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cousin_it comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 6 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Ch. 62-63: I think I found a plot hole. Not as big as the one with eagles in LOTR, but close.
Why didn't anyone ask Harry to drop his occlumency shields and check his memories? There are three people who can propose it:
1) Dumbledore: should have done it immediately upon picking up Harry in Mary's Place, because he still suspected him then. Also the Animagus potion isn't evidence that Harry is innocent, why does everyone think it is?
2) Snape: knows about the existence of the covert message-passing network, knows about the Time-Turners given to students, knows about McGonagall's woefully inadequate method of testing Harry's Time-Turner (just giving Harry a tricky task instead of confiscating the device and checking it), knows Harry had a motive for the crime. A natural first step would be to read the minds of all students with Time-Turners to see if they conveyed suspicious messages on that time/day. He may even stumble upon that accidentally while reading students' minds later.
3) Moody: an order of magnitude smarter and more paranoid than Dumbledore. Should suggest inspecting Harry's memories immediately upon learning the details of the story, e.g. the use of Muggle artifacts in the jailbreak.
Final note: unlike the Time-Turner test, this one can be carried out at any later time unless Harry Obliviates himself or something. It took me three days to get the idea, in-universe characters should be smarter and more motivated than me, so I give them three days of story time and then I will officially declare them stupid.
The obvious test I noticed they failed to perform involves Dumbledore asking Harry to summon his patronus.
That's why I think that Dumbledore is covering up for Harry to a certain extent.
In general, this is explained when bringing up Occlumency in the first place. If he was good enough, he could readily agree to dropping his shields, then just keep them up. How would they tell? Again, this is assuming that he's good enough, but it does mean that they could never be certain. If they were motivated enough, they could Imperios to make sure he actually did it, but it is an Unforgivable...
1) I agree w/ JoshuaZ, Dumbledore might not want to further antagonize Harry w/o quite possibly gaining anything from it. It might be worth the risk, though.
2) That is quite possible, but I think that Snape's biggest hurdle in this is that he is still seriously underestimating Harry. Though the fact that Quirrell had to deduce that the girl had a Time Turner, and not just know, means that he possibly wouldn't know that there's a Slytherin w/ a Time Turner, or even necessarily that there are any issued at the moment. He could, through checking his student's schedules, but he might not know offhand.
3) I really wouldn't say an order of magnitude smarter than Dumbledore, he's just tuned his mind to that kind of thinking through decades of experience. Again, I agree w/ JoshuaZ in that Moody wouldn't be thinking of him as an option. He honestly might not even know the information that would be required for him to make that deduction, like Harry's predilection for Muggle artifacts.
edit: I forgot to say, I did not think of the animagus potion as evidence of Harry's innocence, but rather of Voldemort's guilt. Rather than making Harry less likely, it merely makes Voldemort more likely.
Harry isn't good enough to fool Dumbledore's Legilimency, and he knows that. See Ch. 58:
Harry knows it--or believes it, at least. Does Dumbledore?
To these three, the animagus potion is such a blatant Voldemort calling-card that it screens off Harry's involvement. Not only that, they simply haven't thought of the idea that Voldemort and Harry are working together, so to them Voldemort's involvement exonerates Harry.
Voldemort's potion was just that good of a trick. The only people it could fail to work on were people who were plotting at too low a level, and they were fooled by the time-turner test.
Maybe I'm being obtuse, but why is it a Voldemort calling card?
I think because it's the equivalent of cherry tapping to use a well-known and not-that-powerful magic to do the impossible, and Voldemort showed himself to be that kind of perfectionist.
Judging from the quotations that top the TVTropes page, Alan Rickman tends to play characters who engage in cherry tapping. So shouldn't they be suspecting Snape?
And why test Harry's time tuner if the potion rules him out completely?
Dumbledore received hints of a paradox if he moved to protect Harry before the Azkaban escape. So that highly increased the possibility Harry and time-travel was involved somehow, but it was possible that Harry had been used only as a messenger, rather than the more direct (Azkaban-going, Patronus-wielding, cloak-of-Invisibility-wearing) involvement that they also feared.
Even if they don't suspect Harry, they should still have searched his memories in order to figure out what event might have triggered the time-paradox. That really ought to trump any concerns about Harry's mental privacy, and besides, they should expect Harry to go along with it.
I think that the story leaves a lot of uncertainty in its depictions of other characters' disposition towards Harry and each other. We still don't know what level Dumbledore's playing on. Did he notice Harry in the prison cell (he could, since he might have mastered the deadly hallows)? Did he connect the hole in the wall or transfigured rocket fuel with Harry's magic style? Could he stop rocket-powered broomstick in time? Is he Santa Claus? Did he mislead McGonagall to try the flawed test? Did he prompt Snape to confront Quirrell at Mary's Place? What does he know and suspect about Quirrell?
McGonagall seems to be irrationally optimistic about everything and hopeful about Harry. Snape underestimates Harry, or at least doesn' t interfere with him all that much. Mad-Eye doesn't know Harry personally, or else he would probably instantly unravel all of his plots and half of Quirrell's and Dumbledore's for good measure.
1 is a good point, but Dumbledore doesn't know how good Harry's barriers are and may not want to further antagonize Harry. 2 is certainly an issue and it could easily occur to Snape. 3 isn't that much of a big deal since it isn't at all clear that Moody is thinking about Harry as an option at all.
How would they know if his occlumency barriers were down? It is pretty clearly established that if you are sufficiently skilled, you can make a Legilimens who tries to read your mind see whatever you want them to. So if harry said he let his occlumency barriers down and he was telling the truth, they would see his barriers down and see whatever he remembered seeing. But if he was not telling the truth it would still look like his barriers were down and they were seeing his memories. Harry is already good enough that he does not think veritaserum would be able to have any effect on him, so it seems unlikely that anyone could have been sure if he was telling the truth even if they saw in his memories that he was innocent.
Edit: looks like someone already said this
Telling Harry to drop his Occlumency is no good if he also knows Obfuscomency (from Always and Always).
Which I believe he is as 63 talks about Harry trying to keep up an fake persona of a surprised and Confused Harry in his mind.
As far as I can tell, Occlumency in MoR works like Obfuscomency from Always and Always.
When you think about it, it wouldn't make much sense if canon occlumency didn't, otherwise Snape could never have gotten away with pretending to be a loyal servant of Voldemort. If he was obviously putting up barriers to keep his mind from being read, Voldemort could just have told him to take them down.
From the Wikia:
I think that this would be enough. Snape only had to hide a few key conversations and actions from Voldemort; most of what he said and did in the Order can be open.
If Snape had been a good Obfuscumens, he could have fed Voldemort positive misinformation, but he didn't. He only kept secrets.
That might be the case. The wiki article is uncited on that count, so I don't know where they got the information to indicate that it's true in canon.
It's possible that Snape did feed Voldemort misinformation, but the extent to which he could do so would be limited, since he had to be able to convince Voldemort that he was a loyal spy whose true allegiance was not suspected by Dumbledore's faction.
Suppressing only key parts of ones thoughts and emotions might accomplish the same task, but it seems to me that this would pose difficulties, because the rest of your thoughts might not make sense without the context of the thoughts you're suppressing, giving anyone reading your mind the impression that it was being selectively edited.
I think that the whole paragraph is supposed to be covered by the citation at the end, but that's just OotP, and I'm not about to go through the book looking for evidence.
You're certainly correct that it's unclear, and that it would be difficult.