Voldemort won't always be able to step in and rescue him, he doesn't have him under constant tabs, it's not like he'd instantly know if something bad were about to happen to him.
There are other ways aside from being oppositional that Harry could have failed to be properly impressionable. For instance, he could have been extremely stupid (there would be no way to tell when he was a baby,) and it would have been impossible to set him up as a figurehead leader because he was too obviously incompetent.
In Voldemort's place, I would never attempt a plan like this, because the odds of success, even at their best, do not justify sinking a couple of decades into its execution. Given the same amount of time, I'd expect him to be able to take over the country several times over. I could probably take over the country several times over in his place, given the same level of power along with an outside perspective on wizarding society, and I don't think I'm as good at plotting as Quirrelmort.
I'm betting on what happened with Harry not being intentional, because, for all the ways that one can postulate that the events that followed benefited Quirrelmort, I think the fact that he lost his body, much of his power, all his servants, and a decade of time, should shift our prior considerably away from whatever happened that night being deliberate.
Again, I've cooled on this theory myself, so I think I probably agree with you in the broad sense that I don't think this is exactly what happened. I'm still going to argue a few of the points you made though, because if we share an opinion but disagree on the justifications for it I still think that's a disagreement we should try to heal. Better to be justified but coincidentally wrong than unjustified but coincidentally right, right?
Anyway, I agree with your first point. remember that I said:
...Obviously that doesn't lower the risk to zero, but it's
The new discussion thread (part 15) is here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 82. The previous thread passed 1000 comments as of the time of this writing, and so has long passed 500. Comment in the 13th thread until you read chapter 82.
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.)
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