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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5
- This thread has run its course. You will find newer threads in the discussion section.
Another discussion thread - the fourth - has reached the (arbitrary?) 500 comments threshold, so it's time for a new thread for Eliezer Yudkowsky's widely-praised Harry Potter fanfic.
Most of the paratext and fan-made resources are listed on Mr. LessWrong's author page. There is also AdeleneDawner's collection of most of the previously-published Author's Notes.
Older threads: one, two, three, four. By tag.
Newer threads are in the Discussion section, starting from Part 6.
Spoiler policy as suggested by Unnamed and approved by Eliezer, me, and at least three other upmodders:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.
It would also be quite sensible and welcome to continue the practice of declaring at the top of your post which chapters you are about to discuss, especially for newly-published ones, so that people who haven't yet seen them can stop reading in time.
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Comments (648)
They're finally out of there. Let us never speak of these chapters again!
Quirrelmort should have cast Flawless Function on his plan to rescue Bella.
(And on his body, so he doesn't get ill, age or die).
(Chapter 58)
Harry, once again, plays (or is played like) the fool. He places his life in obvious danger by going with Quirrell, and trusts Quirrell. Again. Agh! Here's what a suspicious Harry would think: Harry is the only one who knows that Quirrell is responsible for break in. Harry plans on staying behind. Quirrell can't stop Harry from staying behind with magic, and can't convince Bella to stop either. One choice left for safety -- manipulate Harry into making the vastly more dangerous choice and leaving.
I feel like the Harry of these past 8 chapters is a lot more human than the Harry of the previous 50 chapters. Much too trusting, much too simple-minded.
On the other hand, Quirrell's stated plan explains Bella's rescue. Bella is a symbol of Voldie, Voldie is needed as an antagonist to create the 'mark of good.' Downside? I don't see Harry agreeing to use Bella as a tool.
EDIT: Which isn't to say I'm particularly dissatisfied with the novel. No, I'm just agonized. I'm sure Eliezer has some grand plan and I, the common reader, am just blinded by my biases.
61: So they plan to ward Askaban against "opposite reaction". What would that even mean? Are they all going to fall down through the floor for lack of an opposite reaction pushing them up?
Heh, I just thought they'd find themselves unable to walk but that's just horrific. Then I realised that they wouldn't fall as gravity is just the opposite reaction of their pull on the earth, so it's okay. Then I realised that the electromagnetic forces of the chemical bonds within their bodies all rely on opposite reaction, and it went back to horrific. Still, despite the tragic deaths that would result hopefully it would be made up for by all the prisoners who presumably would get somewhat better treatment after Azkaban mysteriously disappeared.
They'll just check with somebody who knows what they're talking about (such as Dumbledore, or whoever he recommends) when they get around to the real work.
I loved the Weasleyisms in this chapter.
They'll probably just put in a ward preventing large objects from moving faster than a broomstick. That's what they're actually worried about, and it's probably easier.
That's what they plan to do, based on what little information they have, but that doesn't mean such a thing is actually doable.
Hogwarts interferes with electrical devices, but brains still work.
There certainly seems to be a common thread in many magic worlds that "physics doesn't work, but all the stuff physics causes that most people intuitively EXPECT to happen, still happen"
And it doesn't simply degrade into bullshit because you think that you can explain why things work as expected for some physical reasons. You may have a certain level of reductionistic insight, you may expect things to stop behaving as usual, but magic is lawful, and so it continues working according to naïve physics, according to expectations of somebody who does not even pretend to understand world in physical terms.
Technology is (bastardized ancient) Greek for trickery. Electricity works, gravity works, macroscopic thermodynamic works. Counterintuitive trickery without Atlantis-issued license doesn't.
Ch. 61: more disappointment. End of chapter tries to create suspense by setting up a hard problem for Harry to solve in the next one. Again. I don't believe you, Eliezer, not after you made Harry blink away twelve Dementors. I still feel that the turning point of the fic was Ch. 55; after the events of 54 Harry should have woken up in a holding cell.
Am I the only one confused by chapter 58? How were Quirrell and Bellatrix surviving the Dementors while Harry had the invisibility cloak? And did the escape let out the Dementors and spray transfigured engine exhaust all over the countryside?
I'm confused by the entire Azkaban arc. All the fanciful language designed to evoke imagery and emotion is preventing me from figuring out what's actually happening. I promise to upvote anyone who provides a concise, transparent summary of the actual events (and motivations for said events) of this arc. In chronological instead of narrative order.
I wonder if Harry is planning on getting the Aurors and Dementors to fight each other?
(58)
Upon reflection, I still think Quirrell held the Idiot Ball in Chapter 54, by misjudging Harry's probable reaction to an AK attempt.
Chapter 61: Proofreading (I think)
Albus looked at her, his face as expressionless as Severus's, now; and she remembered, with a shock, that Albus's *own* - "It is the best reason I can possibly imagine for removing Bellatrix from Azkaban,"
Albus's own what, exactly?
I'm guessing it's that Albus's own father was committed to and died in Azkaban.
Hmm. That makes sense, and I can understand why you might leave the sentence truncated like that... but honestly it doesn't come across to me as clever writing, it just looks like a mistake. If there's a way to write it so that it's clearly a truncated thought instead of a writing error, that'd be better.
Possibly wording it 'Albus' own fa- "It is the best..."
Cutting it off in mid-word makes it a little more clear what is happening, and "fa" has the benefit of looking a bit like "face" so that it still takes some effort to process what the actual thought is.
It should be done with no space and an em-dash:
If em dashes aren't possible on ff.net, then use two hyphens in a row.
Honestly I don't think this is a case where making the audience work for it is really useful. The actual answer is revealed in the next chapter, so it's not like you're keeping it a secret for any length of time, but most people probably won't connect Albus' "my own father was in Azkaban statement" with Minerva's truncated though. The people wanting to solve the mystery don't have much payoff, the people who assume it's writer-error will just be confused.
Honestly I think "Albus' own father --" would works better. There are places for clever, mysterious writing but this isn't it.
I'm enjoying the story; but am bothered by this passage:
Bella's life isn't just less valuable than Harry's. Her life has a large negative value. Harry should be trying to prevent her escape. This righteous, humble talk about why Harry can't save himself instead of her is exactly the sort of thing that makes me so exasperated with comic-book superheroes; and just the sort of thing I was hoping the Methods of Rationality would expose, or at least avoid.
It does work out better than if Harry had tried to save himself - but, it's a story. This story is remarkable partly because it uses a rational protagonist; but it could also be remarkable for making more concessions to reality than most stories. This is a case where it failed to make a concession.
If she kills again, then yes, she shouldn't be saved. But this is a claim about consequences unrelated to the value of her life itself. If she can be saved and prevented from killing others, she should be.
By TDT, the fact that she did a lot of evil things in the past is reason enough to assign her life less value.
For game-theoretic reasons? (If so, even though this isn't about consequences, it still seems very worth separating from the terminal value of her life.)
It's still about consequences, just not causal consequences. It might be that saving the murderer has an acausal consequence of leading to more murders in the past. This should of course be taken into account, and is harder to guarantee.
"It might be that saving the murderer has an acausal consequence of leading to more murders in the past."
... This sentence makes no sense to me at all as a statement in conventional English.
What are the meanings of the words in this sentence, what are the beliefs that I would need to hold for this sentence to make sense, and how would they pay their rent?
(I am not asking for a list of sequences to be directed to. I am asking for the translation from deep LessWrong jargon into conventional English.)
I'll try my hand at the translation, although the rent-paying thing is above my pay grade.
Something like: "If you save a murderer, that means you are the sort of person disposed to save a murderer. That means that in the past, murderers, insofar as they had accurate beliefs about your dispositions, will have been less disincentivized to murder."
My short take: your decision algorithm that outputs saving or not saving the murderer is instantiated multiple times. Anyone who tries to predict your output also runs a more or less precise simulation of your algorithm. Suppose a perfect predictor murderer in the past. In this case, no matter what your decision is, the prediction was the same.
So, you can reason this way: "although I don't know my final decision yet, I know that it correlates with the prediction perfectly. Therefore I also have to consider the consequences and resulting utilities of the prediction when making the decision. Shouldn't I just act then as if was controlling the output of both my current algorithm and that of the predictor, weighing the utilities together? I should output a decision now such that maximizes utility over present and past, because the past prediction mirrors the current me perfectly."
And if there are imperfect predictors involved (or algorithms with imperfectly correlated outputs), you reason as if you had imperfect control over their outputs. As far as I managed to understand it, this is TDT. Note that there is some interesting self-referentiality: the TDT algorithm computes the expected utility of its own "possible" outputs, and then makes output with maximum utility.
Above my pay grade too, but as I am an amateur, I won't let that deter me.
First, you would need to believe that free will is an oversimplification. More specifically, that what may appear to be a free-will moral decision made today (about saving a murderer, say) is actually a decision the making of which is spread over your entire past life (for example, the point in your life where you formed moral opinions about murder, revenge, and so on). And not just spread over your life, but actually spread over the entire history of our species, in the course of which the genes and cultural traditions that contribute to your own moral intuitions were formed.
Second, you would have to believe that your moral decision today is so correlated to those aspects of the past, and those aspects are so correlated in a causal and deterrent way to the past behavior of potential murderers, that your decision nominally made today about punishing a murderer is correlated "kinda-sorta-causally" with the number of past murders.
And third, you would have to realize that if you actually refer to this as a "causal" relationship, you probably will no longer be invited to the best dinner parties, and therefore you would choose to call this relationship "acausal". It is basically a way of signaling your own mental hygiene - scare quotes would also suffice, but the word acausal has become entrenched.
Rent paying. Hmmm. I'm going to get cute here and say that this holding these beliefs is not not really about paying your rent. It is about paying your taxes. Your duty to society and all that.
Um?
OK, I would say that your first belief implies that what appears to be a decision in this case is in fact not a decision, but rather a working out of the inevitable consequences of an earlier state. The only reason it seems like a decision is because I'm ignorant of the real possibilities.
The situation, on this account, is analogous to my "deciding" not to fly away when dropped off the top of a building. I can imagine being in a delusional state where it does not seem inevitable to me that I will fall to the ground, and I can further imagine being in a state where I believe I have decided to fall, but In both cases I would simply be wrong.
Similarly, on this account, my belief that I choose whether to save a murderer or not is simply wrong. There's no actual decision to be made; that there seems to be a decision is simply a delusion shared by approximately everyone.
It's like having an electrical switch connected to both a buzzer and a lightbulb, with a 3-second delay between the switch being flipped and the lightbulb going on. Clearly any intuition that the buzzer caused the light to turn on is just post hoc ergo prompter hoc run amok, but to start talking about the lightbulb having an acausal consequence of the buzzer going off seems downright unjustified.
It is not clear to me why that situation changes if the buzzer is a murder and the lightbulb is me saving the murderer, or if the buzzer is Omega putting money into boxes and the lightbulb is me opening the box. Sure, the underlying mechanisms are way more complex, but I don't see how any of that complexity affects any of what we're talking about, if we start from the assumption that free will is an illusion.
(shrug) Maybe the whole point here is to resurrect some notion of free will worth considering, or something... I dunno. I am still working my way fairly linearly through the old OB posts, and have not actually read any of the more recent TDT stuff, so probably I shouldn't be trying to engage in these conversations just yet.
But, well, sometimes I do things I shouldn't.
Nominally, decision theory is all about giving good advice to people who make decisions.
Now I am willing to entertain the idea that the free will of the decision maker is an illusion.
But my 'willing suspension of disbelief' goes all to hell when I ask myself: "Why does an illusion need good advice?"
Decision theory absolutely requires an assumption that the will is free in some sense. However, it does seem reasonable to consider the possibility that free decision making can be spread out in time.
Traditional game theory assumes that an agent freely chooses a set of preferences over states-of-the-world well in advance. Then, at decision time, he chooses an action so as to maximize the probability of reaching a desirable state of the world. Classical game theory and decision theory offer advice on that second free decision, but they don't advise on those earlier free decisions which created the preference schedule. Perhaps they should.
Or, perhaps we need an additional theory, over and above game theory and decision theory, which will advise agents on how to set their preferences so as to take into account some of the side effects of those preferences. What do we call this new kind of normative theory? 'Moral theory', perhaps?
In a situation where other people can predict your future decisions, you can reason as if your decisions have backward causality, because they were predicted before you carried them out. It's a generalization of the concept of making credible threats and promises.
If you buy the acausal "reality is not turing-computable" view of the HPMOR universe, then none of our usual reasoning methods work all that well. I'm surprised Harry hasn't been making a bigger deal of this fact.
If she kills again, it's too late. I don't understand how you can divorce the value of her life from the consequences of her life.
Hence the conditional in the last sentence. And it's never "too late", the same reasoning applies no matter how many people she murders.
It is too late to save the person that she murders.
Given that she's already murdered many people, why would her murdering one more change your decision?
Why?
Is this an absolute moral position, without regard for how she is prevented from killing others? I thought you frowned on those. If she can be saved and prevented from killing others by locking her in a cell for the rest of her life, she should be? If that's not the plan, what is?
On a related note,
It seems the author is flat-out telling us that Harry is deliberately acting irrational, and commends him for it. Curious.
Perhaps the story will have a "Harry's fall from rationality" arc?
The more I think about 55-56, the more potential holes I find.
McGonagall (or people from the Ministry) successfully detected the use of a Time-Turner before, in Ch. 18. So they will detect it now and all clues will point to Harry. It can be patched over by saying Mary's Room (or Quirrell's wards) makes the event undetectable.
I don't understand the rules regarding Patronuses. Can't McGonagall ask her Patronus where it found Harry, if Dumbledore can ask his Patronus similar questions? Or, alternatively, can Dumbledore send his Patronus to Harry, like McGonagall did, and then ask something like "is he here in Azkaban?"
To everyone saying Harry will create a third copy of himself to save the day: he can't easily do it without Quirrell's assistance, because the Time-Turner is locked. One possibility would be for him to find the original Quirrell and ask for help.
Chapter 61:
Two minor (and easily fixable) plot holes:
1) Harry never got around to tell McGonagall that the Hat called her an impudent youngster etc., and it's an interesting enough exchange that one doesn't expect it to have happened off-screen. More importantly, he freely told the story to random Ravenclaw pesterers just minutes after his Sorting, so it wasn't at all a safe security question since it's the kind of funny anecdote two-thirds of Hogwarts would know by now.
2) Lesath addressed Harry as his (Dark/Light) Lord, and didn't stick around to hear Harry "compare" himself to God while talking to Neville; nor does it seem likely that he would have learnt it indirectly at a later point.
2 isn't a plot hole. Severus saw Harry make the comparison. That's what matters to the analysis.
Snape was pointing out that Lesath unknowingly prayed to Harry.
I just had an awesome misreading of Ch. 60. Quirrell says to Harry, "People don't care in the slightest, and if you had not led a vastly sheltered childhood you would have noticed that long ago. Console yourself with this!" and hands him a game console. Wham, Dumbledore's hero neutralized.
Ch. 57-58: I'm finally forced to abandon my original misplaced expectations about the fic. I thought it was trying to be realistic in the Watt-Evans sense, but now I see that awesomeness is more important to Eliezer than plausibility. (Scaring away twelve Dementors who approach close while the Patronus is down? Building a rocket from memory?) Okay, this kind of fiction makes for an enjoyable read too.
Now that I think of it, the plan has been doomed since Ch. 56, and possibly earlier. Harry's idea of dealing with McGonagall involves using the Time-Turner again. This means a version of Harry must leave Mary's Place before Harry and Quirrell begin their elaborate precautions, and maybe before they even order their food (Ch. 51). Whoops.
I was thinking whether, considering the nature of the wizarding world, Azkaban is really that unreasonable a punishment for Death Eaters. Keep in mind that in order to deter crime (to acausally prevent it) a potential criminal calculating the expected utility of committing a crime must get a negative value.
This value depends on:
EB, the criminal's expected benefit from getting away with it.
SP, the severity of the punishment should he get caught.
p, the probability of getting caught.
Specifically we want (1-p)×EB < p×SP or equivalently (1/p-1)×EB < SP.
In this case the expected benefit of successfully taking over the government and establishing a dictatorship is quite high. Also the Death Eaters were only stopped by a complete stroke of luck, so p is quite small. This suggests we need a very sever punishment to deter would be dark lords and their minions.
The punishment needs to be so sever that even though the would be dark lord and his minions have a good chance of succeeding, they're still deterred because of how severe the punishment would be on the off chance that they fail.
Given this, condemning them to spend the rest of their lives being tortured by dementors sounds about right.
Doesn't that assume people are rational?
No, that only assumes that society in general exhibits certain patterns attributable to rational agents behind the scenes. Groups, memes, corporations, tournament players, lottery organizers, markets, butterbeer optimizers can all be rational. The smarter villain is, the more aligned with rationality (all things considered) his behavior is. Stupid baddies have higher probability of failure even with deterrents not working on them as intended.
Just because somebody has a significant degree of irrationality doesn't mean they will necessarily fail- skill is a far more important factor (and people can be rational in some areas but not others). How would you deter irrational crooks?
That depends on which biases they're exhibiting.
For example if they're exhibiting availability bias, make punishments public and memorable. Maybe put the mutilated corpses of criminals on display in public places.
For overconfidence bias if they're underestimating their probability of getting caught, you may have to make the punishment more severe to compensate.
That won't work. If the prospective criminal in question is being flat-out irrational, thinking that the probability of being caught is arbitrarily low or zero, no logistically-feasible increase in severity will compensate for that.
Instead, you should attack the subject's confidence directly. Brag about your analysis of some form of evidence that can't be effectively suppressed, tell fictional but realistic-seeming stories about crime scene investigators with mythic levels of competence and dedication. To make it clear that you're not bluffing, capture some people who thought they'd never be caught and extract confessions from them. Ideally, these would be people who've actually committed serious, well-concealed crimes, but depending on your other governmental priorities almost anyone could serve as such an example.
Yes, that strategy gets ugly if you carry it far enough. There's a reason 'police states' aren't fashionable anymore.
So have lots of cop shows on TV? That seems to be the best strategy given how much people generalize from fictional evidence.
That is a chilling thought. The preponderance of cop shows on TV is real-world social engineering to predispose individuals not to commit crimes?
Not in most cases, but in some.
There's a simpler explanation: people like watching cop shows with mythically competent investigators because it helps them maintain the pleasant belief that most crime will be detected and punished. This not only makes them feel safer, but also helps them rationalize away any feelings of cowardice or subordination associated with choosing to follow society's rules.
To the extent that network execs push cop shows with happy endings for ideological reasons, it's much more likely that they simply applaud when they see "criminals get caught" than that they follow any hypothesis as complicated as "the best way to deter crime is to lower criminals' confidence that they will escape detection by propagating fictional evidence that people will erroneously generalize from."
Agreed.
Even if there's an attempt at social engineering, the audiences would have their own motivations for watching.
Anyone have information about whether such shows are popular with people who are subject to obviously corrupt and/or arbitrarily violent policing?
Infallible police shows might also be popular because people identify with the police-- it would be fun to be right all the time and able to enforce it.
Right; stupidity (or at least, weakness to bias) is a much better explanation than malice.
Increasing the severity of punishments generally does not result in a reduction in the rate of crimes, whereas increasing the certainty of punishment produces a reliable if weak reduction. Trying to overcome criminals' overconfidence bias by means of draconian punishments appears to simply not work.
Re-Edit: Thanks, I thought that I did that the first time around, but it just caused the text to vanish. I must have mistyped.
I have always had the impression that, in real life, people treat very small probabilities of being caught as zero, however severe the punishment. Maybe I'm wrong, but if I'm right torturing criminals isn't a good strategy.
That depends on how available the punishment is.
Azkaban was not created, in-canon, in order to specifically deter potential Dark Lords. Its history is never stated, but it seems likely that it is a fairly old arrangement between the wizards and the dementors. It was created, instead, as a prison for ordinary criminals (viz. the woman Harry hears pleading while in Azkaban, who is forced to keep reliving the moment of her presumably accidental murder). The Dark Lord and his followers were indeed put in Azkaban when the opportunity arose, but this was for their crimes in the way of murder and such, not for their intention to take over magical Britain. Dark Lords are not very common (the only marginally-modern ones mentioned are Voldemort and Grindelwald, and Grindelwald is not even put in Azkaban, nor ever really messes with Britain except with the Muggle side, aka World War II). With this in mind, I think it becomes very obvious that Azkaban is vastly, awe-inspiringly overkill in the SP.
Many Death Eaters were put in Azkaban, but Voldemort never was. Indeed, there's no evidence in canon that Azkaban has ever been used to hold a Dark Lord.
Also, and this has come up before although I forget whether it was in this specific thread, increasing the severity of punishments statistically tends not to result in a reduction in the rate of crimes, whereas increasing the certainty of punishment does. Creating a justice system on the assumption that criminals are good rationalists would be profoundly misguided.
I suppose this depends on what we consider evidence. I would personally assign high credence to that based on 2 considerations:
1) that there have been quite a few Dark Lords, such that they are considered a generic natural category and are spoken of collectively; the Harry Potter wikia includes a list of 9 wizards/witches who don't appear in canon events, but I'm not sure on what basis they are listed. 2) the only other Dark Lord whose disposition we know of was put into an institution much like Azkaban, but not Azkaban for at least 2 plausible reasons (Grindelwald having built that prison himself, leading to it being poetic justice that he be confined there rather than Azkaban; and having rampaged mostly over Europe, and not Britain.)
Given that Grindelwald was not given the death penalty, it seems reasonable to think that captured Dark Lords are not executed out of hand, but imprisoned; and where to imprison the many Dark Lords but Azkaban?
What basis do we have to suppose that there have been many dark lords? There have certainly been multiple dark lords, but canon provides us with a grand total of two examples, and the gap between Grindelwald and Voldemort was implied to be atypically short. We don't know how far back the history of Azkaban goes, and how many Dark Lords have been contemporaneous with it. We only know that the one canonical example of a dark lord who was imprisoned, was not imprisoned there.
That's my own personal reading of the language scattered over the seven books; obviously, it's not easy to prove this to someone else who didn't already pick up on it - I would have to re-read all 7 and take notes where language that could have pointed to Dark Lords being rare as hen's teeth instead pointed to them being fairly commons (1 or 2 a century, which is 10-20 over the lifespan of Hogwarts).
Given the powerful magics implied to have been used on it, and the general Golden Age conception in the Potterverse where older=more powerful, again my inference is that Azkaban is hundreds of years old - per above, we could expect >5 Dark Lords contemporaneous.
The only powerful magic in the defense of Azkaban seems to be the fact that time turners can't be used on its premises, which might be deep old magic, but I'm inclined to suspect otherwise. Aside from that, its defenses seem to mainly boil down to
1) taking away wands 2) anti apparation jinx 3) dementors 4) human guards.
Our impressions may differ based on the fact that I still tend to draw most of my background information from the original canon, which didn't actually contain the Golden Age element used in MoR. New magic was described as being invented over time, but very little was ever described as being lost, and Voldemort was described as the most dangerous dark wizard of all time, not just the last century, with Grindelwald, his immediate predecessor, a close second. While the two are both referred to as Dark Lords, when they are compared to each other, it's within the class of dark wizards, and I infer from this that Dark Lord is a prohibitively small class within to draw comparisons.
That's Yudkowsky-only, I think. I expect Azkaban to be as well defended as Gringotts in Deathly Hallows - all sorts of intruder spells, monsters (if they can survive), and whatnot.
I think canon has the Golden Age! The founding of Hogwarts, the heirlooms of the founders, controlling the basilisk, the Deathly Hallows themselves, the Dark spells Voldemort uses, the list goes on. If it's powerful, it's probably old. The entire 20th century sees only a few new magical feats: the Philosopher's Stone (maybe); Inferi; and... some new uses of dragon blood, I suppose.
The part about time turners being unusable on Azkaban premises doesn't show up anywhere in the original canon, no. There's nothing in the original books I can think of that suggests that any especially strong magic went into the creation of Azkaban. Its main strengths are that it's guarded, and that the people who aren't supposed to get out have their wands taken away.
While plenty of powerful things in canon are old, most of the old knowledge is still available. The Interdict of Merlin is also HPMoR original. Voldemort knew old dark magic because he looked it up, the basilisk was controlled by communicating with it via Parselmouth, and the heirlooms of the founders are presumably powerfully magical, having been made by some of the greatest wizards of the day, but the greater part of their value comes from the fact that they are heirlooms; if you made another sword with all the properties of the Sword of Gryffindor, it wouldn't be the Sword of Gryffindor. The only founder's heirloom that actually does anything really remarkable is the Sorting Hat, and while it's probably a work of magic far beyond ordinary wizards, it doesn't appear to be treated as an awe inspiring relic of the golden age of wizardry. If Dumbledore hasn't created anything like it, it's quite probably because he doesn't have any incentive to. He already has the Sorting Hat, after all.
Rather than the founders of Hogwarts setting an unreachable standard, Dumbledore is described as the greatest headmaster Hogwarts has ever seen (albeit by a probably biased source,) and Voldemort and Grindelwald are referred to as the most dangerous dark wizards of all time.
The Deathly Hallows have powers which surpass ordinary magical objects in the original canon, but their powers are not that outstanding compared to other, non legendary magical objects, and while they were probably not actually made by Death, the people who did make them never divulged the methods of their creation.
All in all, the wizarding world of the original canon certainly didn't demonstrate the sort of meteoritic rise in knowledge that the muggle world does, but the general trend seemed to be that while individual wizards might not be getting more competent, knowledge is being added to the community on net, rather than being lost.
Flamel's stone presumably dates from the 17th Century, since that's when Flamel himself (a real historical figure) dates from.
I believe Harry considers some punishments completely out of bounds, too severe for anyone. Certainly I do. The following may have no connection to the real reasons for this; but even without Many-Worlds you have a non-zero probability of personally suffering any possible punishment. Legally allowing a given punishment for anyone seems to produce a non-zero increase in this probability (even in a world without Polyjuice). Some possible punishments may have such negative utility for you that a course of action which avoids such increases, but which almost certainly leads to your death, would still have positive utility. Azkaban seems like a good candidate for such a punishment.
On the other hand, reducing the deterrent for potential dark lords, increases your probability of winding up living under a dark lord at which point your chances of suffering horrific torture, either in Azkaban or somewhere else, is greatly increased. Assuming you don't consider being wrongly punished in Azkaban under the current administration vastly worse then being punished and/or tortured under a dark lord, you can't simply declare certain punishments out of bounds.
Another way to think of this is that any government that fails to provide sufficient deterrent to prevent successful overthrows will be overthrown. This process will continue until you get someone who is willing to be sufficiently brutal. So it doesn't matter how nice your ideal government would be; if it can't prevent overthrows, you won't get to live under it.
That certainly seems like the relevant Star Goat probability. (I speak of the One True Star Goat, braise His mane, who will devour the souls of all who believe in God and make them stew in His Holy Bile for eternity, not the vile worship-demanding blasphemy proposed by the Restored Church of the Star Goat.) The Anti-Pascal's Wager argument may not work here, though.
The part of your argument that deals with Dark Lords overthrowing each other until we reach sufficient SP assumes that some possible deterrent will stop them -- although canon!Voldemort clearly did not fear Azkaban after enlisting the dementors' aid, and he allegedly altered his own mind, ensuring himself another dreadful fate if he lost. The argument also seems to assume an inexhaustible supply of at least minimally competent Dark Lords. It may further assume that said Lords themselves can make a subjective distinction between 'different' people who've altered their own minds, repudiated their original names/origins and left bits of soul strewn around the countryside, since otherwise Voldemort would have no rational reason to object if some 'other' Dark Lord of this kind tried to possess him. More on that later.
In practice, the ambiguity in the term "Dark Lord" makes it hard to show that reducing deterrent increases the probability of Azkaban or some other torture >= Azkaban. Offhand I don't recall canon!Voldemort personally doing anything worse than kill people, give them brief though intense pain or try to use the Imperius curse on them. I just realized something that makes our disagreement seem silly, but I'll finish for the sake of completeness: while canon!Voldemort used dementors against Muggle-born wizards in a horrific way, I don't believe we know if he favored prolonged happiness-free death such as we find in Azkaban. So wrongful punishment of the sort we find under the current wizard administration could easily seem far worse, for individuals, than canon!Voldemort's version. A lot of Fudge's victims might have living friends and relatives who would have died under canon!Voldemort, but the victims themselves wouldn't remember.
Now, as I say, while I wrote this response it took on a certain deck-chairs-on-the-Titanic feel. Because it turns out the dementors, once they'd accepted canon!Voldemort's offer, started multiplying ("like fungi", according to J.K. Rowling, which seems compatible with the hole-in-the-world theory) in anticipation of having more victims to eat. As I understand it, no single Patronus works very well against dementors that attack from behind, from above and possibly from below you as well as in front of you. Nor can you shoot them in the head. If genuinely immortal predators multiply enough I think "deterrent" and "Dark Lords" cease to matter. So a non-Azkaban version of your argument might hold true with a vengeance if not for the plausible claim (by MoR!Voldemort) that the Ministry keeps increasing the use of dementors precisely to give the impression of grasping deterrence to the nominal decision-makers, and the established fact that Dolores Umbridge sends dementors after canon!Harry while serving the elected government. She didn't seem to care if the evil creatures killed Muggles, whose population far exceeds that of Muggle-born wizards. The set of Muggles who nobody would miss probably exceeds Muggle-born wizards in number. Assuming Azkaban continues to exist indefinitely, what probability would you assign to the claim that nobody would ever try sacrificing them in order to enlist the aid of dementors for personal gain? Even if people who want to stop the ensuing disaster catch the culprit, the culprit can't go to Azkaban, because we've already established that dementors can agree to release people in return for more victims. Going back to Dolores Umbridge for a second, we know she seems eager to join in the possibly apocalyptic Holocaust once canon!Voldemort takes over. This brings me to the last of my original points:
MoR!Voldemort can possess people. It seems likely that he plans to create and possess a dictator. If the government he secretly takes over will do whatever it takes to deter normal usurpers, people may not notice the change. Except that MoR!Voldemort might have a greater chance of shutting down Azkaban and finding some relatively certain way to avoid an existential threat. All hail the savior, MoR!Voldemort.
Although for him to know this would work he might need, say, a dictator with a known propensity for trying on Horcrux-ed rings, or a dictator who contained a Horcrux from the start.
We don't know if he can possess people against their will. In canon, Quirrel allowed Voldemort to make use of his body. Even if he can, He's claimed that he's trying to set Harry up at the ruler of the country, and Harry is one person he almost certainly can't possess.
In canon, Voldemort did possess people against their will, including Harry (despite his mother's protection) in the climactic Ministry scene in Book 5 (although it was a struggle that Harry shortly won).
He inhabited Harry briefly, but it's not clear that it afforded him a useful degree of control over Harry's body, and as Dumbledore noted, inhabiting Harry caused Voldemort excruciating pain. Considering the way their magic has been shown to interact in MoR, I'd think any attempt to possess Harry would turn out even worse in this canon than that one.
Furthermore even if one is a pure consequentialist, there may be a case for acting like a deontologist in some cases. While a perfectly rational entity can properly weight costs and benefits, people can't. Chances are if a person's moral code says "it's a good idea to subject some people to mind rape for decades" that person has made a mistake, and one should account for that.
It's also useful, if you're going to do this kind of equation, to decide ahead of time how many innocents tortured for how many years you're willing to exchange for a reduced chance of political insurrection... and to develop as realistic a sense as you can of how reliable your courts are, so you don't fool yourself into thinking the quantity is lower than it is.
I'm considering doing a more detailed calculation, including such things as false positives and the fact that you don't have perfect information about criminal's utility functions as a top level post.
(nods) This sort of thing is worth thinking about cautiously before supporting, even in theory. A few other points worth considering in a more detailed analysis:
Beliefs vs. actuality
It's not the actual probability of getting caught that matters for deterrence, it's the potential criminal's belief about that probability.
That is, if I only have a 1% chance of being caught but I believe I have a 99% chance of getting caught, I'm easier to deter. Conversely, if I have a 15% chance of getting caught but believe I have a 0.0001% chance of getting caught, I'm difficult to deter (at least, using the kind of deterrence you are talking about).
Similar things are true about EB and SP -- what matters is not the actual expected benefit or cost, but rather my beliefs about that expected benefit/cost.
Magnitude vs. valuation
People's valuations of a probability of a cost or benefit don't scale linearly with the magnitude of either the cost/benefit or the probability.
Which means that even if (1/p-1)×EB < SP is a manageable inequality for crimes with moderate risks and benefits, SP might nevertheless balloon up when p gets small enough and/or EB gets large enough to cross inflection points.
So the threat of a lifetime of psychological torture might not be sufficiently unpleasant to deter certain crimes. Indeed, it might be that for certain crimes you just aren't capable of causing enough suffering to deter them, no matter how hard you try.
Knock-on effects
Official policies about criminal justice don't just influence potential criminals; they influence your entire culture. They affect the thinking of the people who implement those policies, and the people whose loved ones are affected by them (including those who believe their loved ones are innocent), and of their friends and colleagues.
The more extreme your SP, the larger and more widespread the knock-on effects are going to be.
Addendum
For my own part I think Azkaban, and the whole theory of criminal justice that creates places like Azkaban, is deeply flawed and does more harm than good. I could use stronger terms like "evil," I think, with some justice.
Also, I think the endpoint of the kind of reasoning illustrated above is in practice the conclusion that our best bet is to instill in everyone an unquestioned belief in a Hell where people suffer eternal torment, and unquestioning faith in an infallible Judge who sends criminals to Hell. After all, that maximizes perceived SP and perceived p, right?
Unfortunately, the knock-on effects are... problematic.
There are better approaches.
Such as, ...
I suspect you can answer this question yourself: think about all the crimes you don't commit. Heck, think about all the crimes you didn't commit today. Why didn't you commit them?
If your answer is something other than "fear of being caught and punished," consider the possibility that other people might be like you in this respect, and threatening to punish you might not be the most cost-effective way to keep them from committing crimes, also.
But if you want more concrete answers, well, off the top of my head and in no particular order:
Increase P
Compare attributes of people (P1) who commit a crime given a certain perceived (p,EB,SP) triplet to those of people (P2) who don't commit that crime given the same triplet, and investigate whether any of those attribute-differences are causal... that is, whether adding a P2 attribute to P1 or removing an attribute from P1 reduces P1's likelihood of committing the crime. If any are, investigate ways to add/remove the key attributes to/from P1.
Decrease perceived EB -- for example, if a Weber's-law-like relationship applies, then increasing standard of living might have this effect.
Condition mutually exclusive behaviors/attitudes.
Arrange your society so that there are more benefits to be gotten by participating in it than by attacking it, and make that arrangement as obvious to the casual observer as possible.
If your answer is something other than that and other than "being considered or treated as a bad person by others despite absence of legal proceedings", then I would be very interested in hearing about it.
Altruism?
It doesn't happen every day, but I often have the urge to commit petty theft (technically a crime, but probably not worth prosecuting) under circumstances in which my expectation value of punishment (including extralegal punishment such as you suggest) is well below my expectation value of the item that I might steal. Nevertheless, I almost always resist the urge, because I know that my theft will hurt somebody else (which effectively reduces the value of the item to me, since I should also include its value to others).
I evolved to care more about myself than about other people, but reason allows me to (partially) overcome this; it doesn't reinforce it.
And what is your rational reason to care about other people?
It's the same as your rational reason not to: none at all.
But once I do, I can notice my selfishness and work to overcome it.
Well, there are a huge number of crimes I didn't commit today because I feel no particular impulse to commit them.
And there's a smaller number of crimes I didn't commit today because I've internalized social prohibitions against them, such that even if the external threat of being punished or considered/treated a bad person were removed, I would nevertheless feel bad about doing them.
I suspect this is true of most days, and of pretty much everyone I've ever met, so I'm not sure what's so interesting about it.
Well that's given; I meant other than crimes you don't want to commit in the first place.
A heuristic, a learned behavior. As a rationalist I see value in getting rid of misapplied heuristics of that kind. It would puzzle me if this wasn't the default approach (of rationalists, at least). Granted, most of the social conditioning is hard or impossible or dangerous to remove...
Your answer sums up to "fear of repercussions that is active even when I know consciously there's nothing to fear". This is the standard (human) answer, and not very interesting.
Well, you were the one who said "if you have any reason other than X or Y then I'd be very interested to hear it" where X and Y don't cover the "standard answer", so it hardly seems reasonable for you to complain that the standard answer isn't interesting.
(I also think it's highly debatable whether those internalized social prohibitions are best described as "fear of repercussions that is active even when I know consciously there's nothing to fear". You've certainly given no reason to think that they are.)
I agree with your points in general; however, note that unlike increasing SP your suggestions can't simply be implemented by fiat.
Also given these things weren't done, I believe TDT requires us to use the values of p and EB at the time the crime was committed when calculating SP because those are the values would be dark lords are using to determine whether to start an overthrow.
I'm inclined to wonder if Harry's ability to block the killing curse with his patronus might be enough to clue Quirrelmort in to how it works. Possibly any collision of their magics would have produced a similar effect, but if not, it still makes thematic sense that the patronus would be able to block a killing curse, since it represents defiance of death. Given that Harry has already told him that he made the patronus by thinking about the eradication of death, I wonder if Quirrelmort might have enough information to piece together the nature of Harry's revelation.
He should be able to deduce the nature of the dementors from Harry's invisibility cloak being able to hide the wearer from them (which should be readily apparent from Harry's summary of events and the fact that Bella was wearing it). Other things like what you point out or Harry's parselmouth description as life-eaters could help, but the cloak thing by itself should be quite sufficient given Quirrel's previously displayed deductive abilities. I don't think he will be able to cast a true patronus, though.
The fact that the true invisibility cloak effectively hides one from dementors doesn't necessarily mean that dementors personify death, only that whatever mechanism they use to detect people is also blocked by it. The cloak is said to be able to hide one from the gaze of death itself, but that doesn't mean that if the cloak hides you from something's gaze, that thing must be death. The hint Harry used doesn't really carry in the opposite direction.
The life-eaters part does sound like a clue though.
Would a person have to think about universally conquering death to cast a true patronus, or is it enough to imagine personally conquering it? If all it requires is the latter, I can certainly see Quirrelmort managing it.
Not as a logical deduction in the strict sense, but its so obvious that he would consider it, and since Dementors = death also fits well otherwise that answer is much more probable than that dementors are something else, coincidentally also blocked by the cloak (which Harry somehow figured out in another unrelated way), and hiding one from the gaze of death itself refers to yet something else that is so far inexplicable.
Even if personally conquering it were enough it has to be a positive thought and Quirrel doesn't seem to think about life in particularly positive terms, merely preferring it over the alternative.
Considering that the true invisibility cloak is said to have a general ability to keep one hidden, rather than merely invisible, I don't see how the fact that it hides one from dementors counts as evidence for the idea that dementors are personifications of death. It's evidence that it's a really kickass invisibility cloak.
I believe that Quirrel, being the overeducated ruthless genius that he is, has already understood Harry's revelation, but has his own obstacles to casting human patronus, some that are not so easily overcome. For one, he may already be a bit too dead.
Hmm. Also, it's another big coincidence that the Boy Who Lived grows up a transhumanist (at least, his light side does).
Explanations for events in MoR may differ from explanations in canon...
The answer to Harry’s question at the end of Chapter 60, “Why am I not like the other children my own age?”, is, of course, that he is the protagonist of a story, and therefore he must do interesting things to amuse the readers. It would be pretty cool if he actually realized that and started considering in his decisions the likelihood that this story will have a happy ending and the likelihood that he will be killed off as a result of a minor accident as opposed to an epic duel with Voldemort. It would be really hard to write, though, and Harry would naturally be cautious about thinking he’s in a story, to protect against being Wrong Genre Savvy, so we are unlikely to see this.
As per a comment by Pavitra in an earlier thread, I think it might be that he's a copy of Voldemort, without (most of?) Voldie's memories - hence the single soul under the hat, the red remembrall, and various insinuations by Quirrelmort.
In the latest couple chapters, the remembrall's importance has been revealed I think: He was at broomstick flying class, and yet he had forgotten Newtonian mechanics and thus failed to see they didn't apply to broomsticks.
I don't like this interpretation because I don't think there's any problem to solve.
My memories tell me that broomsticks in both the books and movies were determinedly Newtonian, and not Aristotelian. Broomsticks do not stop instantly, people smash into the ground when they can't pull up enough, and so on. Before I accept that Eliezer has not made a mistake or is not deliberately diverging from canon and so there is even a forgetting for the remembrall to be linked to, I want to see some citations where broomsticks act in a clearly Aristotelian manner.
It seems that they might act in a hybrid Aristotelian/Newtonian manner. Certainly in canon they talk about broomsticks having maximum speed not maximum acceleration. And people have trouble pulling from being near to hitting the ground, something which sort of makes sense in an Aristotelian framework because objects want to go to the ground.
Outside canon, the movement of the broomsticks in the movies does seem to be a definite mix but this is likely more due to standard movie physics than anything else.
It makes sense by postulating that a broomstick always goes where it's pointed (no Newtonian momentum), but there is a maximum angular speed for turning the broomstick. The rider applies force to turn the broomstick, which means there's resistance, so it's not difficult to assume that the resistance creates an effective maximum angular speed.
This doesn't sum up to Newton, of course, because this maximum angular speed isn't dependent on current linear speed.
I remembered the top speed from the whole Firebolt/Nimbus sequence of events, but I don't regard that as even weak evidence for Aristotelian mechanics.
Wind resistance/drag means that there's a 'terminal velocity' even in free fall; change of acceleration simply changes a broomstick+wizard's terminal velocity upwards, doesn't remove it at all.
(Another example: my car operates according to Newtonian mechanics in the real world - but still has a top speed, which is why I'm not setting land-speed records on Nevadan salt flats in my spare time.)
But the terminal velocity should then be a function of the cross-section of the person on the broomstick. Instead the brooms themselves have maximal velocities.
I don't think Quidditch players vary all that much in cross-section. As well demand that auto manufacturers list their speeds as a function of how clean the car exterior is, how inflated the tires, what weight is being borne, the altitude, etc.
EDIT: OK, after looking at the descriptions on the Harry Potter Wikia, I've changed my mind. The Seeker article specifically characterizes seekers as small and lightweight and the fastest players on the team. Which, fortunately for my self-esteem, is consistent with my position that canon uses Newtonian mechanics.
Broomsticks have very tiny cross-section, so cross-section due to the person will be the majority of the air resistance. The difference in size between say Harry Potter and some of the big Slytherin Beaters should matter a lot.
Newtonian brooms are supported by canon then even more, aren't they?
Most Beaters are large and burly, and all the Seekers (with their premium on top speed) are the opposite. Exactly as expected with Newtonian brooms (or horses).
But if air resistance didn't matter because brooms move at a fixed velocity/acceleration in an Aristotelian manner, one would expect Seekers to have normally distributed body sizes as Quidditch team captains select for things like piercing eyesight, lightning reflexes, or just simian arms.
(Harry & Draco are both relatively small and thin; Viktor Krum is tall, but also 'thin'.)
Um, I thought it was pretty clear that he forgot he wasn't supposed to use his Time Turner for silly shit like that.
That was also my belief up until this passage:
In-universe, this is little evidence for or against anything. But from a narrative point of view, if the answer to "What did the Remembrall flare up about?" had been "Do not use the Time-Turner for showing off", this was the time to reveal it, rather than show Harry and McGonagall being confused. Certainly it wouldn't be an answer worth waiting over forty chapters for.
I agree that you could read it like that, but I'd have thought that if it was something immediate like that, we'd have seen Harry realize and acknowledge it to himself. There doesn't seem much point in leaving it a bit mysterious if that's all it meant.
That doesn't seem like sufficient payoff, especially since there was no way to anticipate that meaning ahead of time. Also, that's not really something Harry forgot, more something he didn't even notice.
How long until the next chapter is posted anyway?
Personally, I found it very useful when Eliezer posted when we could expect the next update in his author's notes. The RSS feed is cool but doesn't seem to update right away, so I still find myself checking ff.net compulsively so I can read the new chapter the moment is goes up.
If you get an account on ff you can set it up to email you when the story updates.
Or you use my mailinglist on http://felix-benner.com/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/fanfic
Chapter 61:
So Voldemort is a perfectionist seeking the "most powerful" combination of enemy, servant, and ancestor. Nice and good. But it sounds like if he were maybe a little less perfectionist, he could get any servant (I'm sure Lucius could spare Crabbe or Goyle, or he could just buy a house elf), any enemy (it's not like he doesn't have enough enemies, and anyone who wasn't an enemy before he took their blood would certainly be afterward), and so the only even slightly hard-to-come-by ingredient is the bones of the ancestor. So why in the name of Merlin haven't the bones of all Voldemort's ancestors been dug up and placed in a locked box under Dumbledore's desk? How come Mad-Eye Moody is out guarding the graveyard as if leaving Dark Lord Resurrection Ingredient #3 literally lying in the ground is at all safe?
(even so, an MoR-worthy solution would be for Voldemort to grab a sufficiently old hominid from a museum and assume it was common ancestor to everyone, but it would at least slow him down).
That would not be a safe assumption; most of what we dig up are our auncles, not our parents. Still, it's worth a try.
Canon Voldemort killed his own father. Since he was already planning to make the horcruxes anyway (or perhaps that was how he started? I forget.) what I would have done in his place was secure some of his bone at that time so I would have it available I case I ever had need to revive myself.
Of course, I would also have had Bellatrix donate some flesh, which I would keep frozen somewhere inconspicuous, unless the recipe actually requires that it be fresh.
I think Voldemort would have been staggeringly stupid NOT to have kept a remnant of his father's body given how much blood magic requires these types of ingredients.
I had assumed that Dumbledore had destroyed the remains but posted a guard at the grave in case someone showed up.
Another question is: would the most immediate or the most distant ancestor possible count as the best option for Voldemort? If the most distant, then he'll probably be wanting Salazar Slytherin's bones. If their location is known.
A hominid fossil might have no living descendants at all.
I think a fossilized hominid might have worse than average chance of having no living descendants too: To be fossilized they have to undergo a fossilization event, which is probably correlated with disaster: and given that ancient human did not stray far from their genetic siblings (and progeny) this probably indicates a high chance of that disaster affecting their progeny. I certainly wouldn't rely on it.
Nevertheless, given my cultural heuristic for what counts as most important, it would probably be father (in terms of how much various cultures put a value on either the father or the mother), or most recognized powerful ancestor (Salazar Slytherin in this case).
I congratulate you on noticing your own confusion. Yes, I thought of that.
New thread after 500 comments, now in the discussion section.
Come to think of it, the earlier reference to the Confounding of Neville Chaimberlain doesn't make sense. Historically, Chaimberlain's motives are easily explainable- nationalist sentiments (most of the lands were still seen as German), learning to negotiate through trade-union negotiations (where concessions can be compensated for as inflation erodes wages), and post-overrun of Chekoslovakia getting his head out of the sand (he referred to a "general conflagration" if I remember right) and starting buildup necessary for war.
Chapter 61: I don't get what the laws of time are supposed to be. At one point, it seems that it's impossible for information to get back more than 6 hours, by any method. At another (and for the test they plan to do on Harry), it's impossible for a single person (or time-turner?) to go back more than 6 hours over the course of a day(/24 hour period?). Or both (with a strange coincidence between the absolute limit and the personal daily limit).
In any case, Harry can pass the test without breaking any laws of Time if he can find someone else with a time-turner.
I expect he may bypass the test a different way. I could be wrong about the timeline, but it seems to me that McGonagall's patronus is about to show up in the warehouse where Harry and Quirrell are having their little chat...
Could be. But another possibility is the McGonagall's patronus passes the message to the Harry that she expects to reach, but then, after visiting McGonagall and receiving her message, Harry dispatches his own patronus to pass a message to the warehouse. From there the message passes to Mary's room, and from there to Flitwick as an errand run on the on the way to Azkaban.
Need send a message to the past? Don't have enough charge in your time-turner? No problem. Just find someone who has already traveled back (using a fresh time-turner) and ask them to carry the message for you.
But in this case, his patronus will still have to show up at the warehouse. IOW, it doesn't alter the prediction that a patronus will show up at the warehouse to give them the message.
They already went to Azkaban, so they can't undo that to run an errand. The message would have to be sent on their return trip from the warehouse, i.e., before Harry's "rescue" from the washroom. These are the only currently-blind spots in the story where a change can occur now.
What's still not clear to me is whether this is even remotely possible within the story's current timeline. Aside from it being not at all clear what the current clock time is throughout the story, the mere fact that the time turner was used in an overlapped way (first turning back to before lunch, then again back to the same point after the prison break), may mean that their total travel may not span the full six hours.
Dumbledore has one. :) My theory is that the message from McGonagall to Flitwick is going to pass through many hands (or pockets), including Dumbledore, Snape, Quirrell, several versions of Harry, and at least one use of Harry's patronus.
You gotta understand, this is Eliezer doing the plotting here.
Of course, a different trick that could be used, if necessary, would be to bring a fresh time-turner (or several) back from the next day. I'm sure Harry has already experimented with what happens when you carry a time-turner back from just after midnight, and then hand that freshly recharged time-turner to an earlier version of yourself. Can a time-turner be transfered back in time? I'll bet Harry knows. Harry is already familiar with puzzles involving trucks leaving caches of gasoline cans in the desert. The Ministry of Magic is not.
Harry has likely not yet experimented with taking time-turners back in time. He stopped all time travel experiments after he got the warning about not messing with time.
Chapter 61: 'There was another pause, and then Madam Bones's voice said, "I have information which I learned four hours into the future, Albus. Do you still want it?"'
This seems like a useless question. A bit of information was already conveyed representing the fact that Amelia Bones was 4 hours into the future & found some information that would be useful to Dumbledore. Is this not sufficient information transfer in and of itself to prevent Dumbledore traveling backwards?
Sorry if I'm confused, but reasoning about time is hard, and my diagrams are not as helpful as Snape's and Dumbledore's.
I think the info was sent to Bones rather than her finding it and going back, but your point may still stand. Perhaps "somebody sent something back to Amelia Bones" is vague enough to slip past the filter. There must be some nonzero cutoff, because otherwise the info would affect the whole future (from the point of receiving the info) light come of anyone who got time-traveled info, and the whole earth would be interdicted whenever somebody went back.
If I'm wrong about that, it's possible that either Bones or Dumbledore wasn't thinking, or Dumbledore realized that he was already blocked and that's part of why he decided he wanted the info.
"Is this not sufficient information transfer in and of itself to prevent Dumbledore traveling backwards?"
Obviously it is not. I'm sure that Harry would find it ludicrous that such a rule exists permitting the transfer of this one bit of information but not the rest of it... but neither Amelia nor Dumbledore think in terms of "bits".
Btw this "6-hours" window? Though I don't expect it, it'd be hilarious if in-story this had anything to do with the infamous "TimeCube" ramblings. Something like "Gene Ray was once an Unspeakable that went insane trying to figure out the mysteries underpinning the 6-hours rule.".
It seems to be anything that would change the actions of the ones who hear it can't be passed back. I'm thinking it's a simulation that's processing 6 hours at once, with the earliest arbitrarily small unit of time being finalized at the same rate new time starts processing. So Harry just needs to upgrade the universe's hardware and he'll be good to go further back, but he should be able to get around the maximum daily uses per Time-Turner before then.
In other words:
All Cube Truth denied. 4-corner days, 24 hours divided by 4 corners is 6 hours per corner. The math is simple but no wizards will debate me. Time-Turner can only turn one corner at a time. 4 days are in one rotation. If Time-Turner turned more than 6 hours it would be in a previous day! Turners are connected in ONEness with Time and to disconnect equates death of opposites.
This is the best timecube reference I've ever seen. I think its very clear that the wizarding establishment is afraid of confronting your revolutionary claims.
That's not obvious; what's obvious is that Amelia thought that it was not. (I guess that Dumbledore also thought that it was not, since he had to think about whether he wanted the information anyway.) Amelia might actually be wrong here; she's good, but time travel is confusing.
I'm not happy with the rule about time travel not allowing travel more than six hours back of information. If that's the case then time travel should be much less common since anything sharing the same light-cone segment will transmit information back based on minute changes to gravity. This only makes sense if it means information that humans would regard as information because magic works like that. If that's the case, I'm really waiting for Harry to find the explicit rules for that and then find a loophole to engage in major havoc.
I think I can actually deflect this one by appeal to Actual Reality. (Some familiarity with quantum mechanics required.) Note that photons, by virtue of their momentum, have gravitational pull; yet in the quantum double-slit experiment, the gravitational pull of the photons is not enough to "collapse the waveform" as to which path they have taken. This seems to me to be exactly the same sort of "prohibited information" as in the fic. The best explanation I'm aware of for this is that the uncertainty in the quantities involved is high enough that, even though the photons' gravitational pull could in theory transmit information, in practice the resolution of the universe is simply not high enough for that to happen. The same thing could be at work here.
I feel like I just used a sledgehammer to kill a fly.
This is what I figured.
The same thing applies to prohibiting time travel in Azkaban, or allowing one person to tell another person (while giving them access to who knows what subtle face expressions) to talk to a person that the first one can't communicate with.
Which suggests that to time-travel further than 6 hours back, you'd just need to completely Obliviate yourself, wiping your mind so clean that a Remembrall in your hands would blaze like a miniature sun. Best to also take the form of an infant, since you'll be a mental one anyway.
I suddenly really hope Harry doesn't "Where did all you zombies come from" travel back to himself as an infant to destroy You-Know-Who for the second-first-only time as the end of the book, leading to his obliviated-adult-in-the-form-of-a-child brain as the cause of his "childhood" genius.
I'm in an unusual position I find hard to express!
I never considered that possibility until your comment.
The possibility is awesome and if the story had really ended that way I would've been totally satisfied, I think.
Now that you've pointed it out and I've thought about it, I'm greedy and want a different awesome ending, so
Now I agree with you and hope it doesn't end that way.
I think a pretty straightforward answer is that for it to be information, an intelligent being has to perceive it as such. I don't think there's a loophole - if you would successfully send information farther back in time using any means, Time Gets Mad, and things somehow work out so that you don't. And even if you get around that, unspeakably bad things probably happen.
However, I suspect that the six hours is an artificial safeguard built into the spell. You could PROBABLY create a new time travel spell that can go seven or eight hours without breaking things. I doubt the 6 hour limit is actually the snapping point. It's just the limit to what you can do before you start to deal damage to reality. Going farther once might work, but if everyone did it then Very Bad Things happen. If the payoff matrix for "everyone defects" is that the universe stops existing, you should probably cooperate.
Edit: NVM, reread the end of the chapter, and it seems like if there's any way to go more than six hours, period, it's such a well kept secret that no one thinks its possible. Then again, this would not be the first time Eliezer has employed the "powerful weapon being an amazingly well kept secret" thing, and it was somewhat foreshadowed when Harry mused that maybe scientists had come up with things worse than nuclear weapons.
Either that, or that's the size of the simulation's event buffer. ;-)
(That is, it might be a hard limit on the size of time loop the simulation is able to process, if they're actually in a simulation.)
Assume they are in a simulation - why would it have an event buffer created able to compute time travel at all, and why pick 6 human hours (equivalent) as the magic number constant for it?
Presumably simulating a human brain is harder than simulating the same mass/volume/atom count of solid metal, so as the population increases has the time-turner interval shrunk correspondingly? Seems unlikely it would settle on such a round number if it was changing with population. (Or is that why magic is getting weaker - as the simulation computer fills up?)
Why not? I think it'd be kind of cool to simulate a universe with magic and I'd feel altogether clever if I could implement time travel in it. :)
OK, simulating time travel for the hell of it sounds good, I still question the buffer limit idea:
"Simulated time travel now working, but what should we set the Horological Constant value to?"
"Dunno. Three years? A thousand years? Just enough time to undo saying something rude? MAXINT seconds? AVAILABLEMEM? User configurable?"
"Oh whatever, it's time to go home, I'll just put six simulated hours and be done with it. Shall I start locking up?"
That would be a disappointing reason for the 6 hour limit, and an unconvincing way to make the universe work so that the plot works. I hope the 6 hour limit is either not real, or something more interesting.
It may be that the limit is not due to the physics itself but because of the intervention of an early wizard. Unbounded time travel is one of the most powerful abilities imaginable. The first witch to exploit this and take ultimate power would obviously want to prevent others from overthrowing her. It would be in her best interest to find a way to put constraints on the powers of others. Longer than six hour anomalies may well trigger destructive countermeasures.
My first hypothesis would be simple processing complexity. Time travel is complicated. It is the kind of problem that grows ridiculously with time and space. The programmer has been able to invent an algorithm that simplifies it for low dimensionality but even with that algorithm higher order time travel would still take too much time on the given hardware.
Second: the programmer initially programmed the buffer in to allow for short term time processing. Things like the soda that prompts you to drink, spell dodging time hop magic, etc. It didn't even occur to him that the wizards would find a way to exploit the mechanism for long term use.
Another possible reason to have a time-buffer in a world simulator (which, btw, I don't believe the HP:MORverse is) is that the simulation doesn't actually do everything in real time.
Rather, you may have situations where process A and process B are defined as taking the same number of simulated time-slices, but process B takes more actual time to simulate for whatever reason, and so the simulation of process A is halted until process B catches up. (This presumes that it's not possible to reallocate simulated processes across simulating resource threads with arbitrarily fine granularity.)
Which means that at any given real-world moment, some parts of the simulation are at timeslice T, some parts are at timeslice T+1, and so forth. The six-hour limit might simply reflect the typical spread, and simulated time-travel might be a hacking of the system that is bound by that spread, rather than an explicitly simulated capability with an explicitly simulated upper bound.
Something like this is true of the only reality-simulating system we know of, namely our own brains. For example, color phi is a kind of simulated time travel where, in response to a perceived event E1 at time T, your brain constructs an illusory event E2, which you experience as occurring before T. This works because different parts of your brain construct your experience of time T at different rates, and tag those parts as occurring at T; the experience of simultaneity is constructed by your brain.
If the six-hours is to avoid too much time-skew, it's a hack and one would expect better from simulation-builders.
There are plenty of ways to efficiently calculate differing time-space regions, using lazy evaluation or equivalents thereof. For example, the famous Hashlife algorithm for Conway's Game of Life does exactly that - different regions can be billions or trillions of generations apart thanks to memoization. Lazy evaluation proper allows weird techniques like the reverse state monad or circular programming (aka time-traveling).
It occurs that magic is basically the ability to hack the simulation; the wizards who developed time travel didn't know what was actually safe, what was unsafe, what would crash the simulation, and what the simulation could actually even do - so they picked the weakest version of time travel to implement (both branches consistent) and slapped a bunch of arbitrary limits on it so it (hopefully) couldn't break anything major.
A 6 hour simulation buffer would explain a T-6hour limit, but not that you couldn't go back into the same simulation buffer more than once, or that you couldn't operate on the 4 disjoint 6-hour segments of the 24 hour limit.
With an un-shelled Time Turner, could Harry go backwards from 23:59 to 17:59, then cover most of the same 6 hour interval again by jumping back from 00:01 the next day to 18:01?
Depending on how the 6 hours in 24 constraint is imposed, (Scotland's midnight-midnight, noon-noon, whenever the operator's variable 24-30hour days roll over, 9:00pm-9:00pm, a leaky-bucket token at 15sec/min, or whatever), what happens at 9 hours past lunch could be odd.
If it is a simulation, and time travel devices are limited in ways to save on computation and such, some of these restraints make sense: the quibble over what counts as information is resolved as "anything that will force the simulation to recalculate futures", the simulation buffer is locked to one per time-turner because allowing an arbitrary number of retries would cause the computation requirements to explode, and Harry can get around the limit by using someone else's "turn", even if they can't use it, because they have information that the simulation won't allow to travel.
My money is on Dumbledore's timeturner. McGonagall, Snape, and Amelia Bones won't suspect it, all having witnessed Dumbledore receive future information (therefore he can't travel back in time far enough). Harry will capitulate to Dumbledore's offer of the Timeturner once he determines that a) Dumbledore knows Harry was involved in the Azkaban break, and b) being able to travel the full 6 hours will convince the rest of the wizarding world, including his teachers, that Harry was not involved. Dumbledore will do this because it suits his interests (or sense of drama) to have war declared on Voldemort.
I don't think Dumbledore would knowingly declare war on Voldemort prematurely. If he doesn't believe Voldemort is back, he won't try to convince others that he is.
Dumbledore very nearly took over the wizarding world of Britain last time there was a war, according to the Malfoys. This is a good reason for him to have war declared yet again, even (especially!) in the absence of Voldemort.
Then why wait until he actually has reason to think that Voldemort may be on the brink of returning? Why not simply fabricate evidence?
I'm fairly confident that the Malfoys are wrong in their assessment of him. Not only would it be an arbitrary departure from the original canon, having nothing to do with making certain characters more rational, there are also plenty of ways he could have pursued his supposed ends more effectively if those were his real goals.
I don't think it would depart from canon, and it would be very much in line with fanon: the fanfiction involving Dumbledore shows him as someone who thinks he knows better - and has no qualms about misleading or mistreating anyone to get them to do as he wishes. Canon never states this outright, but it does give you all the evidence you need to make a decision: Dumbledore, with full knowledge of the situation, condemned Harry to spend nine years of child abuse under the Dursleys.
If the six hour limit is or resembles a natural limit of any kind, which it may, it seems most likely to correspond to one quarter of a day, where "day" might be sidereal, stellar, or solar (probably not civil). Hours are just... very artificial, and while magic seems perfectly happy to abide by artificial rules, this limit is likely to predate accurate timekeeping (and accurate timekeeping precedes the careful pinning down of how long an hour is!)
The "quarter-day" interpretation would have the following implications:
Depending on which sort of day limits time travel, certain astronomical phenomena would mess with time travel.
Six hours is unlikely to be an exact figure, and the figure in question may vary depending on seasonal and geographical context.
Time travel in outer space will behave very strangely.
Yet Dumbledore says that someone erased Atlantis from time, and I'm guessing Atlantis existed for more than six hours. (Also, it was erased from time in such a way that people still know about it).
We know that earlier wizards were stronger, yet the book says "time turners can't go back more than six hours" multiple times, so it seems an important fact and widely believed by the characters. We know that strong Dumbledore can't do it, nor can efficient Quirrellmort (or he wouldn't suggest to Harry the plot with Bulstrode), and that time travel can be blocked long-term by the Wizards who created Azkaban. I think it will be a matter of partial-transfiguration style understanding for Harry to find some kind of loophole.
I think Atlantis serves as a cautionary tale for what happens when you TRY to go back more than six hours.
That's what you get when you program your universe without checking your array indexes consistently!
Perhaps the six hour limit was placed on time travel a long time ago, by wizards much more powerful than today's, who knew (perhaps first-hand) how nightmarishly screwy time travel could get. This sort of thing has precedent: the Interdict of Merlin prevents the most powerful magical knowledge from being passed on in writing. The reasoning is similar, too: some magic is just that dangerous.
I would not be surprised if the destruction of Atlantis involved Time Travel. Especially if we consider that this fic might be influenced by "Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time."
I'm a little baffled about how Dumbledore and Co. aren't at least CONSIDERING the possibility that Quirrel is involved, especially since Dumbledore was already suspicious of him.
He doesn't have a Time-Turner. The thought that he could turn into a snake Animagus in Harry's pouch is not in their hypothesis space.
They don't need to assume he actually went to Azkaban, just that he was involved somehow.
One of them mentioned "the obvious choice as to who was pulling Harry's strings." I'm not sure whether that's intended to be Quirrel or not.
I took it as a Quirrel reference. Who else (besides Voldemort) does any of Severus, Dumbledore, or McGonagall think has manipulated Harry in the past?
Malfoy.
This thread is going to reach 500 posts soon. Should future threads be posted in the discussion section?
Poll:
Vote this comment up if you think that future MOR threads should be posted in the discussion section instead of here on the main page.
vote main page, reason for this poll, karma balance
The poll is evenly split (tied 13-13 now), which I see as support for moving to the discussion section, considering that the poll is located in the middle of the MOR comments.
I was leaning in that direction anyways. Most of the MOR discussion is about the story, not that closely related to rationality or that interesting to people who aren't reading MOR. And these discussion threads do clutter up the site, especially for people trying to follow the site via the Recent Comments. We've had over 3200 MOR comments over the past 6 months (over 17 comments/day). Plus another 600 Luminosity comments over the past 3 months. Having so much fiction discussion on the main page also doesn't accurately reflect what LW is about.
One disadvantage of switching is that it's a bit inconvenient. For one thing, the tags are separated - a main page tag only shows main page articles, and a discussion section tag only shows discussion section articles - so you won't be able to get all the MOR discussion threads just by clicking on one tag. Also, the MOR thread might help get people who found LW via MOR to stick around, and that won't work as well if it's hidden away in the discussion section. But I don't see those as strong enough reasons to stay on the main page, especially since it seems like the story still has a ways to go.
This thread is already over 500 comments. I plan on posting Part 6 in the discussion section later tonight, but first I'll wait a few more hours to allow for disagreement and debate.
Poll:
Vote this comment up if you think that future MOR threads should continue to be posted here on the main page, not in the discussion section.
vote discussion section, reason for this poll, karma balance
A note about the fic in general.
Harry gets frustrated when Dumbledore claims to not know what to do with immortality and immediately claims to have an immortal soul. It means Dumbledore compartmentalizes and does not "truly believe as he speaks". But Harry exhibits the same compartmentalization when he defends democracy to Quirrell and simultaneously wants to become a "Light Lord". And belief in democracy doesn't mesh very well with establishing scientific conspiracies, either.
Chapter 60.
A very interesting chapter containing much food for thought. I read this HPMOR chapter just after posting this LW comment. If I am to believe my own comment, I suppose I have to consider much of that food for thought completely un-nourishing.
But potentially rent-paying puzzles may remain. For example, how does the anti-paradox machinery of the time-turner work? My intuition is that the answer to this fictional question pays only fictional rent, but, well, ... You never know.
Without having given it too much thought, I like to think that it's just the anthropic principle on really good crack. Any Everett branch containing a paradox simply ceases to exist / ceased to exist / has never existed (I think time-travel science fiction should adopt as its official idiom one of those East Asian languages that do not employ verb tenses).
I think that branch "never existed in the first place". It is something like a triangle with four sides.
I agree with your assessment, but the question that puzzles me is unitarity. How do we maintain the idea that the sum of the probabilities of all things that can happen add up to 1 at every point in spacetime?
Or, to put it in macroscopic terms, just before Dumbledore read the parchment, how should an observer estimate the probability that the message will be "No" rather than "Don't count on it".
There's been work specifically on this question about expectations for simplified cases when one has a 2D Newtonian system with wormholes violating causality. Kip Thorne discusses this in some of his books although I don't remember if the results are due to him or to someone else. The upshot is that at least in limited circumstances, one can make meaningful statements.
Chapter 59 Author's Notes
Does "story time" mean word count (the time it takes to tell the story), or in-universe chronology (the time of which the story tells)?
Given it's already longer than the first three books of canon, the second seems to make more sense.
This will, of course, miss one thing that is nice about the canonical books: they show Harry change through adolescence.
Chapter 59
I'm a bit miffed about Dumbledore apparently knowing about the requirements for Voldemort to cast the spell to restore his body. That wasn't part of the prophesy, that was, in the original canon, magic of Voldemort's own creation. Even if Dumbledore knows Voldemort to be capable of such a thing, he shouldn't know how. One difficulty of compressing plot elements from a series that takes place over seven years into a one year space is that you have to be extra careful that people don't suddenly start knowing things they shouldn't know.
EDIT: Eliezer has addressed this point in the tvtropes thread for MoR. It seems that I misremembered, and canon Voldemort did in fact refer to the potion he used in The Goblet of Fire as an "old piece of dark magic," thus robbing him of the one legitimate piece of ingenuity with which I still credited him.
I wonder if, given the nature of their relationship, Harry's blood will not actually be useful for Voldemort's spell? After all, in the original, Harry had opposed Voldemort-as-Quirrel, and destroyed one of his horcruxes, but the fact that he was ultimately responsible for Voldemort's death was, as this version of Harry has already noted, in no way due to Harry's own actions.
It might be enough that Harry is ideologically opposed to Voldemort, and intends to defeat him when he comes back, but practically everyone in the country ideologically opposes Voldemort. In the original, he noted that he could have used the blood of anyone who once fought against him, and chose Harry for the special protection that would confer upon him, but this Harry has never fought against him.
The spell doesn't call for "blood of the student."
Perhaps that means that Dumbledore's blood is required instead.
I would think not, if we were going on the original canon's rules, but in the original the potion didn't require flesh of one's most faithful servant, otherwise Wormtail would never have done.
Eliezer may have altered the requirements to make achieving the same goal more difficult for Quirrelmort, because if he wanted to he could easily have already gathered all the ingredients the original Voldemort did, and probably without anyone noticing to boot.
Requiring the blood of one's worst enemy would neatly preserve the thematic symmetry in this version of the potion, so in that case it would make sense if Dumbledore is the only candidate.
First, ask yourself how you would set things up if you were Lord Voldemort. Then, reread Ch. 53.
Guvf pbhyq or n genc sbe Qhzoyrqber, jvgu Uneel nf gur onvg. Vg frrzf yvxr n cbbe pubvpr sbe n genc, gubhtu- Ibyqrzbeg jvyy cebonoyl or qenvarq ol tbvat gb Nmxnona, naq Qhzoyrqber vf (va pnaba) fvzcyl fgebatre guna Ibyqrzbeg vf. Pnaba!Qhzoyrqber fnpevsvprq uvzfrys gb fnir Uneel (naq Qenpb), ohg ZbE!Qhzoyrqber frrzf gb unir frg guvatf hc gur bgure jnl nebhaq, jurer Uneel vf n urebvp pehvfr zvffvyr cbvagrq ng Ibyqrzbeg, naq fb V jbhyqa'g gehfg nal nygehvfz ba uvf cneg.
V pna'g frr jung Ibyqrzbeg tnvaf ol sbepvat gur vffhr abj, gubhtu. V vzntvar cbjreshy jvmneqf qb abg eryvadhvfu gurve oybbq rnfvyl, rfcrpvnyyl qhevat onggyr. Ur pna'g enafbz Uneel vs Uneel'f znva hfr gb Qhzoyrqber vf xvyyvat Ibyqrzbeg.
Gur zbfg frafvoyr cyna V pna pbzr hc jvgu vf Ibyqrzbeg jvyy fnpevsvpr Dhveery va sebag bs Uneel, fb n jrqtr vf qevira orgjrra Uneel naq Qhzoyrqber, naq abj ur gnxrf bire fbzr bgure uncyrff mbzovr gb thvqr Uneel shegure, naq Oryyngevk vf bhg bs Nmxnona naq va fbzr snenjnl ynaq (jurer V vzntvar gur Zvavfgel pbhyq fgvyy svaq ure).
Father's bones are buried inside Bella? That's twisted but so is Voldemort.
What, nobody? Oh, well.
Voldemort stands next to the crib of his destined enemy, the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord, the completely defenseless one year old child. The Dark Lord's most faithful servant, Bellatrix, is waiting for him at the graveyard, near his father's grave. One Side-Along-Apparition, and not even death will slow Voldemort down for long.
Too bad he died the moment he touched the baby.
Why would Voldemort touch the baby at all, if he was aware of the danger? And if he wasn't, why did he leave his wand to Bellatrix, why did he come alone and prepared for the ritual?
There's also Harry's flashback in which he learns the precise shade of avada kedavra.
Why would Bellatrix hide the wand next to Pappa Riddle's grave? Kinda arbitrary, isn't it? Unless that was the designated meeting place where she was supposed to wait. As Yvain pointed out, it's possible she aquired the wand from Voldemort's corpse, and went looking for the shade afterwards.
There are other possible meeting places beside the graveyard, the only reason I can see for going there is for the bones. It means a plan for the revival ritual was in the making, still missing an enemy. My guess is, it was a safety net thing, bring the baby there, do the deed, and if something goes wrong, instant resurrection. Who would think a simple touch of the destined enemy could kill as well.
Something did kill Voldemort, and with the safety net almost ready, it must have been something unexpected. Had everything went as planned, Voldemort wouldn't have disappeared for ten years.
This is my guess, anyways. Still a few things unexplained. What made the scar? Voldemort's touch? Horcroux? Also, technically, Lily died in a duel, same as James. There might not be any protection at all.
Also the AK color thing? mor!Harry saw only the one that killed Lily.
A couple of scenarios I considered would suggest that Voldemort's death was not an accident, but suicide. I can think of reasons he might have done it, but I don't put a lot of stock in them, first because it doesn't seem like the most practical course of action, it's not what I would have done in the same circumstances, and second because even with every expectation that he would actually survive, considering how much he fears dying, I don't know if Voldemort would commit an act of suicide if he could possibly avoid it.
Chapter 53 strongly indicates that Voldemort had left his wand with Bellatrix at the graveyard; where she hid it before she left.
This strongly implies that he knew there was atleast a high chance of being incapacitated in some way; and he didn't want his wand taken by aurors.
But then what wand did Voldemort use to duel James and Lily and to cast Avada Kedavra?
It's not really clear whether Bella knows how Voldemort died. She recognizes Harry from his scar, and it's improbable that she could have been captured so soon after Voldemort's death that she didn't have time to read the newspapers. But she also says:
"My... Lord... I went where you said to await you, but you did not come... I looked for you but I could not find you..."
Which would be an odd thing to say if she knew his body had been found on the floor of Potter's house. Maybe she knew about the horcruxes and other dark magic, and figured Voldemort losing his body would be only an inconvenience?
So either Voldy gave Bella his wand and used a different wand to duel the Potters (which meant he knew something was up and probably planned to die), or she just took the wand from the corpse or stole it from the authorities or something.
Any reasoning from Bella's apparent knowledge should take into account the Dementor-induced censoring of good memories, (e.g., sun, clouds).
Perhaps she can still remember parts of the plans that went wrong without remembering the successful parts.
As his most faithful servant, Bella likely dismissed the possibility of Voldemort's (permanent) death out of hand, burned corpse or not. Several people do so in canon, with her group's torture of the Longbottoms occurring specifically because the former thought the latter had information regarding Voldemort's location.
Oh my! That's an interesting point. What if his suicide was a way of short-circuiting the Prophecy?
I'm assuming that's what your scenario is, and it's brilliant.
That wasn't one of my ideas, actually. To know if that was viable, I would need a much more precise understanding of how prophesy actually works in this setting. My guess is that suicide would not allow him to circumvent the prophesy unless it killed him off for real, and if it was a true prophesy, then he wouldn't kill himself off for real, because that's not how he's prophesied to die (not that he'd be likely to kill himself if there weren't a prophesy.)
It's not the prophesy I imagined Voldemort might be trying to throw off by suicide, but his enemies. If you check the rot 13 text in my earlier post, you'll find an explanation of why the prophesy might not be trustworthy at all, but whether it is or not, note that Voldemort is now in the close circles of his most prominent enemies, none of whom seem to be aware of his true identity.
I'm afraid I haven't a clue how I would set things up if I were Voldemort, because I'm still not clear on what it is he's actually trying to accomplish. Assuming I were simply trying to defeat Dumbledore, I can think of what I might have done that would explain some of Quirrel's actions, but not others.
Actually, on second thought, if my opponent were Dumbledore, I think I do know what I'd do, because it's a Dark Lord strategy I've contemplated before which seems practically tailor made to the situation.
V jbhyq neenatr sbe gur perngvba bs n erq ureevat cebcurfl juvpu bhgyvarq fhccbfrq cererdhvfvgrf sbe zl qrsrng, fb gung zl rarzvrf jbhyq ubyq bss ba nggrzcgvat gb qrsrng zr va rkcrpgngvba bs n frg bs bppheeraprf gung jbhyq cebonoyl arire unccra. Qhzoyrqber, jub oryvrirf va gur cbjre bs fgbevrf, jbhyq yvxryl nggrzcg gb shysvyy gur cebcurfl yrggre naq fcvevg, ybpxvat uvz vagb na haivnoyr fgengrtl V jbhyq or pbzcyrgryl cercnerq sbe.
V'z abg ng nyy pbasvqrag gung guvf vf jung Ibyqrzbeg vf npghnyyl qbvat gubhtu, gurer'f fgvyy n terng qrny vg jbhyq yrnir harkcynvarq.
Tonight, after the Deathly Hallows premier, there are going to be readers who don't normally advertise HP:MoR flooding social networking sites with posts about the movie. Posting more chapters by the time they get to their computers to do so could get them to include their joy over the superior story in this flood, simply by relevant association, advertising MoR and spreading the love. Using the release of the canon movie in this way is the right thing to do, if there are chapters ready to be posted, and the fact that I desire moar MoR is a mere coincidence.
I haven't exhaustively read all these comments and all the reviews, so these theories might have been presented before, but here are two things I'm thinking:
-1- (medium probability) Quirrell seemed genuinely surprised to learn Harry had a mysterious dark side after the learning to lose chapter. He may not have realized this until they met, but he probably generated the hypothesis that it was a fragment of Voldemort very quickly. I think his bringing a Dementor to Hogwarts was his attempt to verify this hypothesis.
It was mentioned in Stanford Prison Experiment both that Quirrell is unusually sensitive to Dementors (probably because Voldy is unusually afraid of death) and that Harry's dark side is unusually sensitive to Dementors. Since Quirrell knows he is unusually sensitive, he theorizes that if Harry's dark side is really Voldy, Harry should be unusually sensitive. So he brings in the Dementor, arranges for the wand to be placed next to it, waits to see how badly Harry is harmed, and then pulls the wand away before there's any permanent damage.
Because of how badly Harry was harmed, he concludes that he probably does have a fragment of Voldemort in him. He asks Harry where he would hide horcruxes as a confirmation of this.
-2- (loooong stretch, low probability) We know that unspecified bad things happen if you meet yourself time-turning and that this is generally discouraged. If Voldemort went back in time at some point (maybe after his defeat in canon) thus causing some of the differences between canon and MoR, then the sense-of-doom interaction between his and Harry's magic could be Voldemort meeting Voldemort-fragment out of temporal sync with itself.