Oh, hmm. For some reason I thought Dumbledore's arrival was triggered by the wards. Gotcha.
Right; I'm using the wards triggering right then as evidence for the souls theory. In a souls world, it's easy to notice when souls exit the body (and set up wards to detect that), and hard to notice when souls are about to exit the body, so you can show up and suspend them or whatever. In a 'people are just computation' world, where you're able to read the computation from afar using magic, a ward that notices "Hermione's not alive anymore!" would require tech that could be used to build a ward that notices "Hermione's going into shock!", which would be a much more useful ward to have.
[edit] I didn't fully remember the wards from the Draco Incident, where they could detect injury. So either there are multiple levels of wards and the injury ward was disabled (or set to death), Dumbledore didn't respond to the injury alarm but did respond to the death alarm (reasonable, if he's somewhere else important, and the Deputy present at the castle would have already known the troll was around and have the castle in high alert by the time Hermione was attacked if she was attacked after Filch's alert), there's a continuity break, or something I'm missing.
Oh! What if the wards only work inside the castle? Hermione's battle with the troll was in the sunlight and thus outside. While I would hope that the wards would cover the entire school grounds (rescuing students from the Forbidden Forest seems like a more common use case than rescuing them inside), that's another possibility that seems somewhat more reasonable than some of the others I've listed. (I should also, for completeness, add the "he responded to the injury alarm but it took too long" option, but I find that one unsatisfying for several reasons.)
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 88-89. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
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, 15, 16, 17, 18.
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: