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dxu comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 113 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Is Voldemort familiar with logical syllogisms? If not, it should be possible for Harry to trick him by saying something that seems to imply something else, without actually confirming the second thing as true, a la Chapter 49:
One possible example proposed in a review on fanfiction.net (and the one that set me on this train of thought in the first place) is, "If you kill me, the world will end." Since the world will end no matter what, the consequent is guaranteed true, making the content of the antecedent irrelevant due to contrapositive shenanigans... but Voldemort doesn't know that, and it sounds like the end of the world is dependent on Harry's death.
"All your servantss will die if they fire at me. They will die if you do not command them to sstand down NOW."
Amusssse me, then, child.
I really like "Parseltongue 'if' is material implication", but if this were true I'd expect Voldy to know about it and request clarification, e.g.,
"Explain exactly how they will die, or I will shoot you in five seconds."
"The world will end if I tell you!"
(admittedly non-optimal)
Not necessarily. Parseltongue, if I understand it correctly, forces the speaker to tell the truth as he/she understands it (while bypassing Occlumency). If Harry knows about material implication (which he almost certainly does), he can utilize it in such a manner, but it's unlikely that Voldemort has ever encountered something similar. This isn't your standard clever wordplay that anyone smart can think of, after all--it's formal logic, which is decidedly Muggle.
So it's nonstandard clever wordplay. Voldemort will still anticipate a nontrivial probability of Harry managing undetected clever wordplay. Which means it only has a real chance of working when threatening something that Voldemort can't test immediately.
Correct. I address this in another comment.
That second clause might not be too good of an idea. Harry should keep his claims nebulous; something like "they will die if you don't command them to stand down now" is too easily testable, and Voldemort will very quickly figure out that Harry has come up with some way to "lie" in Parseltongue if it proves false.
(Something similar might work, though. "They will live beyond thiss day if you command them to sstand down." Though, on second thought, that might actually restrict Harry from taking any lethal actions against the Death Eaters later on if he should find himself in a position to do so, which might not be that great. "This hour" instead of "this day", perhaps?)
AFAIK, Parseltongue isn't binding, it can only state the truth about one's current intentions/beliefs.
Maybe something like:
"The vowss you have made me sswear have taken effect and I tell you thiss with the goal of protecting the world in mind: If you and your servantss leave girl-child and me alone here and causse uss no harm before or in doing sso, it iss very likely that the world will continue to exisst in more-or-lesss itss current form for the foresseeable future and you will all live passt thiss day. However, in the casse that you or your servantss sshould sseek to kill me, harm me, resstrain me, or otherwisse hinder me, there iss very high chance that the world will be desstroyed."
Any suggestions for developing this further?
[edited iteratively]
This is correct, but for Harry to regard the claim "they will live beyond today" as absolutely true (or as close to absolutely true as you can reasonably get), he has to both (a) have no intention of killing them at the time of making the statement and (b) not anticipate that intention changing over the course of the next twenty-four hours or so. At that point, Harry will basically be dealing with Kavka's Toxin Puzzle, which is isomorphic to Newcomb's Problem and the Prisoner's Dilemma played against an identical copy of oneself. Since Harry has stated in Chapter 33 that he cooperates in the Prisoner's Dilemma played against an identical copy of himself, he can't make the statement "they will live beyond this day" if he anticipates having to take lethal action against the Death Eaters at any point during the next twenty-four hours, which he very well might.
TL;DR: The above is basically just a very complicated way of saying that even without Parseltongue being binding, Harry still can't make a statement like "your servants will live beyond this day" if he anticipates a significant probability of having to kill them within that time.
Notice that in my latest suggestion, I phrased it as:
That is indeed a good way of hedging your bets, and I agree that it works very well in the context of the world ending. However, I'm not sure Harry can even call it "very likely" that the Death Eaters won't die within the day; the probability that someone ends up killing them is nontrivial. (Of course, I'm aware that your suggestion doesn't include anything about the Death Eaters' well-being; I'm just talking about the statement I originally suggested, more for the sake of argument than anything else.)
Also, I find it interesting that people seem to be suggesting more physical/magical solutions than verbal ones, because even if Harry somehow gets rid of the Death Eaters, Voldemort himself can't be permanently killed, and he is not going to be happy if Harry somehow blows up his thirty-six Death Eaters and more importantly, the resurrected body he just made for himself. Remember, people, the condition Eliezer set for us is simply to get Harry to survive somehow, not pull a seemingly impossible victory out of thin air. Why are so many people advocating physical/magical solutions to the problem?