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loserthree comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Why should the time of an ominous decision be so relevant to seers? Even if the consequences of the decision have a big impact on the future, that future already was the future. It's not like there is a default future before you make your decision and a different future afterwards, your decision itself would already be a part of the future of any earlier point in time. From a many worlds perspective you might have several different possible futures so your overall prospect of the future might significantly change after an important branching, but Harry's decision doesn't seem particularly influenced by recent random chance; it seems unlikely that from the perspective of 6 hours ago most future Harrys would make a completely different decision.
The clock is a gift from Dumbledore. On the one hand, it could be recording. On the other hand it could be transmitting. On the gripping hand, Dumbledore has a Time Turner.
If Dumbledore wanted to assure that any time he was the best pressure-release for a prophesy that pressure was released as easily and discretely as possible and less likely to be overheard, he would want to make it easy for the Prophesy Force to get that information to him.
So he gives her a clock and tells her to ask it for the time each time she wakes up in the middle of the night. The clock tells Dumbledore. Dumbledore gets invisible. Then it's just a jump to the left and he receives any prophesy intended for him.
That's so obvious in retrospect, and Dumbledore is so meddling, that now I don't think he's allowed not to have thought of that.
So when the clock responds to her question, that's actually invisible Dumbledore?
No. It's just a clock. But it is there, so Dumbledore knows at which point in time he should jump back to (given the option of course) {all this is an interpretation of loserthree's post}
I meant, if whenever she queries the clock for the time, Dumbledore will have arrived already, then there was no need for him to enchant the clock further to respond to the query - he could just answer it himself, since he's already there.
That may fall under the don't-mess-with-time injunction. Easier to just be silent and let the clock do its job.
That might explain the first sentence of Albus Dumbledore's aftermath in Chapter 63: "It might have been only fifty-seven seconds before breakfast ended and he might have needed four twists of his Time-Turner, but in the end, Albus Dumbledore did make it."
Or perhaps not, since there would presumably be more than 4 hours between 2am (when Trelawny heard the prophecy) and the end of breakfast.
it looks like it's saying that Dumbledore used four twists of his time-turner to make it to breakfast.