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Solvent comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 8 - Less Wrong
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Comments (653)
Okay, chapter 76.
"But do you know how many licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?" is Hermione's best line so far. That part of the story felt slightly unrealistic, as a result of how ballsy Hermione was being. She's an eleven year old girl, confronted by some unknown person. I am surprised she is that confident.
As always, I love how the theme of "surface appearances" is placed throughout in so many ways, in every one of the scenes.
I thought it unrealistic more because it's an accidental Americanism in something supposed to be set in Britain.
I was a little surprised by Hermione's lack of curiosity. Just because it would be unwise to trust Mr. Hat-and-Cloak doesn't mean that she should completely ignore him instead.
I was also surprised about how out of touch Mr. Hat-and-Cloak seemed to be. Where is he getting his information? He seems to have an absolutely abysmal model of both how Harry thinks and how Hermione thinks Harry thinks. He hasn't been much better in previous cases. It wouldn't have taken much snooping around to get better informed than he seems to be.
I'm fairly confident that Mr. Hat-and-Cloak is well-informed but aiming to miss-inform. Why he wants to make Hermione suspicious of Harry, I'm not sure.
The point is more that he's not very good at making Hermione suspicious of Harry.
I'm wondering if Mr. Hat-and-Cloak is someone who's stupid, or at least stupid compared to the main characters. With all the layers of intrigue, it could take a while to be sure.
At the very least, the dictionary obliviation attack is pretty clever. In retrospect, it's kind of obvious - but no one else in canon or MoR does it. (Harry could think of it easily based on his experiences with his occlumancy instructor, but hasn't yet, probably because it's a very Dark technique or because he can't yet obliviate.)
It is clever, although if he has to make enough attempts in a row, Hermione may notice the missing chunk of time. That wouldn't be enough info in itself to reveal what's been going on, but it should make her suspect something malicious, and possibly even that she's had her memories tampered with.
This will not happen if Hat-and-Cloak has access to a Time-Turner.
Time-Turners are locked onto a single person's use and cannot normally be used to transport more than one person back in time (Harry and Quirrell had to go through some trouble to travel back in time together using a single time turner, although now I am wondering why they didn't just use simultaneous rotations to meet with each other in the past; surely Quirrell has his own time turner?)
Very true; I've forgotten whether wizards can create false memories to cover up big time gaps. If they can, it's a much smaller problem than it looks.
But we have reason to believe that Cloak-and-hat was not expecting to have to make very many attempts, that he either is usually very good at the dictionary attack or he's that Dunning-Kruger - he got so frustrated he exploded and asked a revealing question outright. And then, the writing seems to imply, he only needed one more try to crack Hermione's code.
So, this reads to me like an expert using an effective tool who happened to run into an extremely unusual girl/problem, not a only-modestly-clever-or-perhaps-even-stupid person. (Also, thinking again on my remark that it's a very Dark technique, I'm even more confident that this is not Lupus or Sirius - neither of them seems like the kind of character to pull such a Slytherin technique.)
It's never Lupus.
Are you sure about that? Hermione firmly denies being suspicious of Harry while talking to Mr. Hat-and-Cloak, but that doesn't necessarily mean that this won't make her more suspicious of him on at least a subconscious level. If Mr. Hat-and-Cloak is Professor Quirrell, as is strongly suggested in both of his appearances, then we should expect that this is fairly likely to be the case, as I would expect Quirrell to be fairly good at this sort of thing.
Yes. If Mr. Hat-and-Cloak is Quirrell, then either:
a) He will sucessfully make Hermione more suspicious of Harry, or
b) He will make Hermione less suspicious of Harry and that will be what he wanted.
I would expect Quirrell to know better than to appear to Hermione as Hat-and-Cloak in the first place.
Yes, this particular episode has greatly increased my confidence that H&C, whoever it is, is not Quirrell.
I'm not entirely convinced. If Quirrell has a weakness (note, I did say "if"), then it's his lack of empathy with children, and especially Muggle-born children. Harry is able to consistently surprise him (f.ex. in Azkaban, or by cheering him up at the end of the bully saga, etc.), and I didn't get the impression that this is because Harry is some sort of an uber-outlier. He's an outlier, yes, but he's still a human kid.
This weakness probably stems from Quirrell's cynicism, which a few characters have already commented upon. Qurrell subconsciously assumes that everyone is acting like a perfectly rational agent that attempts to maximize its own expected utility by enhancing its power to manipulate external reality (which occasionally includes other actors). In Quirrell's subset of the world, this assumption is quite often correct, but most real people -- such as Hermione -- do not, in fact, act that way all of (or even most of) the time.