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Pringlescan comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 12 - Less Wrong
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Hopefully i'm not deluding myself by believing that my solution outlined here is equal or superior to Harry's solution whatever it is.
I outlined my solution here
http://lesswrong.com/lw/axe/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/64am
Check out Chapter 24, which mentions "The Rule of Three": Any plot which requires more than three different things to happen will never work in real life.
I'm counting atleast 8 different things that have to go right for your plot to work (steal Draco's wand, steal Hermione's wand, steal Jugson's wand, convince Snape/Quirrel/Dumbledore to cooperate with your plan, convincingly tamper with the wands, sneak back and return Hermione's wand, return Draco's wand, return Jugson's wand)
I could be wrong, but i believe its been noted that Harry has a tendency to bypass the rule of three.
I don't think Harry has even noticed that the rule of three exists yet. He hasn't actually had any of his plans fail, so he has no experience with trying to make sure that they don't. This is why I'm fairly skeptical of his whole "If your plan isn't working, be more clever" attitude - sometimes, clever isn't enough. Dumbledore's inactivity seems a lot more sensible in a lot of cases, as would be expected from someone who's learned the hard way.
sometimes, there isn't enough clever
This is also true.
would you care to elaborate?
That a plan might be possible that would allow him to achieve all his goals will not benefit him if he doesn't think of it, and there is no guarantee that he is capable of thinking of it. Harry is a very bright boy, and the laws of magic allow a lot of cheating. But there are a bunch of reasonably intelligent opponents out there that would be opposing his efforts, and the Harry of this story is demonstrably not smart enough to calculate in advance all of their possible countermoves and preempt them.
His knowledge of the rule's existence is irrelevant. I don't think It was meant to be taken as a limiting boundary on all plans, just good advice that Lucius seemed to trust. And his solution isn't to be merely clever, its to be creative. Harry's point is that a world where evil goes unchecked is barely worth living in, and so there's no real room for compromise. With power like magic that can literally rewrite the laws of physics, no situation is ever really unsolvable if you're creative enough to directly manipulate the rules.
I understand the attitude, but Harry's default plan seems to be to throw complexity at any given problem. That doesn't end well, magic or no magic. And to steal a quote from canon, "the problem is that our enemies have magic too".