TimS comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 10 - Less Wrong

11 Post author: Oscar_Cunningham 07 March 2012 04:46PM

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Comment author: shokwave 13 March 2012 08:15:39AM 11 points [-]

Hat-and-Cloak is Voldemort but not Quirrell. When in Quirrell, Voldemort has a whole (probably quite powerful!) brain to run his computation on. Outside of Quirrell, he relies only on what computation he can do purely as a 'ghost', or as magic, or whatever. Hat-and-Cloak is thusly disguised because Voldemort lacks a body. Or maybe Voldemort possesses someone else, who isn't as smart as Quirrell, and is proportionally dumber and more prone to mistakes. Quirrell is zombie while Voldemort's away because Voldemort set it up that way. Don't want your robot walking away without you.

Part of the groundhog-day attack involved setting up a trigger in Hermione, that when she can attack Malfoy, she should try to kill him. This explains her behaviour in the battle, and her apparent behaviour in the duel.

Hat-and-Cloak is a player in this story. Players in this story are clever and powerful. A sensible way of resolving this apparent contradiction is to postulate some form of disability or restriction applying to Hat-and-Cloak. Then all you need is Conservation of Characters.

Comment author: TimS 15 March 2012 05:35:41PM 2 points [-]

When H&C drops the disguise, Hermoine recognizes him/her. I don't think it is particularly likely that ghost-Voldemort looks anything like any picture of him from a history book. So how would Hermoine recognize him?

Comment author: GeorgieChaos 03 April 2012 03:40:37AM *  1 point [-]

I feel that I should point out that when the black mist lifts and Hermione recognizes the face of her assailant we have no reason to believe that the face she recognizes is not itself an illusion.

Since we already know that she has been obsessing about Draco, I suspect that it may even have been his face (though with the information we readers have it is obvious that H&C is not actually he), though I don't put a great weight on that suspicion.