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75th comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 14, chapter 82 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (790)
Your suggestions are based on a faulty premise. Even in canon, Avada Kedavra has varying effects. Usually it causes an instant, silent death. At the end of Half-Blood Prince, it blows Dumbledore's body over a railing and off the tower. In Godric's Hollow, the rebounded Killing Curse exploded the upstairs of a house, and we never actually hear what happened to Voldemort's body.
I don't think we're necessarily meant to suspect something amiss here; I think Eliezer just filled in a blank that was left open in the novels.
And I also don't necessarily think a "love shield" is what's involved in this story. In canon, Lily's nonviolent sacrifice is what protected Harry. Eliezer presumably doesn't believe that attempting to defend yourself makes your sacrifice any less noble, so it's probably something different here. I think the likely story in MoR is that when Voldemort sarcastically said "I accept the bargain, yourself to die and the child to live", he accidentally created a magically binding oath.
I actually think the clearest clue here is probably the "but how does anyone know that's what happened?" problem. Other problems: reference to souls, bizarre behavior of the killing curse, total lack of explanation for why a totally reliable spell backfired so spectacularly. But Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story.
Yes, but we saw the actual event in Humanism, part 1. We saw it right up until the moment Voldemort cast the Killing Curse. The "small, small note of confusion" refers to what Harry realized much later: "Dark Lords were not usually scared of infant children." The confusion was about the reason Voldemort was so intent on killing Harry in the first place.
The reference to souls is simply because that's what Dumbledore believes, not because of any plot. Yes, the Killing Curse behaved bizarrely, but we're supposed to think "Why did it behave bizarrely?", not "That must be a lie!", especially given that it sometimes behaved bizarrely in canon.
If "Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story" and we don't know what it is, that means he lied to us in Chapter 43.
You're misremembering the chapter, that scene ends like this:
Thank you for quoting the bit in chapter 46. I had forgotten it, and it is worth taking into account. But in context, I don't think it shows what you think it does:
So prior to recovering that memory, Harry didn't have nearly as much reason to think Voldemort had been afraid of him. In Ch. 3, for all Harry knew Voldemort was just the sort of person who would murder his enemies' children given the opportunity, and he would have been largely correct to think that.
But it seems Harry's inference that Voldemort meant to kill him may not be as safe as Harry assumes. It is equally consistent with everything Harry notices to think that Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry. Consider this part:
Suppose Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry other than kill him, and that he succeeded in doing whatever he meant to do. If so, "your death here will not save your child" would turn out to be true. In that case, perhaps what amused Voldemort was realizing that Lily had misunderstood what he was going to do to Harry, and that she had offered up her life to prevent something that was not going to happen anyway. In that case, "Yourself to die, and the child to live" also reflects Voldemort's true intentions.
At this point, it looks to me very much like Voldemort somehow decided killing baby Harry was not the right response to the prophecy. The prophecy looks like a key clue here; probably Voldemort wouldn't have bothered with such a complicated plot as he appears to be pursuing without the prophecy. But what thought process led to that plot?
Chris Hallquist wrote: "Suppose Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry other than kill him, and that he succeeded in doing whatever he meant to do. If so, "your death here will not save your child" would turn out to be true. In that case, perhaps what amused Voldemort was realizing that Lily had misunderstood what he was going to do to Harry, and that she had offered up her life to prevent something that was not going to happen anyway. In that case, "Yourself to die, and the child to live" also reflects Voldemort's true intentions."
That makes sense. Maybe all he wanted was to turn Harry into a horcrux, and suceeded. Since creating horcruxes requires killing someone, killing James Potter was a convenient horcrux-energy source, while killing Lily could be an extra, but unnecessary bonus.
An experienced mage making an unforced error of that magnitude sounds an awful lot like the Idiot Ball to me.
"Held the Idiot Ball" does not mean "made a large mistake". It means "behaved implausibly stupidly so as to cheaply advance the plot". If Voldemort could never make significant mistakes then Harry could never defeat him.
I agree with you about what "Held the Idiot Ball" means.
I evidently disagree with you about how implausibly stupid it is for Voldemort to accidentally, for no apparent reason, magically bind himself to the infant Harry in the middle of a fight.
Or do you imagine this to be a thing that happens a lot when wizards fight, such that it happening in this case is plausible?
I don't think it happens a lot, because I don't think such ironic offers are made very often. The reason for Voldemort to say what he said was to be prideful and cruel, to make Lily feel how futile her sacrifice would be. In the heat of the moment, in his cruelty, he might not have thought of the magical significance of verbally accepting such a bargain. If indeed this theory is correct, his first fall was a result of his hubris, which fits his character well; and it also fits his character well for him to have learned from it and to not make the same mistake again in the future.
I'm not married to this theory. I'd put it at maybe 50% or 55% confidence? But it seems clear to me that Voldemort made some large mistake that night, because no explanation I've seen for Voldemort willingly stopping his war in 1981 holds any water at all.
Still... one of the very first lessons of Quirrel was about pretending to lose when that gained you more than fighting would.
Granted that Voldemort back then was seen to be winning. But he was winning a war we still don't know his motivations for starting in the first place...
True, no explanation offered so far explains it convincingly, but I don't see the idea that an Avada Kedavra bounced off a baby holding any water either.