The first experiments Harry did, where he told Hermione what the spells did but gave her wrong pronunciations, tested for this theory. If your idea is correct, the spells should have worked anyway. But they didn't.
If Harry did not expect them to work, that might have been enough to make them not work. Was this study double blind?
e.g. Harry should have written down two pronunciations, left the room, and let Hermione randomly choose and cast one.
New chapter!
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 102.
There is 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.)
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: