I can't believe I didn't realize this before.

Someone complained elsewhere (I think it was in the other thread) about Harry being the Boy-who-Lived and having a prophecy and having a cold dark side and being super-rational.

From MoR itself:

It's too much coincidence for one girl to be the strongest magically and academically unless there's a single cause.

It's plausible that one of the Muggle-raised students at Hogwarts could be a science nerd. It's not plausible that that student would also be the Boy-who-Lived. There must be a single cause.

I think it's most likely that Harry's dark side is somehow an effect of being AKed. Perhaps he's a horcrux, like in canon. The hat said no, but it's possible that Harry was killed and the only soul left in him is Voldemort's fragment. Or, without positing souls, maybe horcruxing a person overwrites the victim with a copy of yourself.

Harrymort has a warm side because he was raised in a loving household; he doesn't remember being Voldemort because he was stuck in a child's brain, with the plasticity and pruning that entails (or maybe V. wiped Harrymort's memory for some reason?); he didn't survive the attack, but rather his fresh corpse was appropriated as a horcrux.

This also explains his prodigious intellect and indignation at being treated as a child: he's really an adult mind, overwritten onto a child's brain. This is also why the Remembrall reacted the way it did: he's forgotten decades of his former life as Voldemort.

That doesn't seem like a sufficient degree of caution, considering how McGonagall behaves with respect to other potentially dangerous Transfigurations. She doesn't say to only Transfigure things briefly into liquids because of evaporation, she says not to do it at all.

And she especially wouldn't do a potentially dangerous Transfiguration as the introduction to a Transfiguration safety lecture without making a big deal out of all the precautions she had to take to do it. In fact, she specifically says that the students could guess the direction of the Transfiguration based on safety principles, and based on safety principles, it should have been pig to desk, not desk to pig.

I think the question "Is it rational to be religious?" is one that deserves critical attention and testing, but talk of ancestor simulations completely demolishes the point. Any entity capable of creating an actual ancestor simulation--a fully-modeled "Matrix" populated with genuinely human-equivalent sentient Sims--is an entity for whom the results of such a test would be irrelevant and obsolete. The premise, that some form of Faith might be useful or even necessary for rational humans to maximally act in accordance with their values, is not applicable for a posthuman being.

The technology for creating a real ancestor simulation would almost certainly exist in a context of other technologies that are comparably advanced within their fields. If the computer power exists to run a physics engine sufficient to simulate a whole planet and its environs, complete with several billion human-level consciousnesses, the beings who possess that power would almost certainly be able to enhance their own cognitive and psychological capacities to the point that Faith would no longer be necessary for them, even if it might be for us here and now, or for the Sims in the ancestor simulation. A creator of ancestor simulations would for all practical intents and purposes be God, even in relation to his/her own universe. With molecular nanotechnology, utility fogs, programmable matter, and technologies we can't even imagine, conjuring a burning bush or a talking snake or a Resurrection would be child's play.

Proposing ancestor simulations as a way to test the usefulness of Faith is like saying, "Let's use a TARDIS to go watch early space-age planets and see if rockets or solar sails are the best way for us to explore the universe!"

On the other hand, we do already possess computer platforms that are fairly good at emulating other human-level intelligences, and we routinely create plausible, though limited world-simulations. These are "human brains" and "stories," respectively. So one way to partially examine and test to determine whether or not it could be rational to be religious would be to write a story about a rational person who adopts a Faith and applies it to maximally operate according to his or her values.

Then, present the story to people who believe that Faith, and people who don't. Is the story itself believable? Do the other minds processing the simulation (story) judge that it accurately models reality? Unfortunately this method cannot simultaneously generate billions of fully-realized simulated lives so that a wide variety of Faiths and life-circumstances under which they are used can be examined. Instead, the author would have to generate what they consider to be a plausible scenario for a rational person adopting a Faith and write a genuinely believable story about it. To serve as an effective test, the story would have to include as many realistic circumstances adverse to the idea as possible, in the same way that the secret to passing the 2-4-6 Test is to look for number sets that produce a "no." It could not be written like a fictional Utopia in which the Utopia works only because everyone shares the author's beliefs and consistently follows them.

Eliezer's story Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality does a mirror-opposite of this, providing a story-test for the question, "Would the Sequences still be applicable even under the extreme circumstance of being catapulted into the Harry Potter universe?" Some of the best moments in this story are where Harry's rationalist world-view is strained to the utmost, like when he sees Professor McGonagall turn into a cat. A reader who finds the story "believable" (assuming sufficient suspension-of-disbelief to let the magic slide) will come away accepting that, if the Sequences can work even in a world with flying broomsticks and shape-shifting witches, they'll probably work here in our rather more orderly and equation-modelable universe.

So, a "So-And-So and the Methods of Faith" story might, if well-written, be able to demonstrate that Faith could be a valid way of programming the non-rational parts of our brain into helping us maximally operate according to our values.

Another method of testing (perhaps a next step) would be to adopt the techniques of Chaos Magic and/or Neuro-Linguistic Programming and try out the utility of Faith (perhaps testing different Faiths over set periods of time) in one's own life. Or better still: get the funding for a proper scientific study with statistically-sufficient sample sizes, control-groups, double-blind protocols, etc..

Here's what I think will happen:

Zabini stuns himself in the name of Sunshine to create a tie. And here's why:

1) The rest of the school is very partisan about their favorite army, so it's not likely that many are betting on a tie. Zabini (through a proxy or otherwise) put all of his chips on "tie." So he will return to Hell a much richer Prince of Darkness.

1a) "Aftermath" scene: Hogsmeade. Zabini meets his broker. Hogwarts is basically a closed economy, and Zabini has now walked off with the lion's share of the student body's disposable income. He plunks his Bag of Holding on the table. "Take this and convert it to Muggle money. Then go buy unmarked silver bullion..."

2) The three Generals are tied for Quirrell points. Given what we've seen of him in this chapter, Zabini is probably in fourth place, and not too far behind. How many Quirrell points will he get for getting all three generals to play according to his plan? We see Harry and Hermione accepting, and per the Prisoner's Dilemma thing, Harry and Draco had to synchronize their moves ("cooperate") to have a chance against Hermione. This would mean that Draco is also more or less following Zabini's plan. Zabini was able to steer the battle to his personal chosen outcome, so he (as an individual) wins the battle. The betrayal rules+scoring are set up to favor individual objectives rather than army loyalty/collective goals/unity. Zabini has realized this, and acted accordingly.

3) After collecting Quirrell's wish from his come-from-behind victory (which provides a "practical" demonstration of the 2-4-6 Test, since no one, Generals included, expected Zabini to have his own victory conditions), Zabini goes to Dumbledore's office. "Well done, Blaise!" Dumbledore says. "I suppose you're here for your wish..." That is, Dumbledore has offered Zabini a wish if he could steer the battle to a tie, since that would stop a Hogwarts equivalent of a football (soccer) riot, which would be likely if one of the armies won.

4) At the Christmas feast, Dumbledore rises to announce that the three armies are being merged into a Hogwarts Army, and starting at the end of January, the HA will compete in three-way battles with Beauxbatons and Durmstrang. Per the experiment mentioned earlier with the "Eagles" and "Rattlers," the Hogwarts students are united against external foes. He and Quirrell allowed the Headmasters of the other schools to watch the battles using Quirrell screens, and their staffs liked the idea. The mock battles use more magical skills and incorporate more students than Quidditch, and are thus a better encouragement to learning. New rules could be applied to future battles. "You may use any magic item you can make (under teacher or senior-student supervision) in your battles, providing it's not dangerous." "You can use any Potion you can make," etc.