= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
75th comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 11 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (1174)
Your reasoning makes sense, but I believe we're clearly supposed to understand that Harry's going over to his Dark Side was the premeditated purpose of Quirrell bringing the Dementor to Hogwarts in the first place. Quirrell's plan was defeated that day, more or less because of Harry's love (not romantic love, necessarily) for Hermione. That day Quirrell realized that to really turn Harry Dark, he had to neutralize those Harry holds dear.
Thank you. {EDIT} I reserve most of my nonsensical actions for comic relief in tense real life situations.
Well for me two obvious questions arise: Why are we supposed to believe so? Given that Quirrelmort is dark, wouldn't the Dementor just be the experimental method applied so as to test whether or not his brain-wave patterns interfered with Harry's ability to act as a champion of light? {added} Also any of the given actions that day might as well have been a test of Harry's current limits and willingness to follow a plan.
Even if not, shouldn't Quirrelmort realize that after the Stanford Prison Experiment other venues for reaching his goal might be more attractive?
I do believe that Quirrelmort is currently trying to get Harry into thinking Dark and acting Light. [ADDED] At least that would make extreme amounts of sense to me for Controlling Britain purposes.
I think Eliezer gave us some good advice for understanding some of his characters' plots: “One way to fathom a strange plot is to look at what happened, assume it was the intended result, and ask who benefited."
Quirrell knows how Dementors affect him, and he knows that Harry's got a piece of Voldemort stuck inside him, so it was a reasonable guess that Harry might be similarly affected, and permanently, if he was exposed for long enough.
Quirrell certainly anticipated the possibility of failure — his experiment was orchestrated so that failure left him no further from his goal — and in fact, he almost did succeed; I think it is highly more likely that he was hoping for an easy route to victory that almost occurred, rather than that what happened was an unexpected side effect.