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Bakkot 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.