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MarkusRamikin comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 117 - Less Wrong Discussion
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This is silly. He'd taken the time to do exactly that before. And now, if he's going to give him a full minute just to think...
The whole thing falls to the "plausible excuse" vs "what you'd expect to happen" problem, which Harry explains in Answers and Riddles:
If you only knew up to chapter 108 or 110 or so, and someone told you that Voldemort is going to take every precaution to contain Harry's threat that he can think of, running a search of the sort that would generate such ideas as "put up elaborate wards, including ones against timelooping", "keep him naked", "have 36 Death Eaters point wands at him, some of them with different orders than others", "murder him very elaborately and thoroughly", "but first make him take a Vow", "commit to guarding the place for six hours anyway" etc., would you expect one of those items not to be "disarm him"?
Certainly, but if you must leave Harry a way out, better to have a plausible excuse instead of no excuse at all.
Agreed. Especially if we judge the story by usual storytelling standards. Though that's harder to do after HPMoR itself has been teaching us the difference between story-logic and what is realistically probable, and mocking stories in general and the original Harry Potter in particular at every turn for that stuff.
I don't think that hole was even necessary. Voldemort did need to let Harry keep his wand for the Unbreakable Vow. and could have intended to have someone disarm him afterwards. So just have Harry prepare the antimatter bomb while Voldemort is dictacting the Vow, and announce it before he could be disarmed. What do you think?
(Sure, that would probably mean no "final exam" for the readers. Now I hated the idea of holding the story hostage, and refused to even "try to try" for that reason, so that doesn't bother me. I suspect I'm in the minority about that, though.)
Well, ‘hate’ is a strong word, but I certainly wasn't going to be bullied into leaving a review.
The problem is that there doesn't seem to be a plausible excuse for the wand thing except "Voldemort was careless", and carelessness under such conditions simply hasn't been part of his character at any point until now.
Word of God says that the plot of HPMOR was set in stone since the beginning. If there was some better reason for Harry to face the Final Exam with a wand in his hand, Eliezer would have known about it from the start, and could have seeded all the necessary foreshadowing for it way in advance.