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Psy-Kosh comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10 - Less Wrong
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Another thought: write down a description of a complex magical principle that you understand, but that the interdict of merlin would prevent someone else who was reading it from understanding. Use the parchment you wrote on as an ingredient in a potion to make a potion with the mental work needed to discover/comprehend that principle.
Poof, Interdict of Merlin loses its teeth entirely. :)
Another thought that occurred to me: Felix Felicis. No wonder it's hard to brew. Only way you could brew it is if you literally got lucky in the process of brewing it, by chance, so that you can take that "chance" and put it into the potion.
(hrm... might be able to automate the process of making Felix: Have a machine that keeps mixing the ingredients many times in parallel, ie, many "potential potions", and in the process does something like for each potential potion, has a coin (or some random bit source which can then be physically placed in the potion) which it flips a 100 times. It also tracks the results, and when one of the coins comes up all heads, it drops it into the candidate potion then calls up the wizard to complete the potion.)
Oh, and MoR!Snape did claim you could brew fame and stuff. That was one of the things MoR!Harry challenged him on, saying something like "How does that work anyways? You drink it and turn into a celebrity?"
Or, wait, an even more recursive version of your science power potion:
Make a clever potion. Use that potion as an ingredient in a potion to extract the mental work of creating a clever potion.
Use that potion as an ingredient... repeat. :)
Entertainingly, precisely this trick can be used in Morrowind to beat what is meant to be a 20-40 hour game in a matter of minutes. Global victory condition, indeed.
I have to imagine there is no "clever potion" in MoR, though, because otherwise Harry would have seized on it instantly. It's too much like the recursive self-improvement we look for in AIs for Eliezer or Harry to have missed this possibility.
Hee hee. But no, I didn't mean a "potion of cleverness", I simply mean "be clever and invent a potion. Then use that potion as an ingredient to place the quality of the mental work of inventing a potion into a potion... then use that potion as an ingredient, etc.."
And actually, we know Harry meant to investigate mental magic, but we're not sure if he ever got around to it. (And, of course, there is Rowena's Diadem, which would seem to be an intelligence augmentation device. If that's in MoR, Harry's got to do something with it at some point. (But then, harry hasn't yet really jumped onto the existence of the Philosopher's Stone, so... well, I guess everyone here's already waiting for when he notices that and Epic Rages at the wizarding world along the lines of "you mean you already know how... you... ARGH!")
And we'd expect Ravenclaw members to already be using any clever potions or at least have rules against them (either imposed by the school or by themselves as 'cheating'). In canon, they all know about the Ravenclaw diadem which is supposed to make you more clever. So it's reasonable if there were any such thing, Harry would have been told about it (everyone knowing his interest in self-improvement or being more clever), heard of it, or read about it by now.
Yes, because people want Harry Potter to be smarter than he is.
If it existed and was semi-public knowledge, then Lucius would have made a priority of acquiring some for Draco.
Draco doesn't even need to know about this.
Who says he didn't? I notice that Draco is unusually bright, as are Crabbe and Goyle. It would certainly be convenient for the Malfoys if the youngest sons of all three families were significantly above average....
^ Truth.
On the topic of potion invention, what ever happened to the cloak from the dementor Harry killed? Based on the rules of potions given so far, that could probably make a nice Potion of the True Patronus™.
Or a potion of instant death if it instead stored the decay effect from the dementor.
That's so easy to do you don't even need magic.
I'd imagine that would be determined by the other ingredients and stirring patterns. It could also be used to make someone invisible to dementors, immune to the effects of dementors, temporarily unkillable, give off their own dementor-like aura, or just look like a dementor. Depending on what the other rules are, that cloak could be very valuable.
Testing which potion we got by such and such stirring pattern would be fun.
You give it to your hero and he is instantly dead. Or you give it to some criminal sentenced to death/Azkaban and he becomes unkillable for a month, or invisible to Dementors :)
Or you give it to rat and nothing happens - you try to kill the rat and he's killed - maybe that was potion that makes you invisible to dementors?
That sounds a lot like modern drug testing, actually...
I think you would need a remnant of the destroyed dementor itself, not just a cloak a dementor happened to be wearing when you killed it, and I don't think dementors leave anything behind when you kill them.
Either Dumbledore or Quirrel took it, or it's long since locked away in the Department of Mysteries.
But yeah, as JoshuaZ points out, just as easily could be a Potion-of-Death. (Or heck, "potion-of-anthropomorphic-personification")
I guess Harry's got another reason to destroy more dementors. Also, I suspect the cloaks will have more than one use. Dragons blood apparently has twelve uses, after all.
Um. It's not like Dementors come with cloaks, you know. If cloaks-that-have-been-worn-by-Dementors were really valuable potions ingredients, there's lots of easier ways to get them than by destroying Dementors. The Aurors manage to get the things to put them on in the first place, after all.
Dementors are implied to cause their cloaks to rapidly deteriorate, so they probably don't last long. Maybe "living" dementors accept new cloaks, but don't let the people take the ones they're wearing any more than you'd let a stranger make off with your shirt.
Yes, but the magic that was used to acquire that particular cloak was capable of blinding/destroying dementors, so it should be possible to get that magic back out using the newly revealed rule of potions.
I'm not so sure obtaining an object is the same as creating it. Using Accio on a potion-ingredient will not allow you to make a summoning Potion.
It's already established that obtaining a crushed ingredient will let you access the strength involved in crushing it. So obtaining an ingredient that had to be taken by invoking extreme powerful magic might let you access that...
Regarding possible ingredients of Felix Felicis, Malaclaw Venom bestows upon the victim an unnatural misfortune; maybe this effect can be reversed and exponentiated by the process of brewing, and thats the hard part? (EY knows about this; second flask in case you ever wondered what that did.)