You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

ChrisHallquist comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 24, chapter 95 - Less Wrong Discussion

6 Post author: palladias 18 July 2013 02:23AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (304)

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: ChrisHallquist 24 July 2013 07:46:07AM 7 points [-]

After sitting down and going over everything I know about this fic, I believe I've gotten a substantial way towards solving its puzzles. The long version is at my blog here, but here I'll just state without justification the prediction I've come up with:

Voldemort believes fate won't let him defeat Harry until Harry attains the power to vanquish him, which in this case means becoming powerful enough to destroy all of Voldemort's well-hidden horcruxes. And in fact, Harry will become that powerful, by using the differing conservation laws for magic and science to conduct conservation-law arbitrage. Voldemort's plan is to possess Harry once Harry has attained ultimate power, but Harry will prevent Voldemort from winning through complicated means involving multiple currently yet-to-be-fired Checkov's guns.

Comment author: NancyLebovitz 31 July 2013 02:50:43PM 2 points [-]

That sounds like a variant of a pattern from Frank Herbert. A wants B to be strong enough to be useful, so A makes B's life worse to toughen B up. B becomes stronger, but is unwilling to cooperate with A.

Comment author: TobyBartels 25 July 2013 07:22:38PM 2 points [-]

I haven't read your blog post yet, but I'm already upvoting for the concept of conservation-law arbitrage.

Comment author: sboo 19 April 2014 04:24:11AM *  0 points [-]

why would voldemort need to possess harry? he's already stronger and smarter. and immortal.