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 hard to determine, but I think 5% is a solid lower bound; some advantage if not big advantage.
Similarly, , per Spurlock's comment, wiping out Hermione as "a Light-side witch showing skill at military command and Battle Magic", well, it was obviously not enough of a consideration to keep him from making Hermione a general in the first place . . . but even then it's still at least some advantage.
And so on. There are, I think, reasonable arguments for minimizing many of these items, but even then you still wind up with a long list of small advantages, and a lot of small advantages in itself adds up to a big advantage.
What's also interesting is how many of these got at least partly achieved even though Hermione basically is going unpunished. QuirrelCloakMort's plan may not have achieved everything it could have, but it didn't fail.
wiping out Hermione as "a Light-side witch showing skill at military command and Battle Magic", well, it was obviously not enough of a consideration to keep him from making Hermione a general in the first place [...]
It gets better if you think of it as make use of the powerful witch to level-up Harry, then get rid of her before she’s a problem and make do it in a way that brings all the advantages you quoted.
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: