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moritz comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9 - Less Wrong
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There are certainly some analytical charms that give you some sort of idea how magical objects work. For example where Harry offers Dumbledore and Quirrel some Comed Tea, they both analyze it before drinking.
The complexity of such analytics probably scales withe complexity of the magical object that is being analyzed, so finding out about the dial was probably immensely difficult, but not by collecting and correlating data, but by inspecting the device rather closely.
Not that I disagree, precisely, but I'm not sure you can use the Comed-Tea thing as evidence that it's possible to analyze how magical objects work: Quirrell and Dumbledore both seemed taken by surprise by the actual effect, after all. The charm(s) they used seem more likely to be poison/biologically-interactive-potion detectors.
Or maybe they both decided to fake being caught off guard. That seems like Dumbledore's style, anyway.
So was Draco, who had been told the effect; unlike Harry, he probably didn’t doubt that the thing worked, he probably just thought that it’d be lame.