Sorta ties into something I thought about much earlier;
-- The easiest way to prevent LV from killing HP would be for HP to convince LV that his intention is misguided. -- His intention is to kill Harry to save the world. (funny, that) -- Killing Harry will not save the world. It is clear that LV is aware of this, based on his reflections on self-fulfilling prophecies. -- LV intends to defy the prophecy at every point of intention, and will therefore try to kill HP anyway, because if the prophecy is coming true anyway he's already screwed and has nothing to lose. -- Convincing LV that killing HP is useless is therefore insufficient. He must be convinced that killing HP will bring about the very thing he wishes to avoid. -- HP's existence must be tied to the continued well-being of the world. -- What does HP have that could save the world? Well, power over dementors. -- What might dementors do that could destroy the world? Jump into the sun, perhaps? -- The realization that that would be an optimal thing for death incarnate to do will cause the thing itself to happen. -- Unfortunately, the vow cannot prevent this, because it allowed for the weighing of risks, which by nature includes contemplation of disastrous possibilities. (if I die, does this end the earth? Is it dementors? if I don't think about this question, and they've done something, that's a certain bad thing, but if I think about it, I might decide there's nothing wrong and that's a not-certain bad thing, so I'll take the lesser risk and think about it.) -- HP is the only one who can stop them from destroying the sun. And if he dies, he cannot prevent them from doing so. -- Not that killing HP would be intelligent in any case, as there's a non-zero chance that his death and subsequent entrance into the horcrux system would kill LV too.
I'm very interested in commentary.
I don't think Harry would automatically consider Dementors jumping into the Sun an optimal thing to do as there are too many unknowns.
Can a Dementor fly high enough or fast enough to leave the Earth's atmosphere? Practically speaking, we don't know how much of their flight is true flight and how much they are bound by forces like gravity (not as much as true material beings, obviously, but that's not necessarily the same as not at all).
Can a Dementor survive away from the Earth? We don't know if they need to absorb sustenance. It may be that they need
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 113.
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.)
IMPORTANT -- From the end of chapter 113: