I thought faster than Voldemort, even though he was older than me and smarter, because... because I had a reason to think. Voldemort had a drive to be immortal, he strongly preferred not to die, but that wasn't a positive desire, it was fear, and Voldemort made mistakes because of that fear. I think the power that Voldemort knew not... was that I had something to protect.
This looks like a false to facts rationalization by Harry.
Voldemort actually didn't know about the partial transfiguration, right? Neither was he likely to know about carbon nanotubes. He simply didn't have the data to anticipate Harry's move. (Though I'm among those who think Voldemort should have taken Harry's wand prior to their chit chat.) If anything, Voldemort lost because he was lazy and over confident, not because he was afraid and therefore thinking poorly while all wands were on Harry.
And shouldn't fear and threat prime Voldemort's "dark side" at least as well as Harry's?
Agreed, I didn't buy it either. Felt a bit like a forced end-of-episode moral in a kid's show.
I see the point of the Something to Protect article as being about growing past your current conception of how you should think and act. That you need something more important to you than whatever is anchoring you to your current rules of thought, in order to do that.
Say, when Harry realized he could have used Lesath to save Hermione from the troll, instead of thinking that would have been "sort of Dark-lordish", that seemed like an example to me.
Or when...
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 122, which is the final chapter of the story.
Happy once-in-a-century Pi Day! (3/14/15 == 3.1415)
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.)