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ArisKatsaris comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81 - Less Wrong
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Who said the solution had to be dark?
Now, ofcourse, his Plan B would have been to let the Dementor feast on the souls of the Malfoy faction of the wizengamot. That's dark. Slightly so. :-)
Might have been a net win in the long run.
I think we're meant to understand from previous 'dark' plans that HJPEV's dark side makes plans that specifically don't do well for the long run.
It's clear that Dumbledore thinks that, but I'm not sure he's right. Dumbledore thinks the universe runs on narrative.
Dumbledore's universe does.
But he has no way of knowing that. Objects in our world don't come labelled "Chekov's gun," even when it turns out that they should have.
We don't have a way to be sure our universe runs on casuality. It's just generalization from our experiences. The same could be true for Dumbledore and his universe.
I can't say that Quirrel is more wrong than Harry, but Dumbledore's position ("of course some people should not be powerful wizards") is fatuous in his own universe, much less in the real world. It might turn out to be right, but there's no of course about it. In short, my only assertion is that Dumbledore is not qualified to be our moral ideal in an imperfect universe, even if he is a better choice that Fawkes.
A) Dumbledore argues that Dumbledore is a better moral ideal than Fawks, but he doesn't do it very well
B) Even if we are in a universe that runs on causality, we often misunderstand how the causality mechanics interact with us. Likewise, Dumbledor thinks he is the eccentric mentor when sometimes he is the obstructive zealout.
My interpretation has been more that the 'dark' plans rely primarily on application of force (most often political rather than physical)--threatening, blackmailing, bribing--and trickery. They tend to work in the short run, but in the long run can poison his reputation (people notice how dark he acts over time) and have nasty side effects. For the most part Harry's dark plans are pretty clever, because his dark side is pretty ruthless and very clever.
If you take that definition for the plans his dark side comes up with, he actually started out with a light side plan (talk reason with Lucius, however undiplomatically) but resorted to a much darker plan B (force the issue via political loopholes) when that failed. Releasing the Dementor actually doesn't strike me as the kind of plan Harry's dark side tended to come up with, since for all its risk it doesn't really solve the problem or use his resources efficiently. It sounds like what normal Harry would come up with when very angry; the same normal Harry who was having happy thoughts about Guillotines right before the sorting.