I am arguing that the contract was made absurdly sweeping because the framers were erring on the side of paranoia in a big way.
Which does work, in that they are safe from all means of harm excepting only that BY is for obvious reasons free to teach any hogwarts graduate anything said graduate or student is capable of learning in the field of battle magic, even if this means one of said students enemies gets his or her ass kicked into orbit.
Flip it around; Do you think the students dropping their names in the original goblet would have considered it a violation of the pact if she had destroyed the noble or ancient status of the family of a hogwarts student?
I am pretty sure the answer is yes. Their intent was to prevent all offensive actions. Because the spell is symmetrical, this absurd scope protects her standing as the teacher of battle magic.
OK. That makes sense. I am uncomfortable with your theory because it reaches a long way beyond the few facts we are given in the text, but then I have felt that way about other theories which have recently turned out to be correct.
New long chapter! Since I expect its discussion to generate more than 160 comments (which would push the previous thread over the 500 comment limit) before the next chapter is posted, here is a new thread.
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 108
(and chapter 109, once it comes out on Monday).EDIT: There have now been two separate calls for having one thread per chapter, along with a poll in this thread. If the poll in this thread indicates a majority preference for one thread per chapter by Monday, I will edit this post to make it for chapter 108 only. In that case a new thread for chapter 109 should be posted by whoever gets a chance and wants to after the chapter is released.
EDIT 2: The poll indicates a large majority (currently 78%) in favor of one thread per chapter. This post has been edited accordingly.
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: