= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 18, chapter 87
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 87. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
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, 15, 16, 17.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (592)
I failed both to understand that after second rereading of the fic and to find the explaination in the discussion thread, so... Could someone please expand in the most expansive way possible the Harry/Lucius dialogue in Ch. 38? It makes no sense to me, like I was reading random sentences. And it seem like a major part of the plot, so I don't want to miss it.
From chapter 85:
Did anyone else get this ref? I haven't seen anyone else post about it.
Eliezer says on r/hpmor that it is a reference to the John Brown of Harpers Ferry. Responding to someone pointing out time-and-place difficulties, he says:
Which spells/potions/etc have Eliezer declared too overpowered to appear in HPMoR, or at least nerfed considerably?
Context: Ten years ago, when I and my writing allies were considerably more stupid, we started on an RPG that wound up fitting the insane crossover tropes a bit too closely (Sauron and Jedi have yet to show up, at least...). It's still ongoing, if considerably slower due to everyone else getting lives, but as some tenth aniversory shenanigans, we've started rewriting the first couple years to not suck, and I've realized that I really need to pay more attention to Harry Potter magic for it to make any sense, even though I kept the HP references as few as possible. So far, I've already made use of Voldemort's horcrux cave from Halfblood Prince, and am going to look up exactly how the fidelius works next.
Regarding the Rita Skeeter prank. The leading hypothesis now seems to be that she was memory charmed, though this didn't seem obvious to me when reading.
Something else that didn't seem obvious to me until recently is that there is a character who is both skilled enough to pull off such a convincing memory modification, and secretive enough to require that the twins be obliviated. It isn't entirely clear that he remains so skilled and in character in HPMoR, but Madeye's description points toward those remaining similar enough to canon that I'm seriously considering the possibility that Fred/George/Floom hired Gilderoy Lockheart to modify Rita's memory.
Of course, I was so unobservant that I only caught Dumbledore's slight of hand in his first meeting with Harry on my latest rereading (whish is, like, the fourth or fifth). I'm also considering an insane conspiracy theory in which Dumbledore gave Harry his father's rock and his mother's potions book specifically so he could set fire to a chicken, probably for some rituals/soul magic/horcrux/really evil chicken-related reasons. But I'm less confident in that one. :)
Bogdan Butnaru is quite the busy man - if someone with the ability, willpower, and time would like to take the management of the HP:MoR book-style PDF off his hands, or merely lend a helping hand updating previous chapters &c., please pm him at bogdanb to inform him your willingness so he may be motivated to make the LaTeX sources available.
Sorry for that. It’s not only that I was busy, it’s also that I got a bit sad and unmotivated after the phoenix chapter, and started procrastinating.
But I just received some happy news recently, so I’ll get right back on that.
Sorry everyone for the delay, and thank Zaine for reminding me where to place my newly-acquired motivation points :)
Glad to hear your emotional state is now positive! Thank you!
I don't think I'm thinking clearly at the moment, but it occurred to me that splitting the soul is based around the act of murder from the murderer's perspective. This makes me wonder if it would actually require a death to split the soul, rather than the would-be murderer believing that they're deliberately killing someone.
If it's the mental process, rather than the actual killing, that strikes me as a potential avenue for slightly more ethical horcrux creation. The details of the horcrux creation ritual might contradict this, or it really does have to be an actual murder. Even if it's an option, I imagine it'd still be a pretty serious turnoff, though maybe there are enough useful mental magics to pull it off and still end with someone who values human life.
All that assumes that souls exist and can be split, which may be canon but not necessarily true in MoR.
re: "you can see what the male characters will be when they grow up..."
I stopped to think about what Harry would grow up to be.
I think Harry Jules Vern Potter grows up to be... The Doctor.
"A magic wand is indistinguishable from a sonic screwdriver of sufficiently high technology".
Sorry if this is the wrong place to put this, and also sorry if it's been asked before (three different search engines gave me nothing on this) - but in chapter 7, we see interesting behaviour from Ron's owl: "The owl gave Harry an oddly measured and courteous hoot (actually more of an eehhhhh sound, which surprised Harry)." How likely do we think it is that Ron's owl is an Animagus? We know that the pet rat which Bill killed in chapter 29 was just a rat; we also know Pettigrew's Animagus form was really a rat; is it possible that Pettigrew had two forms (owl and rat) and abandoned one of them in order to stay undercover? Or, more likely, the owl is a different witch/wizard who is undercover in the Weasley family. (This feels to me like a "grasping at straws" kind of thought, but EY is indeed ingenious and wily, and something definitely rings not quite true about the pet rat story…)
If the owl IS an animagus, it's probably Serius Black--"i'm not serious, i'm not serious!".
minor non-cannon penalty: cannon serious black is a dog animagus.
Hi. Just found HPMoR and read it all, and please forgive me if anyone had raised this before in the thousands upon thousands of comments that I haven't taken the time to read...
I think I've figured out some Important Things that are going on here.
1) How harry survived the Killing Curse.
Right after the Incident With the Fake Summoning Ritual, we learned about a reference class of magic in which the practitioner first specifies a thing they are willing to sacrifice, and then a thing they expect to receive in exchange. Reviewing Harry's memory of his mother's death in light of this, I realized that Lily stated that she was willing to offer her life in exchange for Harry's safety, and VOLDEMORT AGREED!
2)WTF is Quirrelmort doing? It seems like he is befriending Harry and not trying to kill him.
Rational!Voldemort is very interested in space travel and wants to visit other worlds. He placed his horcrux aboard the Pioneer probe not to insure it could never be found and destroyed, but as part of a plan to move his consciousness to other worlds. When he heard of Trelawney's prophesy, R!V went to mark Harry as his equal so that Harry could eventually destroy all but a remnant of him, using a power that R!V knows not, resulting in their two souls not being in the same world.
I don't understand why he needs Bellatrix for this, but I think he is being honest about having given up on being Dark Lord and wanting Harry to take that role. I think he really likes Harry, and genuinely sees them as having a lot in common, almost like Harry is his surrogate son.
Also, he supported Harry's decision not to reveal the secrets of the True Patronus because he NEEDS Harry to have/use a power that he himself knows not, and also doesn't want Dumbledore to have it.
Re: Bellatrix. In canon Quirrel is a temporary stopping place for Voldemort's spirit until he can incarnate in a new body. One of the ways to do this is a ritual that requires the parts mentioned in HPMOR, eg a servant, an enemy, an ancestor etc. Bellatrix is his best servant.
But, if his plan is that his soul be sent to another world, he does not need his body back, does he?
Maybe. He'd have to be content to spend an indefinite but probably very long span of time as whatever goes into a Horcrux in this continuity, without any well-defined hope of resurrection.
It's a cool idea, but Quirrell's not the type to send his soul (for lack of a better word) to another planet just because it's a cool idea. Unfortunately we don't know much about how well a Horcrux can perceive or influence its surroundings, which is somewhat important in this context. He might be trying to cast a light into the future, cryonics-style, but that seems like a long shot by my measure of Quirrell; he knows something of Muggle science but he's probably not hip to obscure, relatively recent ideas.
He's using the Pioneer probe as the ultimate safe deposit box. I don't think we have enough evidence to say he's looking for anything more dramatic than that.
Actually, it has occurred to me that maybe he doesn't need his body back, because he never lost it. He's not wearing a turban to cover two-facedness, and Harry's "recovered" memory from his infancy may have been the result of a false memory charm. In this continuity, can we really be sure that Quirrel is a separate person that Voldie is using, or maybe he is just Voldie in disguise?
Also in canon, the servant chosen was Pettigrew. HPMoR is at least feinting towards Bellatrix as a much more obvious choice at least partially as a commentary on how Pettigrew's a dumb choice.
to be fair, in canon breaking out of Azkaban involved secret animagus status (Until Voldie was back in life and able to control dementors). In HPMOR it involved Harry's special abilities, cloak of true invisibility, etc. etc. Pettigrew still seems like a dumb choice but
Is there any particular reason that nearly every chapter just got refreshed in RSS at 6:15 AM? A mass update? Computer error on my end?
Not a computer error on your end; the HPMoR Facebook page spammed its followers with a post for every single chapter, too.
Chapter 62:
Wasn't test to check Harry's Time turner too simple? Harry cheated very easy, he just used another person with Time turner. But this is grave matter, escape from Azkaban, and professors had chosen this kind of test...
Yeah, I don't know why the test didn't involve Time-Turning such that he would appear right in front of Dumbledore or whoever at three o'clock. It shouldn't be too difficult to prevent cheating with the Cloak.
It doesn't even require having thought of the test before three, just knowing where someone (Flitwick, etc) was at three, without actually seeing it yourself.
You don’t even need that. It’s enough to have someone with another Time-Turner accompany Harry back.
It couldn't have been Dumbledore or McGonagall or Snape, could it? Because at the time they thought of testing Harry they had already not-experienced Harry appearing in front of them at 3:00. Which itself, though, I suppose, could be a clue pointing to Harry's guilt. But maybe that's too much like "messing with time"?
I wasn't sure what time they were meeting- it seemed like it was a short time after retrieving Harry from lunch, but I couldn't find any specifics. Even if it was after three, though, they could (for example) send a Patronus to Flitwick asking where he was at three o'clock, but not to tell them anything else but that; and have Harry come there at nine, tell him to tell Flitwick not to report his arrival to anyone before nine, then Time-Turn in front of them.
Okay, time to amuse ourselves while waiting for the next chapter.
When last we saw Hermione Granger, she was considering mass producing immortality to clear Harry's debts. I say we should see if we can think of things she could do to make money that are even more disruptive of the status quo than that.
1: "Hi Harry! I created a workaround for Merlins interdict! How much do you think I should charge for teaching someone Al-Azhims Greater Gate"?
2: "I found Rowena's Library Annex. Also, Rowena. anno 987 english: Incomprehensible. But her latin is excellent, so I think we are good to go."
3: "I used a wit-sharpening potion to devise a better wit-sharpening potion... "
4: "The good news is, I now have 27 metric tonnes of gold on hand. The bad news is, about that international wizarding secrecy decree..."
"I managed to get a fully functioning perpetual motion machine via Maxwell's Demon, not much use on the Magical Marketplace, but I think a Muggle initiative might be received a little more positively."
"I've had limited success in permanent transfiguration; no forms but I can power some nuclear reactions with my magic, the effects being ... as lasting as one might expect of the end product. Where would one sell weapons-grade plutonium in quantity?"
"My experiments in time-turned computational arithmancy were going perfectly fine until the ghost of Alan Turing showed up. Alan, do tell Harry here what you told me about Dho-Nha geometries ...."
Forgive me if someone's mentioned this before, but...
The ritual to resurrect Voldemort requires three things. Willingly given flesh of his servant (the closer and stronger the better in this story). A bone from his father's grave, taken without his father's knowledge. And lastly, and I quote from "Goblet of Fire;" "B-blood of the enemy... forcibly taken... you will... resurrect your foe."
So, one would think that Quirrell has two of these three things, correct? Wrong. Recall chapter 26, when Professor Quirrell and Harry are discussing the ridiculous article Rita wrote. "Give me that,' said Professor Quirrell, and the newspaper leaped out of Harry's hand so fast that he got a paper cut.
Harry automatically put the finger in his mouth to suck on, feeling rather shocked, and turned to remonstrate with Professor Quirrell -
Professor Quirrell had stopped short in the middle of the street, and his eyes were flickering rapidly back and forth as an invisible force held the newspaper suspended before him."
Now, Quirrell hands Harry the paper back, but is it not also possible that, noticing that he had obtained a precious resource, took the blood on the paper without Harry's notice?
The Bone of the Father must be removed during the ritual, not before; it stands to reason that the flesh and blood must be sacrificed during the ritual as well.
I do feel required to point out that that very chapter also contained this tidbit:
Yes, that's been pointed out before. I don't recall anyone raising any good evidence for or against it.
From the harry potter wiki:
I haven't read all of the original books, but is that bit about casting spells far above their level true? If so, it suggests a fairly easy way to gain control of an entire population: imperius a few wizards with the order to imperius as many other wizards as possible with this same command, and to await further instruction. If imperius curses have some sort of time limit after which they expire, include an additional order to seek out another imperius'd wizard to re-imperius you every x days.
This should spread exponentially like a particularly nasty virus.
Previous discussion.
I wonder how the Imperius curse resolves loops.
Just finished Lawrence Watt-Evans' The Sword of Bheleu. It was quite good. I'm guessing with P=70% that Eliezer has actually cracked open a Watt-Evans book while preparing to write hp:mor. Really, take away the old-timey sexism and replace half of the scene description with dialogue and I would have guessed Eliezer as an author.
Edit: okay, I was over-pattern-matching.
Quirrell's "ritual to summon Death" is a reference to the Seething Death from LWE's Ethshar novels, so it's a pretty safe bet.
Huh. Well, I'll clarify a bit to deprive myself of a win on reference: I guess that the style of hp:mor was similar enough to Watt-Evans that I was guessing that it was intentional, and as part of making it happen Eliezer had actually opened a book.
Or at least, that hypothesis is way above the base rate.
Just wanted to note that Quidditch is in fact a perfectly workable game - if you just change up the player strategy a bit.
It's like a game of attack/defense where different plays can be worth different amounts - you go for the highest-payoff thing (the snitch) most of the time, but sometimes you also go for the less valuable things to get free wins or distraction.
If the snitch is the most valuable resource, then just have everyone on your team work towards catching the snitch. It's certainly not what Rowling intended, but it makes sense - catch snitch first, win game. If a seeker can find the snitch quickly, then 5 practiced teammates should be able to keep track of it almost all the time. Then it becomes something more like a race, or dogfighting - particularly if the snitch moves according to predictable patterns so that there's reasonable strategy to it. As the snitch takes longer to catch, it makes more and more sense to split someone off to take points with the quaffles. At this point quidditch actually becomes a high-skill game again, capable of containing brilliant plays that advance your team's position both in terms of catching the snitch and in the slow game.
I was under the impression that only the seeker could legally catch the snitch and take the points, but having the rest of the team act as spotters seems like an obvious good idea.
Its entirely possible (at least in HPMOR canon) that the tactics at a professional level are wildly different to at the school level, as is the case in a lot of sports.
In "Quidditch Through The Ages", it states that non-seekers touching the snich is not allowed, and if you do so that is a penalty, that is it gives the opposing team a penalty shot at your hoops. However, yes, hving the rest of the team act as spotters could be a good idea. The question is how far do you take it. If literaly your whole team did nothing more than look for the snich, your opponents could easily score imediatly at least 15 goals, rendering the strategy moot.
Then you'd end up with each team attempting to distract the other teams spotters by scoring goals.... and you're back to the start.
I've often thought about how Quidditch could be made into a better game, without simply getting rid of Seekers and Snitches. My idea:
By these rules, all the players must make active contributions to the goal-scoring game, and catching more Snitches earlier confers a significant advantage, but not an unovercomeable one.
BELATED EDIT: I must also add, so long as we're talking about Quidditch rules:
Is Quirrell's Starry Night horcrux communication? Is this how Harry will catch him out?
It occurs to me that Harry is overlooking a pretty blatant piece of evidence that the minds of wizards are either not running on wetware at all, or that there is a trivial way to transcribe them. Animagi can turn into small animals - and back again. That would simply not work, unless their minds could be trivially separated from their substrate.
Eh.. Which brings up another point. Do wizards suffer brain damage? At all? I don't think Harry has actually checked..
Bella, Voldemort, Obliviation backlash, half of St. Mungo's parents, Cruciatus... if they don't suffer brain damage, Eliezer has gone against quite a bit in canon.
I think Izeinwinter was asking whether physical damage to the brain causes mental damage in wizards, not whether there's any way to cause mental damage (where "mental damage" is distinct from "brain damage" if wizard's minds aren't actually running in their brains).
Oh. Hm... is anyone physically knocked unconscious at any point? That would seem to satisfy the criteria: a non-magical thing that affects only the physical brain but which causes negative effects on the mind.
We can find in "Quidditch Through the Ages", which can be assumed to be canon, this lovely poem:
Bludgers are still magical and therefore could still "get at" the 'mind' regardless of the physical brain.
What if Bludgers, being modelled after naive physics, have inherent knocking-people-out property? Wouldn't that be in line with how canon is being dealt with in HPMOR?
Very improbable; in Canon, they break bones in extremities all the time.
(Long-time lurker; first post)
Some points from earlier chapters that remain unclear to me: any insights would be appreciated?
1) Why did Neville's remembrall go off so vividly in Harry's hands? Also, how are there now two remembralls?
2) Do we have any more information/guesses about Trelawney's prophecy that Dumbledore cut off? What starts with 'S'?
3) Who told Harry to look for Hermione on the train? The writing is ambiguous, and it's not really clear why McGonagall would've wanted them to meet. I guess other theories are worse, though.
4) What's up with Harry's father's rock? Just a way for Dumbledore to encourage Harry to practice transfiguration?
5) Why are we so sure Dumbledore burned a chicken (or transfigured something)? His explanation makes total sense, and Harry's confusion at the time is well-explained by his lack of familiarity with phoenixes. It seems more reasonable to assume almost-burned-out phoenixes look like chickens than...whatever the alternative is.
6) Who is saying "I'm not serious" in Azkaban?
7) Is the "terrible secret" of Lily's potion book really that Snape and Lily fought about it? That just seems like a bizarre reason for a friendship to end. Were Dumbledore's suggestions incorporated into the potion Petunia took?
8) Why did Quirrell leave a polyjuice potion in Bellatrix's cell? (especially since the crime was meant to go unnoticed)
(8) is because he knew that the moment Dumbledore learned of the potion, he would conclude that Harry Potter was not the mastermind of the escape. "to fathom a strange plot, one technique was to look at what ended up happening, assume it was the intended result, and ask who benefited."
on 3; From chapter 6
Seems clear to me that the whisper came from McGonagall - Harry was talking to her, Harry turned his back and heard a whisper from "her" that sounded like her. Harry thinks so to - in chapter 8 we have;
1) Harry is a horcrux who forgot his entire previous life.
2) Not sure.
3) I like the theory that it was Quirrell but I would only put it at about 20% likely.
6) Peter Pettigrew.
7) The terrible secret is that Dumbledore intentionally sabotaged Snape and Lily's relationship by writing bad advice into her textbooks in Snape's handwriting. It would indeed be bad if Snape discovered this.
8) I'm pretty curious about this one. I think that if it were discovered, say, a year later that Bellatrix was gone, and the potion was found, the authorities would assume that Bellatrix had used the potion to become an animagus and escape.
I thought the terrible secret was that Dumbledore was sneaking into the girls' dorms turned invisible.
If memory serves, Dumbledore was pretty specific that really grave things would happen if the secret got out. If people found out that Dumbledore was sneaking into the girls' dorm ... it probably wouldn't matter; everybody thinks he's insane anyway, and some scribblings in a notebook are not evidence of anything in particular anyway.
However, if Snape in particular found out that Dumbledore had turned Lily against him on purpose because Dumbledore, based on his bizarre worldview, did not think the prim Gryffindor should be with the greasy Slytherin, then it could undermine Snape's secret allegiance to Dumbledore and his secret desire to protect Harry Potter on behalf of his beloved. This would be relatively disastrous.
This is probably already happening, now that Snape has started to see Lily as a human being.
1) Evidence/Reasoning?
6) Evidence/Reasoning?
8) I thought the idea was that if it were discovered a year later, people were going to assume Bellatrix had died in her cell. This requires the death doll to decay, which might be implausible.
Harry being a Horcrux explains the origin of his mysterious dark side. He's also a Horcrux in canon; the murder that created him was the murder of Harry's parents, which still happened.
Chapter 29, Chapter 42. Harry learns that Scabbers was an ordinary rat in this continuity and Bill Weasley went crazy after believing otherwise. That means Pettigrew is not hiding out with the Weasleys. Lupin reveals that Sirius and Pettigrew were former lovers who had some kind of quarrel. That gives Sirius a motive to do something terrible to Pettigrew. And if "I'm not serious" is supposed to be read as "I'm not Sirius," then it starts to seem more plausible that Sirius somehow got everybody to convict and incarcerate Pettigrew in his place (Imperius + repeated doses of Polyjuice?).
Doesn't Dumbledore also simultaneously provide Lily with the recipe of the potion she eventually gives to Petunia, which leads to Harry being raised by a scientist? It's unclear to me whether this was intentional though.
It wasn't the murder of Harry's parents, it was
(Deathly Hallows, Ch 33)
The Killing-Curse-reflecting Love Shield doesn't exist in HPMoR, so if Harry is a Horcrux it's not because things happened the same as in canon.
He wasn't even convicted, just tossed straight into Azkaban. And another piece of evidence is the Quibbler article claiming Pettigrew and Sirius are the same person.
When I was reading the latest update to HPMOR, I was upset to feel that the Hermione character was veering into disappointing territory. From the beginning of the story, I thought that Hermione was an awesome character, and I've been waiting for her to have a more active role. For one, I think this would make the story more interesting (I dislike that Harry and Quirrell do nearly everything of importance). Additionally, however, society as a whole has an idea of men as active and women as passive that is very problematic and doesn't need to be reinforced.
Of course, EY has not finished his story yet, so I hesitant to pass judgment on an incomplete work. Nevertheless, he has indicated that this story is swiftly drawing to a close, yet we have not seen a single female character burst from her cocoon into the butterfly of rationality.
The male characters in this story have more leeway for flaws because, for one thing, there is an automatic real-world assumption that men are more capable (of nearly everything!) than women. If you disagree with this, merely turn to much of the discussion surrounding Hilary Clinton's presidential bid. Within this story itself, the best examples of rationality are Harry and Quirrell (and now Moody, it seems). Neither Hermione nor McGonagall operates anywhere near the same level as them on the spectrum of rationality. EY drives home this fact by having McGonagall constantly remarking on her confusion.
In a cultural vacuum, this situation wouldn't be a problem - if there are only two "successfully" rational characters, then it doesn't seem unlikely that they both be male. I am not accusing EY of any malice or purpose. In fact, that is just the problem. Male is the default I'm our society - I go to an Ivy League college, and even there (a bastion of liberalism!) the school store has a "clothing" section and a "women's" section. Not a "men" and a "women's" section. This kind of default to the male experience and the male gaze is persistent, insidious, and harmful. If EY and Less Wrong are truly interested in making the world a better place, optimizing, increasing awesomeness, etc., then it seems like this is a relevant area of concern. Just as seeing positive portrayals of gay people in mass media make individuals more accepting of homosexuality, seeing active intelligent portrayals of women decreases sexism.
That's why, for as much as I love HPMOR, reading it makes me sadder and sadder as the story progresses. Some of the comments in response to Alicorn's criticism make me sad, too. I think what my Feminism, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department calls "male privilege" is really just an example of irrational thinking.
I have no idea what EY's plans are or what his intent is, but I know how this story seems right now. It seems like HPMOR is defaulting to male, when it would have taken only a little bit mor effort to include more positive female representations and make the world a little bit better place.
Edit: Please excuse any grammatical errors #Damn You Autocorrect
So, in MoR, we see that not only do Pensieves work well, it's apparently easy to transport the memories to boot, since Voldemort sends Dumbledore a torturous memory. This means Pensieves are even more broken than canon, and you'd think Harry, who said he was specifically looking for intelligence-related magics, would've noticed this...
New theory: Pensieves are rare and expensive as part of a conspiracy of elite schools and their elite graduate-alumni to keep education rare and expensive - their business & prestige respectively would be destroyed if anyone could go into an assembly line school, dunk their heads in pensieves for a few months, and walk out the equivalent of the best Hogwarts graduates.
A memory is not a skill... Watching someone cast a spell or make a potion, while helpful, no more makes you a better caster or a potion maker than watching a food network show makes you a better cook. In other words, it would be good for learning history (or apparently arithmancy), marginal to useless for learning charms or transfiguration.
Procedural memory is "a type of long-term memory and, more specifically, a type of implicit memory." The term "memory" is too large in scope when you're basically only meaning episodic memory, if that.
Skills are memories as much as anything else is. Consider the research into experts where much of it is just a large chunk of long-term memory. The question is whether experiencing Pensieve memories is as good as a natural memory.
Skills are partly memories, but memories are not skills. You don't learn to ride a bike just by watching someone else do it and simply remembering it later (EDIT: though it helps, thanks to mirror neurons). I'd guess that procedural and other implicit memory is not pensievable.
EDIT: while looking stuff up, I came across this fascinating study on off-line memory consolidation.
Watching a bike merely forms a particular subset of memories, and does not show that 'memories are not skills'.
Yes, that rather is the question: how far does the Pensieve go? Is it merely a game-breaker for the kind of declarative knowledge schools spend so much time on, or a game-breaker for pretty much everything they might teach?
Not sure what your point is. If there were a way to use a potion, a spell, a charm or a human sacrifice to master the school curriculum without spending years in Hogwarts, surely there would be some students who did just that.
Which could be said of the Felix potion as well.
I haven't read MoR in a while, but do we see anyone use Pensieves on a large scale like that? If not, another possibility is that there are unpleasant side-effects to using them on a large scale. For example, perhaps they overwrite elements of the recipient's own cognitive function, which isn't too big a deal in small doses because the recipient's brain/mind reroutes, but in larger doses resembles the effects of a brain aneurysm.
Of course not. I'm pointing that out.
A rather post hoc assertion to make...
Sorry, I'm being unclear. I understand you're pointing out that it isn't being done on a large scale in terms of populations, I wasn't sure if it was also never being done on a large scale in terms of individuals (e.g., if we never see Quirrell using Pensieves as a private training tool, or something).
And, sure, it's totally a post hoc assertion. Though so is the assertion that they are rare and expensive as the result of a deliberate program of deprivation. All we know from the text is that they don't seem to be used as an educational tool, apparently not even by the rich and powerful.
As far as I know, the only suggested or shown uses of Pensieve in canon or MoR are (extrapolating a bit from Draco in MoR, and Dumbledore in both):
The second suggests that the memories upon reviewing are just as good as a 'real' memory; the first suggests that they are convincing (otherwise why bother); and the fourth suggests that they are intellectually useful even if they were useless from a learning or skill perspective.
For education purposes, Pensieves seem entirely analogous to video recording. Is there a relevant distinction?
Pensieves appear to function equivalently to a video lifelog - they give you an accurate view of things that have happened to you, and allow you to share it with others. As a teaching tool, it is a VCR. It would be very useful for DADA, if you can talk some aurors into sharing memories of real fights, but I'd not expect exposure to that prior to NEWT level classes, and having that record be restricted to auror trainees would be easily justifiable.
As an investigative and intellectual tool, it is highly valuable, of course. But for basic education? Nah.
How do you know that when they're never used for education, and are only ever shown for personal experience? Perhaps they burn in memories effectively, in which case they're a clear win: take the smartest and most skilled student, have them learn something, extract the memory, and mass produce that. Amortize it over thousands of students for indefinite decades... Sounds much better than video.
We have no evidence that it's possible to reproduce memories extracted from a pensieve. It may be that the only way to do so is manually, i.e. casting memory charms that exactly replicate the content of the memory from the pensieve. That would mean a whole lot of man-hours to mass produce a memory.
It's a whole lot of man-hours to produce education the old-fashioned way too - think of how much of the economy education makes up.
That's true, but when you put in all that time to produce a memory, you're making something that can only be used by one person at a time, albeit an indefinite number of times. A video takes less time and money to reproduce, and can be watched by many people simultaneously.
I don't think viewing a pensieve memory guarantees understanding of the contents. In canon, when Harry first viewed one, his reaction was essentially "what the hell is this?" A star pupil who puts their memories of their classes into a pensieve may not produce something that confers any more comprehension than a video of the lecture. You can't ask a pensieve memory or a video questions when you're confused.
So you have multiple Pensieves and each student does a different memory at a time, and when they get confused they ask another student No different than books or 'flipped' classrooms.
If the pensieve memories don't confer greater understanding though, why not just use books instead? They're cheaper.
Faster (at least in the movies, wasn't a time-speedup implied?), 3D sound & audio, literally immersive, forced attention...
I don't know, I've only watched a couple of them, but I'm pretty sure that it wasn't in the books.
I think wizards can probably produce 3d sound and audio via illusions without needing pensieves anyway.
A pensieve puts you in the memory, so you can't focus on something outside it, but I don't think there's anything that prevents you from zoning out or dozing off in someone else's memory. Of course, in the books, everyone perusing a pensieve memory had enough reason to pay rapt attention that it wasn't an issue.
As far as I recall, we are given no indication that such an advantage over video is present.
The argument from silence works both ways.
Except, we know that they aren't in fact used for education.
In fiction, if something is not foreshadowed, it can be true, but it shouldn't play any role in what follows, and in this sense it could be said to not belong to the fictional setting.
There was something that has always been bugging me. It's actually several things I don't understand.
When Snape says "You almost died today, Potter", what does he mean? Maybe it's because I'm not a native speaker, but I can't understand that part. My best guess is that Snape got so upset with what Harry said that he almost killed him in his rage. But that seems very counterintuitive to me.
Second, Snape had possibly changed after his conversation with Harry? Does this mean that Snape took Harry's words and thought that Lily is actually not worth his love, after all these years? That's my best hypothesis, but I find it very weird.
Third, did I actually properly understood that he still loves her, after more than 11 years have passed? This is very unrealistic, people get over things, and I suspect that either EY is being unrealistic here, or Snape is simply lying.
Edit: I retract the last part. Still, this does not mean that now I believe this to be realistic, but rather that it might possibly be realistic. Also that EY could indeed have decided to just go with the canon, and I see good reasons for that.
Yes, but in canon, Snape doesn't get over Lily. Everything heroic Snape does in canon, up to and including becoming a double agent and dying for the cause, is because of Lily. He dies more than twenty years after he and Lily were friends at Hogwarts.
Point one: Snape originally stayed in love with Lily because of the lost chance. He actually did think he had a shot with her till he called her a mudblood, but Harry pointed out that in fact he never did. I mean some people fall in love and if their loved one dies, never date again, so I was assuming Snape's feelings were of that variety. He knew they weren't actually "dating" but he thought he'd had a chance before That Day. Now, Harry tells him "Sounds like this Guy never had a chance with that Girl ever, because she's shallow." So, yeah, hearing that he's held on to these feelings for no reason instead of "if only I'd not called her a mudblood we'd have married" - I can see how hearing that you've really wasted your past 11 years of life can piss you off. His rage was due to changing his mind, but clearly Snape finds it hard to Not Shoot The Messenger.
Point two: It's more that Dumbles probably had been insisting for years (in a more subtle way than I'm about to do) that Loving Lily made him a better person so he should continue to do so. But the axiom for Loving Lily - that he could possibly have been with her if he'd been a better person in the first place - has indeed shattered. I don't think he's mad b/c Lily was shallow specifically, but just that she never, ever, ever, would have been with him. So yeah, he's trying to update on that new axiom.
Point three: as others have said, Snape Loves Lily is canon, but if you take that axiom above, it's not quite that unrealistic. I knew a girl in college who didn't date for 4 years after her boyfriend was killed in a car accident. And remember Snape thinks it's his fault she died, too.
Yes, but sometimes very slowly. I can tell you from first-hand experience that fixations on people with whom the fixator has zero contact for eight years do exist, and from second-hand knowledge that upwards of 13-year-long ones almost certainly exist as well. It's quite unhealthy and quite irrational, but it happens.
That was always my interpretation, unless I'm thinking of some other chapter. What's counterintuitive about it?
It doesn't fit my model of human behavior. But that's possibly just me.
I'd imagine that if Snape got really angry, but it's only because Harry offended him without knowing, well, he wouldn't be close to harming him. I guess it would be appropriate to say "you almost died" if it's not true, but then Harry acted as if Snape might reconsider his decision to not kill him, rather than being just apologetic, or something like that. Or maybe he was indeed, and I am likely to be underestimating the strength of the impact that Harry's words had on Snape.
But if others interpreted it like me, then I got it right. Hmm.
Cannon!Snape has loved Lily since the two of them were children - considerably longer than 11 years. I don't think it's unrealistic at all. While I wouldn't call such a love typical human behavior, it's also not particularly rare. There are thousands of people who still profess love for Princess Di for example.
I doubt that it was telling Snape what an idiot he is that angered him, but rather saying Lily was shallow and unworthy.
I agree that it's weird that someone who could carry a torch for that long would stop just because an 11 year old boy gave them random advice. I think it's likely that when Snape kills Dumbledore, it's going to be because of his love for Lily and Dumbledore's interference in that. His love hasn't diminished at all.
I don't think it's particularly unrealistic coming from some unspecified hypothetical character who's just heard the love they've been harboring for more than half their life insulted, but I would find it pretty weird if Snape said that to Harry in that situation, and he wasn't exaggerating. Anyone who'd commit murder in that situation would either have to be profoundly lacking in restraint, or possessed by a really maniacal level of infatuation.
I suspect Snape was engaging in hyperbole, because if he wasn't my judgment of his character is completely out of whack.
Second thing is possible, but if it's not a lie, it's not Eliezer's absurdity but J.K. Rowling's.
From Reddit: A concise summary of all plot high points in HPMOR.
I just had quite a dismal thought. Harry is in disbelief the entire wizarding world is not pursuing the stone as priority one, which is a reasonable enough reaction.. Except.. How many wizards actually manage to die in their beds? Given the stated lifespan, and the cultural tendency to marry young, families ought to have a lot of generations alive at the same time.. but the older generations are thin on the ground. Harry was not raised by his grandparents! none of whom ought to have passed away from natural causes. Those elders we hear about are in the main fairly high up on the "competency/scary/power" scales. The logical implication being that wizards are not overly concerned about old age, because very few of them ever die from it. Something else - A dark lord, screwing up a spell, the magical wildlife, a succession dispute.. will get you first.. This logic could well deter a lot of people from attempting alchemy ; Succeeding in making a stone without being as good a survivor as Flamel carries a significant risk of dying now to violence instead of in 90 years to natural causes.
Of course, this also means that Flamel might not be very unique at all. If the stone is widely regarded as a nuisance magnet, successful crafters may be keeping a low profile.
For that matter, screwing up an attempt to make the Philosopher's Stone might very well be one way to invite a premature death. Alchemy isn't necessarily safe.
They just had a magical war in which pretty much everyone lost a lot of their family, as noted in the earlier chapters.
And another one 40 years earlier.
And these are wizards whose power comes from knowledge, so this is often a world where Old Is Strong. We might expect older people (in good health, because of healers arts, as Harry notes when talking to Dumbledor eabout immortality) to be closer to the front lines.
Good theory. The only objection I see is that it does not explain why the few wizards who have survived to a moderately old age do not pursue the stone. (It cannot be the case that all wizards die before they get close to dying of old age, as there are several old wizards running around both in HPMOR and canon. (e.g. Dumbledore))
In other word, while this theory explains why young wizards don't try to make the stone, it does not explain why wizards who are already old don't try for it.
Couple of options:
1: They do. Once a decade or so, someone succeeds and promptly takes full advantage of the fact that nobody is going to connect the youth of 16 they now have the look of with the magus of 160 they were, assume a new identity and keep their gob shut. For maximal hilarity, this could explain the rumor about double witches - there is no such thing, but youthful witches and wizards with absurd powerlevels? Real, if rare.
2: The rite does not work well, or at all, for the old. Several options:
2a: The muggle mythos about the stone is not entirely off base. The creation of the stone requires a level or type of virtue exceedingly rare in people who have survived 150 +years in the wizarding culture.
2b: "Alchemy" is wizarding euphemism for "Tantric Magic", which is why all the books are restricted and while the spirit may be willing... >,) This also explains why Flamel only shares the stone with his wife - You can only help people you sleep with. This, of course, also rather nixes any of our heroes doing it anytime the next 5 years or so.
2c: For reasons similar to potions, the rite just does nothing for a caster over the age of 15.
3: Merlins interdict is screwing with the recipe- anyone wishing to make a stone has to do the research from scratch, and without an extant community of alchemical researchers, that is a project beyond the capability of any intellect ever born. - Flamels success happened in a context that no longer exists.
I like the idea that Merlin's interdict has ruined any community of alchemical (or any other kind of magic) researchers who don't work face to face.
Plausible mechanism which would allow both immortality and lead to gold: The Philosopher's stone is a device which makes lasting transmutations. Thus, it would be necessary to re-use it every once in a while to stay young, but a single usage would suffice to turn materials into other materials.
Making Petunia pretty is a lasting transmutation. I keep thinking that's a significant plot point.
In fact, Cat Girl was a lasting transmutation too. Didn't seem like it's so hard to make a lasting transmutation.
Control, however, seems hard and crucial.
Here's a theory regarding the open secret of the Philosopher's Stone: in RL, alchemists often saw the stone as a metaphor, and talked about purifying one's soul in order to "purify" metal into gold (which, as we all know, is the purest metal.) Thus the reason Flamel assured Dumbledore that Voldemort couldn't create his own stone was that he's evil. Anyone reasonably skilled in alchemy can pull off the stone-creation ritual; but only someone worthy enough will actually get a stone out of it. This might also ease Flamel's conscience about not mass-producing immortality, I guess.
Ok. Big analysis of Patronus magic coming up.
Central Assumption: The Stone and whatever saved infant Harry from Voldemort are both based on Patronus magic.
We have already seen the True Patronus, which is powered by an absolute rejection of death and serves as an antithesis for the killing curse.
Perhaps whatever saved Harry is caused by a terminal value in a specific person surviving (the mundane Patronus does not reach that level)
Perhaps the Stone is powered by a rejection of personal death in a non-universal, non-utilitarian way?
I suspect that Harry will use the True Patronus to provide immortality.
I reckon Voldemort accidentally performed a ritual, sacrificing Lily Potter and granting Harry Boy-Who-Lived status. But ... it's certainly not worth rejecting out of hand.
I'm not sure I would call the True Patronus "an antithesis for the killing curse." It seems more of an antithesis for death!dementors.
I'm not sure what you mean by "terminal value" here.
Wouldn't that make Quirrelmort an ideal candidate for stonemaking?
Woah there. That thing is overpowered enough as it is. If it starts raising the dead then, well ... let's just say that sounds a little too easy. I thing EY is too good a writer to simply hand his protagonist a get-out-of-plot-free card like that. Harry is already powerful via rationality - he doesn't need the author to hand him the solution to all his problems, and if he did, it would IMHO suck horribly.
Um ... no offence, or anything.
Immortality isn't a solution to all problems-- there's still dealing with people to consider.
I reckon that was Dumbledore's and Lily's (and maybe James') plan.
What's the evidence that Voldemort actually cast a killing curse at Harry? That he tried to kill him in any way?
It's possible to determine the last spell cast by a wand.
In MoR, aren't we told that Bellatrix took the wand from the scene of the crime?
Actually, not true that I can see.
If what she said was true, we only know that she had the wand and hid it in a graveyard. We don't know when or how she got it. If Dumbledore did find Harry, he should have found the wand as well, if it was there. Similarly, if Bellatrix had found the wand at Godric's Hollow, she should have found Harry too, and killed him.
If they're not lying, I conclude that Voldemort gave her his wand before he went to Godric's Hollow. If he ever did go to Godric's Hollow.
An aside on Bella - she is described in much the same terms as Hermione.
As long as you're working inconsistencies, the Pettigrew/Black encounter is obviously wacky too.
EDIT: Add another quote to the collection
Didn't remember this one at all, but it looks significant. The "him" referred to is Quirrell. Harry had seen him at the bar on his first visit to the Leaky Cauldron, and had asked McGonagall about him. "Sense of loss" is from James and Lily getting killed, or some positive connection to Quirrell?
I think this is unwarranted. We have no reason to doubt Bellatrix's version, so on the fatal night she: arrived at location A, following direct orders from Voldemort, and waited for him to arrive; Voldemort failed to arrive within the expected period; she went looking for him, but could not find him; at some later period, she hid his wand in a graveyard.
This is consistent with Voldemort ordering her somewhere to wait for him to do something to the the Potters; Voldemort failing and dying; Bellatrix going to the Potters' house; not finding him, finding his wand; and then hiding the wand.
Not finding Voldemort is far more important than killing a random baby who had no possible connection to anything that night - as everyone knows, the Killing Curse cannot be blocked, and certainly not cast by a baby, so something else must have happened to Voldemort.
By your theory, she knows enough to look for him at the Potter's house. She sees known enemies, Lily and James, dead. She can't find Voldemort. Instead, she finds his wand abandoned near to the crib of the Potter child. She possibly saw what looked like a burn out husk of a body near the wand.
Upon meeting a completely defenseless child of prominent known enemies, I think her impulse would be to kill him, particularly since the missed return and abandoned wand would seem to indicate that something went wrong for Voldemort in this attack. It's not like it would take a long time to break a baby's neck, or slit it's throat, which would be her natural inclination anyway.
She expected to meet her at location A, not at the Potter's residence. Where did she need to rush off to that she wouldn't have taken a moment to kill Harry?
The Potter child is not some "random baby" - he is the son of the couple who effectively started the opposition against Voldemort, and that's even if she knew nothing about the prophecy and potential schemes by Dumbledore and Voldemort based on the prophecy.
Also, I wonder where Dumbledore is during all this. By whatever theory, I'd expect him to monitor or check on the situation in some way.
No, she finds what might be her lord's body - unthinkable thought, how could he possibly die? - near the dead body of their enemy Lily Potter. There does happen to be a live baby somewhere, but that's not important.
Anywhere she might find her lord. She is insane and brain-damaged into unyielding loyalty and fanatical devotion to her lord. Anything to do with him takes priority over casual mayhem and slaughter.
Yeah, that's always been a question in canon too. Perhaps the alarms went off but it just took him long enough to get there. From the description of the actions, it could all go down in under a minute: bust down the door, curse James Potter, fly upstairs, chat with Lily for 15 seconds, and curse her and then the baby.
I thought so too.
Further, the assumption is that he just cast Avada Kedavra against Lily and James. So that would have been the last spell if he cast no spells at Harry and just left. Or tried to throttle him with a pillow.
How do we know he cast any more spells? How do we know he cast any spells at Harry?
The Dumbeldore plan, to trick him into accepting a bargain by ritual magic and then violating that magic seems like something that would have been obvious to Voldemort.
I never thought it made sense for Voldemort to try to kill Harry, or at least try to kill him himself. But if he did try, maybe Dumbledore (with the Potters' consent) booby trapped Harry in some other way? Maybe that's where the magical resonance between them comes from.
If we're assuming a clever Voldemort, there's any number of ways that 'check his wand's last recorded spell' could fail to be conclusive evidence. He could've used someone else's wand (a backup wand is a good idea for a ton of reasons). He could've brought someone else to do the actual deed (how else did Bellatrix get to the wand before anyone else showed up like Dumbledore or Aurors?). He could've used any of a billion Muggle methods, as you point out (plausible since we know about Pioneer and Dumbledore regards clever use of Muggle tech as pointing to Voldemort). He could've used an innocuous spell in a fatal way (a dark lord in hiding could be expected to use Apparating all the time, and Apparating seems like it could be quite fatal given 'splinching'). He could simply have broken the detection spell and set up a false audit trail, as it were. And so on and so forth.
The official story seems completely inferred.
Lily and James are dead. Harry has a scar. There is a burnt husk of something nearby.
In fact, not even so much. What the world sees are Dumbledore producing the dead bodies of Lily and James, a scarred Harry, and a burnt husk of something.
One point against a Dumbledore conspiracy theory - how would he know that Voldemort wouldn't show up a week later and blow his story?
Are you saying that they tried and failed to do this? Or just that it was no accident?
Well ... he does have the scar. And something happened. I mean, its conceivable that he just took the opportunity to fake his death, but it seems simpler to suppose that he was actually killed, survived via horcrux, and possessed Quirrel. And it happened roughly the same in canon, where he defenitely cast the curse.
Yeah, meeting the clear terms of ritual magic seems like quite a freakish coincidence unless that had been their plan. So I think they tried this, or at least tried to give the appearance to Voldemort of doing this, so that he would feel himself safe from other traps.
As for the scar, anyone involved could have given Harry the scar, in a myriad of ways.
Ha! Maybe Dumbledore gave it to Harry after finding him alive in his crib.
Evidence - unidentifiable burnt out husk of a body. Scar on Harry. Voldemort at the scene of the crime. Voldemort presumed to want Harry dead. That's pretty weak tea.
The best bit of evidence I can see is the one no one talks about - the feeling of Doom and magic resonance between Harry and Quirrell. It seems credible to me that Voldemort might not have anticipated that, and it was Dumbledore so booby trapped Harry with that resonance.
First, is the True Patronus really that overpowered? We know that it can be used to destroy Dementors, but that is a very specific limited purpose and will have no value after The Great Dementor Hunt.
Do we know where Dementors come from? Could it be possible that the Killing Curse creates them?
I don't think that the True Patronus is going to be an easy way to bring the end of death. It would not do it on its own and would probably be much harder than figuring out how to kill dementors.
It can be used to block the Killing Curse, but Quirrelmort probably is smart enough (and has been around Harry long enough) to make use of some transfigured depleted uranium slugs and a Mass Acceleration Charm. Or fire. Or lightning. Or anything, really. It merely neutralizes another seeming game-breaker. (While Mad-Eye Moody's description makes it sound very powerful, but I don't know if anybody has ever actually used it through all barriers or over intercontinental ranges, and the ability to dodge it indicates that it cannot be THAT good of a homing spell.
Here is an alternative interpretation of the prophecy:
THe one: Harry With the power: The True Patronus To vanquish the dark lord: The Dark Lord is not Voldemort, but rather a personification of death (maybe even a literal personification of death such as the grim reaper as a King Of Dementors. approaches, born to those who have thrice defied him. :Heroism is often called 'death defying'. Alternatively, it could be a wierd interpretation with Harry being born from his biological parents to his adoptive parents. His adoptive father is a biochemist (IIRC) who works in a field that is probably connected to medicine. Perhaps he has made three significant medical discoveries? Although I am not sure about the whole thing with being marked as his equal or whatever.
No, I was really, really unclear. The way I see it: Mudane Patronus: A powerful but non-general preference for life rather than death embodied in a desire to protect. True Patronus: A fully general preference for life over death Avada Kedavra: A non-general preference that a specific person die Hypothetical Apocalypse Spell: A fully general preference for death over life. It's unlikely that anybody would ever cast this. Possibly connected to the ritual that will summon death itself? Ritual to summon death itself: True Patronus may be the counterspell to dismiss death. Horcrux: Requires a selfish preference for your life to exceed your acceptance of the sacrificial victim's preference. Philosopher's Stone: Possibly requires very difficult magic and an explicit,non-general but non-selfish preference for life over death.
I think that using the True Patronus charm to end death might (some or all): A) not end death by itself, but open the door to a magical, Muggle, or combination immortality method B) lead to the discovery of a higher-level method of operating the Atlantis system, letting one use magic to directly fulfill any preference C) Re-activate a latent immortality function in the Atlantis system. It won't be easy, or a plot-breaker.
Edit, this comment was redundant.
Yeah, I thought I heard somebody say they are spontaneously generated in places of extreme rank immorality, death, or negative utility (in which case WWII probably generated many of them due both to city bombings and the Holocaust, for example).
Does anybody know what happens to Dementors re: Muggles? They cannot use the Patronus. Do wizards collect them all at Azkaban, or what?
In cannon, according to word of God, muggles cannot see dementors, but dementors can induce depression in muggles, and in extreme cases put them in a coma.
It seems to me that you need to do more than just prefer immortality for all. Harry's happy thought is not just that he wants people to stop dying, but that he has a great deal of hope--confidence, even--that it will happen, one day.
Re where Dementors come from, I assumed the "ritual to summon death"(rope that has hanged/sword that has slain) is where they come from.
First, the question remains: Why would anybody cast the apocalypse spell (Dumbledore mentioned omnicidal maniac Dark Lords, though).
Second, I still don't think the True Patronus is all that powerful. It cannot be used offensively against anything other than dementors and it does not defend against any magical, technological, natural, or creative-use-of-magical (such as the Mass Accelerating Charm) other than the killing curse, including ones that are just as fatal and which are probably almost as hard to shield against. Moreover, in noncombat uses the True Patronus gives almost nothing that cannot be given by the mundane Patronus or other mundane magical or mundane technological means. (the only thing I have thought of is an unforgable signal of anti-deathism to people able to understand the philosophy of the Patronus or the True Patronus.
Considering the protagonist got it simply for being the protagonist, it turns dementors from unstoppable soul-eating monsters to a trivial threat (they can't even see you), and it may be able to stop the (unstoppable) killing curse ... it's pretty damn powerful. Not "winning-every-conflict" powerful, tipping-over-the board powerful.
THe one: Harry With the power: The True Patronus To vanquish the dark lord: The Dark Lord is not Voldemort, but rather a personification of death (maybe even a literal personification of death such as the grim reaper as a King Of Dementors. approaches, born to those who have thrice defied him. :Heroism is often called 'death defying'. Alternatively, it could be a wierd interpretation with Harry being born from his biological parents to his adoptive parents. His adoptive father is a biochemist (IIRC) who works in a field that is probably connected to medicine. Perhaps he has made three significant medical discoveries? Although I am not sure about the whole thing with being marked as his equal or whatever.
I have to admit, I find these alternaive interpretations ... unlikely.
I'm guessing that "Apocalypse Spell" is where dementors come from.
The Killing Curse is
Not only that but Harry says that wanting them dead needs to be a terminal value in your utility function. Thats what I meant.
I assumed that he blocked Quirrelmort's curse due to their magical interference, not because the True Patronus is actually intended as a way of blocking Avada Kedavera
Also, the Patronus automatically moved to block the killing curse based on Harry's preference, without his will or knowledge of the magical interference.
Whether or not the True Patronus can block anyone else's Killing Curse, the way it's described above sounds pretty antithetical to me.
Oh, I see. Because the True Patronus is a magically embodied preference for life over death ... interesting.
He might simply not qualify anymore - Maintaining the prerequisite spiritual purity over the course of six centuries, and however many attempts on his life is likely to have proven impossible. If this is the case, the rite will work for Hermione.. and a fair few of the other characters.
Good point, it could easily be a one-off thing. Kind of like he phoenix, only with goodness or purity instead of courage. And you need to be performing some alchemical process at the time, I guess.
I'm wondering whether Harry was simply completely off base about the Philosopher's Stone, or if he's actually right about the whole "turned up to eleven artifact" thing.
I mean, we have considerable evidence of the Philospher's Stone existing from the original canon, numerous references to it by characters in a position to know in MoR, and plot points that appear to hinge on it....
But what evidence do we have of it actually being able to turn things into gold?
That was an attributed ability in the original canon, but as far as I remember it got exactly no references to it ever having actually been used that way. Only Ron even seemed to care, the Elixir of Life was just so obviously more important. Similarly, none of the characters who've actually had contact with the Stone in MoR mention an ability to create gold. This doesn't mean it can't; compared to its ability to grant immortality, creating gold pretty much fades into irrelevance. But, supposing several hundred years ago Flamel created a stone with the ability to create an Elixir of Life, but it didn't transmute base metals into gold, would he say "well, looks like I've almost made the Philosopher's Stone, better keep trying?" I doubt it.
Given the evidence at hand it wouldn't be that weird if the attributed ability to turn base metals into gold was simply made up.
Or... the Stone can actually do a ton of other things and Flamel successfully hushed up what they were because some of them cause extinction events? "Make me immortal and wealthy" is the minimum Flamel needed public to explain his own continued existence and wealth. Everything else... there are gates you do not open, there are seals you do not breach.
Flamel didn't need to make anything public. He could have switched identities or countries every few decades - he pretty much did this anyway by going into hiding. If he could have kept the Stone's existence a secret, and given that as far as we know he never used it for anyone but himself and his wife, then he was a colossal fool to allow its existence to be known and linked with his name.
The fact that a stone exists can be ascertained via magic. The location of it, likewise. That is why it is currently at Hogwarts. - Flamel is worried about the divination efforts of Voldemort. Given that the world knows anyway.. Not so foolish as all that.
I'm not talking about him hiding for the last few years. I'm talking about the hundreds of years he lived before that.
The stone is some sort of ultimate permanent transfiguration spell? Similar to a universal assembler in scifi.
Maybe the stone is a terminal with root access.
Plenty of people have been able to copy his process to make the stone (the terminal) but no one else so far has guessed the password (PASSWORD)
The password is always SWORDFISH.
Actually, the password was originally "12345". Flamel was just the first wizard to use Arabic numerals, and he changed it. Merlin kept typing in "MMMMMMMMMMMMCCCXLV", and never understood why it didn't work.
That's the kind of code an ID10T puts on his luggage!
I figure anyone who's a great enough alchemist that they're the only person ever to successfully create the Philosopher's Stone, with other people having hundreds of years to try to duplicate the feat, probably doesn't need the Stone to make them wealthy. So really, only the "make me immortal" part is needed to explain his continued existence and wealth.
Is this no longer showing up on the discussion page for other people? I'm not complaining, and I can imagine the reasoning behind that choice, but I was a bit confused when I tried to find it and couldn't see it.
Showed up for me.
Yeah, different issue all together. Thanks though.
In any fic that comes out in installments, there's incentive for the author to have ever-more-gripping plot, for the sake of readers' short attention spans. I'm glad Eliezer has not fallen into this spiral, and still feels able to post a chapter in which no new plot developments happen (other than characters finding out about previous events).
So have a heart-shaped red-foil-wrapped candy.
Harry is missing a point, tough. Flamel is 600 years old, and started out powerful. Presumably, "trying to blackmail / kidnap Flamel" has been the endpoint of the careers of enough dark lords that they do not attempt this anymore.
,,, Wait. alchemical diagrams need to be drawn "to the fineness of a child's hair"? ... ... Eh,, I think it entirely possible that Flamel is the only wizard to ever manage to make a stone because he is the only wizard to ever try it while young enough to use his own hair. In which case, Hermione is going to show up with a working stone shortly.
You can't use the fineness thing as a reason for the Philosopher's Stone to be unique to Flamel as it says explicitly in the chapter that all alchemical magic has the same requirements, and it doesn't sound at all like Flamel is the only one who can do alchemy.
I don't see why this would be an advantage over an experienced alchemist who's old enough to use their own children's.
Or any other children's for that matter. Or they just know from experience how thick hair is. (It varies a lot between people, at least as much as between ages.) Or they're dedicated enough to make it much finer than needed just to be sure.
Harry's failing pretty badly to update sufficiently on available evidence. He already knows that there are a lot of aspects of magic that seemed nonsensical to him: McGonagall turning into a cat, the way broomsticks work, etc. Harry's dominant hypothesis about this is that magic was intelligently designed (by the Atlanteans?) and so he should expect magic to work the way neurotypical humans expect it to work, not the way he expects it to work.
In particular his estimate of the likelihood of a story like Flamel's is way off. Moreover, the value of additional relevant information seems extremely high to me, so he really should ask Dumbledore about it as soon as possible. Horcruxes too.
Edit: And then he learns that Dumbledore is keeping a Philosopher's Stone in Hogwarts without using it and promptly attempts a citizen's arrest on him for both child endangerment and genocide...
I disagree. It seems to me that individual spells and magical items work in the way neurotypical humans expect them to work. However, I don't think that we have any evidence that the process of creating new magic or making magical discoveries works in an intuitive way.
Consider by analogy the Internet. It's not surprising that there exist sites such as Facebook which are really well designed and easy to use for humans, rendering in pretty colors instead of being plain HTML. However, these websites were created painstakingly by experts dealing with irritating low level stuff. It would be surprising that the same website had a surpassingly brilliant data storage system as well as an ingenius algorithm for something else.
We have some weak evidence, namely McGonagall asserts that new charms and whatnot are created on a regular basis, which puts an upper bound on how difficult the process can be. But point taken.
He already knows that the Dark Lord's death protection requires killing people. (Does it prevent physical degeneration or dying of old age?)
Somehow circumventing the Hayflick Limit is a possibility I suppose.
It might be too surprising and horrible for him to let himself think that people might have access to the obvious stand-in for cryonics and just ignore it.
Do strands of hair really become thicker over time? I doubt this.
No, I am thinking that the process of making the stone may simply not work for wizards that have begun to age. - That the crafting process draws on the youth of the wizard or witch crafting the stone, - the hair of a child. And it has to be the hair of the crafter - Everyone after Flamel have substituted the hair of some random kid, which just does not work. it is a spell that can only be done at all by a child prodigy, Which explains why it has not been duplicated - Very, very few teenagers and below would try it. This would also explain why he has not mass produced it - He can not make it again.
Also, there is the point that Hermione knocking off a philosophers stone out of the blue would derail everyone's plots in the most hilarious fashion. Flamel's Stone locked away behind insane security? Too bad Dumbledore, there is a second one in a students trunk. Heck, she would probably start selling the darn things.
Probably? Definitely - the whole idea is her Get Rich Quick scheme to repay Harry.
You don't need to sell the literal hen that lays the golden eggs to make money from it. It turns stuff into gold, remember?
Yhea, the open selling of stones would be more about "Not being kidnapped" than "making money". Her defenses rather obviously not being up to Flamels standards (and Flamel appears to rely in large part on hiding!)
Penalty for incorrect use of the word 'literal'.
Hmm. In my head I wanted "literal" to modify "golden" but not "hen" or "eggs." I guess that didn't work out so well on paper.
Try ‘You don't need to sell the hen that lays the literally golden eggs’.
I thought it was a goose.
So it was!
Baby hair is very fine...
I have read that the reason shaving seems to make hair thicker and stubbier has something to do with the thicker hair taking longer to grow. The baby hair may remain as fine all one's life, but be slowly hidden under the slower-growing thicker hair?
I'm pretty sure not. While I don't examine the hair in my hairbrush hair by hair, it all looks to be of about the same thickness.
Shaving doesn't actually make hair thicker and stubbier, it just takes off a hair's tapered point and exposes a cross section.
I think this chapter just proved that someone, most likely Quirrell, has modified Harry's memory. Remember how Harry easily figured out how to quickly make large sums of money by trading gold and silver between the wizard and muggle markets? And now, he doesn't seem to recall that brilliant insight when Hermione mentions that they need a way to make lots of money fast. Moreover, the occlumency teacher with whom Quirrell set up a lesson (possibly Quirrell himself in disguise) mentioned that he would like to be able to remember that same trick after he read it in Harry's thoughts. Clearly, whatever the villian is planning, it requires Harry not having large sums of money.
The creation of a philosopher's stone would, therefore, pose a direct threat to this plan. Hermione is in even more danger than before.
Didn't he already talk about it? He has several plans, but they're all risky. For example, if he tries to make money on gold arbitrage, he runs the risk of the goblins noticing and realizing what he's doing before he can get far.
When Harry wants to withdraw money for Christmas presents Dumbledore outright says he doesn't want Harry to have "access to large amounts of gold with which to upset the game board" I'd say he's as likely to memory charm Harry's gold/silver scheme as Quirrell.
In fact (on a more tangential note) who says that isn't exactly what Flamel is doing? Exchanging silver for gold in such quantities as to make himself rich but not terribly upset Muggle economics. Maybe Flamel is the occlumency teacher, memory charming anyone who comes up with the same plan.
Well, Flamel could just use the philosopher's stone to transmute base metals to gold. So I doubt he would bother with commodity-trading. But, yeah, Dumbledore should be a suspect at this point, though I assign a low probability to him being behind this. Dumbledore does not want Harry to be indebted to Malfoy (unless MoR Dumbledore is secretly completely different from canon Dumbledore), and so he would not hinder Harry in his quest to pay off the debt quickly.
No, no, no. What Axel is saying is that there is no such thing as the philosopher's stone, Flamel is only using that as an excuse to explain where all his gold came from. (And to explain where his immortality came from, which he also is getting another way in this scenario, perhaps from a horcrux.)
It's strongly implied that in MoR, just as in canon, Dumbledore is hiding a philosopher's stone in Hogwarts at Flamel's request. Dumbledore even tries to tempt Harry to use Alohomora on the door leading to the stone.
And if Dumbledore has had a chance to examine it, we can be assured that it is real.
Implied, yeah.
It can be useful to have more than one brilliant-but-speculative idea for making huge amounts of money, in case one of them fails. Harry sounds like the kind of person who would hold off on proposing uncertain but alluring solutions when the problem is difficult, important, and not urgent.
Hell, they might even come across something a lot better than currency arbitrage -- mass-producing immortality, for instance.
First: Harry and Quirrell can't interact magically. Quirrell didn't Obliviate or Legilimize Harry, and he is not Mr Bester in disguise. (Theoretically he could have Imperiused Sprout to do it, though.)
Second: why would Harry mention that idea here? What purpose would that serve other than to make Hermione feel even more useless and stupid?
Do we know if Imperiusing someone into casting a spell counts as him casting the spell for Doom purposes?
Well no, we don't, not specifically. I'd find it a little odd if it did, but I suppose blackmail or threats or FMCs would also work.
Well, in canon it's described as similar to having them as an extension of your body, albeit one with it's own skills and knowledge. So it might count less as "coercing someone into casting" than "casting with someone else's wand".
But yeah, it's hardly impossible to force people into helping you.
Not damaging her emotionally even more severely if circumstances force him to use the arbitrage?
Do you think Hermione expects Harry to have not thought about the problem, or to have no ideas about how to solve it?
Edit:
Hermione ought to think that if Harry knew how to pay off the debt, he would already be working on it. We have every reason to think that as well. But he isn't. And that's what's very, very odd.
He has bigger and more urgent problems, is the short version. So?
In your own quote, you said:
'it's more important to get that sorted immediately than which one of us gets it sorted."
Regardless of whether it is urgent, Harry obviously believes it to be so.
That says nothing about priorities. It's more important to find the person who framed Hermione than it is to solve the debt, and it's more important to solve the debt than it is which of them solves it. There's no contradiction.