= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
alex_zag_al comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 28, chapter 99-101 - 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 (365)
At no point does Quirrell say "I just used such a spell on this centaur". I'm not ruling out that he killed the thing, and made an inferius in front of Harry. That would explain the unusually (?) sharp sense of doom that Harry felt when he "revived" it.
Also a possibility: memory charming a centaur is a lot harder, since they're only passingly similar to humans, so Quirrel had to draw more heavily on his magic, which in turn resulted in a sharper sense of doom.
Wow, it's amazing how obvious the Inferius seems now that you've said it.
I was reading another comment elsewhere on the page which claimed there must be some magical explanation for how Harry's managed to miss that Quirrell=Voldemort. And my first thought was, "yeah, he sat there with his wand on the centaur for a long time instead of just saying 'Innervate' and then 'Obliviate' and Harry still believed him". That actually seemed to me like an extraordinary thing that needed explaining.
But, then I remembered: I didn't think of it. I read this chapter days ago, I've been talking about it, theorizing, and *I didn't see it. And now it seems so obvious that I look for a supernatural explanation for why Harry didn't see it?
EDIT: As I brought up elsewhere, another reason Quirrell would be drawing heavily on his magic is to read Firenze's mind everything he knows about the future.
But you're forgetting that Harry is smarter than you! :-P
I'm actually not sure how bright Harry's supposed to be.
He's not stupid, obviously. But, from a Watsonian perspective, he's leaning very heavily on rationality skills and an unusual reading list for an 11-year-old, Hermione seems to have him beat in some respects as far as raw intelligence goes, and being the smartest person in a class of a hundred and change isn't that great an achievement in the scheme of things.
From a Doylist perspective, making Harry get a lot of mileage out of raw intelligence would undermine the message Eliezer's presumably trying to preach.