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HonoreDB comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 9 - Less Wrong Discussion

10 Post author: Oscar_Cunningham 09 September 2011 01:29PM

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Comment author: HonoreDB 27 September 2011 09:02:09PM 8 points [-]

I've been reading a chapter of MoR to my girlfriend every time we go to a park, and we just got up to Chapter 39. Two thoughts:

  1. It's fun to try to imitate a long series of random noises with your mouth alone in a public place.

  2. Sarah's immediate reaction to the first part was "Why doesn't he just ask Harry for a Pensieve memory of his conversation with Lucius? Dumbledore doesn't use notes." I can't see why not either. My first reaction was that Pensieves haven't been referenced in MoR yet and might work differently, but I was wrong; Draco's going to use his memory of Harry's first date to blackmail him.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 27 September 2011 09:19:44PM 7 points [-]

The exact details of memories are malleable. It may very well be that pensieves in this setting can only recover what the person remembers not what they actually experienced. It may be that this could still be useful for interrogating less disciplined minds who can remember details but not realize they do, but Dumbledore may think that if there were any specific details that were important enough Harry would in fact remember them.

Comment author: pedanterrific 27 September 2011 09:18:16PM *  6 points [-]

Another example would be Draco, to Harry, in Chapter 7:

"The courts use Veritaserum, but it's a joke really, you just Obliviate yourself before you testify and then claim the other person was Memory-Charmed with a false memory. If you've got a Pensieve, and we do, you can even get the memory back afterward."

And that's a very good point. I can't quite tell whether Dumbledore picked up on the mistake that Lucius made, just from Harry's memory - the only reaction we are directly told about is

Dumbledore's face had grown more remote as Harry went on, and at the end there was a look of ancientness about him, a sternness in the air.

"Well," said Dumbledore. "I suggest you take the best of care that the heir of Malfoy does not come to harm, then. And I will do the same." The Headmaster was frowning, his fingers drumming soundlessly through the inky black surface of a plate inscribed with the word Leliel. "And I think it would be most extremely wise for you to avoid all interaction with Lord Malfoy henceforth."

and then the conversation switches tracks. If Dumbledore did get the subtext just from Harry's (described, offscreen) verbal recollections, then the lack is just a minor puzzling detail; but if he didn't, when he most certainly could have from the inhumanly perfect reproduction of a Pensieve, failing to use one seems a critical flaw.

Comment author: Desrtopa 03 October 2011 10:01:43PM *  1 point [-]

Maybe he's not ready to ask Harry to offer such a major sign of trust as allowing someone else to put one of his own memories in their pensieve and view it directly?

Also, do we know if more than one person's memories can be put into a single pensieve? Maybe different people's memories can't be mixed.

Comment author: HonoreDB 04 October 2011 12:57:02AM 6 points [-]

Also, do we know if more than one person's memories can be put into a single pensieve? Maybe different people's memories can't be mixed.

In canon, they can--Harry spends much of the sixth book exploring memories from many different people, all in the same pensieve. In MoR, Draco says "we" have a pensieve, implying there's a Malfoy Pensieve, where an "I" would imply that his and his dad's are separate.

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