It appears to me that the original purpose of the Interdict was as a form of DRM for strong spells. If you want to disseminate a spell, you can't just take a book, magically duplicate the book, and pass it out to all your friends. Learning a powerful spell thus required a willing trainer to teach you the spell, and you couldn't duplicate the knowledge contained in your mind until you knew the spell well enough to teach it yourself (and teaching something is harder than just being able to use it).
If you take this as a starting point, it's just basic classism at play motivating Merlin. All the wrong sorts were getting literacy and learning spells from books, taking away from the right sorts, who had learned from tutors, exclusive clubs, and networking with other powerful wizards. And it probably worked exceedingly well for several hundred years until those damn four decided to start up a school and accept everyone to be taught.
I'd think of it as being more like "don't spread nuclear design secrets" than DRM, given the nature of powerful wizardry.
The next discussion thread is here.
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 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
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.)
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: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
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: