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orthonormal comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread - Less Wrong
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Chapter 30-31: Was there a more sophisticated basic idea than appearing to be incompetent, then playing possum? I'd have expected one of the other two armies to expend a second (double tap) sleep spell on the downed, given that Neville came up with the same tactic later on.
Also, nice touch writing Neville as Bean without using a sledgehammer on the parallel.
ETA: It took me a bit to understand Draco's particular revelation: that Quirrell made sure to place all the other smartest students (and the other candidate generals mentioned in Ch. 29) on Sunshine.
Well, Hermione wasn't just appearing to be incompetent in the sense of "too stupid to calculate the correct solution;" she was appearing to be irrational in the sense of "too self-righteous to want to calculate the correct solution."
Also, note that Hermione actually did stay true to her goals: her possum tactic allowed her to avoid "unfairly" choosing who to attack first. By waiting until most other players had been sleepified, she was able to attack only the strongest or luckiest survivors, rather than the soldiers controlled by someone that she personally disliked. She was able to both win the game and stay true to her values because she (somehow) was much better at working in groups than Draco or Harry. One wonders how a girl who had no social skills in Chapter 3 suddenly became so socially adept -- has she been reading books on how to get along with people?
It's more that both Harry and Draco were mentally handicapped here. Draco has the glamorous dream of being the dark overlord who controls everything from the top, his orders unquestioned and his name spoken in hushed tones. Harry has the habit of trying to think up an ingenious plan by himself, and it just didn't occur to him to get other people in his army to do strategy planning. Tactics, sure, but not strategy.
Hermione, in contrast, is perfectly used to learning from others, and doesn't have particularly grandiose ambitions. And maybe Quirrell casually hinted that some of the people in her army were good at planning things. It seems the sort of thing he'd do, to make his plan less brittle.
As I argue in the reviews for chapter 31, Hermione herself was surely not playing possum, and likely neither were her 6 soldiers. That was not their idea. (Whether Nevile is smart enough to tell Harry, or whether one of the other armies will think of it in time for battle 2, is a question for the future.)
There were 24 people per army, and 11 of Sunshine came at Harry and 12 at Draco. And Harry & Draco had their realization of what happened when they remembered that Sunshine's soldiers went down immediately at the first shot. They were playing possum (all but Hermione, who didn't want to risk it).
The 6 soldiers left is after the battle of Sunshine's return, after they've already taken Potter hostage.
I increased the number of soldiers Hermione had left to help make this clearer.
Harry has been learning an Evil Overlord List (warning: tv tropes), but apparently he had to figure out #13 the hard way.
Coincidentally enough, today's Overcoming Bias post is about the same thing.
Cremating people isn't enough to make sure they're dead if you have backup records and nanotech. I don't know if that approach has been used on a naive villain in fiction.
"Elementary"
I wonder if he is going to learn #92 as well!
"You got played, Sam. And you forgot that all warfare is based on deception"
Yeah, not double-killing everyone seems just grossly incompetent (and therefore out of character) on Harry's part.