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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 4
[Update: and now there's a fifth discussion thread, which you should probably use in preference to this one. Later update: and a sixth -- in the discussion section, which is where these threads are living for now on. Also: tag for HP threads in the main section, and tag for HP threads in the discussion section.]
The third discussion thread is above 500 comments now, just like the others, so it's time for a new one. Predecessors: one, two, three. For anyone who's been on Mars and doesn't know what this is about: it's Eliezer's remarkable Harry Potter fanfic.
Spoiler warning and helpful suggestion (copied from those in the earlier threads):
Spoiler Warning: this thread contains unrot13'd spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality up to the current chapter and for the original Harry Potter series. Please continue to use rot13 for spoilers to other works of fiction, or if you have insider knowledge of future chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
A suggestion: mention at the top of your comment which chapter you're commenting on, or what chapter you're up to, so that people can understand the context of your comment even after more chapters have been posted. This can also help people avoid reading spoilers for a new chapter before they realize that there is a new chapter.
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Comments (649)
Hey Eliezer- if you're planning to upload your Author's Notes to the LW wiki, it might be helpful to post that intention to your profile on Fanfiction.net. I know of at least 3 groups independently trying to collect all of the AN's themselves:
The Facebook Page
An Evernote Page
Dan Cowell's Translation Page
Please do. I would like to read the earlier notes.
I, too, have been trying to collect whatever AN's I could, along with the little description blurbs. My version is a bit messy, though.
So many questions... For one, Quirrel is pretty good at magic - did he figure out a way past the Interdict of Merlin, or is he just that good? And does he still have You-Know-Who in the back of his head in this continuity?
We don't know. Maybe he is Voldemort sobered up and his magic skillz are from the basilisk; maybe Voldemort is a parasite again, or maybe he and Quirrel have 'traded utility-functions'. Tons of speculation has been offered - indeed, one might say that of the many mysteries in MoR, Quirrel is chief.
Eliezer has drawn attention to the fact that Quirrell just has a bald patch on his head, which he does not conceal, where canon!Quirrell has Voldemort's face. This suggests that MoR!Quirrell at one time had Voldemort's face stuck there, but somehow got free of it. In which case, where is Voldemort now? Who would be absolutely the worst person, from Harry's point of view, to turn out to be possessed by Voldemort?
Dumbledore.
Dumbledore? I think the worst situation for him would be if it was hermione
Harry is smart enough not to be so scope-insensitive. It would be personally painful for him if Hermione had succumbed to that fate, but disastrous for the world which Harry wants to save if Dumbledore had. Dumbledore's power, plus Voldemort's own, plus what he got from Slytherin's Monster looks like a challenge fit for a superrational scientist-wizard.
Although my point was mainly on the emotional level, I don't know... even with Dumbledores political power and magical experience, possessed!Hermione would be a much greater threat to the world than possessed!Dumbledore, given her memory, her sanity, and the speed she learns spells. combined with the motivation of wanting to take over the world, I would expect her to be much stronger than Dumbledore before long. (both in combat and politically) Though she seems like an unlikely choice for a muggle-born hater.
On another note, I do not think that Voldemort left Quirrel for someone else, he still seems to be controlled by another being most of the time, even if there are less visible marks. Quirrel may have applied some kind of permanent illusion, instead of using a turban.
Or better than a permanent illusion, a magically-induced blindspot like the Interdict of Merlin or the thestrals.
Why have a noticeable bald spot instead of hair?
Maybe a blind spot is an empty spot, and an empty spot on a head = bald spot? Hair would be a presence, not an absence.
Presumably when one reads a book under the Interdict of Merlin, one reads blank pages, not mildly obscene limericks about a man from Nantucket.
I think a sensible wizard would cover any blind spot they create with something very ordinary, if this is possible.
Presumably some people knew the real Quirrel person back when Voldermort was still alive. Maybe he just naturally had a bald patch all along.
Also, we don't know that hiding a bald spot is possible (or safe). For instance, making someone pretty using magic is known to be very dangerous.
Possibly it's an illusion or Someone Else's Problem Field (Perception Filter) such that the evil is still there, most people just don't see it because they don't want to.
Yes, I don't have any ideas about zombie-Quirrel/lucid-Quirrel, or Harry's sense of doom around the latter. Does any of that exist in canon, and if it does, what's the story there? I'm only familiar with the general ambience of the Potterverse, not having read any of the books or seen the films. (Spoilers welcome, I don't intend to read/see them.)
Here's an idea about the sense of doom following on from V having tried but failed to possess Q: Harry's scar is a piece of Voldemort (doesn't canon have the scar being a horcrux of V?), and the sense of doom is the Voldemort-fragment's fear that Quirrel might discover and destroy it.
Quirrel has spoken of at least one past experience that appears to have been Voldemort's (killing an entire monastery because the master wouldn't teach him). So, maybe what we are looking at is a Quirrel/Voldemort merging, in which Quirrel is in control (except in zombie mode), and the Voldemort-fragment reduced to nothing more than memories.
Haven't read Canon Potter in many years but I believe Harry had pains in his scar when Voldemort was awake/active on Quirrel's body. In the book, Harry often misattributed this to Snape's presence (I think).
Harry's scar wasn't a Horcrux (nor was Harry*) in canon, although that was a very popular fan guess before the 7th book came out. I'm extremely intrigued by how this whole story line is going to play out.
*Actually, according to canon, Harry had a piece of Voldemort's soul but was never Horcruxed on purpose, so Voldemort was unaware of this fact.
Er, I thought Harry was one of Voldemort's horcruxes in canon, or something very much like one.
Whoops, you're right about that. Though, according to wiki Harry isn't technically a Horcrux:
So you can hold a part of a guy's soul and not be a horcrux?! This is why HPMOR is better than canon.
remember what the sorting hat said though... It seems unlikely that voldemort put the necessary protections on harry's soul-fragment to stop the sorting hat from detecting it considering that he almost died as soon as he attacked harry.
The sense of doom may just be a filled-with-fantasy Harry brain's interpretation of the Voldemort-emotion/proximity as opposed to the pain that cannon!Harry felt. MoR!Harry already has a far different view of things due to his fiction reading (just look at his interactions with Hermione), why not a different mapping of an unnatural sense?
Harry.
What was the Interdict of Merlin again? I googled but none of the links were defining, just referencing.
If Vold. is in his head, it isn't visible, Quirrel no longer wears the turban he used to hide it in canon.
Ahh, was that what Harrizer called his plan to stop the misuse of magic or knowledge in general by limiting it to people who can discover it for themselves?
If so I was actually trying to do the reverse lookup a week or so ago.
OK, I think that is it. H.P. thinks its why witches are no longer as powerful as they used to be. The idea was to prevent dangerous fools from having powerful magic, but it also means a lot of ancient magic was lost as some spells were never orally transferred, and there was no written copy to be discovered later.
And note the hat's commentary on the matter.
It was the ancient magical equivalent to an existential risk prevention mechanism.
From Ch. 23
Ch. 49. The throwaway reference to Tenorman Family Chili is awesome.
Agreed, vg vf na ncg & njrfbzr pnaavonyvfz ersrerapr. Rot13'd for those who haven't seen the awesome South Park episode that it's referencing. The full episode is available to watch here if you'd like to make up for that deficiency.
Bah. Doubly a cliffhanger. I don't like waiting!
Shame about the Basilisk. That creature would have been almost as handy as a familiar as Dumbledore's phoenix!
Slitherin's monster would have been a great snake, but most definitely not a bassilisk in HPMOR. If it had been created to transmit knowledge, it would be some other kind of serpent. Otherwise, one look and oops! there goes the heir of slytherin.
Survival of the fittest. Sounds like something Slytherin would do to weed out potentially unworthy heirs. ;)
In canon you can look at it indirectly (e.g. through a camera lens, or a reflection). You get injured, but not dead. Maybe if you look at it through your Snake Animagus eyes, you'll be okay.
It seems to be required that the Heir be a Parseltongue. It's not a stretch to require that the Heir also be a Snake Animagus -- after all, there are many more people who can speak snake than become snake. In canon, Harry wasn't the Heir but could still access the chamber -- apparently any Parseltongue could have. In MoR, that would mean any Parseltongue could have accessed all of Slytherin's secrets. But only the Heir of Slytherin can access the chamber (according to legend?). Therefore Parseltongue is not sufficient to gain access (if the legend is true).
-- Chapter 49
I venture that the entrance to the Chamber of Secrets responds to Snake Animagus Parseltongue but not Common Parseltongue.
In ch. 47 Harry teaches Draco how to cast a Patronus, but in ch. 48 he refuses to teach Hermione. Why?
He refuses to teach the advanced kind, and expects she can't perform the regular kind in any case (which she tried). Draco couldn't learn regular Patronus because, being a Slytherin, he never made a honest effort.
Harry should be able to help Hermione find a happy thought appropiate for Patronus 1.0, as he did for Draco.
Inability to find a happy thought is not the problem.
Not all happy thoughts work. Harry suggested to Draco a particular happy thought that would work: his father protecting him from human frailty. This is appropriate to protect against a symbol of death, as Harry's father buying him books is not.
So no, Hermione's problem is not that she can't find a happy thought, but that she doesn't know what sort of happy thought she is supposed to find.
Um, it's pretty much established the reason Hermione can't cast an animal Patronus is because she doesn't have faith in an afterlife...
I don't think it was established one way or another what the reason for Hermione was.
The standard Patronus "feels wrong" when Hermione tries to cast it, just as it does to Harry.
Thanks.
Really? Cite? I didn't catch that.
Edit: Answered by EY in a nibling of this comment.
Didn't Harry also swear to keep what he and Draco experiment with secret? This is why he never told her about the magic gene either, unless I am misremembering things.
So the parable supports his intended real world lesson to the greatest extent possible. The details of the whole subplot are actually extremely well done. Some of the transposition is subtle enough for me to be not quite sure whether it was intended or merely coincidental.
Mind you, any persuasiveness is dependent on actually thinking Harry is making good decisions. But at least it serves as a medium by which he can educate (a more positive word than 'indoctrinate' but something in between the two would be better) without violating the whole point of secrecy by explaining why he believes a real world secret should be kept - which would in most cases sabotage the whole exercise.
What Harry SHOULD have said was that the information was highly secret and that as she wasn't adept in Occlumency he wasn't even able to tell her. It wouldn't have gone and explained his motivations clearly, which we all know he loves to do, but it would have answered the question clearly without implying that he doesn't trust her. That's sorta his strength and his weakness.
It wouldn't be the real reason, and if he understands that, it would also be a lie.
Fair call. That said, including it in the reasoning whilst still doing his usual explaining would have markedly improved things without having to be dishonest.
The more I think about this the more that bit in ch. 48 seems like a mistake by the author. Harry did tell her. She presumably still has the "42" envelope containing the piece of paper where Harry wrote the secret obliquely. Ch. 48 reads like EY forgot that.
Edit: OK, technically Harry implied back then that she should avoid reading it unless she had to, so Hermione followed his wishes when she put the paper away unread. How do they expect this to work?
"That feels like a dementor. Better apparate away -- oops, can't do that, another wizard must have made an anti-apparation hex. Better pull out that wax-sealed paper I always carry and calmly open it with one hand, using the other to hold my wand in case I need it to defend against my postulated wizard opponent, and then calmly read Harry's hint while hoping the dementor doesn't make me forget who Harry is, and then figure out what he meant, and then apply the knowledge to the problem of duplicating a spell that Harry prepared carefully in a relatively safe situation."
Harry teaches Draco to cast Patronus 1.0, Hermione wants to learn Patronus 2.0. Harry doesn't want anyone to know of 2.0, so he keeps it secret. Draco learning of 1.0 is a net gain in terms of Dementor containment -- he represents all of Slytherin.
Hermione learning of 2.0 would be a 'net gain' at face, but too risky to allow. If others learn of the secret from her (or read her mind to find out) and the secret spreads, then it's a net loss for Dementor containment. You gain a second 'lifer' (I wanted to say Dementor killer, but that's a bit oxymoronic) and potentially lose thousands of normal guards.
I am happy to promote this fanfic on my blog, which, so far as I know, has no readers :)
Quirrell is reading Hermione and Draco's minds, and the story he told Harry about how he learned that Harry was a parselmouth, in chapter 49, is partially fabricated. While that story does explain Quirrel knowing that Harry's a parselmouth, it doesn't explain why he chose to confirm that knowledge on his very next private meeting after Draco found out. Also, as Harry observed, Quirrell has at least one hidden source of information:
(EDIT: On rereading, Harry brought up parselmouth first, which explains the timing. But the remaining arguments for the conclusion that Quirrell is reading Hermione and Draco's minds still apply, and still seem sufficient.)
And besides that, simply as a prior probability, Quirrell ought to be reading every mind he's confident he can get away with reading, and Hermione and Draco are very unlikely to notice . This also suggests that when Quirrell arranged for Harry to learn occlumancy, it was a bit of misdirection; he knew he'd be able to get the same information from Harry's friends, but that having suggested it would make Harry more inclined to trust him. Finally, this means that the secret of partial transfiguration is not safe, and if Quirrell is Voldemort then it does not satisfy the conditions of the prophecy.
Harry's friends? Harry is a compulsive secret keeper! He will not even tell Hermione how to make patronuses and he keeps what he does with Malfoy and Hermione a hidden from each other (and incidentally manipulates them by keeping the key details of what he is trying to do to them to himself.)
Harry may be a compulsive secret keeper, but he also uses the scarlet letter technique a bit too often and Quirrel probably realizes that.
The discussion of snake's sentience reminded me of an argument I once made about the nature of pureblood discrimination against Muggles, which I'll reproduce here:
Consider how we, as humans, justify our definitions of personhood. Why do we say that chimps, for example, are not people? Essentially, we come up with a list of features which we have, and things which aren’t people don’t have, like talking, tool use, etc. and then say everything which looks very similar to something which has those features is a person (why, for example, we consider a severely mentally retarded person a person).
In the Wizarding World, manufacturing a facsimile of sentience – talking, etc. is trivial. Even a very poor family can purchase multiple such objects as a child’s toy (Magical Chessmen). They would reject that these object are people, they’re simply toys, not truly free willed, despite resembling that strongly. When it comes down to it, the only difference between real people and all these simulacra seems to be the ability for autonomous magic use – so this becomes the criteria for person-hood.
For wizards, form is not a determinant of nature, thanks to the various transmutations and shapeshifting that is possible, this means that something looking similar to a person cannot be assumed to have the characteristics of a person, so the familiarity based extension I mention above that we have doesn’t apply.
All in all, by this rather natural definition, Muggles aren’t people. All they are is clever simulacra, with no greater moral significance than a child’s toy.
Move back to the chimp analogy. A chimp can do many things a person can do, but falls short on the key criteria. Despite this it’s being suggested that human-chimp hybrids may be genetically viable. It’s quite possible such a hybrid would then meet the criteria for personhood by our definition. Would you approve of people breeding with chimps? Or accept chimp-human hybrids as full members of society without reservation?
I actually rather like the canon Ministry of Magic's current definition of personhood, which is "any creature that has sufficient intelligence to understand the laws of the magical community and to bear part of the responsibility in shaping those laws".
Further, certain intelligent creatures such as centaurs have declined legal personhood status in favor of self-governance.
I'm not so much talking about the legal definitions, as about the basic intuitions that form the framework for the moral reasoning that goes into determining behaviour and then the formal laws and systems that govern them.
It's one of the priors that someone with a non magical upbringing may never consider, that the basic foundation of moral reasoning is different for pureblood wizards.
That other sapient beings have weight as moral actors is pretty basic, and if pure bloods were to instead use a different intuition as the starting point for moral construction, then Harry has a very substantial amount more work to do.
n.b., I have to admit that I was rather disappointed by their being a physical basis for magical ability that proved Harry was right and the pureblood faction wrong. I think it would make a far more interesting setting if the pure bloods were actually factually correct but still morally wrong. Just as interesting would be there being no physical basis for magical ability, and it simply being an example of large scale magic such as the taboo or the cure on the DADA job, the equivalent of a curse or blessing on a family line.
Sorry, I didn't mean to make it about law. I just happen to find that particular definition pretty intuitively appealing; that the definition was canon magical law was a minor side point of only marginal relevance.
To what extent can magic be used to make food that doesn't require killing?
Chapter 6 mentions a "bottle of food and water pills", which seems to have been forgotten about.
This is not necessarily food created by magic, though: maybe someone took ordinary food and magicked it into a pill.
Canonically, it can't beyond increasing the amount (a really bad idea in MoR) or summoning something that's already dead. Not sure if it can in MoR, given that it seems mostly to use the 3.5 D&D spell list (although, come to think of it, neither <i>create food and water</i> nor <i>heroes feast</i> is a Sor/Wiz spell). Although even if it turns out plants are sentient, <i>fruit</i> should still be mostly okay.
I suppose that milk and infertile eggs would still be problematic because the cows and chickens are killing plants.
On the other hand, what's morality for? I thought the original intent was to improve life, not to make it impossible.
Mutilating, yes, but not necessarily killing. Grass can regrow after being cropped.
Chickens are also at least partly insectivorous, but if insects turn out to be sapient (and Rita Skeeter certainly demonstrates that it's possible to hide human-level intelligence in an insect) it might be time to rethink the existential triage priorities.
Morality? Original intent? To assert political influence among the tribe in a way that benefits yourself while simultaneously preventing yourself from making faux pas that would result in negative political (or occasionally environmental) consequences to yourself in cases where explicit reasoning about probable social outcomes is prohibitively expensive.
Always a pleasure to hear from the Slytherins.
OK, why do you think Harry is concerned with ethical behavior to all sentients?
I think there's some evolutionary pressure on morality, so that it's a mixture of requirements for behavior which improve the odds of survival for the group, maintain the status of high-status people, and/or are just people making things up because they sound cool/seemed like a good idea at the time/distinguish the group from other groups. People are encouraged to think of all three as the same sort of thing.
Ahh, but am I? Or am I a hufflepuff who does not base his value system on self-deception?
The original intent of the egg laid by hens was something to do with the reproduction of chickens. Yet as far as I'm concerned eggs are there to be separated white from yolk, whipped thoroughly and combined with the extract from artificially selected cane. Morals, ethics and values general are similar - what matters to me is not what the original intent was or causal factors but what my values happen to be right now. I get to choose which of my values I consider, well, part of 'me'.
I note that maintaining the belief "the original intent of morality was to improve life", or even "the intent of morality that can be inferred from human behavior is to improve life" is not necessarily a stable belief to hold. That is, exposure information from the world around them through either social observation or theoretical study will cause the belief to be discarded because it just isn't, well, true. To refer to a well known exhortation by a source held here in disrepute: don't build your house on sand!
It seems he took his intuitive value for 'other thing that I can empathise with' and applied it more generally than most. This is not a logical problem - there is a huge space of values that are internally coherent. Yet it does have implications that lead me to consider the values of Harry<as expressed at that particular time> are only slightly preferable to those of Clippy. Optimizing the universe by those criteria would create an outcome that I personally (and I suggest most people) would not like all that much.
My thinking is along similar lines... yet I divide the three modes from a slightly different perspective. I don't put much weight on the 'odds of survival for the group' for example, although there is definitely a sense in which moral claims are meant to be interpreted as declarations of pro-social norms. I had tended to leave off 'just making things up because they sound cool' because I was focusing on the explicit political influences but come to think of it "seemed like a good idea at the time" probably does explain a lot!
If by "assert political influence," you mean not accept garbage like the Pirate Game, and by "tribe" you mean any group of mammals. Obviously I'm using a broad definition of morality here.
No, I don't mean that and it isn't exactly the kind of game morality is set up to handle.
But it is an interesting link and the progression is far from intuitive.
...OK, I have little experience with the game Taboo, but people claim to have found 5 major instincts that together provide "mechanisms" for nearly all societal codes. I care more about the first two then the others.
Before, I linked to evidence that dogs care about Fairness in a way that seems to clearly increase their chance of surviving to reproduce in the wild. (Though I admit they'd likely never have to face the Pirate Game as such.) This study purports to show Empathy and its backward cousin Group Loyalty in mice.
Your examples seem to work by Authority, which I feel pretty confident exists in other animals (especially for children). It makes a certain amount of sense to describe rules of this nature as ways to assert political influence, provided we include unconscious political behavior and allow a wide range of motives for wanting to influence others.
"Purity" seems like a mindless animal's version of germ theory.
(Edited once for clarity in the first paragraph.)
Morality? Original intent? To assert parental influence upon your unruly children in a way that gives you a moment's peace while simultaneously preventing your children from making future faux pas that would result in negative political (or occasionally environmental) consequences to the little darlings, in cases where explicit reasoning about probable social outcomes is just too complicated for those immature brains.
Elaine Morgan's ideas about mankind's physical origins may have been all wet, but I think she was right on when talking about where human society and language came from. Hint: it wasn't created to satisfy the needs of adult male hunting bands.
Morality tends to become less necessary as one matures. It is also, as you allude, plays a less significant role in all-male social competition than in mixed group or all female competition. Yet to limiting it as you do to just children is a mistake. The role of morality is clearly visible outside of the family unit and used by and directed at adults.
Agreed. But the context was "original intent". Morality originated as a way to align children's behavior with mother's wishes. It then was discovered that it could be extended to align adult behaviors with tribal wishes.
That is my story and I'm sticking to it.
Are you using "morality" in some narrow technical sense, here? I ask because this statement seems so bizarrely false to me that it seems like you may have been saying something entirely different than my understanding of what you said.
I'm using a perfectly standard definition of morality. I can only assume you are using a different meaning of necessary.
Take, for example, 'crossing the road'. Look both ways, hold hands, etc. That is all presented using the mechanism for morality. This is necessary for most young children because their ability to reason out natural consequences and actually make responsible judgements is undeveloped. As an adult you don't need to to have a feeling when you cross the road that you may be transgressing on an absolute moral law. You take care because you know about the dangers of cars.
Then, on the social side of things, consider 'please and thankyou'. It is presented as a moral obligation to children. Part of being a 'good boy and girl'. Because children don't have decades of experience and a theoretical grasp of the intricacies of deference to status and supplication. As people mature they learn when it is best to supplicate and when supplication would actually be detrimental. Heck, in the worst case following that moral literally get you killed.
I make no suggestion that abandoning ones ethics entirely is either a good thing or practical. I can only assume that is the 'bizarrely false' thing that you are talking about. Because the fact that morality is more useful for children than for adults seems blatantly obvious. Perplexed (although not myself) went as far as to say it is the sole reason for morality's existence!
Mine is still too young for us to let her cross the road unshepherded, but I'm certainly not presenting that sort of thing to her "using the mechanism for morality"; at least, I'm trying not to and so far as I can tell I'm succeeding. (I think my wife is doing likewise, but I don't know for sure; we haven't discussed the matter in depth.) When there's something she mustn't do for reasons of safety, we tell her "don't do X, it's dangerous and here's why". Seems to be working well so far.
Now, maybe however I present things my daughter interprets them using "the mechanism for morality" (e.g., if that's automatically triggered by any sense of parental disapproval); it's hard to tell. And maybe I, or my daughter, or both, are unusual. But a blanket statement that "That is all presented using the mechanism for morality" seems to me to need some actual justification which isn't in evidence; it looks clearly false to me.
There is no other example you can think of where morality is useful for keeping young people from being hurt by environmental or social dangers that they are later able to handle in a more sophisticated, practical way, without the morals of children protecting them?
This may be an inferential distance that is too large to cross. Morality is something that many find hard to reduce.
Okay, so you're not using morality in the sense of a deep understanding of motivations and consequences which guide a person not to do things which may eventually harm them, but in the sense of rules for people to follow when they haven't thought it through, or can't think it through. I think that sufficiently explains our difference on this.
Er, really?
Use an asterix on either side of the word or phrase to make italics.
This is one of the few cases where canon is very clear about how magic works: Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration.
So it looks as though food can be created without additional killing, and if Harry is willing to eat duplicates of preserved food (I can't see any reason why not), then the proportion of killing to the amount of food can be driven very low.
Particularly given that magical healing would allows the collection of initial 'food prototypes' with no long term damage! (Although it would probably rule out things like hearts.)
Harry chokes on his water twice in ch 49. Suppose that Quirrell, having been tricked into drinking Comed-Tea, finds out what spell makes it work, and puts it on Harry's water. Then he can think the following: here are some guesses I have about Harry. I will think about them in order; if Harry raises his glass, I will state my guess.
A pretty interesting way of reading minds, right?
Harry tested that. He concluded that the tea works the other way. That is, it detects when something weird is going to happen and gives you an impulse to drink.
How much intelligence does it take to know when something weird is going to happen?
Where is the intelligence located?
I think I'd feel worse about drinking something like that (except that it doesn't mind?) than eating deep-fried talking rattlesnake.
Errr, good point.
Of course, for all I know it wants to be drunk. If that is the case then who am I to go about projecting my mind and other optimising?
About as much as it takes to detect a sudden involuntary contraption of the throat muscles, combined with a jolt of various hormones and a few other such symptoms.
So, probably not much more than a polygraph. Plus whatever intelligence may or may not be required to look into the future.
(Forgive me if people already discussed all this and just I didn't see it.)
Well, we know a person can appear to turn into a cat. One could probably take this as evidence for wizards' ability to fit a time-traveling intelligence into a can of soda. But it seems to me that the simplest explanation for both (or the one with the greatest prior probability) involves a Source of Magic teleporting in a newly made cat body that it controls using the memories and personality traits it finds in the human body it just snatched. Then this intelligence 'writes' the changes to the original body or a copy. So the good news is, you probably don't have to worry about the soda and wizards seem halfway to a form of immortality.
Obviously this has disturbing implications as well. The fact that Harry's world still exists seems like a good sign, as does the existence of time-turners if that really rules out a standard simulation. But the fact that "the Universe wants you to say 'Wingardium Leviosa'," suggests an imperfectly-Friendly AI that cares about a dubious form of volition among people with a certain genetic marker.
Sounds like J K Rowling and her memetic descendents.
Harry tested whether you could make something weird happen by drinking the tea, not whether you could make someone drink the tea when you did something weird, subject to you not yourself knowing what would be weird enough before you saw them drinking.
I have refined my idea based on some re-reading. I forgot that you aren't guaranteed to choke on every sip. Someone let me know if the following is too farfetched.
As you said, when something shocking is going to happen, someone with access to the tea feels an impulse to drink it. Now recall this line from chapter 7, not given much thought to by Harry:
So translating to the backwards-causation hypothesis, if nothing shocking is going to happen before you finish drinking the can, the tea stops you drinking it.
OK, let's put this together with the idea that time-reversed causation preserves self-consistency. I deduce that if you sit someone down in front of a glass of Comed-Tea for lunch they will start drinking from it only if they will be shocked enough to choke on it at some point. So what you do is resolve to take the 'water' away if your lunch-mate drinks from it and does not splutter. The Comed-Tea enchantment, by self-consistency, will ensure that this never actually happens, so you can now be certain that if your buddy raises his glass and starts to sip, he will choke.
Now you do what I suggested and run through your guesses. If your buddy raises his glass, you know that what you're about to say will be shocking. If he doesn't, you don't bother saying it. We know that Comed-Tea creates a strong impulse to drink it when one is about to be shocked, so your buddy, not knowing what he's drinking, is a sure bet to drink it if he is in fact about to be shocked. The only part of my idea that is now in question is this: if your resolve to do something shocking is conditional only on him drinking the tea, and his drinking the tea is conditional only on your being about to do something shocking, will he drink the tea in response to your commitment, given that your possible action is in fact shocking?
A causes B; B causes A. Do A and B both occur, or do neither? That's exactly the same question that occurs to Harry when he gets the Time-Turner. And that in turn makes me think that I'm missing something, because it can't be the case that all temporally self-consistent A-B pairs happen. Any ideas?
That does seem like it may just work. It is also a case where TDT comes in handy. Causal reasoning would suggest that once you have already got your answer there isn't any reason to actually make the scene (which could potentially give away your strategy.)
There are some limitations on working out whether the 'weird' is 'good guesswork' specifically but it certainly gives you some strong evidence.
Unfortunately, there's nothing that says the tea will force your lunch-mate to drink on the first thing you think about that would cause him to choke. You could run through a dozen true and shocking guesses in your head without him feeling any urge to drink. Once you get bored and give up thinking of new hypotheses, if your lunch-mate hasn't drunk from the can, the vendor's guarantee is still intact because none of the the tea has been drunk. Why does this remind me of the halting problem?
On the other hand, if you wait until after your lunch-mate has taken his first sip (taking the risk that something unexpected and shocking will happen when he does so), and you have resolved to take away the drink immediately after his second sip, you might be in a better position.
You also need to hope that the shocking event that causes your companion to choke is not an epiphany on his part where he suddenly deduces one of your secrets.
I don't think that the vendor will apply the guarantee in that case. Next you'll forget about messing with causality and just try to get your money back by opening the can and pouring the contents away. Surely the guarantee only applies if one finishes drinking it!
I have a question about chapter 49 and was wondering if anyone else had a similar reaction. Assuming Quirrell is not lying/wrong, and Voldemort did kill Slytherin's Monster, then my first thought was how unlikely that Slytherin's Monster should have even survived long enough to make it to 1943. No prior Heir of Slytherin had had the same idea? Perhaps no prior Heir of Slytherin had been strong enough to defeat Slytherin's Monster? No prior Heir had been ruthless enough?
Maybe this constitutes weak evidence for the theory that Quirrell is lying.
It also could be that the Basillisk has some sort of genetic memory (or DNA-based cognition ala the Super Happies!) such that the monster in the book is not the original monster but rather a great-great grandwhelp of the original monster. This would allow any heirs to kill their specific monster while the line (and thus memories) are preserved.
(This is of course all predicated on Slytherin realizing that his descendents may be nasty enough to keep knowledge from others by any means possible).
I wonder, did Slytherin actually expect his descendants to be nasty? In MoR quite possibly not.
Eliezer mentioned an RSS feed in the author notes. Can you actually get one? I was under the impression that you could not.
http://demented.no-ip.org/~feep/rss_proxy.cgi?5782108
You can also get email alerts of new chapters, directly from fanfiction.net
It seems to be a plot hole in MoR (ETA: not in canon - so the zombiehood is important) that no-one who appears on screen seems to have known Quirrel before his appointment as teacher. In particular, no-one ever gets to ask, "why is Quirrel acting like a zombie, he didn't do that when I met him ten years ago". Neither does anyone say, "I know you've been wondering why Quirrel acts like a zombie; he's been like that ever since I met him ten years ago, and here's why."
No-one is holding the idiot ball. Therefore Dumbledore didn't take a complete stranger on as Defense Professor; Quirrel must have had references.
Since the zombie-hood is due to possession/mind control (in canon), we can assume that it implies possession in MoR as well (even if possession isn't true here). Also, Dumbledore remains suspicious of Quirrel. Therefore Dumbledore must have investigated Quirrel's zombie-hood, or gotten a satisfying explanation from Quirrel himself.
Further note: Dumbledore can cast warding spells such as "no-one who wishes to harm the people living here may enter this house" (this was used on Harry's house in canon and was powerful enough to protect Harry from Voldemort and the Death Eaters in the summer vacations). The warding spells on Castle Hogwarts are described as diverse and very powerful, and if they didn't have this function already, Dumbledore would have added it (in canon he presumably was holding the idiot ball and didn't do this). Therefore we know Quirrel isn't planning to harm Harry directly, or at least wasn't planning to do so at the time he entered the castle.
I'm pretty sure Quirrell is not a zombie in canon.
In canon, Quirrell had been a Hogwarts professor for several years before Harry enrolled, and other professors actually had noticed that he hadn't been himself ever since he came back from a trip. Specifically, he had suddenly become unusually meek and afraid of everything. They attributed it to something like post-traumatic stress syndrome; I don't remember the details, but they seemed to believe that he had encountered some kind of danger and had barely escaped with his life. (In Book 7, it's mentioned that Dumbledore had indeed been suspicious of Quirrell and had given Snape the task of watching him.)
Was he a professor of something other thanDADA? Cos' I think in Canon, Dumbledore had mentioned that they never managed to have a defence professor for more than a year after Voldy's curse.
I wonder what all tests must they have done on that curse. Did they try to alternate professors between two subjects? Did they try semester assignment? After all it has been atleast 12 years or so for that curse, right?
Even in MOR, a string of bad events or bad professors has happened, so I assume not much has changed there.
Yes. Rowling said in an interview that he taught Muggle Studies.
You're right! Fixed.
It may be more challenging to write a ward that covers many people rather than a single person or small number of people.
You can't cast that ward on Hogwarts, or a lot of students wouldn't be able to enter. Not to mention a few professors. Frankly, I don't understand how the Dursleys managed to enter their own home.
Has Quirrell been kissed by a Dementor? With Voldemort responsible, presumably.
That would explain his zombie mode - when he slouches, drools, doesn't speak, and can only stagger around.
And in chp 45 the Dementor could have been speaking to (zombified) Quirrell rather than to Voldemort when it said to Quirrelmort "that it knew me, and that it would hunt me down someday, wherever I tried to hide."
Voldemort can take over Quirrell and act through him, turning him into articulate Quirrell. But when he's not actively in control Quirrell enters zombie mode. Voldemort might be going someplace else while he leaves Quirrell on autopilot, or maybe he just needs to rest because controlling Quirrell uses up his energy.
More evidence for this: when he sees Quirrell slumped over in Chapter 16, he thinks "Now what does that remind me of...?" What could Harry possibly have seen that might look similar to zombie mode Quirrell? Well, just a chapter earlier, he saw a picture of a criminal killed by exposure to Dementors (the criminal who transfigured gold to wine as payment for a debt).
I can't think of any alternate hypothesis for what Harry might have seen to remind him of zombie Quirrell. There just aren't very many things he's been exposed to in the first 15 chapters.
Good catch. That does seem like another hint, although the alternative that comes to mind is that he just reminds Harry of zombies. (Minor correction: it's chp 16, not 14).
Chapter number fixed.
I've had some thoughts about why, within the HPMOR world, it makes sense for Voldemort to choose to occupy a dementor-kissed body. I don't know the details about how the magic works or the solution to the HPMOR!mind-body problem, but it seems like it would be easier to take over a vacated body than to try to share the space with the original soul. It seems like a cleaner process, with no ambiguity about who's in control within the body. Second, based on Voldemort's personality (assuming that's what we're seeing from Quirrell) I think he'd prefer to be alone rather than having a roommate as he does in canon. Third, removing the original Quirrell also removes the need to rely on him to keep the secret and not give himselves away out of stupidity, lack of self-control, poor acting skills, or outright betrayal. Finally, other people might be able to tell when a body contains two souls - if the Sorting Hat can do it, why not the Hogwarts security system?
In part 3 of this thread people talked about the likely locations of 5 Horcruxes and the riddle that "Quirrell" mentions. Somebody mentioned the pun, the fact that canon!Voldemort's mother named him Tom Marvolo Riddle. I don't think anyone pointed out that he made himself the answer. 'What exists in every Greek or magical element?' Sounds like Tom Marvolo Riddle.
Canon!Voldemort infected historical artifacts with parts of himself because he valued, and wanted to see himself as the fruition of, the history of wizardry in general and Hogwarts in particular. (I think Rowling gave him a Gryffindor artifact in the form of Harry Potter in order to show that Voldemort's evil existed in some form throughout that history and no House escaped completely.) MoR!Voldemort probably also values magical history, but sees it as part of a vastly larger whole. So he distributed his backups throughout the elements of reality as pictured in magical history. In so doing he happened to corrupt the Pioneer 11 plaque, but any message there seems like a function of his desire to rule humanity at least as much as his alleged admiration for the Pioneer program. If EY decided to continue Rowling's metaphor, he probably locates the source of MoR!Voldemort's evil in reality itself, or values drawn from archaic thinking, or both.
New Chapter: 50.
Eliezer's author notes say: If you want to know everything HJPEV knows and more, read the Sequences.
That would have been fair enough while there were only a few chapters of MoR up. Now, however, Eliezer is promising that reading the Sequences will teach readers how to perform Transfiguration, how to protect themselves against telepaths, how to conjure up a (v2.0) Patronus, and so forth. That seems a little optimistic.
Yeah, I can only imagine how disappointed they'll be when they learn stuff about how to build benevolent superintelligences instead.
You've worked out how to do that now? Cool!
I can't find the article where you list hardware specs. Is it on the wiki?
Well I read Lesswrong, and I'm already protected against all know telepaths, and can destroy every dementor in existence.
This is true, but I don't think the Sequences need to teach what has already been covered to a sufficient degree of detail in the text. I can, for instance, vouch that Occlumency is taught well enough by the fic alone; since I read chapter 27, no-one has been able to read my mind! And I think I got the theory for conjuring a Patronous v2.0 down, too; as soon as I get a magic wand, I can put that to the test and see if it works.
Something that came up in a conversation offsite between me and Adelene Dawner:
Both in canon and MoR, where are all the grandparents and great-grandparents?
Supposedly, wizards have much longer lifespans than Muggles. I'm a Muggle, about to turn 22, and I've still got a grandparent left. Meanwhile, baby Harry managed to be orphaned without any of his grandparents stepping forward to take him in, or even trying to have a relationship with him. Perhaps Lily and Petunia's folks, Muggles both, were dead by this time - they never show up in canon - but what happened to pureblood James's mom and dad? Or their parents, or their siblings - when these people could all easily have lived to be a hundred years old, there should be some many-generation families running around.
The only visible ancestors we have before the canon epilogue are Augusta Longbottom, and, by the end of the series, Andromeda Tonks. Old characters like Dumbledore and McGonagall exist, but seem unmarried, childless, grandchildless. The Weasleys had at least one great-aunt and one great-uncle, but neither Molly nor Arthur has parents coming around for dinner, and they try to be an awfully close-knit family.
Not only that, but if I remember correctly, Augusta Longbottom was portrayed as being considered old. Wizards seem to follow the same schedule as muggles for settling down and having kids, so she should have been about 70 when Nevil started at Hogwarts - not even middle-aged compared to a 200-year expected lifespan.
I'm not sure this is too unusual relative to our own society: these days life expectancy in Western countries is around 80-100, but people still tend to be considered to be getting old at fifty, relatively old by sixty and definitely old by seventy. In our case though we have the excuse that it's a recent change.
This implies pretty awful things about wizarding society, if we can safely assume that people with children retire around sixty and then spend the next century or so being ornamental, and that it's been like that for centuries.
The usual handwave by people discussing Rowling's canon is that any missing family members were probably casualties of the civil war against Voldemort, I think.
There's no obvious comparative shortage of people from any particular age group. Unless the Death Eaters and the Order of the Phoenix selectively went around a little over a decade ago and picked off enemies with grandchildren/married offspring who were likely to go on to have kids, but not non-grandparents with kids - which, really, why? - this is an unsatisfactory explanation. And it'd have to be both sides. We're not just missing Molly's Prewett ancestors, we're missing Abraxas Malfoy too.
There was a war with Grindelwald that took the place of World War 2 in the wizarding world. Presumably, many of the older generations perished in that conflict as well. And we have few tales of the potentially-bloody history prior to that.
It's very slightly hinted in canon that these were actually the same war. In MoR (and, I would guess offhand, quite a few other fanfics), this is pretty well confirmed.
Re. the "sentient snakes": I had a similar reaction, "What, snakes in this world are intelligent, and that has no consequences?" But centering the reaction on moral issues... well, this is a gripe/rant/sore spot with me. Particularly when the word "sentient" is involved.
"Sentient" means the ability to feel. I don't know if snakes are sentient. But I absolutely guarantee you that cows and pigs are sentient.
In moral debates, the word "sentient" is one of a class of words I call "words that don't mean what they mean": words that we systematically abuse, by having 2 definitions; and we use the word in practice with definition 1, and pretend it has definition 2 when we want to justify our actions.
It is so very very common for people to talk about "sentient life", and use it to mean "life forms with a grammatical language". If you just came out and said, "I think that the feelings of beings that can't express themselves with a recursive grammatic structure need never be considered", people would realize how unjustified and self-serving this view is. So people use the word "sentient", yet in a way implying it applies only to beings with grammar, so they can say what they want to say, but in a way that sounds like they are saying something less self-serving.
I think you're looking for the difference between Sentient and Sapient. The problem is that they are often conflated to make an awful mess of things.
Sapient means "wise". Most people are not sapient.
Curious why people voted this down. It is correct. Please comment. Note that people don't have a good feeling for what "sapient" means; it is preferred over "wise" only when people wish to be obscure. And using your species name as your criterion for having moral standing is rigging the game.
In any case, I am not looking for the difference between sentient and sapient. The Harry Potter chapter I'm responding to said -
"SNAKES ARE SENTIENT?"
This is a problem throughout science fiction, of which EY (or MoR!Harry) is probably an innocent victim. I don't know how it started, although offhand I doubt that it began in an attempt (conscious or otherwise) to justify cruelty to non-human animals.
It certainly can be confusing, however.
I think "Star Trek" may be responsible for this common word "misuse".
50.
Harry would be doing himself a favour to broaden his circle of friends. Hermione is an unreliable companion and even in the best of times it is terribly impractical to so limit your options. Even from a raw, practical, 'Slytherin' perspective why on earth would Harry be dreaming of claiming complete social dominance of the peer group when he hasn't even got a stable social network within it yet?
Had he approached Padma in a friendly manner, putting himself on equal footing (instead of trying to teach and impress!), and then told her pretty much the same things he ghost-whispered, it would still have likely redeemed her, except he also would have gained a precious friend and possibly ally (and Hermione's respect). Interestingly, he would also have been following both Quirrell and Flitwick's advice in doing so.
But in any case: "Self-centredness", combined with its cousin Arrogance, is the main flaw that keeps Harry from being a Mary Sue, that keeps him making enough mistakes to allow the story to be unpredictable rather than Harry Steamrolls Everyone (steamroller stories are occasionally fun, but seldom for long). The time, if any, for him to solve that flaw should normally be the final part of the story arc.
Personally, I disagree. When I imagine Harry approaching Padma with such a strategy, I see Padma reacting to his attempt to understand her with revulsion and self-justifying lies to minimize cognitive dissonance, thereby pushing her even further from being able to admit to herself the truth of what he says.
The ghost gambit works because, like an anonymous comment, she can't employ a cached thought like 'everything Harry says is evil and intended to manipulate me and false' and reject it out of hand, and she is rendered weak and uncertain in a way independent of Harry. Nor can she overrule her cognitive dissonance by focusing anger on Harry for manipulating her - because she has very strong evidence that it isn't Harry manipulating her.*
But perhaps I am too cynical.
* Yes, we know that Harry did it and that he obviously did it because of his invisibility cloak. But she doesn't know about the cloak, and given the enormous unlikelihood of Harry having such a cloak and a Time-turner, I don't think she is wrong to conclude it wasn't Harry.
Ahh, I hadn't read this when I replied to the message in my inbox. But I absolutely agree.
The may be ok advice and perhaps worth a shot. It may even work - in a fantasy story. But real people tend to have better (or, rather, stronger) social and psychological boundaries - it is actually hard to exact fundamental personal change from people just by approaching them in a friendly manner. And giving unsolicited brutally personal advice to people actually isn't a reliable way to gain friends.
Not Quirrel's. Not like that. Quirrel's advice pertained to an entirely different sort of influence than what you and Flitwick suggest. With Quirrel's Slytherin-typical strategy you influence by controlling the political, reputational payoffs. Direct heart-to-hearts are completely opposed to the spirit of it.
I also suggest that "self-centredness" is not the relevant flaw of Harry's here. This is actually a situation where more self-centredness would have prevented the err (such as it was). Harry has blurry boundaries on just what he is optimising for. Is he optimising for his self, is he optimising for blades of sentient grass or is he optimising for what Hermione might call "her own business"? People don't tend to like it when you act to control things that they don't perceive to be 'yours' - even if, as in this case, it is a benefit to all concerned. A self-centred Harry would have made entirely different mistakes to boundariless-Harry.
It is also -- outside fiction -- not a reliable way to get people to follow that advice.
Neither is offering friendly advice. Or, for that matter, advice of any sort, however delivered.
FYI: Version 1 of Ch. 50 had Harry approaching Padma directly... and having to be considerably more threatening in order to have a smaller impact on her, which is what got him in trouble with Hermione in the original version.
Version 2 won out over Version 1 because it was weirder, and therefore more awesome; and also because it got him into less trouble with Hermione - I didn't like having her be quite so clearly in the right in Version 1, i.e., so right that even Harry would notice. It had to end on a note of ambiguity from Harry's perspective.
The thing a reader suggested that I'm embarrassed not to have thought of as an option was that Harry should have gotten a teacher Padma respected to do it. But then Harry would not have thought of this over an even longer time period than I didn't. And it probably still wouldn't have worked as well as the ghost, on a purely individual level for Padma, simply because Mysterious Visitations are supposed to be Life-Changing Events and having a teacher talk to you isn't.
EDIT: Spoilers even if you have read all chapters (particularly spoilery to those who have not read the original books). Following post is in rot13. Collapse thread from this comment if you want to avoid said spoilers, as some repliers commented in rot26 before it was established this information qualified as spoilage.
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I have not read the original Harry Potter series. I first learned that Quirrell was Voldemort when, after finishing the 49 chapters of MoR out at that point, I followed a link from LW to the collected author's notes and read those.
I think that for those who have not read the source material (though there may not be many of us), it is basically impossible to intuit that Quirrell is Voldemort from the body of the fanfic so far.
That said, I don't feel like I missed out in any way and don't see why it necessarily needs to be any more explicit until the inevitable big reveal.
Edit: I just remembered that, as you can see, my prior comment on this post was written after I read chapter 49 but before I learned that Quirrell == Voldemort.
Eliezer planted lots of clues about many facts that are never explicitly revealed, in such a way that noticing correct hypotheses is sufficient to confirm them upon observing enough of those little clues. Now, for some facts, it could be difficult to even locate them, but Quirrell=Voldemort seems to be a good hypothesis to entertain, even if it's not apparently confirmed from any single passage, and it does get lots of evidence if you know to look for it.
How much of that is hindsight bias? Clues that show a specific hypothesis if you've located the hypothesis aren't necessarily that helpful. For me at least, even knowing the that Q=V, and seeing the clues, they don't intrinsically point to that. Most of them can be explained simply by the idea that Quirrell is subtle, evil, and likes corrupting people.
The biggest clue is the material about the Horcrux and if one hasn't read the books that likely goes completely out the window. (In fact, if I were Eliezer, I'd have Harry find out about Horcruxes pretty soon to help the less knowledgable readers.)
The Law of Conservation of Detail (TV Tropes warning) implies that an important character who is subtle and evil (or even just subtle) has a substantial probability of being the villain.
I hadn't read the original series either, and so at first I had no idea that Q=V except from the Author's Notes; however, I suspect that by this point in the story I would have begun entertaining it seriously as a hypothesis. (And of course as long as the story is still being written, there's always some chance Eliezer could change his mind.)
I wouldn't mind one little bit if the story is structured like Lensmen, with several layers of villains that have to be discovered.
Admittedly, this is less likely in the wizarding world-- the population is much lower than in a universe with multiple inhabited galaxies.
On the gripping hand, it would be really cool if Quirrel/Voldemort were a claw on a finger of a conspiracy of evil alien wizards. Presumably, Cthulhu is part of the middle layer.
However, while that gives evidence that Quirrel is the villain, it doesn't necessarily follow that the villain (the one that is Quirrel) must be Voldemort.
Why does Quirrelmort even have to be a villain? Sure, he was terribly evil in canon, and in the back story, but he's obviously been through some sort of magical transformative process, and that he may have made him redeemable. Killing Rita Skeeter is a pretty substantial mark against him, but we have very little idea what his real goals are.
But there are a lot of subtle characters in HPMOR; Quirrell might be the most subtle and the most apparently evil, but he's not the only one. That would imply that Harry, Dumbledore, and Lucius also have substantial probabilities of being the villain.
Edit: Then again... maybe that's correct.
On the other hand, I think we've been told to expect most characters to be substantially smarter than their canon equivalents, and maybe this kind of subtle schemingness just comes automatically when you have a bunch of smart wizards who don't trust each other and have potentially conflicting goals that they all take seriously as things-to-protect.
Wait, were Horcruxes mentioned explicitly in the text anywhere so far? The one Horcrux we know about is only explicitly stated to be such in the author's notes; at any rate, I didn't figure out it was a Horcrux without reading them.
I concluded Q=V early on based on: 1. Quirrell seems to flip between two wildly different personalities 2. In canon, his body is housing Voldemort ...which I found to be enough to conclude that he is being intermittently possessed by Voldemort. (OK actually I'm simplifying a little but I don't think the other details are relevant.)
The only result for CTRL-F "horcrux" is in a private conversation between Dumbledore and McGonagall, and it doesn't say what it is except that it belongs to Voldemort. Dumbledore does later tell Harry that Voldy achieved immortality through some scary rituals, but says nothing about the method other than that it involves a murder, so a canon-ignorant reader wouldn't be able to make a confident connection. "Horcrux" could very well be Voldermort's super-weapon, or a fancy term for "hideout".
As for clues to Q=V that don't rely on canon knowledge, the two biggest ones that come to mind are the sense of "doom" that Harry repeatedly perceives when coming physically near Quirrell (when something magical happens to Harry that is unusual or impossible even in the wizarding world, it's safe to assume that it's a consequence of his unique battle with Voldemort), and especially the tale he tells about Voldemort and the monastery, which despite his cover story of a deliberate "survivor" should make anyone raise an eyebrow.
On the other side, however, there is the fact that, in a marginally subtler way, Quirrell is NOT Voldemort. Everything we are told about Voldemort in MoR (at least part of which comes from reliable accounts) matches canon Voldemort and suggest an equally cartoonesque villain composed mostly of questionable motives, self-defeating pettiness and pointless cruelty, with zero PR skills and awful fashion sense, not to mention a certain fondness for the Idiot Ball. But if Quirrell is Voldemort, that requires Voldemort being not just far smarter and more patient, but possessing ambitions more sophisticated than being a Dark Lord on his Dark Throne in the land of Britain where the Shadows lie.
Which just so happened to have been the entire core of his character! For all functional and narrative purposes, whatever change Voldemort underwent when he turned into Quirrellmort was so drastic that we might as well say that he is no longer Voldemort.
Eliezer has previously written that a supervillain (meant to be defeated) might do more for world unity than just about anything else. (If the words "I did it thirty-five minutes ago" mean anything to you, you get the idea.)
It's plausible that MoR Voldemort was a facade put up by Quirrell as part of a strategy to bring the wizarding world together and face the very real threat of Muggleborne nuclear war– and both his speech to Hogwarts and his private discussion with Harry make this more plausible.
However, it looks like the Boy-Who-Lived ruined his original plan somehow, and he's trying Plan B now by mentoring Harry.
Note, too, that if V knew he could 'die' and then possess someone, and if he also believed his followers could only lose to a dictator who united magical Britain against them, then he likely figured it didn't matter if they won or not.
Except we also have Dumbledore describing V as clever like Harry, or words to that effect. The two monastery stories seem consistent with this: first of all, canon!Voldemort would never have sought out a Muggle teacher at all. Second, the two stories together suggest that MoR!Voldemort got what he wanted and then returned without his disguise to get revenge, like he said Harry would do if Harry became like him. Also, what orthonormal said.
Edited to add: and come on, we know MoR!V killed Narcissa Malfoy. Draco told us himself to look at the result and ask who benefits. The plan surely broke an evil overlord rule or three, at least in spirit, but if V couldn't get Lucius on his side he probably needed to kill the default leader of the pureblood faction anyway. And V, as a skilled Legilimens, could probably count on Lucius responding irrationally to his wife's death one way or another.
I consider the thing that you point to a spoiler for future chapters for those readers lucky enough to not have had it spoiled the first time around, and it would be nice if you did not state it explicitly in your comment.
I apologize if you or anyone else reading does in fact feel spoiled by my previous comment. Unfortunately I don't think it's really possible to revise the spoilers out of the comment and maintain the meaning; the matter is referred to within the following comments anyway, and since there are following comments it would be disingenuous to remove the comment altogether.
However, I would point out that, considering the matter has been referenced explicitly by the author a long time ago, it would seem that at this point that there is an aspect of the story that isn't being appreciated by readers without this knowledge. Compare the resolution of chapter 26 for readers not familar with certain aspects of GOF, or certain interesting aspects of who Hermione and Harry's generals in the armies are.
Hmmmm. Does this count as "inside knowledge of future chapters" or not? It's stated that any published chapters of MoR as well as HP in general are fair game for no spoilers in these comments, and the public nature of the author's notes makes the moniker of inside knowledge dubious.
The guidelines in the spoiler warning about what should be rot13'd are just what I came up with when I posted the first discussion thread. My thought was that comments like yours shouldn't have to be rot13'd, since these threads are supposed to be full of spoilery discussions from people who know the canon or have spotted hints in MoR and are sharing their insights and informed speculation. People who want to figure out MoR on their own probably don't want to read this discussion, so I put the spoiler warning for them at the top so we wouldn't have to worry about rot13'ing every other comment.
But it's Eliezer's story, so he has final say over what should be rot13'd. Your comment didn't look any worse than all of the other comments that have referenced the D-I vqragvgl, and I still don't think it makes sense to rot13 all of the comments that contain those kinds of spoilers, so maybe Eliezer could clarify what guidelines he thinks we should use for rot13 in these threads.
I came to realize in time that what I thought was a bug was a feature, however frustrating that may be for me, so please rot13 that comment with the warning "spoilers even if you've read all chapters".
Edit has been made. My apologies for having missed the note where you retracted the statement on which I based my previous comment.
Also... (rot13 for potential spoilers) abgr sbe puncgre 18 pynvzrq gung Fancr "jnf qngvat Yvyl Rinaf", nppbeqvat gb gur Rireabgr nepuvir. Zl zrzbevrf bs pnaba nf jryy nf uggc://ra.jvxvcrqvn.bet/jvxv/Frirehf_Fancr pynvz gurl jrer whfg sevraqf, gubhtu Fancr jnf va ybir jvgu ure. Jnf guvf na reebe gung jnf ergenpgrq yngre, na reebe gung jnf arire ergenpgrq, be qryvorengr?
It was acknowledged as an error in a later Author's Note.
And WOW did I ever get called on it. It leaves a small but ugly hole, too, because now it looks like something that ought to stem from the single point of departure, but was actually meant to be unchanged from canon. I should probably just take the "boyfriend" line out of Ch. 17, or rewrite it or something.
I had assumed the boyfriend was James, since I didn't remember in which year they got together (and if I had, I would just have assumed a MoR timeline shift rather than another boyfriend).
Also, checking that passage, Dumbledore says that the first scrawl was his and the second Lily's. Is that correct or, as it looks like, an accidental switch? i.e. did Dumbledore claim that he wrote a suggestion to use a toxic ingredient and that Lily, after finding a stranger's note in her book, proceeded to write a response under it?
New chapter.
In the lack of Comed-Tea, I suggest taking a sip of something before the final line.
Regarding the fact that, at the start of the scene, Quirrell skips one of the thirty security Charms, the most straightforward explanation is that it was just the one preventing time-travel within the room, but could there have been a more devious purpose?
Conservation of Detail. Obviously it means something; with some imagination on your part you could deduce what.
I can't see how it's possible to deduce such things, in the sense of obtaining an answer associated with high degree of confidence. It seems to be hindsight bias on your part to assume it's deducible, and similarly for some of the other hidden "facts" (or, alternatively, you meant to say something else, and didn't mean to imply high degree of confidence being obtainable, but I can't imagine what).
(Imagination allows noticing promising hypotheses, where a person lacking said imagination would need to learn that hypothesis from someone else. But it doesn't allow making confident conclusions despite lack of information, where uncertainty is appropriate. So there could be hypotheses which are better than any other possible hypothesis, but none of them would be "the deduced answer". If you argue that imagination is the problem, you need to be able to argue for your conclusion in a way that fends off other possible conclusions, and not just consistently determine your conclusion as an author by adding more facts to the story.)
Saw someone else do it already.
Actually this is a fallacy I've seen coming up a lot in discussions of the fic. People are so enchanted with being able to come up with many possibilities that they forget to ask which are the probable possibilities. Sure, the laws change somewhat when you're matching wits with an author instead of reality; but when it comes to people talking about lots of other possible explanations for the Mendelian pattern in wizard genetics, for example, they seem to be doing a Culture of Objections thing where they declare victory as soon as they come up with an overlooked possibility that can be used to reject the paper, never mind the prior probability on it.
I've seen this answer gotten, so I know it's gettable.
Do what? Confidently name the "official" hypothesis, guess teacher's password? There certainly are good hypotheses, possibly one hypothesis significantly better than any other, which makes the probability of privileging the one you had in mind non-trivial and thus explains your observations. It doesn't follow that it's correct to assign high level of certainty to that hypothesis (as a within-world event, not prediction about what you had in mind, as the latter would be biased towards the best guess and away from the long tail).
(My best guess in this particular case is "enable time turners (in some sense)", but I won't be confident it's indeed so, it could be something else. ETA: On reflection, "revealing if someone is already in the room" is a better guess, although one could sidestep the defenses by entering from the future as well as from the past, and so not be present at the time of the casting.)
What if: a) Quirrell and Harry's actions in ch 51 only make sense in light of their planning to do something in particular, and b) doing that thing requires a charm not to be in place? I think that counts as a correct deduction.
(Somewhat) plausible hypothesis, not something to be confidently believed (which is the working interpretation of "deduction" I'm using, as stated at the beginning of the comment).
I would guess that he omitted the one preventing anyone from apparating into the room. They have to get back in somehow in a few hours.
They don't. They just need to already be there, which opens another possibility for the omitted Charm: to avoid detecting/incapacitating themselves.
I think that's almost it. My bet is that the invisibility cloak detector is the missing charm. Harry and Quirrell are already in the room when they arrive for the first time, and as soon as they see themselves leave via Time-Turner, they take the cloak off and finish their meal before leaving. But yeah, they have to be in the room at the same time that a bunch of charms are on it, so they can't seal it off completely.
Some thoughts about Comed-Tea.
(I apologize in advance if these have already been discussed; there are a LOT of MoR comments and I haven't read all of them. If someone points me at the thread I'll slink off quietly and apologetically and read it.)
1) It seems there have to be two pieces to the behavioral control surrounding Comed-Tea (supposing Harry's basic theory is correct).
The first piece is, as Harry infers, inducing the drinking of Comed-Tea just before a surprising event is about to occur.
The second is suppressing the drinking of Comed-Tea otherwise. Were it not so, the "guarantee" wouldn't work... there would be no reliable expectation of something surprising happening when you drink it.
That second part needn't be magical, incidentally; there are many things that suppress people's desire to drink them via non-magical routes... castor oil is a canonical example. But if Comed-Tea had blatantly aversive properties Harry presumably would have noticed that. So whatever the aversive factor is, it's subtle (which still doesn't make it magical).
Actually, now that I think about it, the first piece of that is so unreliable (that is, most surprising events aren't preceded by drinking C-T) that it's probably better to model it the other way: the unusual aspect of C-T is that it suppresses the desire to drink it UNLESS something surprising is about to happen.
This seems like a realization worth highlighting in the text, as it gets at a very basic and important fact about false positives and false negatives that people lose sight of all the time.
2) Harry seems to be holding the Idiot Ball when it comes to Comed-Tea's implications.
That is, he convinces himself that Comed-Tea doesn't have the ability to Alter the Very Fabric Of Reality... all it does is combine some minor clairvoyance with the ability to magically influence his decision to drink it... and drops the subject.
Um... really? Isn't that second thing basically a limited version of the Imperius Curse? Isn't that at least noteworthy?
At the very least, it suggests that Comed-Tea is an empirical test of defenses against magical mind-control: if Comed-Tea still works on Harry while using X, then X is not a defense against magical mind-control. Harry in the MoRverse is apparently an Occlumens; testing whether using Occlumency suppresses the effect of Comed-Tea seems worth doing. (This is admittedly difficult because Comed-Tea doesn't work reliably, but it's the best thing he's got at the moment. It seems out of character not to try. Also, if I'm right about point 1, then maybe Comed-Tea does work reliably... maybe it's chemically very addictive, but magically suppresses the cravings except at the right time. In that case using Occlumency against it, if it worked at all, would suddenly cause one to crave it. Which would be startling.)
More broadly, the implication that magic to systematically influence Harry's behavior without his knowledge or consent -- in other words, to introduce bias -- is cheap and widespread seems fundamentally important. What other forms of mind-control are operating in the wizarding world? Does Occlumency work against all of them? Does anything work against all of them? Who markets this stuff, anyway, and how was it developed, and why isn't it classified as an Unforgivable Soft Drink? Is there a variant formula that influences people not to bully one another, or to think rationally, or to hail Harry as their lord and master?
That none of this even occurs to Harry (let alone the rest of the wizarding world) in a world nominally without the Idiot Ball seems like a plot hole. That said, one could retcon it by suggesting that ubiquitous magical mind-control artifacts also suppress thinking about magical mind control. (You might even expect this: mind-controlling artifacts that don't do this don't become ubiquitous.)
Narratively, all of this seems like a worthwhile topic to explore in the context of MoR. The parallels to advertising and critical thinking skills, for example, seem inescapable.
3) I see a number of comments talking as though the Comed-Tea itself were influencing minds to drink it at the right moment, and as I recall Harry thinks this way as well.
That something is influencing the drinker's mind seems a sound theory, but that the Comed-Tea itself is doing so seems less clear. Harry should at least consider alternate theories.
In particular, if Harry is still positing an eavesdropping Atlantean Font of All Magic that responds to "Wingardium Levioso", it seems just as plausible that the AFoAM mediates the drinking of Comed-Tea.
Admittedly, the AFoAM is pretty close to being a Fully Generalized Explanation... which is to say, Harry is coming awfully close to theism there. But I suppose that's another post.
Or, looking at it the other way... if it's plausible that Comed-Tea is capable of influencing Harry to drink it at the right moment (or, rather, just before the right moment), then I'm not sure why it isn't plausible that the phrase "Wingardium Levioso" is capable of influencing objects to levitate.
Words don't normally have that ability, and I can't imagine how they could, but the same is true of soft drinks.
1) Agree
2) "Limited version of the Imperius Curse" looks like an exaggeration to me - it isn't just a matter of scope, the Comed-Tea impulse can be resisted with little effort.
The level of its power of mental manipulation seems about on par with that of the bakery in the city I grew up in, which had set up shop in front of a particularly frequented bus stop and which would keep its doors half-open, even in winter, drowning the waiting (and often hungry) students and workers in the delicious smell of fresh bread and pastries.
That is to say, it's conceivable that the Comed-Tea doesn't use "real" mind-altering magic at all, but simply broadcasts a signal which, to the brain, appears analogous to the gurgling of a fountain on a hot summer day.
3) Well, yes, if all magic relies on the AFoAM while spells and magical items are just triggers this has a lot of implications, but I don't see how this concerns the Comed-Tea more than any other thing.
I would like to take this opportunity to say that I've long suspected you had Discordian sympathies (even before HJPEV started being really overt about it with Chaos Legion and such), and that I often already do portray you as a shadowy conspiratorial figure (and, occasionally, as a dark wizard) when I tell people about your work. Honestly, SIAI is the closest thing I know of to an actual honest-to-Gog real-life New World Order conspiracy, or at least the only one I know of whose master plan to utopia is both (1) plausible, and (2) not shockingly uncreative or unambitious or reactionary about what a better world could look like.