I don't think Harry actually would have taken Dumbledore as an enemy if Dumbledore failed to save Hermione, as he clearly was trying and even using up political capitol. Only having Dumbledore stand in the way of Harry saving her would do that, and when Dumbledore realized just how determined Harry was he had the sense to step aside.
Also I'm not really sure how well "Delegitimized the Wizengamot in the eyes of Magical Britain" would have worked--rest of the world yes, but the papers were certainly doing a hatchet job on her. The question is how representative of the populace is the press? Obviously the biggest papers is Lucius's and Fudge's soapbox here and in canon, but there's more than one paper in those newsstands and dissent isn't illegal until the death eaters take over in the last few books. I'm going to go with "not at all representative of public opinion", but propaganda exists because it works and they sounded prepared to present a unified front.
The rest, though, sound like things he could have planned on and represent MASSIVE gains for Voldemort. I especially like the "Isolated Magical Britain from the rest of the wizarding world" one--I didn't even think of it, but it fits. He didn't just get rid of Hermione, he goaded his enemies into committing an atrocity against her.
Certainly the level of wedge between Harry and Dumbledore if Dumbledore let something really bad happen to Hermione, versus the amount of political capital Dumbledore would have had to spend/lose helping Hermione, covered a broad range of probabilities. I put it in maximal terms, mostly to put it in sharp relief; the precise costs would have been uncertain, but almost certainly real to some extent. Some advantage gained in any case, if not devastating.
And I will freely grant that the percentage of "Magical Britain horrified at the sentence" is ...
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 81, which should be published later today. The previous thread passed 400 comments as of the time of this writing, so it will pass 500 comments soon after the next chapter is posted, if not before. I suggest refraining from commenting here until chapter 81 is posted; comment in the 12th thread until you read chapter 81. After chapter 81 is posted, I suggest all discussion of previous guesses be kept here, with links to comments in the previous thread.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.) When posted, chapter 81 should appear here.
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: