Alsadius comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89 - Less Wrong
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I think you miss that this is a work of fiction that has an author. Think about why the author was motivated to make certain choices instead of thinking why the characters were motivated.
That is actually the other reason that I believe as I do. It seems like a much more interesting storytelling decision for my theory to be correct than for the competitor theory to be.
How is it more interesting storytelling for the guy everyone thinks did it to have done it, as opposed to "Here's a puzzle and the clues to figure it out"?
Because it was a puzzle for the first what, 80 chapters? We're getting close to the end of the story as of about two arcs ago, it's time for puzzles to get solved. it's not an interesting enough puzzle to justify a double twist, IMO.
You think it's not an interesting puzzle because you think it's not a puzzle at all. :) And wouldn't it only be a double-twist if Dumbledore did do it? If Amelia Bones did it it would just be a single twist.
Baseline assumption: Team Death Eater is slandering Dumbledore when they claim he burned Narcissa Malfoy alive.
Twist: Nope, Dumbledore actually did it.
Double Twist: Or it was some random lady who used the word "burn" once. You know, whatever.
One of these twists is revealing of important information about a main character, future motivation for interesting developments(Harry being forced to choose between Draco and Dumbledore over the promise, or Draco having to forgive his mother's murderer), a subversion of our expectations, and is reasonably predictable from evidence dropped in advance. One of them is irrelevant and a complete cop-out of all the character development built into the original twist. Take a guess which one I assume is more likely to be true.
Amelia killing Narcissa would be the sort of thing M Night Shyamalan would write.
If that were indeed an accurate summary of the situation, I would agree with you. I did agree with you, when that was the only potential clue I knew of. All three major clues would be circumstantial in real life, but when you step out a level and see that Eliezer writes this story, choosing every word we read, it's clear that he wants us to figure out that Amelia has something more to do with Narcissa's death.
It's just as important if Dumbledore didn't do it as it is if he did; it's another piece of evidence that he's not a huge evil hypocrite. Which many HPMoR readers seem to need.
I think it'll be pretty interesting when Harry finds out that Amelia did it; Amelia was going for painful revenge, while Harry is already hemming and hawing over whether Dumbledore deserves to be an enemy if he did do it. Harry is much more likely to declare Amelia his enemy, and Amelia is much more likely to declare Harry her enemy.
Sounds to me like Amelia would be the biggest subversion of your expectations! Given the several conversations I've had on this topic, I'm pretty sure that Amelia's guilt will be a subversion of most people's expectations. In fact, I and possibly pedanterrific may be the only ones in the entire readership whose expectations aren't subverted.
I really don't understand why everyone thinks the three clues I identified are worth so much less than the clue-and-a-half we have about Dumbledore.
And this is why I didn't actually mean to start this conversation again; this is the second or possibly third time that I've pushed someone to declare Eliezer a bad writer if my hypothesis proves true, who will now actually feel that way when it is proven true, where they probably would have just said "Huh!" before, or maybe even thought it was cool.
I just don't get it. I don't understand people's reluctance to believe this, to step outside the text and realize that these are purposely written clues. Maybe it's because I'm acting all certain again; maybe perceived overconfidence causes bad reactions in people even with all the supporting evidence, not only without it.
As someone who takes clues in the form of literary convention, extrapolation of authorial intent, etc. on a regular basis, I just think you're really reaching.
As a general principle, it seems to me that most of us, most of the time, are really bad at recognizing the extent to which other people, even ones who are reasonably honest, sane and intelligent, can reach different conclusions from our own. This is a large part of why political and religious discussions get so overheated.
What's not so clear to me is how far this is because so many people are so bad at thinking, and how far it's because the available evidence often really is that ambiguous. Naively it seems as if, for most questions that are in principle resolvable empirically, the totality of the available evidence should end up pointing very clearly one way or another, so persistent divergences must indicate either failures in thinking methods or something like confirmation bias where different people effectively see very different subsets of the evidence. (Both, alas, very plausible.) But given that even very intelligent people trying hard to be rational, with a reasonable knowledge of cognitive biases can end up holding quite different opinions, perhaps there's more real ambiguity than one would naively think. Or perhaps it's just that no human being is really "very intelligent"; the most we ever achieve is "very intelligent relative to the appalling baseline of human stupidity, and still really pretty stupid".
... But I digress; in the present case it seems fairly clear that there just isn't more than, say, 10:1 evidence for Dumbledore over Bones or vice versa.
[EDITED some hours after posting, to fix a minor ambiguity I hadn't noticed.]
Eliezer's overconfidence script is dangerous.
Observation bias. Just because the two people mentioned speak up about it (presumably) so much more than others doesn't mean that they are the only ones who hold this belief.
I share this belief with you, for instance. I find those hints to be convincing, narratively speaking.
Amelia Bones isn't a member of the Order of the Phoenix.
One wonders why she would even know about it at all, if she had nothing to do with it.
Well, I think Lucius probably made sure a long time ago that everyone knew what Dumbledore (supposedly) said to him. I didn't get the feeling from that scene in the Wizengamot that Dumbledore-killing-Narcissa was any kind of a secret idea that people were just then finding out about.
This does rather change my view of some of the peripheral details, though. Previously, one possibility I pictured was Dumbledore restraining Amelia from her vengeance until Aberforth died, then relenting. I knew Amelia Bones wasn't in the OotP, and I knew she felt distaste at Dumbledore's softness, but somehow I never completely drew the conclusion that she wouldn't care one whit about what Dumbledore said or thought, and therefore probably wouldn't have cared if he had tried to restrain her.
Perhaps more likely, then, is the other way I pictured it: that Amelia couldn't get to Narcissa by herself, and after Aberforth's death, Dumbledore actively approached Amelia and said "Okay, I'm ready to help. I'll be the ward-breaker, you do the deed."
Whoops, looks like you're right, the accusation was public knowledge:
Which is why I think it a significant possibility that Dumbledore helped in some way.
Any of those defenses might be sufficient for a single clue, but you have to take the clues together. Three successive clues (plus her character) pointing to Amelia, and only some words spoken to Lucius that we never saw pointing to Albus (and everything else we know of his character pointing away from him, though I know some would argue that), increase the probability of Amelia's guilt quite a bit more than linearly.