I had this idea about Tom Riddle's plan that I appreciated having criticized.
Tom Riddle grew up in the shadow of WWII. He saw much of the Muggle world unite against a threat they all called evil, and he saw Europe's savior, the US, eventually treated as the new world leader afterward, though it was somewhat contested, of course. That threat strongly defined it's own presentation and style, and so that style and presentation were associated with evil afterward.
Tom didn't want to be Hitler. Tom wanted to actually win and to rule in the longer term, not just until people got tired of his shit and went all Guy Fawks on his ass. He knew that life isn't easy for great rules, but thought that was worthwhile. He knew that life was even harder for great rulers who ruled by fear, so that wasn't his plan.
So Tom needed two sides, good and evil. To this end he needed two identities, a hero and a villain.
I guess he didn't think the villain didn't need to have any kind of history. Maybe he didn't think the villain would matter much or for long. Voldemort was just there for the hero to strike down. That was a mistake, because he lacked a decoy his enemies were eventually able to discover ...
That's a really good explanation for how Dumbledore's recollection of the purposeless evil of Voldemort can be reconciled with the clearly purposeful evil of Quirrell.
Right now this post has 53 points. WHY?
The post where put down the theory this grew from only has 2 points. Don't go voting it up just because I mentioned that. I don't want anything 'fixed' I just want an explanation.
This isn't written any better than my other posts, which commonly stay under 3 points and go negative often enough. Those other posts are totally contributions to the conversation. Some of them are even helpful.
I left points hanging. I didn't defend what I was saying. I just told a story. That's what you want?
I'm not even the first to revisit this speculation since my low vote theory post. Chris Hallquist was saying pretty much the same thing and he didn't get over 40 upvotes.
What are you upvoting?
I left points hanging. I didn't defend what I was saying. I just told a story. That's what you want?
Why hello there! We are called humans, have you met us before?
Because votes come more from the location in the thread than from quality of the post - sheer numbers of people reading it swamp a better post made 400 spots downthread. Also, it puts down in decent fashion a thesis that's getting kicked around a lot and that is rather appealing.
Did you just get burned by the Illusion of Transparency while referencing the Illusion of Transparency?
Well. Done.
I guess he didn't think the villain didn't need to have any kind of history. Maybe he didn't think the villain would matter much or for long. Voldemort was just there for the hero to strike down. That was a mistake, because he lacked a decoy his enemies were eventually able to discover his identity.
Perhaps not so much. We may believe Voldemort to truly be Tom Riddle for the following few reasons.
But canon doesn't count, this fic diverges strongly in places.
And knowledgeable, otherwise competent characters are wrong about things.
And, most tellingly, we now know that Voldemort in his Quirrell mask has been dropping hints that he is actually your Scion X (or David Monroe or whomever). He could just as easily be falsely hinting at the Riddle identity.
Yes, I am suggesting that the studen...
When Tom realizes that his plan has failed and cannot be made to work in the intended fashion, he exits his hero, stage left. At that point, 75 or so, he doesn't have a good plan to leave the stage as his villain, so he kind of kicks it for a few years, tolerating the limits of his rule and getting what meager entertainment he can out of being a god damned theater antagonist.
This strikes me as the least characteristic part of your idea. Quirrellmort doesn't seem like someone who would have taken a few years kicking it around trying to come up with a new plan.
ETA: I think that for the most part this seems like a pretty likely outline. I think the evidence stacks up in favor of the new character being a dupe of Voldemort, and this strikes me as the most plausible motivation for him to be playing both sides. I think his plan would probably even have been workable in the sense of making the heroic identity the de facto leader of the country, but he called it quits when he realized that the prize for heroism was not being lavished with adulation, but being treated as responsible for being a hero all the time, whereas the prize for being a Dark Lord was fawning obedience. There are a...
I've been thinking along the same lines, probably because I watched Code Geass not too long ago, and this is basically the "Zero Requiem" gambit employed by Lelouch. He creates a totem of pure evil as a target of the world's hatred, then publicly destroys it, establishing a hero as savior-king. Riddle, like Lelouche, is portrayed as a "Byronic hero"--mysterious, cynical, cunning, arrogant, and brilliant. If this interpretation is correct, Harry might not be his future meatpuppet, but actually the "chosen one", who will fulfill the role of the hero and unite the world as savior-king after destroying the risen Voldemort.
But of course it could have just been a "Palpatine Gambit". In this version, Riddle was using his Voldemort persona to create fear, which his other persona takes advantage of to turn Magical Britain into the Empire, consolidating all power to himself. But in this version, much to the consternation of Tom Riddle, the "Republic" actually doesn't give up power to the obviously qualified hero (due to diffusion of responsibility, political maneuvering, etc.) So instead he decides to just seize power as Voldemort, but by bad...
Tom Riddle grew up in the shadow of WWII. He saw much of the Muggle world unite...
Tom didn't want to be Hitler...
In case it's relevant, remember that Hitler was just a muggle pawn of Grindlewald, and the Holocaust existed to fuel Gindlewald's dark rituals.
Put yourself in his place and his personality, what would you do? I'd probably get bored and set about creating the only thing I don't have: a worthy adversary.
I wouldn't. Sign me up for unworthy adversaries all the way.
set about creating ... a worthy adversary
Just to put slightly differently what others have already said: We're talking here about a version of Voldemort who has read the Evil Overlord List (or written his own version or something of the kind). It is hard to reconcile either half of that with taking considerable trouble and risk to raise up a "worthy adversary".
Am I losing my mind, or was there a change made to Chap 16? I recall this section:
" No, there is exactly one monster which can threaten you once you are fully grown. The single most dangerous monster in all the world, so dangerous that nothing else comes close. The adult wizard. That is the only thing that will still be able to threaten you."
However now it reads:
" No, there is exactly one monster which can threaten you once you are fully grown. The single most dangerous monster in all the world, so dangerous that nothing else comes close. The Dark Wizard. That is the only thing that will still be able to threaten you."
If it was changed... why the change? The original was better, and (perhaps more to the point) more in keeping with Quirrell's character. He wouldn't distinguish between adult and Dark wizards when it comes to threat-to-his-students assessment.
You're right. I search the PDF version, and have been told it doesn't receive edits in it's build (currently - though that's the plan for the future).
"The adult wizard." pg. 226
And I agree. I don't like the change either. Thinking that other adult wizards aren't a threat to you unless they're Dark is a horribly mistaken bias in more ways that one.
Yeah. I dislike this change. "Dark" makes sense for Quirrell to say for purposes of not sounding too evil, for not sounding like he's encouraging being dangerous. But at that point in the story, it was pretty clear Quirrell thought it was a good thing to be dangerous, and saying "adult" wizard is more consistent with that. It's also more consistent with his decision to call "Defense Against the Dark Arts" "Battle Magic."
If you're losing your mind, then either I am too or the nature of your mind-losing is a hallucination about what the chapter says now. I remember the same original text as you do (or, at any rate, the words "the adult wizard" and certainly not "the Dark wizard"). And I strongly agree that the original version is better.
Best rationalization I can think of, but I still don't approve of the change. Let us remember that Quirrell intends to help Harry become a Dark Wizard, in which case, since Harry is in the classroom, he should include Light Wizards in the class of people who can threaten the students present.
It also makes more sense to say "the adult wizard" since that sentence is the conclusion of a list of species that are dangerous, and "adult" sounds more biological.
Maybe there's an important reason for this change, but otherwise I think this is too much like a composer making inane changes to a piece after it's already written, or like George Lucas messing with the original Star Wars trilogy.
Assuming evil people will be susceptible to such arguments
I didn't say evil people will be susceptible to such arguments.
I was naming three reasons that good people have to not be evil, not three arguments that would cause evil people to stop being evil.
Eliezer, in an edit, just reminded me that Tom Riddle is 65 years old. And from there I got to looking that other ages. Dumbledore is 110. Bahry One-Hand and Mad Eye Moody are each at least ~120. From chapter 39, I got the impression that 150 years old is uncomfortably old (maybe 90 in muggle years) and 200 is unthinkably old (110+ for muggles). So now I'm confused again.
Where are all the old people? What would family trees look like if people really lived to be 120+ regularly? If you're a child you've got two parents, and 4 grandparents, but what about the 8 great grandparents...and the 16 great^2 grandparents...32 great^3 grandparents...64 great^4 grandparents... 128 great^5 grandparents...256 ...512 etc? Plus, imagine the number of children each couple would have if people jumped from 40 fertile years to 80. I could buy that with older ages, people would wait longer to have kids (In canon they mention that it was slightly unusual for people to be having children at 20 years old). That would explain why there aren't 7-10 generations of family at the reunions, but on the other hand, I wouldn't expect Wizards to be big fans of birth control or abortion. Plus, that doesn'...
In recent history they've had two devastating wars. Plotting and infighting seems perpetual. Most adults spend a reasonable amount of their time using dangerous magic (there was some mention of wizard specific diseases like 'dragon pox' in canon). And everyone in the world can kill you instantly with their wand. So even if their notional life expectancy is high the number of dangers that reduce the population is enormous.
Actually given how easy deadly curses are I'm surprised there are any wizards left... Possibly explains why age correlates with magical power/skill.
Actually given how easy deadly curses are I'm surprised there are any wizards left... Possibly explains why age correlates with magical power/skill.
Probably for the same reason the existence of guns hasn't resulted in human extinction.
Plus, education for 7 years makes no sense if you expect to live another hundred; muggles spend 1/5-1/6th of their life in education, but wizards only 1/15th
This, at least, does not confuse me. It's not like this is a historical constant, for most of human history most people have spent less.
Anyway, it's implied that vocational training exists after one is finished with one's mandatory education.
I wouldn't expect Wizards to be big fans of birth control or abortion.
Are you assuming vaguely medieval tech = Catholic = opposed to birth control and abortion?
The Catholic Church didn't declare that all abortion was murder until the Renaissance, and I don't think there's any reason to think that wizards are generally Catholics. ETA Nor is there any reason to think that Catholics are reliably obedient to Popes.
The simplest explanation might be that wizards (like Tolkien's elves, but less so) just aren't very fertile.
I wouldn't expect Wizards to be big fans of birth control or abortion.
Why not?
There are only thirty hours in a day and every child means greater demands on your time. It's not like they can hire muggles to raise their kids, like affluent muggle families might hire less-affluent folk to look after theirs. And we don't hear about anyone being raised by house elves.
Why wouldn't they want sex without conception?
1a) Also that other war before that one
3) Dumbledore uses his Time Tuner all the time. If he received it in his teens there could be almost twenty five extra years on that airframe.
(nods) And the Fetusmouths were driven into isolated seclusion in the early 1200s due to ethical concerns, and also they were really annoying at baby showers.
The Weasleys do seem to be more cosmetically poor than anything else. I mean, we're told they're poor, and that they wear shabby clothing and have hand-me-down wands, but they own a big house and land and broomsticks and a car(!) and everyone of age in the family is gainfully employed, often in reasonably respectable and lucrative jobs. Makes you wonder where the money's going.
EY doesn't seem so fond of Rand, and it's like he's building her up as the great bugaboo of the story. That whole talk with Hermione was one of those "Gault Recruits a Striker" speeches.
If you live in a world where you are punished for what was called Good:
And yet it was as if they tried to do everything they could to make his life unpleasant. To throw every possible obstacle into his way. I was not naive, Miss Granger, I did not expect the power-holders to align themselves with me so quickly - not without something in it for themselves. But their power, too, was threatened; and so I was shocked how they seemed content to step back, and leave to that man all burdens of responsibility. They sneered at his performance, remarking among themselves how they would do better in his place, though they did not condescend to step forward."
And rewarded for what was called Evil:
..."And it was the strangest thing - the Dark Wizard, that man's dread nemesis - why, those who served him leapt eagerly to their tasks. The Dark Wizard grew crueler toward his followers, and they followed him all the more. Men fought for the chance to serve him, even as those whose lives depende
I took it as Ron approving of killing Malfoys. That doesn't seem unreasonable considering their families were on opposite sides of an extremely bloody war within recent memory.
I've edited the birthdate of the person Amelia refers to, to be 1927 - too many people were interpreting that as "She thinks he's Tom Riddle" despite the House incongruence, an interpretation I'd honestly never thought of due to Illusion of Transparency.
I recommend checking out what your hints mean in canon, because that's what we have to go off of. The first thing I did when I saw 1926 was head over to the Harry Potter wiki and figure out who was born in 1926. It's Riddle and three of his Death Eater pals, all from Slytherin, of which the obvious option is Riddle. Riddle fits the biographical details you give, with minor modification consistent with the upgrades people get from canon (a MOR Riddle might decide to not murder his family while still in school, for example). The canon rules for Houses appear to be "only Black is Noble and Most Ancient," and so we really don't have any idea which houses are the seven mentioned by Bones, and what the eighth missing house could be. Gaunt is a way better option than, say, Lestrange (where we know Lesath is alive).
In a fanfic, you should expect people to suspect that new characters are canon characters rather than completely new characters, which the person Bones is describing now appears to be (no canon births in 1927).
I think you're underestimating how quick people are to latch onto a detected pattern at the tiniest bit of evidence, and highly overestimating how quick they're to let go of the pattern they (brilliantly) detected when evidence to the contrary appears.
Any date at around that era will keep making people think she identified him as Tom Riddle, no matter any other evidence to the contrary, unless you explicitly have her mention a different name for him by chapter's end.
If you don't want people to have that confusion by chapter's end, just edit the chapter to have her name him with whatever non-Tom-Riddle name she thinks him to be.
especially not when his villain persona's name was an anagram of his real name.
I don't think that's an issue. It's a really long anagram - 'I am Lord Voldemort' to 'Tom Marvolo Riddle'. You need his middle name, you need to use 'Tom' rather than 'Thomas', and how many would think of prepending 'I am Lord' to 'Voldemort', especially when 'Lord' is mostly (exclusively?) used by Death Eaters. (Did anyone in the entire world besides Rowling get that anagram before it was published in Book 2? No one in canon but Harry seems to know.)
Remember that folks like Hook would publish hash - I mean, anagram - precommitments to their great scientific discoveries. Against humans without computers, anagrams are pretty effective trapdoor functions. (And that's when you know there's an anagram in the first place.)
EDIT: For 'Tom Marvolo Riddle', the AWAD anagram server says 74,669 possible anagrams. Some are quite ominous, eg. 'Dread Mil Volt Room'.
That, and an anagram that long can become almost anything. Exapmles: Armored doll vomit, odd immoral revolt, and my favorite, devil marmot drool. So even with the "marvolo", and even with the knowledge that it anagrams to something you're not going to spontaneously make that association unless you have prior reason to suspect voldemortiness.
odd immoral revolt
Of course - it's so obvious in retrospect! And it even encodes a hint about Quirrel's future activities too:
devil marmot drool
(If you squint, his resemblance to a devil marmot is clear.)
In fairness, I think the first anyone heard of "Marvolo" as Riddle's middle niddle -- er, I mean name -- was when he anagrammed it for Harry in the Chamber of Secrets. So it's not a big surprise that no one else guessed the anagram.
It's dawned on me that one of the biggest themes of this fic may be the importance of being able to notice flaws in one's models of other people. Virtually every time something has gone wrong in one of Voldemort's plans, it is because he is weak in this area:
Then there's Lucius, seeing everything in terms of self-interested plots, and concluding Harry is Voldemort because of it.
And finally, the bit in chapter 81 about how Harry is wiser than either Dumbledore or Voldemort, because he realizes he's able to realize when he doesn't understand people.
(I think one of those Azkabans should be a Hogwarts.)
There's also the two miscalculations in the speech before Yule- Harry's wish (which I think genuinely caught him by surprise) and Harry's publicly disagreeing with him (likewise).
In the spirit of making people flee screaming out of the room, propelled by a bone-deep terror as if Cthulhu had erupted from the podium:
One thing I really enjoy about HPMoR is how it likes to show intelligent people taking unreasonable-seeming ( = actually reasonable) precautions. Amelia Bones in chapter 84, and also in the Azkaban arc, Dumbledore and Snape and even Minerva on various occasions... not quite sure why but I really enjoy reading that sort of a thing.
Nicholas Flamel (born 1340) could be almost as good a source of ancient spells lost to the Interdict of Merlin as Slytherin's Monster (exact creation date unknown, but Godric Gryffindor was alive in 1202 and Slytherin was a contemporary). He also seems to be dependent on Albus Dumbledore for protection; maybe it's time Dumbledore called in some quid pro quo if he hasn't already?
Nicholas Flamel (born 1340) could be almost as good a source of ancient spells lost to the Interdict of Merlin as Slytherin's Monster
From Chapter 77:
A single glance would tell any competent wizard that the Headmaster has laced that corridor with a ridiculous quantity of wards and webs, triggers and tripsigns. And more: there are Charms laid there of ancient power, magical constructs of which I have heard not even rumors, techniques that must have been disgorged from the hoarded lore of Flamel himself.
So Dumbledore's already using some of Flamel's knowledge in his efforts against Voldemort.
I'm experimenting with reproducing the sound of the really horrible humming in Mathematica. I haven't changed the duration of notes yet, but I've experimented with trying to make things sound as horribly off-key as possible. I've started out with just changing the pitches of the notes by adding normally-distributed noise. So far the main discovery I've made is that for greater effect, the magnitude of the change should be proportional to the length of the note. Any ideas for things to try?
I'm using MIDI sounds, which are the simplest to set up, but also have the drawback that every pitch must correspond to an integral semitone, which limits how horrible things can sound. Also, what is a good standard MIDI instrument for simulating humming?
After several hours of experimentation, I have figured out what the trick is. Quirrell did nothing except hum the same song for four hours. The Auror's mind filled in the rest. After four hours of listening to the same fifty-one notes over and over again, I'd be calling code RJ-L20 too.
I would think the real key to horrible humming would not be to have it be uniformly horrible, but so close to brilliant that the horrible notes punctuate and pierce the melody so completely that it starts driving you mad- a song filled with unresolved suspensions, minor 2nds where they just should not belong, that then somehow modulate into something which sounds normal just long enough for you to think you are safe, when it collapses again, and the new key is offensive both to the original and to the modulation. This is not just random sounds, this is purposeful song writing, with the intent to unsettle- in my mind, something like sondheim at his most twisted, but without any resolution ever.
I'm not sure how much music you know, and I'm not sure how much music Mathematica knows, so if this is all Greek or too hard, disregard it all:
Try different diatonic modes and different scales altogether. Switch from Major to Phrygian in the middle of a phrase. Switch to different sets of keys depending on whether consecutive tones are ascending or descending. Use a lot of Locrian mode, it is generally wrong-sounding. Try mapping diatonic scale degrees to octatonic ones somehow, and switch between the two octatonic scales at random. See if you can produce a portamento between two notes, and use it a lot when two notes are separated by only a semitone.
Tolerance for rejection is a much harder qualifier to meet for success in standup than being funny is. Just, you know, so you know.
I am reminded of the first time Australian musician Lester Vat did his famous show Why Am I A Pie? (there's audio and video there.) He got up on stage at a rock'n'roll pub - it was a "What Is Music?" weird noise festival, but no-one expected this - went up to the microphone, and for forty-five minutes, just repeated the words:
"Why ... am I ... a pie?"
"Why ... am I ... a pie?"
"Why ... am I ... a pie?"
After fifteen minutes people didn't even have the energy left to tell him to fuck off. By twenty minutes people were slamdancing to it.
Repetition. It's powerful stuff.
I've always had a soft spot for Quirrell. It's made me blind to a lot of his flaws, so I've tried to actively focus on his evil actions and how much I would hate someone doing that to me. But this latest chapter made me love him all over again. Even though I realize it probably contains huge amounts of misrepresentation if not outright lies.
I'm worried I may be turning Bad.
OTOH, this may just be superb writing, to make the villain so completely relate-able. Either way, every time a chapter goes Quirrell-heavy I swoon. Glad we got one in the current arc so I don't have to wait longer.
I'm worried I may be turning Bad.
You need not trouble yourself. Examining Quirrell's actions has merely made you realize how much you would like to have his power. "Bad" is just a label applied by those too weak to seize that power.
Do not fear the dark side - we have cookies!
Could be both. In any case I think it's a fair assumption that Quirrell is always up to something.
I'm confident that is how Quirrell is meant to appear. But the villain's real face may be a bit of a riddle.
"But I -" Her excellent memory helpfully replayed it for the thousandth time, Draco Malfoy telling her with a sneer that she'd never beat him when he wasn't tired, and then proceeding to prove just that, dancing like a duelist between the warded trophies while she frantically scrambled, and dealing the ending blow with a hex that sent her crashing against the wall and drew blood from her cheek - and then - then she'd -
This seems to suggest that her memories of the duel are a fabrication (or the "Draco" she was fighting was someone else under the influence of polyjuice). Draco has no particular reason to further provoke her and was genuinely unsure whether he could beat her. It doesn't seem obvious why anyone would do that if there was going to be a genuine duel anyway, though. Maybe the the genuine memories were just touched up a bit? Alternatively, why might Draco behave as in that memory when there's no one else around? (the behavior would have made more sense for the second, public duel)
I notice that the only thing we're told about Hermione's appearance in Chapter 78 is that she has bags under her eyes, no mention of a cut on her cheek.
I suggest you reroll.
Thanks, but nah. I'm a healthy white male American with a middle class background and an intelligence greater than one standard deviation above the mean. Slow healing wounds are not enough to reroll in the face of the great risk of a less privileged life.
Harry MUST triumph over Quirrel, and he must do so by being more moral, not more intelligent.
That doesn't sound right. If you're looking for ways Harry could win, why not take Harry's advice and draw up a list of his relative advantages? He does have them - knowledge of superrationality, knowledge of science, ability to empathize with non-psychopaths, to name three - and they're likely to be part of the solution.
I will say this much, Mr. Potter: You are already an Occlumens, and I think you will become a perfect Occlumens before long. Identity does not mean, to such as us, what it means to other people. Anyone we can imagine, we can be; and the true difference about you, Mr. Potter, is that you have an unusually good imagination. A playwright must contain his characters, he must be larger than them in order to enact them within his mind. To an actor or spy or politician, the limit of his own diameter is the limit of who he can pretend to be, the limit of which face he may wear as a mask. But for such as you and I, anyone we can imagine, we can be, in reality and not pretense. While you imagined yourself a child, Mr. Potter, you were a child. Yet there are other existences you could support, larger existences, if you wished. Why are you so free, and so great in your circumference, when other children your age are small and constrained? Why can you imagine and become selves more adult than a mere child of a playwright should be able to compose? That I do not know, and I must not say what I guess. But what you have, Mr. Potter, is freedom.
No one seems to be commenting on the way that dumbledore identified quirrel to the wards. It seemed to me to be a very clear hint that someone else was somehow within that circle and so is also recognised as the defence professor, has top level Hogwarts permissions etc. Possibly Mr hat and cloak?
I wonder how long it'll be till everyone in Hogwarts realizes that the whole recent attempted-murder plot was designed by Quirrel for the sole purpose of having both Slytherin and Ravenclaw win the House Cup at the same time (because when Slytherin and Ravenclaw lose students mid-terms, the school rules are ambiguous about whether the points earned by those students should be counted towards winning the House Cup)
I'm expecting the plot to have also contained as a crucial component a Golden Snitch with a delayed-action memory charm, which will cause the Ministry to overreact by banning Golden Snitches on school grounds, thus fullfilling Harry's wish of Snitch-less Quidditch as well.
I'm only half-joking with the above.
Or if catching the snitch gave you the option of ending the game or of having it re-released after a short random time. That way a seeker of the losing team could still engage in snitch denial other than trying to crash his counterpart into the ground.
Canonically the situation was quite reversed, the Snitch (or rather it's predecessor, the Snidget) having been introduced to the already existing Quidditch game by a noble's quirk. I doubt this is different for MoR.
Harry is totally schizophrenic in MOR though. He's got all of the Founders in his head.
You seem to be working from a unified view of the mind in which there is one single personality with one single voice, and deviations from this structure are pathological. I don't think this is accurate.
Even if it was, it is common for people to hold internal dialogues, and not unusual for patterns to develop where certain kinds of thought are given certain labels. I don't think this says anything special about Harry, except that he has a rich and vibrant inner life.
Also, a Public Service Announcement: "schizophrenia" is an umbrella term for a long list of possible symptoms whose main common feature is disconnection from reality or warped perception of it. You are thinking of Dissociative Identity Disorder (commonly known as Multiple Personality Disorder), which is a completely different thing altogether.
Yay!
"Not this again!" Minerva said. "Albus, it was You-Know-Who, not you, who marked Harry as his equal. There is no possible way that the prophecy could be talking about you!"
The old wizard nodded, but his eyes still seemed distant, fixed only on the road head.
This is another brick in the wall of the Prophecy and Potter massacre being a setup by Dumbledore.
Suddenly has a history of setting up both sides of a conflict
Hmm? We have no good evidence to distinguish between the following two hypotheses:
All we know is Quirrell has let hints drop that he was the hero who disappeared. There is no reason to expect that any of his hints are anything other than deliberate lies. If a competent investigation would discover that Qurrell's not really Qurrell, then the deception absolutely requires a second layer to last the year, so people like Bones can feel satisfied that they've discovered "the truth" about Quirrell without suspecting he's Voldemort. The existence of this second-layer deception now does not provide any evidence that the same deception existed eighteen years earlier.
There is no reason to expect that any of his hints are anything other than deliberate lies.
Quirrell certainly talks about the need to act exactly as the person you're impersonating would act. His speech to Hermione would be no evidence at all if it were delivered by someone who practised what Quirrell preaches.
But that isn't Quirrell. Far from putting up a perfect facade, Quirrell's mask is constantly slipping. He "makes a game of lying with truths, playing with words to conceal his meanings in plain sight." His dialogue is peppered with hints to his identity, his past, and his intentions. Almost everything he says about himself is a clue.
His love of the killing curse and his intent to kill. His childhood ambition to become a Dark Lord. The Muggle dojo. The Pioneer plaque. His intention to crush Rita Skeeter. Repeated use of the word 'Riddle'. His willingness to be identified as having eaten 'death'. His wish for Britain to grow strong under a strong leader. The story of Merope's enslavement of Tom Riddle Sr. His theft of Quirrell's body using incredibly dark magic.
I think you've confused the actual character of Quirrell with the master of deception that he claims to b...
I don't actually go to meetups, but Harry's comments about anti-conformity training made me wonder if it'd be worth trying.
You could retest the original experiment, see if lesswrongians can avoid it through knowledge of the effect.
You could mock obviously true statements to practice withstanding opposition.
You could practice the ability to do harmless but nonconformist things to gain the ability to do so if the situation called for something unusual, but you might otherwise be too conformist or embarassed. (each meeting attendee shall order a coffee whilst wearing the ceremonial tea-cosy!). I suspect some of this overlaps with PUA a little and easily veers into general confidence building.
I don't know if rehearsals would do any good, but you could go through the motions of not complying with the Milgram experiment, making people handle little fake emergencies...
You could wonder if EY is planning things like this for the Center for Modern Rationality.
I don't know if rehearsals would do any good
Really, this is how I feel. I'd be really surprised if a setup like that actually worked. I'm not sure Harry is supposed to actually believe (with any confidence) that it works for Chaos. Ultimately you know and everyone else knows that it's just a charade, and that really your "nonconforming" is just conforming one level below surface: You stand there and take abuse that you know to be insincere, and then get a pat on the back about it later, just like everyone else did on their turn.
Hopefully CMR has a better exercise in mind. A really good anti-Asch training tool seems like a great thing to have.
You could mock obviously true statements to practice withstanding opposition.
The danger with this seems to be that you'll also be developing skills for attacking correct positions. It's training you to develop tactics for entrenching yourself in incorrect beliefs. Also it seems to lend itself to the view of arguments as status conflicts rather than group truth-investigation (though I suppose we do need to at least practice how to handle arguments with people who do perceive them this way).
I disagree. I think it would have a very good chance to work.
To a perfect Bayesian, the importance of an act is not what it looks like on the surface, but the state of the world that makes such an act possible. Unfortunately (or fortunately in this case), human minds are not perfectly Bayesian.
To the human mind, merely resembling another thing is enough for the mind to form connections and associations between the two. This is why public speaking courses can improve people's abilities and lessen their fears of public speech. Even though people know they're just speaking in front of a class who is obligated to receive the speech well, their mind naturally reduces the anxiety they feel for any future speaking engagements. The mind says "eh, it's close enough. I can do this," just like how anti-conformity training should fool the mind into considering it 'close enough' to real disagreement. Speech classes don't not work perfectly, just like chaos training (I assume) doesn't work perfectly, but it's pretty good.
Anti-conformity training seems practically identical to a proven training method, and thus I rate it highly likely to work.
Well, I guess it's just an empirical question where we differ in predictions. Personally I don't think the analogy with public speaking is very strong, because public speaking classes are actually public speaking. People stand up and speak in front of lots of people, that's just what it is.
Upon reflection though, it does seem like there's one way that it might help, which is that it might help you figure out how to go about non-conformity, what exactly you can do or say in such a situation. So even if your mind doesn't buy into the charade, roleplaying with good partners might help you figure out ways to navigate a non-conformity situation. Having those methods worked out in advance might make you less hesitant to speak out in real world situations, but only to the extent that your hesitation is about not knowing what exactly to say or do (as opposed to fear of social punishment, the usual explanation for Asch's results).
What I've always wondered about with Asch's experiment is how much of a difference a small monetary incentive (say, $1 per correct answer) would make. It seems like the experiment is odd in that there is no incentive to give correct answers, but at least a potential or perceived social incentive to give conforming ones. This seems like it would be relevant to our disagreement because it's a question of whether the situation becomes different when something is actually on the line. Unfortunately I can't seem to google up any examples of variations like this.
I think that if you've got a deeply habitual inhibition against firmly disagreeing with people, even a known-to-be-simulated experience of breaking the inhibition can help quite a bit.
Based on my own experiences being a lone dissenter, the main thing that has allowed me to stand up and maintain my position consistently in the face of uniform opposition and derision, was not expecting much of everyone else in the first place.
For example, in an introductory logic course, when the professor made a mistake, which everyone else in the class agreed with, and I was the sole person to disagree, and attempt to explain it in the face of the entire class brushing me off and laughing about how I thought I knew better when the answer was so obvious to everyone else, it didn't seem weird to me at all that every other person would make the same mistake and I would be the only one to notice it. It wasn't confusing to me, and my success in showing the professor in a couple minutes after class that she had been mistaken after all confirmed for me that my expectations were on track.
Conforming to the beliefs of the crowd is perfectly sensible behavior, in domains where you have no reason to expect yourself to be more accurate than anyone else. Learning to disregard conforming instincts completely is a bad idea, because a lot of the time, it really will be everyone else who's right,...
Given that places can be made unplottable, I'd guess identities can be made unknowable. Uncertainty in potterverse can be a quality of the thing itself...
Harry nodded. " At least nobody's going to try hexing you, not after what the Headmaster said at dinner tonight. Oh, and Ron Weasley came up to me, looking very serious, and told me that if I saw you first, I should tell you that he's sorry for having thought badly of you, and he'll never speak ill of you again."
"Ron believes I'm innocent?" said Hermione.
"Well... he doesn't think you're innocent, per se..."
Ron approves of trying to murder Draco Malfoy?
Ron approves of trying to murder Draco Malfoy?
I'm pretty sure even canon Ron would at least say he approves of killing Draco.
Why wasn't one of the first things Harry did when returning from the trial exposing Hermione to the light of the True Patronus while she was still unconscious (it looks like it didn't happen at least)? He already knows it restores recent Dementor damage, has a plausible reason to know in that he experienced it himself under Dumbledore's eyes and could have told Dumbledore to secure his cooperation. Is his anger at Dumbledore getting in the way?
Since I don't anticipate getting a chance to point it out inside the fic itself, and the hint is unreasonably subtle:
When Hermione woke the third time (though it felt like she'd only closed her eyes for a moment) the Sun was even lower in the sky, almost fully set. She felt a little more alive and, strangely, even more exhausted. This time it was Professor Flitwick who was standing next to her bed and shaking her shoulder, a tray of steaming food floating next to him. For some reason she'd thought Harry Potter ought to be leaning over her bedside, but he wasn't there. Had she dreamed that? She couldn't remember dreaming.
Harry didn't think of it instantly, but given a little time...
This chapter significantly increased my probability estimate that Quirrell was entirely behind the plot to > 90%. Also, the humming torture was awesome, but not helping his case.
Also, who the hell was Bones' story referring to? That whole section heavily confused me.
The humming torture sounds similar to Vetinari's clock, only taken to the next level. I liked it too.
EDIT: Now that I think about it, the memetic attack is also similar to "The Book" in Anathem, though the delivery vector is different.
Same. The part about disappearing in Albania is from canon-Quirrell's backstory - that's where he ran into Voldemort's wandering ghost, so it's interesting that in MoR he supposedly went there before the war. The rest of the background recounted by Bones and by Quirrell himself don't really ring a bell with me, the closest thing I can think of is him needing "reconciliation" with the Lady of the House being reminiscent of Sirius Black and his spat with his family, but Sirius already exists in MoR and had a different history.
It might be possible that in MoR the house of Gaunt (the one canon!Voldemort is from) did not fall into poverty and retained their household and Wizengamot influence? If the general 'powering up' of characters can go that far back it would be plausible. And now that I think of it, Quirrell initiated talk about witch-on-Muggle magical seduction during the SPHEW arc, which could suggest that that part of his family background was carried over from canon.
(One of the things that annoy me about HPMoR is that when I can't quickly figure out what a certain passage might be hinting to, I have to assign a frustratingly high probability to the event that it's simply a reference/homage/in-joke to one of the myriad HP fanfictions.)
How many instances can y'all remember where Eliezer has repeated himself in an oddly specific way?
Chapter 17, when Harry picks up Neville's Remembrall: "The Remembrall was glowing bright red in his hand, blazing like a miniature sun that cast shadows on the ground in broad daylight."
Chapter 43, when Harry has a Dementor-induced flashback of the night... something happened in Godric's Hollow: "And the boy in the crib saw it, the eyes, those two crimson eyes, seeming to glow bright red, to blaze like miniature suns, filling Harry's whole vision as they locked to his own -"
That really sets off my deliberate-hint senses - so much is repeated that it's got to be intentional. (My apologies if this was already discussed to death in the considerable time since #43 was posted.)
Likewise the basilisk, which I know was discussed at some point:
Chapter 35, H&C speaking: "Salazar Slytherin would have keyed his monster into the ancient wards at a higher level than the Headmaster himself."
Chapter 49, the Defense Professor speaking: "or by some entity which Salazar Slytherin keyed into his wards at a higher level than the Headmaster himself."
I'm sure I could find more if I put my mind to it, but that's all I've got for now.
Regardless of them getting explicitely identified to the wards, so it must get its names independently.
If it must, then Dumbledore overrode it.
He did so specifically to prevent himself from learning the Defense Professor's identity, because that was the term stipulated by Quirrell.
Those lines were specifically included to keep the story from prematurely reaching its climax as soon as Quirrell returns to Hogwarts. I think you will enjoy stories more if you accept that sometimes things happen for story reasons.
Wizarding police have to allow for the fact that some possible prisoners (Dumbledore, Grindelwald, Voldemort) are capable of beating up the whole police department put together. When someone displays surprising power, it makes sense to back off, at least until you're sure you can take him.
Yeah, MoR has a much more well-thought-through concept of what it means to be a powerful wizard, and the difference between that and a normal wizard.
And even in canon, I'm not sure it makes sense for them to be surprised he could escape- everyone thinks of Dumbledore as the most powerful wizard alive- but they could have conceivably been expecting him not to attempt to resist arrest, because he's generally more law-abiding than that.
Two things: one, that first downvote was mine, not ArisKatsaris's. It's still there, someone else just upvoted you.
Two: Quirrell's not stupid. He went through that whole Groundhog Day Attack rigmarole to avoid leaving detectable Legilimency traces; he would be a fool to try it now, after Dumbledore's specifically warded her against "hostile magic [...], or any spirit".
Alternatively, the Arresto Momentum spell is quite instantly deadly if you use the right frame of reference.
Presumably, you'd need some kind of conceptual shift like with partial Transfiguration before you could do this. It seems like an implicit rule of Potterverse magic that it works according to the laws of physics you instinctively expect (or perhaps the ones the designer expected), so you have to "jailbreak" the spell before it can work in an updated, relativistic model.
I'm not sure canon Ron was good in the sense of regarding slytherins as people. Harry potter has a rather jolly tendency to rank getting people into detention on a simular scale to getting thwm savaged by a hippogriff, particularly in the early books.
I recall that when Harry discovers curses of unknown effect in the Half-Blood Prince's book, the first thing he does is go and try them out on Slytherins to see what they do. In fact, Eliezer references this.
An interpretation of the revelations of Chapter 84 that is almost surely wrong, but was first to rise to my attention:
Quirrell's description of the War to Hermione was an honest description of the conflict between Voldemort and Dumbledore from Voldemort's point of view. Voldemort, like Draco's father and his friends, thought Dumbledore was an evil wizard who needed to be stopped at all cost. But even as people shored up support for Dumbledore, they reviled Voldemort.
And Dumbledore has realized he was the bad guy. When he says:
There is evil in this world which knows itself for evil, and hates the good with all its strength. All fair things does it desire to destroy.
he's referring to the darkness he saw in himself, when he began to "resent Harry's innocence", and looking back on the way he's lived his life.
As I said, this interpretation is almost certainly not true; Amelia was clearly talking about someone the public would think of as a hero, so didn't mean Voldemort (and it's not supposed to be Tom Riddle's story).
“People aren't either wicked or noble. They're like chef's salads, with good things and bad things chopped and mixed together in a vinaigrette of confusion and conflict.” -- The Grim Grotto
I thought this bit was interesting:
And felt a distant, hollow echo of emptiness radiating from where Death waited, washing over Harry's mind and parting around it, like a wave breaking on stone. Harry knew his enemy this time, and his will was steel and all of the light.
"I can already feel the Dementors," said the gravelly voice of the Polyjuiced Quirrell. "I did not expect that, not this soon."
"Think of the stars," Harry said, over a distant rumble of thunder. "Don't allow any anger in you, nothing negative, just think of the stars, what it feels like to forget yourself and fall bodilessly through space. Hold to that thought like an Occlumency barrier across your entire mind. The Dementors will have some trouble reaching past that."
There was silence for a moment, then, "Interesting."
I'm wondering if EY is going to come through on this whole "Dumbledore is the Dark Lord and Quirrelmort was in the right all along" approach that he has hinted at recently. There's a precedent here which raises my probability estimate of this slightly, [rot13 for spoilers from another EY story] va uvf fgbel "Gur Fjbeq bs Tbbq" gur gjvfg jnf gung gur ureb'f pubvpr orgjrra tbbq naq rivy jnfa'g n pubvpr bs juvpu bar gb sbyybj (gung jbhyq or boivbhf, pyrneyl) vg jnf gur zhpu uneqre pubvpr bs juvpu jnf juvpu. Gur "tbbq thlf" ghearq bhg gb or rivy naq gur "onq thlf" ghearq bhg gb or tbbq.
So from recent chapters it seems like we're supposed to at least be considering the possibility of that Quirrelmort has been playing some colossal super-villain gambit this whole time in order to set up the rise of Light Lord Harry and defeat death once and for all, and that the Dark Lord prophesied to oppose all this is Dumbledore, who has marked Harry for his equal by nominating him as the future leader of the people he mistakenly believes to be The Good Guys and who wants us all to embrace death when it comes.
This concerns me a little bit, not because I do...
It was labeled as made by them, which isn’t necessarily reliable information, considering the incantation you use to activate it. And at one point it’s shown to locate and identify people under the True Cloak of Invisibility, which seems like powerful magic. (It could also be “made” in the sense that they found some sort of magical ingredient or component, ancient and much more powerful than they could make, which the integrated into the map, or even just that they customized an existing map with their silly “access code”.)
And in MoR, Dumbledore himself needed to use the map. Which suggests it was much more powerful than what four of his students could have made.
Eliezer has retracted that comment, and has stated that such retractions should be spoilered as they are no longer common knowledge.
We can't force you to ROT13 your original comment as well as this one, but you're not being fair to the spirit of the fanfiction and you should expect to take a karma hit if you don't.
The rot13 policy indicates your third sentence should be in cipher, in case you weren't aware.
A question not on the latest chapter but ch4:
McGonagall shook her head. "Your father was the last heir of an old family, Mr. Potter. It's also possible..." McGonagall hesitated. "Some of this money may be from bounties that had been placed on You-Know-Who, payable to his ki-" McGonagall swallowed the word. "To whoever might defeat him. Or those bounties might not have been collected yet. I'm not sure."
Did we ever find out whether the bounties were collected? I was wondering whether 40k Galleons was a reasonable sum for last heir of ancient family + entire wizarding world's bounties on Voldemort, but I can't remember the question ever being answered in the first place.
No fractional-reserve banking does not imply this - there could be lenders (whether goblins or wizards) with a large supply of their own gold which they use to make loans. Or landowners could sell property with a "rent to own" payment plan. Fractional-reserve banking is only necessary if you want to lend someone else's gold.
But at least I know now what true evil would say for itself, if we could speak to it and ask why it was evil. It would say, Why not?"
A brief flare of indignation inside her. "There's got to be a million reasons why not!"
"Indeed," said Dumbledore's voice. "A million reasons and more. We will always know those reasons, you and I.
Anyone care to name three?
People like you worry me.
I identify as 'evil' when it's safe to do so, because it's apt. I worry about people who think they're not evil but act evil when they think no one could ever know, or who think they're outright good but may one day be faced with a traumatically delivered realization of the fiction that is the ordered, punishment-delivering universe their parents conditioned them to act as though they believed in, or who surrender their judgement of right and wrong to the mob.
Those sorts of people tend to not be very good at being good, and to be even worse at being bad. They can't be depended on to either follow a system of laws or their own self-interest to the best of their ability. They are difficult to model and surprisingly volatile.
Of course, my problem with this might be my fault. I'm not sayin'; I'm just sayin'.
Anyone care to name three?
There are many parts of Eliezer that are casting votes for good and against evil, for quite widely separated reasons ranging from the silly to the extremely approvable, and once I realized that instead of thinking that there had to be "the" reason, I understood myself a lot better.
But not a million reasons, though. Hermione is severely exaggerating.
1) In most situations, it is not the most efficient means to an end (interestingly, in Voldemort's case, it may have come close).
2) A reputation for defection in PD-like situations means nobody will ally with you. Unless you are in an undisputed leadership position, this is a very bad thing.
3) People are likely to try to kill you.
FYI, in the tuning system commonly used for western music, all notes except A are irrational frequencies in hertz. Example: A below middle C is 220 hertz, and middle C is
(220 * (2 ^ (1/12)) ^ 3) hertz ~= 261.6255653006 hertz.
(To go up a half step, you multiply the frequency by the 12th root of 2.)
then EY would be conceding that morality is a weakness, or at the very least that strength and strength alone will determine which AI will win.
I'm pretty sure that he does believe that if an AI goes FOOM, it's going to win, period, moral or no. The idea that an AI would not simply be more preferable, but actually win over another AI on account of being more moral strikes me as, well, rather silly, and not at all in accordance with what I think Eliezer actually believes.
We downvote bad jokes now?
As one of the downvoters, haven't we always downvoted bad jokes?
This was a bad joke, not in the sense of inappropriateness (a similar but better joke at http://lesswrong.com/lw/ams/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/61ew was heavily upvoted), but in the sense of being strained, weak, and largely unfunny.
Please stop talking about your karma. I am tired of seeing these huge long threads arguing with you about your karma and whether lesswrong has groupthink and whether other people are being rude or disingenuous or whatever. You have singlehandedly lowered the quality of my experience reading LW this past week, and I am earnestly requesting that you stop it.
Can you explain what part of the comments by ArisKatsaris that you found disingenuous? I'm not seeing it at all.
the instant she decides he's responsible he echoes her thought
No, he echoes her thought the instant she physically reacts to move away from him. NOT the "instant she decides". Keep the facts straight, please.
We've already been told that common sense is often mistaken for Legimancy. This event doesn't require reading her mind, it just requires reading her body language.
..., and her eyes start burning (maybe she's not blinking or something, or EY is adding that as a side effect of legimancy, or it's just to draw our attention to the eye contact
Can somebody explain to me why Harry was so into House points before Azkaban recalibrated his sense of perspective? It makes sense why most people seek them; you take several dozen kids, split them up into different groups, and soon enough you hear them talking about how they can't let those Gryffindor jerkasses win the House Cup and so on. But it seems to me like you need to identify with your House to an unhealthy degree to take so much pleasure in earning points for it. Hermione obviously has that problem (cf. her speech about House Ravenclaw in ch. 34)...
Dumbledore explicitly warded her against mental interference as soon as he got her back - Which is presumably why Quirrell didnt use the groundhog day attack again. He only got one try to sway her this time, and while his mental model was more accurate based on the data from the last go.. nope, fail.
The edit to 53 recently mentioned seems to be here:
"Your wand," murmured Bellatrix, "I took it from the Potters' house and hid it, my lord... under the tombstone to the right of your father's grave... will you kill me, now, if that was all you wished of me... I think I must have always wanted you to be the one to kill me... but I can't remember now, it must have been a happy thought..."
As of last week Eliezer didn't have any plans to include an allegory to FAI, and expected any such allegory to work very badly in story terms ("suck like a black hole").
If you'll all forgive me a few moments of horrible nerdiness, and the attendant fictional evidence, I've said before that MoR's construction of heroic effort makes a good deal more sense once you've played Fate/stay night. This chapter certainly hasn't given me any reason to doubt that, but after Quirrell's speech with Hermione I think I might need to add watching Revolutionary Girl Utena as another prerequisite. The early parts of that exchange could have been lifted wholesale from Utena's princes and witches, and the world's expectations of them.
You would need to always have a shield up.
Yes... this is a fact of combat. Not sure why you said this.
For example?
"Accio frontal lobe."
Or "Imperio, kill yourself."
Or for that matter "Obliviate."
Edit: Actually, I'm pretty sure Somnium is invisible. It doesn't kill immediately, of course, but that's easily rectified.
When I awoke, I had lost half my karma and I was ready to fight about it.
[...] and I am sure as hell not going to change what I wrote now, rules or no rules.
Too bad, agreeing to follow the rules of the thread, even if that means editing/rot13ing past comments, would have been the easiest way to get your karma back.
Edited to add: Some Quirrel-type lesson about learning when to lose, and the costs of needless escalation, seems appropriate.
My comment from fanfic.net:
I loved the chapter- there was nothing wrong with the previous two, but this the mixed bag of very good stuff pointing in multiple directions that I hadn't realized I was missing. I'm talking about psychological/philosophical/emotional material more than the potential plot twists.
I've suddenly realized that this is a chapter in which almost nothing happens in terms of physical action- it's all talk and thought and emotion (and a bit of humming), and it's incredibly engrossing.
Is Hermione's inability to think that she might have b...
Is Hermione's inability to think that she might have been bespelled part of the spell, or normal psychological reaction? Would fake memories have the same kind and amount of detail as real memories?
I would hypothesise that, to an ordinary person who has not learned about the fallibility of memory in general, the idea that something that feels like a completely real memory would be false is a very challenging one. Thinking "have I been memory-charmed?" is like thinking "I could be wrong about absolutely anything I remember" for the first time. It would be very difficult, and exactly the kind of thought one flinches away from.
From personal experience, I remember recalling a very emotionally charged MSN conversation months later, and thinking about an agreement I'd made with someone in it. But searching through the logs (and I logged everything), I could find no mention of any such agreement ever. It was pretty traumatic to discover that my memory was so fallible on something so important, and I'm not sure I could have accepted it without such firm evidence.
In regard to detail, I'm not sure people ever go through their memories and say "huh, this memory lacks detail so something must be off". Unless some key feature is missing (say, Hermione being unable to recall the words of the curse she used), I imagine any given detail's absence could be easily rationalised.
Harry saying that the first year girls should put their reputations on the line about Hermione is so perfectly Harry...
I'm pretty sure he was inviting everyone in Ravenclaw.
Actually, maybe this is the glitch in the Marauder's Map? 'the Defense Professor' is a little unusual a tag opposed to 'Minerva McGonagall' or ordinary names. (Although yes, it could also be reading 'Tom Riddle' or whatever, and Dumbledore wouldn't notice because IIRC he only grabs the Map from the twins to check for Riddle in Hogwarts after Quirrel goes to the Ministry.)
Also, I'm slightly confused at how he's being portrayed in this chapter.
I'm not. It's easy enough to say that "character X is Y", but what does that mean ? The motivations of character Y in HP:MoR are very different from what they are in canon. Merely knowing the label "Y" tells you very little; the greater mystery is not what label we should apply to X, but what his goals are, and what actions he has already taken, or is planning to take, and what his overall grand design looks like. Everything we observe the character saying or doing is evidence that can help us expose this design. His canon counterpart's actions in the original HP books, on the other hand, are not.
He acts as different people in Azkaban, as Hat and Cloak (and/or Ghost Lady). He has a different face to every person he interacts with, from Snape to Harry to the public at the ceremony, and in this chapter presenting an entirely new, almost caring face to Hermione.
and in this chapter presenting an entirely new, almost caring face to Hermione.
Which makes perfect sense, since, via his dictionary attack (that took place in earlier chapters), he'd already learned that this is the easiest way to manipulate her.
IIRC, neither Quirrell nor Dumbledore have pre-cast shields in TSPE, which (IIRC) is the only piece of serious action by competent people in MoR.
Funny thing about the combat in TSPE, we get this little digression:
...The Auror was protected by a blue shimmer, it was hard to see the details but Harry could see that much, the Auror had shields already raised and strengthened.
Crap, thought Harry. According to the Defense Professor, the essential art of dueling consisted of trying to put up defenses that would block whatever someone was likely to throw at you
I wonder if Quirrel simply had a bad model when he tried to play the hero:
"I was not naive, Miss Granger, I did not expect the power-holders to align themselves with me so quickly - not without something in it for themselves. But their power, too, was threatened; and so I was shocked how they seemed content to step back, and leave to that man all burdens of responsibility. They sneered at his performance, remarking among themselves how they would do better in his place, though they did not condescend to step forward." (84)
The theory about Qu...
Hm, so to rewrite the ending...
There were a certain few of the Wizengamot who wondered why Voldemort's lieutenant had made a attempt on the life of the Minister's daughter rather than the Minister, done so publicly rather than privately, and why a recluse was there that day. They had already marked the Miracle of Diagon Alley as an anomalous and important event; they have wondered why it happened, if it did, or if not, why Voldemort is colluding in the praise.
Look. It's very simple. The only response necessary is a gesture toward the main post:
...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
So, it seems more likely that Quirrel was behind the plot.
The thing about there only being seven houses seems big, though, and as far I can tell isn't from canon. (The list of purebloods, for example, doesn't include Jugson, though 500 years old might not be enough to be Most Ancient. I think we have HPMOR confirmation of Malfoy, Potter, Greengrass, and Longbottom, and I think in canon the only ones that get that description are Malfoy, Black, and maybe Potter (really, Peverell).
The 1926 hint narrows it down to four canon characters (though, of course, Bon...
We know Dumbledore thinks Tom Riddle was Voldemort, because when he's looking for Voldemort within Hogwarts he tells the map to find Tom Riddle.
Tom Riddle wasn't a hero. He was a villain whose villainous plot was to create a fake villain named Voldemort for him to defeat. He arranged for there to be a kidnapping attempt on the daughter of the minister of magic so that he could save her and be propelled into herodom. But things did not go according to plan:
..."Long ago, long before your time or Harry Potter's, there was a man who was hailed as a savior. The destined scion, such a one as anyone would recognize from tales, wielding justice and vengeance like twin wands against his dreadful nemesis." Professor Quirrell gave a soft, bitter laugh, looking up at the night sky. "Do you know, Miss Granger, at that time I thought myself already cynical, and yet... well."
The silence stretched, in the cold and the night.
"In all honesty," said Professor Quirrell, looking up at the stars, "I still don't understand it. They should have known that their lives depended on that man's success. And yet it was as if they tried to do everything they could to make his life unpleasant. To throw every possible obstacle into his way. I was not naive, Miss Granger, I did not expect the power-holders to align themsel
I evaluated your arguments, I precisely showed how you were wrong in one case (his words didn't exactly echo her thought), how her eyes burning can't be treated as evidence of Legimancy if burning eyes are never correlated with Legimancy.
At this point the only specific argument you got left that I didn't address was that Quirrel is mentioned staring at her. So here, let me address that one as well: In chapter 70 (one of the Self Actualization chapters) Quirrel is again mentioned to be looking at her:
...Then Professor Quirrell’s gaze shifted away from Trace
Hostile magic is obviously not the same as Legilmancy
It's also not the same as the sort of LifeAlert wards Quirrell (claims that he) put on Draco, which we know (that Quirrell claimed that) Heh specifically forbade.
Why would Dumbledore care and what would Dumbledore do differently if Dumbledore found out that Quirrell had looked into Hermione's mind?
Well, for one thing, he might look at the Map again. (He suspects Voldemort is trying to influence Hermione's mind; the Defence Prof is caught trying to read Hermione's mind; it doesn't take a genius.)
...
I think you're confused about the meaning of Sword of Good.
No, Argency summarized it well. It isn't a treatise on moral relativism.
Hm. If we were using physics here, I'd observe that a usable time turner has to be tied into things like the rotation and movement of the earth, because traveling back in time without taking those things into account somehow leaves one stranded in interplanetary or interstellar space. Given that we're talking magic, well, who knows. But sure, I agree that it's suggestive but inconclusive.
The dark side is ridiculously afraid of death, which we know to be a Voldemort trait. It's also very much separate from Harry.
I don't think he really believes in magic... he just points out that belief is not necessary since it can be tested:
"Then you don't have to fight over this," Harry said firmly. Hoping against hope that this time, just this once, they would listen to him. "If it's true, we can just get a Hogwarts professor here and see the magic for ourselves, and Dad will admit that it's true. And if not, then Mum will admit that it's false. That's what the experimental method is for, so that we don't have to resolve things just by arguing."
Although...
In canon, Snape was able to shut down everything Harry tried against him in combat in the sixth book, because as long as Harry hadn't mastered occlumency or silent spellcasting, his attacks were all sufficiently telegraphed that a superior duelist and leglimens like Snape could simply counter them all before he could fire them off.
You should probably cipher a bit of that. This part, specifically:
jub Dhvevahf Dhveeryy npghnyyl vf
I mean, unless you intend specifically to not follow a rule while criticizing the rule. You might notice that seems to attract disapproval.
I also really doubt that any police force would let a prisoner resist them that way again and again, they would call reinforcement and break him.
It happens they did not. We know that, because he isn't broken and there's no sign they tried, other than the mention that he has apparently sneezed more than once. Also, he's not under arrest.
The Defense Professor of Hogwarts was being detained, not arrested, not even intimidated.
Magical Britain has a history of exceedingly powerful individuals that the muggle world just doesn't. It is not unreasonable that law enforcement developed differently as a result.
“There is no good and evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it."
-Lord Voldemort
In Methods of Rationality, the Weasley twins refer to the Map as being part of the Hogwarts security system. So it probably gets the information from the wards.
My interpretation of the quote is that the Headmaster overrode the usual process of identification (which is automatic) in order to protect Quirrell's privacy; in that case, the Map would also know nothing beyond "The Defense Professor".
An alternative interpretation, however, is that the circle-drawing bit was only meant to key Quirrell into the wards as a professor. Normally, I suppose, ...
Here's a vote for not-mind-reading. This seems deliberately written to suggest Quirrell's reacting to body language, not thought:
Without any conscious decision, she shifted her weight to the other foot, her body moving away from the Defense Professor -
"So you think I am the one responsible?" said Professor Quirrell.
How likely is it that the outcome of the Defense Professor's talk with Hermione was genuinely not what he wanted? Surely he has to have realized by now that Hermione is the sort of person who'd act like that, however incomprehensible it may be to him. I am reminded of the passage in the LotR omake that reads:
"If the Enemy thought that all his foes were moved by desire for power alone - he would guess wrongly, over and over, and the Maker of this Ring would see that, he would know that somewhere he had made a mistake!"
Maybe he truly doesn't un...
Hermione came very very close to agreeing with the Defense Professor, and we see him using all the ways and mannerisms which cause her to trust him a little bit more -- not to 'acquire extra suspicion'.
So, no, I think Quirrel made a very very good attempt at what he wanted -- getting Hermione away. He simply failed.
Why did he not let Harry - whom IIRC we previously saw saying that Hermione ought to be sent to Beauxbatons - beg Hermione to leave, or failing that, order her?
"Why did he not let"? I don't see any place where Quirrel isn't "letting" Harry do these things. Perhaps your question should be better phrased why he didn't ask Harry to do these things?
I think a simple enough answer is that he feels he has a better chance of convincing Hermione to leave, than to convince Harry to force Hermione to leave against her will. Since Bellatrix, Harry has learned to inquire about what is in it for Quirrel when Quirrel asks him to do things. And he'll see that wanting Hermione to leave may be to the advantage of whomever wanted to frame her in the first place, as both events lead to a Hogwarts without Hermione in it.
Is this all reverse-psychology?
I don't understand your usage of the term. It's me who's saying he wanted her to leave (aka non-reverse psychology), it's LKtheGreat and you who seem to be saying he was applying reverse-psychology and that he really wanted her to stay.
...Why did he make the blatantly manipulative hard-sell tactic of 'buy now, this is a limited-t
We cannot privilige the human experience, and therefore the length of the earth day cannot be a physical constant.
The length of an earth day is part of all Earth life experience, not uniquely human.
This attempted murder was well-planned to evade detection both by the wards of Hogwarts and the Headmaster's timely eye.
Quirrell sure loves his stealth puns. Is there any reason he is not openly telling Hermione about Dumbledore's time turner?
The Defense Professor turned his head down from the sky to regard her; and she saw, in the light of the doorway, that he was smiling - or at least half his face was smiling.
Is Quirrell's half-smile a reference to Robin Hanson's picture?
The dark side isn't even a personality, as such, which implies strongly that it's not a soul.
I was originally going to put a quote here, but it turned out to be pretty much half the chapter, so... Chapter 56. In particular, when you read
a blind terrified thing that only wanted to find a dark corner and hide and not have to think about it any more - [...]
Visualizing himself cradling his dark side like a frightened child in his arms.
Think back to Deathly Hallows, Chapter 36: King's Cross, specifically the bit
...He was the only person there, except for
Clearly
Not so, good sir. Do you call me a liar? I would challenge you on the field of honor, had I any.
For what it's worth, I hadn't read the Rowling books when I first read MoR, and finding out who Quirrell was was actually somewhat of a shock. I'm the target audience for this rule, so far as any such exists, and I think it's pretty dumb.
Is anyone logging anecdotes? We've got one here!
I wouldn't just slap it on as a chapter title if I was the editor, but if you're reading this forum thread, certain things are assumed of you.
Okay. That's coo...
He said "responding to unmarked edit" as though there was something wrong with failing to mark a simple addition made 10 seconds after the original post. I was confused, since it was not my experience that anyone considered this a problem anywhere.
That said, even the sort of people who go to such events probably have some limits.
Yes. It sounds like it takes them twenty minutes to start making the best of things.
I hadn't realized that Eliezer retracted the statement or that I was I was violating the rules.
In general, when someone says something is a spoiler and should be put in ROT13, the polite thing to do is to comply. You can then argue that it shouldn't be necessary, after the damage control is done.
If you're failing to do that, then the only recourse the rest of us have is to downvote the comment several times so that it is by default hidden from view. I will generally check back in a day to see if the spoiler has been ROT13'd, and reverse my downvote if...
Are you suggesting there's some rule about what a post 'deserves' in terms of votes?
The actual mechanic is that scores or hundreds of individuals read each post. If they like it, they hit upvote. If they don't like it, they hit downvote. Some voters may think "this has enough upvotes already" and not upvote even though they like a post. Some voters may think "this has enough downvotes to collapse and I only get a limited number of downvotes myself so I'll save them for things other people aren't downvoting." But in the end it is mo...
It was like a glass of warm water thrown into her face.
What exactly is this supposed to evoke?
The prophecy (at least canon - I remember MOR having a slightly different one, but cannot find it offhand) could point to two identities of Tom Riddle. The hero and the villain. Neither can (truly) live while the other survives.
That part could still fit. Certainly Voldemort and Noble Hero cannot (simultaneously) exist in the same world.
For more than six hours a day.
Not that Rowling did impeccable world-building, but is it possible to put together a plausible history of muggle influences on wizarding culture?
Jesus in Potterverse, as a wizard who experimented with turning squib-disciples into wizards so he could eventually do the same with all muggles and be their king. His blood in wine-potions and flesh in bread-potions only gave the recipients as much magic as went into creating those body parts, allowing the occasional "miracle".
Decades after this story, Draco and his Science Eaters isolate and replicate the magic genes and start making potions that turn muggles and squibs into wizards (but also marks them in a way they can't see, for ... research, and to give them extra power), and use their huge army of new wizards and noble and blood purist allies everywhere to conquer the world. Hermione leads a resistance force of the best trained wizards alive to stop them. Harry discovers that Draco's mark sets in too soon before the transformation to wizard is complete, becoming fatal within a few years in ~90% of cases, which Draco considers an acceptable risk to become a wizard. And that it bends their will to Draco's. So Harry, the elite Bayesian Conspiracy, and the Chaos Legion, formed from anyone/anything else that would fight, fight to remove the mark, stop Hermione's people...
Eliezer also has magical pop-top soda cans. I think he's just keeping it as random and nonsensical as canon, which to me accurately maps the way cultures bleed into one another.
Doesn't seem worse to me than dissecting mice as it was done in biology lessons at school not so long ago here. Well, for the vanishing charms of mice at least. For the kitten it sounds more scary to us who have cats as pets, but the "this is a pet that you can't kill"/"this is a farm animal that you can eat" categorization is very depend of culture.
But I imagine those would be already-dead mice? You wouldn't have to kill them yourself?
Until very recently, vivisection was also a staple of biology classes.
You could cut open a frog while it was still alive and watch its heart stop beating as it wished for the faculties necessary to cry for mercy.
Ron was not a target of interest. Hat and Cloak wanted both Hermione and Draco out of the picture.
It's from Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Havelock_Vetinari
Lord Vetinari also has a strange clock in his waiting-room. While it does keep completely accurate time overall, it sometimes ticks and tocks out of sync (example: "tick, tock... ticktocktick, tock...") and occasionally misses a tick or tock altogether, which has the net effect of turning one's brain "into a sort of porridge". (Feet of Clay, Going Postal).
A problem with Quirrell's heroic alter ego being Tom Riddle, even if the only ones who know Tom Riddle is Voldemort are the inner circle of the Order of the Phoenix, is, why wouldn't madam Bones tell Dumbledore that Tom Riddle is currently inhabiting Quirrell's body?
Quirrell said that he "reported to the headmaster" by which I interpret Dumbledore wants to know in what ways the defense professor was involved in this whole debacle, from which we can infer that he will have or has had Bones report to him as well. The fact that a war hero that was a...
1926 is the date Amelia Bones gives for what she suspects to be Quirrell's true identity. It is also the date of Tom Marvolo Riddle's birth in canon. This and other details suggest that Bones believes Quirrell is Riddle. But for that to be true, it must be that during Voldemort's first campaign, Riddle was still appearing as Riddle until, apparently, 1973
Bones must not know Riddle is Voldemort, or she would be behaving very differently towards Dumbledore. Dumbledore, on the other hand, appears to believe Riddle is Voldemort, because just a few chapters ago...
The Author's Note you refer to has since been retracted. You're ruining the twist for the people who haven't figured it out yet. As are all those other people, yes.
You've completely conceded that your initial argument was total crap.
No, I haven't.
Now you're making a completely different argument.
Since you then made a completely separate and different error, of course I'll make a completely different argument against that completely separate and different error.
and your initial argument was wrong
I've not made a wrong argument against any of your positions.
...My imprecision led to no flawed conclusions. And you just stole that argument from pedanterrific, you didn't even think of it yourself, that's patheti
This is the first legitimate counterargument that's been made and we're seven layers in, that should tell everyone something.
It tells me that you see far fewer counterarguments as "legitimate" than you should.
I think textual clues outweigh extratextual extrapolation, too. The fact that the eye contact was specifically mentioned seems important, it was probably mentioned for a reason.
As I mention in a comment above, Quirrel's intent gaze is also mentioned in ch. 70, in a situation where we're pretty sure no Legimancy occurred.
...Even if I wa
and the negative karma you gave
I didn't downvote you - please don't assume that a criticism is always accompanied by a downvote.
That she stepped away from Quirrell in no way mandates that she's distrusting Quirrell, it could be many other things.
Quirrell is an idiot if he jumped to the conclusion that she thought he was responsible just because she stepped away from him, that conclusion only makes sense in the context of the information in Hermione's mind.
When her first reaction to his sight was "Are you here to kill me?"
...But here's the thing - his portrayal has pretty much no redeeming features. He's not even "nice unless you get in the way of his ambitions", he's just low-grade nasty all the time, except when he's being blatantly patronising. Whatever the big picture view of his personality, at any given time he is either 100% unpleasant or actually redeemed.
I think that goes for most of the other characters as well. They aren't portrayed as, say, positive 10% of the time and negative 90% of the time - instead, every single thing they do conforms to the same moral level. Someone like Lockhart couldn't pet a kitten without it being a PR move (or possibly without accidentally hurting it to demonstrate his incompetence).
It depends on a few assumptions:
there will be a Singularity, the human race will survive and greatly expand through the universe;
some of those future humans will be interested in history;
LessWrong site and HP:MoR will be among the important historical artifacts, and their contents will be preserved.
Of course each of these assumptions is open to discussion, but if you give non-zero probability to each of them, the inevitable logical conclusion follows.
(Also, I am joking.)
Well it's been five days now so as a newly minted ex-tobacco smoker: There are plenty who can and will honestly say "My will is not strong enough". I was 21 before I ever smoked a full cigarette. Believe me when I say that there are people who know in their bones how stupid smoking is, who make no defense based on reasons they will own, they will stand behind, but who keep smoking nevertheless. Nicotine may not be heroin (and I'm not going to find out) but it is truly some good shit.
Don't start smoking kids.
your parents would be so very disappointed with you
Yes. Don't know about the other two, but seeking the approval of various authority figures as they appear in my mind, consciously or not, is definitely one of my most frequent motivations when I act altruistically.
Not too troubled about privacy or immortality, though; I view both as more or less inevitable if a half-decent singularity does come, unless it's incredibly weird, not just Eliezer-level weird. That is, I want to want both, and don't currently worry too much as to whether I want either one in my heart of hearts.
Harry explicitly says earlier that he'd say he could be trusted with a secret, even if he couldn't be, because it was never helpful to be ignorant of it.
I'm going to need a direct quote. The only thing I can think of similar to this is
"All right," Harry said slowly. It was hard to see how having a conversation and being unable to tell anyone could be more constraining than not having it, in which case you also couldn't tell anyone the contents. "I promise."
Not to mention
...A secret whose revelation could prove so disastrous that I
But hey, he's already employing a scatter shot approach towards their weirdness training so if this one idea doesn't work out it doesn't cost him much more than the time it took him to plan the exercise.
There's almost certainly a way to do this sort of thing that would function quite well as a morale and team-building exercise even if it didn't work at all on the conformity level.
Not that the Chaos Legion needs more morale.
True. But that would have to be an extreme amount of acceleration, whereas in MoR it takes several casters just to fully counter the effect of gravity on one teenage boy. Also, it seems unlikely at best that the Hover Charm can accelerate people downwards - and if you lift someone high enough for a fall to kill them, you give them time to react while they fall.
Also, it's possible that the Hover Charm could be blocked by a pre-cast shield - in fact, this seems likely, otherwise people could just get around non-spherical shields by lifting the target and then shooting them from underneath.
I see no reason to believe that Godric could cast the True Patronus. Even if he knew enough to ruin his ability to cast the traditional one(and knowing that it was literally hiding from death would likely be enough to make him disdain it), that doesn't mean that he could take the necessary leap to using the True Patronus.
"Bad" in the sense you mean is a label placed on behaviors by individuals or groups who wish to discourage those behaviors, usually for selfish reasons. I have to say 'usually' because sometimes they do so for stupid reasons instead of self-interest.
"Selfish" is a wrong word in this context, for what you mean is person's (idealized) goals/values, which are probably not purely selfish.
Your whole argument seems to be "if someone might potentially get spoiled, then by golly everyone should be".
We realize the rule can't prevent all spoilage. But it can reduce it, and (it being simple and specific) it's extremely easy to follow for anyone who is a non-jerk.
The vast majority of humans don't have perfect pitch, so the specific pitch of the note is far less important than the relationships to the notes surrounding them. I agree that he is rather showing off, but unless you spend a very large amount of time ear training, you likely cannot tell when a note is a quarter tone sharp or flat. However, just like there are cycles of notes that always sound amazing together when you run them through variation (see the circle of 5ths), there are notes that sound horrible and jarring. Furthermore, the amount of time it ta...
I just tried some experiments and I find that if I take Brahms's lullaby (which I think is the one Eliezer means by "Lullaby and Goodnight") and flatten a couple of random notes by a quarter-tone, the effect is in most cases extremely obvious. And if I displace each individual pitch by a random amount from a quarter-tone flat to a quarter-tone sharp, then of course some notes are individually detectable as out of tune and some not but the overall effect is agonizing in a way that simply getting some notes wrong couldn't be.
I'm a pretty decent (though strictly amateur) musician and I'm sure many people wouldn't find such errors so obvious (and many would find it more painful than I do).
Anyway, I'm not sure what our argument actually is. The chapter says, in so many words, that Q. is humming notes "not just out of key for the previous phrases but sung at a pitch which does not correspond to any key" which seems to me perfectly explicit: part of what makes the humming so dreadful is that Q. is out of tune as well as humming wrong notes. And yes, the ability to sing accurate quarter-tones is rare and requires work to develop. So are lots of the abilities Q. has.
(Of ...
Try this instead; it should work on any OS and generate a .wav file you can play. (It's better than putting up a recording because you can play with the parameters, put in your own tune, etc.)
import math, random, struct, wave
from math import sin,cos,exp,pi
filename = '/home/dgerard/something.wav' # replace with something sensible
def add_note(t,p,d,v):
# t is time in seconds, p is pitch in Hz, d is duration in seconds
# v is volume in arbitrary (amplitude) units
i0 = int(44100*t)
i1 = int(44100*(t+d))
if len(signal)<i1: signal.extend([0 for i in range(len(signal),i1)])
for i in range(i0,i1):
dt = i/44100.-t
if dt<0.02: f = dt/0.02 # attack: 0..1 over 20ms
elif dt<0.2: f = exp(-(dt-0.02)/0.18) # decay: 1..1/e over 180ms
elif dt<d-0.2: f = exp(-1) # sustain: 1/e
else: f = exp(-1)*(d-dt)/0.2 # release: 1/e..0 over 200ms
signal[i] += f*v*(sin(2*pi*p*dt)+0.2*sin(6*pi*p*dt)+0.06*sin(10*pi*p*dt))
def save_signal():
m = max(abs(x) for x in signal)
d = [int(30000./m*x) for x in signal]
w = wave.open(filename, "wb")
w.setparams((1,2,44100,len(signal),'NONE','noncompressed'))
Two passages I see changed so far:
“My... Lord... I went where you said to await you, but you did not come... I looked for you but I could not find you... you are alive...”
became this:
"My... Lord... I waited for you but you did not come... I looked for you but I could not find you... you are alive..."
and this:
“Your wand,” murmured Bellatrix, “I hid it in the graveyard, my lord, before I left... under the tombstone to the right of your father’s grave...
became this:
..."Your wand," murmured Bellatrix, "I took it from the Po
I suggest that Voldemort was intentionally turning Harry into a Horcrux. There are at least two reasons for the burnt-out husk result. (1) Using a human as horcrux was probably experimental, and prone to disaster.
Seems like a really good reason not to be the first to try it then.
Wizarding society likes to let people figure out the dangerous secrets for themselves. You don't tell people the dangerous secrets until they have proven themselves on the easier ones, you don't tell people the secret of potion invention because they might get turned into cats, etc.
Of course, Harry can violate that as he pleases if it is just a social convention, and Harry's guesses at principles seem\ to hold up far better than it seems like it should.
I suggest that Voldemort was intentionally turning Harry into a Horcrux.
For the central premise on which your theory is founded, you skip over this without giving any reason to privilege this possibility over others (such as "Voldemort wasn't intentionally turning Harry into a Horcrux"). It's hard to take a theory seriously when it skips straight from a central premise to discussing implications, without considering the state of the evidence first.
As an example problem, all other Horcruxes, both in canon and MoR, are nigh-indestructible magica...
I agree that we should have a spoiler tag.
One data point in favor of rot13 however: The extra effort it takes to decode is an incentive to try and figure things out on your own.
EDIT: I mean this in general, not just for HPMoR.
why should new readers get a twist we don't get?
Because the author wants to give it to them.
He made his decision ... so he should live with it.
It is commonly held that making friends is easier when you keep judgements about what people should do with their lives and their possessions to a minimum.
Prediction: Harry's investigation to clear Hermione's name leads him to Quirrlemort's true identity.
so why should new readers get a twist we don't get?
Why shouldn't they? Eliezer has edited lots of things in the past in order to improve the story according to his judgment -- e.g. removing a mention of the Philosopher's Stone at chapter 4, or editing Draco's words at chapter 7 to make them less vulgar.
What meta-ethical theory is your objection supposed to be indicative of?
I've been here since the beginning, and yes, good jokes get upvoted, bad jokes get downvoted. 'good' and 'bad' are of course highly subjective.
It looks like EY just took any pure-blood family and decided to make it a Noble House
This is lazy of you, downvoted.
The Crabbes and Goyles have not been declared noble. The Parkinsons and Montagues and Boles have not been declared noble.
That doesn't seem to follow.
Doesn't it?
The old witch sighed. "What does Dumbledore think of this?"
The man in the detention cell shook his head. "He does not know who I am, and promised not to inquire."
The old witch's eyebrows rose. "How did he identify you to the Hogwarts wards, then?"
A slight smile. "The Headmaster drew a circle, and told Hogwarts that he who stood within was the Defense Professor. Speaking of which -" The tone went lower, flatter. "I am missing my classes, Director Bones."
Aw, I just noticed Auror QQQ got renamed. Here I was wondering how Bones managed to pronounce that, and how he avoided getting stuck with "Mike".
Then how could the destruction of one cause their numbers to fall from eight to seven? If it's just a matter of who can trace their roots back the farthest, surely the next-oldest would be bumped up.
If you understand that such a ruse would further his goals, what's left to be confused about? What is he supposed to do, not further them?
A large part of the point of Quirrel/Riddle/Voldemort in HPMOR is that he can assume any identity he wants to. His behavior being at odds with what you imagine a Voldemort would do is simply his deception going to a much higher level. He doesn't act like a Voldemort because he was never actually Voldemort any more than he is actually Quirrel.
but the way its written makes it look like its trying to fool the reader.
Eliezer might be aiming further than just us. Future readers will probably not read the notes and LessWrong threads in parallel with the book, and he knows from past reactions that the Voldie hints are interpreted more ambiguously by readers than he intended to. So the style might be intended to be ironic for us and mysterious for future readers.
In 1971, while visiting Diagon Alley, he fended off an attempt by Bellatrix Black to kidnap the daughter of the Minister of Magic
Is this a reference to A Black Comedy?
Groupthink triumphs again.
I've been looking at it, and I really have no idea what part of my comment you are referring to here. Which is mildly concerning. Could you clarify?
His first comment capitalized "NOT", which was kind of rude. He also chided me in a paternalistic manner "keep the facts straight please".
Rudeness isn't the same thing as disingenuousness. I was probably rude. But I wasn't disingenuous.
it's kind of odd that he would go around following all my comments and pointing out their flaws.
I don't expect you to believe me now, since you didn't believe me before, but since I was honest before, perhaps you'll hopefully have updated the level of my trustworthiness upwards: I didn't "fol...
and in my mind downvoting should be used for punishing (or expressing disapproval of) immoral things
Fuck that (ie. I viscerally disapprove of and hold in honest contempt this asserted social norm.) Moralizing gets annoying.
That's not a good thing for people purportedly trying to promote rationality.
ie. Not trying to promote moral purity.
People should probably be more laid back about downvoting.
You're the one getting worked up about it. Really, getting voted down isn't that much of a big deal and even if it was directly challenging it is a tric...
I had sex ed at that age. I think it was a remarkably unproductive use of time for most of the people in there. But there was a least one girl who was pregnant the next year, so it's possible that it prevented further pregnancy.
Sex education does not prevent all pregnancy any more than driver's education prevents all accidents. Kids both fuck and fuck up.
and (at least in MoR) the exact durations of the vowel sounds in "oogely boogely" are essential for conjuring glowing bats
In canon you have to pronounce it Wing-gar-dium Levi-o-sa and can't cast it unless you make the 'gar' nice and long. (In the movies, it's "Levi-o-sa, not levio-sah").
It isn't a very complex plan -- it just required that he play two roles; this gave him two avenues of success (if resistance to Voldemort is strong, take over as the hero -- if resistance to Voldemort is too weak take over as Voldemort). And it fits in perfectly with the plan that he has already suggested to Harry Potter (find an actor to play Voldemort, have him cast Avada Kedavra at you, block it with Patronus, be hero), so it's perfectly consistent with Quirrel's way of thinking.
When we talk about too complex plans, we talk about plans with multiple points of possible failure. You call this complicated because it had multiple points of possible success.
I'm curious why the spell has to be shot out from the wand, rather than from a completely different direction or appearing spontaneously in the middle of the target. There's an underlying assumption that magic is like lasers and wands are like guns in much of Canon!HP and in MOR, but that doesn't really seem justified. Maybe this is just another conceptual limitation?
How Magic Works, Some Facts, Inferences, Conclusions, and Speculations
The Facts:
Eight notes: C D E F G A B C. (People used to not know how to count properly.* I think it comes from not having a clear concept of zero.)
* One can argue that this counting system is no worse than ours, but to do so, one would have to explain why ten octaves is seventy[one] notes.
He means that Tom Riddle isn't connected to any noble house but Scion of X was. So it is incongruent that people would just to think that Scion of X was Tome Riddle.
Born or married house, not sorted house.
Thanks for the mention. It's nice to hear that my contributions have been noted.
Just an FYI, I said almost the same thing in my very first post, "Mr. Hat-and-Cloak, who we are to understand is most certainly Quirrell" The difference is that you know a spoiler about the one, and don't know a spoiler about the other. In both cases there are sufficient in-text cues for me to speak as confidently as I do.
Although it raises the question of what they would have done if the battle had not turned out that way, since Hermione probably would not have challenged Draco.
Possibly nothing, if Quirrell is to blame. That would sound just like him:
..."Usse ssensse, boy! Ssupposse I am evil. To end usse of you here iss obvioussly not what I planned. Misssion iss target of opportunity, invented after ssaw your guardian Charm, whole affair meant to be unnoticed, hid when left eating-place. Obvioussly you will ssee persson pretending to be healer on arrival! Go back
Obvioussly you will ssee persson pretending to be healer on arrival!
Is... is it not possible to lie in Parseltongue? I mean, we have
"I am not regisstered," hissed the snake. The dark pits of its eyes stared at Harry. "Animaguss musst be regisstered. Penalty is two yearss imprissonment. Will you keep my ssecret, boy?"
"Yess," hissed Harry. "Would never break promisse."
The snake seemed to hold still, as though in shock, and then began to sway again.
and
You ssay nothing, to no one. Give no ssign of expectancy, none. Undersstand?"
Harry nodded.
"Ansswer in sspeech."
"Yess."
"Will do as I ssaid?"
"Yess.
This is not a point for using it for something that the majority of people posting in the thread already know.
If spreading spoilers hurts then its hurt is not limited to vulnerable people posting in the thread, but encompasses all vulnerable people reading the thread.
I doubt you have evidence that the majority of people posting in the thread are aware of the spoiler. I am certain you have only weak reasons to believe you know about all the people reading the thread. I lurked here for over a year.
I think he's just describing what happens when you tell people Dementor's are Death. He considered that a tactic in the WIzengamut to prevent them from being able to cast a patronus, and gives no thought to the possibility that knowing that would enable them to cast the True Patronus.
How do we know that Godric could do it? I recall Harry musing on Godric and Rowena knowing that Dementors were Death (pg 742, pdf) - but would that automatically imply that they could also cast the True Patronus?
Harry can because he rejects Death as part of the natural order. Is there any evidence that they did? I don't remember any evidence that anyone but Harry has ever done it.
Quirrellmort's history (or, at least, his history as believed by Bones) reminds me a bit of Count Fenring from Dune, somehow.
Wasn't that the Ravenclaw door asking a riddle? And anyway it says "Vanished objects", it would be a weird non-answer to say "they die".
Actually, he also tests a toenail-growing curse on either Crabbe or Goyle, and at least one other on a different Slytherin.
Harry had already attempted a few of the Prince's self-invented spells. There had been a hex that caused toenails to grow alarmingly fast (he had tried this on Crabbe in the corridor, with very entertaining results); a jinx that glued the tongue to the roof of the mouth (which he had twice used, to general applause, on an unsuspecting Argus Filch); and, perhaps most useful of all, Muffliato, a spell that filled the ears of anyone nearby with an unidentifiable buzzing, so that lengthy conversations could be held in class with out being overheard.
You've been told the spoiler policy. You've been asked to obey it. Expect to be downvoted if you don't obey the rules of the thread. Capital letters and multiple exclamation marks aren't an argument.
I don't like people who deliberately join a forum whose rules they don't have any willingness to follow, no matter how "unfair" they seem to them.
There was a bookcase containing random books rescued from a bargain bin, and a full shelf of ancient magazines, including one from 1883.
Funny. 1883 seems to be the year Grindelwald was born. (Although that's not sure – it even says “c. 1882” in the main article.)
I can't see how this might be related to the rest of the story, and most probably this is just a way of telling us “Yes, these magazines are ancient.“ On the other hand, this 1926/1927 thing made me somewhat more susceptible to possibly meaningful dates …
Despite the many good reasons to believe Quirrell is H&C, My Red Herring Alarm (©) wouldn't stop going off while Harry was going over the list of suspects. My gut is usually fairly good at seeing plot-twists coming, and it's very certain there's someone Harry is forgetting about. Anyone else getting a similiar vibe?
(This isn't a prediction, exactly. Or if it is, it's extremely speculative and with a fairly low weight of confidence.)
The end of an arc will be posted here in a little while. The last couple of arc-concluding chapters have been from points of view we don't normally get. The end of TSPE was with Trelawney, and before the switch, Self-Actualization ended with Snape. Both were rather portentous moments: Trelawney had a vision of something horrible coming, and Snape made a decision that might ally him permanently with the Dark side.
For obvious reasons, we've ...
Just noticed this lovely little tidbit at the very end of Chapter 84:
"[Hermione] thought she heard, as she was within the doorway, a distant cawing cry. But it wasn't meant for her, she knew[.]"
What on Earth is that supposed to mean? Who or what is cawing in Hogwarts or on the grounds, and how does she know something about it that we don't? Or am I missing some terribly obvious connection here?
Automatically, the mask of the innocent Harry said exactly what it would have said: "Are my parents in danger? Do they need to be moved here?"
"No," said the old wizard's voice. "I do not think so. The Death Eaters learned, toward the end of the war, not to attack the Order's families. And if Voldemort is now acting without his former companions, he still knows that it is I who make the decisions for now, and he knows that I would give him nothing for any threat to your family. I have taught him that I do not give in to blackmail, and so he will not try."
This quote from Chapter 62 seems quite prudent to consider in hindsight.
Dumbledore tried to push Hermione away from heroism specifically to push her towards it. Maybe Quirrell thinks the same tool work work on her. He doesn't even have to know that Dumbledore thought that would work or used that tool on Hermione. He could just observe in her the same vulnerability to that method.
Okay, can someone answer in what way it would look different if Quirrel did try to get Hermione away and just honestly failed? As opposed to this supposedly not-real attempt?
Because I think too many people in this thread suffer from thinking that Quirrel is literally infallible in regards to anything he tries.
A good bit off topic but replying here anyway. If humanity was not special enough to set the Interdict of Merlin on absolutely everybody it could really turn against them when the aliens arrive.
There's a difference between dynasties and titles. Houses are dynasties- lots and lots of people were Habsburgs, even though only one person held a title at any particular time. For example, Philip I was, in 1505, King of Castile, Duke of Burgundy, Duke of Brabant, Duke of Limburg, Duke of Lothier, Duke of Luxemburg, Margrave of Namur, Count Palatine of Burgundy, Count of Artois, Count of Charolais, Count of Flanders, Count of Hainault, Count of Holland, and Count of Zeeland, but only a member of one House- the Habsburgs.
Also, take a look at cadet branche...
Would you change your mind if I dug up links to the two times in the last two weeks that someone on the LW discussion page asked why everyone was so certain that Q=V, clearly displaying that they didn't know the spoiler?
And just to reiterate, since pleeppleep is determinedly ignoring this fact despite being repeatedly made aware of it, the spoiler isn't "X" but "Eliezer said X".
The people who frequent this site are expected to read a sequence of posts explaining quantum physics, but a dual "like" system is too complicated?
The rule is that it's only spoilage if you say both things in cleartext in the same post. Yes, I agree, it's a stupid rule, but it is the rule, and I was angry because that argument was used specifically against my claim that it's inconsistently enforced.
"edit the tone to something you wouldn't have to apologize for." I could only do so honestly if this did not make me angry. EDIT - done. I'm still a bit angry about it though...
Anything that isn't fun and isn't good doesn't even enter most people's minds, because there's no reason to do it.
Unless you have a really broad definition of 'fun' you're quire wrong here. Sometime people will experiment. Sometimes people will do what they're told not to as a gesture of defiance. Sometimes people will do things that are very harmful to themselves because it is the only way they can strike against forces they are otherwise powerless to resist, like an abusive partner or guardian. Sometimes people mistakenly think they don't have any...
The author has suggested we pay attention to the Conservation of Detail. With that in mind, the involvement of Albania is enough for almost certainty.
At this point I've gotten most of my karma back, and a lot of people have gained karma, so I'd say karma is up overall.
With regards to karma, most of the comments on LW have positive karma, very few have negative. So by mere participation in a long discussion people gain karma, unless they do something very wrong and refuse to give up.
This does not directly contradict what you said. Most of discussions are added value on LW. I just suspect that the karma does not reflect utility precisely; positive votes are given more cheaply than negative votes. (An e...
World War II had a different story in Harry Potter, and it's a bit clearer in MoR. It was sparked by Grindlewald's desire to have dominion over the muggles - the muggle war was just a reflection of the wizarding war going on at the same time. Grindlewald was the real power in Germany, and Hitler just a pawn. The reason Dumbledore couldn't take down Grindlewald until the war was over, was that Hitler was fueling Grindlewald's power using dark rituals involving the blood sacrifice of millions of muggles.
It seems like an important feature of a security system would be to detect outsiders as well as students.
...I don't think it does. I think what we're supposed to take from those passages, plus every other time Harry has made a promise, is that he doesn't make promises with the intent to break them.
Though of course, Potter and Voldemort exist in the same world for 17 years without breaching physical law in canon, so perhaps it's not entirely literal.
The spoiler is "Eliezer said X", not "X". This has been mentioned, repeatedly, by other users in this thread.
I'm not sure that the word "creation" is quite right (except in so far as for some musically-minded people it may bring to mind the other words "representation of chaos") but yes, I'm afraid it is.
Could anyone try to summarize some of the main theories that have been in previous discussion threads?
This is way too overwhelming for a newcomer.
We don't have canon examples of a lot of things.
But we have an explicit canon statement by a recognised authority in the spell school in question. That should trump guesses based on inferred similarities between different instances of different spells.
Which is more likely, that the Vanished animals follow the trends already observed for all the related magics, or that Rowling makes an exception for the animals and Hogwarts is a charnelhouse?
Given that
1) the trends you cite are only there if we assume that every instance of something disappearing use...
In my understanding of fun theory, you have worthy adversaries, but low consequences in case of failure. Like a video game, where if you lose, you lose a few hours of gaming at worse. Not that if you lose, you end up in Azkaban feeding the Dementors.
At least for myself, I like hard games, not easy ones, but I like it when defeat isn't too severe; I do sometimes play games in "iron will" mode (no saving, if you lose, restart all from the beginning), but not often, it's really the upper limit to what I accept when losing.
I don't think the rule right now prevents any spoilage.
Unless you argue that it actually causes spoilage (which is implausible), it's highly implausible that it's effect is exactly zero.
Such guidelines as you suggest are perhaps nice to be followed voluntarily, but obliging people to follow them would impose an additional cost and burden -- when it seems that atleast two people in this thread have a problem with the rule being as much of a burden on them as it currently is.
It's not treating it a fact that's frowned upon, same way that it's not frowned upon to treat Hat&Cloak as Quirrel, or Dumbledore as Santa Claus - we don't ask that people treat their conclusions as if they're spoilers.
What's against the rules is to reveal the specific announcements that have been "unrevealed".
Is this too fine a distinction for you to understand? Here's a clue, none of those nine comments say anything about what Eliezer has or hasn't revealed in retracted Authorial Notes.
So give it a rest already.
No. Madam Bones said that the man she suspects Quirrell of being just disappeared (and, indeed, was the last of his family before he did so). Granted we don't know where most of Wibble went, but 1) he had a family, and they were peeled as well, and 2) I don't think having your skin found flapping loose in your office counts as a mysterious disappearance.
Whoops, you're right, actually- but it seems to be standard procedure, it's not like he had to fight to have it done.
Now, according to the Ministry of Magic, I'm supposed to teach you countercurses and leave it at that. I'm not supposed to show you what illegal Dark curses look like until you're in the sixth year. You're not supposed to be old enough to deal with it till then. But Professor Dumbledore's got a higher opinion of your nerves, he reckons you can cope, and I say, the sooner you know what you're up against, the better.
Maybe it's a joke. EY could mean that her response to it is the same as our response to the simile: confusion.
The trouble was that you attributed the information to Eliezer, and said that it had been made explicitly clear. Commonly held speculation is one thing, insider information from the author is quite another.
If your comment was (non-rot13'd):
V jbhyq arire unir thrffrq gung Dhveeryy jnf fhpu n sna bs Ngynf Fuehttrq. Nyfb, V'z fyvtugyl pbashfrq ng ubj ur'f orvat cbegenlrq va guvf puncgre. Dhveeryy vf boivbhfyl Ibyqrzbeg, naq V pna'g vzntvar jul snyfr pyhrf jbhyq or tvira gb qvfgenpg sebz n gjvfg gung rirelbar fubhyq frr pbzvat.
then it could have been read as your own speculation, and that would have been absolutely fine.
Seriously. If this was another forum, you'd have been outright banned by now for failing to follow the stated policy, even after repeated warnings. Please go elsewhere or follow the rules.
Why is the text of that section unchanged when he decided not to reveal it after all - are people who can figure it out (as he assumed everyone would when he wrote it) not entitled to as good a story as people who can't?
Figuring it out != getting it spoiled.
I was confident of that fact well before that section of the story. I would expect anyone with knowledge of canon to suspect a connection between the two characters.
But if you didn't get it spoiled, you get to test your hypothesis against every new piece of evidence, and it's a much more entertainin...
On the Stone's mention: http://lesswrong.com/lw/bfo/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/6ahg
Ack. I can't believe it took me this long, but I think Quirrellmort's plan has finally fallen into place for me. Quirrellmort's primary goals are:
(1) Attain immortality. (2) Enjoy it.
But he believes a necessary means to those ends is:
(3) Kill Harry Potter.
When Quirrellmort first said that when he made his Evil Overlord list, he realized following it all the time would defeat the purpose of being a Dark Lord. I wondered if he was telling the truth about that. HPMOR is all about playing with things that don't make sense in traditional stories, and the fact t...
You're assuming that a culture as ossified as modern wizarding society has lots of people striving to create new spells en masse, and that it's sufficiently easy to do so that they'd be getting created if the people were trying and "slots" were available. That's absurd. Also, you seem to have no understanding whatsoever of the Interdict of Merlin - it says that spells above a certain power level can only be passed between intelligent minds, with no intermediaries(like books) allowed. The best I can assume is that you're engaged in circular reasoning, with the lack of new spells proving the slot theory proving your weird interpretation of the Interdict proving the lack of new spells.
Hm.
I'm not quite sure in what sense a choice of language is objective but a choice of religion is subjective. They both strike me as aspects of a culture... though it is admittedly easier to raise a child without a religion at all than to raise one without a language.
Then again, I'm content to say that human parenting pretty-much-universally involves indoctrination. As does education, for that matter, although not all indoctrination is educational and not all education is indoctrination.
What was idiotic about the way Harry was protected? They were betrayed to a superior force by someone highly placed, and there's no good defense against that. And Voldemort was knowingly superior to every possible defender, so why would he worry about it?
And re prior probabilities, it's obviously dependant on the issue in question. On something where MoR is silent, canon carries a lot of weight. On something where MoR spends time adjusting expectations, canon carries very little weight. So it's quite likely that Aberforth loved goats(though even more like...
Well, you get to pick your race and your class (middle)
Pfft
I'd stick with the Human race. I don't like the lack of supplemental material for the others. They're really under developed.
I have serious doubts that class in the sense you use it in could possibly be elective. The spread just doesn't match any decision making process I'd want to relate to.
I think she intended it to be plausible. Weren't we just discussing what a terrible worldbuilder Rowling is?
I was under the impression this was a community rule. People were certainly talking as if they believed in the logical basis for having the policy in order to prevent people from getting spoiled, rather than just doing what he says.
How does that make sense?
The idea is mainly to keep new users from wrecking the site by downvoting everything. Since things tend to get upvoted over time, everyone who participates (and doesn't seriously piss off the community) tends to get a slow trickle of karma even if they don't post anything astounding.
It was a quick-fix sort of solution. The initial limit was equal to your karma, but I already had used more than 4x that many downvotes, so it was quickly changed to a limit of 4x your karma, since the intention was not to limit the downvoting powe...
Its purpose might simply have been to slow down the rate of high-level spell development and use. We know that the greatest body of magical lore would have been lost with Atlantis (going with the theory that the Atlanteans created the Source of Magic) and that magical research appears to largely be the province of individuals. The Interdict of Merlin would be like going to medieval Europe and saying "OK, you can carry on developing science/natural philosophy/etc., but you can't read any classical works, and if you want the latest research, you've got ...
It appears to me that the original purpose of the Interdict was as a form of DRM for strong spells. If you want to disseminate a spell, you can't just take a book, magically duplicate the book, and pass it out to all your friends. Learning a powerful spell thus required a willing trainer to teach you the spell, and you couldn't duplicate the knowledge contained in your mind until you knew the spell well enough to teach it yourself (and teaching something is harder than just being able to use it).
If you take this as a starting point, it's just basic classism at play motivating Merlin. All the wrong sorts were getting literacy and learning spells from books, taking away from the right sorts, who had learned from tutors, exclusive clubs, and networking with other powerful wizards. And it probably worked exceedingly well for several hundred years until those damn four decided to start up a school and accept everyone to be taught.
It was explained that the [well, a] main purpose of downvoting is to cause "bad" comments to be hidden from view, rather than to punish the writer. When I asked in another thread for an explanation of downvoting to very low scores under this model, it was explained that this is done to offset the risk of people voting up the posts after the downvoters are no longer paying attention to the thread.
One way to change the system that might mitigate these factors would be to allow for "soft" downvotes that don't subtract from the karma of the...
fairness means only following the rule that reactions should be proportionate to the initial action. I thought you guys were being silly by insisting that I had spoiled something everyone already knew. I thought you were all too quick to judge, and I felt that you became biased against my comments, even ones unrelated to the spoiler. I was not aware that I had broken any rules until I had nothing left to lose. An accused person has the right to know why they are being accused and to defend themselves before receiving a penalty. If this were not the case then the accusing party would wield far too much power to be trustworthy. I think I have made it very clear why I thought this was unfair.
Long-form noble titles are used very rarely, because they're so unwieldy, and we've only seen a couple of folks who would be in a position to have multiple titles at all in the sort of detail where the long form would be used. Dumbledore is the only example I know of where they actually used anything longer than a few words. You're right that we might have seen one, but Rowling would likely have found it a bit too complex, and they're not so common that the lack is significant.
Well yes but there is quite a big difference between having moral standards and actually living up to them enough to think of oneself as "good". At least in my brain truly "good" people are very rare.
75%
Seems very clear at this point that Q. cannot predict Harry's actions, and that he was responsible for Hermione's framing. Truth is entangled, Harry is very clever, especially when not under a time crunch- this seems very likely to me.
Create enough tension and it'll spring loose somewhere, and I doubt Quirrel much cared where. There's no way that those two(Hermione in particular, given the lack of political training) have enough self-control to hate each other, think that they're scheming at each other, and then do absolutely nothing about it for an extended period.
That's something I hadn't thought of before. When I first heard the prophecy I immediately assumed it just meant Harry didn't need to come up with a way to deal with the Pioneer, and I didn't reevaluate upon Harry's reconciliation with his dark side.
Also, I've been wondering what that means in reverse- what's stopping Voldemort from destroying all of Harry, what would his remnant be? Interesting thought- maybe Harry's dark side counts as a remnant of Harry, too.
Is it? I can't remember. The only Santa Claus reference that springs to mind is the signature on the notes in MoR.
Goes into non-being = ceases to exist = dies if previously alive. Possibly worse than that, since in canon the dead do not disappear but go on to an afterlife.
If I said to you "Bob has gone into non-being", is there even a slight chance that you would interpret this as "Bob has been temporarily teleported to another dimension" rather than a fancy way of saying "Bob has ceased to exist"?
Things with negative karma get downvoted even more. You hadn't noticed?
Edit: perhaps not. It actually took longer to go from -2 to -3 than 0 to -2. I think we need more data points.
I don't have any saved copy, but clear memory of the bolded part not being there. I think the wording is otherwise identical.
Some of the resistance to rot13 may be the complexity of using it: it requires multiple steps and an external program.
If you have Firefox, install the LeetKey addon.
Canon!Ron had a lot of time and personal interaction in which to grow to like Hermione. MoR!Ron is in a different house, and much of his interaction with her is informed by her close friendship with Harry, whom he considers Evil. And according to Ron, being friends with Evil is extremely damning in and of itself.
You seem to have taken the wrong emphasis from my words. The grandparent was arguing that the things that good people won't do but bad people will, are all fun-but-naughty stuff. My point was that there are lots of things that 'bad' people might do, that are not fun.
The idea that someone would kill someone else for a pair of shoes has gotten so ubiquitous that it's become a cliche!
This supports my point, unless you think that people are stealing shoes because shoes are fun.
When was the Naruto parody added to the omake chapter?
Well as I've said somewhere in this tree, I don't like the "evil" label, so I'll stick to "bad". But I do think that the baby-eaters were bad, regardless of what they were evolved to do. There are a whole bunch of things that humans are evolved to do that I also think are morally wrong - I think that humans who do those things are bad. If we didn't have a drive to do bad things, no one would ever do them and morality would be pointless. The baby-eaters perhaps shouldn't be hated too much for being bad (in the story they weren't as i...
Wild guessing:
There's a lot of things said about Voldemort that don't really make sense. How did get killed by a child? Quirrel himself makes fun of the Dark Mark, and why would someone who wants to be an effective leader torture his own servants for fun? He destroys the martial arts school without learning anything. I'm starting to think that Voldemort makes far more sense as a propagandized creation of Dumbledore's side than as a real entity. It's pretty obvious that the known story of what happened at Godric's Hollow isn't what REALLY happened. Dumble...
Tom Riddle needed a Voldemort for his plot so he became Voldemort for a time. Just as he needed a Quirrel and a Mister Jaffe.
Are we certain that the amount of time that each rotation takes you actually is an equinoctal hour, or a constant? If broomsticks can use Aristotlean physics, maybe Time Turners can be limited to six solar hours.
Do not have the audience be part of the group being tested. Pull in confederates off the street, and tell them about the test. Do not allow subjects to see each other's testing. Let's say now that the current subject is Alex. Alex prefers vanilla ice cream to chocolate ice cream. Now go through the anti-conformity training.
After the training, hold a break (still with just Alex and the confederates). Offer ice cream in chocolate, vanilla, and, say, mango. Have most (maybe about 80%) of the confederates go for the chocolate, 10% for the vanilla, and 10% for ...
Do not have the audience be part of the group being tested. Pull in confederates off the street, and tell them about the test. Do not allow subjects to see each other's testing. Let's say now that the current subject is Alex. Alex prefers vanilla ice cream to chocolate ice cream. Now go through the anti-conformity training.
After the training, hold a break (still with just Alex and the confederates). Offer ice cream in chocolate, vanilla, and, say, mango. Have most (maybe about 80%) of the confederates go for the chocolate, 10% for the vanilla, and 10% for ...
If you go as far as to outright patronize people for not understanding something then it is just too late to pretend it is a secret.
See, I could've sworn I said
And just to reiterate, since pleeppleep is determinedly ignoring this fact despite being repeatedly made aware of it, the spoiler isn't "X" but "Eliezer said X".
Should I change that "pleeppleep" to "wedrifid"?
The next discussion thread 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 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
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, 14.
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.
I just tried some experiments and I find that if I take Brahms's lullaby (which I think is the one Eliezer means by "Lullaby and Goodnight") and flatten a couple of random notes by a quarter-tone, the effect is in most cases extremely obvious. And if I displace each individual pitch by a random amount from a quarter-tone flat to a quarter-tone sharp, then of course some notes are individually detectable as out of tune and some not but the overall effect is agonizing in a way that simply getting some notes wrong couldn't be.
I'm a pretty decent (though strictly amateur) musician and I'm sure many people wouldn't find such errors so obvious (and many would find it more painful than I do).
Anyway, I'm not sure what our argument actually is. The chapter says, in so many words, that Q. is humming notes "not just out of key for the previous phrases but sung at a pitch which does not correspond to any key" which seems to me perfectly explicit: part of what makes the humming so dreadful is that Q. is out of tune as well as humming wrong notes. And yes, the ability to sing accurate quarter-tones is rare and requires work to develop. So are lots of the abilities Q. has.
(Of course that doesn't require that the wrong notes be exactly quarter-tones.)
Python code snippet for anyone who wants to do a similar experiment (warning 1: works only on Windows; warning 2: quality of sound is Quirrell-like):
import random, time, winsound
for (p,d) in [(4,1),(5,1),(7,3),(None,1), (4,1),(5,1),(7,3),(None,1), (4,1),(7,1),(12,2),(11,2),(9,2),(9,2),(7,1),(None,1), (2,1),(4,1),(5,3),(None,1), (2,1),(4,1),(5,3),(None,1), (2,1),(5,1),(11,1),(9,1),(7,2),(11,2),(12,4)]:
if p is None: time.sleep(0.2*d)
else: winsound.Beep(int(440*2**((p+1*(random.random()-0.5))/12.)), 200*d)
Here's a tweak I made that I think keeps to the spirit.
import random, time, winsound
timebias = 0.2
pitchbias = 0.7
changebias = 0.75
current = [(4.,1.),(5.,1.),(7.,3.),(None,1.), (4.,1.),(5.,1.),(7.,3.),(None,1.),(4.,1.),(7.,1.),(12.,2.),(11.,2.),(9.,2.),(9.,2.),(7.,1.),(None,1.),(2.,1.),(4.,1.),(5.,3.),(None,1.),(2.,1.),(4.,1.),(5.,3.),(None,1.),(2.,1.),(5.,1.),(11.,1.),(9.,1.),(7.,2.),(11.,2.),(12.,4.)]
timeshift = 1;
while 1:
timeshift = timeshift + timeshift * random.uniform(1 - timebias, 1 + timebias)
if timeshift > 1.0 + 2.0 * timebias