(Presumably Parseltongue only prevents willful lies.)
Quirrell also claims (not in Parseltongue):
Occlumency cannot fool the Parselmouth curse as it can fool Veritaserum, and you may put that to the trial also.
It seems like what you can say in Parseltongue should only depend on the actual truth and on your mental state. What happens if I Confundus / Memory Charm someone into believing X? Can they say X in Parseltongue? If they can say it just because they believe it, then Parseltongue is not so hard to bypass; I just Confundus myself (or get someone to do it for me), tell the lie, and then cancel the Confundus. If they can't say something because it is actually false, then Parseltongue is an instant win condition. You just use binary search to figure out the truth about anything.
Or maybe Parseltongue checks the speaker for mind magic, since this is the same principle as the Dark Mark, and Salazar is not too many levels below Voldemort. Is this evidence against the "Harry was Confounded to not realize Quirrell was Voldemort" theory? I don't remember if he talked about that in Parseltongue...
If Parseltongue depended only on the actual truth of the world, Voldemort would have won already, because you can then pull single bits of arbitrary information out of the aether one at a time.
Two new short chapters! Since the next one is coming tomorrow and we know it'll be short, let's use one thread for both.
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 105 (and chapter 106, once it comes out tomorrow). EDIT: based on Alsadius' comment about thread creation for MOR chapters, let's also use this thread for chapter 107 (and future chapters until this nears 500 comments) unless someone objects to doing so. Given that this is the final arc we're talking about, thread titles should be updated to indicate chapters covered.
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: