= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Macaulay comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
Comments (609)
What's going on here? Is it just that Harry isn't paying attention to what's happening around him?
Yeah, it sounded like a first person perspective of Harry-in-shock to me.
No, the abruptly-ended and grammatically-incorrect sentence preceding this passage indicates actual discontinuity:
"Dumbledore wasn't being very cooperative, and in any case this was several minutes after the critical location within Time"
Notice the lack of punctuation. The end of this sentence has been lopped off, and deliberately. Eliezer Yudkowsky does not make careless punctuation errors.
For some reason, my gut instinct is telling me that this is an abnormally important detail. Hooray pattern matching and cache lookup hardware I suppose.
I interpreted it as Harry being jolted out of his all-consuming inner monologue by Dumbledore suddenly touching his shoulder while he wasn't paying attention to Dumbledore at all.
He wasn't paying attention at all to Dumbledore, Fred, or George, and he's startled by their sudden agency. To me it seems more likely that leaving off in the middle of a sentence as he's startled is a stylistic choice, rather than a particularly meaningful missing period.
As Harry's just pointed out, though, this is several minutes too late.
It's possible that there's still something a Future!Harry can do, but...
Prediction: Harry will attempt to learn Obliviation, use his Time-Turner to go back to before, and attempt to mess with his own head to save Hermione while preserving his own experience of events.
This is more likely to not work than work.
There are too many principals who interact with Harry afterwards for that explanation to be the easiest unless the story we have read is the False Memory that Future Harry implanted in his prior self after he shoved causal theory into a refrigerator and dropped it into Puget Sound.
That was originally where I was going with that, but further evidence of Harry's plan (the lack of any use of time-turning until at least six hours after the fact) has pretty well falsified my prediction.
Next easiest: Harry goes back 5 hours, sends a note to original Harry explaining exactly what he has to do to save Hermione; original Harry does the heroics, including setting up a fake death and writing the directions he got, while future Harry executes the actions in the chapter, failing to prevent the death. There's a maneuver somewhere in there where future Harry then snaps his fingers, goes back one hour, and somehow initiates the course of events described (probably by blackmailing time).
The theories have now gotten more unlikely than that Harry got the timey-wimey ball and is prohibited by an unstated rule from preventing a plot event.