This doesn't account for "the power the dark lord knows not" does it, though?
I think that Harry's "alien power" is still unclear for the same reason that readers resisted identifying MoR!Quirrell as Voldemort. The author has so much fun writing Quirrellmort-the-clever that he has great difficulty writing Quirrellmort-the-flawed.
The only flaw in Quirrellmort that the author's actually shown is Quirrellmort's nonbelief in goodness. The backstory suggests that Voldemort had serious problems beyond mere cynicism. But there's a big difference between "the story asserts" and "the story demonstrates".
(I'm usi...
EDIT: New discussion thread here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. With two chapters recently the previous thread has very quickly reached 500 comments. The latest chapter as of 17th March 2012 is Ch. 79.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author's Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: