Harry has already upgraded two existing spells: partial transfiguration and Patronus 2.0
In both cases, he achieved the impossible by ignoring what wizards believe and instead concentrating on his own beliefs.
What does Harry believe about Hermione that other wizards do not? He believes she is a purely biological machine, that there are no souls, and that a reductionist viewpoint is correct.
Therefore, in the right frame of mind, perhaps Harry can reparo a dead human (although canon!reparo cannot repair magical items properly, I wonder if it might restore Hermione without her magic, and if she might just be just as awesome without it.)
There's a genetic marker that the Source of Magic recognizes. The gene is still there, but the magic may not be. What wizards believe to be the soul leaving might be the Source of Magic withdrawing its power.
I loved this:
That's not how responsibility works, Professor." Harry's voice was patient, like he was explaining things to a child who was certain not to understand. He wasn't looking at her anymore, just staring off at the wall to her right side. "When you do a fault analysis, there's no point in assigning fault to a part of the system you can't change afterward, it's like stepping off a cliff and blaming gravity. Gravity isn't going to change next time. There's no point in trying to allocate responsibility to people who aren't going to alter their actions. Once you look at it from that perspective, you realize that allocating blame never helps anything unless you blame yourself, because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there. That's why Dumbledore has his room full of broken wands. He understands that part, at least.
Does anyone else run into the problem of frequently giving this advice to yourself and finding it useful, but struggling to find a non-awful way to convey it to other people? I don't want to get them to self-flagellate, but to look for what leverage they have and not worry as much about what it totally outside of their control. Stoicism seems like the main way people hit on this idea of responsibility in my social circle.
I think Harry phrased it poorly, and if he meant it, he was absolutely wrong.
Allocating blame on yourself is a category error. We morally judge to separate the sheep from the goats, the wheat from the chaff - in short, to sort into piles of approach and avoid. You're stuck with you - where ever you go, there you are - so the point of the categorical judgment is simply inapplicable.
The sensible and very valuable part of what he is saying is to look to what you can do, and don't seek to console yourself with "that was his responsibility". Such interpersonal judgments are all about roles
because you're the only one whose actions you can change by putting blame there.
But you can change your actions more directly and more effectively by changing them. Putting blame on yourself is one of the better paths to depression, which is not an effective state. Blame others where appropriate and useful, but don't blame yourself, only search for actions to improve the situation, and choose them. You blame others because their actions are not yours to choose. Don't blame yourself, choose better.
I went through a situation very similar to Ch90. Same story, different details.
Even got the worse-than-useless attempts at comfort - now I can't even say "I'm sorry" to my uncle for letting his son die. That's one of the few things that still brings me to tears about this whole incident.
My thought process was fairly similar to Harry's, and I've given it a lot of thought, so I might be able to shed some light on the topic.
Any thoughts about how to apply this sort of thinking when you're extremely stressed?
When the pressure was on, there was no room for guilt and it was just do do do with some frantic thinking interpersed - even when it was clear that there was little hope. The feeling that I was to blame didn't come until afterwards, when there was nothing left I could do. At the point where you can still do something, it's not so much the "it's your fault and you should feel bad", but rather "this can't happen. THINK THINK THINK!" which gets in the way.
The main advice I have here is to come to terms with the possibility ahead of time. Get those tears out of the way now, so that should it happen, you just see it for what it is and not what it "...
My issue is that I don't have a good procedure in place for constructive blame: by default, when I blame myself for something mostly what happens is that I rehearse to myself what a terrible person I am without trying to figure out what I could do differently in the future (and then actually making sure that that happens).
Well, being a stoic for such a long time means my reflex is usually, "What is useful here?" And when I run that check on kvetching, it doesn't make the cut. Sometimes I pretend to feel guiltier, since most people read practicality as callousness, but internally, I focus on, "What different action should I take or new data should I look for?"
ETA: Actually, the other check that helps me is asking: "Is there a causal link between my feeling bad and my being helpful?" Usually, no, or if there is, it does the opposite of what I'd like!
Would you guys agree that Harry is being unfair to Minerva regarding his Time-Turner? "But you thought it was your role to shut me down and get in my way."
At the time she had it locked, she was right: he'd been irresponsible with it and needed to stop abusing his new toy every time a minor problem arose, and there's not a hint that even Harry disagreed with that. You can't refrain from such corrective actions on the remote possiblity that limiting your student's options will do harm. Not-limiting an irresponsible student's options in the relevant way can also lead to harm.
Yes, and it's part of a pattern of behavior. HJPEV consistently finds (seeks out?) uncharitable explanations for other peoples' behavior, especially when he's under stress. It's probably the most 11-year-old-like thing about him.
I think this is actually Harry's fault: He should've requested his time turner be unlocked as soon as he could plausibly argue that REALLY IMPORTANT things were happening around and to him. When Mcgonnigall first locked it, he was doing more harm than good with it.
It depends on what other corrective options she had. She might, for example, have password-protected it as a form of probation, and told him the password. She could then check every couple of weeks/months to make sure he hadn't used it, while still leaving him the option in case of emergency. Of course, she probably wouldn't have believed him able to not give in to the temptation, and it's hard to say whether she would have been right at that exact moment in time.
Of course, she probably wouldn't have believed him able to not give in to the temptation, and it's hard to say whether she would have been right at that exact moment in time.
Considering that she was reacting to the signs of time-turner addiction, a phenomena that had been observed in others before, I think it was a safe assumption for McGonagall to make.
At some point, these people have a school to run. They can't spend all day thinking of clever stratagems and obscure contingency plans.
This has only just occurred to me, but if the sole threat to the students was (as far as everyone knew) an ordinary troll, and it was daylight outside, and they were already in the Great Hall, then why didn't the professors just lead the students out of Hogwarts and into the sunny open before assuming defensive formation? It would also have the advantage of giving a group of casters long range on a melee attacker.
For that matter, I wonder if the sky illusion on the Great Hall ceiling counts? It reflects real weather.
Considering McGonagall's first impulse was sending them back to their dormitories, I believe they just didn't think it through.
The fact that there a troll in Hogwarts is a sign that Hogwarts is under attack by someone who thinks that he has something to gain from smuggling a troll into hogwarts.
If you notice that someone breaks into your house, you call the police. It's the right thing to do even if you sit with a bunch of friends and you have a bunch of riffles at home because you are an American who loves the second Amendment. The population of magical Britian is very small so Bones basically heads the local police department.
McGonnegal thinks that it's plausible that the troll is a distraction to an attack on the third corridor where something imported get's stored.
There's fog of war.
Even in the case where Amelie Bones has some other fight to fight at the same time, McGonnegal traveling 6 hours back and time and giving more information to Amelie Bones, helps Amelie Bones to understand that multiple targets in magicial Britian are under attack at the same time.
If Hogwarts staff can't handle that, they're not worthy of their titles.
Evidently they can't handle it and as a result one student died. Even if they were 95% certain that they could handle the troll on their own, it would still be prudent to go back in time and place a call for help.
Don't forget that there are people outside of the Great Hall like the Librarian.
According to the Harry Potter wiki, the Great Hall is located off the Entrance Hall, which suggests that leaving the castle from it should be fairly trivial.
Here's how I would have saved Hermione if I were Harry.
In an accessible but seldom visited hallway of Hogwarts, a rail-way sign reads 6PM to 5PM Express.
At 5:00, a boy materializes under the sign. He is wearing a rail-way conductor's hat. He is holding a trunk. His name is Harry Potter.
Conductor Harry puts down the trunk. He opens the lid. Inside his Trunk of Holding are wooden seats numbered 1 through 1000. All seats appear to be empty.
Conductor Harry yells "Arriving at 5PM! Please add one tally to your forearm now".
Silently, hundreds of people draw a tally mark on their arms.
Conductor Harry steps away from the trunk and the hundreds invisible passengers of the 6PM to 5PM Express disembark.
At 5:10, Conductor Harry closes the trunk lid. He stashes the trunk [EDIT] and Time-Turner in the Great Hall.
At 5:12, Conductor Harry burns his conductor hat. He draws one tally mark on his previously blank arm, and puts on his invisibility cloak. He sighs. He has a long day ahead of him.
...
At 5:30 in the Astronomy Tower, a smelly and disheveled Harry Potter pulls off his invisibility cloak. He is covered with hundreds of tally marks, and looks like he hasn't slept in days...
Just came across this in re-reading chapter 3:
The Killing Curse rebounded and struck the Dark Lord, leaving only the burnt hulk of his body and a scar upon your forehead.
Why a burnt hulk when the Killing Curse does no physical damage whatsoever?
It strikes me that the body doesn't match Voldemort's presumed cause of death, there are no witnesses of said death (since Harry's memory cuts out early), and burning a corpse is a classic way to render it unidentifiable.
Moving from considering evidence to speculation, it strikes me that the prophecy would make it incredibly easy for Voldemort to fake his own death - if he went to the Potters' house, killed the parents, placed a mysterious mark on Harry, and then disappeared, leaving a body behind, there is no way his enemies wouldn't take that as his death and the prophecy's fulfillment.
I suspect Quirrell's closing statements to McGonagall at the end of this chapter are not quite what they seem. I'm thinking of two in particular: the first, that he wants Harry kept away from the Restricted Section, and the second, that he wants McGonagall and Dumbledore to try to restore Harry's mood by any means necessary.
The trick to the first one is that he hasn't mentioned sealing off a certain other means of discovering arcane secrets at Hogwarts. Admittedly, Quirrell's suggested that it's probably blocked off anyways. But it might not be; even if the basilisk itself is gone, there might still be useful books. So it looks as though Quirrell is trying to push Harry into finding the Chamber of Secrets. There could be any number of reasons why - though the fact that it's a secret, hidden place at least partially exempt from the Hogwarts wards seems like a good place to start.
The trick to the second one is that McGonagall's way of cheering Harry up is actually going to be quite predictable: she and Dumbledore are likely going to try bringing Harry's parents to Hogwarts. Naturally, this opens up a whole world of possibilities for Quirrell; he could use them as hostages, kill them, Imperius them, or do any number of other nasty things if necessary. Or, if he's interested in understanding Harry better, he could use Legilimency to learn all about his background.
Also, limiting Harry's access to knowledge (warning off the other profs, warding the books, etc) makes Quirrell the sole conduit for advanced knowledge for Harry. (Or at least limits the competition). And Quirrell implied to Harry that he was at his nearly-unrestricted service. That gives Quirrell more access to Harry's thought processes (by the questions he asks) and more capacity to steer his choices.
As to what he's steering them toward, he pushed Harry off of new spells, which makes me wonder if he has an old one in mind. There was talk about rituals of sacrifice here (the blood-to-fire) and generally recently (Tracy Davis's invocation). It's possible that there's some ritual that Quirrell would like Harry to perform, not for what it manifests, but for the changes it makes to the caster.
He probably also wants to push Harry away from new spells for safety reasons (presumably he thinks Harry might try to science up a dangerous new spell and that's how he ends the world; he has some experience with Harry attempting to combine magic and science from Azkaban). If he personally steers Harry towards old spells then at least he knows what those spells do.
It's also possible that the Restricted Section contains enough information for someone like Harry to figure out how to create spells from reading it.
It's possible that Quirrell himself intends to be Harry's source of information, but so far he's only been manifestly unhelpful. Basically every response he gave was a brush-off; he didn't even name his spell of cursed fire. When directly given an opportunity to suggest spells or rituals of his own choosing ("There's some magics I mean to learn"), he wasted it. It's possible that he did so out of concern that he was being listened in on, which would also explain his choice not to switch to Parseltongue; still, it certainly doesn't seem like he's trying to point Harry in any particular direction.
In my analysis, I've considered this strong evidence that Quirrell is genuinely worried about what Harry will do. This isn't (just) a plot to get Harry dependent on him so he can feed what he wants into his ear; this is also an actual limitation on Harry's power, denying him information that he doesn't intend to tell him personally, either.
... given the Prophecy, I can't blame him, though we don't know much about the effects of fighting Prophecies.
I think it's more likely that Quirrell is being sincere, and that he is trying to avert the prophecy that he heard at the end of Ch 89. As evidence, I submit:
"You don't like science," Harry said slowly. "Why not?"
"Those fool Muggles will kill us all someday!" Professor Quirrell's voice had grown louder. "They will end it! End all of it!"
- Chapter 20
"HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD."
- Chapter 89
"... If I have to brute-force the problem by acquiring enough power and knowledge to just make it happen, I will."
Another pause.
"And to go about that," the man in the corner said, "you will use your favorite tool, science."
"Of course."
The Defense Professor exhaled, almost like a sigh. "I suppose that makes sense of it."
- Chapter 90
I'm actually impressed with Quirrell's control, here. We can judge how great his fear of death is from his response to Dementor exposure, and here we have a prophecy which (to him, at least) is signalling the end of the entire universe. He's spent decades desperately trying to...
Quirrell has it all wrong. HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality, and Harry is going to figure this out and either rewrite the universe to his will, or airlift everybody in the world the hell out of there by their bootstraps, thereby mass-producing immortality.
I doubt it, on the basis that this is something that's unlikely to appeal to many audiences as a realistic application of rationality, and would probably cheapen the plot for a lot of readers.
HPMORverse is actually a simulation being run at some higher level of reality
The funny part is, we know this to be literally true. The less-funny part is that it is incredibly difficult for an author to write himself into his own story as a character without coming off incredibly hokey. Heinlein mentioned himself in passing a couple of times and it wasn't any worse than any other in-joke, but I know of no better examples than that.
Edit: I have, of course, forgotten Godel, Escher, Bach. Not sure how. That's a bit of a special case, though.
Star lifting is not only a thing, it's a thing that has been mentioned in HPMOR... by Harry... in response to Trelawney's prophecy.
Chapter 21, after Trelawney says "HE IS COMING. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY -" and is whisked away:
"Not to mention, tear apart the very what? "
"I thought I heard Trelawney start to say something with an 'S' just before the Headmaster grabbed her."
"Like... soul? Sun?"
"If someone's going to tear apart the Sun we're really in trouble!"
That seemed rather unlikely to Harry, unless the world contained scary things which had heard of David Criswell's ideas about star lifting.
Pointing out the obvious, but
scary things which had heard of David Criswell's ideas about star lifting.
Is long for "Harry James Potter Evans Verres". Of course, he gave plausible explanation for why it couldn't refer to him at the time, and all he had to go on was the letter s, so of course that hypothesis wouldn't have elevated itself to his attention at the time.
And since the phrase "is a thing" is acknowledged by many people, we could say that "is a thing" is a thing. Unfortunately, ""is a thing" is a thing" is not yet a thing.
Actually, the process in stars is fusion. The same as modern atom bombs, too.
Fission is used in nuclear power plants, and only really used to reach the conditions for fusion in bombs.
Actually, most nuclear weapons get roughly comparable amounts of their force from fission and fusion, usually a little more from fission. Fission-only bombs are so much less powerful not because fission is but because they have very incomplete fission (around 1% for the Hiroshima bomb design, for example). The fusion reactions used in bombs produce a lot of excess neutrons, by design; all those neutrons flying around mean a lot more fission ends up happening. The only bombs that get most of their power from fusion are neutron bombs (which use a lot less fissionable material, and use the excess neutrons to increase the radiation damage) and clean bombs (which also use a lot less fissionable material, but replace it with lead to absorb the excess neutrons; clean is of course a relative term here).
The trick to the second one is that McGonagall's way of cheering Harry up is actually going to be quite predictable: she and Dumbledore are likely going to try bringing Harry's parents to Hogwarts.
Really? That doesn't sound like something I'd expect Dumbledore to do. It sounds transparently tactically dangerous given that someone close to Harry has already just died at Hogwarts, and his parents have no idea how to relate to what he's going through now anyway.
Like I said in another post, I suspect Quirrel simply wants Dumbledore and Minerva to get in Harry's way in order to get him to distrust them. Or perhaps I should say, to maintain the distrust that currently exists. Asking them to cheer Harry up will only have them keep treating Harry's feelings as a problem to be solved, like what he yelled at Fawkes for, and Quirrel knows this.
He's cut him off from Draco, Hermione, and now he's working on Minerva.
I don't think this will drive Minerva from Harry. Despite the unpleasantness, I think this has decreased her loyalty to Dumbledore and increased it to Harry. Dumbledore was complacent about the lapse and didn't think she was worth blaming. Harry gave her a sense that more is possible (even if he doesn't think she can pull it off) and I think she'll surprise him.
Dumbledore and Harry don't actually do anything very different from each other in that scene. They're both blaming themselves instead of McGonagall. What's different is in how they express that. Harry is very clear about who he is blaming, and why; he tells McGonagall exactly what she did wrong when she asks to be blamed, although he still does not in fact blame her. Dumbledore, on the other hand, offers only comfort; he doesn't even tell McGonagall that he's going to blame himself, although she can very well guess.
It's also worth noting that Harry chooses an interesting fault to explain to Professor McGonagall. He doesn't suggest that, like Quirrell, she should have checked on all the high-value targets before leaving the room. Instead, he told her to trust her students more. This is something that McGonagall could actually do; it's much better suited to her than the more complicated, strategic options Harry would suggest for himself or Quirrell. So, although it's definitely not explicitly said this way, it's pretty easy to read Harry as giving advice here, which Dumbledore notably fails to do.
She's a teacher. This is a default state for anyone who spends their life around 11-17 year olds, because about 90% of the time it's true.
Some of those really bad orders match the ones she gave in canon, and Dumbledore doesn't seem to think they're out of ordinary for her.
I suspect Quirrell's closing statements to McGonagall at the end of this chapter are not quite what they seem. I'm thinking of two in particular: the first, that he wants Harry kept away from the Restricted Section, and the second,
He set up a situation where Harry wants in the restricted section but McGonagall is trying to stop Harry. The result will be that Harry will get annoyed at McGonagall and Dumbledore for forbidden him access to the restricted section.
that he wants McGonagall and Dumbledore to try to restore Harry's mood by any means necessary.
Harry asked Quirrell to tell McGonagall that he shouldn't be disturbt. From Quirrell's perspective McGonagall is likely to do something that annoys Harry when she tries to restore his mood.
"Other people have done huge amounts for me!" Harry said. "My parents took me in when my parents died because they were good people, and to become a Dark Lord is to betray that!"
(...) "So you are held back by the thought of your parents' disapproval? Does that mean that if they died in an accident, there would be nothing left to stop you from -"
"No," Harry said. "Just no. It is their impulse to kindness which sheltered me. That impulse is not only in my parents. And that impulse is what would be betrayed."
Chapter 20. It would seem Harry dodged a truly enormous bullet there.
"So you also don't think it's worth the trouble of holding me responsible..."
This could be interesting depending how she reacts later. I'm mostly expecting despair, but with a small chance of a heroic Minerva.
I'd be pretty shocked if we don't see a heroic Minerva, given how she reacted to Harry's rant and the fact that this incident provided the name for the chapter.
On a side note -
"But what I must actually tell you is that you will find the standard introductory text in the north-northwest stacks of the main Hogwarts library, filed under M."
First, I rather appreciate the comic relief, Eliezer.
... But second, what the heck are Memory Charms doing outside the--
Right. Hogwarts. Crazies. Nevermind.
Keep in mind that while on the one hand, memory charms are a crazy broken superweapon for anyone with a bit of unrestrained creativity, they also seem to be a standard response for ordinary wizards on the spot dealing with muggles who've caught a slip in the Statute of Secrecy (for instance, a rampaging dragon.)
While they can detect underage spell use, if I remember correctly they canonically cannot detect the type of magic being used. Perhaps it would have been possible to set up spells to detect types of spells in use by adults, perhaps not, but I think wizarding norms on privacy and individual rights probably would make it politically unviable in any case. Remember when Harry offered Minerva his wand when he was going to be staying at home, and she responded that "that isn't done." Wizarding minors aren't allowed to use magic unsupervised, but even muggleborns at home with no adult wizards are still left the use of their wands. That strikes me as a society which has some very strong norms about autonomy.
... But second, what the heck are Memory Charms doing outside the--
Right. Hogwarts. Crazies. Nevermind.
Or Quirrell, who has declared his intention to visit the restricted section, is planning to plant the book for Harry's 'benefit.'
Doubtful. That's not a lie Quirrell can sustain: Harry can ask anyone else what the status of memory charms is in the Hogwarts curriculum.
Wizards in general need memory charms to deal with muggles, so that's a plausible reason they aren't seen as Dark by the wizarding community. There are probably strong cultural taboos against using them on other wizards (as opposed to muggles), in the same way there are strong cultural taboos against using cars to run over pedestrians even though that's a power that many teenagers acquire here in the real world.
Last chapter I complained about EY having hermione Stuffed Into The Fridge, i.e. unceremoniously killed offscreen to provide motivation for the main character. Today I find that he is literally refrigerating her!
"Of course it's my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything."
The first time this sentence appears in HPMoR is in the italic text that begins Chapter 2:
"Of course it was my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything."
I'll assume the difference between "it's" and "it was" isn't significant. I'm inclined to refocus my attention now on the italic text that begins Chapter 1:
Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...
(black robes, falling)
...blood spills out in litres, and someone screams a word.
I didn't know what to make of this when I first read it, and I still don't. Does this describe an event that has already happened? It's not Hermione's death, since that didn't happen in the moonlight.
Does this describe an event that has already happened?
It's been debated constantly since the start because it's highlighted as important. The best guess was that it might have been when Voldemort attacked the Potters, but there's obvious problems with that (what's the silver? and as far as we know, no blood was shed by Voldemort since he favored AKs). Given that ch90 brings up blood as a powerful sacrificial element, it's looking more like it's about a future event and maybe a ritual by Harry - pursuant to bringing back Hermione being the obvious goal.
When you said AKs, I immediately thought you meant AK-47s. That put a very amusing picture in my head.
I might play too many videogames.
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 90. The previous thread has passed 750 comments.
There is now 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.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,18,19.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: