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.
Interesting. I saw it largely as Canon:
Harry: That even though we got a fight ahead of us, we've got one thing that Voldemort doesn't have.
Ron: Yeah?
Harry: Something worth fighting for.
Basically Something to Protect = Something to Love.
Otherwise, doesn't Quirrell also have "something to protect", namely his life, and the world in which he lives it?
The difference seems to be the motivation. Which is what Harry is claiming. And he is correct in the general case. Quirrell isn't motivated by love or happiness. He doesn't really enjoy his life much (though he did seem pretty jolly after defeating Dumbledore).
The distinction between a Yes to Life versus a No to Death is a very common theme. I can see how the Yes to Life provides more motivation, but the claim that this made the difference in this particular outcome just seems false.
But in chapter 114 I don't see anything holding Harry back that he needs to see past. The nanotubes solution was a purely technical thing that Harry would either think of or not,
Let me give it the best interpretation I can. Wouldn't a Yes to Life be a much better defense against despair in that situation than No to Death? I can't cite studies, but that does seem plausible to me. It's not that Yes to Life makes you think better, but that it better keeps you thinking instead of giving up.
So, from Harry's perspective side, it's maybe true that having a more positive reason provided more motivation to keep him thinking and not just giving up, but "thinking faster" still seems like a mischaracterization.
And from Quirrell's perspective, I don't see that a heartfelt "Kumbaya" would have allowed him to overcome his ignorance of certain facts, which was a clear cause of his defeat.
The overconfidence that I would argue that Quirrell also displayed by leaving Harry his wand seemed very out of character for the hyper prepared but totally unloving Quirrell. How would a lack of love explain his failure to take the wand, given his general level of hyper preparedness?
ETA: re: "something worth fighting for"
Amusingly, that's probably more true in MoR than in canon, even if our Harry would never phrase it that way (or speak to Ron if he didn't need to). Here Tom Riddle's a bored sociopath without any strong connections; the only thing he really cares about is self-preservation, and that's more adequately assured if he doesn't pick fights with major wizarding governments or do crazy things like set up alternate versions of himself to spar with. In canon he's basically just Snake Wizard Hitler, and Hitler had if nothing else the courage of his convictions.
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.)