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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89
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:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
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Public Service Announcement: If you feel strongly affected by chapter 89, and do not yet have first aid training, consider googling a local class and signing up. Some sudden deaths can be prevented, and it might need to be by you. Make the most good out of your horror and revulsion.
As far as teachable lessons go, Harry didn't get first aid training for his first aid kid.
If Eliezer wanted to maximize the amount of the impact of this lesson he could let a healer tell Harry that he didn't use the kit to maximum effect in an upcoming chapter.
First aid kit as curiosity stopper. Treating it as more a checkmark on a list of things responsible people have, and not an item that causally interacts with the world.
One of the first things we got taught in first aid was "there's nothing in a first aid kit that can save a life". This probably needs a bunch of caveats to make it absolutely factually true, but it's worth generally bearing in mind.
(My actual first aid kit includes a pair of trauma shears, which I think could save a life in a non-negligible amount of emergency circumstances.)
This is a very powerful demonstration of how the sudden death of a single loved friend affects one more than the horrible, slow torture to death of a thousand strangers in Azkaban.
This applies to Harry - but I'm not talking about him. I'm talking about myself and all the readers now expressing their pain on reddit.
A single death is felt differently from a thousand deaths. At least in fiction...
Y'know, I like the new, true version of Ch. 85, the one where Harry fails to get a phoenix -- but I also really liked the original version (which, remember, Eliezer wrote as a stand-in because he couldn't get the true version finished in time), where Harry, compromising with himself, made a resolution that for now he would try to win without killing people -- but if anybody died [by his opponent's hands], not just a PC, but any arbitrary bystander (he'd been thinking about how Batman's ethics only come off as good if you don't care about all the NPCs the Joker kills), the gloves would come off.
I'd kind of hoped that Harry would be able to actually go through without a death, and failing that I kind of expected that it would be some random NPC's death that would change things -- but I don't think that would actually have worked to justify Harry's future actions to the reader. [ETA: I guess buybuydavis is right too that, even more importantly, it wouldn't have worked as a statement against death.] It really does need to be somebody we (the readers) care about in order to carry even a fraction of the emotional impact that death should carry.
(Tangent: As a preteen, I read 2001 up to the point where HAL kills Poole, and then had to stop and had some bad nights because that was so terrible. [Actually there was a similar thing a couple of years before that with The Neverending Story and the point where Atreyu's horse Artax dies.] And around that time, possibly a bit later, I decided that feeling that death was this bad was the appropriate emotion, and grownups and other kids who not only didn't have that reaction but who felt that it was childish exaggeration were wrong. And when, much later, my own emotional reaction to death in fiction -- and, more deplorably, reality -- started to subside, I still found myself in agreement with my earlier self on the question on appropriateness.)
I don't think it works if what EY is making a statement against Death, which it seems to me he is. Rationality is all fine and dandy, but I think it's window dressing on the main theme of the value of Life and the horror of Death. The best, the brightest, the most loved, the least deserving of it will die with all the rest. So, Hermione dies.
There was one thing that annoyed me about this. Harry wasn't just fighting Voldemort. He barely even cares about Voldemort. He's fighting everything bad about the universe. If he was truly willing to take the gloves off after the first death, then he would have done so after about half a second.
Depends on the circumstances. For example, if you're inflicting the deaths yourself; I read somewhere that the Nazis used gas chambers rather than the bullets they used at first, because killing unarmed, unresisting individuals of all ages and genders by the dozen disturbed the soldiers. Or when you don't know the people yourself, but their disappearance impacts and cripples your world.
(http://hpmor.com/chapter/6)
When I first read the end of the chapter, my thought was that Quirrell hadn't arranged the incident; he had thought it was a "surprisingly good day" which suggested to me that he hadn't expected the troll.
After reading comments, I became less sure about that; someone suggested that Quirrell might have simply not intended for Harry to be at the scene and in danger. This seems plausible, but one thing still makes it difficult for me to believe it was Quirrell.
The troll had been enchanted against sunlight:
And Harry transfigured part of the troll:
But before, it was stated that Quirrell could not charm something that Harry had Transfigured:
For Quirrell to have been behind this, I can see only two possibilities: 1) Harry can transfigure something Professor Quirrell has cast spells on, even though Professor Quirrell can't cast spells on something Harry has transfigured, or 2) Quirrell had a confederate (or imperiused lackey) cast the appropriate spells.
If you go with option 2, the increased complexity makes it less likely that it happened (though not necessarily less likely than a given alternative).
Harry transfigured the inside of the troll. Maybe Quirrell only needed to enchant the outside?
Oh snap. I didn't even notice that problem.
There is a third possibility: Dumbledore brought in the troll to guard the Stone (or other object), as in canon, and he was the one who cast the spells to protect it. I'm unsure about this, because it seems unusually violent for Dumbledore.
In canon "Troll" was defense layer number.. 5? Anyone in that deep can fairly be considered to be asking for it. If this is the case, the naive reading of events is that it got loose because someone was cracking the defenses...
Why would Dumbledore enchant the troll against sunlight if it was going to be in the third-floor corridor all along?
To defend it against anyone with a sunlight-generating spell or who has some acorn potion handy.
This is interesting. From the end of Ch. 89:
From Ch. 46, after Harry destroys the dementor:
Every day that Harry kills something is a good day, of course.
From Chapter 6:
From Chapter 89:
The oxygenation potion also slows circulation. Did Harry accidentally kill Hermione? Would the potion have unintentionally prevented blood flow to her brain by retarding flow in her carotid artery, while unhelpfully oxygenating her neck? It makes sense that a potion designed to prevent the spread of poison would prevent movement of the blood. It's also stated that it works on "a treated area." If it's primarily meant to slow the spread of poisons from bites, the spell's "treated area" might be defined as the volume of flesh a certain distance away from the injection site.
Also, giving CPR to someone when their heart is still beating is definitely not good for them.
Huh, reading that quote again it occurs to me that Harry doesn't reach for the oxygenating potion, he reaches for the syringe of glowing orange liquid that was the oxygenating potion. A truly prepared murderer would merely have to replace the syringe with... something else.
Man, that's brutal
The Headmaster can feel when a student dies in Hogwarts. That's how he showed up the moment Hermione died.
But the Headmaster can also feel when a creature unknown to Hogwarts is in Hogwarts. That's how he showed up when Harry rejected his phoenix.
But so why didn't Dumbledore feel the troll and intercept it much sooner? I expect before long the Dumbledore-haters — both those in the story and those on Less Wrong and Reddit — will latch on to this as proof that Dumbledore has been evil all along.
The problem is, we know a thing or two about Hogwarts's wards by now. We know, for instance, that Salazar Slytherin was the one who wove them:
Salazar Slytherin's wards. Salazar Slytherin, who left a basilisk that knew all his secrets. Secrets that Quirrellmort now knows.
Dumbledore will try to tell the wizarding world that the only explanation of Hermione's death is that Voldemort was behind the attack. This will be seen by the world as the same thing Headmaster Dippet actually did when Myrtle died: the accusation of an unlikely — "preposterous!" — scapegoat.
And now, Lucius Malfoy is there to stir up the opposition:
Those bare margins are about to be erased. For the first time in fifty years, a student has died in Hogwarts, and there is reason to suspect Dumbledore of involvement. Dumbledore is not going to be Headmaster for very much longer.
And the Philosopher's Stone is there, in Hogwarts, in the place, until now, of Dumbledore's own power.
Eliezer took the troll fight that a first-year Ron Weasley won in canon and turned it into the death of the #2 character in Methods. I can't wait to see what he does with this.
The Headmaster was off campus; it's not necessarily true that he can access all the Hogwarts wards from off campus. He did notice when Hermione died, but considering the giant soulsplosion it's likely that this was somewhat more obvious to him than a wards violation. Furthermore, considering the timing of his absences, it's likely that Dumbledore was off hunting Horcruxes - an excellent opportunity, therefore, for Quirrell to lure Dumbledore into a trap to induce magical radio silence.
Politically speaking, it makes no sense for Dumbledore to kill Hermione. Even the Daily Prophet would have a hard time spinning that particular story. The Wizengamot's response to the death of Draco Malfoy's supposed assassin and Lucius Malfoy's hated enemy will not, no matter the circumstances, be to flock to Lucius' side. It would, however, still reflect very badly on Dumbledore; obviously, mountain trolls should not show up in schools, and the responsibility for preventing such things lies with him.
I think you're being generous to the wizarding public. Lucius Malfoy can probably prove — the Hogwarts wards can possibly prove — that neither Lucius nor Draco has been in Hogwarts for quite some time. It won't be too hard for Lucius to say the better-written equivalent of
"Regardless of my personal feelings for Miss Granger, I would never besmirch House Malfoy by reneging in such brutal fashion on a matter of House honor. The question at hand is this: how could Dumbledore not have known the troll was in Hogwarts? And if he did know, where was he during the attack? If you would like to propose that Dumbledore and I were in collusion on the matter — well, I'm sure a simple show of hands will make clear how likely this assembly is to believe that."
Not too hard for Lucius to talk his way out of. Very much harder for Dumbledore.
EDIT: I agree that not all of Hogwarts's wards are necessarily available to Dumbledore off-campus. But the mechanisms of these two wards have been described identically: Poof, he appears, and says "I felt X". I wouldn't assume by default that two wards that function identically would differ in such an important aspect.
DOUBLE EDIT: It could easily be said that it makes political sense for Dumbledore to kill Hermione, as an attempt to frame Lucius. But then, if Dumbledore doesn't actually speak up against Lucius…
It is complicated. But I still think Dumbledore is in trouble, just from the perspective of Eliezer taking a more serious, realistic look at events from canon.
Honestly, I think you're the one overestimating the Wizarding public. The arguments from the wards aren't bad ones, necessarily, but they're technical ones. They won't play well. At best, they'll turn into conspiracy theories. Most of the public is going to look at the scene and see Lucius triumphant and Dumbledore with a black eye, and make the obvious conclusion.
It will still be basically the same in front of the Wizengamot. Having Hermione killed under his own protection means trouble for Dumbledore - it would be the second major security incident at Hogwarts in less than a month, and the first student killed in fifty years. It's not an impossible black eye for Dumbledore to overcome, and he could surely take it if necessary. But... Dumbledore doesn't have a compelling reason to take the hit. Framing Lucius is not an especially good motive, particularly considering that half of the Wizengamot cares not one whit about Hermione Granger's life or death. And, if he did want her dead, he could have avoided the fallout by sending her home over Spring Break with a snake in her trunk.
The technical argument... is still a bit above the Wizengamot. They might understand, "well, because of the wards this should have been impossible," but this will translate to "Lucius Malfoy found a way to trick Dumbledore's magic" and not "Hmm. Should Lucius Malfoy and his hired help really be in the same weight class as the Founders' wards?"
Finally, you're assuming that Lucius wants to clear his name. I don't think this makes very much sense, either. Sure, it's bad PR in many circles, but Lucius already has a horrible reputation, and I don't expect he'll be terribly concerned. On the other hand, killing a student right under Dumbledore's nose would be an excellent show of force, and it would impress people that he cares rather more about. It might be exactly what he needs, in fact - I imagine his credibility took quite a hit when Hermione Granger managed to escape punishment for an attempted assassination.
Lucius is going to be outraged and lead an opposition to Dumbledore because the attempted murderer of his son, who he tried to send to Azkaban for 10 years, got killed in Hogwarts? I think that would seem a bit odd to everyone involved.
Lucius has means of his own, and had every reason to arrange Hermione's death.
No, Lucius is going to stir up an opposition to Dumbledore because Dumbledore is his hated enemy. Do you honestly think that Lucius would pass by any excuse to harm Dumbledore?
(And he will have a easy time at it too. A troll loose in Hogwarts, killing a student? That will reflect extremely badly on Dumbledore, even from the viewpoint of the neutral factions.)
A nice touch when Harry is fighting the troll: When he engages his killer instinct, from then on the troll is only referred to as the "enemy", in one case even with a capital E.
Interestingly, while Harry explicitly mentions "censors off" (concerning no more screening off of potential killing methods), that mode of thinking also engages other filters, dehumanizing (de-troll-izing) the creature he's fighting and only seeing it as "the Enemy".
Another nice touch: Quirrell's thoughts do the same.
Most of the plans to use time turning to fix this are massively overly complicated, by the way. Best bet is to swap the oxygenating potion for something which will make her death less permanent.
Which Harry can find or have made in < 6 hours.
Options: 1: Elixir of life. The stone is at hand, Snape is at hand. It is possible that shout is what taking it looks like. 2: Undeath. The potter verse does have vampires, and they are integrated in magical society at least to the extent that seeing one in a bad neighborhood is not grounds for an auror raid. Werewolf infection might also do it. 3: Draught of living death?
I'm ruling that MoR!Vampirism does not indefinitely extend life or Voldemort would be a vampire (HPN20), similarly werewolves do not regenerate or Moody would be a werewolf.
Well, at this precise moment Harry cares rather a lot more about moving her out of the "Dead" state than he does about rendering her immortal, so if vampires have a finite lifespan, that is not an unacceptable drawback at this particular juncture. (.. and would outright be an advantage if it means she gets out of being stuck at age 12. Not that having her stuck at age 12 would stop Harry. That can be fixed when he is not staring down a 6 hour timer)
Further upsides; keeping her rising on the quiet would shield her from repeated attempts at ending her, if he can swing that.
Likely downsides: 1:Feeding. But there has to be an acceptable solution to that, or the magical community would not tolerate vampires at all. On the other hand, the wizarding world generally fails ethics 101 very badly, so maybe they are just all hypnotizing people into being faux-willing donors.
2:Might no longer count as a witch. Giving her the brick powerset of a stereotypical vamp would be a hilarious mismatch for her personality.
That all assumes vampires have continuity of personality with who they were, but if that is not the case I would be somewhat puzzled why they are tolerated. Also, that turning her is workable. If the process of becoming a vampire takes a year and a day or requires her to die from a vampire bite..
Although I'm not at all sure it was deliberate (is there a way to submit potential typos?), we may have just gotten some new evidence about the true nature of magic. In Ch 89 Fred/George cast a spell solely from the memory of seeing Dumbledore cast it ("Deligitor prodi"), got the incantation wrong ("Deligitor prodeas"), and yet still achieved an (apparently) identical effect (The summoning of the Sorting Hat). It appears that if this is legitimate evidence rather than a typo, magic has an error bound for the correct pronunciation of spells.
"Prodi" is the imperative ("come forth"), "prodeas" is the subjunctive (here used in supplication, for which there is no precise English translation; perhaps "wouldst thou come forth").
Which itself suggests something quite interesting about the nature of incantations... unless it's not actually an incantation, just talking to Hogwarts in Latin.
Well, in the first usage, Dumbledore did seem to be addressing Hogwarts ("Hogwarts! Deligitor prodi"), so it's possible, but Fred/George didn't do that. I suppose it is possible that Eliezer just used the subjunctive form rather than the imperative accidentally, but I'm not sure if I want to count on that :D
Note that this seems to contradict the glowing bat experiments performed in chapter 22.
If doing magic for more time makes one stronger (which seems to be a hypothesis taken seriously in HPMR), then it is possible that as one gets more powerful, the increased power can compensate for the incorrect pronunciation. In fact, this also may explain to some extent how less powerful witches and wizards can't cast some spells. In some cases it may be that the orally transmitted version of the spell is not quite right, but that doesn't matter as much for the more powerful spellcasters. A problem with this hypothesis is that one would then expect there to be weak spells which could only be cast by powerful mages and we haven't seen any indication of that.
Point against: Professor Whatsisname, the presumably quite-powerful dueling legend, learned/developed "Stuporfy", which is intentionally meant to sound almost exactly like "Stupify". If powerful wizards get a pass on their pronunciation, how is it that a powerful wizard can effectively differentiate those two similar spells when casting?
It may be that this is only true for some spells? Although, to be honest, I'm leaning towards it either being a typo or not an incantation, just communication with Hogwarts.
This might be different when you're manipulating unthinking magic system rather than addressing a sentient entity such as the sorting hat.
Wild Mass Guessing (that I don't believe in, but would be cool):
When Hermione fought Draco, and cast the Blood-Chilling charm on him with intent to kill, Hat-And-Cloak!Quirrell activated the spell to create a Horcrux of Hermione, which he can now use to blackmail Harry.
That would imply that only an attempted murder can create a horcrux. With the right self-delusion or whatever, one might be able to mass-produce horcruxes and train an army capable of ruthless action at the same time.
Dumbledore believes an actual murder is needed to create a Horcrux. And as far as we know, he is right, unfortunately.
I'm mildly surprised no-one has speculated on what Harry will do next. He won't accept that Hermione is dead, and I'm guessing that it will occur to him that transfiguring her into a steel ball and then freezing it (I'm pretty sure there's a spell for that) provides a quick and easy form of cryonics, which as an added bonus bypasses the problem of ice crystal formation.
How to resurrect her is the tricky bit.
I would nominate the Blood-Cooling Charm as a convenient and adequately-foreshadowed first response. Like packing a recently-deceased patient in ice, that will buy her enough time until she can be properly cryopreserved. That is, literally stuffed in the fridge. One of the FFnet reviewers had it right: this chapter was an epic troll.
ETA: Gah! Bleugh. There's just no getting rid of the taste of a wrong prediction. It's like a mouth full of soy sauce.
What exactly does this mean? Both Quirrel and Harry Potter are already here. Sirius no longer seems feasible for this.
Possibly it refers to the new personality-state of Harry which Quirrel just sensed? I suspect that Harry has just succeeded what he failed to do in Azkaban: to fuse his normal self with the grim and ardently indomitable dark side.
Prediction 1: Soon, Harrry will do something somewhat clearly allegorical to FOOMed super AI. Alternatively, Prediction 2: Instead, Harry will be incredibly badass (I.e, Quirrel's equal) more conventionally. Prediction 3: Harry will be able to get some real resources finally. He might somehow get enough mana to pull off Quirrelesque blasting, or find a creative/technological-seeming way to provide it. Prediction 4: Harry's involvement in
The version starting with "HE IS COMING" was given the same chapter and same day that Harry and Draco formed the Bayesian Conspiracy.
Horrible half-prophecies occurred when Harry pondered the distinction between ruthless war and the superhero's quest to save everyone. This would lead to him deciding to be ruthless if he failed to save anyone (in Ch 85), and the closest possible person just did. At this time a phoenix came to Harry, and then left.
Trelawney suffered a horrible half-prophecy when Harry decided that he would break Azkaban even if it meant going to absurd lengths.
I thought earlier about the first prophecy, that 'the power to vanquish the dark lord' might refer to the ability to destroy Death rather than Voldemort.
Harry could disassemble the world and the stars into computronium - in fact star-lifting crossed his mind when he heard the first part of the prophecy. EY stated that there would be no AI analogy, and magical intelligence amplification seems more plausible anyway.
A different route to a mini-foom is that one can make luck potions. Then gamble, get money, recruit people who know how to make potions. Now you have huge amounts of luck potion, and provided your thought process is fairly random, you will always find the right answer (e.g. opening a random book at a random page happens to provide exactly the right insight). Routes to magical IA:
Luck potions.
A thinking hat - like the sorting hat, only it uses your brainpower to help you solve problems.
Efficient use of memory charms to spread insights rapidly through a group of researchers.
Use of telepathy to create a group mind.
Potion of thinking, made of e.g. ground-up crossword puzzles.
Potion of... OH CRUD.
Buy supercomputer time to solve problems in some physical form. Melt printouts into potion. Foom.
Possibility: Normal harry and his Dark Side have now merged (or Harry has lost his restraint to the extent the distinction is irrelevant). This new Harry has all his abilities and none of his previous restraint and is effectively a new person, with the expressly stated intention of changing the world that now exists to the extent it is effectively destroyed.
Secondary possibility: The current 'world' will end because Harry is going to somehow turn back time and destroy thus timeline in its entirety.
Eliezer has stated that nothing in HPMOR is allegory for AI. I don't have a source for the quote, but I remember it very clearly, because it surprised me.
Something to note - A Singularity, of whatever kind, is generally held (citation needed) to be the point at which a pre-Singularity being can make no useful predictions about a post-Singularity being, usually due to runaway growth of intelligence.
It is very much a metaphorical "end of the world" for a pre-Singularity being, and prophecies are nothing if not metaphorical.
Not around these parts.
So there's already a resurrection ritual that Harry has heard about. Blood of an enemy, bone of the father, flesh of the servant. Can he find these things for Hermione?
Anyone else confused by the line in chapter 89:
On first reading I thought it was the as-of-yet-unnamed-but-totally-Hermione victim, which seemed odd, but on a third read I think it might be Harry, and the distance of the narration just a reflection of Harry's horror. Not sure, though.
In canon this ritual is used to give the Horcrux-preserved shadow of Voldemort a new body. His body has the shape of a human baby and is able to talk coherently; he reemerges after the ritual with a fullformed body. Hermione has got no Horcrux of her own, and is thus beyond the means of this resurrection ritual.
Well. That went poorly.
Harry has direct sensory evidence that souls are real, but it doesn't look like that's updated his sense of what is and isn't possible yet. I feel more and more trepidation.
You say that like having an immortal soul, a major part of your mind that can survive literally anything, would make it harder to revive the dead.
I'm not sure what this is referring to. Ghosts? Harry currently thinks those are magical echoes.
Reread the event in question. (I'm trying to keep the start of my comments a little unspoilery, since they show up in the recent comments sidebar.)
In the universe where souls do not exist and people are just electrical activity embodied in lipid computers, that description and it triggering Dumbledore's immediate arrival seem very unlikely. In the universe where souls do exist, it seems very likely.
He felt something "happen" when Hermione died and Dumbledore also confirmed it. It might just be a magical echo but it's definitely evidence for something like a soul.
This is true, but without further investigation, it fails to distinguish the world where souls are independent from physical form from the world where souls are magical echoes/uploads/backups/etc.
On that note, this would be one convenient time for Quirrel to drop in and say "Oh, by the way, that description of the Resurrection Stone you gave me turned up something interesting..."
I'm sad now.
Those of you who didn't read canon before reading this, there's a corresponding incident in the first book which I think would add to your understanding of this incident. Quirrell sneaks a troll into the school, but Harry, Ron, and Hermione are improbably able to defeat it using the first thing the Weasleys try here (smacking it with its own club). The difficulty level of that encounter was clearly calibrated to the characters' strengths in a way common in heroic stories and I think Eliezer was deliberately subverting that expectation. (He's made this point in the sequences on a few occasions - something about how it's allowed for Nature to just throw problems at humanity that are too hard for it - although I can't find a quote at the moment.) I particularly appreciated how Harry only used tools that he had deliberately prepared in advance, sometimes way in advance, e.g. the healer's kit.
I also wonder where Fawkes was while this was happening. You'd think he would've found his way to either Harry or Hermione.
I have a mild complaint about all these cameos. Some of the names of the people who end up getting cameos don't fit in the Harry Potter universe to my ear and they stick out really noticeably. One of the first things I'd do if I were hypothetically rewriting HPMoR for publication is to come up with a consistent and meaningful naming scheme.
I think it's ironic that at the begining of the update, Harry refers to Filch as a "low-level random encounter whom [he] often breezed past wearing his epic-level Deathly Hallow".
First, I have to get the emotional reaction out of the way: holycrap!
Now that that's done, is the last time we've heard about the Marauders' Map when Dumbledore borrowed it to search for Tom Riddle? I don't remember off hand whether that was after TSPE or in Taboo Tradeoffs.
I'm a little perplexed at how Harry's medical treatment didn't seem to work; it sounded like it should have bought several minutes, but the action that followed didn't seem like it could have taken more than 60 seconds. I've only read it the once through, so I could be missing it completely, but the timing felt deliberate. (And all the ticks in 88 seem to emphasize the passage of time, though they could well have just been to emphasize the pressure).
Also, Susan knows how to effectively magic giants? That makes her smarter than Umbridge's entire team-to-sack-Hagrid in canon. I suppose it pays to have a competent defense professor (even if he is the most likely suspect for all the awful that just happened), and the director of the DMLE as a close relative.
I was pretty shocked at the Troll in the Dungeon line. That seemed like something that wouldn't be at all likely to happen with a RATIONAL! Voldemort, foreshadowing in Quirrel's first class aside. Apparently I never bothered to think about a decent motivation for such a plot; using it as a plot to get at the stone didn't come across as particularly clever in this universe, and I didn't search beyond that and just dismissed it as a silly idea. Oops. Of course, that brings forward the question of whether or not Harry will have to kill a Hungarian Horntail. I wouldn't expect it, but I haven't thought about it for more than a few seconds yet.
Re Marauders' Map: Quirrell pretty obviously has it. He obliviated the Weasley twins and took it. This is just the smart thing for him to do.
Note how he's burning straight through to the melee with the troll at the end of Ch. 89 - so he knows exactly where and in what direction Harry and Hermione are. This could also be because of the psychic link, but it also increases the probability he has the map.
Hypothesis: Time-Turned Harry has it.
My understanding is that once shock is refractory, there is no turning back (in particular, oxygenation at that stage is useless). I'm not familiar enough with the medicine to know if it's reasonable for her to progress that far that quickly, but my layman's guess is "probably."
... On a side note.
Hermione Granger, of House Potter, at great cost to House Potter, was just killed on Potter's watch.
Harry knows how smart Quirrell is, and he knows that if it occurred to him that the troll was an attempt on Hermione's life, it would have occurred to Quirrell instantly. We (and Harry) know that Quirrell said nothing to McGonagall, from which Harry will soon infer that Quirrell could have saved Hermione yet did nothing. (Which makes it likely, but not certain, that it was Quirrell who was behind the troll.) In either case Quirrell has reached a point, or is about to reach a point, in his sinister plan where it no longer matters (or perhaps even requires) that Harry take him as a mortal enemy.
Draco (and maybe even Lucius) will most likely infer from the troll incident that Hermoine was not the one who attacked him, and he will align himself with Harry in the coming Roaring Rampage of Revenge. I would not be surprised if Lesath Lestrange also made an appearance.
It's also possible/likely that the Malfoy household is either involved, or believes that one of their allies is involved, in a revenge killing.
And thus, Hermione Jean Granger was permenantly sacrificed in a ritual which manifested Harry Potter.
Clever, but I just can't bring myself to upvote it.
I think I've identified three techniques Eliezer uses to create associations in the readers' minds and promote ideas to their attention.
There's repetition. If you're sensitive to repetition then the repetition will drive you mad. Five false prophets, many uses of Grindelwald's name, and about a zillion instances of the phrase 'the old wizard'. Dumbledore is old, old, old.
There's placing two related ideas side by side. Like Harry wondering how magic could possibly work, then segueing into an 'analogy' to artificial intelligence. (Repeatedly, so it's a twofer.) Or the description of phoenix travel appearing in the same chapter as Harry confronting Dumbledore over Narcissa's death.
And there's the throwaway gag that contains the literal truth. "It's not like I'm an imperfect copy of someone else." "Let me know after it turns out that it was Professor Quirrell who did it."
And, perhaps, "And if you coincidentally crack the secret of immortality along the way, we'll just call it a bonus."
After Chapter 87, I thought it likely that Hermione's primary contribution to the story would be to rediscover the Philosopher's Stone through the application of the scientific method, solving humanity's biggest problem with the method humans actually use to solve their big problems. It's a natural fit for her talents, it teaches the lesson that saving the world with science is no less heroic than wandplay and derring-do, and it's a goal she could pursue if her magic deserted her, as it may have just done.
The problem was, Hermoine had a heroic task, but not a heroic motive. And of course she has bigger problems now. They're problems for the story as well. Judging by the number of words he's spent on the subject, it looks like one of Eliezer's goals for HPMoR is to teach us his ideas of what it means to be a hero. Hermione's premature death spoils the lesson. The story's told us that she's a hero, but she never finished becoming one. She never found something to protect.
So. I'm confident that she'll return, and that death will be her Azkaban, the injustice that calls her to action. I rather think her heroism will take the form of research into a source of immortality. This will require Harry's means of restoring her to life to be insufficiently general to help the rest of humanity, but I have no idea what Harry's going to do so I think I'll end my speculations here. Am I on the right track?
Huh. It seems like a lot of people in this discussion are convinced that Hermione is dead and will stay dead. I agree that she is probably currently quite dead; however, I assign a greater than 50 % probability that she will somehow be resurrected.
My prediction: Harry will convince a reluctant Dumbledore to put Hermione's body under some sort of stasis spell (cue discussion of cryonics) while he researches ways to revive her. The resurrection plot will resolve the question whether the HPMoR-verse is reductionist or if there is a body/soul dichotomy (my bet is on the former).
Bearing in mind that Eliezer consistently foreshadows important events, let's brainstorm what Harry might do to end the world.
First, ritual magic and Dark rituals have played a prominent role in the story. Dark rituals have been mentioned over and over, and it's been emphasized that they are dangerous and powerful.
A magic ritual, much like a magic potion, seems to achieve much more than a spell. In my opinion this is probably because of the same conservation law by which potionmaking uses a small amount of magic to unlock the power already in some sense inherent in the potion's ingredients. (Example: Lily Potter sacrifices her life and successfully provides Harry with lifelong magical protection, while not even Dumbledore is capable of casting such a spell even with the Elder Wand.)
In fact, I conjecture that Eliezer brought potions into the story the way he did as a way of making us aware of this magical conservation law. A potion, to my mind, is merely a certain class of magic ritual which produces a magically potent substance. I may be wrong, since we don't know that potionmaking obeys the same ceremonial formula as a ritual.
Here's Quirrell's description:
So, I think Harry will either discover or, equally likely, invent a magic ritual which sacrifices something really ... squeamishness-inducing ... in exchange for root access to the Atlantean mainframe, or whatever.
It would be nice if there were rituals described other than Ask'Enthe.
I also wonder if MOR verse has an actual Death anthopomorphic personification, apart from the Dementors, spawned by Magic. I also wonder what EY's opinion on the way Death is portrayed in Discworld is.
For years, when trying to explain just how easy it is to break D&D 3.5 specifically, my example has always been a 5th level transmutation wizard with shrink item, mage hand, a twenty thousand pound rock and 100d6 of falling object dammage.... And somehow, I managed to not see that coming. I wonder if EY's falling rock idea originally came from D&D.
Wasn't exactly a falling rock, more like a rapidly expanding jawbreaker.
I predicted that the rock would be used in more or less this way, although I expected it would be used as a projectile by accelerating the ring to a high speed at an enemy and then Finite Incantatem.
Harry should be screaming at Dumbledore to use his time-turner. There are a lot of options, constrained mostly by the necessity of seeing a Hermione-looking-thing die.
"I've already used it six times today, Harry..."
In HPMOR, time travel obeys the Novikov self-consistency principle (with the exception of liberal use of deus ex machina to keep it from being over-powered). If it were possible for Harry to use a time-turner to save Hermione, she wouldn't have died in the first place.
I'd wondered why no one used a time-turner the moment they knew a troll was loose. Even if Dumbledore had already used up his hours, another professor could've used some form of priority magical communication to call for aurors to travel six hours into the past, swiftly prepare to deal with a Hogwarts-attacking troll, and teleport to the site. Then I realized that Quirrell could prevent all attempts to stop the troll using time travel by exploiting the restriction against information traveling back more than six hours, i.e. by waiting until six hours after he wanted the attack to start, traveling back six hours, and initiating the attack.
I predict that it will be revealed that Quirrell or a closely related entity has been abusing Harry on and off throughout his life, to try and make him into a Dark Lord.
He can go to Harry's house like the time he played Father Christmas.
Obliviated memories leave residue, which is how in Chapter 88 the twins remembered that they could find people, in the castle, but couldn't remember how.
In the first chapter, Harry noticed that he believed in magic.
In chapter 16, Harry is almost reminded of something when he looks at Quirell, but can't remember what. And when Quirrell is first introduced, Harry ominously recognizes him
In the sixth chapter, McGonagall points out that Harry can act like an abused child.
Quirrell uses Obliviation and memory charms and as Mr. Cloak-and-Hat, he manipulated Blaise. And he uses Obliviation and memory charms more subtly, to change someone's mood and personality over time, as shown when he brute-force-save-scumed his way to making Hermione suspicious of Draco.
Quirrell expected Harry to become a Dark Lord when he spoke with him after the first class and was surprised that Harry aspired to science.
Quirrell expects the worst out of people, and so he expected that an abused Harry would be destined to darkness.
Edit: I just realized that Harry was probably abused almost every night (or day) for some significant period. There was a time turner involved, and that's why his sleep cycle is off.
My interpretation is that all of these are symptoms of Harry's dark side (which is the backup copy / horcrux of Voldemort somewhere in him).
This is an intriguing hypothesis, but are you aware that Eliezer also has this condition? I was under the impression that he was working off of his own experiences here and nothing more.
I think the simpler "conscious Horcrux inside Harry" theories are ruled out by the sorting hat: "I can tell you that there is definitely nothing like a ghost - mind, intelligence, memory, personality, or feelings - in your scar. Otherwise it would be participating in this conversation, being under my brim."
It is possible that the original, canon Harry has been completely replaced by Voldemort, or that the Horcrux has merged with Harry to form a new single personality. The sorting hat is also explicit that it does not remember previous students such as Tom Riddle as individuals. Therefore it would not notice if HJPEV were in fact Tom Riddle redux. However there's just one person in Harry, not two.
The hat talked specifically about objects under its brim. Maybe the horcrux is in some other part of Harry?
This is good evidence right up until you destroy your own case:
"Quirrell expected Harry to become a Dark Lord when he spoke with him after the first class and was surprised that Harry aspired to science."
Surprise that Harry aspired to science is not what someone who had been regularly communicating with Harry for a decade would experience.
On the other hand, you're firing with some fully automatic plot-armor-piercing bullets, there. Quirrell's primary motivation is clearly to groom Harry for some future, so if he waited to start doing so until Harry entered Hogwarts, why did he wait?
My favorite theory (Harry is an amnesiac transfer of Voldemort, Quirrelmort is just a horcrux) is only slightly better here. In this case Quirrelmort wouldn't anticipate how much a happy childhood might change Voldemort's personality and wouldn't see the need to remold himself until after that first encounter. That still doesn't explain why he wouldn't even check in on himself for a decade. It took that long for the "mort" part of Quirrelmort to take full control? Or maybe after taking control Quirrelmort knows he only has a year's worth of activity before decaying away, so he chose to save it when he would have extended contact with Harrymort and the latter would be studying magic?
So that Harry would have started to use magic, and could be seen to defeat Voldemort in combat, instead of just be part of some freakish accident that killed Voldemort.
Harry "defeats" Voldemort while Voldemort downloads into Harry, transforming himself from Villain to Savior and living happily ever after.
I don't know about this, for a couple of reasons.
1) If there was a time turner involved, why do the issues with Harry's sleep schedule persist even after he gets to Hogwarts and gains a time-turner of his own?
2) If someone spent a two-hour period of time abusing Harry and then time-turnering it away every day, wouldn't he get tired two hours early nstead of two hours late? That is to say, wouldn't his sleep cycle appear to be 22 hours instead of 26?
Fridge Horror.
Don't forget (emphasis added)
I don't think so. He's not supposed to use magic on Harry, and his attempts to influence him through their link fail as well.
Two interesting observations: The most recent utterances of the words "temporal pressure" (similar to the titles of these last two chapters) was in chapter 86 when discussing the Halls of Prophecy:
Next, near the end of chapter 89, Harry "turns away from Dumbledore" twice, almost as if there's a kink in time after explicitly mentioning "pressure":
Hypothesis: Something very strange just happened to Time around Harry, possibly involving a time turner, and things are definitely not as they seem.
It's almost as if someone is trying to manipulate Harry's reaction to these events, like when H&C tricks Hermione repeatedly. Fred and George are unconscious at this point, too. It goes without saying that Harry is probably an unreliable narrator.
I was under the impression that "temporal pressure" referred to some kind of mysterious Fate-like force that occasionally compels seers to release prophecies when important parts of the future gets resolved. That could just be Harry's new resolve to do anything necessary to get Hermione back (in addition to "time pressure" meaning the pressure he was under to get to Hermione on time). Is there a particular reason the "fracturing feeling" needs to be externally imposed rather than, y'know, a perfectly reasonable emotional reaction to current events?
On the other hand, Eliezer has mentioned that he wants to go through common tropes but do them better. He hasn't really done a full-blown Peggy Sue yet, although he's poked fun at the idea, and I'm pretty sure I remember Eliezer saying that he's read Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time, which is a Peggy Sue fic in which Harry finds Atlantis and weird things happen involving time, so... (recommended for the awesome ideas, but if you're like me you'll get annoyed by the way Harry talks.)
Eliezer
I think the facts at least are as described. Hermione is certainly lying in a pool of blood, something significant did happen to her (Harry felt the magic), and Dumbeldore definitely believe Hermione is dead.
If there is a time turner involved, it won't change those perceptions one bit, And I doubt Dumbeldore would try too Mess With Time ever again (as mentioned in the Azkaban arc). Harry might, but he's out of his Time Turner Authorized Range. Even then, it looks like he's thinking longer term than that.
I haven't visited these threads for nearly a year; please forgive me if someone else has shared a similar prediction in the meantime.
I predict that Quirrell's goal is to start a war between magical people and non-magical people.
The student armies have been taught combat skills, organization, and discipline but they have not been indoctrinated. The text does not show that the student armies have been guided toward one faction or another within Magical Britain. Quite the opposite, they have been taught to work together across the 'house' lines that may have divided them in the past.
It would be counter-productive to prepare tools that could be as easily used by your enemies as yourself. So we may reason that all members of the student armies are already on the side Quirrell wants them on. One thing all members of the student armies have in common is that they are members of Magical Britain.
I have found nothing to suggest international tensions, so a war against another magical nation would be out of place in the text, as I understand it.
On the other hand, Quirrell had a downright emotional reaction when Harry declared his aspiration to be a scientist in chapter 20. After the end, when we read through the story from the beginning, we will see that as the point where the villain's motivations are revealed: Quirrell wants to save the world from scientists and their careless exploration of powers they cannot contain.
Quirrell has been pushing Harry down a path of isolation. He created situations that built up Harry's distrust of authority. He cut Harry off from his friends. I believe he means for Harry to trigger the Great Muggle War by doing something grand and ill-advised that makes sense in the desperate state Quirrell intends to put him in.
My prediction of Quirrell's overall goal does not depend on my prediction of his intentions regarding Harry, and I am less certain of those. I feel there are pieces I am missing there.
I think Quirrell wants the leader of the magical side to be Harry rather than himself. 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 based on Quirrell being both a Robin Hanson stand-in and Voldemort 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:
(Ch. 35)
In other words, the power the Dark Lord knows not is hope.
I don't think it can be usefully summarized into one punchy word (ETA: I don't think hope is quite the right way to describe what Quirrellmort is missing that's preventing him from creating and ruling over an intergalactic dark empire), but now that I thought for one minute about which one I would choose if I had to pick one, it would be one that doesn't at first brush sound like it fits into that slot at all:
The power the Dark Lord knows not is ambition.
After thinking about this for a minute I have to confirm my first impression: This is nonsense. The Dark Lord knows craptons of ambition. Any definition of 'ambition' for which the Dark Lord does not know it is a ridiculous definition. And if we're talking about Quirrellmort we've even heard him share his ambitions. Maybe he has somewhat less ambition than Harry but that's not sufficient for the claim to be reasonable.
*shrugs* So my opinion is that when one ambition is so much greater that the other isn't even distinguishable from zero unless you plot them on a log scale, it makes poetic sense to call the Dark Lord "not ambitious", even though I of course agree that Quirrellmort is ambitious compared to the median human. But if you don't agree that this is poetically appropriate, sure, fine.
(I'll recall my disclaimer that I don't actually think that it makes sense to use just a single word to describe the concept -- seriously trying to do that strikes me as trying to make the discussion compliant with Dumbledorian thought-by-cliché.)
The power the Dark Lord Knows Not is optimism?
Is there more to be said about Quirrell being a Robin Hanson stand-in? Was this covered in another thread? Does anyone have handy links to the relevant posts?
Well, it was mentioned in this comment thread, and I thought it made a lot of sense.
Doesn't that sound a little familiar to you? Like there's someone around here like that?
"Time Pressure" is a pun! Somewhere previously, prophecies were described as being caused by a sort of pressure built up on time, and TP2 ends in a prophecy.
It appears Quirrell now believes Harry has used the killing curse. Applying Story Logic, this misjudgement of Harry will lead to Terrible Bad Consequences for Quirrell.
Some ramblings before ch90: Quirrell will not learn the truth of how Harry killed the troll, since Dumbledore will memory charm the Weasely brothers (they saw Harry's patronus) and thus discover that their minds have been tampered with (by Quirrell). Suspecting Quirrell, Dumbledore will also erase the Weasely brothers' memories of how Harry actually killed the troll. Quirrell will not actually see the dead troll. He will not be told how it died.
If Dumbledore does not find memories of the maraurder's map in the Weasely brothers' minds, he may well make the Quirrell=mort connection immediately: Dumbledore used the map to unsuccessfully locate Tom Riddle, and only a professor could have tampered with the minds of students who have been in Hogwarts this whole time.
One look at the troll's supine body should clear that misconception. Didn't he reach the site by the end of the chapter?
A close read indicates that he probably hasn't - he seems to be somewhere in the middle of Hogwarts, burning through walls, and abruptly stops once the troll is killed, and not actually present. And while he does respect Harry's ability, an AK is probably the most parsimonious explanation for 'how did Harry just kill an enchanted adult troll in a few seconds?'
Hmm. It seems highly likely that the troll was timeturned back six hours itself in order to prevent people using time turning against it - given the amount of prep work that went into this (sabotaging Hermoine's kit, lifting the map, making her miss that meal. sun proofing it...) it would be a major oversight to not do that. Of course, that limits the suspect pool to people who know about time turning. From our perspective, all relevant suspects do, but in universe, this probably does rule out people. For example, if means Lucius may in fact know that it was not one of his minions getting overly ambitious.
Someone should cast a chain-Imperius , commanding the victim to:
1) Not attack anyone else subject to these rules 2) Imperius anyone not subject to these rules, and subject them to these rules 3) Inform your enchanter of any plans you know of that might hinder the grand Imperius effort.
It's established in Rowling!Cannon that the spell can be chained, and Harry has probably read the GNU manifesto, so he should have these sorts of ideas.
A liberal arch-wizard might object that this would reduce the entire world to a dull statis of mindless servitude:
But there would be ways around it; maybe just 10% of the world could be Imperiused at any one moment as a police force. They could then use a shift system, so that everyone got 90% freedom. This might seem extreme, but I think the devastating, distributed destructive powers of magic render it (or something like it) the only sane response for a society not comprised of angels.
I count 30 Ticks, and then no more. Why doesn't the ticking continue, as Harry's still in the Great Hall (with the clock) for a while? Is this just arbitrary, or could the amount of Ticks given be somehow important, perhaps the time Harry would have had to arrive earlier in order to prevent Hermione's untimely death?
From Eliezer's facebook post:
"Predictably" being an essential part: don't waste your time on what you know is not helpful.
Why would Harry not send his Patronus to Dumbledore, or McGonagall in order to alert them that Hermione was in danger? Why would he not immediately time-turn (break the shell, it's supposed to be a deterrent and/or indication that you've obviously misused it, right?) before he had more information about what was going on?
I'm more upset now than when I read certain scenes in A Storm of Swords; I suppose congratulations are in order for that, but... damn. Do not want.
Not surprising-- it was clear from A Game of Thrones that Martin was writing That Sort of Universe, but HP:MOR has gone on for a much longer time (and possibly a higher proportion of the story) without that sort of death.
Do not want, indeed.
But as to time-turning, the shell would have been enchanted by someone stronger than him in magic, and I imagine he either couldn't do it at all, or couldn't do it without damaging the Time Turner itself.
Mostly I think he was panicking. But I think he had reason to believe that they wouldn't react quickly enough and/or would force him not to look for Hermione.
This I'm less clear about.
Legs eaten off at the thighs! For some reason this stuff reminds me of the fight scene from the fifth Twilight movie. Here's a great video review describing that scene, it really brought a smile to my face.
What with the timey-wimey shenanigans in the writing and her brain not having spent too much time "dead" yet, I'm suspecting Hermione will yet live.
What with the show and Dumbledore's diagnosis, I'm suspecting Magic will continue to think her dead and thus her career as a witch being over (pending Harry hacking the Source of Magic).
Plus repercussions of the "Do not mess with time" kind.
It seems ridiculous that Hogwarts doesn't have any kind of PA system, even schools in the 90's had that.
Also, basically no kind of preparation for disasters at all even though they were in the middle of a war 10 years ago. They didn't even do head counts.
The wizarding world doesn't keep track of muggle accomplishments.
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.
Or alternately, somewhere in the literally thousands and thousands of predictions or claims (I have ~200 in just my personal collection which is nowhere comprehensive) spread across the 20k MoR reviews on FF.net, the >5k comments on LW, the 3650 subscribers of the MoR subreddit, the TvTropes discussions etc etc, someone got something right.
You know perfectly well that one does not get to preach about a single right prediction. He had the opportunity to make more than that prediction, and he failed to take it.
He also predicted that Hat and Cloak was Quirrell, Santa Claus was Dumbledore, and S. was Snape. He considered these predictions blatantly obvious as well. I remember receiving ~13 upvotes for arguing that Quirrell could be ruled out as H&C, so it wasn't as obvious to all of us.
All of which were consensus beliefs; do not make the mistake of interpreting upvotes as object-level agreement - you may have received the upvotes for making the anti-Quirrel case well or bringing up some bit that people hadn't remembered or just being funny.
It's a large space, not a binary yes-or-no, so successful predictions are impressive even given a large base. Also I could be prejudiced but MoR is supposed to be solvable god damn it.
Someone was criticized. S/he was right, the critics were wrong. The neural net updating algorithm calls for a nudge in the appropriate direction of "Beware of dismissing those who speak with what you think is too much confidence."
I update in favor of "user 75th is more experienced in the tropes of enigma fiction." Indeed I would not be at all surprised were I to discover that user 75th writes such fiction him or herself. It similarly wouldn't surprise me if user 75th had gone to the library and checked out and read some of the same 15 books Elizier checked out and read before writing HPMoR.
For example, before reading the author's notes on HPMoR I was not familiar with Chekhov's Gun. Now that I am, I am much more likely to catch such a device when it appears in other fiction. I now suspect user 75th is quite familiar with Chekhov's Gun and other standard tricks of this sort of story. 75th picked up on one such trope (one I'm still not familiar with) that signaled that Hermione was heading for death.
If there's a general update to be had here, it may go something like this:
Before dismissing those who speak with what I think is too much confidence, I need to consider the possibility that their confidence is based on facts or experience I am not aware of. I should probably take five minutes to ask them why they are so confident before dismissing them.
Ha, you've got me all wrong. I am woefully under-read, particularly in fiction. I get a very small percentage of the references Eliezer makes in Methods; most of the time, I find out that he's borrowed something months (or, let's face it, years) after I read it, only by seeing someone else explicitly point out the reference. I have had my life ruined by TV Tropes, but most of what I'm familiar with there is video games, and not too awfully many of those.
But it's not a matter of picking up on specific tropes, exactly. It's more a matter of getting into the author's head. Of constantly asking "If this were foreshadowing or a setup or a clue, what would be the most effective payoff?" I read Chapter 84, and then, put together with many other quotes from my many rereads of HPMoR ("Nothing really bad ever happens at Hogwarts", "Her life was officially over", etc.), I answered that question with "Hermione will die horribly," then posted how I felt about it.
It's the same deal with my prediction — which I'm far more certain of than I was that Hermione would die horribly — that Nzryvn Obarf xvyyrq Anepvffn Znysbl. I got into an argument with someone on Reddit once, who was bringing up all sorts of random canon characters who haven't even been introduced in Methods and coming up with categories in which to score them 1 to 5, then giving them wildly inappropriate scores and adding them up. She said things like "We're in a state of abysmally low evidence" and "At least I appreciate what Eliezer is trying to do," claiming to be following the spirit of Bayes better than me, when all I was doing was pointing out three successively more blatant clues that Eliezer put into the text and saying that my certainty had increased as they were successively pointed out to me.
I see a lot of that, it seems. A lot of people thinking the whole Bayes thing is about immediately reducing a situation to a bunch of numbers and seeing what the numbers say, and fie upon anyone who acts sure of something without attaching their spreadsheet. But it seems to me the numbers themselves are not the most important part of Bayesian thinking. Perhaps the least important part.
No, it doesn't, not out of thousands of predictions of which you selected one post hoc. If I may quote you, our minds do not run on floating point beliefs.
I totally get the point of the rest of your comment, but not this sentence. A correct prediction is meaningless because it wasn't accompanied by another correct prediction?
I'm not trying to toot my own horn here; I've gotten things wrong too, and my original comment in question here was much more about expressing my despair at Chapter 84 than trying to register a prediction for later credit. But I don't see how I had any particular "opportunity to make more than that prediction" that I failed to take, beyond the fact that anyone can make any prediction they feel like any time they feel like it.
More or less. Think of it in terms of selection bias: a bunch of people enter a lottery of some sort. After the lottery concludes, the lottery organizer Yliezer Eudkowsky praises the winner, entrant #57, for their deep insights into lotteries and how to guess the winning number and admonishes everyone who told #57 to not get his hopes up. Do we now credit #57 for wisdom and study his numerology? No, not really.
Now, if #57 had simultaneously entered 5 other lotteries and won 3 of them, then we would start wondering what #57's edge is and preorder #57's upcoming book Secrets of the RNG Illuminati. Or even if he had won none of those other lotteries and simply gotten 3 near-misses (5 out of 6 digits right, for example), that would still serve as replication of above-average predictive accuracy and not mere selection effects, and persuade us that something was going on there beyond randomness+post-hoc-selection.
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.
I am breaking my "only comment on LW if you expect some benefit" rule because I am in a somewhat unique position to comment on this, and I agree with Eliezer that "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". See, I made this update at an earlier time under not-dissimilar circumstances. (In short, I thought ArisKatsaris was making an overconfident prediction about HPMoR, bet against him, and lost.)
An excerpt from my journal, 3/28/2012:
So, you know, here's a chance to learn a $30 lesson for free, people.
Prediction for Chapter 90: Time Pressure, Part 3:
"Wait a moment," you say. "Time Pressure, Part 3? Harry already lost his race against the clock. Why would Chap. 90 be called 'Time Pressures'?"
Because Harry's race against the clock to save Hermione's life has only just begun, and he has slightly less than six hours left. Eliezer mentioned that one of his most significant purposes of Chap. 86 was to update characters' states of knowledge before the next arc. If you recall, in that chapter, Harry learned the word "horcrux." And in Chap. 87, Harry learned of the philosopher's stone.
So what will Harry do? Get the shell removed from his time turner, or obtain a time turner from someone else. Learn about the Horcrux ritual as quickly as possible, travel back in time, get Hermione to create a horcrux, and erase her memory of doing so thus that her death plays out just as before. Then start working on the stone to restore Hermione to life. (He could also take the "bone of the father, flesh of the servant, blood of the enemy" route, but positively identifying Hermione's enemy could be difficult. Lucius Malfoy and Company, who were tricked into antagonizing Hermione, might not count for purposes of the ritual.)
The hard part, of course, will be getting Hermione to kill, but Harry can probably find someone in a hospital who has only days to live and convince Hermione that creating a horcrux is a net ethical positive.
Without Hermione's death, murder would have been a line Harry was unwilling to cross. I think that whoever is behind this plot really wants Harry to cross the Moral Event Horizon and/or create the stone (the second possibility is less likely though, since Hermione was already working on the stone, but that fact could have been unknown to the plotter).
Edit: As of Chapter 101, this prediction has probably been proven wrong, unless Harry's memory of executing this plan has been erased (not completely impossible; there's a moment when he becomes momentarily disoriented.) But I think this would make a totally awesome piece of recursive fanfiction. After HPMoR is finished, I might write this.
While I consider this unlikely, it would help explain the scene with Hermione's soul seemingly leaving her body. As far as I remember the characters who deaths seems we saw in canon didn't have this effect and having a Horocrux would differentiate Hermione from them.
I'm not capable of reasoning about time loops in my sleep-deprived state, but would it be possible for Hermione to create her Horcrux by killing herself?
Yes: Consider the following loop: Hermione A goes and kills future Hermione B (who already has a horcrux). Hermione A is then killed by the troll, but has a horcrux (possibly with a mind wipe before so she doesn't know about it). Hermione is then A is then resurrected to be sent back in time to become Hermione B. Then Hermione B is resurrected.
However, we know that messing with time is bad and we know that magic with souls is powerful, so this combination looks potentially very dangerous.
More generally, if resurrection doesn't require additional sacrifices and doesn't use up a horcrux, people who don't have horcruxes could make them by murdering other people (by arrangement) who already have one (and then resurrecting them). Eventually, everyone is alive and has a horcrux.
Predicted with what probability?
80% probability that Hermione will make a horcrux; a mere 30% probability that everything will happen exactly as I specified above. It is a very specific prediction, after all.
...And a 90% probability that the plan will occur to Harry whether or not he pulls it off.
I can't see either Harry or Hermione going along with a Horcrux ritual. Just too evil and out of character for both of them.
Given the title and some other hints in the story, I think use of a time turner is inevitable; but whatever Harry does it won't involve a Horcrux.
Not out of character for Harry; in fact, it would be perfectly in character for him. But Hermione would never go for it.
I thought that horcruxing required mens rhea.
Mens rea, and yes.
I'm tentative to make predictions here since, reading through comments, I consider you folks more grounded in rationality, logical thinking and also fictional predictions than me. But I wanted to share a thought and get feedback, so here goes.
My interpretation of the big magical release goes like this: Hermione's brain, experiences, knowledge, magical ability, etc., are programmed via the genetic magic marker to upload into... something. The Atlantean Neural Database, or something like that. We've got reason to believe that magic was artificially created and the genetic marker programmed into people, so that they are capable of interfacing with reality on a far more interesting level than most people. We've also got plenty of evidence to suggest that the brain is, if not fully understood by magical knowledge, more than capable of being interacted with. We have Legilimency and Obliviations capable of accessing memory, thoughts, knowledge, and intentions; the author is capable of working with things WE don't know about because wizarding knowledge is stated to have been lost, so we also have some unknown-unknowns working against us. So the odds of neural magic having existed in a more advanced form (peaking in Atlantis) seems pretty decent to me.
If I imagine myself as a group of wizards (or an ultra clever protoMerlin), capable of interacting with time and brains, and I'm still interested in doing research and data gathering, then it seems like being able to collect ALL neural data on ALL wizards would be a big boon in doing research. So the magic marker, given a certain degree of trauma, could trigger the release of information back to the source of magic. Dumbledore's certainty that Hermione is dead (despite certainty in other comments that HP should still be capable of preserving her brain) tells me that he knows, based on that big blast of magical resonance stuff, her death is now as official as it gets. He's also very confident that life goes on after death; if you're capable of uploading every part of your brain that makes you YOU into a big database, there's no reason for him to be wrong, in this sense.
And from a narrative perspective, the fact that Harry immediately jumps to conclusions about Atlantis and searching outside of time to bring her back--no to protect everybody else from death, as was his original statement, but to specifically fetch the string of information that represents Hermione and restore it to existence--suggests they're related.
Maybe I'm late to the party on this idea though. Odds of somebody else thinking of it before, especially if I'm the one thinking about it, seem pretty good.
I predict that Harry will save many or all people who ever died from oblivion with magic that reaches backward through time to capture the mind of each person at the point of their death.
I further predict that this magic will create the mechanism of magic, possibly incidentally, and be responsible for the sort of Atlantis that magical Britons believe in.
I speculate that magic and ghosts are unintended byproducts of Harry's Afterlife Immortality Project.
Harry is an anti-death hero. Whatever villains he may encounter, his enemy is death and his heroic victory will be over his true enemy.
The afterlife figures centrally in the original work in ways that are incompatible with the author's worldview. In this way, the author incorporates important elements of the original work without betraying his convictions.
I made this prediction last April, and wish there had already been an admonishment to share predictions like the one involving 75th, yesterday.
What happened to Hermione was shocking and has nearly monopolized the posts in this thread so far.
There's aftermath coming, though, and I'd like to talk about that. Harry is probably in a lot of trouble. Here's a short list of rules violations:
The transfiguration is probably the worst on the list, really. If Harry is lucid at the end of this chapter I expect there will be some throw away line, possibly post-timeskip, about Dumbledore taking measures to avoid Transfiguration Sickness from the gases escaping the troll's skull.
And, really, why did Dumbledore tell him to carry that damn rock? Did he know? Or has Dumbledore found it so useful to carry a large rock around that "get a big rock, keep it with you at all times" is in the top five things he'd tell his younger self if he ever got the chance? Seriously -- the fuck?
I wonder if this arc will be like the psychological sort of horror movie where there's lots of action in the first twenty minute and the rest of the movie is the people who aren't dead yet being mean to each other. I can see that kind of aftermath, here. It won't be pretty.
On the other hand, if the twins go sufficiently public about Harry's homid patronus then Lucius will find out about it anyway and there won't be any reason for Harry not to use it to communicate with Draco. At least, not until the restraining order shows up.
Seriously, having your stalker's glow-in-the-dark spirit animal bounce in through a wall at the most inopportune moments to remind you that they're still thinking about you and really just want to talk could lead a person to think maybe Azkaban isn't so bad an idea after all. Ugh.
I actually expected Harry to cast the Killing Curse as a last ditch desperation/rage effort. He knew what it does, has seen the wand movements and pronounciation (in the Dementor dream), knew and had the required state of mind. That should be enough to cast it, as per Ch26 ("He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.").
Harry may have had the mood, but there's doubt about the Power, and there's also been multiple foreshadows of how broken low-level spells are, and a recent mention that he's he can't stop himself from noticing them. Hence "censors off".
Not that it were very important, but actually Harry told Dumbledore to keep the patronus secret, not the other way around.
Also, merely seeing the Patronus isn't the problem. Understanding it is.
The obvious interpretation of this is that spellcasting is a skill like any other, and practice develops it. By giving Harry an implausibly large object to carry, and then having him interact with the Transfiguration professor, Dumbledore can be fairly confident that Harry will try to transfigure the rock into something more reasonable to have in constant physical contact with him. This constant transfiguration practice will help Harry level up his abilities, and a huge rock is predictably useful in combat situations.
He also showed off his unique partial transfiguration trick during combat, which Dumbledore was hoping he would save for the Final Battle.
He threw the troll's head over the wall, so its well away from anyone who could breathe in the gases, and a simple bubble-head charm should solve the problem. Given that the alternative was being eaten, he won't be punished for it (also, the most important thing is keeping partial transfiguration secret - other students would be told that Dumbledore killed the troll).
The twins were going to try to rescue Hermione anyway.
The twins will probably agree to keep the patronus secret.
While Harry and the twins did break a rule which was said to result in expulsion, they did almost save Hermione, which is more that the staff did. Expelling them would lose even more face then failing to follow through on a threat of expulsion would. Maybe McGonnigal will admit that when it comes to military matters, her students know more then she does. Maybe in future emergencies the 7th year generals will be able to countermand the orders of professors.
[EDIT: formatting]
Trolls already use continuous transformation on themselves; to find a needle in a haystack with a magnent, you first have to suspect there is a needle. Harry's partial transfiguration attempt(did that happen or...?) is probably more like a needle in a haystack of troll-magic. The only people who I think could spot it without knowing what they're looking for...already know about partial transfiguration.
Edit: and then Dumbledore finite's the acid to prevent transfig. sickness. any chance of anyone else figuring it out by looking at the magic involved will be looking for a needle without a magnent.
You would suspect that something strange happened (worthy of an autopsy) if a first year killed a troll... unless of course he just snapped his fingers :)
I wouldn't worry about transfiguration sickness: breathing sulphuric acid is probably worse than breathing atomized(?) troll brain matter, and AFAIK sulphuric acid and its salts are either directly harmful or aren't absorbed anywhere interesting in a human.
Now that you've pointed this out, I'm curious: why sulphuric acid? Hydrochloric is simpler.
My friend and I were emailing about this update. I asked her for her opinion on it and whether or not she liked it. Here are her thoughts:
"Yeeah, I kind of don't. I posted this review on it yesterday (after quietly fuming for a bit):
If this had been Neville or someone, I'd be commending you on how you handled the emotion here, but as it is I was too annoyed and appalled that you were damseling and then fridging fricking Hermione while halfheartedly suggesting she put up an offscreen fight to be able to appreciate it.
I'm not easily annoyed with fridging, or character death in general. In fact, a lot of my favorite scenes in fiction involve my favorite characters dying, and I've always argued that a character of any gender dying as a vital part of the main character's arc is fine. But Hermione had a huge incomplete arc and you've just rendered the entirety of it pointless. This is Hermione, she wasn't as rational as Harry, she tried to be a hero but only made things worse, she was framed for murder and ended up in a huge debt to Harry, which she had plans to try to settle and potential for interesting emotional growth, except whoops, then she died, and nothing ever came of any of it. For shock value and unexpectedness purposes, I guess that's cool. But for storytelling purposes, it's breathtakingly unsatisfying, and the fact she was your primary female character by a mile and you just killed her off in an offscreen fight because a boy was too late to save her, her last words spent reassuring him it's not his fault, adds a bitter aftertaste of typical gendered tropes to the whole thing.
I'm hoping this isn't what it seems, one way or another, and Hermione gets to come back and do some of the stuff she should have gotten to do so that maybe at least some of the time you spent developing her wasn't just inane inconsequential filler. But if it is what it seems, I'm just emptily disappointed - too distracted sighing dejectedly at the fact I thought you were better than this to even care on an in-world level that she died.
A chapter like this shouldn't fall flat like that. Although my reasons for disliking it may be fairly meta and you could argue you're intentionally averting accepted standards of when characters cannot die, the ultimate result is just that I'm left unaffected by a chapter that should have been powerful and emotional. As an author you should care about that if nothing else.
Basically, remember when I was telling you that one of the few things that bugged me was how near the beginning Harry's interactions with Hermione where she was traditionally smart but he was rational seemed to be belittling her to glorify him? Well, the reason it didn't bug me that much was that Hermione was still interesting and seemingly getting real development and they story seemed to be giving her her own quest of self-improvement through which she could easily become his equal or better. Now she turns out to have existed purely to make Harry care about her and nothing she did mattered and she never got to be anything but Harry's less rational, less successful, less efficient, overemotional love interest foil. Argh. And we didn't even get to see her put up a proper fight! I wouldn't have minded nearly so much if, say, Harry had arrived to find Hermione had already killed or otherwise disabled the troll, with a victorious smile of contentment on her face, and died from her injuries as he watched while whispering "I did it, I'm a hero." But NOPE she put up some kind of fight and threw some explosive-looking spells but of course she was actually helpless and couldn't possibly have defeated the troll on her own so her survival completely and utterly depended on Harry making his way there in time which he didn't, oh no, look at his sadfeels while all she cares about is telling him it's not his fault instead of being livid that she didn't achieve fucking anything in her life because Harry constantly overshadowed her and now she's dying before she could figure out how to fix it.
All that made me too angry to give a damn about the plot or emotion or anything, which is a shame because otherwise I'd probably have enjoyed this update."
I emailed back, and she elaborated:
"Oh, no, my issue is not with the fact that Eliezer killed a female character for Harry's motivation. Like I said, I like character death. I like character death used to put other characters through an emotional rollercoaster. And when people complain that X is sexist because a female character got fridged, that annoys me because while the trend is an issue, there is nothing wrong or sexist with an individual instance of a character who happens to be female dying for a character who happens to be male. It actually kind of surprised me on a meta level that I was so mad - I have never been annoyed by an individual instance of fridging before.
But the issue here is with the context in this particular instance. Your argument that it had to happen this way is flawed, because it assumes the story prior to the exact point of Hermione's death was fixed and out of Eliezer's hands. I don't have a problem with Eliezer killing Hermione, in itself - but if he was going to, he should have either not given her this character arc in the first place or completed the arc first in a way that gives at least some vague kind of closure. He could also have killed Neville if he wanted to - he'd just have needed to develop Harry's relationship with Neville in such a way that it would make sense as a motivator, instead of (or along with) his relationship with Hermione. And it's not as if he suddenly realized here after writing the story up to this point that he needed to kill Hermione in order for it to work out - the trigger warnings page has noted that the next chapter with a trigger warning would be called "The Bystander Effect" (he notes specifically on chapter 88 that the original title was "Bystander Apathy", clearly as a way of alerting those who have been watching out for the next triggery chapter that this is it) since August 2010. This was planned. He knew exactly how he was going to kill Hermione, and he had all the time in the world to plan out a way for it to go that wouldn't involve aborting a potentially interesting arc and making Hermione The Character Who Could Never Step Out Of Harry's Shadow And Then Died.
If you've watched Game of Thrones (or read A Song of Ice and Fire, assuming this bit is more or less the same as the show), it also shockingly kills off main characters a lot, but while it is shocking and unexpected, it is not unsatisfying like this, because the characters who are killed, while they had personalities and plans and development, didn't have arcs going much of anywhere in particular at the moment - the story wouldn't have been any better with them remaining alive than dead at that point. I feel this is very distinctly not the case for Hermione in MoR. She had interesting stuff left to do. She had been written with uncomfortable overtones (taking a canon character one of whose main qualities was being smart and repeatedly making her fail where Harry succeeds because he's more rational), but the story suggested her arc was about her discovering her own way towards not having to be in Harry's shadow anymore, which would have fixed it. By aborting the arc, all that's left is those uncomfortable overtones of glorifying Harry and belittling Hermione - a character who happens to have canonically been the intelligent one, who taught millions of girls that being smart could be pretty badass.
And now MoR's only remaining vaguely developed female character is McGonagall, who, while fun, is also repeatedly emphasized as being markedly irrational (in this very chapter, even). From a source material that did at least reasonably well with female characters, after a story that seemed to be heading towards also doing at least okay on that front, Eliezer ended up with a story about how much better a boy is than almost everybody else, where all of the rare exceptions are male and the one female character who could have held her own gets fridged before anything comes of it. As a canon-Hermione fan, I feel pretty damn slapped in the face, especially when this comes straight after chapter 87 (which also irritated me a lot by making Hermione preoccupied with her tiresome ~unrequited love~ for Harry when she's just been framed for murder and should have way better things to think about). It did not have to be this way.
And, like I said, even if he absolutely had to develop an arc and make it look like Hermione was going to get something done in her life only to have it not happen to make her death more shocking, he could still have done it without the pathetic damseling, and I might have been able to let it slide. Couldn't this have been from Hermione's point of view up until when Harry arrives at the scene? (He could still have done Harry's viewpoint, too.) Couldn't we have actually seen her attempts to fight it off (which Eliezer could at least have attempted to make somewhat awesome)? Couldn't Harry have arrived sometime before Hermione became a helpless immobile McGuffin, and seen her holding her own at least somewhat? (If chapter 90 is Hermione's fight with the troll from her point of view and it's awesome and has some kind of closure to her character, or Hermione gets brought back in some manner and gets some closure afterwards, I'll be reasonably content.)
The end result, as I also mentioned, is that I don't even find it heartwrenching, because I'm too busy being angry at the context to be immersed in the story at all anymore at that point. I couldn't even concentrate when reading the whole last bit because all I wanted to do was start to type a rant into the comment box. If I had managed to be emotionally impacted by it, I'd probably also be more inclined to forgive it for the sake of good storytelling, but exactly because the context was so maddening, I couldn't. I was more saddened by the death of Mrs. Norris than Hermione.
I posted my review on FFN, and he says he reads all reviews, so he's probably read it already, but you can post it if you want. (Probably better include my elaborations here.)"
High-confidence prediction: Chapters 88-89 are Snape's doing.
What? Snape has been trying to set up Hermione as a heroine. What does he gain by luring her to her death?
from http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5782108/27/Harry-Potter-and-the-Methods-of-Rationality
Note: I'm not sure Snape did it, my instinct is that this is the work of QQ. But Snape has reasons.
How high confidence? http://predictionbook.com/predictions/19862
I have updated strongly downward on this prediction based on chapters 90-94, especially 94.
Quirrell can feel Harry's emotions. This can partially explain at least some of the cases when he unexpectedly realized what Harry was thinking (for instance, this probably gave him some information during their conversation about Parseltongue). It might be worthwhile to find all cases when they talked and Harry attempted to hide his emotions.
Some of the comments on what Harry should do reminded me of something that has yet to, as far as I know, appear in HPMoR: The Room of Requirement (aka "the god room"). In canon, Dumbledore (apparently) didn't even know about it; it was Dobby who revealed it to Harry, and hence the DA; I don't remember there being an explanation for how Draco found it (maybe Dobby knew about it before Order of the Phoenix, and Draco ordered him to tell him about it?). It also had some poorly defined, but clearly restrictive rules, which Neville eventually mastered over the course of Deathly Hallows (if not off screen in the previous books): it can't provide food, it didn't show Harry what Draco was up to based on the way Harry was requesting, there was something about what conditions prevented people from entering that I don't remember in detail, etc. It clearly wasn't much use at conjuring up god-mode equipment for use outside of the room, since Neville didn't use it as an armory for the final battle.
I don't remember this being mentioned among the "not appearing in this fic" elements of canon, though it does strike me as ridiculously overpowered in this Harry's hands. However, canon Riddle used it to hide Ravenclaw's diatem, which suggests that canonmort knew enough about the room that rationalmort would almost definitely have found it and abused it for all it's worth if it exists in HPMoR. (It seems to have a decent supply of books, at least, though I have to doubt it could generate information that wasn't put into it beforehand.)
Thinking about the RoR also reminded me of that two-way vanishing cabinet connecting Hogwarts to Borgan and Berk's, which I'm rather doubtful JKR thought much about before Order of the Phoenix, since at some point since it's creation, enough people will have had to have been put through it to make the connection and exploit the blatant hole in Hogwarts security.
Did she mean that she had muggle computer programs? Or did she mean some magical artifacts that work in the same way, or was this just a simple misunderstanding?
I assumed that it was sarcasm.
The thought didn't cross my mind and now that you've mentioned it it seems quite obvious. My sarcasm detector must be broken.
I interpreted that as a self-describing insult/conversation: "Do you know of <things which pattern-match mindlessly and spit out random precanned phrases>?" "Of course! <random precanned phrase>".
(I really hope Brienna or whomever didn't donate or anything to get that cameo. I would be completely mortified.)
It was meant to be a clever rejoinder by Brienne. I may need to rewrite if people are interpreting it this way.
I thought it was clever in a vaguely self-deprecating way. "I obviously have no way of knowing what that thing is, but I can be funny about it." This could probably be conveyed through tone - deadpan may be what you're looking for?
That is a good writing suggestion. I will take it. Thank you.
EDIT: This isn't working when I try it:
Makes it fall a bit flat for me compared to the original. Suggested rewrite? Or is it just me?
Sometimes I use "deadpan" as a verb. "Of course," the witch deadpanned. "I have a dozen of them. In my trunk." (I think splitting the sentence may help.)
I tried that one too. The problem I felt while reading it is that it... breaks up the humor? Like a THIS IS A JOKE sign?
Well, if people keep getting lost on the way to the joke, a sign might be useful.
Michelle Morgan was mine! D:
I thought she mostly understood his sentence (though of course she hadn't known about ELIZA beforehand) and owned a few magical items that could talk to a limited extent.
Prediction:
Quirrell is grooming Harry to become as similar to himself as possible because he wants Harry to become his new permanent vessel/body ("Want you to rule!" - ehehe!).
He chose Harry because Harry already contains part of himself (hence the "resonance") and/or has a high innate potential for magic, and because the dark ritual for permanent possession requires a very high degree of "fidelity", of similarity between him and the host (in this case raw brainpower).
That's why his takeover of the original Quirrell isn't taking, and why he requires more and more rest to retain control (he may have lobotomized the original Quirrell to keep him from taking over, hence the original being just a drooling idiot when Quirrel isn't in control). Only when Harry is as similar to Voldemort himself as possible will the permanent ritual work, and time is running out for Voldemort to engineer Harry such. Which is why HPMOR is fast building towards its climax.
Enough conjunctions for you, enough of a complexity penalty? Eh? We'll see!
What was he going to do when he got there in time?
The paragraph before that one suggests that Quirrell was trying to keep Harry alive. It seems to imply that he was trying to get to the battle in time to ensure that Harry does not get himself killed.
There's some debate about whether the passage about Hermione's soulsplosion rules out becoming a Hogwarts-anchored ghost. I have offered a bet to chaosmosis (LW, Reddit) on Reddit on this topic - I am skeptical of any ghosts.
Why are people here reacting like Hermione is perma-dead?
I get that they'd act that way on reddit, but people here actually believe and sign up for cryonics. Harry's got a whole team of Alcor cryonic specialists right in his wand. And if he can't manage the magic, Dumbledore can. Hermione's soul and magic may have exploded in an impressive lightshow, but her brain is still fully oxygenated and hasn't even begun to decompose.
Everything that makes her her is still doing fine.
(And on a meta level, Elizer knows that fictional examples are strong drivers of behavior. A fictional example of cryonics working would be big for cryonics adoption.)
from http://hpmor.com/chapter/56
He's familiar with cryonics then, or at least the concept of suspended animation.
The next line implies that he'd have used the plan if he didn't immediately think up a better one. Any plan he comes up with to save Hermione has to be at least as likely to succeed as cryonics.
Because the old ancient wizard has reason to believe souls exist, which means that while it's probably possible to keep Hermione's body functioning, there's "a burst of something... too vast to be understood" that's just gone missing.
Mind, that doesn't stop someone from figuring out a way anyway. Harry certainly plans to. It just makes things significantly more difficult.
Stuffed Into The Fridge, indeed.
Harry has shown again and again that he can't lose, and instead doubles-down. He did so with Hermione, and now Lucius has killed her. If people realise it's Lucius, all the better for him; nothing can be proved, but he shows himself to be extremely dangerous and willing to protect his family.
Is it just me or has no one in the story really considered that Quirrell = mort? Like, why does the hypothesis that Quirrell = Grindelwald briefly come up first? Why is everyone blindly trusting him even when they think he might be responsible for some of the bad stuff going on? It seems like everyone is doing some serious mental gymnastics to avoid considering that he is actually seriously evil (esp. Hogwarts faculty and Harry).
Yeah. One thing that’s very striking if you read through it while thinking about motivated cognition is just how often words to the effect of “Harry ignored his sense of doom and …” show up. Its really shocking, Harry explicitly and actively ignores a strong sense of doom several times per chapter.
Yes, I think someone's been tampering with their minds in this respect. It's bizarre that at least Dumbledore or maybe Snape hasn't considered this (Harry doesn't think Voldemort's alive, and McGonagall is engaging in motivated cognition so she can keep Quirrell around to teach as long as possible). Maybe it's related to the curse on the Defense Against the Dark Arts position.
Does Harry believe Voldemort is dead? I thought he learned he was alive way back in Chapter 6:
Harry expresses a lot more skepticism than that a lot more recently. Chapter 86:
And:
Not quite the Red Wedding, but close.
What will it take to give Harry a breakdown, to have him say, or think, "this is too much"?
At the start of this story he's human, vulnerable to stress; merely facing up to Minerva McGonagall is enough to make him have to excuse himself and go retch. When I consider everything that's happened to that boy since then, it's a wonder he's not in need of therapy. But now his strength and sanity seem inhumanly unerodable; even Hermione's death immediately leads to an "unyielding resolution" that he's going to get her back.