Benito comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 21, chapters 91 & 92 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 04 July 2013 11:49AM

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Comment author: Benito 04 July 2013 10:12:45PM 5 points [-]

For a rationalist fic, where you're meant to be able to work things out though, it does seem a bit 'magical' if the answer to every "well that's a bit weird" is "Quirrell probably did it". It's fitting the evidence to your theory.

Comment author: elharo 05 July 2013 12:45:43PM *  10 points [-]

What weird things do we know Quirrell wasn't behind?

  1. Dumbledore is Santa Clause and sneaks into students' bedrooms to leave them notes.
  2. Snape was helping SPHEW.
  3. Whoever memory charmed Rita Skeeter (Gilderoy Lockhart?) was almost certainly not Quirrell.
  4. Harry himself was behind the weird events in Chapter 13. In fact, Harry is behind a lot of the weird events in the book, but we don't always realize that because we see them from his point of view.
  5. The universe is behind Comed-Tea.

Anything else?

Comment author: alex_zag_al 06 July 2013 07:27:53PM *  0 points [-]

Whoever memory charmed Rita Skeeter (Gilderoy Lockhart?) was almost certainly not Quirrell.

What? Why? There was that time that he threatened her in chapter 25. Also, it would explain how he knew that Harry had enlisted the Weasley twins.

There's a motive, too. At lunch afterward, he made Harry deal with the cognitive dissonance of ruining somebody's life, yet feeling proud of himself at the same time. If I was Quirrell I would have helped fake the story just to make Harry rationalize destroying Rita Skeeter.

Comment author: elharo 06 July 2013 09:24:14PM 3 points [-]

It's possible that the Weasley twins hired Quirrell and not Lockhart, but I tend to think that Quirrell was genuinely surprised at the newspaper article about Harry's betrothal and it took him a few minutes to realize it was done with a false memory charm. Quirrell's smart, but not omniscient.

Comment author: Velorien 04 July 2013 10:16:41PM 8 points [-]

Good point. Now if only Quirrell wasn't actually behind 75% of all the weird things happening in the story (as far as we can tell)...

Comment author: solipsist 05 July 2013 05:03:41AM *  4 points [-]

For any weird thing, you may be able to find someone who thinks that "Quirrell did it". That doesn't mean some faction out there believes Quirrell is responsible for every weird thing -- different people think Quirrell is responsible for different weird things.

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