Quirrell doesn't seem to recognize that Harry would side with the non-magical side instead. (Harry has noted some peculiarities in Quirrell's model of the world on several occasions, and [...] I suspect those peculiarities can be summarized as Quirrell failing to account for, for lack of a better word, "love.")
Agree that Quirrell doesn't recognize this; agree that Quirrell's model is peculiar in failing to account for, for lack of a better word, "love"; disagree that the latter is the reason for the former. I don't think Quirrell would be wrong in predicting that even many Muggleborns will join him.
I haven't been following these threads enough to know whether it's even worth spelling out the obvious theory of what the "power the Dark Lord knows not" is in the Verresverse, but it seems pretty clear that it's neither "love" as in canon nor "science" as Harry suggests (and Snape disputes) in Ch. 86, but Harry's belief that a good future can actually be made to happen (and is worth fighting for), i.e. an interstellar transhumanist rationalist ethical civilization that has left death behind. That may not sound like "power", but it really is ... not primarily because it means that Harry can cast the True Patronus charm and Voldemort cannot, but because it means that Harry can try and make an interstellar transhumanist rationalist civilization happen that has left death behind, and Quirrellmort -- who wants to beat death, who wants to be safe from nuclear weapons, who hates being around pretty much everybody because he finds people hypocritical and stupid, who wants to go to the stars -- can not.
Which is relevant here because this is deeply intervowen with Harry's rock-solid morality:
No one knew quite how many wizards there were in the world. He'd done a few estimates with Hermione and come up with numbers in the rough range of a million.
But there were six billion Muggles.
If it came down to a final war...
Professor Quirrell had forgotten to ask Harry which side he would protect.
A scientific civilization, reaching outward, looking upward, knowing that its destiny was to grasp the stars.
And a magical civilization, slowly fading as knowledge was lost, still governed by a nobility that saw Muggles as not quite human.
It was a terribly sad feeling, but not one that held any hint of doubt.
(Ch. 35)
In other words, the power the Dark Lord knows not is hope.
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: