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Normal_Anomaly comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 12 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Short detour back to chapter 79, to look closely at the night's events:
At midnight, Draco and Hermine meet for the duel. (Let's assume they did have a duel, because implanting very believable (but still false) memories into both of their brains would take about twice the time of the duel and would thus be unnecessary work.) Let's assume that the duell takes about 15 to 20 minutes, so it's now 12:20am. Enter Mister X. Mister X stuns Draco, implants false memories (< 1 min) into Hermione's brain of her doing the Blood-Cooling Charm, and finally performs the Blood-Cooling Charm on Draco in a way to make sure he survives for >6 hours. Mister X is back in his room at 12:30am and needs to wait 6 hours (plus epsilon) until all traces leading to him have vanished.
And guess what:
Some Bayesian updating on P(Quirrell did it | Quirrell found Draco at 6:33am) tells us that this increases the probability of "Quirrell did it" by a quite noticeable amount.
OTOH, I'm not sure whether it would be okay to just do the math, without taking into account the possibility that Eliezer chose that time deliberately to steer us in a certain direction. Any thoughts on that?
My model of EY says that he would want the evidence he gave us to point to the true culprit--more evidence ought to make finding who did it easier, not harder. If EY chose that time deliberately to point at Quirrell, it's further evidence that Quirrell did it.
And his comment to the effect that he doesn't intentionally mislead readers, made about 4 hours after this one, implies that it may have been in reference to the above hypothesis.
More specifically, from my model of EY: If some information, rationally interpreted, is (internal to the story) evidence for a hypothesis, then this is good evidence (external to the story) that EY intends this hypothesis to be true. And if some information, interpreted according to a common bias, is (internal to the story) evidence for a hypothesis, then this is good evidence (external to the story) that EY intends this hypothesis to be false. Not only is he not trying to trick us, after all; he's trying to teach us rationality skills. So he can put in red herrings; we just shouldn't fall for them!