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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 14, chapter 82
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.)
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: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
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:
You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).
If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.
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Comments (790)
Honestly, Harry is placing far too little weight on the hypothesis that Hermione actually did do exactly what she confessed to under Veritaserum.
Story-logic would indicate that she is indeed innocent, and we as readers have evidence that someone has indeed been messing with her mind, but Harry doesn't know what we as readers know. And, to be honest, in a similar situation in the real world, I'd also conclude that the 11 year old probably did indeed do exactly what she is accused of doing.
Harry's had 7 months to know that Hermione isn't a sociopath or a psychopath, that she's a very kind and moral and ethical person instead.
What's the prior probability he should therefore assign to this person, out of all of Hogwarts, to be the one to commit a cold-blooded murder on another 11-year-old kid? I think he's giving the hypothesis of her actual guilt pretty much all the weight that it deserves - effectively zero.
Outside view: when someone in a similar situations does do something horrible, all of his friends and family insist that they "have no idea how he could have done something like this".
I wonder how much of that is a “don’t speak bad of the dead” reflex, or “nobody could have seen it, so it’s not my fault I didn’t”, or even just “I’m such a good & loving friend/relative I didn’t see anything wrong with him”.
I’m sure there are cases that really came out of the blue, but I also have a nagging feeling that if you could interview the same people before the something horrible, and do it from an insider point of view (i.e., a question asked by another friend of the interviewee rather than by a reporter), a lot of answers would be of the “he’s kind of a weirdo” type.
In some cases, people who commit major violence have a history of minor violence.
However, another possibility is that even people who commit major violence have people they like and/or want to please, and behave better in some contexts than in others.
Now update on the amount of people who call somebody "a weirdo" who does not end up murdering anyone. And add the negative halo effect, and fundamental attribution fallacy, from knowing in hindsight that the person you're talking about has recently murdered someone.
As I said, I don’t really have any real evidence, and I believe it’d be very hard to collect. That said:
I’m not quite sure I understand what you mean by this. Let H=(did something horrible), S=(really suspicious), W=(just a bit creepy, weird, etc.).
I suspect that (H & S) > (H & W & !S) > (H & !W & !S) and that 1 > H/S >> H/(W & !S) >> H/(!W & !S). All fractions are low, but I’m not sure what you mean to say by that.
I’m pretty sure such effects are not linearly additive. Especially when there’s a conflict (friend/non-hated-family, did something bad), I don’t think you can determine the result just by logic, you have to see what people actually do.
Notice how media narratives tend to become either “I always knew he was up to no good” or “I’d never have thought he would do something like that”, but you almost never hear something in the middle. I’m even having trouble finding a concise wording for a middle case other than “meh”.
I’m sure the media has a lot to do with that, showing just the witnesses with the most “interesting” story, but I’m almost sure people also do this more-or-less automatically in their heads.
This could easily be face-saving. You can't well publicly say, "You know, I thought he might have been a dangerous criminal, but I didn't bother trying to prevent any crimes."
And you're ignoring the many more cases where people expected a person to be a murderer and he wasn't.
See also: Amanda Knox.
I was pretty sure that "prior probability of a normal girl just hauling off and murdering someone in cold blood" was a Knox allusion. I wonder if Ms. Knox herself has read it.
Yeah, this set of chapters started making a lot more sense when I realized it was a gigantic Amanda Knox allegory.
Well, then condition on the fact that Querril caught her and she has memories of doing it.
Quirrell didn't say he caught her. He did not claim to observe Hermione at or departing the duel. Time-travelling Dumbledore did not claim to have observed Hermione at or departing the duel.
We are meant to learn from Rita's Folly that memories are not worth trust.
Just what condition is your condition in?
Actually, based on the Legilimens finding all the fantasies about Draco and Snape conspiring to hurt Harry and her, I've adjusted my probability estimate that Hermione actually did it significantly upward.
Hermione has been having paranoid fantasies about her friends being harmed by Draco -> Draco attacks her, she weakens Draco -> Hermione is suddenly in a position of power over someone she views as a threat to her friends -> Hermione temporarily goes crazy and tries to eliminate Draco.
However, my probability that she did this without mind control being the deciding factor is still virtually zero.
My belief is and has always been that she did it, and was not given false memories, nor Imperiused or controlled in any way beyond the Groundhog Day attack. Eliezer believes that humans are hackable (cf. AI box experiments) and this Hermione storyline is showcasing it. Hat-and-Cloak had to find the right hack by proof and error, but once he found it, it was just ordinary words and no magic which influenced Hermione to "freely" decide to murder Draco (just like the AI gatekeepers who "freely" let the AI escape).
ETA: by "proof and error" I meant "trial and error". I guess the reason for the mental typo is the Spanish equivalent "prueba y error".
What about the possibility that Draco attacked Hermione with sufficient force that the blood-cooling spell was plausibly self-defense?
A "blood-cooling charm" doesn't sound like it would have had enough stopping power to be effective in self-defense.
In that case: she knew when she awakened next morning that it should have killed him. If she had known that the night before, then after disabling Draco with the charm, she should alerted a teacher, or maybe woken him up and stunned him the usual way. If she didn't do any of that, she was knowingly leaving him to die.
This is a really interesting point.
We know for a fact that Hermione has been manipulated because we've seen the scene with Hat and Cloak. That may bias us in favor of thinking the evidence is clearer than it really is. Yet Harry knows that in this universe memories can be tampered with. The prior probability of a morally upstanding little girl trying to murder someone is much less than the prior probability of someone else trying the memory-charm plot, especially given that Hermione is friends with Harry and Harry's status as the Boy Who Lived makes him a target.
Now, I might put a probability of something like 0.2 on the possibility of Hermione casting the charm after someone messed with her mind. But if you're the plotter, it's so much easier to do a false memory charm to make her remember casting the charm, than to do all the delicate manipulation to get her to actually cast it. So more likely than not, Hermione didn't cast the charm.
Harry is making a subtle mistake here, though: he's over-confident about his ideas about the details of what was done to Hermione. For example, he thinks a false-memory charm was used to cause Hermione to start obsessing over Draco, when in fact that was based on true memories of a conversation (albeit one involving lies and some kind of shape-shifting/illusion magic). Feminist bank tellers and all that.
Anybody believing Hermione was meddled with ought to be asking who will be next. The mentioned mistake has Harry assuming Hermione didn't go undetected for six months, so he is far less alarmed than he should be.
Neville is the most likely next target for an attack intended to separate Harry from his allies. Voldemort is probably too clever to try the same trick twice, though.
On the last point: Hermione almost certainly was false memory charmed twice; H&C would have removed the memory of their final conversation and replaced with with something innocuous at the same time as he implanted the false memory of casting the blood-cooling charm, so as to not leave a suspicious gap. He might also have implanted false memories immediately after the groundhog day attack, either to cover up the time gap or to not have Hermione wandering around with an extremely suspicious memory in her head (If Dumbledore or Snape had seen the memory of H&C, or his less-creepy disguise, they probably would have been fairly suspicious).
HP:MoR 82
Wizard People, Dear Readers
Was there any inspiration?
For others who didn't catch the allusion, and didn't notice the googlepation, here is the relevant "movie".
HA I love that I read that in Neely's voice.
How much of the cost of saving Hermione was announcing that Harry responds to blackmail? He made his entrance onto the stage of players in a way that cannot endear him to any of the others. No matter what he did, he would antagonize Lucius, but he demonstrated an extreme disrespect for the rules of the game and preserving the existing order is in the interests of all the players. Not to mention, he implicitly declared challenge to the ministry of magic. If he actually had the power that Lucius believes he does, he might get away with that, but he cannot survive for long against the Aurors. As it stands all that is keeping him safe is Dumbledore, shock and bluff.
I rather expect the first of those to disappear sometime in the story. I have no idea how General Chaos can develop an ultimate weapon powerful enough to stand off the nation of Britain.
On the other side of the coin, Hermione is extremely valuable. She's almost the 1st or 2nd best duelist in 1st year and her aid probably doubles Harry's ability to do research on magic. Unfortunately for Harry, while those skills would be decisive if he could go hide and research for a few years, I doubt that he'll get the time.
There was no explicit blackmail, was there?
Well, if his trick for deactivating other wizards' patronuses (patronii?) works, he basically has an unblockable army of instant-death assassins, the only defense against which would be Apparition... That's a pretty good ultimate weapon in a Mutually Assured Destruction sense. And as long as we're discussing mutually assured destruction, there seems little doubt that Harry would be able to transfigure nuclear weaponry. Or botulinum toxin (of which it would take an appallingly small amount to kill every human on Earth). Etc, etc. Harry does not lack for access to Ultimate Weapons.
A lethal dose of botulinum toxin is indeed tiny; using it as an Ultimate Weapon, though, requires a delivery system.
Which is also easy with magic.
Probably; magic makes everything easier, but you still have to find a way to get the people you want to eat it, inhale it, or get it into their bloodstream, and the Harry Potter world isn't defined well enough to give an obvious way to distribute it in such a way that, say, wearing a gas mask and only eating thoroughly cooked food wouldn't defeat.
Gas mask? That doesn't defeat the most obvious distribution mechanism: transfiguration into oxygen or nitrogen. But of course this would require an actual source of botox. If trying to use transfiguration as an ultimate weapon purely in the sense of 'creating stuff for free' (rather than untransfiguring stuff inside folks) it would be far simpler to transfigure something into radioactive isotopes of common airborne gasses. Oxygen-15 seems like it has a half-life in the right ballpark.
Or just transmute cyanide into oxygen. Or their face into cyanide.
He does have the ability to turn the world into a lake of fire, true. All powerful wizards have this ability and it is implied that every magical power in the world would turn against him if he tried anything that foolish. He has a giant hammer which he dare not use, if only because he's not evil. Also, he is still amazingly vulnerable to almost any adult wizard who wishes him ill - powerful weaponry doesn't imply a powerful defense. He might have been able to assassinate every member of the Wizengamot, but I doubt he would have survived the attempt. If it comes to open warfare he's toast, and his stunt made it much more likely that someone would decide he had stepped over the threshold of open warfare. He's safe for now at Hogwarts, but it was still stupid.
Good advice, and advice Harry failed to follow.
Dumbledore seems a bit off in equating the two situations. Lucius isn't threatening to send Hermione to Azkaban in the hope of getting something from Harry/Dumbledore; in fact he made clear that he would rather send her to Azkaban than receive the money. Therefore paying of the blood debt does not equal giving in to blackmail and Harry can save her while still maintaining a consistent position of not giving in to blackmail. Engineering similar situations without making apparent that they are engineered (and therefore blackmail) is probably too impractical to be worth the effort.
That Lucius' intention was not to blackmail Harry, does not change the fact that now Lucius and Harry's other enemies know that Harry would be willing to sacrifice any amount of money to save a friend.
And there is no problem with that if it's restricted to non-blackmail interactions (except perhaps to the degree it's mistaken by others to also apply to blackmail). Not responding to blackmail as a principled position and not valuing the life of the hostage highly enough for the amount asked for are completely different things.
Otherwise it would have made sense for Voldemort (who wouldn't care about Death Eater families) to keep taking family members hostage and ask for lower and lower amounts until hitting the sum they are valued at. Either that sum would have been low enough to devastate the morale of the Order members (e. g, 100 galleons and Voldemort asks for 101 the next time) or it would be high enough to drain their funds.
A refusal to respond to blackmail needs to be unconditional.
Except Lucius doesn't know that, because he thinks this was part of some inscrutable plot by Harrymort!
The fact that Harry proceeded to scare Lucius afterwards is probably to his advantage in this case though. In his position, I would probably make it a priority to get Lucius to forgive the debt, which not only saves him the money, it sends the message "you can try to blackmail me, but I'll make the consequences of forcing me to pay out worse than letting me walk."
Congrats to all the people that figured out that the death of Aberforth was likely causally connected to the death of Narcissa Malfoy.
It was indeed logical and elegant that the two non-canon deaths we know about should be connected to each other...
Thanks, but I don't know how much being wrong about the connection counts for being right about there being a connection.
And anyway, all we know for certain is that it is believed that there is a connection.
Well, Draco has probably already been removed from Harry's side of the gameboard, so at least Harry doesn't have to worry about honoring his promise to take Dumbledore as his enemy.
I don't think Harry's promises work like that, he seemed very earnest about them.
The thing that still gives Harry some room to maneuver is that he still doesn't know if Narcissa Malfoy was burned alive, or if Dumbledore just arranged it to appear that she was burned alive. This was one of the explicitly declared conditions, that if she wasn't burned alive, Harry will get to decide by himself whether to still go ahead with the pledge or not.
And there's also the secondary possibility that she was burned alive, but that it wasn't Dumbledore who arranged it to happen, he just took credit for it afterwards to serve his purpose of protecting the families of the Order of the Phoenix.
"And there's also the secondary possibility that she was burned alive, but that it wasn't Dumbledore who arranged it to happen, he just took credit for it afterwards to serve his purpose of protecting the families of the Order of the Phoenix."
Exactly. Similar mechanism as in "Breaking bad" TV series. The legend, that Jesse Pinkman crushed the non-payer Spooge with the ATM machine improved the payment discipline of other customers. Even though Jesse, in fact, did not do that and would never be able of doing it.
I thing it is more likely, that Dumbledore took credit for the murder rather than actually committing it. A premeditated, exemplary murder of innocent women seems too unprobable and OOC for a "light" character. The only think that makes me uncertain about Dumbledore innocence is this part of chapter 80:
When Lucius Malfoy spoke again his voice seemed to tremble ever so slightly, as though the stern control on it was failing. "Blood calls for repayment, the blood of my family. Not for any price will I sell the blood debt owed my son. You would not understand that, who never had love or child of your own. Still, there is more than one debt owed to House Malfoy, and I think that my son, if he stood among us, would rather be repaid for his mother's blood than for his own. Confess your own crime to the Wizengamot, as you confessed it to me, and I shall -"
"Don't even think about it, Albus," said the stern old witch who had spoken before.
What I meant is, I do not think Dumbledore would confess that he murdered Narcissa to Lucius, if he did not do it. I would rather expect evasive statements instead of a confession. Similar evasive statements as he used in confrontation with Harry. On the other hand, it seems more like Dumbledore to apologize for Narcissa's murder to Lucius, if he actually killed her. Well, this dilemma can be solved by assuming, that Dumbledore used evasive statements, which Lucius understood as confession. But Lucius was supposed to be intelligent, huh ?
Why would Dumbledore use evasive statements to Lucius if Dumbledore's purpose back then was to convince Lucius that he did kill Narcissa?
His words to Harry are different because the context is different - he wants Harry to understand the necessity behind the Death Eaters thinking he burned Narcissa alive, but there exists disutility both in saying "no, I didn't burn her alive" and this potentially leaking back to the Death Eaters, and in saying "yes, I did burn her alive" and this potentially leaking back to the Wizengamot.
So he gives Harry the reasons that the belief is necessary, but he doesn't tell him if it's true.
And what about the disutility of saying "yes, I did burn her alive" and this potentially leaking back to his supporters ? Wouldn't it destroy his image as the representant of Light ? Would it still be worth fighting on his side ? Maybe I am fooled by assuming, that Eliezer Yudkowsky has the same cultural background as I have, and that the light characters strongly believe in Geneva conventions, particularly the protection of non-combatants.
My impression is that the senior Order of the Phoenix members already know the truth, and the Light-side power brokers who don't know the truth are not particularly interested in evidence.
You mean if he actually said it as clearly as that to Lucius Malfoy?
Almost nobody believed Lucius, not even his own supporters in the Wizengamot, as has been mentioned in the story already. Only the Death Eaters seem to have believed it, perhaps because Voldemort believed it.
It's different if The Boy Who Lived testifies to the same effect (that Dumbledore told him he did it) infront of the Wizengamot.
Witness Draco's efforts to find some plausible deniability as a Malfoy, and realize what the odds are that anyone would believe Lucius even if he spoke simple truth.
If Dumbledore endorsed the burning-alive (even after the fact), then I think Harry's promise requires him to take Dumbledore as an enemy.
That said, I'm not sure that D has endorsed the act, so much as declined to shoot an ally - which isn't quite the same moral position. (Or is it? Have to think about that).
Well, if I evaluate in terms of expected consequences, it seems the question reduces to what effect the two things have on the odds that someone will be burned alive in the future.
The answer to which is of course uncertain, but I can certainly see the argument that demonstrating that I won't enforce any negative consequences for you burning our shared enemies alive has about the same effect on those odds as endorsing burning our shared enemies alive.
So your position is that HP is obligated (based on what he knows right now) to take D as his enemy or forsake his promise to Draco?
I don't have a position on that question; I don't know what HP promised Draco or how it relates to D.
My position is that declining to "shoot" (taking that metaphorically to mean punish) an ally who performed an act is usually pretty much morally equivalent to endorsing that act.
I think I may misunderstand you.
Please explain how HJPEV is relieved of his promise?
I hope Draco hasn't been removed from the story. I liked the convert Draco storyline as an example of what "raising the sanity line" would really look like.
Given all the character development Draco has undergone (best example is the scene with Goyle), I think it unlikely that he disappears, never to return. I would interpret that occurrence as evidence that raising the sanity line is not possible in magical Britain.
Well Draco's not coming back now.
Hopefully Eliezer will throw us a short section from Draco's point of view as he extends the Bayesian Conspiracy to Durmstrang or wherever.
Nooo!!!!
(Just saw new chapter. Looks like you were right. But if Draco's really gone, then I'm really confused where this story is and has been heading. Draco is not capable of leading a Bayesian Conspiracy. HJPEV is barely capable of doing so, in that he is a ridiculously overpowered polymath genius. If the main person of Harry's age worth inducting into the Bayesian Conspiracy is not longer in contact with Harry, what's the point of the Bayesian Conspiracy? Conservation of detail, if nothing else. <Ok, I admit I'm biased because I like political-ish maneuvering like Dune and Game of Thrones, and HPMoR doesn't have that without Draco>).
I expect he'll write letters to Harry on the sly.
Also, remember back about 60 chapters when Draco realized that Lucius would be ecstatic to have Harry in his debt? Sort of funny in retrospect.
This should probably also be the discussion thread for tomorrow's Chapter 83.
Dark rituals involve permanent sacrifice. The way I see it, Dumbledore sacrificed his capacity for love in order to win the war. And he isn't going to get it back, no matter how much Harry's words make him want to have it back.
That wasn't a dark ritual, it was just a choice. Like any hard choice, it forced him to seriously weigh his values against each other, and it's hard to go through that completely unchanged, but that doesn't mean it completely rewrote his character.
You can love others and acknowledge that there are some things you can't sacrifice, even for love.
... So.
Prediction, since I can't be bothered to put it on predictionbook: Harry will apologize by sending Dumbles a list of people versus Galleons - an implicit admission of a mistake.
Derp. Probability 10%, because it seems a little OOC.
What's the total probability that Harry will apologize, then?
[comment deleted]
Dumbledore is the strongest piece the Light has, bar Potter himself(and he's higher only due to prophecy). Emptying the vaults for Albus would probably be a good trade.
I'm going to dismiss this hypothesis because I don't think Eliezer would be happy to have HPMoR's discussion threads taken over by the inevitable "How many Galleons is Person X worth?" disputes.
If he apologizes he'll probably either do it in person or in a similar way to last time, when he apologized for being unfair after Fawkes started shouting via Flitwick.
One major problem with such a list is that he currently doesn't know how difficult it would be to earn more money.
This is related, and is a good way to become smarter about taboo tradeoffs too:
Making Big Decisions about Money
It seems both Harry and Dumbledore are missing one of the big payoffs of Harry saving Hermione: making it very attractive to become his freind. There's no explicit enemy around at the moment, so he can't rally minions like Dumbledore did by using the threat of Voldermort; love might be his best option.
Everyone knows that Draco was trying to be Harry's friend.
He almost died for his trouble, and Harry's not the one that saved him.
There doesn't seem to be any causal connection in anyone's mind (other than Harry & Dumbledore) between their friendship and Draco's attempted murder.
Friends with Harry -> Interact with crazy mudblood girl -> Crazy Mudblood girl tries to kill you, and Harry defends her.
->Can't come back to school. -> Loses local positions of power. -> Odds of becoming future bigwig of magical England are reduced.
Then again Dumbledore just pointed out that being Harry's friend will now make you a target.
Being Harry's friend already made you a target, hence what happened to Draco and Hermione.
True, but there was a ceasefire in place regarding friends and family and such. That's what accepting the death of Aberforth, and the murder of Narcissa were about. All of the players anyone knew about had kept to the truce since then.
Hermione was a special case in many ways, they were already thought by many to be 'true loves' and she did save him from a Dementor, so it would be unlikely to count as a guarantee. Also Hermione did still have significant costs from this, she was imprisoned, exposed to Dementors, her reputation ruined and now she is bound to the service of the (possibly Dark) Lord Potter. So not an insurance scheme I'd be particularly willing to take up.
What he really needs to do is save draco in the same way
Only if the author wanted to cheapen the whole thing.
And that doesn't seem to be the author's style.
Save him from who? His father's(perfectly reasonable) educational decisions?
So one thing to notice in this chapter is the parallel between Dumbledore's situation during the War and Harry's situation in court. In particular, the price of a life was one hundred thousand Galleons in each case. That the price should be the same makes the story more dramatic and the moral lesson more clearcut, but neither of those are a reason for something to actually be true in HPMOR, are they?
It could easily be a coincidence. One hundred thousand Galleons is a nice big round number, and so two big-number-pickers might both pick it for that reason, the same way people write songs about what they would do if they had a million dollars and not $1,349,921. I'm not discounting that as an explanation, but I will note that Lucius Malfoy was a high-ranking Death Eater and probably knew about the Aberforth ransom. And given that he had recently been talking about the death of his wife, it should have been salient. And he did suddenly take a cold smile on his face as he demanded compensation of one hundred thousand Galleons. And he certainly expected it not to be paid.
If we assume he assumes Harry is Voldemort, which seems like a good assumption given his recent behavior, he would think Voldemort would see the symbolism in the price. And then... what? Is he taunting Voldemort? I mean sure he's angry, but taunting Voldemort doesn't seem wise. But it doesn't even make sense as a taunt unless he expects Voldemort to accept, which he doesn't. Does he see it as the winning move? Voldemort now has to back down or admit he was wrong about the value of family? That would explain why he got so pissed-off, I guess, it sucks when your opponent starts cheating. Was it another dig at Dumbledore? Gotta constantly troll Dumbledore as vengeance for your wife's death.
Another possibility, which seems a little implausible but I'll mention it, is that the scene was faked by Dumbledore. Either things didn't happen quite as he said they did, or things basically happened that way but Dumbledore touched up the evidence to appeal to his sense of narrative drama by getting the numbers right.
First possibility that comes to mind is that it was a nicely salient price point that Lucius could be sure Voldemort wouldn't be willing to pay to get back a valued ally. After all, Voldemort implicitly said as much before, if Dumbledore's testimony about his reaction during the last war is to be trusted.
Lucius probably doesn't want to taunt Voldemort, but he does want to win, and by persisting when Harry made it clear where his interests lie, Lucius has already implicitly opposed himself to Voldemort in the current conflict. I can't think of any other price point that'd work better, either, now that the precedent's been set -- a little lower sends a message that Voldemort is less serious in his intentions than Dumbledore, a lot lower risks being paid in full, and higher makes Lucius look desperate.
Depending on how well known the ransom story is, he might also have been trying to score points off the other people in the room by drawing an implicit parallel to those events. Of course, by doing so and getting a different outcome, he's lost some of the moral high ground; I'm not sure how much, though, given how cold Harry was being and given the little stunt with Umbridge and the Dementor. Lucius is also probably updating his estimate for the Harrymort interpretation downward now (previously he had a hypothesis that matched all his data; now he has new data both for and against and should be very confused), but I'm not prepared to say what the consequences of that might be.
Remember what Eleizer said in the authors notes about simple vs. complex explanations? I'd default to the 'big round number' hypothesis.
Even if he was influenced by Aberforth's ransom, it might just have been to the extent that the amount Aberforth was ransomed for was the first to pop into his head.
Wasn't ransomed for.
It wasn't just a dig, it was a stab. My rereading of the passage leads me to think that Lucius gave that number expressly because of Dumbledore. Remember, Lucius knows that Dumbledore doesn't bargain - and that he gave up on his brother, rather than pay a hundred thousand. Lucius wanted his offer to be rejected, and he was counting on Dumbledore to reject his offer. That explains Lucius's cold smile when he made his offer. And also his confusion, and reassessment, when Harry strong arms Dumbledore into giving assent ... "You pretend you can destroy Azkaban, and Dumbledore pretends to believe it."
It also explains Dumbledore's extremely heavy handed reaction to Harry's decision. The hundred thousand triggered his memory of Aberforth, and to see Harry then choose differently, invalidates Dumbledore's beliefs at some level. Always a painful thing.
Harry, why are you going to classes? Why is he not talking to Lucius, to Draco, to Dumbledore, or Quirrel? Hell, even Cornelius Fudge could probably use a chat right now.
I feel Quirrel's frustration, and it burns.
(Dumbledore, apparently, does not realize yet that Harry was involved in Azkaban, or realized it all along and does see a reason to act on that knowledge. That seems hard to believe given that he forgot Harry's parents were dead.)
Forgot Harry's parents were dead? What in the world?
I read it more as forgetting that he had sacrificed Harry's own parents so he had no right to lecture Harry about the costs of sacrifice. Harry has lived with those costs his whole life.
If true, it makes me curious how Sirius was involved in the betrayal, if at all.
Harry is being unfair to his mother.
She did not throw away everything for nothing.
She wagered something of such little value it was practically nothing, a life in which she did not do everything she could to save her infant son, against a test she had very little chance of passing, singlehandedly taking down the Big Bad.
When the cost is so low the bet is less foolish.
This is a rather blatant method of disguising a deontological ('ethical') demand as a utilitarian calculation. You can easily transform any deontology of "Do X" into a utilitarian calculation by asserting 'I assign zero utility to my life if I fail to do X'.
But it does not seem likely that this was truly what was going through Lily Potter's mind.
Okay, I was wrong. It's not at all likely that Dumbledore had the prophecy and Lily's death in mind when he turned Lily against Snape. He hadn't yet become willing to make that sort of tradeoff when the two of them were in school. And it beggared belief in any case that he could have correctly predicted the effects of his actions on Snape so many years in advance. So, no. Whatever his intentions were back then, if he's responsible for the prophecy, he merely capitalized on the outcome.
Despite that, I think it's now a little more probable that Dumbledore deliberately sacrificed the Potters, hoping to defeat Voldemort with Lily's sacrificial protection.
It also looks significant that Harry twice enumerated Lily's options as: leave, or stay and cast a curse. Voldemort offered her a third choice.
We know from canon that if she'd accepted, it would have saved her son. But Voldemort told her it wouldn't, and laughed at her for considering it. So she refused his offer and tried to kill him. Does that affect whether the protection is activated? Is it relevant that she had to willingly give her life out of love, when she died casting a curse that's powered by hate? Dumbledore didn't hear about this part. I'd love to know what he'd say.
We can assume that it would have saved her son in canon. The universe of HPMoR doesn't need follow the exact same rules.
You're assuming that such a protection by sacrifice need exist at all in HPMoR.
I parsed that sequence as Voldemort deliberately manipulating Lily so as to avoid her placing any magical protection on her son. I don't think MoR Voldemort would have been stupid enough to overlook major feats of magic just because they involve something as unpalatable as love.
Unlikely. The avadra did backfire.
Now, Voldie could have set up a backfiring scene and retired for 11 years on purpose, but then I can't fathom why: he was winning at the time.
Something that bothers me: what do fights involving the Killing Curse look like? What is it that made Voldemort so much more powerful and the conclusion of Lily vs Voldemort so foregone? His ability to pronounce the phrase faster?
Avada Kedavra seems like the Snitch of combat technique; trumps everything most of the time and dumbs the whole thing down.
After the Azkaban sequence, Quirrell mentions Avada Kedavra as a technique that can't be blocked and must be dodged, and therefore essential to magical duels. So that's half your answer. If spamming AK isn't the dominant strategy, it follows that there must be other considerations: perhaps it takes more time to execute, or drains more magical power.
In canon I believe it requires actual hatred for the target, not mere killing intent, which would limit its usefulness for people who aren't YA-lit Nazi pastiches, but I'm not sure if we can consider that reliable in MoR. It doesn't seem to fit comfortably into the fic's themes.
In HPMoR too: Chapter 25: "Who'd been silly enough to build in a spell for Avada Kedavra that could only be cast using hatred?"
Perhaps update your model on what the fic's themes are?
If anything, HPMoR makes a person's mind-state even more significant than in canon. It buffs up the Patronus charm, it affects pretty much anything having to do with Dementors (how they look like, whether you can hear them, how much they affect you, even how they act like or whether they'll obey you), it directly affects how the Sorting Hat will behave towards you (as it borrows intelligence from your own mind), spells don't work if you only know the incantation and nothing else about them, "knowledge" can't pass backwards more than 6 hours, knowledge of powerful charms can't pass through books at all as it requires person-to-person communication...
Hmm, you're right. Odd that Quirrell was able to use it on Bahry, then. My model of Quirrell(mort) allows for him killing obstructive strangers if it happens to be expedient and not feeling at all bad about it, but hating them? That seems a little personal to mesh well with what we've seen of his style.
Perhaps he's got the narcissistic-personality thing where any impediment automatically becomes a hated enemy, but if so he's hiding it exceptionally well. Or perhaps he's using an Occulumens trick to self-modify into such a person... that seems to fit pretty well, actually. And would be a significant advantage in combat, not to mention a significant obstacle to using AK if you can't self-modify that way.
Nope, I'm going to stand by this one. It's made fairly clear that MoR magic is tied closely to wizards' thoughts and expectations -- it imposes Aristotelian physics, for crying out loud -- but in this specific case, I read the canonical situation as an intrusion of J.K. Rowling's moral universe into the Potterverse. We've seen enough subversions of that ethic elsewhere in the fic that I didn't want to allow it to constrain my expectations of the text.
I've never parsed "cast with hatred" as "you must hate the target." In canon, Crouch Jr. as Moody demonstrates it by killing a spider (although I suppose it's possible he's an arachnaphobe.) I imagine that it's like the patronus charm, which you can cast by calling up a happy thought, even if you weren't already happy. Even if Quirrelmort doesn't hate everyone personally, I doubt he has any trouble calling up feelings of hatred.
I doubt any one of us would have much trouble calling up feelings of hatred. Or feelings of nearly anything for that matter.
Typical Mind Fallacy.
Do not be so quick to assume that everyone is like you. I have great difficulty recalling emotions and, in a minute of introspection, am unable to make myself feel or relive hatred towards anything.
As Quirrel said in his very first class
So it's surely not unheard of.
Canonically, I think it also took substantial magical power to be able to cast it, so I suspect that the average adult witch or wizard wouldn't be able to use it (most ordinary adults were made out to be fairly incompetent at the magical skills they didn't use regularly,) but Quirrel seems to be imposing rather higher standards on his students.
Interesting... Can I please interview you as a case study for my paper on Wittgenstein?
Quirrell was planning to teach it.
I’m not sure exactly what Harry was thinking, but if it simply means that you must “call up feelings of hate” as suggested below, then it might simply be intended as a simple safeguard. Presumably almost anyone can call up such feelings if they tried, but it wouldn’t happen by accident unless you really hate someone. (Given the apparent age of the spell and its character, I don’t think its creator would worry much about accidentally killing someone you hate, if it even occurred to them.)
In canon, when Dumbledore and Voldemort fought in Order of the Pheonix, they weren't just launching high level spells like missiles, they were apparating around and manipulating the landscape around them. On one occasion, Dumbledore has Fawkes catch an Avada Kedavra for him (reducing him to a chick,) and I believe he may also have blocked another with an animated statue (although that might have been a different spell.)
I was extremely disappointed that the movie adaptation reduced their confrontation to a highly pyrotechnic instance of magical arm wrestling. J. K. Rowling may not have thought all her ideas out properly, but at least she managed to show that when wizards of Dumbledore and Voldemort's caliber duel, they get creative.
you would probably enjoy the Read or Die OVA, which is one of the few instances I've seen on super heroes using their power instinctually (as they would if they'd had them from birth) rather than intentionally.
If anyone knows of anything else in this vein do share, I find it enjoyable.
Many things in real life are much like that. See nuclear weapons. No law of nature says that there can't be a brute-force technique that overpowers creativity and finesse.
I think the most interesting part of this chapter (82) is another two clues about the Harry's Dark Side/Voldemort connection:
"Why was there a part of him that seemed to get angry at the old wizard beyond reason, lashing out at him harder than Harry had ever hit anyone, without thought of moderation once the rage had been raised, only to quiet as soon as Harry left his presence?"
Hmm, Harry's dark side mysteriously hates Dumbledore but doesn't remember why..? This is just one more clue that his dark side is an obliviated Voldemort or a horcrux - Voldemort's memories influence his dark thinking even if he doesn't remember why.
Also,
" 'Step aside, foolish woman, if you have any sense in you at all -' An awful chill came over Harry as he spoke those words from his own lips, but he shook it off and continued."
This could just be a creepy thing to hear yourself say about your mother, but could it be even more creepy if you realized you'd already heard yourself say it? Thinking back to the Remembrall incident, it's likely Harry has memories of Voldemort that are slowly coming out...
Good insight! This would also explain why "Harry's worst memory" was something he shouldn't actually remember. If it was actually Voldemort's memory passed through Harry's loyalties and emotional valuation, it might be the thing that popped out. Which also makes Harry having revealed this memory to Dumbledore in Ch 82 pretty significant, and suggests a radically different interpretation to this text:
The eyes widening and seeming to be shattered... what if Harry and the reader are meant to think this is just Dumbledore being all human and weak and sympathetic and stuff, but actually Dumbledore was surprised by learning that Harry is Harrymort in a deeper sense than he'd realized and then covering it with acting?
Very good point. Will be looking for evidence of this theory in the future.
I think you're right. If Eliezer is keeping the Harry-as-horcrux plot element, and we're still living in a world without souls or an afterlife, the horcrux in Harry would be a part of Voldemort's memories and personality, because that's what a "soul" really is.
I don't know if it's been mentioned before, but this probably explains Quirrel's trances. He has distributed a large part of his mind across several parts of the globe he no longer has access to. This means his mind can't function properly 100% of the time. (Would his mind function better when he's near Harry?)
Or, instead of your mind being distributed across multiple processors, a horcrux is a copy. And if you're killed, you survive not as a ghost, but by virtue of the fact that there's still a copy of you extant and functioning in the world. The same way uploading counts as survival.
Which means that by filling the world with horcruxes, Voldemort is executing the Hansonian strategy of flooding the labor market with EMs.
ETA: Hey, would Voldemort care what happened to a copy of himself? Perhaps the "power Voldemort knows not" is TDT. :)
If a Horcrux is a copy, it’s more of a redundant rather than an independent one. Voldie had several horcruxes, some of them for years, and yet there was exactly one “resurrection”.
A resurrection requires a host body, though. And his other horcruxes didn't find their way into anyone's hands. Except, perhaps, for the button he threw to Hermione.
I don’t think the restoration requires the presence of the horcrux. In canon there’s no indication of any horcrux present at Quirell’s possession in Albania (in fact, there’s a vague handwavy indication that Quirell was made into a kind of horcrux), nor at the graveyard resurection.
(AFAIK, no horcrux could have been present at either event. Albania was where he made the diadem into a horcrux, but he hid it in Hogwarts before his death, the diary was destroyed before the resurection, and I don’t think Bellatrix was there, nor that the Hufflepuf cup was taken out of the Lestrange vaults before it was destroyed, and all the others were hidden.)
So, I don’t think it’s required for someone to be near a horcrux for the resurrection.
In canon Horcruxes bound the original spirit to survive beyond the death of the body. If Horcruxes are just copies there wouldn't be an extra spirit floating around to do the possessing / resurrecting.
Graveyard resurrection? A misunderstanding. I meant Quirrell. This is not a canon-compliant hypothesis I'm proposing. It's speculation on how far the rules might be changed to fit the restrictions of a world without souls. As such, it needs to be consistent with the story so far, play to OB/LW themes, and be generally cute. But it depends on facts we haven't been given and changes that haven't been established, and I don't have any strong reason to believe it's actually the case.
Well, I've solved the story. Harry defeats Voldemort by tricking him into doing the "rational" thing and defecting against himself. Posting this in a new, unedited comment just in case it turns out to be more than a bad joke.
That's interesting. Are Harry and Quirrell sharing the Dark Side module in Harry's head, so that only one can use it at a time?
The far easier explanation for this, which does not have all the problems of being an ridiculousness easy and yet unknown method for detecting of Obliviation having occured is that Harry forgot that he is strictly forbidden to use a Time-Turner in view of the public!
What Obliviation?
I think he's referring to JoeA's Obliviated-Voldimort-Memories theory. I agree that forgetting about the Time-Turner rules is a more likely explanation of the phenomena.
That would make sense, except that it was really bright, I was under the impression that McGonnagal was puzzled about it.
One thing I find really interesting about this story is that nobody has any idea what's going on, and nothing is going according to anyone's plan.
(1) It seems clear that Hat and Cloak = Quirrellmort. Less clear, but still likely in my view, was is that the point of this plot was to eliminate those friends of Harry's who would make him resistant to manipulation by Quirrellmort ("Lessson I learned is not to try plotss that would make girl-child friend think I am evil or boy-child friend think I am sstupid," Ch. 66). Instead, while the plot may be the end of Harry's friendship with Draco, it's probably strengthened his bond with the morally pure Hermione, and convinced some members of the Wizengamot that Harry is Voldemort, which probably doesn't have a place in Quirrellmort's plans. Furthermore, Quirrellmort may not realize what he's done.
(2) It occurred to me that giving Draco Veritaserum might have made Lucius realize that Harry is not Voldemort. However, if you look at some of Lucius' dialog closely, the subtext appears to be, "Dark Lord, you have lost your humanity, and therefore cannot possibly understand the love I have for my son. I am willing to risk your wrath over this, especially since I suspect you are much weaker trapped in the body of a child. And why do you bother telling such ridiculous lies about your motives?" If Lucius knows that Harry confessed to Draco that he had no idea what the conversation in Ch. 38 was about, Lucius probably dismisses that confession as a well-told lie.
(3) Dumbledore believes that Harry has just signaled to Lucius and the other Death Eaters that he will pay any price to save his friends. But Dumbledore is wrong, at least about Lucius. Lucius believes he has just fallen victim to an incomprehensible plot of Harrymort's, possibly designed solely to torment Lucius, and therefore does not see this as relevant evidence to how far Harry(mort) will go to save his friends in the future. Indeed, Lucius accused Harry of lying when Harry explained that "his stake" in the situation was just that Hermione was Harry's friend.
(4) Harry is deeply conflicted about his actions. Yet there's a case to be made that that Harry's decision making process (the one he's now feeling conflicted about) was better than Dumbledore's. Not perfect, but better than Dumbledore's. Not only is Harry ignorant about the consequences of his actions (as described in points 1-3 above), he was in the no position to know anything at all about those consequences... except for the consequence of "save a little girl from getting eaten by Dementors." Under those circumstances, Harry's arguments in Ch. 77 may actually apply here. Unfortunately, that may mean Harry ends up learning the wrong lesson from this incident.
Quirrellmort has already pontificated on the benefits of ambiguity, and his desire to let both sides think Harry is on their side.
Now that I think about it, it's odd that he stated that with such certainty. It's not like Voldemort or Dumbledore used that strategy - maybe he's thinking of Grindelwald? Apparently his motto was "for the greater good"...
Yet that's not exactly what happened as a result of Harry's actions. The "afterword" of the trial suggests that any members of Lucius' faction who follow story-book logic will see Harry as a dangerous enemy, as will members of Dumbledore's faction who have "walked the path of a powerful wizard."
Though that actually raises an interesting question--what happens when, say, Alastor Moody goes to Dumbledore and says, "Albus, I think Harry is Voldemort"? Does Dumbledore tell Alastor he's wrong, and convince Alastor that there is a better explanation for Harry's actions? Or does Dumbledore say, "dear God, Alastor, you're right!"
On a related note, what does Dumbledore know about horcruxes? Dumbledore's dialog has suggested that Voldemort may have gone around destroying a lot of information on horcruxes, so Dumbledore may know less in this story than he did in canon. Hmmm...
EDIT: See also JenniferRM's comment below.
RE: your (1).
I think that Quirrelmort's aim was to turn Harry.
From Quirrel's point of view, Harry has shown incredible promise except for his pesky humanist streak. All Quirrelmort needs to do is to kill his faith in humanity off and he's ripe for the job of future Dark Lord. What better way to accomplish that than to have the wizarding world at large sentence the one person he believes to be wholly good (Hermione) to death? Dumbledore will refuse to help Harry destroy Azkaban and bust Hermione out, at which point Harry will lose all faith in him and his methods, and turn to Quirrel for help. Quirrel says, "Poor dear, didn't I tell you that people were basically evil if left to their own devices? They need a ruler to help them to be good. Let's break your chum out of Azkaban and take over the wizarding world for good measure as soon as we can, although I'm afraid that by the time we are in position to get her out and keep her out she'll probably be a vegetable..." So Harry and Quirrel sear Azkaban out of existence, free the crims (many of whom will now follow Harry into fire out of gratitude). Harry is left with a broken England and a broken Hermione and the only thing left for him is to rule with an iron utilitarian fist, Quirrelmort at his side.
And look how close it came to working! Harry's backup plan was to kill almost the entire sitting parliament of Wizarding Britain in cold blood! There's no coming back from that one. I don't think avoiding this plot inoculates him against similar attacks, either - if anything he's in a weaker position now and is therefore more vulnerable to being forced into the kind of irredeemable, desperation-induced act that he won't be able to put back in the box.
This occurred to me, but in retrospect I tend to think Quirrellmort must have realized he couldn't have accomplished so much with one plot. And where does Bellatrix fit into all this?
If Dumbledore believes that Harry's action told Voldemort that blackmailing will be effective again, shouldn't he now proceed to move Harry's parents to safety at Hogwarts, as Harry suggested when the issue was raised after Azkaban?
He may very well do that, but also remember that people ARE still up against Dumbledore, who DOES have his reputation intact.
Unfortunately, Harry has just shown that he is both able and willing to overcome Dumbledore's refusal to offer concessions.
On the other hand, he doesn't currently have much in the way to offer potential kidnappers.
...unless a family member of someone locked up in Azkaban takes him at his word that he's capable of destroying the place. I'm not sure Harry would pause even as long as he did for Hermione if that was the price demanded for the safe return of his adoptive parents. The narrative demands of the story make that unlikely, though.
Shouldn't the next small chapter have been posted already, according to the time mentioned in ch.82?
EDIT TO ADD: Eliezer has posted it as an author's note.
Yes, and the FFN update alert already went out. My guess is that Eliezer posted the chapter and deleted it immediately afterwards, perhaps due to some formatting problem.
Notes on hpmor.com say login.fanfiction.net is down. It wasn't down when I tried it, and that doesn't explain why it's not on hpmor.com itself.
It's posted in the hpmor.com author's note due to FFN being unresponsive: http://hpmor.com/notes/83/
... Wonderful.
Why do you keep doing this to us, Eliezer? Exactly once in the past, oh, four weeks or so has the chapter not ended on a cliffhanger. :p
Eh, well. So.... I wonder what Harry's response to this will be? It's not clear that he can do anything, but I can't imagine he'd be particularly happy with just leaving Draco to Lucius.
Apologies for perhaps being obnoxious... but can you taboo "cliffhanger" for me, what do you mean by it?
I think that people tend to use that word so much that it has lost all communicative meaning. For me a cliffhanger is something where in the next few minutes of in-story action someone is in deadly danger -- like someone hanging off a cliff, you know. This isn't the case here.
Ah. To me, a cliffhanger is ending on any dramatic moment - any point where you'd say "But what does he do neeeext?!" Which for me at least is the case here: I'd at least like to see Harry's reaction.
I take a slightly broader view: a device in which the final elements of the piece inspire intense curiosity in the reader/viewer.
That would be a reasonable view in most cases, but after the first five or so paragraphs I can’t really think of any point in MoR, end of chapter or otherwise, that didn’t inspire me with intense curiosity about what’s next...
So Draco will have to build political power without the benefit of growing up in Slytherin. I wonder if Lucius will try to influence other families to pull their kids out of Hogwarts too?
Well, almost certainly Crabbe and Goyle are pulling out too.
I really should have thought of that. That's what Harry gets for scaring Lucius.
This is awesome.
Indeed. It makes me wish I had written up my complaint about Harry mistaking desires for competences before he improved his internal names, though, as it seems less relevant now. Oh well.
I am confused as to why Dumbledore tolerates Quirrell's presence at Hogwarts: he clearly suspects Quirrell, and we've just seen that he can be exceedingly ruthless. At the very least, one would expect Dumbledore to put heavy security precautions in place around him (along the lines of tracking his movements, etc).
One hypothesis that would partially explain this, along with many other things, is that Quirrell might be a fragment of Voldemort's soul that disagrees with the other fragments, or at least with Voldemort himself. (Or, equivalently, that it has persuaded Dumbledore of this.) (Presumably, it is the one based on the Pioneer horcrux.) This fits with (real-life) modularity of mind, which has been extensively discussed on LW, and has also already been shown to exist in-story by Harry's internal, conflicting voices.
(In addition to explaining why Dumbledore trusts Quirrell, this would also explain why Quirrellmort acts so differently from Voldemort.)
To extend this line or reasoning a bit, there's no reason to think that Hat and Cloak and Santa Claus are any of the previously introduced characters- they could easily be yet another fragment of Voldemort's soul, possibly cooperating with or opposing the other fragments.
(My previous hypothesis was that Dumbledore was simply so desperate to gain a DADA teacher that he made concessions and accepted as possibly dark candidate. However, this doesn't fit with the ruthless Dumbledore we've seen in recent chapters.)
Why would Dumbledore lie about that?
If Santa Claus is aligned against Voldemort, as seems likely, then Dumbledore would want to conceal their real identity. And we already appear to know that Santa is on Harry's side, and so presumably opposes Voldemort. (Although I did overstate the case regarding Santa Claus in that sentence- I mostly just included him for completeness.)
The position is cursed (I think in MoR as well as canon). Many of the ways someone can vacate the position forcibly by the end of a school year are fatal or debilitating. It might be that he's willing to trade a year of Defense education for all of his students in exchange for putting a suspected enemy in harm's way, if the enemy is foolish enough to hold still for it. (Or believes himself immune to the curse because he's the one who placed it.)
Actually, come to think of it, I now expect that smart!Dumbledore would weaponize the curse in this way as the only explanation for why there is a Defense teacher at all who is not explicitly under a one-year contract. Otherwise it would probably make more sense to cobble together the educational requirements with dueling clubs, student tutoring, and extra sessions in Charms, plus throwing textbooks and the fear of OWLs at all the students, rather than put them under the influence of high-variance low-average bottom-of-the-barrel educators who will be found staggeringly unfit or disabled or dead by summertime.