= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Velorien comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (423)
It doesn't matter so much that Voldemort didn't see the exact means of his downfall coming. What bothers me most is that he was sloppy.
The point of my post is that I am much less intelligent than Voldemort, and vastly less experienced in cunning and subterfuge, yet I was able to think of a dozen relatively practical means of reducing risk from Harry in 20 minutes. How many would Voldemort have thought of and implemented if he'd tried?
Maybe they wouldn't have worked against the actual solution Harry chose. That only makes the story better. It means Harry successfully defeats the Voldemort we know and love, Voldemort at the top of his game, not a cut-down Voldemort shacked by a sudden Idiot Ball.
A satisfying way to defeat Voldemort would take advantage of his genuine weaknesses - his despair in humanity, his loneliness, his arrogance, his inability to comprehend genuine compassion, his need for a worthy foe. But until the latest chapters, he had not been shown to have the weaknesses of carelessness, poor planning, or leaving a dangerous enemy armed when they are in his power.
So, up until the prophecy, Voldemort can coexist with Harry. (The reverse may not be true.) So why did Eliezer add the prophecy to the mix? Was it just to set up the eventual duel between H and V?
It seems to me that that's the place to do an Author's Saving Throw, if there is one; if people reason about V as an optimization process rather than a character, they will never be satisfied by V losing a duel because V is defined by his duel-winning property. So the only winning move is not to play, but there are satisfying ways for that to happen. (In fact, I think I might write that up in long form.)
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres only exists because of the prophecy!
I am referring to the prophecy that Trelawney gives in chapter 21, that is original to Eliezer, not the prophecy that Snape hears and leaks to Voldemort that was written by Rowling.
Oh yes, that does seem like the pivotal moment in retrospect. It also seems central to the story. And it extends the Chosen One theme in canon, taking it up to Aleph-Null.
Why assume you're "much less intelligent than Voldemort," in addition to the gap in experience? As others have noted, he makes mistakes all the time. (I was surprised by the news that he actually died and was actually trapped for years, but not by him leaving Harry's wand alone given this previous information.) We know that V had vast experience with magic and secret information about the same, which could support your view but could also be a disadvantage when it came to partial transfiguration. Note that the mistake he knew about with the Horcrux network (and would perhaps have updated on) partly consisted of thinking he could overcome a long-established magical limitation without testing it. Maybe the actual complaint should be that Harry's use of partial transfiguration shouldn't have worked without more testing - though here we know that he based it on vast civilizational knowledge which V had only begun to assimilate.