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solipsist comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115 - Less Wrong
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I'm not sure what you're trying to say. In most stories that involve a final conflict between a hero and a villain, none of those options apply. The villain is stronger, and is defeated through some combination of circumstances and advantages that allow the hero to bypass that strength or temporarily exceed it (typically through significant effort and/or sacrifice, often prior to the confrontation).
Right, that's what happened in this story: Harry temporarily got the upper hand on Voldemort. Voldemort allowed Harry to get the upper hand. When Voldemort possessed Quirrell's body, he didn't just take over the world over the course of a week. When Voldemort realized that Harry was an existential threat, he didn't relieve Harry of his limbs, mind, and freedom to move outside a little box. Voldemort allowed Harry to be a threat because otherwise there wouldn't have been a story.
The problem is that he did so in a way that feels inconsistent with the rest of the story. Most villains in most stories aren't the type that would relieve their nemesis of his limbs, mind, and freedom to move outside a little box. Sauron didn't seal off the Cracks of Doom, or even post a serious guard around them. The Emperor didn't place the shield generator on Endor in a hidden underground compound guarded by a small army. A great succession of villains have failed to just shoot James Bond. HPMOR!Voldemort would do all of those things, because from the start his extraordinarily high intelligence and skill at what he does have been cornerstones of his character. When he makes a mistake, many readers will assume (and have assumed, usually correctly) that it is a deliberate ploy. Mistakes as bad as what we're seeing here aren't just folly; they verge on character derailment.
As a simple matter of fact, Voldemort is stronger than Harry in basically every way, other than Harry's (incomplete) training in rationality. If Voldemort were a good enough planner, there's no way he could lose; he is smarter, more powerful, and has more ancient lore than any other wizard. If Voldemort were also rational, and didn't fall prey to overconfidence bias / planning fallacy...
Well, you can be as rational as you like, but if you are human and your opponent is a superintelligent god with a horde of bloodthirsty nanobots, the invincible Elder Lightsaber, and the One Thing to Rule Them All, then the story is going to read less like HPMOR, and more like:
Yup. So the solution is not to make your villain a superintelligent god with a horde of bloodthirsty nanobots, the invincible Elder Lightsaber, and the One Thing to Rule Them All to begin with. Eliezer took the risk of setting up an incredibly powerful villain, and it is to his credit as a writer that up until the very end he made us believe that he was capable of writing a satisfying resolution anyway.
Frankly, he still might. There are four chapters left, and Eliezer is nothing if not capable of surprising his audience. And as a Naruto fan, he might also have come across Bleach (another of the Big Three shounen series), and learned from its author already having made the exact same mistake.
Professor Quirrell will always be a step ahead of you, will always outwit you. You cannot beat him in any game.
That is the characterization of the Defense Professor. A story cannot start with "You can't beat the Professor Quirrell at any game" and end with "Professor Quirrell has lost the game" without a character break in between.
Is that what we've seen presented so far?
Dumbledore won during the Battle of the Three Armies. His assault on Azkaban would have gotten him killed (and more seriously, set back his efforts by years) for a stupid communication error, were Harry not willing to risk his own life and invent new magic to save the man. Hermoine outlasted several hours of the Defense Professor's most aggressive psychological attacks possible, using fairly basic deontology. His 'lesson plan' with Ma-Ha-Su in Chapter 16 was bluntly stupid, even if Harry hadn't used the easy way out. In Chapter 35, he fears that Harry has screwed over his plans because of voicing an obvious disagreement that Harry has repeatedly given privately before.
And that's before we get to the stupidity that was enforced by canon : testing multiple novel spells (Horcruxes, however he 'reformated' the young Harry Potter) without sufficient and verified safeties, the highly fractious Death Eaters, the lackluster war with Dumbledore.
Quirrellmort is smart. He thinks ahead. But his fundamental philosophy is still very restricted. As much as he tries to claim otherwise, he's running on distilled Command Push -- we'll note that no Death Eater gave him advice in this chapter, nor would we expect them to. His speech in Chapter 34 follows the same philosophy.
But more importantly, he underestimates risks. He's a partially-formed rationalist, who has heard of Kolmogorov complexity but can't quite understand why he should shut-up-and-multiply yet. He leaves Harry a wand because wanded Harry is only a threat because of that wand if he has a) wordless, b) motionless, c) wanded, d) magic that can instantly disable Death Eaters, e) can hit him at all and f) threatens an immortal. It's understandable to not think Harry is a risk. A full-grown wizard in the same environment wouldn't be a risk -- Dumbledore or Mad-Eye Moody would have died, and died quickly. That's not as unreasonable a mistake as you'd expect.
I think this is a great comment, but could you please expand on two points?
What are you talking about here?
And also
What does this mean?
In Chapter 16, Quirrelmort instructed the class in a very simple hex that caused a small amount of pain and no lasting harm called Ma-Ha-Su. He then selects three students, Hermoine, Draco, and Harry Potter, and then requires them to select a student and fire Ma-Ha-Su at them, taking Quirrel and later House points for non-compliance. The comparisons to the Millgram Experiments become explicit in chapter 63. Hermoine refuses, Draco fires on Hermoine, and Harry fires on himself.
Harry explicitly beats Quirrelmort's plans, here : "Yes, quite ingenious, but there was a lesson to be taught and you dodged it." It's not clear he ever gets the intended lesson, given that Quirrelmort seemed to intend to teach Harry to harm Draco on obedient command.
Interestingly, this could have not just failed but have gone horribly wrong for Quirrelmort, and he wouldn't have even understood why. One of the common responses to Millgram-like actions in the last few years of science fiction is to turn on the person giving illegal orders. Harry wouldn't do that because of his upbringing, but other possible Riddle-clones would wanted to fire Ma-Ha-Su on Quirrelmort and claimed he counted as a student -- and either required he flinch or dodge from a trivial spell, or risked publicly triggering the resonance that would have brought Dumbledore down on Quirrelmort's head. The man's not exactly been known for his happy subservience, after all.
Even without reaching that unlikely but disastrous possibility, 'success' would have had dramatically different results than Quirrelmort expected, given Quirrelmort's difficulty understanding what Harry was trying to do with Draco even at that point. Blunt, blunt stupidity.
Command Push is set of force philosophy where commanders give direct orders involving not only a mission's goal, but also its execution, tools, and specific tactics. It's very common historically, where communication is slow, or where the commander has much greater understanding of the field than individuals, but it's highly dependent on commander skill and knowledge, and very vulnerable to subterfuge. Quirrelmort is hugely prone to this, as are Harry Potter and (to a lesser extent) Draco.
This is usually contrasted with Recon Pull, Mission-type Tactics, or Command By Negation, where commanders provide goals, time constraints, and resources, but allow units to develop their own strategies to achieve those goals. This requires more training, faster communications technology, and higher levels of trust in subordinates (less so in Command By Negation, where you at least double-check with a commander), but puts more minds on a problem and can more readily adapt when lines of communication are cut or when situations on the ground change.
((Command Push and Recon Pull are video game terms from the Civilization series: different armies have different terms for these philosophies, usually subdivided into separate generations or divided by recent inspirations. Modern armies tend to use more modernized techniques derived from combinations of the two branches and further IT developments, though they'd not really be practicable in the time frame present here.))
That was very interesting, thanks.
I wondered the same thing. The only thing Google gave me that made sense in context was jargon from a Civilization wiki, meaning a style of military command where orders include implementation details: "here's the actions you need to take". The pitfalls of this style are that it places increased cognitive and communications load on the commander, that it can fail to account for local or changing conditions, and that it can lead to poor responsiveness under conditions of imperfect communication.
Current management theory (and, I believe, Western military doctrine, though I'm not an expert) favors objective-based orders: "here's the goal you need to accomplish". That leaves implementation details up to subordinates.
The term of art is mission-type tactics or mission command.
This makes a lot of sense, thank you. I see the parent comment to mine is right too, that this is Voldemort's political philosophy. Give me all the power, and then all of my values will be attained.
THANK YOU.
If you want a retcon that makes it actually reasonable to let Harry keep his wand, let's say that speaking Parseltongue only makes you tell the truth if you're also holding a wand at the same time. (Or that you can't speak it at all without it.)
...or character growth in the protagonist, theoretically.
Perhaps, but you have to get around why the villain doesn't destroy the growing threat while it's still weak.
Which isn't a problem in HPMOR, because we've been given a number of persuasive reasons why Quirrell wanted Harry alive - he didn't change his mind about this until he heard the prophecy about Harry destroying the world, at which point it seems he decided to kill Harry as soon as he'd used him to obtain the Philosopher's Stone.
That... sounds dangerously close to "did it because of Plot", which isn't supposed to happen in a rational story.