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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
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Comments (1221)
(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 not really had a section from Quirrell's point of view. The parentheticals a couple of chapters ago, about Amelia Bones being quite intelligent but surrounded by morons, might have been from Quirrell's head, and much of the rest of the section was written with implied omniscience of Quirrellmort's past, but it was far from a complete inner monologue.
As we approach the end of Harry's first year in Hogwarts, things are probably going to get much worse fairly quickly. And if the revelation of Quirrell's true nature is forthcoming, I wouldn't be surprised to see — or at least, I would love to see — Quirrell's last thoughts before his endgame plans are put into motion.
Nice catch.
I'm now wondering exactly how the prophecy system works. Did Harry's resolution alter time and directly cause these seers to see what they saw?
Quirrell is reading Hermione's mind and manipulating her during their conversation at the end of 84.
And also:
He stares at her, and plucks thoughts out of her head to persuade her, 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), and the instant she decides he's responsible he echoes her thought. So that seems pretty obvious. I now understand why EY thinks that we're bad at reading clues, I've read that chapter about three times and this is the first time I've picked up on it.
Also, I'd like to have said that he stopped manipulating her right after she broke eye contact, but it never explicitly says where she breaks eye contact. I would assume that she broke eye contact when she stepped away from him though, that seems more natural and is how the scene goes down when I imagine it inside my head.
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.
Eyes burning has never been mentioned as a side-effect of Legimancy previously, as far as I can remember -- so I don't see how you can use it as evidence in favour of Legimancy. Eyes burning seems more likely to be indicative of someone who's about to cry.
This quote from Chapter 62 seems quite prudent to consider in hindsight.
Just noticed this lovely little tidbit at the very end of Chapter 84:
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?
I'm very sorry about this. It referred to a part of Ch. 85 that I simply couldn't work out in time for the posting deadline. I've removed the corresponding lead-in from Ch. 84.
If I get Ch. 85 to work as originally planned, I may put it back in later.
It's so totally Snape.
Fawkes.
Yes. And it absolutely was meant for her.
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.
I have no idea how to interpret the first clue. Are Voldemort's eyes Remembralls?
My interpretation was that we're meant to connect the two incidents and conclude that Harry's (seemingly numerous) forgotten memories are something to do with Voldemort, whether specifically memories of that night or something wider.
Well, the fact that he remembered the night of Voldemort’s attack (I have 80%+ confidence it was a real memory, though I’m not sure of what), it’s clear that there was at least one thing that he had forgotten at the time he held the Remembrall. I hadn’t made the connection until now. Previously I thought the crimson eyes were a hint pointing to Moaning Myrtle’s recounting of her encounter with the basilisk. Now I wonder if it’s just a coincidence because the “blazing sun” simile works well for a bright Remembrall, or if Eliezer is giving us a three-way hint. A basilisk being present at Godric’s Hollow had a lot of awesomeness potential, but it does seem like the less likely hypothesis.
On the other hand, pretty much everyone has forgotten most of their infancy—presumably, Dementors don’t bring such memories back because they’re almost never as traumatic as Harry’s—and Remembralls don’t start glowing like mad in everybody’s hands, so something is still missing there.
Much more than infancy - apparently everything before 10 is suspect, and everything before 4 especially so according to Wikipedia on childhood amnesia.
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 don't like the idea of Voldemort being secretly good but because it would be tragic for Dumbledore to turn out to be so evil. Don't get me wrong, Dumbledore is greatly mistaken on many points but on the surface it doesn't seem fair to call him a Dark Lord. His intentions seem to be better than almost every other person in the wizarding world, and it seems a bit rich to brand him with that label just because he opposed someone who was doing a very good job of pretending to be EVIL with a capital everything.
This, of course, is WORSE because it means that EY won't do it like that - if Quirrel turns out to be good it will mean that Dumbledore has known the Voldemort gambit was a ploy all along, and has been actively opposing Quirrel's attempt to reform the world because he doesn't think the end justifies the means. And now he's been broken further and further, forced to do more and more horrible things and turned into a monster just because he didn't want monstrous things to happen! I just can't help but think that it would have been better for Quirrel to sit down and talk this all out with Dumbles, but even if for some reason he couldn't, I dunno if it's fair to Dumbles to call him a Dark Lord since he was trying hard but got it wrong.
Of course there's always the possibility that Dumbledore doesn't care about the means and is just opposed to Quirrel because Quirrel wants to kill death. That would make Dumbledore more evil but be less tragic. It also seems a bit less believable that Dumbledore could be so smart but so intractable in his wrongness on this one point, though.
What do you guys think?
I don't think the guy who doesn't think twice about torturing or murdering anyone who slights him will turn out to be in the right all along.
My viewpoint is essentially opposite yours, lolz.
I don't really think it's probable that Dumbledore will become the next Dark Lord. The only thing that has happened so far to suggest this is the one line by Dumbledore in Chapter 84 (there might be other evidence but it would help if you would explicitly point it out). And I suppose there's an argument to be made that Voldemort couldn't have "marked Harry as an equal" since Harry was a baby who Voldemort expected to easily kill (which is why Voldemort didn't bring reinforcements). And there's probably some people on here who think Narcissa was burned alive (but I am almost certain that Dumbledore faked her death and that she is living in a secret OOTP base somewhere).
But I think the counter evidence is stronger. It's too late in the story to suddenly change the villain, and Dumbledore probably wouldn't have the opportunity or motive to cause mass death. Those points seem simpler and like stronger arguments than the above. Consider that, in canon, Voldemort attacking a baby was apparently enough to mark Harry as an equal. Also consider that Dumbledore was completely hysterical when he mentioned the possibility that he would become the next Dark Lord.
It would help if we actually knew what some of the unheard prophecies say. Maybe Dumbledore was misinterpreting one of them, and he doesn't have to be a Dark Lord at all, but Harry would still fight him. That's not a great solution and it's actually less probable than anything above, but it does represent a kind of middle ground based on details and possibilities not yet made known to us.
And, I actually like the idea of Dumbledore being a Dark Lord who was corrupted by his power. I really don't think it would be sad, because I'm not attached to canon Dumbledore very much. I actually don't really care about any of the Canon!Harry Potter main characters, I just realized that. I only care about the minor characters, and thus far HPMOR has only improved those characters.
Dumbledore as Dark Lord just would be really cool. Maybe the rule of cool will outweigh my above probability based assessments, and he'll end up being a Dark Lord. I hope so, at least, unless EY figures out something even cooler to do.
That the only death Tom is opposed to is his own.
A very minor mistake at ch.84
This of course should be something like "save them from bullies" or "save people from bullies".
It's disturbing that I read that like three or four times without once noticing.
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:
Maybe he truly doesn't understand her psychology, especially if he doesn't have H&C's, erm, experimentation to draw on. (I rather think he is H&C, but that's another issue entirely.) But working from the supposition that he wanted Hermione to react as she did, what does he gain from that?
She's within easy striking distance if he wants to use her in some future action.
She's acquired extra suspicion of the Defense Professor, which she will communicate to Harry, and which the Defense Professor may duly disprove to Harry, strengthening the latter's trust.
She may, if she stays near Harry, do something unpredictably Good (c.f. SPHEW) of her own free will (inasmuch as that exists anymore) that would be useful for enacting various lessons.
Something else that I haven't thought of yet.
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.
He knows Hermione is suspicious of him. 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 make the blatantly manipulative hard-sell tactic of 'buy now, this is a limited-time offer only!' to someone whom he knows distrusts him, has read literature on manipulative tactics, and without giving a convincing Inside View explanation for why it's genuine and not what the Outside View says it is (manipulation)? Is this all reverse-psychology?
"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.
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.
The simplest explanation of why someone tries to manipulate you into doing something is because they want you to do it.
And frankly he came very close to getting her to say "Yes." We were inside Hermione's head. Quirrel came close to succeeding. If someone comes that close to succeeding, and fails just by something tiny which is outside their control, then the simplest explanation is that they wanted to succeed.
It's particularly worth considering that if Quirrel's last success in manipulating Hermione came at the end of a long obliviation cycle, then that was achieved when she was already in a state of mental exhaustion.
Excellent point about Harry. The Defense Professor virtually certainly knows Harry's opinions on the subject, whether by his mental model of Harry or by observing him telling anyone who'll listen that Hogwarts is dangerous.
On the other hand, I believe we've seen Harry failing to convince Hermione of something she was morally set on, much like this. (Anybody remember the specific incident, or am I imagining things?) Once Hermione had refused Harry's entreaties for her to leave, it would have been much harder for the Defense Professor to change her opinion.
And finally, there's this:
Which supports your argument that he's being a little too over-the-top. The Defense Professor is above all, subtle - this kind of all-out effort is not like him. Maybe there's some time constraint, though, and he doesn't have time for "subtle?" Aargh.
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.
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."
Definitely not insane. Do not like this change.
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.
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.
It used to say "adult wizard" yes -- I just confirmed it with an old pdf.
Maybe it's phrased that way in order to be similar to the bit several sentences down:
That instance of "Dark" makes sense (since they're Dark Arts and not "Adult Arts") and so there is a reason to use "Dark Wizard" throughout.
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.
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), but I would have expected Harry to avoid falling into such an obvious trap.
Note that Draco never seems interested in getting house points (as far as I can remember, anyways), so I guess his Slytherin education allowed him to see what the Ravenclaws missed: House Points are just one of those totally useless things you use to incentivize people into desired behaviors without having to give them any real, costly rewards. Like employee of the month awards, and military medals, and lesswrong kar-
...
Nevermind, I think I get it now.
(But seriously, karma at least has an individual tracking component that allows one to gain status in the community; is there anything about house points that would win Hermione or Harry more status than they would if they just kept getting good grades in class, answering questions correctly, and saving victims from bullies?)
Who's the person who've deleted their account, and may I ask why? It's always sad/confusing when we lose someone and we can't even know the reason.
This was jaimeastorga2000. I think Misha deleted their account today too.
I regret that Misha is gone, he was one of the smarter commenters on mathy decision theory posts.
(blinks in surprise)
How odd and sad...
Well, for whatever reason he chose to unperson himself, so I'm not sure if I should be saying this, but that was jaimeastorga2000, I believe. I don't know why he decided to leave.
Hermione is less passionate about Ravenclaw than Harry is -- e.g. Hermione in January thinks that she should have gone to Gryffindor. Harry is very clear about wanting to go to Ravenclaw, and belonging to Ravenclaw.
Either way it's clear that it's marked how many points each student gets -- Dumbledore in Hermione's trial mentions she has earned 103 points for Ravenclaw so far, and even in canon it seems to be known who cost them/won them points (e.g. in Harry Potter & the Philosopher's stone, the protagonists are ostracized at some point for costing Gryffindor 50 points each)
Sure. By earning house points, Harry and Hermione are essentially doing a favor for their houses independently of whatever they did to earn those points. It's a favor that's absolutely useless in functional terms (at least, I don't remember the House Cup granting any substantial perks), but that doesn't matter too much to the psychology involved; you're well above the 20 karma threshold but you still get a little spike of satisfaction when someone upvotes you, don't you? Same mechanism at play.
This is complicated slightly by the fact that House standing is zero-sum, but I still think in-house status gain would outweigh out-of-house status loss thanks to a number of considerations. Point allocations tend not to be announced to the entire school, for one thing.
In order to be an effective incentive system, house points would necessarily need to be awarded in social circumstances were other students can track them. And in practice that's usually how they're awarded. Points are given out in front of the class so all of the student's classmates can see them instead of privately. Some of this may be because teachers primarily interact with students in classes, but even private events which earn house points are announced publicly later.
Functionally, in canon, the house point system physically updates as soon as anyone authorized says "10 points to Gryffindor." Since it's auto-updating I'd be surprised if they don't track the reasons why as well in a magic ledger or something. When teachers were in strong contention for the house cup, they would give out house points on the flimsiest excuses, but they'd always have a reason for it, which implies that it's tracked. Otherwise teachers would subtract 50 points because 'potter looks stupid' when they're alone in the lavatory instead of taking 10 points for backchat while in class to unfairly win the house cup.
Quirrell sure loves his stealth puns. Is there any reason he is not openly telling Hermione about Dumbledore's time turner?
Is Quirrell's half-smile a reference to Robin Hanson's picture?
Why would it benefit him for her to know about it?
If the light's coming from the doorway, it's one side of his face that's illuminated, not the bottom.
Edit: ...that is a pretty creepy picture, isn't it?
A question not on the latest chapter but ch4:
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.
The Davises have 300 Galleons in their vault, and they do not seem to be especially poor or especially wealthy. If Harry has 130 times the wealth of an average family, that sounds like a reasonable sum for the circumstances stated.
It's worth noting that we don't really know to what extent bounties would have been placed on Voldemort. For one thing, it seems like the international community couldn't give a toss about the fate of Britain, and British wizards seem to have spent their time cowering in terror and believing that Voldemort was invincible, rather than financing mercenary warfare.
Well, so far as the international community consists of other governments. There may have been plenty of concerned foreign citizens.
It's hard to compare, yes. But if you want to compare with the Davises and Potter fortunes, it doesn't sound like 40k is all that much.
For example, if we wanted to compare bounties, we could compare Voldemort to Osama bin Laden's federal bounty of $25 million; googling, the median net worth of an American household is something like $90,000, which gives us a Muggle multiplier of not 130x but 277x. If the Davises really are average (median) then with a Muggle multiplier the bounty on Voldemort might be as high as 113k galleons*. Then presumably you'd have the Potter family fortune of unknown thousands but let's round to 7k and then 120k total - that's 3 times what Harry actually has.
Of course, one can make assumptions which would erase a difference of 300% but you see why I might wonder if Harry did actually receive the bounties.
* Which if anything sounds low to me - Lucius shocks people by demanding 100k for Hermione just for attempting to kill Draco, but it seems plausible they would not be shocked by something like 10k - and Voldemort doesn't just attempt to kill one person, he kills dozens, hundreds, thousands, and multiple Noble House members. The Order, a subaltern organization unapproved of by Magical England, is able to raise 100k all on its own for its own operations. And so on.
Muggle America is also some hundreds of thousands of times more populous than wizarding Britain. That does change some things when it comes to ratios of that sort.
That muggle net worth includes property values that would not be reflected in the Davis vault.
Wizards are specifically described as not engaging fractional-reserve banking, which implies that any real estate is bought without debt with saved-up funds; hence, we would also expect to see savings reflected in wizard vaults and the Davises in particular unless we think they already bought a property (in which case the 300 galleons would then become a massive underestimate, yes).
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.
It's entirely possible that, for the most part, land ownership is not an economic issue for wizards. They are a very small population with no reliance on infrastructure and with easy, accessible and instant transportation from the FlooNetwork and apperation. They don't have pay utility bills either.
I'm willing to bet the only properties that change hands with meaningful frequency are shops in Hogsmead and Diagon Alley. Some folks rent rooms in these places when they are young and career-driven, but when they settle down to raise a family, if they haven't got a property to inherent, they just zip out to some picturesque chunk of rural Britain, get their friends together or hire some specialists to magically assemble a house, and then the ministry stops by to register the place and hook the fireplace up to the Floo Network for a fee.
The vast majority of wizards we see in canon live rurally. Bill and Fleur get set up with a little seaside cottage when they get married and no mention is ever made of cost. The only wizarding house that isn't rural which we know of is Number 12, Grimmauld Place, which was probably straight-up stolen from it's muggle owners in the 19th century and hidden.
Of course, if some muggles show up to ask why their land suddenly has a cozy little house on it that wasn't there yesterday, you bust out the memory charms and suddenly it's been your property all along, sorry for the trouble neighbor.
I was not using implies in the logical deduction sense. Not having fractional-reserve banking eliminates a massive source of capital which could be used for mortgage lending and ceteris paribus will reduce such lending, does it not?
It's probably worth comparing it to "the entire war chest" of the OOTP, 100k galleons.
Edit: ah, you did that.
No.
It's still possible he's got some money down the pipe.
Or that the unpaid bounties were put up by people who now believe Voldemort to have returned.
How Magic Works, Some Facts, Inferences, Conclusions, and Speculations
The Facts:
The Speculations:
The source of magic has a certain limited number of permitted Spell to Effect associations on each power level. These associations are susceptible for expiration when no-one knows the spell anymore. High level associations were frozen in place by the Interdict of Merlin, but low level slots are still expiring, and whatever ritual the wizards use to create spells is merely triggering a garbage collect and conditional new spell insert.
Upon reception of the insert ritual, the Source of Magic scans the Wizard's mind, and performs an optimization algorithm on a set of existing spells to make a new spell which is close enough in some set of dimensions to what it thinks the Wizard wants, after which it associates the spell and effect. Therefore it would use thousands of years of existing infrastructure for making intelligent object effects.
In this scenario a wizard might be trying to create a spell for years, until a slot opens up that he will get to first, competing with everyone else trying to make spells.
Wizards, of course, not willing to accept the apparent randomness of this, have additional learned behaviors about creating spells, things they believe are required, most of which are not required and boil down to daydreaming about the effect you want and practice with the spell string and wand wave.
Can you expand on the reasoning here? I don't see how you conclude that the limitation on time turners is somehow dependent on someone thinking in terms of equinoctal hours. It seems just as plausible that the (length of day)/4 limit (which happens to equal six equinoctal hours) is based on the physics of time turning and has applied all along.
Chizpurfles appear to be canon.
Would you mind giving your evidence for the following points?
We don't actually have any general comments on what kind of animals and plants don't exist. We only know which ones exist in the vicinity of Hogwarts, plus a limited sampling of foreign ones (such as Veela).
Isn't this the opposite of what it does? I thought its sole effect was to prevent the impersonal transmission of spells (and thus the rediscovery of old powerful spells from books).
Example, please?
This is Draco's opinion, IIRC, and apart from the fact that he's an 11-year old boy of limited education, we know that his information sources on wizard power over the ages are strongly biased and unreliable.
I wonder if Quirrel simply had a bad model when he tried to play the hero:
The theory about Quirrel creating Voldemort as a villain to vanquish is probable, especially if you ask Cui Bono?. I wonder if the opposition to his heroics was by the not-so-dumb portion of the Wizengamont:
How would they react to a savior?
Hm, so to rewrite the ending...
I was rereading the new chapters and got very confused about what happens between casting a spell and its effects.
Hexes are slow enough to be dodged from almost point-blank range. Chapter 78:
But some spells have instantaneous effect. Chapter 78:
(There is no way that could have been safe given normal reaction times and current values of g)
Then there is wandless magic, which (I think) is instantaneous in canon, but that would be far too overpowered for MoR. Actually even the hover charm, assuming it is instantaneous, could be deadlier in the hands of a powerful wizard than the killing curse.
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?
You're right, no hint of an explanation why wands are necessary has ever been given. Spontaneous underage magic, as well as high-level wandless magic, would be evidence in favour of the "conceptual limitation" theory.
On the other hand, this wouldn't explain why Bacon, who apparently lacked this conceptual limitation, was severely held back in his research by lack of a wand. Also, it doesn't explain why high-level wizards continue to use wands for the overwhelming majority of their spellcasting.
Maybe it's not that wands are needed to cast spells, but that they amplify magical power (and perhaps adds focus to a target). While the magically powerful are able to cast high level wandless magic, most are unable to. Hence, they have to use wands to make their spells powerful enough to have an effect. Children have spontaneous magic but they can't cast as much as adults normally can with wands.
Perhaps Roger Bacon just wasn't magically powerful. -shrugs- Not all great thinkers have to have tons of strength. Er, wasn't he Muggleborn? If the "Muggleborns-are-weaker" theory is true, then it makes sense.
My hypothesis for the reason why high-level wizards continue to use wands is that they've simply grown dependent. If they've been using magic-amplifying wands ever since they were eleven, then they would be used to being assisted by the wand. I think this matches my mental model of Quirrell, who is seen doing a lot of wandless magic (stopping spells midair, spontaneously combusting inkwells). He seems like the kind of person that would train himself to use his wand as little as possible. And even if he can't duel without, his magical ability is certainly very impressive.
However, the spells they do cast are fully as powerful as those of adults with wands.
Pretty sure this theory has been unambiguously dismissed both in canon and in MoR.
Otherwise your hypothesis is credible, though I still don't accept it as I can't see all the high-level wizards we know being dependent on wands when there are so many advantages to wandless magic (and when high-level wizards tend to be ones with strong, independent personalities).
I think both have been silent on the question of whether there is any notion of inherent "power levels" at all, let alone whether it is heritable or whether it is correlated to being a "muggleborn".
EDIT: It's clear in MoR that - if Harry's hypothesis on magic heritability is true (a big if), then other non-binary factors seem unlikely to be correlated to being a "muggleborn". However, I felt that Harry very strongly anchored on that hypothesis, which was one of my reasons for being annoyed with him and eventually stopping reading (to pick it back up later on, obviously)
In fact more powerful than most adults; there's a line in Chapter 78 that "If [Mr and Mrs Davis]'d been children young enough for accidental magic they probably would've spontaneously Disillusioned themselves.", which we know requires significantly above-average power in MoR. (Assuming that line from the narrator isn't exaggeration.)
If you accept the hypothesis, wanded magic has the not-insignificant advantage of being more powerful. What's the advantage of wandless magic?
I thought it was obvious. What if you're without a wand?
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 you are erring when you assume that these are Voldemort's plans. They might be, but I don't think they have to be. The story seems to have deviated quite far from the original story.
In fact, my reading is that Quirrell may actually be some good guy, destroying our expectations from the story. I mean, has his turban even been mentioned?
Chapter 12 (the Welcoming Feast):
This is a better interpretation of that bit than I've seen before--I approve.
Not that the theme isn't present, but I almost consider that a general theme of fiction. Romeo and Juliet is enabled by the authorities on both sides not having accurate models of their respective scions. Of Mice and Men is about Lenny's inaccuracy in his model of George. Die Hard always ends because the villain does not have an accurate model of John McClane. I'm sure you could write a whole book about Death Note. etc.
While it is present in HPMoR, it doesn't strike me as especially significant any more so than other fiction, compared to the many more overtly rationalist themes already present.
(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).
Assuming you meant Hogwarts...
If there is a possession element to this plot, as Dumbledore believes, it may not have been her will she was fighting when she had to clamp her mouth shut to keep it from saying Yes.
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.
You're right.
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.
Quidditch really nags me, because the team you are playing with has nearly zero relevance. And it is so unnessesary, even if Rowling desired a position on the team of key importance, the way the snitch works is still wrong - If it was worth zero points, but catching it ended the game, then seekers are still key, they just cannot win entirely on their own anymore, and the job would require more than just "flies fast",
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.
To be honest there is still a small impact of the rest of the team on the game : the Beaters can use the Bludgers against the seekers (so they do interact with seekers and affect their chance of catching the Snitch), and there are occasional cases in which the Quaffle point difference is high enough so the Snitch doesn't decide the game (the final of the World Cup in cannon).
But yes, since the first time I heard about the rules of Quidditch, I was "gah, that just doesn't make sense - make the Snitch worth much less, like 30, at the very least".
Hypothesis: Once upon a time, the wizarding world had no popular sport of its own, and Quidditch was more akin to aerial dueling, a one-on-one contest of skill. Then, someone realised all the various benefits/opportunities offered by popular sports (perhaps by watching the Muggle world), and added extra rules and a team element to give the crowds something to watch while the Seekers continued their long periods of boredom interspersed with sharp bursts of activity.
Quidditch today generates a massive market in terms of matches, merchandise, contracts, celebrity culture etc. - a market that benefits the economy as a whole and certain key segments of it especially. It also serves various other purposes common to team sports, such as channeling the volatile energy of young people, and creating a harmless outlet for tension between countries (harmless in theory, anyway - we don't have riot statistics for the wizarding workl).
Whoever shaped Quidditch into its modern form didn't need a balanced game - they just needed something to fill the sport-shaped gap in wizard society. Such a hypothesis would explain why Quidditch is so poor in game design terms - unbalanced scoring, disproportionately high risk of injury and matches of unpredictable length don't matter quite so much if your goal is to pander to the audience rather than make a fair test of the competitors' skills.
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.
Alas. I have not read any of the follow-up works, and did not realise that they would persist in demolishing any attempt to inject credibility into the Potterverse.
I think the canon explanation is about as credible as yours, and they're both pretty good. "A typical competitive ballgame got merged with competitive bird-hunting" is a decent way it could have happened.
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.
There were a bunch of theories regarding the identities of Hat and Cloak and Santa Claus and the details of the prank on Rita Skeeter, but those were mostly settled in recent chapters.
I can haz evidences, plz?
But thanks for even just the claims.
Quirrell makes 'riddle' puns and told the story of his mother's crime as an offhand remark. The rest is all under Conservation of Detail, which the author suggested we pay attention to.
That is, there is only room for one, true antagonist, everyone else is just an obstacle. Voldemort, more than anyone else (except maybe Dumbledore if you follow that fascinating fringe theory), is set up to be the antagonist. Behind all the things that Quirrell does for HJPEV or anyone else, he is evil. He really is.
Donc, he's almost certainly Voldemort.
I think it is also fairly accepted that Dumbledore helped Lily Potter pretty-up her sister through the potion textbook he gave to HJPEV with the "terrible secret." I think that's winning out over the "Dumbledore used Lily to break Snape" theory that I was favoring a while back.
We think Lucius thinks HJPEV is Vodlemort because it makes a lot more sense out of what Lucius says to HJPEV in chapter 38. And later chapters, too. That's a "It just fits together" answer that I'm sure some don't like. But there it is.
I don't know of good proof for Harry's status. I thought it was disputed. There's the whole 'dark side' thing, but then he kind of has a lot of sides.
I could get quote for all of these later, like Monday or maybe sooner. But not right now. Maybe someone else will in the meantime, maybe not.
On Riddle Puns:
Malfoy's "instant" of surprise doesn't make sense unless it's in response to what Potter said. Malfoy wouldn't have been surprised for only an instant by anything else that Harry said, because he had already seen Harry spook the dementor. This supports the theory that Malfoy thinks Harry is Voldemort, to the extent that the Quirrell = Voldemort theory is true. It also supports the Quirrel = Voldemort theory to the extent that the Malfoy thinks Harry is Voldemort theory is true. It ties those theories together, a little bit.
The weakness of this argument is that it requires a previously unmentioned detail, that Malfoy knows Voldemort uses riddle puns. But that's a small weakness and the argument still seems more true than false.
It only requires that Malfoy knows Voldemort to be Tom Riddle -- which in canon he did.
In addition to what the others have said there are numerous other passages and oddities that hint at Quirrel = Voldemort = Harry's dark side. Harry and Quirrel describing a Horcrux between them when they talk about the Pioneer plate. Quirrel saying he "resolved his parental issues to his satisfaction" long ago, just after saying being grateful for his parents could never have occured to him. Quirrel having a much better model of Harry than of Draco or Hermione, particularly when Harry's dark side is involved. Harry's dark side and Quirrel both being extremely vulnerable to Dementors. Harry's dark side and Quirrel both being very good at pretending to be other people. Quirrel's extremely odd reaction when Harry talks about having a mysterious dark side and his going along with the convenient conclusion that it's just another part of Harry. Dumbledore and Snape recognizing Voldemort's hand in Quirrels actions. Harry's dark side hating Dumbledore. And so on.
The strongest piece of evidence for Lucius believing Harry to be Voldemort is his "I know it was you" message after breaking out Bellatrix.
And of course, from Chapter 34:
Evidence for the second one (Sirius Black).
The guy who caught that second quote is completely amazing.
Why thank you.
Wait, when did we learn anything about the Rita Skeeter prank?
Harry concluded that it must have been a false memory charm. That was one of the more popular theories before, and Harry agreeing is probably as much confirmation as we are going to get in-story.
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?
This is might be my favourite comment thread on all of Less Wrong. Terrible pity that the poster left!
EDIT: Semi-relevant.
EDIT 2: I have a great love for some technically awful music that I find still entertains me loads. I inflict The Shaggs on my friends in college every excuse I get.
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.
On the one hand, I once listened to "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" for three days straight. I had not stopped enjoying it when I stopped listening to it. (My roommates and guests did not share my enthusiasm, but I don't think they ever liked the song.)
On the other hand, while attempting to transfer a customer to the appropriate party I once listened to "Unchained Melody" for almost an hour. I didn't snap (it was a mill of a call center, so public nervous breakdowns were not unheard of), but the piece gained the ability to infuriate me even without the extra hours and fuck-with-your-brain inconsistency.
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.
EY is one hilarious fellow. He should do standup. The Horrible Humming was just too funny.
And interesting too, because you wonder if it could work.
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.
Tolerance for rejection is a much harder qualifier to meet for success in standup than being funny is. Just, you know, so you know.
The Horrible Humming was great in itself, but it felt a bit artificial to me : why didn't the Auror just cast a Quietus charm ? Silencing prisoners with a gag is not that unusual in the Muggle world, and I would definitely except the wizards to use a Quietus charm or equivalent if a prisoner started to bother the Aurors with sound. It's not like Wizard Britain is very respectful of human rights of prisoners and that gags (mundane or magical ones) would be felt a non-acceptable behavior.
Listening and watching - monitoring - appears to be part of the job.
Because of the humor, I'm willing to suspend belief a little on realism. It's not a fundamental plot point. But it is funny.
Quirrell would probably have sneezed it away, again.
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. Even if he didn't do anything before, just resisting police forces is a criminal in many places, and it would really surprise me if Wizard Britain, with its awful human rights record, would let that go.
Edit : unless there is something much, much deeper at work here. Like Quirrel imperiusing or controlling in another way some high-ranking officers.
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.
Hum, in canon at least, when they try to arrest Dumbledore at the end of tome 5 (HP and the Order of the Phoenix) they don't seem that hesitant to arrest him, as soon as they have proof he's doing something illegal, and they seem quite surprised he escaped.
But that could be a point of divergence between canon and HP:MoR, especially if the head of the Auror is very intelligent in HP:MoR, she could know about not escalating conflicts too easily.
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.
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.
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.
To cast the charm would be effectively to admit defeat before an unarmed prisoner (in a way that calling in a replacement according to standard procedure wouldn't), and also to be roundly mocked by other Aurors if they found out. Or so the Auror in question presumably thought.
Casting the charm is also an admission of defeat.
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.
See, I'm the sort of person that reads that and wants to buy that record. Probably from the small ads in the back of The Wire.
(Breaking musical rules sufficiently horribly is a well-established way to win at music, even if you're unlikely to get rich from it. Metal Machine Music actually got reissued and people actually bought it.)
Well, first we're dealing with variations on a specific tune. The reason I suspect that random variations might work well is that if the probability of a change is sufficiently low, it would have exactly the effect you suggest: mostly the original "Lullaby and Goodnight", but with occasional horrible. Of course, if I were actually a cruel genius, I could do better, but it would be foolish of me to admit to being one.
Another reason random changes might work well is that they are by definition unexpected. If I did something purposeful, it would have a pattern; the real Quirrell might break that pattern by observing his victim's reactions, but not having a pattern at all might also be an interesting thing to try.
My music theory is rusty and anyway underdeveloped. But I don't think individual notes can be disturbingly off key. It is the relationship between notes that takes them out of key. A single note of any frequency will produce harmonics with anything in the environment that is capable of responding, and thus create its own meager, on key accompaniment.
I think MIDI keeps you from even approaching the kind of terrible close but not quite right tones you want to reproduce.
Changing one individual note in a monophonic tune absolutely can be horribly off key. Melody is harmony, and harmony is counterpoint; even with a single voice humming, if the tune is "classical" enough your brain understands intuitively where the chord changes are and what the bass line should be.
You don't need microtonal pitches to violently defy people's expectations.
(EDIT: Though you almost certainly do need microtonal pitches to precisely mimic the effects described in the text. But I think you certainly could do something horrible without them.)
I don't think you need to even venture into the world of quarter pitches in order to create horrible humming. To give an idea of a song that twists your expectations of keys and time signatures and melodic progression, and breaks it in specific ways to ramp tension, check the epiphany from sweeney todd.
When I was reading that part, all I could think was "Man, I have to try do that..."
There are ways around this: a program called Scalar allows you to build microtonally tuned scales and set them up to be controlled by MIDI. Also, Native Instruments' Kontakt allows you to change the tuning of instruments and map the new tuning to a keyboard.
Scalar is free but hard to use: I was never actually able to figure out how to set it up to hear the scales I'd built - but my laptop seems to have a grudge against MIDI devices anyway. Kontakt is a lot easier to use but costs a couple of hundred euro.
You might check out a program called Max/MSP if you want to get really deep into this stuff. It handles conversions between MIDI and audio signal pretty elegantly. Other ideas..
You might try making notes that change pitch continuously You might try putting the breaks in parts of the music where we expect it to continue. MIDI "doo" or other synth voice instruments tend to sound pretty maddening on their own without much special effort. Maybe layer in helicopter sounds or applause to simulate breathiness?
The FluidSynth sound fonts are quite nice within their instruments' usual range, but do try going up or down a bit far for great lulz.
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.
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!
Is he actually loyal to his students or Up To Something?.
Remember: Quirrell can care about his students any time he likes, because he's not Good.
Or perhaps it's more accurately phrased as "I can show up the good guys any time I want to make them look bad, because I'm not constrained by the same fear of ill consequences that they are".
Could be both. In any case I think it's a fair assumption that Quirrell is always up to something.
This is driving me crazy.
I never know when he's doing evil or not. This chapter, for example, led me to believe he was doing good at some point of his life. Although my rationalist-beginner-side is screaming at me he is Voldemort or something, I can't help but sympathize with that point.
Um, his "good" deed consisted of attempting to set up a fake ultimate hero and getting really pissed of when people didn't fall for it.
We don't actually know that yet. It's only a popular fan theory.
Velorien should not be downvoted. He asked himself the fundamental question of rationality:
and the fact of the matter is, we don't know that that's true, it is a falsifiable theory with supporting evidence and multiple proponents but we don't know yet.
Upvoted.
I think he takes his responsibilities seriously. His evil comes from his condemnation of the weakness, stupidity, cowardice, and irresponsibility of others. He lives up to his standards, but others don't.
I'm confident that is how Quirrell is meant to appear. But the villain's real face may be a bit of a riddle.
Groan.
You know you love it.
I do, that's the worst part.
Incidentally, are there no Author's Notes for chapter 84?
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)
You don't think a pissed-off 12 year old who's fighting a duel for vengeance might be inclined to rub a little salt in the wounds?
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.
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't explain where all the grandparents are.
So many things don't match up. In retrospect, it seems odd for Lucius Malfoy to be alone in front of the Wizengamot when he ought to have four grandparents roughly Dumbledore's age and two parents at around Voldemort's age (though canonically his father dies of an old age disease prior to 1996...what?). That hearing doesn't seem like the kind of event his family would skip out on. The bureaucracy and government structures don't make sense either. When I first read the story, I thought the Ministry and other power structures were dominated by old fogies, but now I realize that they're damn near children! 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. And heck, how does Harry go to his muggle relatives when he ought to have dozens of still surviving wizard relatives up higher in the family tree?
I suppose the real answers to these questions is that JK Rowling didn't think through the societal implications of living 150+ years old and HPMoR adopted it rather than having to overhaul the entire canon. But that's not quite a satisfying answer. So, can anyone think of any thoughts or theories on how the magical world looks the way it does with regard to age? I'd rather save my suspension of disbelief for birds of fire and talking hats, not have to spend it on census statistics.
Nitpick:
Why would you think that would happen? Women already regularly outlive their fertile periods in real life. Unless you're also proposing some magical mechanism of fertility increase (and if so, why?), you wouldn't expect fertile periods to increase.
Of course, wizards would have longer fertile periods, but you still bump into the hard limit of how many children witches are willing and able to have.
Maybe he is thinking of fertility the way a gamer thinks of health.
Wizards are just healthier. There isn't a solid, hard science fiction explanation for why they heal faster and shrug off harder hits. They just do.
Likewise no attention needs to be paid to the nature of the end of fertility or the resources that run out or the way the odds of viable offspring and safe childbirth start ramping down around in the mid to late twenties in normal females. They just don't in a witch's life.
Could be, although there is still menopause, which is more what I was thinking about... That seems less attached to a general concept of "health" to me for some reason.
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.
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?
Particularly since there's almost certainly an easy spell for that.
Which seems to be unknown to 7th year students of Hogwarts.
Sigh. Magical education is seriously lacking.
Or you cast the spell after doing the deed, and that one time they were too busy fleeing/claiming this wasn't what it looked like/getting castigated/getting dressed.
...just how many pregnancies has McGonagall caused, anyway?
Or maybe they simply wanted a child? That can happen at that age, even if it's not all that common in our societies.
True. It's not like having a child at that age will prevent them from going to college or have any particularly negative effects in the HPMORverse.
Edit: I accidentally a word there. Edit 2: And then I the put word in the wrong place.
Perhaps it still has a drawback.
This being a Potterverse it wouldn't be something straightforward like the way a condom insulates against body heat or decreases sensation. It'd be that the semen is magically transported into a nearby container. If you don't have a proper container prepared it ends up somewhere inconvenient like someone's pocket, or outer ear, or mouth. Or that both parties must spend a moment beforehand concentrating on a blue sphere, or the smell of vomit, or the sound of breaking celery. Or maybe it just makes a lady's feet numb.
So some people in some situations skip the contraceptive because they aren't prepared or don't want to deal with the complication.
Which is much less of an issue if your own parents and grandparents (and maybe even another generation) are around to dote on your children.
Except they'd also be around to dote on your nieces and nephews (who are also their grandchildren) and the children of your first cousins (since those children would be their great-grandchildren just as much as your own children would be). In fact, because they're subject to multipliers as they go further up the family tree, they have even less time for each child.
This does not make any stronger argument against desiring sex without conception, not does it weaken my "only thirty hours in a day" argument for sex without conception.
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.
Church of England, surely.
As an American I can tell you confidently that the wizards and witches of magical Britain have one quality above all others: they are British.
This would explain why religion never comes up in canon.
It does, a little bit. I think there's one church service, seen from the outside, and some important grave -- Harry's parents? -- has a quotation from the New Testament on it. ("The last enemy to be defeated is death", which of course plenty of not-at-all-religious people would have much sympathy with.) But yes, religion in the UK tends to be rather less conspicuous than in the US.
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.
Probably for the same reason the existence of guns hasn't resulted in human extinction.
On the other hand, I don't carry a gun on my keychain, but a wizard's wand is used to do everything from insta-death to turning on and off the lights in a room.
In canon, not only is casting the killing curse extremely illegal, it's probably beyond the abilities of most wizards anyway. It's said to take powerful magic, and most adult wizards aside from professors and aurors are implied to be inept at even the basics of defensive magic.
I thought it added verisimilitude to the setting, that rather than being on a level far above teenage students after decades of honing their skills, most witches and wizards are fairly incompetent and don't remember most of what they were made to learn in school, much like how most of our population can't win Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader
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 his identity.
Then there's this hero. The hero is a what passes for a minor noble in magical Britain. He's from a 'cadet' branch of the family, which means he doesn't stand to inherit anything substantial because he's not main line.
Most importantly, he goes missing in Albania. That's a shout out to canon and a code phrase for "became Tom RIddle's bitch."
As Voldemort, Tom sows terror and reaps fear. He's ridiculously evil and for Dumbledore redefines evil because he is apparently evil without necessity. Dumbledore can't tell what function that outrageous evil serves because Dumbledore thinks that evil is done sincerely. He doesn't know it's just a show.
Tom stages a dramatic entrance into the drama for his hero: he saves the president's daughter, or something like that. Totally Horatio Alger. It's a cliche, which may be EY's way of helping us to understand that Tom is fallible, more then than now.
Tom promotes his hero from Minor Noble to Last Scion of House X by killing off the rest of his hero's family. Tom simultaneously builds legitimacy for his hero's authority and leverages the tragedy to build sympathy for his hero's cause.
Tom's mistake was thinking that would be enough. There was a threat to the peace. There was a solution. The people instead chose to wallow in their failure and doom. He made it all so clear, so simple, and yet the morons just didn't get it.
I'm sure anyone whose been the biggest ego in the room during improv could sympathize.
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.
When Tom gets a chance, he pulls his villain off the stage and may or may not have done something to the infant Harry Potter.
Now he's using the Scion of X as an identity layer to keep the fuzz off his back, while manipulating Harry into a position of power, and I'm guessing he plans to hit Harry with the Albanian Shuffle a little while later and give World Domination another try.
Tom Riddle is a young immortal. He makes mistakes but has learned an awful lot. He is trying to plan for the long term and has nothing but time, and so can be patient.
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 don't think your current post "deserves" as many upvotes as it got, but that other post is just bad. Badly written, badly argued, makes lots of unsupported random claims, like "Voldemort killed Narcissa".
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.
One factor is that it's a top-level comment to a popular post, and once a top-level comment outcompetes most others it's shown more prominently and read by more people.
Why hello there! We are called humans, have you met us before?
I downvoted the previous post because it was a needlessly complicated, poorly justified plan. Crucially, there was little indication of why Voldemort would want to pretend to lose, when he was already winning the war. By contrast, your more recent post is a good analysis of the new insight into Voldemort's history and motivations provided by the latest chapter.
Maybe the illusion of transparency doesn't let you see how much clearer this comment [EDIT: I mean the parent comment] is.
Did you just get burned by the Illusion of Transparency while referencing the Illusion of Transparency?
Well. Done.
You're probably right. I have no fucking clue what you're thinking.
Well, I thought it was!
I liked the story you told, I found it interesting so I upvoted (but your post was like at 5 or 6 when I upvoted it, I wouldn't have upvoted it if it was already above 30, I tend to avoid upvoting posts which are already too high, unless they are really wonderful).
I didn't see the first one - I don't read all the comments, depends of my schedule. Maybe since you posted your new one earlier in the thread, when it wasn't too bloated, more people saw it ?
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 all sorts of directions he could have gone from here, including him deciding that the world seems particularly hateful and so why not keep up the villain role, when the benefits are so much better? But spending a few years in an "okay, now what?" slump seems out of character.
Yeah, I get that now.
I've amended my suspicion to be that Riddle enjoyed himself in the Voldemort role, for maybe a little less than eight years. I still think he intentionally left the stage and didn't somehow end up on the losing end of a Nuts roll vs.. infant. Tom Riddle bites it in a cutscene? Lame.
My primary hypothesis is still that getting cindered by Harry was the consequence of some unknown unknown, some event that Voldemort wouldn't have been able to predict in advance by being really good at planning.
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 student that opened the Chamber of Secrets in '41 was not Tom Riddle, but someone else. Why pick one patsy, when you could have two? It's just one more murder, hardly anything at all.
This means that Voldemort, whomever he really is, had a backup identity behind 'Voldemort' just like he has a backup identity behind Quirrell. It means that he didn't get discovered back in the '70s. And it means that he's just as slick and awesome and I hope he is, as I wish he is.
Oh, damn. I have far, far too much affection for this character. 84 is my new favorite chapter.
That sounds unsolvable with only the information we've been given.
If it was another kid in Hogwarts that opened the chamber then why haven't there been any hints in the text to this man behind the man who is also the man behind the other man who is pretending to be the man behind yet another man.
And if it was an adult then also who because there are not hints and how did they get into Hogwarts and the Chamber and I don't think you mean it was someone who was already grown up in 41.
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.
What exactly is this supposed to evoke?
It was a surprise, but a "warm" (i.e. emotionally positive) surprise.
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 doubt whether it's good to do actual anti-conformity training because it might make you too non-conforming (i.e. sticking to wrong positions). Instead, maybe it'd be better to do training on how to use others' opinions as evidence, similar to calibration training. The approach of anti-conformity training sounds good, but I'd stray in some statements which are actually false, the goal here is to actually get to the right conclusions whether the rest of society is right or wrong.
It seems unlikely to be the sort of field where people will overcorrect - the causes of conformity(both psychologically and sociologically) are immense, and a bit of training will not overbalance the scales.
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, and you who's making a stupid mistake which will make you feel like an idiot when you finally realize it. Refusing to conform is both achievable and proper when you have a palpable expectation that other people are going to be stupid.
Unfortunately, it's rather easy for one's expectations of other people's intelligence and rationality to become poorly calibrated.
Having an experience of being right where everyone else is wrong, is good for breaking the fear of nonconformity.
When I was a child, I participated on a science olympiad and on one question I gave an answer that seemed trivially wrong, but in fact it was correct. (There were two objects of different size, made of same material, balanced on a lever, then both immersed in water. How will the balance chance?) Everyone thought I was wrong, and the official solution confirmed it. Then the organizers realized they made a mistake, and confirmed my solution.
Since then I knew (also on emotional level) that it is possible to be right, even if everyone else disagrees. Sometimes it is wise to keep quiet, because the social consequences of nonconformity are real, but being alone does not make one automatically wrong. It was a good lesson.
On the other hand, the fact that you were comfortable being the lone dissenter while untrained in resisting conformity may indicate that your social wiring is atypical. Some people in some situations may interpret that difference as a socioemotional flaw.
It might be that my own experiences won't generalize to other people, but in domains where I haven't developed an expectation that everyone else really will make mistakes that I didn't, if everyone else is saying I'm wrong, I'll tend to conclude that I'm probably wrong.
I wouldn't exactly say I was untrained though. We learn from our life experiences. I was smarter than the great majority of my peers growing up, and fairly precocious, a stage ahead through my childhood, so seeing people around me believing things that seemed head-in-sand stupid, because the things they believed were actually stupid, as the products of less developed minds, was simply the way of the world as I grew up.
The hard part, which I see reflected among many other people who grew up ahead of their peers, was developing a sense of when you really should expect other people not to be any less sensible than you are.
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.
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.