ETA: gjm is right: Voldemort himself says the target must be either willing or too weak to resist him. So Voldemort can't possess most random people, and certainly not Dumbledore.

If Voldemort could possess Dumbledore, he could have done so earlier and simply given himself the Stone, as well as the Elder Wand and any other interesting gadgets Dumbledore has. He'd have made Dumbledore teach him all the spells he knows, too, if those survive possession. And he'd have used Dumbledore to attack by surprise Flamel or anyone else if he wanted to.

In the least convenient world, possessing someone doesn't give Voldemort access to any of their previous memories or spells, it just wipes the mind and takes over the body. Then it might be hard to possess Dumbledore and use him to get the Stone. But he could still take out Dumbledore, cause Flamel to remove the Stone from Hogwarts, and then possess Flamel while he has the Stone.

Possessing anyone in the world (or at least, any wizard other than Harry) just by making them touch any object you prepared beforehand is so overpowered that if it's true, the only possible reason Quirrel is still plotting anything or playing games or appearing to ever be in danger, is that he'd be bored otherwise.

If Voldemort can possess Dumbledore at will and chooses not to, the only reason I can think of is that it would make the game too boring, like he said about the Wizarding War. This strikes me as... inadequate. With the Stone involved, Voldermort is playing for real stakes, and waiting for the end of the year increases the chance something will go wrong, weakens the Quirrel body, and eventually forces Voldemort to operate on the last day of the school year, when others might guess something important would happen.

(Edited:) But why wouldn't Voldemort be able to possess Dumbledore, or anyone else in the world, other than Harry? He claims the only requirement is to have the target touch a Horcrux 2.0. This seems fairly easy: to give make sure your target will touch a Horcruxed coin, you can just toss them one and they will catch it by reflex, as an earlier chapter pointed out. And you can horcrux the doorknob of their office, a chair they'll sit on in a public park, etc. It may be, however, that since Voldemort has only had this ability for a few months, during which Dumbledore has been on high alert, he hasn't been able to accomplish this yet.

Those seem like they'd be harder to misunderstand, and less tempting to cut corners on.

Anyone here have experience hiring people on sites like Mechanical Turk, oDesk, TaskRabbit, or Fiverr? What kind of stuff did you hire them to do, and how good were they at doing it? It seems like these services could be potentially quite valuable so I'd like to get an idea of what it's possible to do with them.

How did the grading work? My first guess was that Quirrell was telling the truth, but this seems unlikely, and would mean that the EE+ he gave Harry couldn't mean anything. My second guess was that Quirrell came up with the grades before-hand, but all he knows is how well they could actually defend themselves, and real-world ability is not a good indicator of how well you'd do on a written test. My third guess is that a Time-Turner is involved, and he'll have Harry deliver the tests to him in the past.

I plan to be there.

By coincidence, September 26th is also my brother's birthday. I'm not quite sure how to celebrate both...

For what it's worth, it sounds odd to me. Part of that is, presumably, because "I want" instead of "I'd like to" in connection with something directly involving the interlocutor is rather forceful, likely inappropriately so. But even "I'd like to know how you are doing" comes across as weirdly and artificially sincere, which I suspect gets interpreted as evidence of low social skills, hence reflecting negatively on the speaker. I wonder if this is a trap that all attempts at solving this linguistic problem are bound to fall into.

I do the exact same thing, so far it's been working pretty well. It's a bit easier in German, because we have a larger range of expressions to play with, I wonder about how to do it in English properly.

"How do you do" wouldn't work for me at all; if the other person is familiar with it, then it will function merely as a greeting; and if they don't and take it seriously as a request, it'll cause me to perceive them as uneducated.

I've always felt that "How are you doing" is slightly more of a sincere question that "How's it going", and I am hereby asking for native speakers to confirm or deny this.

Hi LW, My name's Olivier, I'm a 37-year-old Canadian currently living in Ottawa. My background is varied: I have a BA in Communication Studies and an MPhil in Japanese Studies but also a DEC (some special Quebec degree equivalent to the last year of high school and first of university in the rest of Canada and the USA) in Natural Sciences. I've owned a business, worked in cultural media and am now a public servant working in immigration.

I've been interested in AI, existential risks, intelligence explosion et al. for a number of years, probably since finding Bolstrom's paper on Simulated Reality.

I'm not 100% sure how I found LW, but it probably was while browsing for one of the topics above.

I've considered myself a rationalist for as long as I can remember, though I've long called it (rather naively?) "realist". Also being an existentialist, I try to bring these beliefs/convictions into practice in my work and how I raise my children (we'll see how that turns out!)

Through browsing here, I'm glad to find community that appears in between rigid academia and sensationalist media.

Anyhow, I'll most likely lurk a lot more than I post. Having three young kids leaves me with little time, and a sleep-addled, rather incoherent brain.

Thanks for reading!

I get it. Makes sense, actually now that you point it out I think I've also seen this phrase employed as a "pseudo-compliment". Rest assured that it wasn't intended that way.