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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 13, chapter 81
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:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
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Comments (1099)
I'm not sure if this is the place for it, but I haven't found somewhere better and I don't see how it could be plot-critical. Nevertheless, warning for very minor spoilers about chapter 86.
I gave my mother a description of the vrooping device, and she had no idea. I said that it was one of a collection of odd devices with bizarre uses, and the conversation progressed as follows:
"Well in that case, it was an egg coddler." "An egg coddler?" "Coddling is like poaching but slower and gentler." "What about the pulsing light and the vrooping?" "The vrooping is to put you in mind of a hen and the light is for enterainment while you wait." "I'll suggest it." "Good egg!"
Given that we are meant to be able to recognise the vrooper, that it matches no known magical device and that Heads of Hogwarts tend to create strange devices to mystify their successors, it seems reasonable to me to presume that the vrooper is a really weird form of a muggle device. I further suggest that it's use is for cooking something or for keeping it warm (it might, for example, be a phoenix-egg incubator, given that Fawkes doesn't seem to build nests).
I'm not sure what kind of stance we need to take with regards to the characteristics of the device - if all of its properties are meaningful, then we should have identified it by now, and, moreover, we have no reason to believe that the designer would want all its properties to make sense. On the other hand, its real designer is EY, who expressed surprise that we haven't guessed by the time his last progress update came out.
re-reading chapter 76 made me realise the prophecy could not be about Voldemort at all :
Let's look at this prophecy in detail :
"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches,"
Vanquish, as Snape said, is a strange word to describe a baby accidentally toasting Voldemort, especially since we have evidence that this might not be what really happened. "Dark Lord" is used by EY quite loosely, and not as something specifically relating to Voldemort. Indeed, Dumbledore seems to worry that he could be this Dark Lord. Now, if we step outside of what we think we know about the prophecy...
Who is Harry trying to "vanquish" ? Who is it which Harry has "the power to Vanquish" ?
Dementors ? Death in general ? Dementors as an incarnation of Death ?
Could Death be considered as the Dark Lord ? I admit this is stretching the use of the word Dark Lord, but it does sounds interesting and more appropriate to Vanquish. Now, bear with me a moment and let's look at the rest of the prophecy : Born to those who have thrice defied him,
Now, while Lily and James have defied death 3 times, there's a million person in the same case on the planet. But WHO has defied Death three times in the Universe ?
The Peverell Brother. Harry's ancestors through the Potter Family.
Born as the seventh month dies, And the Dark Lord will mark him as his equal,
The Tale of the Three Brothers specifically says : "..."And then he [the third brother Ignotus, owner of the Cloak] greeted Death as an old friend, and went with him gladly, and, as equals, they departed this life." Harry having the Cloak works, as such. Alternatively, Harry "killing" Dementors make Death and he litteraly equals, in that they can destroy each other.
But he will have power the Dark Lord knows not,
The only unique powers Harry has are Dementor 2.0 and partial transfiguration Dementor 2.0 seems rather good.
And either must destroy all but a remnant of the other, For those two different spirits cannot exist in the same world.
I find really interesting that nowhere it is said that the dark lord "lives". "Destroy all but a remnant" could mean Dementing Harry, or Destroying all dementors except one, or giving Philosopher's Stones to everyone but without the death rate falling to zero (because accidental Death would still happen buit would not be an inevitability.
Note that this theory (still improbable, if I had to bet on it I wouldn't assign more than a 15 % chance for Death to be the "Dark Lord" of the prophecy) is still compatible with Dumbledore trying to trick Voldemort in a Dark ritual, or both of them interpreting the prophecy as in canon.
Well, so much for that !
Harry left "a portion of his life" (not an exact quote) in Azkaban, and apparently it will remain there forever. That could be the remnant that Death would fail to destroy.
Anyway, Snape drew attention to the final line in the prophecy. It talked about two different spirits that couldn't exist in the same world, or perhaps two ingredients that cannot exist in the same cauldron. That's not Harry and Voldemort; that's Harry and Death.
I mean, Harry has already sworn to put an end to death. It's how he casts his patronus. He's a lot less sure about killing Voldemort, and would prefer not to, if given the choice.
In light of chapters 96 I would update this chance to 45 %.
Putting my wager where my mouth is : http://predictionbook.com/predictions/20831
I only count one defiance there. Or did you mean the brothers plural accounted for three defiances? But the other two brothers just die horribly after making ill-chosen requests.
Well, each of them successively defied Death by asking a gift from it. Still far-fetched, I admit.
For all those wandering WHY wizards don't use their powers to get money from the Muggle economy...
Canon!Lucius does, according to Rowling (from her website Pottermore):
" The Malfoy name comes from old French and translates as 'bad faith'. Like many other progenitors of noble English families, the wizard Armand Malfoy arrived in Britain with William the Conqueror as part of the invading Norman army. Having rendered unknown, shady (and almost certainly magical) services to King William I, Malfoy was given a prime piece of land in Wiltshire, seized from local landowners, upon which his descendants have lived for ten consecutive centuries.
Their wily ancestor Armand encapsulated many of the qualities that have distinguished the Malfoy family to the present day. The Malfoys have always had the reputation, hinted at by their not altogether complimentary surname, of being a slippery bunch, to be found courting power and riches wherever they might be found. In spite of their espousal of pure-blood values and their undoubtedly genuine belief in wizards' superiority over Muggles, the Malfoys have never been above ingratiating themselves with the non-magical community when it suits them. The result is that they are one of the richest wizarding families in Britain, and [b]it has been rumoured for many years (though never proven) that over the centuries the family has dabbled successfully in Muggle currency and assets. Over hundreds of years, they have managed to add to their lands in Wiltshire by annexing those of neighbouring Muggles, and the favour they curried with royalty added Muggle treasures and works of art to an ever-expanding collection. "
I'd love to see a list of spoilers about things that were hinted at and reasonably sounding hypotheses, if anyone ever made one. Please do reply to this post with your discoveries and speculations. I'm also going to post mine, once I finish rereading HPMOR.
I just wanted to drop in to say that this song on the very popular nerdy YouTube channel vlogbrothers by Hank and John Green closely echoes the spirit and values of HP:MoR. Nerdfighters (the community centered around John and Hank's videos) would be a great potential audience for this fic. I think fans of Hank Green in particular would really appreciate this, because he is known as the "science and math" brother. Hank has often been excited about advancements in medicine in the past, and has supported things that the general public may consider icky, like genetic engineering and synthetic biology. I left a quick comment recommending MoR, but it will likely get swamped by the thousands of others. Repetition is power, though, so if you would like to leave a quick link to hpmor.com, that might help the cause of sanity (and entertaining fiction).
I didn't post this in the most recent thread, so I'll repost it there. Don't vote up/down twice, please. :)
IIRC, canon!Harry met a vampire in book VI. Does anyone know if they exist in the MORverse?
My instinct would be that rational!Harry would have already encountered them while researching immortality - especially since he frequently compares the wizarding world with D&D, where the primary form of magical immortality is to become an undead wizard, or "lich", although I doubt he would actually accept immortality via vampirism - they may be bound by magical law (or at least the Statute of Secrecy) but I expect it still screw with your utility function, magic and social/legal status.
I don't remeber him explicitly dismissing this path, which could be conservation of detail, indicative that vampires don't exist in MOR, or me misremembering.
Am I the only one who interprets the most recent XKCD as a Sorting Hat shoutout?
The wording isn't quite identical, and the sentiment isn't especially singular, so I'm probably wrong to do so, but I'm wondering if I'm alone in that likely wrongness.
Is there a new thread yet? If so, why can't I find it?
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/bfo/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/
Thanks. :)
Can we get a sub-reddit? I'm tired of finding out which is the right thread for the present, and all the posts are scrambled over multiple threads, etc.
A sub-reddit might also get new people to hpmor, as opposed to being on lesswrong.com
I don't have a reddit account, but I'd create one if hpmor was there.
http://www.reddit.com/r/hpmor
Did anyone archive the April Fool's chapter from ff.net?
The April Fool's chapter was never in fanfiction.net, it was in a site made to look like like fanfiction.net, where it still is.
"You can't put a price on a human life."
"I agree, but unfortunately reality has already put a price on human life, and that price is much less than 5 million dollars. By refusing to accept this, you are only refusing to make an informed decision about which lives to purchase."
Actually the estimate I heard was about 6 million dollars. And I'd argue the other way: That human life is the only thing you can put a price on, the basis for all trade. Whenever you cross a road, you're trading a slight chance of being run over for the value of being on the other side. When you eat something unhealthy, you're trading a portion of your life expectancy for the taste. So people do it every day, except they only trade in fractions of human life.
Or in abstract expected larger numbers of human lives. Direct human-life trading in larger amounts is more unusual, and usually carries strong stigma (hostages, slave trafficking, etc.)
Time for a new thread, surely.
http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/bfo/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/
I'm not sure if anyone has commented on this, but I just noticed it while rereading the Self-Actualization chapters:
Hermione went to tremendous lengths to be her own person rather than just something of Harry's, including becoming a general and fighting bullies. Now she has sworn herself into Harry's service and house forever. That is really sad.
That's only a legal formality, though. Harry hates the wizard society and wouldn't use its laws against her, and he'd discourage others from acknowledging it.
Still, Hermione (unlike Harry) cares what others think of her, so being surrounded by people who act as if she belongs to Harry is going to hurt her.
He's just (ab)used the laws of wizarding society to get Hermione out. I can certainly imagine him using his position over her if it is useful for solving the next crisis he has to deal with.
Also, Harry has a dark side, it might also do things.
The laws of Wizarding society are, broadly speaking, insane. There is a vast gulf between twisting or breaking a rule that makes no sense and violating the trust of a friend like Hermione.
It suddenly occurs to me that Dumbledore has seen two interactions between Harry and a Dementor. In the first one, it almost destroys him. In the second, he casts a Patronus that destroys it. Neither would seem to provide the kind of evidence that you would need to confidently assume that other Dementors would run away from you if you said "Boo" to them.
So, is this enough evidence for Dumbledore to decide that he's wrong about who broke Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban?
How well supported at this point is the theory that HJPEV is... unmodified, if you will? I.e., that the person we know as our protagonist is the product of James and Lily's son progressing linearly through eleven years in exactly the way that we've heard from various in-story sources, and not the product of any other, unknown influence whatsoever.
I am almost convinced that there's some other influence at work, but I don't know what to attribute it to. His oddities, especially his "dark side," could be from the Horcrux (assuming he is one in this 'verse) or something else from canon, which Eliezer would have taken to a more logical conclusion than JKR. On the other hand, rational!Riddle (or another unexpectedly rational entity) could well have done something drastically different from our canon expectations, and that could be what's made Harry the rather unusual creature that we know.
When I think of in-story sources about HJPEV's upbringing, I think
So, um. I'd say 'not very well supported at all'.
Thank you, this comes of posting in a hurry. Let me restructure that in a better way: How well supported is the theory that HJPEV's behavior is completely explained by rational extensions of something in-canon? Has he done anything that could not be explained by the interference of Horcrux!Riddle (who did in fact have pretty much the upbringing that McGonagall describes), and has anything at all happened in the story that would suggest something else at play there?
Ok, this is quite old stuff, and maybe it has been discussed already, but I couldn't find it,. Chapter 25:
No, not the ancient forebears. There are spells that sound "a lot older than Latin", and (at least in canon) there's a spell with incantation "point me" (Goblet of Fire, iirc).
So it looks like the spells haven't all been created at ancient times, but rather some spells have been created later. That is supported by McGonagall in Ch. 16, "people invent new Charms and Potions every year."
So, it seems there is some rather complicated way to invoke magic, and Charms present a shortcut that original discoverer of a spell has installed.
Probably because the spell only channels your magic, and there's a magical barrier that the locking spell has left, and that has to be overcome with magical strength. Or maybe it's more like pulling a lever than pressing a button. It's still efficient, but you still need some magical strength to perform the action.
As a safety mechanism. It prevents you from fooling around with the spell and killing somebody if you haven't actually meant it.
Since wordless Transfiguration doesn't have a word as a trigger, there needs to be a different mechanism for preventing accidental Transfigurationt. Going to some extra length mentally might be that safety mechanism
Hatred may not be the only way to cast Avada Kedavra, just as the happy memories are not the only way to cast the Patronus Charm, and Oogely Boogely doesn't need to be pronounced correctly if you don't care whether your bats glow. Maybe he'll discover a True Killing Curse.
I think that's Harry's point about Wingardium Leviosa. That it doesn't make sense for people many thousands of years earlier (as far back as Atlantis) to have created a spell that looks like a Latin-English mangling. That's why the immediately following sentence to the passage you quoted is:
So basically he had made a hypothesis (preprogrammed program-instruction by the people of Atlantis), but his theory seemed to collapse on this bit, that the language didn't fit.
Here's a question: how does excessive magic use cause unconsciousness? What's going on there, physically?
When we exert willpower or mental effort, it uses up glucose from the blood in the brain. One way you could explain the exhaustion that comes from using magic is that it requires mental effort to the point of creating dangerously low levels of blood sugar in the brain.
When someone becomes a witch or wizard, their consciousness/soul/whatever is removed from the brain, leaving the body a mindless puppet. The magic proceeds to control the body, but when the magic is exhausted it is no longer able to do so, and the body falls down unconscious.
This also explains why wizards are more resistant to damage (it's just the mindless puppet that's being hurt, so unless you hurt it enough that it can't be fixed, everything is alright, even if it's a Bludger to the head), and how Animagi can think when their human brains are transfigured into animal brains (the human brain wasn't doing any work, anyway).
If this is true, it should follow that brain surgery would have no effect on wizards. It should be pretty easy to test.
So wizards are Zombies...
Nice theory, but it has a flaw : effects on the body of the wizards do affect their mind, eating chocolate helps to counter the Dementor effect, alcohol seems to have the normal effect, and (at least in canon) the wizard teens are affected by hormones like normal teens. So it would require the magic to scan that, and affect the mind in a similar way than a normal chemical effect on the brain would work, but yet still preserve the "resistant to damage" property ? Well, starts to be quite un-occamian.
But they don't wear any fancy jewelry, though. And their animal familiars are not nearly as cute.
Edit: Hmm, Soul Gems as Horcruxes... Horcrux'd wizards as liches... we're on to something here.
A good question.
Maybe "magic" is what gives you a free will, ie the explanation of how a will can exist with a certain measure of independence from the neurons. So all consciousness requires a small amount of magic, and only wizards and magical creatures have the ability to further manipulate that mysterious magic.
And if a wizard exhausts his magic, he becomes unconsciousness until his magic recovers, because the mind can't work without the basic .
If magic is a prerequisite for conciousness, it would also explain the correlation between intelligence and strong wizardry.
That would send a message quite contrary to lots of what LessWrong is about; so it'd be highly unlikely for Eliezer to have something like that in HPMoR.
Besides you are confusing at least three different concepts -- (a) "free will" in the sense of being active agents who make our decisions based on our own inner drives, (b) "consciousness" in the sense of being qualia-possessing self-reflective entities, and (c) "consciousness" in the sense of being mobile and receiving significant input about your physical surroundings (i.e. not sleeping or passed out).
When sleeping, people can be conscious in the (b) sense (as they can dream), but they're unconscious in the (c) sense.
It all makes sense now: wizards are Zombies!
I suppose a generous reading would be that magic is what allows one to go on thinking in possessing-ghost form once your neurons are left burning on the floor of your enemy's home. Which seems trivially true.
If you’re going for “what’s going on”, you might as well ask where does the “excessive” come from. I mean, you could switch to a “lever” instead of a “button” analogy to “justify” that the magician provides energy for the “magical mechanism” of a spell, but the ridiculous amounts of energy implied by even some low-level spells means that won’t actually explain much.
(For example, first years can fly broom-sticks with non-Newtonian mechanics. This either means that a large amount of energy is used to simulate them over normal physics—compensating for inertia with very high accelerations—or that the “normal” physics is actually simulated on a completely different real physics substrate, in which case all bets are off.)
Also, the reasoning for the single-magic-gene, if true in-universe, raises the question of where do all differences in magic ability come from. Sure, Harry considers training and conscientiousness and talent, but only that seems to me not enough to explain differences that we see. Alohomora is explicitly said to balance the casters’ magic powers, and the interaction of many spells (e.g., shields and shield-breakers) are seen to depend on the relative ability of the casters.
There are huge differences of ability between a talented painter and the average person, but that would only explain stuff like creating spells. Pushing a button on a printer works the same for both.
And in the “lever” analogy, just as relative strength is not governed by a single gene, differences between magical power are hard to explain with a single gene. (Even if there are more than two alleles, some of which are magic but with varying strength, and some of which are not, that should result in quantified levels of power rather than what appears to be a continuum.)
I would just go with a combination of “it just ignores the rules” and “intuitive user interface”. If whatever causes magic allows spells like Somnium, it can make you progressively tired and then unconscious as you exhaust your magic ration, just to make a point.
I tend to think of spells as being less like a button or a lever, and more like a high striker. If the spell is the ringing of the bell, then you've got to put sufficient energy in to attain that. More energy will allow you to hit the bell harder, and thus ring it louder, but you have to be able to put enough in to reach the basic threshold in order to ring it at all.
Of course, spells routinely output more energy than they could be getting out of the metabolisms of their casters, so for the analogy to hold up under extension, it's more like an electronic high striker, which sounds a siren at different volumes depending on how hard you hit the target.
But can they build them?
I don’t think so—I read something about it being somewhat hard, but I don’t remember the details or the source.
Hmm, you got a point. The energy required to fly them should be spent while flying; if you’d do it on creation, there would be the risk of it being exhausted at some point. But Hogwarts has been running for centuries and it’s constantly doing stuff that needs lots more energy than a broom.
I guess my example is just silly. Without more information guessing about the relative magnitude of energy expended for various magics is useless.
I’d say that the energy involved for pretty much all spells is too huge to give any plausibility to the idea that it’s somehow generated by the human body through the genome, with or without a magic gene.
There could be multiple factors that govern the strength of wizardry. For example the base could be a trained component like muscle strength, but the total observable strength also depends on your ability to control it. If you have very fine control over the magic (ie very precise wand movements, nearly perfect self control for spells that require it), you can make your magic flow much more efficiently. A bit like pulling a lever into the exactly correct direction, or a bit in the wrong direction -- it'll still work, but requires more strength.
If it worked like that, there’s still the question of “what component?” Muscles becoming stronger as a result of exercising them is a complex behavior, governed by many genes. Harry’s reasoning towards one “magic marker gene” suggests that is not the case.
I can think of all sorts of possible explanations, I just can’t see one that looks really reasonable; since we have no actual explanation about how stuff works, you need a lot of assumptions for anything and stuff tends to be arbitrary. If you think about it, all substances being combinations of four elements, or Lamarckian inheritance, are plausible explanations if your only observations are on the level of “some stuff burns” and “water quenches fire” or “children kinda look like parents”.
(“Inventing” new charms is mentioned several times, but there are basically no details about how that works. Harry just changes how to apply a couple of existing charms, and he seems to have figured out how he might pick ingredients for potions, but even there he’s not told where the gestures and ritual come from.)
Maybe using magic doesn't strengthens your magic the way that physical exercise strengthens your muscles, but rather similar to a river carving its way through the landscape -- the more water flows, the deeper the river bed becomes.
Such a mechanism wouldn't require any more genetic information, because it's not a property of the individual magic user.
Hypothesis: the Source of Magic is an AI with the goal to work in the way (magical) people really believe it should work. Or maybe, to make the world work in the way (magical) people really believe it should work. The strength of belief appears to be important, so a strong belief can override weak ones. On the other hand, when something is already "generally known" to work in a certain way, this is a very strong belief.
Examples:
1. Broomsticks work by Aristotelian physics [because it was what people believed when the broomsticks were invented, and now people just know (=believe really strongly) that's how broomsticks should behave]
2. Spell names and laws [inventors create spells by finding sounds they believe should work. When spells become known, they stabilize in that form]
3. Potions Law
4. Ritual magic [people really believe in sacrifices and not getting something for nothing]
5. Ghosts (and afterlife?) [effects of religious beliefs]
6. Harry's partial transfiguration [very strong belief, finds a loophole to not be in conflict with existing strong beliefs of other people]
Magic doesn't make sense to Harry because it now reflects lots of ad hoc rules and beliefs accumulated in centuries. Wizards and witches believe them from childhood. [No wonder they are half-insane.]
Interestingly, this hypothesis implies that Dumbledore's narrative causality may actually work - people do believe in stories.
Wow. That's just an absolutely fabulous theory. In one fell swoop, you explain why EY appeared to leave AI out of his largest story yet, plausibly account for a vast array of in-story phenomena, and rehabilitate a character (Dumbledore) who seems suspiciously irrational for someone who's supposed to have oodles of meaningful in-story-real-world accomplishments. The theory has falsifiable, concrete predictions -- for example, we should not expect the AI to care if Harry asks it really nicely to give everyone magic powers; nor should we expect magic to be able to do anything that a super-intelligent AI couldn't do (simulating cat-brains is AOK; uncomputably complicated time loops are not OK). The theory also seems to fit with Chapter 82's hint that people subsumed by pheonix fire are re-instantiated "instances" of a more general Fire. In other words, the AI can maybe call the "Harry" subroutine somewhere else if it wants.
I'm in awe.
One possible victory condition if the AI in fact is coded to enforce the beliefs of people with a particular genetic marker is for Harry to find a way to put that marker into most people / his friends using a retrovirus. Does anyone else find it in the least suspicious that Harry's father is an expert biochemist?
So, have there been any fundamentally uncomputable events in the story so far? :-)
With Eliezer's comments about how plots are better when they aren't needlessly complicated and the point isn't to trick the reader into wildly off-base or over-the-top-speculation, I've increased my probability of Harry being placed into Slytherin by the actual Sorting Hat up to 50%. If we assume that it was Dumbledore that veto'd the Hat's choice, why didn't he place Harry into Gryffindor? He would have been much closer to MacGonagal, Dumbledore's most loyal agent. Was he trying to keep him close to Hermione? Can anyone recall support for that in the text?
HPMOR!Harry's wand signalled itself to him by BLUE and BRONZE sparks, while Canon!Harry's one made red and gold. (IMO as a reference to the Phoenix, not Griffindor).
I'd take it as a strong hint from EY that Ravenclaw IS Harry true House.
This is another case of an issue that's supposed to be mysterious to the characters, but not to the readers. We know what actually happened: the Sorting Hat said "SLYTHERIN!" to try to scare the crap out of Harry, to make his life flash before his eyes, to make him think that his hopes and dreams were ruined, so he would get serious and vow right then and there not to become the next Dark Lord. But the Hat actually, truly meant him to go to Ravenclaw.
Harry acknowledges that this is what happened: "It had been an awfully cruel prank the Hat had played on him, but you couldn't argue with the results on consequentialist grounds."
No other characters know what happened, so it adds to Harry's mystique for them, but we, who saw the whole thing from Harry's point of view, ought to know better.
Harry is wrong sometimes. From his point of view Quirrell is awesome, and engaging his Dark Side is a perfectly valid option whenever he runs into a problem hard enough (despite his vow to not become the next Dark Lord). He acts more Slytherin than Ravenclaw most of the time.
If Harry had an image of himself as belonging to Ravenclaw and not Slytherin, and the Hat told him "You deserve this too" and then yelled out "SLYTHERIN!"... and then after a few seconds of silence yelled out "Just Kidding, RAVENCLAW!" - given that Harry knows nothing about any of the major players, and has no idea how powerful Dumbledore is and his usual crazy-style of plotting - than to him the most probable explanation is likely "The hat must've played a cruel prank on me to teach me a lesson."
But if he had knowledge of the politics and players in Hogwarts, didn't have such a strong self-identity as Ravenclaw, and hadn't had his "prank" mental network readily available due to the Hat scolding him about it just a few minutes beforehand, a neutral interpretation of the facts would've placed at least an equally high probability on someone meddling with his sorting, as on the Hat played its first prank in over 600 years.
Your "neutral interpretation of the facts" apparently ignores the facts that the Sorting Hat has never been self-aware before, that Harry is aware that the Hat is self-aware now, and that the Hat is borrowing a lot of knowledge and a little bit of personality from Harry's own brain at the time of the prank.
I just fail to see how you can take an explanation that fits 100% of the known facts, and then somehow, by applying
, you come up with a needlessly complicated and speculative idea that assumes the existence of secrets we have no clues about.
I don't see how self-awareness makes any sort of difference?
Either explanation fits 100% of the known facts. Harry assumes the Hat pranked him because that's what he wants to believe. But that Harry was actually sorted into Slytherin is considered more likely by several intelligent characters in the story. Regarding Quirrell's belief of this, Harry even admits:
What evidence does Harry have that Quirrell lacks? The only relevant special knowledge he has is that the Sorting Hat had some extra ability to appreciate humor at the time of his sorting, and wanted to steer him to Hufflepuff. I don't consider that strong evidence. However it is the reason that I even allow a 50% chance that the prank really did occur, as opposed to being 80%+ certain that Harry is actually Slytherin.
And what sort of evidence did Quirrell have that Harry lacked? A knowledge of how Dumbledore works, how the various factions in the school mesh, and the history of the Sorting Hat's lack of screwing around when it comes to the business of sorting. Harry knows all those now, but he's already fixated on his previous answer and doesn't want to abandon it.
We've been given more than just clues - we've been told directly by two characters that Harry is actually Slytherin, indirectly by at least one, and have Harry's actions to judge him by. When the most intelligent and rational character in the fic considers this the simplest/most probable answer, I don't think it's that complicated or speculative. It may very well be a large flashing neon sign by the author saying "Hey! Consider this hypothesis! This one right here that I've repeated several times and pointed out how likely it seems!"
You said:
But you did not consider that since the Sorting Hat was sentient for the first time in its existence, it would be very likely to do other things for the first time in its existence.
Seriously? Harry knows the entirety of his conversation with the Hat, which no one else knows. In that conversation the Hat used all of Harry's knowledge and vocabulary to try to convince him to go to Hufflepuff, Harry obstinately refused, the Hat got pissed at Harry's obstinacy, and then, with Harry demanding to go to Ravenclaw, and the Hat admitting that only Harry's choices can determine where he belongs, the Hat says "You deserve the scary thing I'm about to do to you" and calls out "Slytherin!" and lets Harry stew on that for eight full seconds before calling out "Ravenclaw!"
That is hardly a mere "extra ability to appreciate humor".
Yes, he does, but he does not have all the information necessary to come to an informed conclusion. Harry does, and so do we. Harry and we are the only ones privy to his conversation with the sentient Sorting Hat.
And when thinking about the above passage on a more "meta" level, if Eliezer had intended us to have any lingering doubts about the Sorting, he would not have have flatly had our protagonist say "Professor Quirrell was wrong," and he certainly would not have gone on to point out, in the very passage you quoted, that Quirrell did not have all the evidence available to him, so as to corroborate his statement.
I know you want this to be a mystery, but there are plenty of other mysteries in this story to wonder about that are far more deserving of your attention than this matter, which was settled many chapters ago.
I wonder, what was its last prank?
The actual quote is 800 years, which is how long the Hat's existed.
I was under the impression Hogwarts was founded over a millennium ago. With a wizard's lifespan being around 200 at most, the founders would need to have raised Hogwarts as infants for the hat to only have existed for 800 years.
and
and
ETA: Oh, haha, maybe I should have just gone with
But Harry is a Slytherin. At his very core is his ambition to become immortal and reorganize the universe to his satisfaction. He wants knowledge, and he wants it for its own sake, but it's not his deepest wish. If he looked into the Mirror of Erised he'd see himself as the benevolent and omnipotent lord of the universe, not himself surrounded by books.
Almost all the possible consequences of Quirrell's plot with Hermione might have helped Quirrellmort somehow:
The question is which set of events Quirrell most wanted to happen, and whether he will consider the events of Chapter 81 a success or a failure. Harry successfully saved Hermione, which might indicate failure if we take the plot at face value. But Quirrell would surely have foreseen Harry's going to any lengths to save Hermione, and Quirrell knows that Harry read that Rita Skeeter article. Perhaps he
The Harry-horcrux has a speaking part in Chapter 81, saying "DIE" when he looks at Dumbledore. If Quirrell's main goal was not to immediately rid Harry of all his strongest allies, but simply to further coax out Harry's Dark Side and further drive the wedge between Harry and Dumbledore, then he can count it as a success.
Maybe Quirrell didn't actually have one particular outcome in mind; maybe he just wanted to inch the pieces forward so he could plan his next move.
I do hope that tomorrow's chapter shows us what happened with Quirrell, how he got out of his interrogation without drawing attention, and what his mental state is about all this. If everything up to now has gone as planned, surely the rest of the arc will show Quirrell's attempt to make Harry believe that Dumbledore was behind it all. If everything has not gone as planned, if Quirrell did not expect to see Harry spend 250% of his fortune to save Hermione, then Quirrellmort will be pissed, and I shudder to think what his drastic next move might be.
Every possible result is a negative for Harry when his closest ally is accused of murdering his next closest ally. Even if he "wins" it is going to hurt, and it did. I can't square that with the motives of someone who wants to make Harry dark and strong. It is a big risk, especially when you are stuck in an interrogation cell for the grand finale.
We have inferred that he got between Snape and Lily with the notes in the potions book. But Harry has no way of inferring this from the above. The only thing I can think to infer here is that Dumbledore was taking an "inappropriate interest" in Lily while she was a student.
I'm running with the theory (from Donny) that the prophecy was planted by Dumbledore as a plot to lure Voldemort into a trap, where Lily completed a dark ritual to protect Harry and destroy Voldemort should he attack Harry. Thinking further on this, I concluded that Lily would have to be in on the plot for it to have any hope of working. Then I recalled feeling that there was some "off" connection between Lily and Dumbledore, and came up with this.
What was Harry supposed to conclude from Dumbledore invisibly sneaking into Lily's room while she was a student, besides the obvious that Dumbledore was fooling around with Lily? It almost seems like he's trying to tell Harry he's his father. See his sadness and disappointment later in the scene.
Objection. I don't believe Lily completed a ritual. She's not the one who spoke the words in the correct order. I don't think Voldemort would accidentally confer a protection upon an intended victim, either.
My version of this theory has Dumbledore creating the same setup as in canon because he thought it would lead to the same result as in canon. Not because he'd read the novels or anything, but because it looked like the logical outcome to him. He's brilliant, but no rationalist, and he fell prey to the conjunction fallacy, formulating a complicated plot with lots of plausible-sounding detail.
Still, he got two out of three right. Lily and Snape acted as expected. If only Voldemort had been a little dumber.
ETA, just to be clear: I think Dumbledore expected Harry to be protected and Voldemort to be defeated by the power of Lily's love, as in canon. He thinks Voldemort would be blind to an attack from this direction, because
ETA2: Actually, the part about the conjunction fallacy is wrong. I mistook Snape's involvement for an extraneous detail, but it's not. For the protective magic to activate, Lily needed to have been offered the chance to survive. Snape's role was to beg Voldemort to spare her. So every piece of the plot has a function.
Hmm, haven't we seen something like that before? "I know you arranged my father's death." [pause] "No. -- I am your father."
I started writing a counter-argument and remembered the date. This is meant as an April 1st joke, right?
Thoughts on the whole "guess the solution" situation from last chapter.
When I first reached the end of the chapter and the "You have 5 days to find the solution" bit, for some frantic moments I was worried that Eliezer would let get Hermione go to Azkaban if we weren't sufficiently clever to find the solution. It seemed rather unlikely, because we didn't seem to be so very near the end of the whole of HPMOR (and surely Hermione's effective killing would have major repercussions).. but I had already known about the similar situation in Three Worlds Collide, so yeah, I couldn't be quite sure. I read the related author's notes trying to check for a confirmation or the opposite, but there was nothing clearly stated, only the hint that a solution should have been clearly foreshadowed.
At around this point, after a few brief seconds of considering begging Eliezer not to let Hermione get eaten by Dementors, no matter whether we find the solution or not -- I just decided to do the simpler and slightly less embarrassing thing and actually figure out the solution instead. (Reading the author's notes had convinced that it was meant to be a fair solution after all)
I must have come up with the idea in 5 minutes after that, as I was rereading the chapter. I don't remember the exact thought-process, but I do remember that the solution "snapped easily into place" as Eliezer mentioned. When I thought it, I was certain this was the solution. It was pretty much the only earlier significant discussion of the handling of debts in Wizarding society. From an authorial-perspective it explained why Fred&George's article had to talk about saving Arthur Weasley from the Imperius curse, instead of saving his life. That a trading-of-debts was possible was indicated in the very previous chapter (though the particular debts mentioned wouldn't have been valid).
So, yeah, once I had thought it up, I was pretty confident it was the real solution, enough to bet money on (and win some money) it. It had snapped into place.
During the later discussions I did think also about whether Malfoy will try to bankrupt the Potters in addition to the debt, because I did consider the fact that the monetary compensation of Arthur Weasley was also mentioned in that Rita Skeeter article... which thought was also partly behind several of my various specifications I listed at the time I did the bet-- it being a lesser debt, it being only part of the solution, etc, but I didn't mention it for two reasons (a) At this point Eliezer had already clarified that Harry's solution was really written, and that therefore my adding further details wouldn't actually help save Hermione (b) I had been sufficiently convinced by Malfoy "not for any price will I trade away vengeance", etc, that I thought it would most likely not be a monetary debt that Malfoy would seek in compensation.
(b) was wrong, because I didn't properly consider that Malfoy might make an offer that he believed it certain to be refused, and that would be obvious to all that he thought it certain to be refused. I should have considered this possibility, because after all Lucius had already done the same in the current chapter.
What I thought Malfoy might seek in additional compensation, or that Harry Potter might offer in additional compensation, if the two debts didn't cancel themselves out... would be an Unbreakable Vow towards the purpose of hunting down whoever was behind the plot to hurt Draco or the killing of Narcissa; much parallleling the earlier promise Harry made to Draco himself. I felt this was the sort of thing that might let both Lucius Malfoy and the Wizengamot save face; and yet would produce interesting consequences further down the line.
Just an odd thought about something Draco said in Chapter 48:
...is - is Hogwarts sentient? If it's animate, capable of creative expression, and self-constructing, it's not out of the question that Hogwarts might be in some sense intelligent or alive. It'd also explain some things about the Hogwarts security system, to say nothing about the Room of Requirement, in canon.
A couple of questions on HP lore:
1) If Lucius should happen to have an “accident”, does Draco have any living adult relatives close enough to manage his inheritance until majority? Lucius seems to have no siblings, his mother is dead, he never mentions grand-parents—in fact, I can’t actually recall any living Malfoy being mentioned, and other than Sirius and Belatrix I don’t know any Blacks alive. This tree has a Nymphadora Tonks as a cousin (or maybe aunt?), but I don’t think she qualifies. (Sirius is even less closely-related to Harry and did get temporary guardianship of him in canon IIRC, but he was also his Godfather, and it might have been just Dumbledore’s unilateral decision. Nymphadora’s father was a muggle and her mother was disowned, and she’s an Auror anyway if she’s still alive in MoR.)
2) How come it is Dumbledore specifically that has guardianship of Harry? I don’t remember anything to imply a will or kinship, it seems to be just because he’s Headmaster of Harry’s school. Would he become Draco’s legal gardian, too, if Lucius (and maybe a few other relatives) are taken out of the picture?
1) Andromeda Tonks née Black. There are reasons that might not work, with the disowning and so forth. It's likely Lucius has a godparent lined up like any responsible parent.
2) As far as I can find, it is not laid out why it is Dumbledore as opposed to anyone else in general. (In specific it is not this person or that person for whatever reasons, but never mind that.) I would wildly speculate that it is because Dumbledore wanted to be the guardian of the Boy-Who-Lived and no one could tell him no.
You’re right, didn’t notice she would still be alive. Well, Andromeda and Nymphadora were both in the Order of the Phoenix, so them getting Draco would be similar to Dumbledore getting him.
And given that pure-blood families seem to be rather “sparse”, at least since the war, and Lucius is about the hardest of that faction to get rid of, then even if Draco has another living relative or a designated guardian that shouldn’t be a huge obstacle, unless there is a very complex guardianship chain set-up.
So it seems like there should be other ways of dealing with the debt than simply paying it. I’m pretty sure Harry wouldn’t do that unless Lucius does something really stupid, but he probably could do it (using a Dementor is the only idea I have; he probably could think of more). But at least Dumbledore and Quirell should be powerful enough to do it, and might conceivable want to.
For example, if Quirell wanted to separate Harry from Draco and Hermione, and this plot doesn’t achieve that (I’m not sure how Draco will feel about Harry and Hermione now), he could try doing it the other way around by framing Harry for an attack on Lucius: Draco would hate Harry and Hermione could at least stop being his friend, if they’re both convinced. He might even convince Harry that Dumbledore is to blame at the same time. Hmm, I wonder if you could fake Dementation by creative abuse of Obliviation.
"You fools!" shouted Lucius Malfoy.
Lucius is using classical villain language (Matthew 5:22 etc...), which he really shouldn't be doing in any sensible world unless he's been contacted by Voldemort, or believes that Voldemort would have wanted him to do so. If we assume that he thinks that Voldemort wants him to play the villain role, the reason for his villainous behavior is made rather more clear.
I'd say trying to have a 12 year old girl tortured to death is a better example of villainous behavior. I also don't see much evidence of Lucius doing any of this to help Harrymort. It seems more like a desperate attempt to sabotage him out of fear and anger.
Agreed. However, very few people are villains in their own minds. And You Fool! has classically been a narrative tag for villains for over a century.
Progress of Eliezer vs JKR, Fvapr Ryvrmre unf fgngrq gung gur fgbel jba'g or ybatre guna gur frira obbxf, cre jbeq, naq gung vg'f zber guna unysjnl qbar
I don't get it pretty clear. Could you explain in few words?
The individual colored patches are the five first JKR books, and the overlapping patch is The Methods of Rationality, plotted by chapter and book, vs the number of total words written. MoR is now longer than all the first four books put together. The reason I made the graph was I was wondering if those two individual EY statements (rot13'd in my statement above) were would add up to make more than one bit of information, but they did not.
If Eliezer finishes Methods of Rationality at 150% of current length, we'd end up midway into the sixth book.
A matter with the Comed-Tea that was bugging me for a while:
Chapter 14:
Hypotheses: Comed-Tea on person = impulse to drink, Comed-Tea not on person = no impulse to drink.
According to Chapter 12:
So no matter what, even if you don't end up drinking it, you will get the Impulse before something funny happens.
Chapter 46:
So Harry has used up all of his Comed-Tea. (edit: it appears that Harry actually has tons left unless he's not mentioning some he drank/gave away, look at bottom of post)
...
WHY? WHYYY?!
It is apparent that you'll still get the impulse to drink whether or not you do end up drinking. So why didn't he save a can he's never ever going to drink?
Even if Harry will end up choking on his saliva, wouldn't the early notification of something ridiculous happening be helpful to him in any way? Like... it'd be an early warning to be prepared for whatever another person could say/do in conversation. Or if he's looking for interesting information, say from the library, he can just walk by all the shelves until he gets the Impulse-- that'd be an indicator that he's near the shelf that has the interesting book. There might be more uses.
Chapter 14:
The charm even works for other people. If, for example, Harry wishes to test whether or not someone knows that Voldemort is alive, he could see if he has the Impulse to give that person a drink, all while thinking about saying that "The Dark Lord is still alive". If he gets the Impulse, they don't know. If he doesn't, then they already know/has been suspecting that he's been alive.
Chapter 8:
In fact, just asking, "Are you feeling thirsty?" seems to be enough to trigger the charm's apparent spit-taking powers. Harry could think about talking about Voldemort, and ask if the other person's thirsty. If yes, they would take whatever he's going to say as a surprise, if no, then they won't. Geebus this thing is powerful.
edit: actually, I'm going to check the text and see Harry actually used up his supply. Be right back.
Chapter 7: “Two dozen cans please.” (24) He tossed a can to Draco and then started feeding his pouch... (23) (Harry's drinking one too) (22) Harry snarled, threw the can violently into a nearby garbage can, and talked back over to the vendor. “One copy of The Quibbler, please.” He paid over four more Knuts, retrieved another can of Comed-Tea from his pouch... (21)
Chapter 8: The boy reached into his pouch and said, “can of soda”, retrieving a bright green cylinder. He held it out to her and said, “Can I offer you something to drink?” (20)
Chapter 12: Harry reached into his pouch and whispered, “Comed-Tea”. (19)
Chapter 46: “Three sodas." (16)
Nevermind, Harry lied, he still has tons unless he's been drinking them and not mentioning it. However the Comed-Tea hasn't been mentioned since, so it might actually be all gone.
Chapter 17:
He doesn’t seem to choke after this, but there follow several occasions where might have, had he been drinking. Anyway, the sentence means he kind of does use the Comed-Tea to kind-of-sort-of-predict the future, albeit not systematically.
Regarding the counting, his line in chapter 14 might be meant to suggest he had been doing more experiments “not on camera”. There are only three occasions where he’s seen using it until then; he shouldn’t have been that frustrated about the explanation after that few tries.
Earlier thoughts on Comed-Tea here
I interpreted Comed-tea as the simplest example of backwards causality - an event A causing event B, where A occurs /after/ B in time. Eliezer introduced Comed-Tea to make the point that the HPMoR universe does not operate by what we imagine to be standard causality rules.
I suspect that, the same way that messing with Time somehow results in a message saying "NO", it would be similarly impossible to commit to drinking Comed Tea.
Unless he actually followed through with saying that Voldemort is still alive, this wouldn't be enough.
We don't know that, committing to saying Vldemort is alive conditional on actually giving them a can might suffice.
Harry could still get a false negative. Remember, Harry will feel the impulse to offer a drink to Alice if and only if if Alice is about to be surprised. So not feeling an impulse to offer her a drink would indicate that either that Alice would not be surprised that Voldemort is alive, or that Harry will not actually end up telling her.
Again, we don't know that. The soda working in two steps as you seem to suggest (detecting future surprise, then determining whether that surprise is sufficient to cause soda spitting when drunk at the right time) is consistent with what we know about the soda. But that's not the only possibility consistent with what we know. The soda could also work in a single step and detect whether soda drunk at various points would be spit, without directly detecting surprise at all.
You are right, those are both possibilities. Though, one of them has been explicitly presented by the author, and endorsed by Harry. I don't think we have much reason to doubt the canonical interpretation.
Regardless of the reason for the spit Harry would still have to follow through with whatever that is for the signal to be sent back in time to cause the urge to drink. Otherwise it would be like Harry escaping from that locked classroom after Draco tortured him without then going back in time and sending the Professor to let him out.
So from what we know of Quirrell, it would be just like him (having recently learned about Comed-Tea) to have a policy of spitting out soda that he drinks, so that no one gains information on whether or not he is surprised.
You know, that is a really good idea.
Question entirely unrelated to the current events of the story:
What would happen if a person bought a pack of Comed-Tea and committed to drinking one every morning with breakfast?
You might simply forget to do it, or the idea might simply not occur to you unless there are enough surprising events going to follow every morning. Or, if the idea occurs to you, it might be because there are a couple surprising events followed by a scary event that causes you to abandon the idea. (À la “do not mess with time”, but less obvious.) The space of possible stable time loops is huge.
Also, like somebody mentioned, it might not be perfect. It probably doesn’t work within Azkhaban, for example. The producer might simply make it “good enough” and expect that most people won’t bother to ask for their money back.
It's likely that Harry's assessment of how Comed-Tea works isn't airtight. At the very least, it's certainly not the only possible explanation. The other comments posted so far have already produced more than one solid alternative.
Most importantly, there's no particular reason to suspect that the Tea relies on one thing alone. If it could be prescience + mind control, why not prescience + mind control + occasional bad taste? Harry's current top theory of prescience + mind control, for one, is already more complicated than it needs to be; we could easily cut out the prescience part and presume that the Tea works by merely lowering the drinker's threshold for choking on it/spitting it out.
Harry sometimes successfully resists the urge to drink Comed-Tea, and then something spit-take-inducing happens anyway. It's just a prediction with a clever user interface, not an artifact of eldritch power (except to the extent that predicting the future constitutes eldritch power, which is a nontrivial extent).
Getting you not to drink it at the wrong times seems at least as difficult as getting you to drink it at the right times though.
It probably doesn't matter when they actually open the can. The only thing that matters is that they sip the can at the exact right time. So every morning at breakfast, one of the many sips they take would be precisely timed with whatever the most shocking thing to occur during that period of time.
Well, that depends on whether people's decisions to drink Comed-Tea are controlled by the Tea's knowledge (??) of when they're going to see something ridiculous and whether it can affect anything else. It also depends on how powerful the mind-control is.
If it just sends a "drink Comed-Tea" impulse whenever something funny's going to happen, the precommitment would probably beat it. If it controls your mind, either you'd only be able to decide that if you were fated for twelve consecutive days of surprises with breakfast, or you'd just forget about it when you weren't fated for a surprise. If it can control the rest of the universe to any extent at all, it'd probably try to make you decide to begin at a time when you were likely to face a lot of surprises, and then conspire to delay breakfasts or make you forget to drink it until something surprising was going to happen. And we can't rule out that, as a desperate measure, it could alter your sense of humor a little, or prompt you to, e.g., turn on the television at the right moment.
I thought about it a bit more, and I'm going to hazard a guess.
It's charmed to taste bad if drunk at the wrong times. If the customer insists on drinking it anyway, it won't work and they can get their money back.
It's already charmed to mess with your desires by making you want it at certain times. Why can't it be charmed to make you not want it when it won't work. You wouldn't even notice that your preferences were being edited.
How far can that charm extend though? If I had never seen a can of Comed-Tea (hey, I already haven't,) I'd want to try it out according to a consistent schedule. If a can of soda has the power to control people's minds without their ever coming in contact with it, we're already getting into realms of omnipotence-via-soda.
Is there anyone keeping a history of the story? I suspect there are some clues to be gleamed from the edits.
(Note: I originally specifically asked for what was chapter 76 but now 77, but I realized that the thing I was looking for was there all along. Regardless I am still interested in a history.)
I wish to register my alarm at this:
Given that he was "amazed" at our performance this time, presumably an equivalent performance would pass the future test — but even if that's true it doesn't comfort me much.
I humbly beg our author to consider simply withholding updates, rather than issuing an ultimatum that may result in us never getting the "true" ending. "I won't post any more chapters until you solve this," rather than "I'm going to torch the last few years of your life if you're not smart enough."
I agree, this is a bad idea. I didn't figure out the answer when it was just for fun; my performance will probably only get worse under stress (and there's not much farther to fall from "uh... well, maybe it has to do with destroying Dementors, I give up").
I know this shows no confidence in my own rationality, or that of the other readers, but can we please just have a normal story?
There's nothing to worry about. We were presented with the same challenge in Three Worlds Collide. If we don't succeed, we will just get a false ending instead of a true ending.
So, after what happened.. turns out I was both wrong and right.
So failure would have just meant the end, and yet there was nothing to worry about: the much larger audience managed to figure out a space of much more effective solutions, along with a much more hilarious space of failures.
A always thought the false ending was better.
What can I say? I'm a sucker for stories where everyone lives happily ever after. :-)
I agree. The "false" ending definitely ranks higher in my CEV than the "true" ending.
…did you mean "along with a true ending"? Because "instead of" is precisely what I fear, but your links seem to indicate that we might get both endings? I don't understand, and Three Worlds Collide predates my awareness of Less Wrong so I don't have firsthand knowledge of exactly how that went down.
I think he meant that in case of failure, the happy ending will simply become the "false ending" instead of the "true ending". Since we get both either way, there really isn't a difference.
Gotcha. As long as we do get to read the full, complete, unbesmirched and unabridged "good" ending, I can live with that.
Yes. The exact phrasing of the challenge was:
Is it just me, or does that NOT sound like someone who just found out that dementors, thought to be manifestations of fear, are afraid of her student? I'm guessing it's one of two things:
She's so relieved that one of her student isn't going to be tortured to death that she isn't really processing everything else that's going on or
She thinks the whole thing is a trick Harry and Dumbledore came up with, and dementors aren't really afraid of Harry.
Either one could lead to a very entertaining aftermath.
A possibility is that she thinks very fast* and realizes that Harry ought to move away from the dementor (since it is effecting him some) but that it must be done in a way that makes Harry look strong, not weak. Showing that Harry has no problem standing undefended next to a dementor but walked away out of pity reinforces his strength nicely.
*= fast may actually mean that Dumbledore went back and gave her carefully edited information so she could make plans in advance
Or, she’s the head of Gryffindor, and she felt the need to at least appear to put up a brave front in support of her students.
Or, you know, relief + dry sense of humour = exactly that kind of reaction as a coping mechanism.
I am reminded of why I prefer British comedy to American - in American comedies everyone tends to be very obvious and melodramatic, while in British the tendency is more towards understated and deadpan. McGonagall's reaction fits perfectly into the latter category, trivialising the entire situation rather than mugging for the audience. (Not that some of the humour in the earlier chapters hasn't been overblown melodrama. Harry's parents leaving the room to have hysterics stands out as the most obvious example)
Fawlty Towers is a good example of the understated and deadpan nature of British comedy.
I'm kidding, by the way. Anyone who has seen it would know that it has a lot of broad slapstick humor.
Watch the original Bob Newhart series for understated and deadpan.
Or, in addition to everyone else's reasons, she's already working hard to maintain a calm demeanor for the sake of Hermione and Harry.
McGonagall is House Head of Gryffindor.
She is just that unflappable.
You have no idea how tempted I am to go back through the story and come up with a montage of Minerva sputtering incoherently / tearing her hair out / sticking her fingers in her ears and going la la la / at a loss for words / blurting something inadvisable / etc.
She's so unflappable that she's the best choice to demonstrate that a situation inspires the maximum amount of flap, I guess.
Unlike most of the room she knows Harry well enough that even him scaring a Dementor, no matter how surprising, wouldn't make her personally afraid of Harry; she might be worried about what trouble he could cause but she knows perfectly well that he wouldn't do anything to her. Besides it was less of a surprise for her since Dumbledore already told her Harry had developed a new charm.
~And furthermore, in her post-Azkaban-breakout council with Snape and Dumbledore, Dumbledore explicitly told her that Harry has unique magics that would help orchestrate an Azkaban breakout. She doesn't know the specifics of Harry's ability, but Minerva would certainly be able to deduce that it has something to do with Dementors.~
[EDIT: Apparently I did not read your last sentence before deciding to post this.]
I agree that her being afraid of Harry isn't something I would expect, but her comments make me think she isn't taking the situation seriously.
Or she already knew.
Or, she's simply ceased to be surprised at the extent of Harry's abilities outpacing her expectations of them.
I think I figured out how Dumbledore knew about Harry wanting to change the rules of Quiddich. Instead of reading student minds he used the cloak:
(Emphasis mine. Well, of course, that he would use it is obvious and the note is not proof of anything, but that’s what triggered the idea. Also, it makes a lot of sense that Harry’s father would lend the cloak to Dumbledore for study.)
If he did this on the train platform (which would make sense as an opportunity to be mysterious to new students, or just to Harry) there’s a bit of other interesting stuff he might have heard. Whatever Draco cast (the description doesn’t quite match Quietus, and it was wordless or at least not heard by Harry), it probably doesn’t work for a cloaked guy near you, and certainly not Dumbledore if he really wanted to listen.
Then maybe the cloaked Dumbledore is the one that told Harry to talk to Hermione.
Would that make the mysteries less complicated, or more?
We already know it was McGonagall that told Harry to find Hermione, no? Where's the mystery?
No? No, I suppose. Could you tell me how we know that?
Chapter 6:
Chapter 8:
While reading, I never considered this to be a mystery, or even a question.
FWIW I agree with your interpretation.
To take it further: McGonagall accompanies Harry to Diagon Alley, while (on Dumbledore's orders) learning as much as possible about him. She attempts to report to Dumbledore, but is speechless; Dumbledore may or may not be reading her mind, I don't know. Before this, he was happy to delegate the responsibility, but after this meeting, he naturally decides he'd better investigate personally. Platform 9.75 is the next convenient opportunity.
Yes, that's a lot of detail, but I think the story bears it out.
From this I understand that she said goodbye outside the LC (in the magic side), then he entered, presumably closed the front door, traversed the LC, reached the back door that leads to the muggle side, and then he heard a whisper behind him. Unless the distance between the front door and back door is very short, if it was McGonagall she had to have gone to the trouble of crossing that long distance and exit the front door in the time it took Harry to turn around, or disappearing outright, or casting her whisper across the distance. While not impossible, none of that is very much in character for her, and Harry was distracted enough at the time not to notice.
I think it’s supposed to be a Clue, or at least a Mysterious Foreshadowing Event (TM). I’m not saying it was Quirrell, but the fact that he was noted to be there earlier seems like a hint. Although Hermione seems to have been an opposite influence to Quirrell, as Aris mentions below, remember that Quirrell is a very high level player. Much of that might have been intended as part of a complex Xanatos gambit, which can have more than three steps if you have access to prophecy and time-travel. “Make goverment crush hero’s girlfriend, hero crushes government” was suggested as a possible Quirrell plot, you need only prepend a “Make hero love girl” step to justify him being the whisperer.
(But don’t anchor on that one, plots that involve time knotting have plenty of opportunity for weird facts being explained as someone’s intent.)
To add another data point: When I read that, and after some subsequent events, I couldn't quite manage to ignore the fact that Quirrell was in the Leaky Cauldron at the time.
Perhaps you should.
McGonagall said what she meant to say, and then she said goodbye. Also, McGonagall doesn't do the Batman Exit at any other point in the fic or the source.
Between this and the auncle comment by pedanterrific, it seems plausible that it was Quirrel who said that line.
It's an ugly hypothesis, because so far Hermione's influence in Harry has been that of greatest opposition to Quirrel's influence... If Quirrel set it up so that they met, then this would have all been to his purpose since the beginning, setting up some future betrayal from Hermione from the start. (e.g make a paragon of goodness friends with Harry, so that he'll do anything to keep her from Azkaban, even if that means declaring war on magical Britain?)
Thankfully, I don't consider it very likely. I think this being McGonaggal who matched the two of them is still much more likely.
Alternatively, perhaps Quirrel thought Hermione would make a good straw foil to himself. Set up the main anti-Quirrel voice in Harry's life as someone who's conspicuously naive, and Harry will be more inclined to see Quirrel as the voice of reason rather than the voice of evil.
You would think that Harry, on hearing a mysterious voice, would mention something. Harry turned around expecting McGonagall, not expecting some random person. Harry heard McGonagall.
The author would also mention that the voice changed owners or sounded strange. It's clever writing to drop clues in plain sight to the reader. It's not clever writing for your story to omit sensory experiences that are immediately apparent to all the involved characters, but are not conveyed to the reader.
I would be very surprised if there were a grand total of 0 voice-changing charms in existence.
And besides, it's a whisper. That's probably significant in some way.
You're multiplying hypothesises unnecessarily.
Every member of Hogwarts could actually be Dumbledore with polyjuice and a time turner. Remember we only know about the 6 hour limit from him (or people that could be him, or forged by him). There's no reason it couldn't be so, just like there's no reason that the person Harry was having a conversation with couldn't have changed out by a an invisible man with a 'changemyvoiceio' spell.
But it's way more reasonable to assume that people are who they think they are, and that the person that starts a conversation is the same one that finishes it.
Suddenly, Dumbledore EVERYWHERE.
The way I see it, she then had a last minute thought that the loneliness avid book-reader Harry mentioned and the loneliness she saw in avid book-reader Hermione might be healed if they met each other. But she didn't want to say anything more, because it'd be inappropriate to actually discuss another student to Harry.
I think Eliezer just being silly with the dramatic-ness of the thing has a higher prior than Dumbledore going around invisible and playing ventriloquist to make him think that McGonagall told him to find Hermione -- especially when Dumbledore could have accomplished just as much by e.g. telling McGonagall to tell Harry to find Hermione. (And there's no other player at this stage, neither Quirrel, nor Snape, nor Lucius, that would know or care about Hermione at this point. It's unlikely that even Dumbledore knew anything about her beyond that she was a new Muggleborn student.)
But I don't think this is anything more complicated or mysterious than Minerva thinking that Harry & Hermione would be a good match for each other.
Now I do find it slightly more plausible that Dumbledore was following Harry around invisible during his King's Cross station visit -- but that's mostly because in that occasion Harry Potter was known to be in a known location and thus might have been a potential target for enemies and therefore require protection.
You are making excuses for your assumptions by piling on more assumptions. Chapter 6 is written in a way that does not make the speaker clear. That looks deliberate. We are given Harry's opinion of who said it, but he never confirms that with McGonagall. We've been in McGonagall's head quite a few times, and she has never thought back to playing match-maker.
You may believe that was McGonagall. You may be right. But when you say, "we already know," you are mistaken.
You're misusing the word assumption. I don't *assume" that was McGonaggal's reason, I simply judged it to be the most likely and most natural explanation, given the facts in evidence. But yes, I did assume that my initial reading of the text and that Harry also wasn't being mistaken about who told him about Hermione. As I said, I didn't even realize some people saw this bit as a mystery. That's what true assumptions look like, I guess, when one doesn't even realize some people consider it a question.
Okay. As I said, when I wrote that sentence, i didn't even realize there existed people who considered this a question. Discussing more about this would probably just be about what the word "knowledge" means.
Since we're doing this by chapter now, I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I'm not sure where to put it otherwise.
I was rereading chapter 26, Noticing Confusion, and-- maybe I'm not the first person to notice this-- I was thinking of a certain other indestructible diary.
Surely Quirrelmort wouldn't give Harry that diary, right? But if the book is indestructible, and made of paper, there is magic involved. He does say Bacon was a wizard, but also that his experiments never got very far without a wand. Making books indestructible does not seem like not getting very far.
I thought it was fairly obviously that diary, and thus an effort by Quirrelmort to take over/destroy Harry the way Ginny was (almost) in canon. Harry has apparently avoided the trap entirely because he is under the logically reasonable impression that he needs to learn Latin to read Roger Bacon's diary. I'm pretty sure other people have reached the same conclusion in previous threads.
We then see a second effort to approximately the same end with the Dementor brought on school grounds (at Quirrelmort's instigation) with Harry's wand "accidentally" being left near the cage.
Jbeq bs Tbq fnlf bgurejvfr. (Pgey-S 'rnegu-funggrevat')
Vagrerfgvat.
Honest dilemma: Should Hermione decide to get the memories of casting the Blood-chilling Charm obliviated?
On one hand, one would think that messing even more with Hermione's mind should be a no-no. On the other hand, we're pretty sure it's a false memory, and it seems grossly unfair for her to have to remember attempting to commit a murder that she didn't truly attempt.
Second question: Regardless of what Hermione should do, will she so decide it?
Third question: If she doesn't so decide, will some helpful other person override said choice for her sake and obliviate her anyway?
If she wanted to do that, I'd have the memory extracted and saved as evidence.
If she does get the memory erased, she's going to be awfully confused when someone else inevitably brings it up again.
Edit: it occurs to me that you probably only meant the memory of performing the charm itself, not the memory of being put on trial for murder. But even if they did that, I suspect she'd imagine something just as bad to fill the space, knowing what was supposed to go in it.
Prediction: Harry will try to explain the general concept of arbitrage to Dumbledore, and it will be blocked by the Interdict of Merlin.
Because otherwise, certain things about the wizarding economy make no sense at all.
The Interdict of Merlin blocking transmission of non-magical knowledge between living minds?
Funny, but unfortunately people telling other people things is exactly what the Interdict of Merlin doesn't forbid.
The magics of Echo Gnomics from the Counterweight Continent?
I don't quite understand. Arbitrage has nothing to do with magic.
It's a joke, I think. And if it is it's hilarious.
I laughed aloud.
It was't a joke, but rather a completely serious prediction of a joke. That's hardly the same thing at all.
That one is funny too.
Prophecy update!
Like most readers, I took Trelawney's magical clock for a listening device. What if it transmits instead of receives?
We've seen Dumbledore manipulating events into storylike patterns. He was the instigator of the three-way tie, and he precipitated Snape's fall and eventual redemption by the power of love.
In his Fortress of Regrets, Dumbledore gave the surface appearance of being terribly reluctant to allow his decisions to cause the deaths of others. But in the last chapter he was ready to let a small child be tortured to death - with much trembling reluctance, of course - in order to preserve his plans.
Could he have caused Trelawney to deliver the prophecy, triggering the other half of Snape's destiny, while feeding the Potters to Voldemort to create his orphan hero?
Dumbledore meant for Voldemort to have been killed by Lily's sacrifice. He believes it happened. Instead, Voldemort, taking the obvious trap (thanks Vladimir!) as a challenge to his wit (thanks Gwern!), pretended to lose (thanks buybuydandavis!), while fulfilling the letter of the prophecy in a manner maximally advantageous to himself.
He disarmed the trap by goading Lily into attacking him. He left a burnt husk of a body - not his, Avada Kedavra leaves no marks - and departed unharmed. Voldemort's not a ghost possessing Quirrell. He stole Quirrell's body the way he stole Harry's, although the defect in the copying process is different. He doesn't need Bellatrix's flesh to rise again. He rescued her, at least in part, while acting in the role of someone who'd been fooled by Dumbledore's ruse.
Events have followed the course of prophecy because someone created one as a deception and someone else played along as a counter-deception.
It looks viable to me. What do you think?
Ha! So Dumbledore inserts prophecy as a trap, and Voldemort plays along to set his own trap. Nice!
One reason I like implanted prophecy theory is that it would play into rationalist biases against prophecy. I expect magic to be explained as commands to some AI in Atlantis. But prophecy? Seeing into the future? Messages from Atlantis?
Maybe it's just my bias against backward in time causality, which he has really committed to anyway, with Comed-Tea. Me, I'd rather that prophecies are explainable by other means.
But wouldn't this imply that Dumbledore doesn't really see Harry as the destined savior against Voldemort? Maybe he is just saving him to use as a trap again, unaware that Voldemort had already seen through the trap and was playing it for his own purposes? Yeah, saving him as a trap again makes sense, since the dark ritual should still be binding.
As long as we're adding in people playing the prophecy, how about Lily and James? They could have been playing the honeypot knowingly, in league with Dumbledore. I'm reminded of Dumbledore bringing up Lily Potter as a heroine, and noticed the incongruity at the time, though I didn't notice my confusion, as it were. Now that I do, saying she was a heroine seems like she was promoted beyond her station, unless she played a knowing part in her sacrifice to attempt to bring down Voldemort. That would certainly qualify her for the ranks.
One thing - a Voldemort plan to upload into Harry could be said to keep the terms of the dark ritual by allowing Harry to live on a permanent basis. And Harry as Dark Lord also satisfies those terms.
I’m not sure I understand, what incongruity do you see there? IIRC, at least in MoR, the prophecy says something like “born to parents that have thrice defied him”, so James and Lily did take part in the war other than just trying to defend Harry when Voldemort came after him. (They had to have defied him three times so that he would know who the child is, assuming he went after him because of the prophecy.) That sounds kind of heroic even without them doing it just as a trap, given what used to happen to Voldie’s opposition.
McGonagall's description:
Is this meant to explain the incongruity (if so, I still don’t get it), or to support that they were heroic (as McGonagall claims it)?
Support. It seems difficult to read that passage, then go on to see Dumbledore's naming Lily a heroine specifically as "promoting her beyond her station". Regardless of whether it's true or not, Lily = Hero is apparently the official Light-side position.
Point in your favor - when discussing heroines during his time as Headmaster at Hogwarts with Hermione, he suggested she might add both Alice Longbottom and Lily Potter to the list. I'd count that as a point in favor of "thrice defying" as membership to the club.
But still, does defying the Dark Lord thrice really put you in the top 3 witches of 40 years, and the top 15 or so witches and wizards? With all the people who died, with Dumbledore's room full of dead friends, there aren't others who had done more and risked more?
Lily and James were in hiding. Are they really the best examples of heroes in the last 40 years - two people in hiding from Voldemort?
Dumbledore:
Hiding in Godric's Hollow sounds more like the former than the latter to me.
Unfortunately, even in canon, "thrice defied" occurred offstage, so we don't know the details. Just to keep it clear, though, the prophecy occurred before the births of Neville and Harry, so well before the deaths of Alice and Lily, so whatever final defiances they had at their deaths are not part of the 3.
Yeah, so I can’t quite contradict you. (Also, I haven’t read all books, and for those I read I wasn’t very careful with the details.)
That said, my understanding was that first Lily and James fought Voldemort before they had Harry, and perhaps for a while afterwards. And presumably fought well, since they survived to do it thrice, and courageously, if they didn’t stop after the first time (which would qualify both as heroes). In contrast, the journalist mentioned at some point was killed, together with his entire family, after simply writing an article. He was possibly brave (or maybe just an optimist), but not quite heroic.
(It’s not perfectly clear, but the wording of the prophecy seems to suggest that they defied V. thrice before H.’s birth, and possibly again afterwards.)
My understanding was that they went into hiding after they learned that Voldie was going after Harry; presumably this was because of the prophecy, but it doesn’t mean they knew it was a trap (if it was). Note that in MoR Dumbledore says he taught Voldie & Co. not to go after families of the Order of the Phoenix just for blackmail—which obviously had to be before his death—which suggests that they went into hiding only because (and after) they knew Voldie had a better reason to go after Harry, the prophecy. But nothing (AFAIK) indicates that they’d be aware that it was a trap (if it was one).
Also, going into hiding is not necessarily selfish or cowardly (i.e., wanting just to protect themselves and their son). If they knew and believed the prophecy they could just be trying to protect the future defeater of Voldie. Everyone was surprised at baby Harry (apparently) destroying Voldemort, including those that knew the prophecy, so their theory must have been that he’d defeat him after he grew up.
But not what I'd call heroic, either.
On the other hand, it would be definitely be heroic to set yourself up as bait for Voldemort on what was fully intended as a suicide mission.
If we go with the theory that Dumbledore was setting a trap for Voldemort, based on a dark ritual, I would think it's rather important to make sure that Lily fulfills the dark ritual. IN fact, I think this theory requires that Lily and James are in on Dumbledore's plot, otherwise why not just apparate away? Have port keys set up? At least have Lily and James attack him together?
The prior odds that Lily will just happen to fulfill the terms of a dark ritual seem miniscule, even if we assume that Voldemort had been prepped to give Lily a chance to live.
If it was a plot by Dumbledore to have Lily perform a dark ritual, Dumbledore would tell her to increase the odds that she actually fulfills the ritual. Otherwise he's spending the lives of two members of the Order for a miniscule chance at killing Voldemort.
IN fact, if Dumbledore is going to do this kind of plot, he'd want to set it up in advance with the people involved, not draft them after he got the ball rolling, so that he could arrange a proper prophecy.
I’m not quite sure how you got to the dark ritual part. At least, I see no hint of this, nor any indication that Lily would go with it. Even if you’re going with the “love sacrifice as old magic” in canon and calling it “dark” just because it has a sacrifice, I’m not quite sure it would work if you did it with the explicit purpose of stopping Voldie (intent might taint the sacrifice). Dumbledore might create a situation where Lily would sacrifice herself for Harry, because Dumbledore intends to get rid of Voldie, but this (I think) requires that Lily not know about it, so that her intent is pure.
Canon is careless enough with details to be hard to use for explanations. For example:
It does sound weird, but then again if it were that easy even Voldie would have much more trouble killing people than it appears. http://harrypotter.wikia.com/ suggests that for side-along apparition (i.e., for taking someone with you who can’t do it themselves) the “passanger” needs to be a wizard, and might need to have a wand. So maybe they just couldn’t take Harry. Also, Voldie might just have a policy of casting Anti-disapparition jinxes when he attacks, it’s not clear how hard they are to make. Something like this might also explain why someone who’s hunted by Voldemort, even in hiding, doesn’t have with them a dozen intercontinental portkeys, just in case. (In MoR, at least. In canon they probably just didn’t think of it.)
If he’s actually thinking in story terms rather than faking it, he’d likely think it almost certain rather than minuscule.
In canon, portkeys aren't affected by disapparation jinxes - or so sayeth some site.
You couldn't portkey out of Azkaban, so there must be some way to stop them. But probably not a lot, since Quirrell was relying on a few of them after they cleared Azkaban. But yes, I agree that canon is weak here. That's the benefit of this scenario - it makes a tighter plot that makes sense. They didn't run because it was a trap.
Can't but this one at all. The assumption I'm working under is that it was a plot of Dumbledore's to destroy Voldemort. Why would thinking like a story mean that Lily would automatically fulfill the conditions of a dark magic ritual? Just because it would be convenient if she did? That just seems like massive wishful thinking on Dumbledore's part.
I wouldn’t bet on it, it was just my impression that in stories good mothers sacrifice themselves for their babies in such situations—see canon for an obvious example—perhaps more often than in reality.
Two aurors would be most likely to beg for mercy for their child and let themselves be slaughtered instead of fighting back? Harry himself noted the absurdity of thinking that would work, and I believe called it her "final failure as a mother".
And wouldn't there be a whole lot of dark rituals going on, if mothers making sacrifices for their children would unknowingly and automatically invoke a dark ritual?
Why did you link there rather than here?
Mental hiccup. It’s 2AM here :)
By the way, there’s quite a bit lore on that site that would be quite interesting if we knew what parts of it applied to MoR, such as some info about Snape and Lily that don’t quite match what Snape says.
Seems unlikely that the original prophecy was caused by Dumbledore, at least by the method of the magical clock. As in canon, Trelawney seems to have made the prophecy during a job interview, presumably before she was regularly sleeping with the clock. I expect that if Dumbledore wanted her to make a false prophecy at a specific time, something like an Imperius folled by Obliviation would be more expedient. Furthermore, we have seen Trelawney spontaneously prophecy in the dining hall; this prophecy at least appeared unplanned by Dumbledore.
Regardless of what the clock is for, it didn't play a part in the first prophecy, since Trelawney didn't receive it until after she was hired. And it's less likely that there are two ways of forcing someone to speak a prophecy than only one. The obvious explanation for the clock is that it's a listening device. The clock is evidence against Dumbledore being the source of the prophecies.
The issue of the second prophecy is trickier. For a prophecy to be 'accidentally' overheard would be history repeating itself, if Dumbledore caused it. That would also be consistent behavior for a liar who tries to trick people into believing in destiny, as he did when he told Harry that his father's cloak had found its own way to its destined wearer. But it certainly looked like Dumbledore was surprised that morning, so I don't know.
I think the weight of evidence is still on Dumbledore. For the reasons I've given in this thread, and also this: In the aftermath of the prophecy, his manipulation of Snape and Lily netted him a defeated Dark Lord, a double agent and powerful ally, and a newly horcruxed hero. If the prophecy hadn't occurred, he'd instead have... a bouncing baby boy. It's hard to see what he hoped to accomplish by driving Snape and Lily apart if he didn't intend to prod Voldemort into attacking the Potters. His plot has a prophecy-shaped hole in it.
But I can't account for that damned clock, which means I've gone wrong somewhere. Ugh. I hope someone else gets interested in this question soon. I could use the help.
If it's a listening device. If it's a just a clock, it's not evidence of much. If it's a transmission device, I'd say it's evidence for Dumbledore being the source.
One possibility is that he didn't intentionally drive Snape and Lily apart. I don't think there's enough evidence of that to overcome the prior probability that Trelawney's prophecy was genuine. Note that Dumbledore himself seems to regard the prophecy as genuine---witness, for example, his apparently genuine interest in discovering the "power [Voldemort] knows not."
Here's another way of looking at it. Assume Dumbledore planned in advance to defeat Voldemort by (i) convincing Voldemort of a false prophecy that would lead him to attempt the murder of a baby, and (ii) somehow manipulating the baby's mother into either performing ritual magic herself, or causing Voldemort to perform ritual magic that would bring about Voldemort's death when he attempted to kill the baby. We might now ask, is there a simpler way that Dumbledore might have tried to enact (i) and (ii), other than the means you have suggested?
Note that a priori, assuming that Dumbledore is primarily concerned with defeating Voldemort, there is no reason for Dumbledore to deliver the false prophecy to Voldemort via an agent who is in love with the mother in question. He must then rely on the agent not understanding the prophecy in time. Furthermore, if the agent figures out the prophecy after relaying it to Voldemort, Dumbledore must then rely on Voldemort disregarding the agent's request to spare the mother. So going out of his way to push Snape and Lily apart, and then using Snape as a messenger, seems like a very unintuitive way for Dumbledore to execute this plot. Why not keep Snape and Lily together, see that they have a child, and then deliver the false prophecy to Voldemort via some other agent?
Now, personally, I do think it's a possibility that Snape and Lily were driven apart by Dumbledore, maybe even intentionally. But I don't think it was for this reason.
Ah. See, my prior probability that Trelawney's prophecy was genuine is not very high.
This story has an epidemic of false prophecy. This looks to me like it's intended to prime the reader to accept that an apparently true prophecy is actually false. I also think this is a consideration, but that appears to be a minority view. I'm expecting a false prophecy, and I'm looking for a reason for it to have occurred and apparently been fulfilled despite its falsity.
I think Dumbledore expected the story to play out as it did in the novels. He would get a hero who was bred with the heroic qualities of his parents, bullheaded but pure of heart. Snape, who in HPMoR is terrible at riddles, would fail to solve this one, and his guilt at causing Lily's death would cement his status as a lifelong soldier of the light. Lily would die a martyr, and her sacrifice would ensure Voldemort's defeat. From canon:
This is a complex plot that hinges on storybook logic, but that's not out of character for Dumbledore.
(Yes, it's Quirrell saying it, but remember that he was right.)
The plot is not too complex to be Dumbledore's, but it is too complex to succeed. That's why it didn't. Snape is no longer Dumbledore's. Instead of canon!Harry, he got HJPEV. Harry's mother attacked Voldemort, so her protection doesn't exist; Quirrell can pass the wards around his house at will.
And although it failed, it has the outward appearance of having succeeded, because that's what Voldemort wants Dumbledore to believe.
Apologies for repeating things I've said upthread. I wanted to set my beliefs in their proper context. I hope I've addressed your objections. One that I missed was Dumbledore's apparently genuine interest in discovering the "power [Voldemort] knows not." Dumbledore's relationship to storybook thinking is something I still don't understand. He seems to genuinely believe in the pattern, the rhythm of the world, but also acts as though events need to be nudged into following it. I'm not sure whether this is a dragon in my garage situation of conflicting beliefs and anticipations, or that he thinks you can cause storybook outcomes by setting up storybook premises, or something else I haven't thought of.
My working theory for Dumbledore's emphasis on story logic is that it's a pragmatic decision supporting several different lines of influence.
First, we know he's pretending to be a lot crazier than he is: he acts like a character in a roleplaying game with "Insanity" marked down in the flaws section of his character sheet, not someone with an actual personality disorder, and going out of his way to act like Gandalf fits in fairly well with that.
Second, he spends a lot of his time working with kids, who're probably a lot more familiar with stories than with their real-life cognates: how many times does Draco make an analogy to something he's seen in a play?
Finally, people really are prone to generalize from fictional evidence, and maintaining a semi-fictionalized persona can aid in achieving instrumental goals when they're aligned with the narrative patterns it corresponds to. The Self Actualization storyline provides a good example of this in action: I read Dumbledore's part in that early on as using his persona to nudge Hermione into the high-fantasy hero role that Harry occupies in canon (and considerably more shakily in MoR). When she went off script, so did he. (I suspect that Riddle's Lord Voldemort persona was adopted for similar reasons, incidentally. He might even have picked up that trick from Dumbledore.)
I like this. More support from the text: the narrator draws a distinction between wizards who have walked the paths of power and everyone else. According to the narrator, it's the latter who apply story-reasoning to real life. Dumbledore is one of the former.
ETA: This too.
Which is a downright strange thing to say if you think Mr. Potter is the one with the prophesied "POWER TO VANQUISH THE DARK LORD". It's exactly what you'd say if you understood that the power of stories was a power you wielded over other people, and your hero was just another of your pawns.
Perhaps its not such a strange thing to say if you don't think Mr. Potter knows about the prophecy, and are trying to correct his insubordination. In the following chapters, Dumbledore doesn't act as though he has decided Harry is unsuitable as a hero. Rather than trying to replace him, Dumbledore begins to confide in him.
Does Nornagest's explanation of Dumbledore's relationship with story-book reasoning affect your previous analysis? If you agree that Dumbledore feigns a story-book persona, rather than taking story-book logic seriously, then doesn't it seem strange that he would hatch such a plot? Note that his manipulation of the last battle in December is consistent with having realistic view of the world. Yes, Dumbledore did manage to acheive a "story-book outcome," but he clearly didn't expect this to happen---he had a contingency plan.
So the explanation for
is that Dumbledore is lying, or...?
Dumbledore does think in stories, but he probably doesn't realize it. Some stories don't fit his model (if the villain carries too large an idiot ball or something?).
That's the best explanation I can come up with.
As I said, I don't really understand what's going on in Dumbledore's head.
This is a lie. He claims to have deduced Harry's possession of the cloak by seeing the storylike pattern, when he personally wrapped the cloak and placed it next to Harry's bed. He's trying to convince Harry that life is like stories. Then he contradicts himself in a later chapter. Why? I don't know. "He did it because he's crazy" is an answer that can justify any outcome, doesn't concentrate probability mass, etc., but he sure isn't acting in anything like a coherent fashion.