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Phigment comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 112 - Less Wrong
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Comments (287)
Attempting to shoot Voldemort was still the correct action for Harry to take, given his constraints.
Any opportunity to defeat Voldemort at this stage is going to be sudden and short-duration. If you pass up a potential victory shot because it's possibly some sort of misdirection, you'll likely pass up every potential shot at victory you might encounter.
I think that attempting to shoot him there wasnt giving an intelligent enemy very much credit. It would only work if the stupid mistakes that Voldemort was making were real, and not a ruse. Given that Harry possibly has only one chance (because Voldemort promised in parseltongue not to try to harm Harry unless he tried to harm him first), taking the first opportunity that presents itself, which might be a trick to get Voldemort out of that promise, is probably unwise.
Wise sort of went on vacation when Harry elected to oppose the invincible dark lord instead of volunteering to be his most favored flunky.
Voldemort is capable of making stupid mistakes; he admitted that with his whole discussion of being trapped for years without a body. But he doesn't make stupid mistakes very frequently. So, if you believe he's making a stupid mistake, you should try to take advantage, because you may not see another one.
Yes, that makes sense. It seems Harry shouldve been much less confident that Voldemort was making a mistake, but he was very rushed.
Regardless of the probability of Voldemort making a stupid mistake, Voldemort was apparently casting the Killing Curse on Hermione, which would be an independent reason to shoot him.
Harry had a better choice: "Shoot the hostage"
Either fatally or a good wounding in the leg.
Harry'd already committed that his life was a worthy sacrifice to foil V's plans. Clearly V. felt Harry should be alive for some reason. Ergo, Harry's death would have hurt his plans. Stopped entirely? Maybe, maybe not.
A leg wound, preventing him from walking, requiring his own wand to heal or some machinations on V's part to find some non-magical interaction way to heal/move Harry would have also done nicely.
To what end? He already has his wand back at that point, so this would merely be a slight inconvenience to V (but a great inconvenience to himself).
Also, for what it’s worth, Harry still has the Healing Pack (which he bought in chapter 7) in his pouch, right? So there’s a way to heal him without any magical interaction between V and H; even if H doesn’t know the appropriate healing spells.
Not necessarily. Voldemort did say that he reanimated Hermione for Harry. Simply going along with the plan might be the best option. That would also mean to ask Voldemort about keeping Harry alive. Harry problem is that he can't lose and settle for something less than total victory.
So true. The "learn to lose" lesson fell on the world's most barren soil.
Even if Volde really was hamming it up that badly as to shout that he was mortal again, he would presumably have shields up which would stop bullets.
Exactly. I believe the authors notes or some other comment EY made say that bombs might be effective though. RPG rounds, maybe?
Or transfigured bullets which cannot be blocked due to resonance.
Harry has literally been watching the current body Voldemort is inhabiting for the entire time that body has existed. He has seen every spell cast while Voldemort has been using it.
Either Voldemort has not raised shields (which he typically did not do as Quirrell) or he's capable of casting shielding spells which Harry cannot detect either the casting or ongoing effects of even in the midst of extended close observation. And if it's the latter, we're back to "in order to have a shot at beating someone, you have to assume he's theoretically beatable and act accordingly".
On the gripping hand, I'd more expect his new, permanently-transfigured body to just be naturally bulletproof, rather than conventionally shielded. But it's not helpful to believe he's actually thought of everything.
Shields are useless against Harry's magic because of the resonance. The earthbending trick was nice, though.
I seem to remember that in Azkaban his shields were invisible.
I don't recall invisible shields, but it's certainly plausible.
We've also seen him just flatly stop curse bolts in midair and then flick them away, without apparent shielding or obvious effort. He's got defense options like Smaug has gold coins.
If killing him was easy, someone would have done it before. Even though he had horcruxes, it's telling that he never actually had to respawn from one until he tried juggling dynamite and blew his own self up.
From Ch. 74. It's not clear to me whether the shield was invisible until struck or if he put it up very quickly and silently.
This.
For what it's worth, the visual effect is that of an AT Field from Evangelion, which is normally invisible until struck.