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LucasSloan comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89 - Less Wrong
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Without endorsing any part of this comment dealing with events which have yet to take place, I congratulate user 75th who receives many Bayes points for this:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfo/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/6aih
When I first saw this comment, it was downvoted to... I forget, -6 or something. Going by the percentage score, at least 11 people downvoted it. From the replies, some people didn't like the tone of apparent certainty with which 75th spoke. Sounded uppity to them, I guess. It was at +3 before I linked to it on /r/HPMOR.
I wanted to say something at the time about that, and how penalizing people for sounding certain or uppity or above-the-status-you-assign-them can potentially lead you to ignore people who are actually competent, but at the time all I could say was "Why are people downvoting this? It's a testable prediction" whereupon it climbed up to above 0.
Everyone who downvoted 75th or agreed with the downvotes at the time, please take note. Speaking in a tone of what seems-to-you like inappropriate certainty does not always indicate that someone is arrogant. Sometimes they have seen something you have not.
Well, in the spirit of sticking your neck out:
Harry was sorted into Slytherin.
Dumbledore created Harry to be the ideal literary hero.
Lord Voldemort doesn't want to conquer the world.
Dumbledore is working on way more advance information than everyone else.
Counter-evidence: Harry produces blue and bronze sparks at Ollivander's.
As long as we're sticking necks out, though:
Definitely: The horcrux technology uses the ghost phenomenon. Specifically, by causing the violent death of a wizard under controlled conditions (i.e., murder) it's possible to harness the powerful burst of magic to make a ghost of the living caster instead of of the dying victim: a backup copy. A ghost may be static data rather than a running instance, but hey, so is a cryo patient.
Definitely: Baby Harry was overwritten with a horcrux-backup-copy of Voldemort. Voldemort didn't plan on childhood amnesia, though, and much of the information was erased (or at least made harder to access consciously). The Remembrall-like-the-Sun indicated the forgotten lifetime as Riddle. Remnants of Voldemort's memories are the reason Harrymort has a cold side; his upbringing in a loving family is the reason he has a warm side.
Mere hunch: In chapter 45, the Dementor recognized Harry as Voldemort and addressed him by name: "Riddle".
Mere hunch: Voldemort may have chosen to impress his horcrux in a living human in order to try to get around the "static data" problem. If it had worked, he would have forked himself -- there would have been two fully functional running instances of Voldemort, all the time, plus twelve hours a day worth of Time-copies.
Some of the horcruxes in canon are made from murdering Muggles, though.
I don't see anywhere that this happens in Chapter 45.
Very early in the chapter: "He had regained an impossible memory, for all that the Dementor had made him desecrate it. A strange word kept echoing in his mind."
And later: "Harry glanced in the Dementor's direction. The word echoed in his mind again. All right, Harry thought to himself, if the Dementor is a riddle, what is the answer? And just like that, it was obvious."
Once Harry figures out what Dementors are, he stops being able to hear their "voices", because he no longer sees (hears) them as sentient. But if "the word" was actually coming from the Dementor, I don't know what would've kept everyone else from hearing it.
Nice job!
I think Voldemort sets himself up to move from host to host, and who better to move into, than the hero who saves the world from Voldemort?
Does that mean that both Harry and Quirrel are Voldemort?
Without getting into a tiresome analysis of identity theory, Quirrell is currently almost entirely Voldemort, while Harry has a little of the devil in him.
Not yet, but that would seem to be a plausible end-game for Quirrelmort.
This is canon.
To a lesser extent, this is as well.
Let me be more specific then.
*Dumbledore has had the intention of creating the boy who lived since before Harry's birth and likely, before his parent's marriage.
*Dumbledore has access to many, many more prophecies than anyone else and has been using this fact for decades.
Those are vastly more interesting predictions. Plausible, and it'd be an interesting story if true.