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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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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)
From the latest Author's Notes:
Does anyone have the original version? I'd like to compare.
I have an early version, but I'm not sure how to send it.
Sign up for a free Box.net account, upload the original version of the chapter, and post it here so we can all read it.
Thanks.
If you're quick, the PDF version is still the older one.
I'm pretty sure that the first two paragraphs of the current version are new or changed. I haven't found any other differences so far.
(up to #56)
The title "Stanford Prison Experiment" evokes the possibility of Harry taking on some of the feelings and brutality of Voldemort during his roleplay. So far it doesn't seem like he's fallen.
Not that I would expect him to become like Voldemort - the prison roleplay experiment mostly demonstrated that people have unrealistic fantasies about how heroic they would be if placed in a role, e.g. they were a soldier in Nazi Germany, when in fact they'd behave the same as any other person in that environment. We wrongly blame others' nature for their behavior rather than their circumstance (FAE).
The most Stanford-prison we can expect from Harry is that in having a useful, cringing, unquestioning minion, he may start to more-than-pretend to treat her like one.
And he is in fact beginning to make use of her.
Hypothesis: Quirrel staged this entire rescue mission simply because it would force Harry to pretend to be a Dark Lord, specifically the same one he's a horcrux of. He may also have believed that interacting with his most useful minion would be beneficial to his dark side reclaiming its memories and taking over Harry.
(ch56)
Somewhat trivially... I hadn't realized that Patronuses (Patroni?) could be sent on remote missions, or that they were able to track down individuals whose location the casting mage didn't know (as Professor McGonagall seems to do here).
I'm trying to figure out why, given that, anyone would break into Azkaban to give prisoners temporarily relief from Dementors, rather than just send a Patronus (or hire someone who can send a Patronus) to do the same thing.
So far I can't think of a plausible reason. Admittedly, Patronuses can't bring chocolate, but that seems inadequate reason to take the additional risk of breaking in personally.
Am I being dense?
Normal patroni can be identified, tracked, and presumably dispelled, so there's not much of a reduction in risk.
It would still be a lot easier. Besides, if this is true, then Harry's cover story to McGonagall about being in Mary's room is blown. Especially with the heightened security, the Aurors would have noticed her patronus. Unless communication between McGonagall and Dumbledore + Aurors is especially poor, this would tell them that Harry is in there.
Edit: Sorry, fixed.
Spelling.
Edit: Downvoters: What? There are 4 misspellings in that paragraph (plus nonstandard capitalization). It hurts.
A related nitpick: I was wondering why McGonagall's Patronus found this Harry if there are multiple Harrys around at this time because of his use of the Time-Turner. It seems likely that either the earlier Harry is still around at this time, or the later Harry has come back and is around at this time, or both. Is it because this Harry is using his Patronus?
(A similar issue about communicating with people who have time traveled naq oebhtug gurve pryy cubarf came up in another work of fiction, but I won't say anything more about that to avoid spoilers.)
The reason Harry lied to McGonagall, was because he didn't want her to know his location, and suspected that the only thing she was going to warn him about was that Quirell might be involved in a break in at Azkabam, which he already knows about. If her Patronus had reached earlier Harry, he would have listened to her and told the truth, and she would have arrived, and he certainly wouldn't have time travelled. But then there would have been no attempt to enter Azkabam, and so she wouldn't have know that something was wrong. Since time-turners don't cause these sorts of paradoxes, her Patronus had to find later Harry.
That explains not finding pre-Azkaban Harry. If Harry makes it out of there, there should be a post-Azkaban Harry as well. They want to time it so that they return to Mary's place at about the time they leave. Travel time means there should be three.
How are you counting to three?
Uneel vf tbvat gb gnxr n frpbaq gevc onpx va gvzr, fb gung ur pna jnyx bhg bs Nmxnona orsber gur nynez vf fbhaqrq, naq trg onpx gb Znel'f cynpr va gvzr gb zrrg ZpTbantnyy.
If the patronus found post-Azkaban Harry, then Harry would not have known to travel back in time to by found by it; another paradox that time-turners don't cause.
I think they were planning on going back anyway, so that it seemed like they had never left Mary's room.
I thought the plan was to have no gaps at Mary's place -- he'd travel back for that in any case to get back there/then.
I am not sure, I remember having the impression that Harry was making specific time travel plans in response to meeting the patronus. They had already travelled backwards in time, I am not sure how much time has passed. I will re-read the chapter later tonight.
Though if it was non paradox causing either way, then the patronus was acting in accordance with another global law of the HP:MOR universe: it was more awesome for the patronus to meet Harry in Azkaban and make the situation more complicated.
Er... really?
For the sake of argument, let's assume that in later chapters we will discover that Harry's future goes according to the plan he lays out... that is, at T1 Minerva sends her Patronus, and at T2 Harry gets out of Azkaban and travels to T1.
So at T1 Harry is in Azkaban and in Mary's Room.
If the Patronus finds Harry in Azkaban (as we've read), Harry travels to T1 in order to be found by Minerva, as you say.
But if the Patronus finds Harry in Mary's Room (as you're arguing couldn't happen), then Harry travels to T1 for some other reason, or no reason at all.
"But then there's no actual motivation for Harry's action!", I hear someone object. "No fair!"
Well, I agree. Similarly, by this theory, there's no actual motivation for the Patronus' choice.
"Because it would cause a paradox" is a little bit like "Because it would violate conservation of energy"... it's a reason to predict one consequence over another, but it isn't actually an explanation.
Of course, I will admit that I am confused about what local laws could add up to the "no paradox" global law.
Something like a multiply-branching Universe in which those branches that turn out to contain paradoxes cease to exist?
Not "cease to exist", simply won't exist.
Think of the interference patterns of the double slit experiment. The wave-functions of universes with paradoxes cancel out to give zero probability to those collective sets of conditions.
I was initially wondering about this too.
Actually, I was thinking about it the other way around: that maybe Harry had to make sure not only that he arrived earlier than the time he recorded so he'd be there for Minerva to find, but also that he arrived after the time of the communication to avoid there being two Harrys for the Patronus to find.
But putting it that way made me realize that no, clearly that isn't a problem: the Patronus (did/does) find the Harry in Azkaban, regardless of what else might be true.
As you point out, we don't know how it did so... maybe it flipped a glowing animal-headed coin... but we know it did so, by observation, and Harry does too.
Azkaban's future cannot interact with its past.
McGonagall and the other two Harrys aren't in Azkaban, so don't see why that fact would make her Patronus go to the Harry that is in Azkaban.
WTF. There are multiple Harry's now? Wow, I must catch up on the recent chapters!
Yeah, he suffers from spontaneous duplication, which is being treated by his spinster wicket.
I get this as meaning you can’t use the Time-turner inside Azkaban. I’m not sure if this is relevant to the story, but could one “duplicate” himself (or more) outside Azkaban, and then get all copies inside it? E.g., go to Azkaban, get out, go back to before entering Azkaban, and enter again? Are you forbidden to go back in time over a period you were in it, or is your copy prevented from approaching, or what?
A copy with knowledge of a Azkaban at a certain time seems forbidden from approaching/entering Azkaban at a prior time. See "Azkaban's future couldn't interact with its past, so she hadn't been able to arrive before the DMLE had gotten the message," in Ch55. The restraint isn't so much when the DMLE gets the message, it's when Azkaban sends the message. It can't send a message that affects its past.
Azkaban might be a good place to try a can of Comed-tea.
This must mean that when Harry's Patronus knows that another Patronus is looking for it, it isn't because Harry, say, went back in time and sent himself a Patronus message. (Which would have been problematic on its own: where would the information have come from in the first place? It'd be a stable loop with no reason to exist, and I'd like to think such things don't happen.)
So either someone who has non-time-travel knowledge of Dumbledore's actions sent this message to Harry (and who could have done this?)...
or his Patronus knows this on its own, and it isn't a message after all.
The first option is unlikely, but I am confused by both options. A Patronus isn't actually that intelligent is it? And even if Harry's Patronus is, how would it know that another Patronus is looking for it?
Patroni are sentient!
The same place where "Don't mess with time travel" came from.
I have a theory about that, actually. If the experiment had gone just as Harry expected, would he have been able to avoid the temptation to write something different on the paper, just to see what happens?
Quite possibly the only stable time loop was one which involved a sufficiently creepy experimental result.
My pet theory was that Harry wrote "Don't mess with time" to himself because in a previous iteration, he had succeeded in using Time Turners to quickly factorise, and then parlayed this capability into a money-making scheme; shortly followed by a world takeover-cum-ascension to godhood, realised it was overall a bad thing, had one of his "this is that moment twenty years from then where I look back and point to exactly where it went wrong" moments, and used his power to return to that time, complete with the knowledge that he shouldn't mess with time. Which leads to him writing "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME" down, which leads to him seeing that, realising none of this, but writing down "DO NOT MESS WITH TIME" with the same level of fear and thus the same hand-shakiness, and thus we get a stable loop.
I would like to point out that this theory is both more consistent with the evidence available to us from the story, and more consistent with what we know about Eliezer: that a world that simply cheats is aesthetically unpleasing; and that it would amuse him to hide this from us.
I want to propose two more possible solutions.
First, as I initially assumed, wards that Quirrel cast at Mary's are rendering them undetectable to patronus communication. That way, if there were no second Harry in Azkaban and third Harry on the way back, McGonagall's patronus wouldn't be able to contact him at all.
Second, for all we know about patronus' methods of travel, it might get autonomously dispatched directly to target's location, which is normally unique. There are no conservation laws that prohibit patronus splitting into two independent messengers, as there are no conservation laws preventing you from having two mirror reflections, or two acoustic echoes at the same time; and reflections and echoes can be interacted with in magical ways in Potterverse. That means that all two or three copies of Harry can get the same message, give non-conflicting answers, and McGonagall won't suspect anything.
Oyvax ba Qbpgbe Jub?
Huh, I thought he was referring to Cevzre.
I'm not familiar with that one. I was thinking of gur zbivr Cevzre.
Ah. I haven't seen either.
IIRC, The method for sending messages using a Patronus was developed in canon by either DA or OoTP, and is not common knowledge. In MoR, Harry develops it himself but it presumably has been used in the war games by now.
ETA: Chapter 28, it's mentioned that Minerva's cat patronus contacted Harry, so that's probably where he got the idea.
not the DA, but I think OotP
I hadn't thought of that, but (in canon) only members of the Order of the Phoenix can use their Patronuses that way.
I bet the Patronus' power isn't very strong when it's far away for its owner. It's just strong enough to get the message across, but not enough to repel dementors.
I hereby declare this to be fact. Not least because otherwise Harry would be tempted to send his Patronus into the Dementors' pit at any time, which problem I had thought about and planned to have him just not think of.
Does this count as a violation of the "don't say 'Eliezer said X'" rule? :P
This could make sense, but does it say anything about the possibility of long-range Horcrux action?
It seems that messenger Patroni don't have quite the anti-dementor effects that a local Patronus does. This would make sense both for the reason people go into Azkaban and for the reason that Harry didn't feel any different from the sending being around.
I'm not reading the comments to these threads because I'm a few chapters behind. Do you all feel like the comments here are valuable contributions to this site's content? Like I said, I'm not reading them so for all I know the heavy discussion and high karma indicates a really productive and insightful conversation. But the Harry Potter stuff is dominating the recent comments thread and this is the 5th top level post hosting it.
I think I second the intention of this post. Clearly a lot of people here are interested in discussing MOR, but that shouldn't dominate LW.
Proposal: why not move the MOR discussion threads to the discussion section, where they won't clog up the "recent comments" for those who aren't interested in the story.
Actually the MOR discussion morphed into a discussion of evolution and then into a discussion of voting on posts. Some of that discussion might have been of interest to LW folk who wanted to avoid MOR spoilers. It probably shouldn't have taken place on the MOR thread, but there was no clearcut point in time when it was clear to the participants that the discussion was just getting a second wind. So I'm not sure what to suggest.
Regarding your proposal: I thought that comments in the discussion section appear in Recent Comments interspersed with comments on ordinary (10 point) top level postings. Or am I misunderstanding?
Discussion has its own "recent comments" that can only be accessed via the discussion section. Those of us who don't ever visit the discussion section don't ever see discussion section comments.
The MOR reaction threads began before the Discussion section existed, but you're probably right.
That will fade away once it is finished.
Which we have no idea when it will be.
I wonder if Harry is planning on getting the Aurors and Dementors to fight each other?
Don't the Dementors obey the Aurors' orders?
First Law of Dementors: A Dementor shall prevent Aurors from coming to harm.
Second Law of Dementors: A Dementor shall obey Aurors, except in cases where that would conflict with the First Law.
Third Law of Dementors: A Dementor shall behave all creepy and stuff, except in cases where that would conflict with the first two Laws.
Brilliant.
Zeroth Law of Dementors: A Dementor shall secretly support Dark Lords, to ensure that the need for the Order of Aurors continues.
Not only is that a scary thought... it is exactly the sort of outcome a naive 'F'AI would result in!
(ch56)
Has the nature of Harry's mysterious dark side been established yet? If not, the latest chapter gives a strong hint toward it being a shard of Voldemort.
In chapter 56, Harry discovers that his vulnerability to Dementors is due to his dark side's fear of death. And, back in chapter 39, in the discussion between Harry and Dumbledore it was suggested that Voldemort was motivated by fear of death. Not quite proof, but interesting nonetheless.
I wonder if Harry's dark side (assuming it's part of Voldermort) knows it's part of Voldermort. If it doesn't, what will happen to it when it/Harry finds out? Obviously Harry considers Voldermort an enemy. Will he try to destroy it?
I'm pretty sure it doesn't know anything normal Harry doesn't. Harry finding out it's part of Voldemort won't make a difference. It's useful, but dangerous. Harry already knows this.
"Isn't that like having a coitus fetish?" And of course Harry heard his parents die at the hands of someone who wanted to kill him, after which he arguably suppressed the memory.
Sure, canon!Harry doesn't fear death as much, but the Sorting Hat told MoR!Harry that going to Gryffindor or Hufflepuff would change him. The best evidence here for your theory lies in the fact that he managed to give himself that kind of acceptance and friendship.
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.
Did they? IIRC, it was all indirect evidence.
Chapter 43: I think "nocebo" would be clearer than "placebo".
Most people know what the placebo effect is, but have never heard the word "nocebo". The current version is strictly wrong, but probably better for most readers. If we're going to pick these kinds of nits, I'd assign a rather higher priority to replacing "sentient" with "sapient".
How about "suggestion" instead of "placebo"?
"The power of suggestion" sounds less sciencey than "the placebo effect". Call it something like, oh, "priming", and you're home free.
(Cynicism is in fashion nowadays, doncha know. Also, self-aware meta-snark.)
This is true, even though popular understanding of 'the placebo effect' , including what purpose placebos serve, is largely nonsense.
I was thinking "suggestion" not "the power of suggestion". How does that affect clarity? Respectability?
I'm not sure, I haven't read the relevant chapter of MoR and was exploring a tangent (and pet peeve) that elaborates on Pavitra's comment specifically. For what it is worth even from Pavitra's reply I had inferred that you were almost certainly intending to convey a meaning distinct from "the power of suggestion". Unfortunately Pavitra also has a point that cultural factors may ensure that many people misinterpret your word in that fashion.
My suspicion is that "suggestion" would be more accurate but may require an extra sentence or even an extra paragraph or two to fully make the meaning come across. This may actually be a good thing.
What errors do you have in mind? Everything I know about this I've got from reading Ben Goldacre.
An easy way of linking to all the past discussion threads is to link to the harry_potter tag, which doesn't require updating all past discussion threads every time a new thread is created. Except that this latest thread is tagged with "harrypotter" instead, which ought to be changed.
Thanks. Fixed.
The latest A/N links to an awesome picture that gave me two minutes of non-stop laughter. Best fan art yet IMO.
Gosh golly gee whiz, that's me! I'm blushing with gratitude!
I'd like to second how awesome that was. I'm almost tempted to do a full color version of the idea.
56
I think I figured out Quirrell's plan, or at least what the big challenge for Harry is going to be.
Quirrell spoke of Voldemort learning Slytherins secrets from the basilisk, tempting Harry. Oh but the snake is dead, too bad all those secrets are lost.
Now Harry figures out that his mysterious dark side is Voldemort, has all those secrets, and apparently can be 'reformed'.
So he can have all those secrets (and at some point he is likely to be made to need them) but to get them he has to strengthen the horcrux-voldemort talk to it and listen to it.
(ch56)
I'm a little doubtful. Harry suddenly gained super emotional powers, an area in which he's been shown to be lacking, and yet he hasn't thought to also hide himself under the cloak.
Unless he's giving himself away because he wants to. In which case it's still a problem, because that would be dumb. "Father had told Draco about the Rule of Three, which was that any plot which required more than three different things to happen would never work in real life. Father had further explained that since only a fool would attempt a plot that was as complicated as possible, the real limit was two."
So I'm curious to see what will happen for more than one reason.
Hiding under the cloak would put him in physical contact, or nearly so, with Quirrell. Though I guess he could also have had Bellatrix put him in his pouch.
MoR is now the seventh Google autocomplete result for "methods" and the first for "harry potter and the m".
Edit: And, per JoshuaZ, "harry james p" brings up "harry james potter evans-verres" as the fifth option. (That was the post that originally led me to post this.)
It's also the ninth Google search result for "rationality" (and yudkowsky.net/rational is #4). Cool.
On that note, "virtues of r" brings up "virtues of rationality" as the second autocomplete result; although that string seems be a bit narrower to begin with.
It's also among the first-page results for "rationality".
Make sure you're logged out first, otherwise your search results are tuned according to your search history.
Even logged out, search results are personalized. This can be avoided somewhat by appending &pws=0 to the search string, but they will still use your IP address to customize your search by locale.
(chapter 57)
Did Harry just Transfigure a shotgun?
Perhaps, "This is my (rocket powered) broomstick"?
Might be a plain old paraplane.
(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.
Why not? If it's not a use that harms her directly, just letting her make an appearance from time to time to scare people into voting Harry, why wouldn't Harry agree?
After all, even Quirrel's (possibly just pretending) psych healer fixes her, she's not likely to ever become part of civilized society again. She should have some purpose to her life, no? Both helping the Dark-Lord-Harry (if not healed) and helping her rescuer Harry Potter (if healed) would please Bellatrix herself too. I really see no downsides to using her in this way.
Harry already intends to become god; this seems like a logical first step.
I wonder if he'll see it that way?
In the same sense that learning to fire a rifle is a logical first step to building an atom bomb?
Oh, I'm sure you and I can come up with lots of rationalizations to justify using her. Problem is, Harry, in addition to being a rationalist, is also a fictional character.
Eliezer, through Harry has, thus far, had a certain sense of poetic justice. Using Bella as bait would go against that. The same drive that leads Harry to see himself as the mesiah of two worlds -- the man who will kill death, that same drive will balk at using Bella. It's too ugly.
I see your point. But becoming a Light Lord by using any sort of politics at all is too ugly in any case.
Harry has a contradiction to resolve one day. On the one hand, he disdains politics and "human stuff" and he also sees himself as rationally fighting human biases. On the other hand, he speaks in favor of democracy. I think if he ever tries his hand at actual democracy, he'll soon realize that as Pratchett wrote (paraphrasing from memory), "it's not that you have the wrong kind of government; it's that you have the wrong of electorate".
As I recall, the only time Harry advocated democracy was in chapter 35, in which he seemed to accept its shortcomings. He values democracy because of its practical effect at preventing the brutality possible in dictatorships rather than because he has any illusions or ideals about it.
Also, he seems to dislike the idea of becoming a politically powerful leader as his method of being a Light Lord. In the same chapter, he thought the appropriate way to tackle his Voldemort problem with a small party/fellowship rather than with an entire nation. Likewise, I can't imagine him wanting to throw Manhattan Projects at his scientific/magical research interests rather than continuing to do what he is doing now; recruiting a small number of competent and like-minded people, such as Hermione, and getting them to help him. So unless Quirrel can convince or coerce him otherwise, I don't think we will see Harry try his hand at public politics and democracy any time soon.
Looks like we'll see what he thinks of that soon enough :-)
Of course, Quirrel probably doesn't plan for Harry to rule the nation before finishing school, thus it's outside the scope of this story.
The more trusting Harry may be an artifact of his being terrified. He got played on his dislike of the Dementors to get him in there. Once the shit hit the fan he was running terrified and taking whatever solution appeared to him. In this case Quirrelmort sounding even slightly reasonable (remember he's been talking to himself to keep the dementors off) would be accepted. I'll be interesting to see what happens when he gets back to civilization.
They're finally out of there. Let us never speak of these chapters again!
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?
First Harry summoned his Patronus, which shielded them all. Then he took the cloak. Quirrel became a resistant snake. Bella drank a hyper-potion. Only then did Harry dispel his Patronus.
I don't know what you mean by "letting out" the Dementors. They're not constrained in Azkaban; they live in a pit beneath the open sky, and no magical defense could stop them from leaving anyway.
The bit about the exhaust is true, but presumably it's transfigured from water, just like Harry's original version. Even if someone breathes a bit of the smoke it shouldn't be too dangerous.
Ah okay. That also explains Dumbledore's reaction.
I was under the impression that the Dementors lived inside Azkaban, and so when I read the part about them rising through the air, I thought it must have been through the hole Harry made in the wall. Now that I think about it, it makes sense for them to rise into the air to chase Bellatrix.
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'm not sure what was hard to understand, but here goes:
Quirrel, with much secrecy, proposes to Harry that they bust (the supposedly originally good) Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban. They go to Azkaban and break in near the top. Quirrel guides the way down, while invis-cloaked Harry protects them from the Dementors with his Patronus.
They arrive at Bellatrix's cell and free her in a weak state. Harry pretends to be Voldemort so that Bella will obey him (implying that when Voldie "died" he really went into baby Harry). On the way back up, they encounter an Auror after Harry gets so pissed at the dementors/Azkaban that his patronus temporarily flares out of control, alerting the guards. Quirrel fights him while Harry and Bella hide under the cloak. Quirrel tries to AK the auror, but Harry unconsciously moves his patronus in the way. This saves the auror but hurts Harry and knocks out Quirrel (that "sense of doom" is apparently a warning of bad interactions if their magics touch).
Harry gathers up Quirrel (who reverted to snake form) and stuffs him into his bag, gets Bella to obliviate the auror, and heads downward, somewhat panicked. He almost falls to the dementors but realizes that his dark side (ie Voldie Horcrux) is making him weak to them by being overly afraid of death. He manages to calm down his dark side enough to proceed.
Harry considers powering-up his patronus enough to kill all the dementors, but realizes that this would kill him. He despairs because he knows that aurors are coming methodically down the stairs (taking their time to ensure no escape). Dementors approach. Harry theorizes that they only reflect the minds of those around him, so he tries to believe that they will turn around, and also threatens them out loud. They leave, but he isn't sure if his theory was right or if they just got threatened.
He considers giving himself up, but comes up with one last plan. He hides in a cell while constructing an escape device via transfiguration, and then uses partial transfiguration to cut a hole in the wall. He decides to give up anyway while Quirrel and Bella escape, but Quirrel wakes up and convinces him to come with them. They escape on a rocket-powered broomstick, fast enough to get past the patrolling aurors outside.
Phew.
This leaves out some important events from the aurors' and Dumbledore's perspectives:
Dumbledore and his phoenix are upset about the state of some of the prisoners; it's not clear if this is a matter of police brutality, or...
Someone on a low floor in Azkaban is chanting "I'm not serious (Sirius)" -- possibly metamorphagus Peter Pettigrew, stuck in the physical form of Sirius Black and unable to change himself back
Whoever it is, Fawkes (D's phoenix) tries to alert Dumbledore to the "not serious" prisoner, for reasons that are not immediately clear.
Dumbledore notes to Amelia Bones that there was an item hidden under a piece of cloth in Bellatrix's cell, which he was leaving to the forensic aurors to investigate
Also:
McGonnagal's patronus appears in cat form, and Harry lies about his location, making a note of the time so that he can time-turn again later and be where he said he'd be, so that McGonnagal will not discover the lie or his involvement in the Azkaban escape
Quirrel explains that his plan was not to kill the auror but to convince him to drop shields via credible threat of death, and that his long-term plan is to make Harry the ruler of magical Britain; he does this, however, in a way that reeks of lies told in the form of truths -- i.e., "if I were evil, I'd be doing exactly the same things I'm doing now"
The big lesson of this arc appears to be to show the importance of not jumping to conclusions when you're confused: Harry decides that Q is evil on the basis of what Q rightly calls "misplaced mistrust" (implying, btw, that Harry is right to mistrust Q, simply for the wrong reason), and Harry was confused because there was in fact something he didn't understand: Q's plan to make the auror drop shields.
Bellatrix is beginning to suspect that Harry-Voldemort is beginning to actually care for her; Harry tries to quickly quash that idea before it starts, since he expects this would make it harder to cure her of her attachment to Voldemort
Whew!
Fawkes probably wants to help all the prisoners. That's what phoenixes do, they act as anti-Dementors of sorts. Dumbledore probably dismissed it as just the phoenix picking up on the prisoner's distress.
We saw Quirrel put this there (and Harry saw him too). What could this item be? Any unexpected item would ruin the death-doll pretense.
My guess: a vial with traces of poison to make it look like someone sneaked in poison for Bella and she drank it. ETA: but we don't know why Quirrel would do that; see discussion below.
Poison was my initial theory as well, though I can't really see the point of bothering.
That is, suppose the body is simply found with no flask of poison. How is that any worse, for anyone involved? Maybe there's some kind of forensic autopsy they might perform on the body that they wouldn't bother with given an obvious cause of death, but then why hide it?
There's another theory over on tvtropes that it's a Harry Polyjuice potion, since it's established in canon that those are gold.
That at least makes some sense: even if someone sees Harry, they'll conclude that it was actually someone Polyjuiced into looking like Harry.
So I'm going with that.
I have no clear idea, either.
That makes no sense. If someone was pretending to be Harry, why would that someone leave the empty potion bottle in Bella's cell? Why hide the bottle under cloth, but hide it poorly?
You're right, of course.
Though if I started out with that theory, I might be tempted to start justifying it, and think "Maybe it was going to take the intruder too long to get in and out, so s/he brought a second Polyjuice potion to take in the middle... and maybe s/he left the potion figuring it would give away the game if 'Harry' were caught with a Harry Polyjuice potion on 'him'... and maybe s/he left it in Bellatrix's cell because, um, because s/he couldn't find a better place to hide it... in fact, maybe s/he really thought the cloth would hide it... and didn't crush it because, um, s/he's incredibly stupid... no, um, wait, because... um... give me a minute, I'll come up with something."
So, yeah, OK. The only way I would actually consider finding such a flask convincing would be if I were only thinking about the problem very superficially. Perhaps Quirrell is just counting on the investigators not being very careful thinkers. Lord knows the wizarding world is full of those.
Alternatively... if the potion were a Bellatrix Polyjuice potion, I might conclude that this is someone else's corpse, and Bellatrix was never arrested in the first place, and whoever it was died shortly after being arrested, and expected the vial not to be noticed.
But why that conclusion is worth leading someone to, I don't know. And why not just leave a different body to begin with? So, probably not.
So, OK, turn it around. What potion, if found by the Aurors near Bellatrix's corpse, would lead them to a useful-to-Quirrell conclusion?
(shrug)
Of course, another possibility is that the flask wasn't meant to be found... maybe it was actually well hidden, and Dumbledore is just awesome, and Q didn't expect D to be involved. That would suggest the flask is performing some actual functional role... beats me what it could possibly be, though. Maybe it's meant to explode upon being investigated, destroying "Bella's body."
But why leave the flask at all, then? It must be meant to make them think something else.
Couldn't be. Bella's been there for twelve years - and they've been feeding her daily, they'd have noticed if she died "shortly after". And the fake body doesn't look ten years dead.
Any potion being found stops the Aurors from thinking Bella just died in her cell in the ordinary way from Dementor exposure. (An event that would be no surprise at all, in her state.) A potion indicates outside involvement.
The Aurors would think: someone came from outside, gave Bella this potion-bottle, which is now mostly empty but recently contained something, and now Bella is dead. It certainly looks like poison.
The big mystery is that Harry knows it's there, he must know what its part in the plan is, and yet he seems to think that the original plan was to make the Aurors think that Bella died from natural reasons...
The description given of Quirrel concealing it makes it clear it wasn't well hidden. In fact it was barely hidden at all - if a wizard is doing the hiding, "covered with a piece of cloth in the corner" isn't that amazing. In fact it's on the bed instead of being under it, so it clearly isn't being hidden. The only way an investigator could believe someone was trying to hide it was if he believed that poor, mad, dying Bella was "hiding" it in her last moments.
Presumably since the fuel/engine was transfigured out of water, it should turn into water vapor when the transfiguration runs out. And I wouldn't expect inhaled engine exhaust to go anywhere water shouldn't, so that shouldn't be much of a problem.
Which reminds me - now that Harry has mastered partial Transfiguration, couldn't he just start transfiguring stuff out of bubbles of air, thus making such stuff safe for any use short of injecting them in your arteries?
Since neither of us is McGonaggal the correct answer is "I do not know." :-)
Harry already tried this in Ch. 28, failed, and concluded that it wasn't possible to Transfigure things out of moving molecules. It's safe to assume that he tried it again after (1) figuring out partial Transfiguration and (2) asking McGonagall, and found that it was still impossible; otherwise he wouldn't have bothered touching his wand to the metal stairs to get his mirror.
Good enough as Word of God. (As a reader, I am reluctant to make "he would have thought about it" assumptions about a Harry who after five months still hasn't shown curiosity or even confusion about his unique Quirrell-generated sense of doom).
(58)
Upon reflection, I still think Quirrell held the Idiot Ball in Chapter 54, by misjudging Harry's probable reaction to an AK attempt.
A Patronus (incorporeal!) intercepting an Avada Kedavra spell is bizarre and ridiculous. Anything less ridiculous would not have been able to interfere. With hindsight, sure, he should have known, but he doesn't have hindsight, we do. Before the event, he couldn't have possibly planned for Harry interfering like this, and we can see he already planned for any more probable level of interference - making Harry lie down on the steps far away, ordering him not to get involved, etc. If you really honestly think he should have expected a smart eleven-year-old boy possessed of a stronger-than-usual Patronus charm to be able to deflect the undeflectable curse, then he also should have planned for some equally bizarre event such as Dumbledore breaking the Apparation wards on Azkaban in order to teleport in front of the Avada Kedavra spell, and just taking it on chin because he's invincible.
Honestly. Quirrell would have to be holding either the Idiot Ball or Batman's belt in order to prepare for this.
I think orthonormal was referring to Harry becoming royally pissed off and quite a bit more suspicious, more than (or rather than) Harry blocking the Killing Curse.
Ch. 58 shows that Quirrell expected the Auror to dodge, and had plans in case he wouldn't be able to dodge. Harry would have been royally pissed that Quirrell tried, right up until Quirrell says exactly what he said to Harry when confronted about it later. And hell, if his explanation worked when Harry was that far into believing Quirrell was evil, it would have definitely worked immediately after the fact.
No it doesn't. It shows that Quirrel knows what to say in response to being accused of trying to kill someone to make it look like that wasn't actually his intention.
Given that AK is an Unforgivable, and according to canon the caster must 'mean it' to cast such a spell, I'm fairly confident that Quirrel's explanation is a lie, though I will admit that I haven't checked the exact mechanism for that kind of spell failure - if a not-meaning-it casting of AK would produce a similar visual effect, he could be telling the truth, and it could have been significantly safer than it looked - but in that case, why would he claim that he was intending to move the auror, rather than explaining that the spell was actually harmless?
So him having an excuse prepared for when he casts AK and doesn't end up killing an Auror is evidence that he was intending to kill the Auror? Then him not having an excuse for when he fails to kill the Auror would have been evidence that he wasn't intending to kill the Auror..
That he had an excuse ought to be evidence that he was intending to cast the Avada Kedavra and miss. The story makes more sense that way, too: Consider what would have happened if Quirrell had actually killed the Auror, without some crazy reaction from Harry's magic. Now consider what would have happened if Quirrell had just barely missed. The first option has Quirrell and Harry in an emotional, full-blown argument in the middle of Azkaban with Bellatrix watching the Dark Lord berating a henchman for killing someone, and they haven't escaped yet. The second option has protestations from Harry quickly squashed and a ready escape, with Bellatrix seeing the Dark Lord mock his henchman for failing to kill, leaving behind an Auror who will tell everyone they are looking for a phenomenally powerful sallow-faced wizard all by himself, not a professor and a student.
Leaving behind a memory-wiped Auror who has no idea what happened.
You're misinterpretating the parent comment's argument. It didn't say Quirrel's excuse was evidence he was intending to kill the Auror. It said it didn't SHOW he wasn't intending to kill him.
There's a difference between 'shows' and 'is evidence for'. I'd say that "shows" typically means "is CONCLUSIVE evidence for".
That Quirrel had an excuse IS evidence he was not intending to kill the Auror -- of course it's evidence for that. It's just not CONCLUSIVE evidence for that.
According to canon, the spell must be cast with hatred. I'm not sure it has to be cast with the intent to be lethal.
Also, I doubt that when Voldemort kills some random mook he's feeling personal hate towards him. And IIRC in canon Quirrelmort (ETA: no, not him, another Evil Teacher) kills some lab animals in class to demonstrate the killing curse; I'm sure he didn't hate them. The requirement for hatred is a sort of "Negative Emotions == Dark Side" thing.
You're thinking of Barty Crouch Jr. masquerading as Alastor Moody in Goblet of Fire.
EDIT: typo
Alastor.
thanks
Right, thanks!
I don't think the relevant category here is an incorporeal Patronus intercepting an Avada Kedavra spell, so much as it is Harry's magic coming into contact with Quirrell's. Which does seem like a possibility plausible enough to be worth considering.
Also, Harry has a history of interacting unusually with Avada Kedavra spells, which might lead one to predict an unusual interaction in this case as well.
That said, I expect a lot of that is hindsight bias.
Quirrell put Harry on the steps, out of direct line of fire, so that Harry wouldn't try any magic to interfere with the duel or be hit by magic accidentally, and at this point he (rightfully) didn't know the Avada Kedavra could be intercepted or deflected by any magic, so he shouldn't have expected that Harry would be able to send any magic at all out into the line of fire of the spell.
I think it is mostly hindsight bias: before this particular event, nobody knew you could put magic in the way of an Avada Kedavra. Therefore, Quirrell should not have expected that Harry could put magic in the way of his Avada Kedavra, causing the reaction.
Harry is masterful at interfering.
Personally if I was Quirrell I would have expected a smart eleven-year-old boy with a strong desire to help people to very easily muck up a prison break in Azkaban. He almost did it when he almost killed himself with his strong patronus thinking about killing all the dementors. No doubt there are other things that could have gone wrong. No Plans survive first contact with the 11 year-old Harry.
Edit: Also: Why did Quirrell need the guy to dodge from an AK spell, if he could get through his shields to move him magically? Why not just place him wherever he wanted him.
And I maintain that Quirrell planned out all the reasonable methods for Harry to interfere, and took steps he felt were enough to combat these methods. That they weren't enough is not something he could have known ahead of time; he was reasoning under uncertainty. We aren't reasoning under uncertainty: we are reasoning with the certain fact that he did not prepare for enough ridiculousness. He doesn't have that fact!
If you want to claim that Quirrell should not have been surprised, should have been prepared for anything Harry could do because he is that much better than Harry and that if he isn't that much better, he is holding the Idiot Ball, well... this is where the needs of the story comes in. If Harry is to be masterful at interfering and creating dramatic tension, he needs to be surprisingly good at interfering: if he can't surprise Quirrell, he can't interfere, because it will already be planned for.
I maintain that EY is doing a believable job of keeping Harry surprising, because even if a perfect rationalist had updated on all the evidence available to Quirrell so far, it could not have predicted that Harry would be able to interfere, under the restrictions Quirrell had placed on Harry.
By the way, that is where all these rationalisations for Quirrell holding the Idiot Ball are coming from. Quirrell is updating on all evidence prior to his decision and making the right decision. We're updating on evidence that comes after his decision: namely, that his decision was wrong. It is, of course, very tempting to say that Quirrell did something wrong, and that is why his decision was always wrong. But it was right when he made it! That later evidence makes him wrong does not mean he was always wrong; we are not talking facts here, but decisions.
I'm not so much concerned with the reasoning around the duel (apart from why AK was needed to make someone dodge). I'm mainly against Quirrell taking the boy to Azkaban in the first place. General common sense says that is not a good idea unless it is a desperate situation. Especially since Quirrell can't cast magic on Harry if he decides to do something rash.
What is the expected utility of taking Harry to Azkaban in total, from Quirrells point of view?
How many more months could Bellatrix last in there?
I don't know his numbers, but something like (Bellatrix's life - risk of failing and both dying). Given that he had the perfect plan, is maybe the most powerful wizard around, and had Harry along to beat the Dementors, the risk of failing was probably lower than half, which means the expected utility is positive.
We have very different views on how Quirrell reasons... the stakes are a lot higher from my perspective.
Taking him at face value I would expect him to be concerned with the outcome of the wizarding world's fight against the human, thus him and Harry dieing would jeopardize that fight (there is no one else that seems concerned, no lieutenants to carry on the fight). So we are talking thousands of lives, from this perspective.
Bellatrix might be able to help the fight, whether she would save half as many lives than Harry and Quirrell, I'd guess not.
Surely Quirrell should have considered the possibility that Harry would come up with a surprisingly powerful move. It's at least plausible that Quirrell's plan was too brittle.
Well, yeah, Quirrell could have considered the possibility that Harry would do something he couldn't have possibly planned for. But considering the possibility isn't the same as planning for it, and almost by definition he couldn't have planned for it. If you look at the passage just before the fight with Bahry, he did maneuver Harry into a position where even if he did have some spell that could block an Avada, he wouldn't have been able to direct it into the fight in time. He was expecting some interference, and he planned for it so that Harry wouldn't be able or would feel inclined not to interfere.
Actually, judging from his rant upon being awoken, his error was that he overestimated Harry. He thinks that someone as smart as Harry should have realized it would make no sense to kill the auror.
Essentially Q's error was simply the Usual Error, i.e., assuming that others think in a way similar to ourselves, and especially, that they will find our intentions or conclusions equally obvious. To Q, it was obvious that nobody would be dumb enough to kill the auror under those circumstances.
That's assuming Quirrel is telling the truth, though. If he didn't intend to kill him, why use the Killing Curse? If the goal really was to subdue, to dominate, this doesn't seem to be the logical approach: The battle was almost won at that point, surely using other attacking spells would have been almost as successful. I think real-life fights could be used as analogy: If you intend to subdue, not kill, in real life, you use a taser/pepper spray/whatever, not a gun.
Ever heard of a "warning shot"? ;-)
Seriously, though, you're not noticing that you're confused, here. For at least a week, a whole bunch of people here and on Fanfiction were going, "Wtf? Why is Quirrel holding the idiot ball?", precisely because it would be idiotic to kill the auror, unless Q's plan is considerably more complex than the story lets on.
In a way, we were suffering from Harry's Intent To Kill bias, and thereby overlooking the non-lethal strategic potential of having a spell that must be dodged, and thus can be used to put an opponent on the psychological defensive.
Bahry took all the non-lethal damage Q could dish out, and spat at the offered terms - but he took the AK threat seriously, and might have negotiated in preference to having to dodge a second AK -- especially if Q told him the first was just a warning shot.
You're right- here's the Idiot Ball, in my pocket all along.
A big weakness in Quirrell's plan (assuming he wanted a successful prison break) was counting on Harry to maintain a stable Patronus. Harry is young, inexperienced at casting Patronus, and in a place liable to cause extreme emotional reactions, and he must maintain a Patronus strong enough to keep them hidden from Dementors but not so strong that it starts destroying Dementors or attracting attention.
The trouble started when Harry's escalating Patronus attracted the Aurors' attention, which was a foreseeable (and foreseen) risk. And it doesn't seem all that surprising that Harry's Patronus would go out when he saw Quirrell cast Avada Kedavra (although it is very surprising that it would block the spell).
Rocket broomstick is epic. I wonder what happens when the Transfiguration wears off in however long it does? Very small hail over Azkaban?
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.
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?
The plan as stated is to bring her to a magic shrink who will undo the mental torture that made her this way, so she stops being evil.
Of course, that's just killing her and replacing her with someone similar.
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.)
Even if she were completely reformed with no chance of killing more people, the terminal value of her life could still be lower than that of a random person. For example, presumably continuity is valuable (or we wouldn't mind replacing dead people with random newborns), and there's less continuity between evil and good than between good and good; and someone with an evil past will probably experience less happiness during sincere reflection on that past (for some morally relevant value of "sincere") than someone with a good past. It also seems possible that there are components of terminal value that track the game-theoretic reasons you mention: we may terminally value game-theoretically-defined notions of "cooperation" or "justice" on top of their instrumental usefulness.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Part of my point is that even if "she can be saved and prevented from killing others", she probably still shouldn't be.
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.
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.
Only if how much value people like Harry and Quirrel would assign to her life was a significant factor in her decisionmaking. Chances are that at the time the idea that someone might want to save her from azkaban never even crossed her mind.
To be fair, that passage was a full chapter before Harry realised (very belatedly) that Quirrell might have been lying about the psychiatric healer and Bellatrix's kernel of goodness.
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?
Are you sure? In this fic, Slytherin isn't always bad.
The math does add up, though: Quirrell is at least four times more important than all of Azkaban put together. It's like how, in my mind, at least 10% of the loss caused by the 16-40k guillotine deaths in the French Revolution is from the early death of Lavoisier.
It's pretty clear from the times it's come up that Harry's utilitarianism is either mistaken or too unnatural to actually guide his behavior- and so this just seems like more evidence of that.
(ch58)
erm... Harry was worried that they'd figure out that he'd used partial transfiguration to make a hole in the wall, but he's not worried that they might figure out that he's just about the only wizard on the planet who would ever think of transfiguring a rocket-powered broomstick? Surely that idea has Harry James Potter Evans-Verres stamped all over it?
Debatable.
Sirius Black, and then Hagrid, rode a flying, roaring motorbike.
This was wizarding propulsion on a Muggle vehicle, rather than the reverse, but it makes a rocket broomstick quite a bit more believable.
It's an obvious idea for any Muggleborn wizard, at the very least.
The only reason it hasn't been used to escape Azkaban before is that everyone was using Quirrel's original "perfect" plan. :-)
Is "I'm not serious" a The Dark Knight reference?
There's a brilliant bit of speculation in the reviews on FF that it's actually "I'm not Sirius". Makes sense to me, I was trying to imagine what "worst memory" would prompt "I'm not serious". Although now that you mention it, a guy like the Joker might end up that way.
If I remember correctly, the non-patronus Fawkes also lingered at that cell, which would make sense if there was an innocent trapped in there in place of Sirius.
(ch 58)
I'd thought this question would have already been raised, given the nature of this site and the author, but I haven't found it, so here goes.
Harry has already stated his intention of becoming as a god, and I'm not inclined to bet against him. He has already achieved partial Transmutation and Dementor-eradication, both considered impossible by other wizards, by virtue of his greater understanding of the Underlying Nature of Reality, and it seems likely he's just getting warmed up, and the Rule of Cool is with him, and the author seems sympathetic to that sort of transcendence (unlike most authors, whom I would expect to be setting Harry up for an Icarus flameout and a lecture on hubris).
It would not take much, really. Let him start researching an "Increasium Intelligencium" spell, and all bets are off.
So it seems reasonable to ask the question: is Harry Friendly?
I mean, obviously he avoids the Vast majority of unFriendly design space, simply by virtue of being human. He isn't going to tile the galaxy with paperclips or anything like that. But as I understand the idea, most human minds aren't Friendly either (are any?). It doesn't ordinarily matter, because humans aren't capable of hard takeoff, but given the precarious power imbalances inherent in the MOR-verse perhaps Harry is an exception.
Then again, perhaps not. Perhaps the kind of "god" Harry is capable of "becoming as" isn't sufficiently scary to be worth invoking that kind of decision process for.
But how would we (or, more to the point, his peers) know that? At the moment, they seem to be doing the typical human thing of estimating Harry based on their prior experience with teenagers/wizards, and they will probably go on doing that because that's what humans do. But if they were more rational people who updated their model of Harry based on the evidence of his exceptionality, what would they conclude?
And if he isn't guaranteed to be either not-that-scary or Friendly, does his very existence pose an existential threat to humanity? Is the rational thing to do to stop him before it's too late?
Perhaps the purpose of the entire narrative will be to gut-punch the readers with a lesson in Friendly AI, by showing Harry acting determinedly and rationally to ensure his own Friendliness, but failing anyway.
To me, the most likely candidate for the role of an allegory of AI in MoR currently seems to be the Source of [Atlantean] Magic, assuming that Harry's speculation wasn't completely off the mark.
(My Wild Mass Guess on the matter would be that Harry will eventually discover that the Source was the Atlanteans' equivalent of a moderately unFriendly AI, which didn't destroy the world but did wipe away Atlantis. Eliezer will then be sorely tempted to go on an all-out Author Filibuster (TVTropes) on the subject, but will manage to restrain himself to a couple of paragraphs in the Author's Notes.)
I'll be disappointed if Harry doesn't turn out to have been completely off the mark there.
I mean, the process he went through was roughly "Hey, look at this thing I don't understand. It doesn't behave at all the way I would expect it to. Um... maybe X is an explanation!" with no particular justification for privileging X over the uncountable number of hypotheses he could have come up with instead.
Worse, the hypothesis he came up with was pretty much unfalsifiable, and doesn't make any particular predictions. It doesn't "pay rent," to quote an early OB post.
The moralist in me does not want Harry "rewarded" with a correct answer for reasoning that way.
That having been said, I grant that if I knew the SO[A]M existed, I would conclude that Harry was somehow being influenced by its existence such that the theory of SO[A]M was more available, which doesn't require any additional assumptions given that it is necessarily responsive to wizards' thoughts to begin with. (That is, I don't want to repeat the reasoning error I made elsewhere regarding Quirrell being polyjuiced.)
But right now I don't know that.
My feeling is that the more obvious UFAI-alike in MoR is Quirrelmort. Consider: Inhumanly fast (newspaper reading; duel with Bahry). Inhumanly intelligent (passim). Very powerful in part because of being inhumanly fast and intelligent. Interested -- supposing him to be Voldemort, on which topic I shall say no more -- in defeating death (just the sort of thing someone might ask a superintelligent AI to find ways to do).
Speaking of which: "Tell them I ate it", says Quirrell concerning the destroyed Dementor. Dementors in MoR are a symbol of death, even if many wizards don't quite grasp that. Dumbledore doesn't, but Harry surely does. Is Quirrell really not concerned that Harry may get the message: "I am a death-eater"?
But does Quirrell know, or suspect, that Dementors are a form of death? If not he wouldn't even notice.
Well, like Harry he is unable to cast Patronus v1.0, and he seems to understand just fine when Harry calls the Dementors "life-eaters" in ch58.
We don't know much about how stable human values are under recursive self-modification. It's entirely possible (albeit seemingly unlikely) that humans even tend towards tiling the galaxy with paperclips in particular.
Indeed, it seems likely. Many humans have the concept that 'locked' values are better than 'wishy-washy' ones; few have the concept of local maximums and even fewer the understanding of complex, changing human value systems. Thus a priori we should expect there is some bias or leaning in that direction, which would presumably have a chance of affecting one human in particular. This chance is greater than that of an AI's, who chooses at random.
Harry is aware of these ideas, but he often catches himself in errors. When it comes to self-modification there are no opportunities to catch your errors; you are stuck with them and will never even realise there are any.
I wonder if Quirrell realises Harry desires to be an actual god, and not just Supreme Emperor of the magical world.
Hopefully Harry is bright enough not to test invasive intelligence improvement on himself.
Ugh, he's exactly bright enough to do just that, complete with justification that he can't trust anyone else to both be safe (Quirell, Dumbledore, Draco all too dangerous) and effective (Hermione wouldn't exploit enough).
He could time-turn himself to allow for self-monitoring of the experiment.
Compared to the Vast space of minds in general, they certainly do. Few minds in that Vast space have heard of the concept of a paperclip, after all.
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.
Harry's response is correct, assuming McGonagall's Patronus visited after they activated Time-Turner the first time. It means that they can Time-Turn again (somewhere hidden), enter the room before it's sealed by their first versions, wait hidden in the room for first versions to travel in the past (disappear from timeline), then open the room and let Harry meet McGonagall.
That's the problem. McGonagall's Patronus visited before they activated the Time-Turner the first time, because according to Quirrell's plan, all the events of Ch. 52-58 are taking place within one time-turn.
ETA: oh, sorry, I see what you mean. Maybe you're right. Maybe the allotted time ran out during Ch. 55, thus saving them by pure chance. Then Eliezer only needs to change Quirrell's phrase in Ch. 58 saying "original plan carries on undisturbed". On further reflection, this would've been be a smart plan from the start: if you have an unrestricted Time-Turner, you can carry out complicated plots in the future. Go back by 2 hours, escape the room, wait 3 hours unseen, do your job, go back by arbitrary amount. Like Ocean's Eleven in reverse.
Why do you believe that was the plan? Committing the crime simultaneously with being in Mary's room makes perfect sense.
Right. Given the Cloak of Invisibility, "must leave Mary's Place" does not imply "must be seen leaving Mary's Place".
To be fair, building a solid-fuel rocket from memory wouldn't be too hard as it's all of 2 materials and rather simple in shape. Depending on how much knowledge of the subject free transfiguration takes he won't need anything more than his making of buckystring.
Two materials is true for a solid rocket motor, casing/nozzle + propellant. However, instead of a bare motor lit with a simple Incendio, this muggle tech seems to be a fully tricked out Berserker PFRC rocket complete with an electronic ignition.
How did Sirius manage to switch with Peter?
With Harry thinking the best way to break out of Askaban not to be sent there in the first place when he first hears about Sirius, the Quibbler story that Sirius and Peter are secretly the same person and someone Fawkes is particularly unwilling to leave in their Askaban prison cell mumbling "I'm not Sirius" over and over I have very little doubt that it somehow happened. I see no way to show that all just to have been a red herring that's even the least bit awesome. And then it has also repeatedly been mentioned that there seems to have been no reason for Sirus to search out Peter on that day and been made abundantly clear that those events did not transpire as in canon.
So how did he manage it?
Just forcing Polyjuice down Peter's throat doesn't seem like it would be enough since it's limited to one hour. Maybe Peter is a metamorphmagus (or human-form animagus or something) and Sirius imperiused or otherwise mode-locked him? If there was a way to trade bodies I think it would have been hinted at by now.
If Sirius is innocent, and Dumbledore knew it but couldn't prove it, then the swap could have been done by Dumbledore, replacing some other Deatheater (not necessarily Peter) with him.
Goblet of Fire (and Barty Crouch Jr's escape after swapping with his mother) shows us that Dementors are okay with you bringing in a fresh victim to trade for a less fresh one.
That would be possible, but doesn't match the hints. Sirius would have been in Askaban, it wouldn't explain the confrontation, and the scene with Fawkes would be out of place if Dumbledore knew.