Comment on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113

Tue, 03 Mar 2015 01:33:40 GMT

Your point on a description of Harry's thinking is well-taken. I just had my brother submit this as a review, to err on the side of caution:

"With NickRoy's permission, I am submitting his solution, which I agree with, with additional evidence appended, just in case that is necessary; so consider this as superseding NickRoy's submission:

[the relevant text is here in the submission, but I don't need to repeat it in this comment]

Appended:

Harry does not know the full prophecy for certain, but he can guess it, based on: Harry's thought on star lifting in response to this prophecy in Ch. 21, Harry noticing Quirrelmort's interest in the same prophecy in Ch. 86, Quirrelmort's talk of the stars' vulnerability to "sufficiently intelligent idiocy" in Ch. 95, Firenze's comment on the stars and Harry's innocence in Ch. 101, Voldemort's "while the stars yet live" remark in Ch. 111, Voldemort's more explicit talk on the prophecy and his great fear of it in the next chapter, and how the Unbreakable Vow is framed in the most recent chapter. If Harry connects these dots, he'll have a good idea of what the full prophecy says.

As for how Harry connects these dots: he runs with the hypothesis (quickly, as he did in Ch. 104): "I am to destroy the world [I don't have to explain why this idea stands out to him] in some way that is not actually bad", since if he were to destroy the world in a way that really is bad, but this may be preventable, he probably should die immediately instead! My first thought on this line of thinking (since "Harry is allowed to solve this problem the way I would solve it") is: "well, someday Earth ought to be converted into computronium for hedonium purposes, though the Sun is much more massive, and then we have the nearby stars... Oh".

Also, on Voldemort's response: Voldemort would be skeptical, but he would also be interested, because "It is impossible to tell lies in Parseltongue" and because all this persuasion has to do is raise the risk enough that it makes more sense to stop and gather more information before killing Harry, thus it "allows Harry to evade immediate death"."

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