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WalterL comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 116 - Less Wrong Discussion
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Prediction 1: Hermione will soon harrow Azkaban. Why wouldn't she? She's all but immortal, now.
Prediction 2: Time-travel and memory-charm shenanigans incoming. Evidence:
Harry weirdly ignored the missing recognition code on LV's forged message.
Cedric considered in Harry's plans, and his Time-Turner mentioned, then seemingly forgotten.
Death-Eaters all dead, but no faces observed.
Flamel asserted dead, but we didn't see it, and LV explicitly didn't kill him personally.
Dumbledore thinks in stories, yet we're supposed to believe he's surprised when the villain reveals he's captured the hero and his equipment (Harry and the Cloak), just like villains always catch heroes and take their stuff near the end (see: Frodo Baggins, Luke Skywalker).
Hermione has been asleep the whole time, neither giving nor receiving information.
Questions:
did Harry tell Cedric to do certain things before Harry left? Did Harry tell Cedric to Obliviate Harry afterward so Harry could play his part convincingly? What did Harry most likely tell Cedric to do?
who will do the Time-Turning, Hermione, Cedric, or Harry?
who will be saved? Obvious candidates include Flamel, Dumbledore, Lucius Malfoy, maybe all the anonymous Death-Eaters.
if you were Hermione and had a Time-Turner and the Stone and the Cloak and six hours to save everybody but Voldemort, Quirrell and Macnair, how would you do it? (Do you need the help of someone who can Obliviate well? Do you need partial Transfiguration?)
Prediction 1:
Huh? Hermione is a rule follower. She wouldn't destroy Azkaban if she had a button she could press that would do so. Also she can't kill even one Dementor, or even cast a patronus to prevent one from killing her.
Prediction 2:
Don't think so, remaining story too short for such shenanigans.
She started as a rules follower. Then Self-Actualisation happened.
She also knows exactly what it's like to be an innocent sentenced to Azkaban for a crime they didn't commit, and how easy it is for such a thing to happen. You can't go through an experience like that without re-evaluating some things about how you see the world.
The point of the above post, I believe, is that there is nothing stopping her from learning to cast Patronus 2.0, at which point it's plausible that the infinite unicorn blood would replenish her life-force so killing Dementors wouldn't end up draining it all.
It's not entirely clear how Hermione's troll/unicorn stuff interacts with the depletion of life-force necessary to fuel the Patronus. That said, she has a Horcrux, so at the end of the day it doesn't really matter. And if Harry can eventually destroy Azkaban, Hermione certainly can.
I'm skeptical. If dementors really do destroy your soul then having a horcrux may not be helpful against them. I'm a fan of taking V's wand down to the pit, in fact.
If Dementors really do destroy your soul, how would anyone know?
No magic burst at death would be one prediction to check, though not conclusive. You could test it with Horcrux 2.0, though no one has had the opportunity to do that before now. The fact that Voldemort has expressed uncertainty about whether he is capable of surviving dementors, and that he is relying upon escaping from Quirrel's body in time to survive dementors points in the direction of him believing that a dementor might be capable of taking out him and his whole horcrux network in one shot.
None of that is conclusive, but it's all suggestive and supports the popular version of what dementors do.
The thing about magic burst is that Dementors drain the target's magic anyway. It's entirely plausible that if a Dementor kills you, it sucks away your magic in the process, or at least enough of it to prevent a magic burst.