is generated by the underlying facts of the story. Sometimes it is generated by humor – I can’t realistically claim that comic timing that precise would occur in a purely natural magical universe. But nothing is there to deliberately fool the readers.

Methods of Rationality is a rationalist story. Your job is to outwit the universe, not the author. If it taught the lesson that the simple solution is always wrong because it is “too obvious”, it would be teaching rather the wrong moral. There are some cases where people have scored additional points by successful literary analysis, e.g. Checkov’s Gun principles. But the author is not your enemy, and the facts aren’t lies.

Now, yes, it is possible that Eliezer Yudkowsky's Author Note on this very chapter is a lie, and he will suddenly reveal a whole series of barriers to paying the debt that will shut off everything from arbitrage to time turners to Dumbledore using the Philosopher's Stone in the manner allowed in canon, without having given us any previous hints as to what they are. But I think Eliezer Yudkowsky is not lying, and that at least one of the many simple solutions proposed (or another simple solution) will work.

f they're arguing over lucrative ink importation rights it means they've already figured out arbitrage

Not really. All sorts of arguments and fights over importation rights occurred even during the height of merchantilism. That importing goods can be profitable is a much more obvious claim than that moving goods between markets can be profitable. The second is more abstract. Moreover, they don't think of the Muggle world as that important, so the fact that the Muggle world has imbalanced prices may not be obvious to them as something to even think about.

I disagree. Harry can do partial transfiguration. If he cannot figure out ways to earn insane amounts of cash just through that then he is too retarded to be called rational (remember that he can actually extract resources in ways the wizarding world cannot - as I write in another place: mining ++).

Plus you underestimate the degree of separation between the two worlds plus the extreme lack of respect the wizarding world holds for muggles.

And about the 100.000 galleons: well if they're bright, ambitious and socially aware plus they're using questionable sources they SHOULD act surprised. Not acting surprised would give away their game to the idiots remaining.

I will be severely disappointed if EY will waste time on the money issue. It doesn't deserve much more than a paragraph. Perhaps two just to let us know that Harry won't abuse it, because he doesn't want to call too much attention to himself.

maybe I'm forgetting some piece of evidence but couldn't the simple explanation be that muggle gold isn't actually wizard gold and vice versa? Magical signature as mentioned or any number of other ways.

He's got plenty of time, and doesn't need that much seed money or that high a growth rate -- unless Lucius has a plan that'll get intolerable well before his payment comes due. I ran some numbers, and if he's making 3% profit on each of one-third of all trading days for six years (which I think is if anything conservative -- the arbitrage hack early in the story would be a couple orders of magnitude more profitable until someone catches on), he needs a principal of a little under 40 Galleons to break the 100,000 mark by the end of year 7. For 60,000, it's more like 25.

That's a decent amount of money if we're going by the prices we've seen for goods, but I'd be surprised if he couldn't borrow it from any of the suitably impressed adults he's surrounded himself with. Especially if they've got a motive to screw the Malfoys over.

Further, perhaps ambiguous evidence that Harry's machinitions won't be as successful or simple as he imagines. From Chapter 20, in reference to Quirrell's insistence that Dumbledore pay for Harry's Occlumency lessons with a neutral party:

Dumbledore was frowning. "Such services are extremely expensive, as you well know, and I cannot help but wonder why you deem them necessary."

"If it's money that's the problem," Harry spoke up, "I have some ideas for making large amounts of money quickly -"

"Thank you Quirinus, your wisdom is now quite evident and I am sorry for disputing it. Your concern for Harry Potter does you credit, as well."

Dumbledore immediately identifies Harry's money-making scheme as a terrible idea (even without knowing what exactly it is) and is actually willing to compromise his prior stance merely by being reminded how ignorant and childish Harry can be.

Dumbledore is probably the number one character, except for perhaps Snape, who has demonstrated the most knowledge of Muggle technology, culture, and institutions. I think it's a good bet that Dumbledore, hearing Harry's statement, immediately realized that Harry had hatched some hare-brained scheme with all kinds of horrible consequences that were obvious to Dumbledore, with his knowledge of both worlds, but opaque to Harry.

I think it's also important to remember that all these fancy smancy new ways of making money haven't really been around that long.

Wizards live to be more than a hundred years old, and in general don't have a bunch of children. There's been only a couple generations in which many of these money making methods have been around - for example, the stock market has only existed in a convenient form since, say, 1910? And this story takes place in 1992. Eighty years really isn't that long in wizard years. And while a small percentage ten-year-olds in the 1990s might happen to have some idea of how the stock market can be manipulated for personal gains, probably only a vastly smaller number may have known in, say, 1940 - before the information age.

The noble houses - the wizards that probably make up the majority of the Wizenagamot - are kind of implied to have been rich and powerful for a long time. If any of these people are young enough to have gone to Hogwarts after the thirties, and been humble enough to have taken Muggle Studies, and really paid attention when it came to the Great Depression, and happened to do background reading on the subject in order to exploit it, then sure, maybe it's already done.

But given the information we have, I doubt this is widely known and regularly done enough to be a problem for Harry.

Certainly, the planning fallacy applies. And even if, for example, arbitrage worked the way it seems, and without the extra pitfalls that have been mentioned, there's a lot more to it than just swapping silver for gold and back. Harry's 11, he can't leave Hogwarts, his finances are tightly controlled by Dumbledore, 100,000 galleons = 1.7 million sickles ~= 17 tonnes of silver. Your dad doesn't just slip that into his back pocket. You're going to need help lifting it, security to guard it, vehicles to move it...

On the other hand, Harry has a lot of resources that haven't even been mentioned yet. There's a house in Godricks hollow for example, and the Granger's would probably be willing to contribute.

He hasn't even really made an accurate count of his vault. He described the stacks as a rough pyramid, but then estimates they're 20 wide and 60 tall - so in other words, each step of the pyramid is only three coins high. I made a small model out of poker chips, and it looks more like a flat than a stack. If it were a normal author, I'd figure the description was bad and the "estimate" was spot on, but EY is smart enough to realize that estimates aren't that accurate. Harry might have underestimated and already have 100,000. Of course, he might have over estimated instead.

Maybe he should learn a magical counting spell.

Why not just chose a muggle institution that has a lot of gold and is corrupt enough you don't mind stealing from(shouldn't be hard) and walk in under the cloak of invisibility, alohomora the locks and fill up the bag of holding with gold? I agree that sounds too easy to not already have been done though.

Gringotts won't mint your gold for a nominal fee: Griphook could have been lying, mistaken, or omitted something. Maybe you bring in a ton of gold and they just laugh at it for not having a special magical signature. Unlikely but possible.

"I wonder who came up with the idea of suspending liquid latinum inside worthless bits of gold. "

Hm. What if there is an enchantment on all galleons that prevents them from being melted down? Or better yet, just prevents muggles from seeing them? That would solve a lot of these problems, and still would not violate what Griphook said. I can't think of anything in cannon or in HPMOR that contradicts this. But I could be forgetting.

Apparently confirmed by Dumbledore's dilemma in Chapter 82. And we're pretty sure that Dumbledore is smart and had access to a time turner.

Perhaps the simplest answer is that there's no easy way to move large amounts of money from the muggle to magical world. Is it really possible to buy 17 tonnes of silver without attracting a ton of attention from governments?

On the other hand, if the real criminal is found before the debt comes due, it's presumably a non-issue.

Perhaps Griphook's "nominal fee" is, like, a permanent portion of your magic, or one of your fingers.

It makes a great deal of sense as a purely political ploy. Harry just greatly strengthened the legend of the boy who lived, and since that is the result, Lucius is likely to suspect that it was also the intent.

That mudblood girl is also the most talented witch of her generation. Maybe Harrymort just wants another Bellatrix and this is the first step towards it. Maybe the debt doesn't matter because Britain is going to be at war / Lucius will be dead before Harry would graduate. Also, Harry just gained a sworn minion out of it, which is arguably a lot more useful than a large sum of money.

Confirmation bias remains and this is Lucius who whatever his cunning isn't a rationalist. So he's more likely to be thinking "Why did Voldemort save the mudblood girl?" than consider that he was wrong thinking Harry was Voldemort.

If Harrymort regains 'his' former power, he'll have the use of all House Malfoy's wealth. But Lucius still doesn't know what the Dark Lord wants with Hermione Granger.

Where is Lucius thinking Harry is Voldamort coming from? I've heard this being discussed as cannon, but I didn't pick it up from the story. Was it in the author's notes somewhere, or did I simply miss something?

That's only a legal formality, though. Harry hates the wizard society and wouldn't use its laws against her, and he'd discourage others from acknowledging it.

Still, Hermione (unlike Harry) cares what others think of her, so being surrounded by people who act as if she belongs to Harry is going to hurt her.

Wow. That's just an absolutely fabulous theory. In one fell swoop, you explain why EY appeared to leave AI out of his largest story yet, plausibly account for a vast array of in-story phenomena, and rehabilitate a character (Dumbledore) who seems suspiciously irrational for someone who's supposed to have oodles of meaningful in-story-real-world accomplishments. The theory has falsifiable, concrete predictions -- for example, we should not expect the AI to care if Harry asks it really nicely to give everyone magic powers; nor should we expect magic to be able to do anything that a super-intelligent AI couldn't do (simulating cat-brains is AOK; uncomputably complicated time loops are not OK). The theory also seems to fit with Chapter 82's hint that people subsumed by pheonix fire are re-instantiated "instances" of a more general Fire. In other words, the AI can maybe call the "Harry" subroutine somewhere else if it wants.

I'm in awe.

One possible victory condition if the AI in fact is coded to enforce the beliefs of people with a particular genetic marker is for Harry to find a way to put that marker into most people / his friends using a retrovirus. Does anyone else find it in the least suspicious that Harry's father is an expert biochemist?

So, have there been any fundamentally uncomputable events in the story so far? :-)

No. Mind the Conservation of Detail.

Harry doesn't know that Dumbledore's patronus recognizes Harry's patronus. This is a trap EY has laid for Harry.

For no internal reasons, but for story reasons, Dumbledore will not figure out that Harry was in Axkaban until the next time both he and Harry have their patronuses up at the same time. It is set up to be a shocking reveal, maybe a cliffhanger.

Yes, Dumbledore's icy glare at the end seems to imply that he figured it out.

Harry may be an overachiever, but he's still 11 - he's allowed to be bad at manipulating people. He's still at the "All I have to do is out-clever everyone and I can take over the world" stage. He has the tools to pull it off much of the time, but he still thinks of his opponents as pieces, not as players, which is a pretty serious hole in his worldview when it comes to things like manipulating Lucius Malfoy.

"I should have the whole amount ready by the end of the month." It would take his arbitrage trick, but certainly the Headmaster would let him do that instead of going into debt to Malfoy.

Even if he does his arbitrage trick, what benefit would he get from telling it to Malfoy in advance. Why share unnecessary information with a potential adversary? Why risk additional penalties if something unexpected happens and the arbitrage takes five weeks instead of four?

I'm doubtful about the arbitrage trick to really work that smoothly - goblins will get suspicious quickly, and it'll probably be seen as a threat to the Statute of Secrecy and would lead to legal troubles from the wizarding side. It would have to be done slowly and quietly to go on, not to be rushed in a few months.

It's an interest-free loan. Unless the "certain rights" Lucius has over HJPEV until graduation are troublesome, it is in probably HJPEV's best interest to delay paying the loan back as long as possible.

Or unless, I suppose, he expects significant deflation before graduation. I don't think any of the HJPEV's plans that we know of are likely to result in deflation, quite the opposite in fact.

Why, for the love of wisdom, scare him in public?

Better than scaring him in a dark alley. At least he'll have time to think through his reaction.

Far more important than not scaring Malfoy in public is not insulting him in public. Public scaring isn't too much of an issue unless the nature of the scare is also insulting.

Arbitrage trick is overengineering. Just trade on forex and use time turner to go back and choose the deal.

With 40 000 galleons even going back a few minutes could suffice.

the Crouch family is highly respected and pure-blood and related to the House of Black, but the HP Wikia doesn't list them as nobles), is old, and canon seems to imply he was powerful & competent in Dark-hunting

Not just imply, I'm pretty sure that in the fourth book Dumbledore explicitly calls Bartemius Crouch "powerfully magical."

The relevance of that may be limited if Eliezer hasn't read the book itself though.

Bartemius Crouch is a candidate: as a Ministry head of Magical Law Enforcement

Amelia Bones is Director of the DMLE, not Crouch.

Moody saw it though. The Eye of Vance sees everything.

Scrimgeour seems like a likely candidate for the strange male voice.

I think "the old wizard" was Dumbledore.

It would be a bad use of political capital considering how easy he could gain money in other ways while keeping a majority(? - at least combined with some help from Dumbledore's side) vote on pretty much whatever issue up his sleeve...

I doubt she remembers any of that conversation.

On the other hand, it's now in Dumbledore's interest to see Harry make a lot of money quickly in order to discharge the debt, which means he's far more likely to approve of things that otherwise would be considered unacceptable, like:

• 1) Tricks with the Time Turner involving lotteries, stock markets, and the like.
• 2) The gold/silver arbitrage idea.
• 3) Personal appearance fees and other financial trading on his fame as The Boy Who Lived.
• 4) Calling in debts owed by other Imperiused or supposedly-Imperiused victims of Voldemort.
• 5) Dumbledore himself using the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone to make a lot of gold.

In short, a sixty thousand Galleon debt, while it feels huge, is not obviously a major obstacle given the number of possible solutions already implicitly presented in HPMoR, and it would almost seem a cheat for it to be one

That wiping out the debt easily might have its own negative consequences, on the other hand, is potentially interesting.

Dunno about that. The debt will have concsequences, certainly, but Hermione is not in Azkaban.

I agree, this is a bad idea. I didn't figure out the answer when it was just for fun; my performance will probably only get worse under stress (and there's not much farther to fall from "uh... well, maybe it has to do with destroying Dementors, I give up").

I know this shows no confidence in my own rationality, or that of the other readers, but can we please just have a normal story?

There's nothing to worry about. We were presented with the same challenge in Three Worlds Collide. If we don't succeed, we will just get a false ending instead of a true ending.

Even if he knew, saying that would be a good way to try to get Harry to reveal something. What he would have heard from Draco is that Harry has a super-bright Patronus whose form he keeps secret; he would be curious. So I don't think this quote is strong evidence that Lucius hasn't heard about the Patronus from Draco, since it is pretty likely that he would say something like this even if he has.

EDIT: Actually, since he believes Harry is Voldemort, he probably thinks the Patronus light he showed Draco was an illusion, and not useful for getting out of Azkaban at all. If he thinks Harry is Voldemort he's unlikely, then, to pry for information about it in this way.

I expect the amount of time he had was not sufficient for a full report on everything Draco knows of Harry. Perhaps the Patronuses didn't come up? Seems an odd omission, but not an impossible one.

My speculations were:

Maybe Lucius decided to let Draco keep some privacy.
Or he just hasn't gotten around to fully questioning him under veritaserum yet.
Or he's pretending that he doesn't know that Harry has a Patronus.
Or someone obliviated Draco of this information before Draco was returned to his father.
Or Draco is secretly an occlumens and he just pretended to let the veritaserum work on him.

I don't think Draco is an occlumens. I also don't think Lucius is such a nice dad that he would respect Draco's privacy after Draco was nearly killed.

I suppose he might not have had the chance yet, but if I was Lucius I would have tried really hard to get the chance to question Draco in detail before the trial. Unless Lucius was overconfident of his influence with the Wizengamot?

Yeah, Draco has been missing for a while. EY moved through this very fast. There's been a murder attempt on Draco, and a trial about it, and I don't remember seeing Draco since he was plotting to challenge Hermione.

Has Lucius not spoken to Draco in private yet?

Draco promised to keep Harry's secrets. Including everything that comes up in the Bayesian Conspiracy. Harry's and Draco's Patronuses are just additional items in that subset.

For that matter, why didn't Dumbledore mention the Imperius debt when they were talking about debts?

Dumbledore's being awfully incompetent... Wonder why that would be.

At this point Harry is feeling pretty (over)confident in his ability to keep Lucius in check, so it's not a big deal to him. Witness his riddle.

I was going to say it sounds like a lien, but it turns out that word means something different outside the US.

It sounds like a security interest.

Oh hey. And we have a confession.

"I'm sorry to say, Harry, that I am responsible for virtually everything bad that has ever happened to you."

I actually noticed the dissonance when I read this, that Dumbledore had apparently overlooked the biggest and most obvious tragedy of Harry's life. But I didn't realize what it meant. Whoops.

He disarmed the trap by goading Lily into attacking him.

Unnecessary detail, may or may not be the case. If he was aware of the trap, it would not matter whether this disarmed it; he just needed to not cast Avada Kedavra on Harry. Harry's memory of the event does not end with Voldemort casting the Killing Curse on him.

Avada Kedavra leaves no mark, but getting killed by Lily's ritual sacrifice might. Even so, that the body was burned, which makes identification harder, is suggestive that it is not really Voldemort's.

Ha! So Dumbledore inserts prophecy as a trap, and Voldemort plays along to set his own trap. Nice!

One reason I like implanted prophecy theory is that it would play into rationalist biases against prophecy. I expect magic to be explained as commands to some AI in Atlantis. But prophecy? Seeing into the future? Messages from Atlantis?

Maybe it's just my bias against backward in time causality, which he has really committed to anyway, with Comed-Tea. Me, I'd rather that prophecies are explainable by other means.

But wouldn't this imply that Dumbledore doesn't really see Harry as the destined savior against Voldemort? Maybe he is just saving him to use as a trap again, unaware that Voldemort had already seen through the trap and was playing it for his own purposes? Yeah, saving him as a trap again makes sense, since the dark ritual should still be binding.

As long as we're adding in people playing the prophecy, how about Lily and James? They could have been playing the honeypot knowingly, in league with Dumbledore. I'm reminded of Dumbledore bringing up Lily Potter as a heroine, and noticed the incongruity at the time, though I didn't notice my confusion, as it were. Now that I do, saying she was a heroine seems like she was promoted beyond her station, unless she played a knowing part in her sacrifice to attempt to bring down Voldemort. That would certainly qualify her for the ranks.

One thing - a Voldemort plan to upload into Harry could be said to keep the terms of the dark ritual by allowing Harry to live on a permanent basis. And Harry as Dark Lord also satisfies those terms.

Seems unlikely that the original prophecy was caused by Dumbledore, at least by the method of the magical clock. As in canon, Trelawney seems to have made the prophecy during a job interview, presumably before she was regularly sleeping with the clock. I expect that if Dumbledore wanted her to make a false prophecy at a specific time, something like an Imperius folled by Obliviation would be more expedient. Furthermore, we have seen Trelawney spontaneously prophecy in the dining hall; this prophecy at least appeared unplanned by Dumbledore.

while feeding the Potters to Voldemort to create his orphan hero?

Sometimes the so called good commits serious atrocities to achieve a greater goal. This would be bad.

I smell omake

He didn't marry Hermione.

One hundred points to Gryffindor doesn't seem to cut it.

-100? She just doesn't know when to talk and when to keep her mouth shut.

Chapter 17:

"I'm feeling thirsty," Harry said, "and that is not at all a good sign."

Dumbledore entirely failed to ask any questions about this cryptic statement.

He doesn’t seem to choke after this, but there follow several occasions where might have, had he been drinking. Anyway, the sentence means he kind of does use the Comed-Tea to kind-of-sort-of-predict the future, albeit not systematically.

Regarding the counting, his line in chapter 14 might be meant to suggest he had been doing more experiments “not on camera”. There are only three occasions where he’s seen using it until then; he shouldn’t have been that frustrated about the explanation after that few tries.

If, for example, Harry wishes to test whether or not someone knows that Voldemort is alive, he could see if he has the Impulse to give that person a drink, all while thinking about saying that "The Dark Lord is still alive". If he gets the Impulse, they don't know. If he doesn't, then they already know/has been suspecting that he's been alive.

Unless he actually followed through with saying that Voldemort is still alive, this wouldn't be enough.

Earlier thoughts on Comed-Tea here

I interpreted Comed-tea as the simplest example of backwards causality - an event A causing event B, where A occurs /after/ B in time. Eliezer introduced Comed-Tea to make the point that the HPMoR universe does not operate by what we imagine to be standard causality rules.

I suspect that, the same way that messing with Time somehow results in a message saying "NO", it would be similarly impossible to commit to drinking Comed Tea.

You know, that is a really good idea.

Funny, but unfortunately people telling other people things is exactly what the Interdict of Merlin doesn't forbid.

The Interdict of Merlin blocking transmission of non-magical knowledge between living minds?

The magics of Echo Gnomics from the Counterweight Continent?

I don't quite understand. Arbitrage has nothing to do with magic.

Voldemort used the word to tease as Quirrell and as the cloak and hat. He probably did it in the last war, too. Lucius may think that Voldemort is teasing him just like he used it, when Harry says it.

It's not a strange word, though. That's probably so we know the spell being cast was not AK.

I don't get it pretty clear. Could you explain in few words?