Why is Voldemort not getting rid of Harry in some more final way?
Even if he's worried killing Harry will rebound against him because of the prophecy somehow, he can, I don't know, freeze Harry? Stick Harry in the mirror using whatever happened to Dumbledore? Destroy Harry's brain and memories and leave him an idiot? Shoot Harry into space?
Why is "resurrect Harry's best friend to give him good counsel" a winning move here?
How is Voldemort resurrecting Hermione?
With his own resurrection, he's transfiguring stuff into his body, using the Stone to make the transfiguration permanent, then having his spirit repossess the body.
With Hermione, the body was never the problem. Where's he getting the spirit? How does the Stone help?
So Harry gets his wand back, gets his pouch back, Voldemort resurrects Hermione with superpowers, then Voldemort becomes super-weak, his horcruxes mysteriously stop working, and he mentions this is happening loudly enough for Harry to hear and kill him?
Either this is still all in the mirror, or Harry needs to buy lottery tickets right away.
"Well," said Albus Dumbledore. "I do feel stupid."
"I should hope so," Professor Quirrell said easily; if he had been at all shocked himself at being caught, it did not show. A casual wave of his hand changed his robes back to a Professor's clothing.
Dumbledore's grimness had returned and redoubled. "There I am, searching so hard for Voldemort's shade, never noticing that the Defense Professor of Hogwarts is a sickly, half-dead victim possessed by a spirit far more powerful than himself. I would call it senility, if so many others had not missed it as well."
This is Dumbledore admitting he held the Idiot Ball. We've been promised nobody's holding the Idiot Ball. So something's up. I like the theory that mirror is operating as intended and showing Voldemort what he wants to see, that being Dumbledore making a mistake and losing. Alternately, it could be that Dumbledore was somehow able to make a version of him inside the mirror (maybe in his CEV he saw himself inside the mirror protecting the Stone, and that reflection-Dumbledore gained independent existence?). Or he could just have something else up his sleeve.
What are some sensible-sounding alternatives to eliminating the snitch entirely?
The best I can think of is have two snitches—red snitch, blue snitch. Whenever a seeker catches their snitch, the opposing team can't score any more; the game ends when the second snitch is caught.
Prediction:
Harry gets the Snitch eliminated from Quidditch. Not just in Hogwarts, but in the big leagues as well - they don't want a Germany vs. Austria on their hands.
All of the celebrity Quidditch players of the world - Victor Krum, Ludo Bagman, Finbar Quigley - are distraught by these sudden and drastic changes to a traditional game they've loved for many years. At the ceremony marking the changes, some of them tear up.
The Daily Prophet headline is "BOY WHO LIVED TEARS UP THE STARS"
Eliezer gives all of us a long lecture about how the prior for somebody making celebrities cry is so much higher than the prior for someone literally ripping the Sun apart that the latter hypothesis should never even have entered our consideration, regardless of how much more natural an interpretation of the prophecy it is.
I'm looking for an old post of Eliezer's. If I remember the post correctly, he was commenting that a lot of the negative reaction to evopsych might come from having first encountered it in the hands of dumb internet commentators, instead of <some scholarly book title>.
I don't remember the title he referenced, and the search function is failing me. Can anyone point me in the right direction?
I can't find the exact post you're talking about, but the book involved was probably The Adapted Mind, since Eliezer often praises it in terms like those.
Smell is interesting because it's way overrepresented genetically. Something like 5% of most animals' genomes are just a whole bunch of olfactory receptor genes, each for a different individual smell. So it should be unusually easy to do epigenetics with it. Just say "Express the gene for cherry smell more" and then the mice have a stronger reaction to it.
This doesn't mean that any more complex behaviors can be inherited epigenetically. In fact, it might be that nothing else is as suitable to epigenetic transmission as olfaction.
In his defense, is it possible EY can't win at this point, regardless of his approach? Maybe the internet has grabbed this thing and the PR whirlwinds are going to do with it whatever they like?
I've read apologies from EY where he seems to admit pretty clearly he screwed up. He comes off as defensive and pissy sometimes in my opinion, but he seems sincerely irked about how RW and other outlets have twisted to whole story to discredit LW and himself. From my recall, one comment he made on the reddit sub dedicated to his HP fanfic indicated he was very hurt by the whole kerfuffle, in addition to his obvious frustration.
At this point I think the winning move is rolling with it and selling little plush basilisks as a MIRI fundraiser. It's our involuntary mascot, and we might as well 'reclaim' it in the social justice sense.
Then every time someone brings up "Less Wrong is terrified of the basilisk" we can just be like "Yes! Yes we are! Would you like to buy a plush one?" and everyone will appreciate our ability to laugh at ourselves, and they'll go back to whatever they were doing.
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Presumably, the body was repaired to true health - which also means that the brain was restored to its original state, that is, functional.
At that point, a Muggle can be revived by simply restarting her heart. A witch, apparently, requires a bit of magic.
But that suggests that you can resurrect someone non-permanently without the Stone - and possibly keep them alive indefinitely by expending constant magic on it like Harry does with his father's rock.