This is probably not the solution Harry's going to use in Chapter 81 (I'm writing this before it was posted), but a friend and I were discussing it and came up with a possible solution. I decided it would be much more fun as a piece of fanfanfiction rather than an abstract description, so here it is. I hope you have as much fun reading it as I did writing.
Chapter 81b: Alternate Solution
Beyond all panic and despair his mind began to search through every fact in its possession, recall everything it knew about Lucius Malfoy, about the Wizengamot, about the laws of magical Britain; his eyes looked at the rows of chairs, at every person and every thing within range of his vision, searching for any opportunity it could grasp -
And the start of an idea formed - not a plan, but a tiny fragment of one. He spelled out N-O-T-E on his fingers, and, as discretely as he could, drew a piece of paper out from his bag that he did not remember putting there. It read:
"Mess with time if you want!"
And then he heard a loud bang, and another while he was stuffing the note back in his bag, and he looked up to see that a circular piece had pushed out from the wall, (that wall that could've withs...
Idea: Making the money back will be much more difficult than most people anticipate, including Harry.
Reason: Many wizards are highly motivated towards finance and would exhaust every opportunity to generate infinite gold. The rich wizards of the Wizengamot considered 100,000 galleons to be a lot of money.
First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market. Use a time turner and win the super-lotto. Imperius (or love potion, false memory charm, groundhog day attack, etc) any billionaire and take part of their fortune. Mind trick some bankers with fake documents (as Dumbledore does in book 6). Go rob some banks with invisibility and teleportation (and/or a time turner). Use magic to secure a job with a 50 million dollar golden parachute with very generous terms. Make huge amounts of drug money as a courier via teleportation/portkey. Sell 5 galleon trinkets to muggle collectors for millions of dollars each. Etc., etc., etc..
Some of them are more risky, some of them are less risky, but I bet that any member of these forums could get at least $50 million in a week if we were w...
I think that taking advantage of muggles in lots of ways is against the law, so imperiusing or memory charming a billionaire would be forbidden. I wouldn't be at all surprised if people have thought of and maybe tried using time turners to cheat the muggle lottery, so I'd give fair odds that's illegal too. When it comes to arbitrage though, remember that while wizards in general may not be tremendously stupid, they tend to be incredibly clueless about the muggle world; remember that Arthur Weasley can pass as a premier expert on muggle artifacts. The fact that the values of gold and silver in the muggle world are totally divorced from their value in the wizarding world is likely to be very little known, and the concept of arbitrage may be completely foreign to them as well (look how primitive their whole financial system appears to be.)
The fact that Mr. Bester, Harry's occlumency instructor, said he wished he could remember "That trick with the gold and silver" implies that a) the idea is not obvious to most wizards, and b) he thinks he would at least stand a chance of getting away with it.
I completely agree. Recall also Draco's speech about muggles scratching in the dirt, and his reaction to Harry's estimate of the lunar program budget. It's not just wizards not paying attention to relative values of gold and silver in the muggle world---for the most part, the possibility that there could be a substantial amount of either in the muggle world doesn't occur to them. Now you might expect muggleborns to know better, even after making allowances for the fact that they enter the wizarding world at age 11. On the other hand, if a muggleborn is clever enough to see the potential for profit, they might also be clever enough to see what Harry apparently does not---that calling attention to the fact that the muggles are ripe for exploitation is a Bad Idea.
I would actually suspect parents of a half blood (is there a name for this?) would be the weak link, rather than muggle-born children.
You've got people who have lived their whole lives as muggles, then suddenly they fall in love and get married and find out their spouse is a wizard. They've spent ~20 years in the muggle world and probably have a career of their own. No way they don't ask their spouse to spend a couple hours and let them both live like kings for the rest of their lives. And if they don't even get that much information about their other's life, that's some seriously messed up power dynamics in that household.
Also, as Harry himself speculates, muggleborns, like his mother, probably tend to fall into the habit of not thinking of muggles as Real People anymore, because it's too emotionally taxing, and they're living in a different world. They may stop concerning themselves with the muggle world much by the time they're grown up. The muggle raised wizards in the original canon certainly seemed to.
My guess is that rather than policing any of various muggle institutions, they investigate, as we do in our own world, whenever anyone appears to suddenly come into possession of large amounts of money for no clear reason, and if they find out they did something illegal, they throw them in jail.
Maybe people are already using wizardry to get huge amounts of money through the muggle world, but if so they may have to store and use the money very inconspicuously.
I wonder if they do. The wizarding world is a bizarre mix of modern and ancient traditions. It seems just as likely for them to have an income tax as not. So, they may or may not have the bureaucratic apparatus in place to know how much money people have and make.
I also wonder what the official stance would be on, say, bilking the stock market. It seems like standing up for muggle rights would be an unpopular political stance. Since there's no direct victim and you're doing things that aren't even illegal in the muggle world (nevermind they don't have time-travel), it seems unlikely the authorities would care to stop you, unless they have a blanket ban on anything that would result in inflation.
God, I'm such a double-nerd. There's a dark lord to be fought and I'm hoping the next plot arc is about wizard tax law and how magical Britain handles inflation.
The funny thing is, it's not really bilking the stock market. The whole argument for stock trading is that traders create value by accurately pricing securities, and thus allocating capital efficiently. Time travel is just a ridiculously efficient means of doing so. Given common access to Time-Turners, the stock market would literally be perfectly efficient(assuming that using turner-induced stock prices doesn't violate the 6-hour rule). People without them would be very pissed off, but I'd actually argue it as being the right and proper way to run a stock market if the technology existed.
In canon at least, it's pretty clear that there is few interaction from Muggle Prime Minister and Minister of Magic, unless exceptional events occur. IIRC, in first 5 years, there is only two interactions : the Minister of Magic informing the Prime Minister about the escape of Sirius Black, and the dragons for the Triwizards Tournament. And there seems that not once did the Muggle Prime Minister directly contact the Minister of Magic, it only went the other way around.
So I'm sceptical about that. More likely the Ministry of Magic has someone working in the staff of the Muggle Prime Minister and informing the Ministry if something odds is happening.
First, imagine all the ways a wizard could make effectively infinite amounts of muggle money. Arbitrage. Use a time turner and win at the stock market.
Neither of which are known to the Wizarding world, as evidenced by the Occlumency teacher's reaction to his discovery of it. (and his discovery of it, and his discovery of it... :) )
Something doesn't add up.
Your assessment of the Wizarding World's evaluation of the Muggle world. To the supermajority of Wizards, science is a total unknown. Economic and sociopolitical theory are terms they've simply never heard of.
They are isolated and effectively are like the apocryphal Chinese Emperor who burned his fleets because there was nothing left to discover; or the equally apocryphal Patent Office official who wanted to close the Patent Office in the 1800's because there was nothing left to invent.
So basically what you're seeing is what's called "hindsight bias". It is obvious to you, who knows what "Muggles" have, that the Wizards are vastly disadvantaged here -- insanely so -- but remember that as further demonstrated by Draco's total ignorance of Man's visit to the Moon, Wizards believe Muggles are "wallowing in the mud". The idea that they might LEARN from Muggles is actively suppressed by a concerted political campain by a powerful and long-standing major political faction.
The people who would do this are not on the Wizengamot: Maybe this does happen. Perhaps all the muggle-born realize how easy it is to live a life of luxury in the muggle world and do exactly that, and only venture into the magical world when the want to go shopping. They have the best conveniences of both worlds and none of the dangers of either. This... actually sounds kinda plausible. Plus, there isn't a great job market for muggle-born.
Like going off to live in a poor country if you have a first-world income to live on. I believe it's already been remarked that this is about how magical Britain views muggle Britain.
Some counter-evidence for getting gold being difficult: In chapter 27, Mister Bester (the Legilimens who trained Harry) said:
Though I do wish I could remember that trick with the gold and silver.
Implying that it was at least somewhat practical as a means for getting rich quickly.
I meant it as Bayesian evidence. (updating P(Arbitrage works) down on Bester regretting means updating up on him not Regretting)
Plus, this is stronger evidence for us than for Harry due to Conservation of Details and the recent disclaimer by EY that there are no red herrings, and that simple solutions != bad solutions (and in fact, the opposite is usually true).
ETA: Also, Bester probably thought about it more more than a few seconds, at least the first time he saw it in Harry's mind - Remember that he didn't just see those Ideas/secrets, he's also seen key moments of his previous conversations.
Theres also a psychological dimension to consider. To most wizards, and especially the rich pure bloods who this would be most relevant to, muggles, muggle-borns and anything associated with them are incredibly low status. Mere knowledge of muggles is seen as a major social negative (see treatment of Arthur Weasley). As such they would have a strong incentive not to investigate muggle knowledge, and if you suggested to Lucius that he made his fortune and power from dealing with Muggles his brain might actually explode from shame.
Remember, most of wizarding Britain is either people who were taken out of the muggle world at age 10-11 and don't come back, or people who never lived there at all. How many of them are actually going to understand finance well enough to have a sense of how to exploit it? And the ones who actually have money at Gringott's are almost by definition the ones who never even spent those 11 years in the muggle world, so they may well not have any idea that finance exists. And even if they do, the ignorance and prejudice is rather overpowering, and may well prevent proper use of it. Someone who has both seed capital and the knowledge of how to exploit the crap out of it is going to be rare, and the DMLE is likely going to step on anyone who gets too egregious about using wizarding advantages to do so.
(Edited first sentence for accuracy)
Remember, most of wizarding Britain is people who were taken out of the muggle world at age 10-11 and don't come back.
I don't believe this is correct. In fact, isn't there a section in MoR where McGonagall relates to Harry that less than 10 "muggleborn" Wizards are being inducted into Hogwarts that year? (With Harry being one of them?)
In canon, there are wizards with one wizard parent and one muggle parent, who aren't squibs (Snape and Riddle for two).
In canon they call “squib” the non-magic-capable child of two wizards.
In MoR, that means the child has only one copy of the recessive magic gene. (Either mommy didn’t love only daddy, or one copy of the gene got messed up somehow.) But in MoR you need to distinguish between genetic|squib (has one copy of the gene), and genealogic|squib (can’t do magic but has wizard/witch parents).
All genealogical|squibs are genetic|squibs, but wizards use the word “squib” only for the former, since wizards don’t know much about genetics, and about the magic gene in particular. They call anybody who isn’t a part of magic Britain a muggle (genealogical |muggle), even though they might actually be genetic|squibs.
An example: Wizard Nasty Pants does the nasty with lots of muggle women a couple of centuries ago. He doesn’t like commitments, so he abandons the women to raise their children alone.
All his children are genetic|squibs, but they’re raised by muggles and—after Mr. Nasty dies because he tried that with a witch married to a Gryffindor—nobody knows they had a wizard parent.
M...
Let's quote the current author's notes:
One thing I did notice was that many readers (a) neglected simple solutions in favor of complex ones, (b) neglected obvious solutions in favor of nonobvious ones, and (c) suggested that the correct hints had been put there for deliberately deceptive purposes.
General announcement: I do not lie to my readers. Almost everything in HPMOR is generated by the underlying facts of the story. Sometimes it is generated by humor – I can’t realistically claim that comic timing that precise would occur in a purely natural magical universe. But nothing is there to deliberately fool the readers.
Methods of Rationality is a rationalist story. Your job is to outwit the universe, not the author. If it taught the lesson that the simple solution is always wrong because it is “too obvious”, it would be teaching rather the wrong moral. There are some cases where people have scored additional points by successful literary analysis, e.g. Checkov’s Gun principles. But the author is not your enemy, and the facts aren’t lies.
Now, yes, it is possible that Eliezer Yudkowsky's Author Note on this very chapter is a lie, and he will suddenly reveal a whole series of...
I think that's an inescapable result of the idiot world J. K. Rowling made. There is just so much in cannon that makes so little sense.
f they're arguing over lucrative ink importation rights it means they've already figured out arbitrage
Not really. All sorts of arguments and fights over importation rights occurred even during the height of merchantilism. That importing goods can be profitable is a much more obvious claim than that moving goods between markets can be profitable. The second is more abstract. Moreover, they don't think of the Muggle world as that important, so the fact that the Muggle world has imbalanced prices may not be obvious to them as something to even think about.
Note that Harry secretly buried 100 Galleons in the backyard of his parents' house back in chapter 36, so having seed money is not an issue.
For what it's worth, I interpreted this exchange as Dumbledore recognizing why it would be bad for someone to read Harry's mind. In other words, a competent plotter who didn't have society's interest at heart could implement Harry's ideas successfully to cause significant harm. I didn't take the exchange to show that D believed the ideas wouldn't work basically as intended with a minimum of unanticipated consequences.
In short, Lucius Malfoy shouldn't be able to read Harry's mind to gain a destabilizing amount of wealth.
And he still owes 60,000 galleons, which is 1.2mil.
A pair of dentists with over a decade of practice? My friend with 15 years of practice by himself could handle that. It's not pocket change, but this was to avoid the torture execution of their daughter. I think they could pony up for that.
people who don't bother to create their own universes are statistically going to be less-motivated, less-experienced, and/or less-competent authors.
Do you have this opinion of realistic fiction too?
I have always thought that but the story makes the point even better. Click on that link, everyone.
Uh, wow, I have linked this story on LW before, but your endorsement apparently makes a great big screaming difference to how much traffic a link gets.
Please endorse more of my things. I am addicted to web hits.
If you're Lucius at this point, how the hell do you now update your "Harry is Voldie" hypothesis?
On the one one hand, he just paid 100K galleons to save a mud blood girl. On the other hand, he spooked a dementor. On the other other hand, while that feat may be impressive, it's certainly not anything the Dark Lord had been known to do previously. And is he consprasizing with Dumbledore, or against him?
Probably a very confusing time to be the Lord of Malfoy.
It makes a great deal of sense as a purely political ploy. Harry just greatly strengthened the legend of the boy who lived, and since that is the result, Lucius is likely to suspect that it was also the intent.
That mudblood girl is also the most talented witch of her generation. Maybe Harrymort just wants another Bellatrix and this is the first step towards it. Maybe the debt doesn't matter because Britain is going to be at war / Lucius will be dead before Harry would graduate. Also, Harry just gained a sworn minion out of it, which is arguably a lot more useful than a large sum of money.
Confirmation bias remains and this is Lucius who whatever his cunning isn't a rationalist. So he's more likely to be thinking "Why did Voldemort save the mudblood girl?" than consider that he was wrong thinking Harry was Voldemort.
I'm not sure if anyone has commented on this, but I just noticed it while rereading the Self-Actualization chapters:
Hermione went to tremendous lengths to be her own person rather than just something of Harry's, including becoming a general and fighting bullies. Now she has sworn herself into Harry's service and house forever. That is really sad.
Sounded like marriage vows to me,
Can you please reread them instead of just going by memory? Here, I'll make it easy for you:
"Upon my life and magic, I swear service to the House of Potter, to obey its Master or Mistress, and stand at their right hand, and fight at their command, and follow where they go, until the day I die"
"I, Harry, heir and last scion of the Potters, accept your service, until the end of the world and its magic"
Now, please actually read the above sentences again, and tell me now whether they sound like marriage vows to you?
And if you still think they've gotten married, in short if you're arguing that P(they've gotten married)> 50%, then I'll put my money where my mouth is and bet you they haven't. I'll bet 10 of my dollars for every 1 of yours, up to a maximum of $10,000 of mine. That should be an easy way for you to make some money.
My reading is that Harry intended to get married, because that's the only applicable law he knew of-- but McGonagall figured out what he was about to attempt and instead triggered some sort of fealty or adoption law.
Agreed mostly, but I don't think McGonagall figured out that he was about to propose marriage to Hermione. She just came up independently with the idea of inducting Hermione into House Potter; and of course she preferred to use a more age-appropriate (and less emotionally-charged) path than marriage. The alternate option of service, which Harry didn't even know existed.
Hypothesis: the Source of Magic is an AI with the goal to work in the way (magical) people really believe it should work. Or maybe, to make the world work in the way (magical) people really believe it should work. The strength of belief appears to be important, so a strong belief can override weak ones. On the other hand, when something is already "generally known" to work in a certain way, this is a very strong belief.
Examples:
- Broomsticks work by Aristotelian physics [because it was what people believed when the broomsticks were invented, and now people just know (=believe really strongly) that's how broomsticks should behave]
- Spell names and laws [inventors create spells by finding sounds they believe should work. When spells become known, they stabilize in that form]
- Potions Law
- Ritual magic [people really believe in sacrifices and not getting something for nothing]
- Ghosts (and afterlife?) [effects of religious beliefs]
- Harry's partial transfiguration [very strong belief, finds a loophole to not be in conflict with existing strong beliefs of other people]
Magic doesn't make sense to Harry because it now reflects lots of ad hoc rules and beliefs accumulated in centuries. Wizards and witches believe them from childhood. [No wonder they are half-insane.]
Interestingly, this hypothesis implies that Dumbledore's narrative causality may actually work - people do believe in stories.
After this chapter, a lot of people are going to deduce that Harry was in fact the person who broke out Bellatrix. Including, probably Dumbledore.
Quirrell will likely be forced to show his hand when Dumbledore accuses him of having engineered the escape. Somehow, this turns into Quirrell leaving his post. End of story seems imminent :(
No. Mind the Conservation of Detail.
Harry doesn't know that Dumbledore's patronus recognizes Harry's patronus. This is a trap EY has laid for Harry.
For no internal reasons, but for story reasons, Dumbledore will not figure out that Harry was in Axkaban until the next time both he and Harry have their patronuses up at the same time. It is set up to be a shocking reveal, maybe a cliffhanger.
Or just that he's pissed with Harry for putting himself in Malfoy's debt.
Or for painting a giant bulls-eye on himself.
The icy glare could really mean anything.
Harry Potter is not so clever, part 2. (Perhaps I should call this "advice for Harry," to be less negative.)
"I accept your offer," said Harry's lips, without any hesitation, without any decision having been made; just as if the internal debate had been pretense and illusion, the true controller of the voice having been no part of it. "I should have the whole amount ready by the end of the month." It would take his arbitrage trick, but certainly the Headmaster would let him do that instead of going into debt to Malfoy.
Lucius Malfoy stood motionless, frowning down at Harry. "Who is she to you, then? What is she to you, that you would pay so much to keep her from harm?"
"My friend," the boy said quietly. "As is your son- I would have fought as hard and paid as much to keep him from Azkaban."
"Save it," Harry suggested.
"Let us all go home, indeed." His blue eyes were locked on Harry, as hard as sapphires.
Harry looked further up.
"This is how far I go for my friends, Lord Malfoy. And now that Hermione is safe, I would like your permission to visit Draco. "
Overall: what the heck is Harry's model of...
Harry may be an overachiever, but he's still 11 - he's allowed to be bad at manipulating people. He's still at the "All I have to do is out-clever everyone and I can take over the world" stage. He has the tools to pull it off much of the time, but he still thinks of his opponents as pieces, not as players, which is a pretty serious hole in his worldview when it comes to things like manipulating Lucius Malfoy.
"I should have the whole amount ready by the end of the month." It would take his arbitrage trick, but certainly the Headmaster would let him do that instead of going into debt to Malfoy.
Even if he does his arbitrage trick, what benefit would he get from telling it to Malfoy in advance. Why share unnecessary information with a potential adversary? Why risk additional penalties if something unexpected happens and the arbitrage takes five weeks instead of four?
Worst comes to worst, he asks Dumbledore to cure some rich muggles with cancer who are willing to pay.
I think that the can of worms of why wizards don't immediately go cure world hunger etc. is best left to be opened near the end of the fic, if at all.
Actually, there's a fairly complicated question of why don't we immediately go cure world hunger. I mean, the production and logistics aspects wouldn't be very difficult compared to what today's industry can output on an everyday basis. I guess that it's 80% pure irrationality and only 20% politics.
You mean IRL? It mostly boils down to "we've tried giving hungry people food, it doesn't work, and that's pretty much all the ideas we've got". It's a much messier problem than it seems at first glance, and it isn't all politics or insanity. To pick the most obvious, when you dump planes full of grain on the tarmac in Zimbabwe, what did you just do the finances of the local farmers who now need to compete with free? And what does that do to next year's crop?
So, new speculation: who are the sharp players in the Wizengamot who are drawing up lists on Harry?
They're not Lucius or Dumbledore, both of whom already know a great deal, and the former is too enraged to really be thinking beyond 'why did Voldemort just sacrifice all his wealth for a "friend"?'
I would be a little shocked if Umbridge was meant; she's so moronic in canon that even a MoR brain-upgrade still leaves her dim and bureaucratic, and she certainly doesn't match. And the powerful-wizard background is much more of a 'male' thing, to boot.
Mad-eye Moody could be expected to be making a list, but as far as I can tell he's not present and is remarkable enough that if he was, he would be mentioned. He's also apparently busy watching over & poisoning graves. In one chapter, Bones mentions he just retired, so he wouldn't be there in an Auror capacity. EDIT: Aftermath would seem to imply Moody was not there, because Harry didn't recognize the Moody in the Pensieve memory at all, despite him being quite striking.
Madam Bones seems too much on Dumbledore and Harry's side to be so suspicious, and not 'new' in any plot-meaningful sense. She's otherwise a decent enough candi...
Not necessarily, but this does seem the sort of thing Moody would go out of his way to keep an eye (ha) on.
How about a concerted campaign to persuade the public to lessen the importance of that particular debt? Remind everyone that Harry was a baby at the time and couldn't have intended to defeat the Dark Lord, emphasise that it must have been some kind of freak accident, start spreading rumours with alternative explanations...
Anyway my point isn't about any single thing they could do; the point is that there are a lot of powerful and politically-skilled people who would very much want to do something, and I don't feel at all confident that we can assume they'll be unable to come up with anything now that the gambit is no longer a surprise one.
Ha!
Remember when H&C told Hermione that Harry would sacrifice her if she became inconvenient to his plans for global domination? Guess Hermione can tell him to kiss her ass on that one.
The next chapter is going to be horribly depressing, you know. Harry is going to have to have it explained to him why it's a bad idea to do things that are a bad idea. Otherwise this arc would have the wrong moral...
On the other hand, it's now in Dumbledore's interest to see Harry make a lot of money quickly in order to discharge the debt, which means he's far more likely to approve of things that otherwise would be considered unacceptable, like:
- 1) Tricks with the Time Turner involving lotteries, stock markets, and the like.
- 2) The gold/silver arbitrage idea.
- 3) Personal appearance fees and other financial trading on his fame as The Boy Who Lived.
- 4) Calling in debts owed by other Imperiused or supposedly-Imperiused victims of Voldemort.
- 5) Dumbledore himself using the Philosopher's/Sorcerer's Stone to make a lot of gold.
In short, a sixty thousand Galleon debt, while it feels huge, is not obviously a major obstacle given the number of possible solutions already implicitly presented in HPMoR, and it would almost seem a cheat for it to be one
That wiping out the debt easily might have its own negative consequences, on the other hand, is potentially interesting.
Dunno about that. The debt will have concsequences, certainly, but Hermione is not in Azkaban.
Yes, it's super sad to let a little girl be tortured to death. But there is a cost large enough that it is not worth paying to prevent it, even if the cost is only in terms of mere cash, political capital, personal reputation as not being more fearsome than Fear itself, keeping important military secrets for the coming war secret, and the enmity of those you failed to lose to. That's the meaning of the phrase "Taboo Tradeoffs", it's that stating you kept Hermione out of Azkaban is not enough justification.
Of course, if he had counted the cost, he would have been an awful hypocrite. Recall what he said after Hermione rescued him from the Dementor:
I'll say that no matter what it ends up costing you to have kissed me, don't ever doubt for a second that it was the right thing to do.
At least he's holding himself to the same standard, even if it's a bad one.
I wish to register my alarm at this:
This was actually intended as a dry run for a later, serious “Solve this or the story ends sadly” puzzle
Given that he was "amazed" at our performance this time, presumably an equivalent performance would pass the future test — but even if that's true it doesn't comfort me much.
I humbly beg our author to consider simply withholding updates, rather than issuing an ultimatum that may result in us never getting the "true" ending. "I won't post any more chapters until you solve this," rather than "I'm going to torch the last few years of your life if you're not smart enough."
A always thought the false ending was better.
What can I say? I'm a sucker for stories where everyone lives happily ever after. :-)
There are reasons for avoiding being hit with an anti-polyjuice spell even if you aren't polyjuiced. (1) The spell would reveal that you aren't polyjuiced, which might be useful information for your adversaries if you're masquerading as someone else by other means. (2) If your policy is only to counter such spells when they would have revealed something, then your decision to counter or not is itself revealing. Better to have a general policy of not letting people probe you at all.
You misread the passage. McGonaggal helped Harry take Hermione into the sworn service of House Potter. A very feudal type of thing, but certainly no marriage.
Lucius Malfoy's eyes narrowed. "By the report I received, you cannot cast the Patronus Charm, and Dumbledore knows this. The power of a single Dementor nearly killed you. You would not dare venture near Azkaban in your own person -"
Has Lucius not spoken to Draco in private yet?
If he hasn't... when he does, and tells Draco what happened at the trial, and finds that Draco isn't surprised (or at least, not more than usual when it comes to Harry)... what will he think then?
Even if he knew, saying that would be a good way to try to get Harry to reveal something. What he would have heard from Draco is that Harry has a super-bright Patronus whose form he keeps secret; he would be curious. So I don't think this quote is strong evidence that Lucius hasn't heard about the Patronus from Draco, since it is pretty likely that he would say something like this even if he has.
EDIT: Actually, since he believes Harry is Voldemort, he probably thinks the Patronus light he showed Draco was an illusion, and not useful for getting out of Azkaban at all. If he thinks Harry is Voldemort he's unlikely, then, to pry for information about it in this way.
Lucius didn't ask if Harry could cast a Patronus, I could buy that. But Draco's Patronus didn't come up? Harry's vow of vengeance against Narcissa's killer didn't come up? That whole thing was possibly the single most important interaction Draco and Harry have had, next to when Harry tricked Draco into sacrificing his belief in blood purity.
Draco's a manipulative little snake. Lucius never probably never asked, "Son, are you able to cast the Patronus Charm?" because he was probably under the impression that Slytherins weren't able to cast Patronuses so why bother asking. Hence, the topic never came up. Draco's a scientist now, he doesn't completely believe everything that Lucius says anymore. Draco's probably avoiding talking about dangerous subjects with his father. And of course, he could always lie.
If regular courts had veritaserum, I imagine the first question they'd ask would be "What are the things you don't want to tell us?".
Nevertheless, I believe it was two drops used, not three - so Draco didn't have to volunteer information.
Why does Dumbledore not give a quick Summary of the worst consequences of being in debt to Lucius Malfoy? It's hard to see how that could necessitate telling secrets that cannot be revealed in public, the laws involved should already be known. Naming a few of the "certain rights" Lucius would have shouldn't take more time than Dumbledore actually spends trying to convince Harry.
I suspect that everyone discounts the "I was Imperiused!" claim for being an obvious lie, and thus discounts the implications of it being officially true. It's certainly a plausible hole in worldview - ignoring the implications of a false statement being "true" is an easy mistake to make.
I think Dumbledore is more into the "general wanting to win a war" mindset. In that mindset, you don't spend a trump card like a blood debt from one major enemy just to save one life. So he shouldn't (in his pov) speak about that issue to Harry.
"I mean, suppose I came in here with a ton of silver. Could I get a ton of Sickles made from it?"
"For a fee, Mr. Potter-Evans-Verres." The goblin watched him with glittering eyes. "For a certain fee. [...]
"Give me a wild guess. I won't hold Gringotts to it."
"A twentieth part of the metal would well pay for the coining."
Also, IIRC McGonnagal was there, presumably she would have said something if Griphook was obviously lying or omitting something important, as suggested above. (Also, I got the impression goblins were really serious about money.)
Prophecy update!
Like most readers, I took Trelawney's magical clock for a listening device. What if it transmits instead of receives?
We've seen Dumbledore manipulating events into storylike patterns. He was the instigator of the three-way tie, and he precipitated Snape's fall and eventual redemption by the power of love.
In his Fortress of Regrets, Dumbledore gave the surface appearance of being terribly reluctant to allow his decisions to cause the deaths of others. But in the last chapter he was ready to let a small child be tortured to death - with much trembling reluctance, of course - in order to preserve his plans.
Could he have caused Trelawney to deliver the prophecy, triggering the other half of Snape's destiny, while feeding the Potters to Voldemort to create his orphan hero?
Dumbledore meant for Voldemort to have been killed by Lily's sacrifice. He believes it happened. Instead, Voldemort, taking the obvious trap (thanks Vladimir!) as a challenge to his wit (thanks Gwern!), pretended to lose (thanks buybuydandavis!), while fulfilling the letter of the prophecy in a manner maximally advantageous to himself.
He disarmed the trap by goading Lily into attacking him. He left a bu...
Oh hey. And we have a confession.
"I'm sorry to say, Harry, that I am responsible for virtually everything bad that has ever happened to you."
I actually noticed the dissonance when I read this, that Dumbledore had apparently overlooked the biggest and most obvious tragedy of Harry's life. But I didn't realize what it meant. Whoops.
My working theory for Dumbledore's emphasis on story logic is that it's a pragmatic decision supporting several different lines of influence.
First, we know he's pretending to be a lot crazier than he is: he acts like a character in a roleplaying game with "Insanity" marked down in the flaws section of his character sheet, not someone with an actual personality disorder, and going out of his way to act like Gandalf fits in fairly well with that.
Second, he spends a lot of his time working with kids, who're probably a lot more familiar with stories than with their real-life cognates: how many times does Draco make an analogy to something he's seen in a play?
Finally, people really are prone to generalize from fictional evidence, and maintaining a semi-fictionalized persona can aid in achieving instrumental goals when they're aligned with the narrative patterns it corresponds to. The Self Actualization storyline provides a good example of this in action: I read Dumbledore's part in that early on as using his persona to nudge Hermione into the high-fantasy hero role that Harry occupies in canon (and considerably more shakily in MoR). When she went off script, so did he. (I suspect that Riddle's Lord Voldemort persona was adopted for similar reasons, incidentally. He might even have picked up that trick from Dumbledore.)
I agree. But y'know, it's odd that the three people most affected by the prophecy had their major life outcomes determined by Dumbledore's machinations. That's a coincidence that needs explaining, I think.
Another implication just hit me: it could make Sirius his accomplice, not Voldemort's. Odd that he didn't get a trial while Dumbledore was Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, come to think of it. Huh.
I'm loving the idea that time travel is being proposed here as the simpler, less over-engineered solution to making a bunch of money.
I love Chapter 81, but it would have been way better if Draco was the one accused of murder, so Harry could marry Draco.
"Romantic?" Hermione said. "They're both boys!"
"Wow," Daphne said, sounding a little shocked. "You mean Muggles really do hate that? I thought that was just something the Death Eaters made up."
— Chapter 42: Courage
In other words, the wizarding world is sufficiently accepting of same-sex relationships that Death Eaters could use the idea that Muggles are homophobic as a somewhat believable slander against Muggles.
...By this point Harry Potter had entirely forgotten the existence of Professor McGonagall, who had been sitting there this whole time undergoing a number of interesting changes of facial expression which Harry had not been looking at because he was distracted. [...]
So Harry, who at this point had a fair amount of adrenaline in his bloodstream, startled and jumped quite visibly when Professor McGonagall, her eyes now blazing with impossible hope and the tears on her cheek half-dried, leapt to her feet and cried, "With me, Mr. Potter!" and, without waiting for a reply, tore down the stairs that led to the bottom platform where waited a chair of dark metal.
It took a moment, but Harry ran after; though it took him longer to reach the bottom, after Professor McGonagall vaulted half the stairs with a strange catlike motion and landed with the astonished-looking Auror trio already pointing their wands at her. [...]
"Both of you stop being silly," Professor McGonagall said in her firm Scottish accent (it was strange how much that helped). "Mr. Potter, hold out your wand so that Miss Granger's fingers can touch it. Miss Granger, repeat after me. Upon my life and magic
She just doesn't know when to talk and when to keep her mouth shut.
You're so upset that McGonaggal's intervention prevented Harry from asking Hermione's hand in marriage? You're a Ravenclaw girl at heart, I see. :-)
A matter with the Comed-Tea that was bugging me for a while:
Chapter 14:
SO THAT'S HOW THE COMED-TEA WORKS! Of course! The spell doesn't force funny events to happen, it just makes you feel an impulse to drink right before funny things are going to happen anyway!
Hypotheses: Comed-Tea on person = impulse to drink, Comed-Tea not on person = no impulse to drink.
According to Chapter 12:
Harry couldn't help but feel the urge to drink another Comed-Tea. (And when he didn't...) Harry inhaled his own saliva and went into a coughing fit just as all eyes turned toward him.
So no matter what, even if you don't end up drinking it, you will get the Impulse before something funny happens.
Chapter 46:
I have been saving them for special occasions; there is a minor enchantment on them to ensure they are drunk at the right time. This is the last of my supply, but I do not think there will ever come a finer occasion.
So Harry has used up all of his Comed-Tea. (edit: it appears that Harry actually has tons left unless he's not mentioning some he drank/gave away, look at bottom of post)
...
WHY? WHYYY?!
It is apparent that you'll still get the impulse to drink whether or not you do end up drinki...
Prediction: Harry will try to explain the general concept of arbitrage to Dumbledore, and it will be blocked by the Interdict of Merlin.
Because otherwise, certain things about the wizarding economy make no sense at all.
Funny, but unfortunately people telling other people things is exactly what the Interdict of Merlin doesn't forbid.
Something I just noticed on a second read-through - the reuse of the word "riddle" in context here seems like a reminder to Lucius of who he thinks Harry really is, and this is not the first time it's come up when Harry is exposed to Dementors. Perhaps this lends credence to the theory that riddle is the "strange word" he learned when first exposed?
Voldemort used the word to tease as Quirrell and as the cloak and hat. He probably did it in the last war, too. Lucius may think that Voldemort is teasing him just like he used it, when Harry says it.
It's not a strange word, though. That's probably so we know the spell being cast was not AK.
Progress of Eliezer vs JKR, Fvapr Ryvrmre unf fgngrq gung gur fgbel jba'g or ybatre guna gur frira obbxf, cre jbeq, naq gung vg'f zber guna unysjnl qbar
"Enough, Mr. Potter," said Professor McGonagall. "We shall be late for afternoon Transfiguration as it is. And do come back here, you're still terrifying that poor Dementor." She turned to the Aurors. "Mr. Kleiner, if you would!"
Is it just me, or does that NOT sound like someone who just found out that dementors, thought to be manifestations of fear, are afraid of her student? I'm guessing it's one of two things:
She's so relieved that one of her student isn't going to be tortured to death that she isn't really processing everything else that's going on or
She thinks the whole thing is a trick Harry and Dumbledore came up with, and dementors aren't really afraid of Harry.
Either one could lead to a very entertaining aftermath.
Unlike most of the room she knows Harry well enough that even him scaring a Dementor, no matter how surprising, wouldn't make her personally afraid of Harry; she might be worried about what trouble he could cause but she knows perfectly well that he wouldn't do anything to her. Besides it was less of a surprise for her since Dumbledore already told her Harry had developed a new charm.
Or, she's simply ceased to be surprised at the extent of Harry's abilities outpacing her expectations of them.
She's so unflappable that she's the best choice to demonstrate that a situation inspires the maximum amount of flap, I guess.
We know this not to be true since Quirrel changed back into his normal appearance when the polyjuice wore off in Azkaban while he was unconscious.
I think my favorite part of this update comes not from the chapter, but from the Author's Notes:
"If you write sufficiently good fanfiction, you can realize your romantic dreams!"
(Although "Make him go away" is either tied for the position or a close second.)
I have a suspicion that the average fanfic-created relationship is not caused by anything best described as "good".
I think I figured out how Dumbledore knew about Harry wanting to change the rules of Quiddich. Instead of reading student minds he used the cloak:
This is the Cloak of Invisibility [...] Your father lent it to me to study shortly before he died, and I confess that I have received much good use of it over the years.
(Emphasis mine. Well, of course, that he would use it is obvious and the note is not proof of anything, but that’s what triggered the idea. Also, it makes a lot of sense that Harry’s father would lend the cloak to Dumbledore for study.)
If he did this on the train platform (which would make sense as an opportunity to be mysterious to new students, or just to Harry) there’s a bit of other interesting stuff he might have heard. Whatever Draco cast (the description doesn’t quite match Quietus, and it was wordless or at least not heard by Harry), it probably doesn’t work for a cloaked guy near you, and certainly not Dumbledore if he really wanted to listen.
Chapter 6:
"I am unlikely ever to forget it. Thank you, Harry, that does make me feel better about entrusting you with certain things. Goodbye for now."
Harry turned to go, into the Leaky Cauldron and out toward the Muggle world.
As his hand touched the back door's handle, he heard a last whisper from behind him.
"Hermione Granger."
"What?" Harry said, his hand still on the door.
"Look for a first-year girl named Hermione Granger on the train to Hogwarts."
"Who is she?"
There was no answer, and when Harry turned around, McGonagall was gone.
Chapter 8:
"No," Hermione said. "Who told you about me?"
"Professor McGonagall and I believe I see why."
While reading, I never considered this to be a mystery, or even a question.
So, Dementors Part Deux.
First, because someone had to say it:
Harry took all the silver emotion that fueled his Patronus Charm and shoved it at the Dementor; and expected Death's shadow to flee from him -
-and as Harry did that, he flung his hands up and shouted "BOO!"
The void retreated sharply away from Harry until it came up against the dark stone behind.
In the hall there was a deathly silence.
...And to everyone but Harry, that deathly silence seemed to say "Please do not punish this one, my Dark Liege!"
Harry turned his back on the empty void, and had a moment to wonder why Dumbledore and Lucius were making such odd faces before the Aurors acted on reflex.
(I guess Dementors aren't that smart.)
Secondly, I noticed that Harry's first Transfiguration lesson includes a photograph of a Dementor. What would that look like? What does Harry see, compared to everyone else? Why was he asking all the other students what they saw in the Patronus lesson without ever once thinking of that photograph?
Edit: While some points may remain useful for the sake of reference, this theory is disproved in Chapter 82, and Aberforth's death no longer lacks narrative purpose.
Who killed Narcissa?
Suspects:
Dumbledore
Bones
Lucius
Voldemort
Someone else
HJPEV tells us that this doesn't fit the headmaster's style. His style is curiously consistent.
There is one offhand remark, vengeance, and a practical cold-heartedness favoring Bones. "Why not Bones?" is only a little better than no argument at all.
Lucius is presented as a devoted family man. It would be inconsistent characterization for him to do this. That works for real life, but HP&tMoR is fiction, which must make sense.
Voldemort has reason not to do this, as it made a fool out of one of his tools and weakened his side by making them less willing to strike indiscriminately.
I have a 'someone else' theory: Aberforth killed Narcissa. Aberforth is dead, and meaningfully so due to Conservation of Detail. We know little else about him from HP&tMoR. Only that he didn't testify against his brother in the death of his sister, and his brother got quite stern when he died. Basically, this theory allows me to put a pie...
There is one offhand remark, vengeance, and a practical cold-heartedness favoring Bones. "Why not Bones?" is only a little better than no argument at all.
Also there is the fact (mentioned by someone else, sorry I forget who) that Narcissa's sister, Bellatrix, murdered Bones' brother. Edit: I am an idiot, you already mentioned this.
Bringing in Aberforth is a really interesting idea. Now that I think about it, even given the wizarding wars, it is remarkable that so many siblings have died or nearly died:
Albus/Aberforth
Bellatrix/Narcissa
Bones/her brother (who, exactly?)
Petunia/Lily
The last one is interesting with the role of survivor exchanged as well, since there is a hint that Petunia may have threatened suicide in order to convince Lily to brew the beauty potion.
Can we add the 'harry_potter' discussion tag to this post?
(Contrary to what the post text says, as of right now this post does not show up on the list of Harry Potter discussion posts.)
I am really interested in how this is all going to work back at Hogwarts. Harry has already been pushing the envelope in the past, but this was a public power display. Draco's out for a while, Hermione will be considered a murderess by significant portions of the school (and apparently she's now magically sworn to obey Harry?), Quirrel is doing... something... and all the schemers and plotters are scheming and plotting on overdrive. I think the money will really be the least of Harry's concerns before this tangle is unwoven. I sort of enjoy learning little bits about Eliezer in the author's notes. "Why yes, I do lead the same sort of life as fanfiction characters, thank you for noticing," made me laugh quietly to myself. This is doubtless because I am a gossip-monger and a hopless platonic voyeur of other peoples lives.
Just an odd thought about something Draco said in Chapter 48:
Before them was a small empty place of stone set against the night sky. Not a roof like the one he'd dropped Harry from, but a tiny and proper courtyard, far above the ground. With proper railings, elaborate traceries of stone that flushed seamlessly into the stone floor... How so much artistry had been infused into the creation of Hogwarts was something that still awed Draco every time he thought about it. There must have been some way to do it all at once, no one could have detailed so much piece by piece, the castle changed and every new piece was like that. It was so far beyond the wizardry of these fading days that no one would have believed it if they hadn't seen the proof in Hogwarts itself.
...is - is Hogwarts sentient? If it's animate, capable of creative expression, and self-constructing, it's not out of the question that Hogwarts might be in some sense intelligent or alive. It'd also explain some things about the Hogwarts security system, to say nothing about the Room of Requirement, in canon.
Transfiguration is non-permanent, and any gold sold to Gringotts would be immediately tested for transfiguration. Additionally, trying to counterfeit gets the goblin nation to declare war on you. (Ch 15)
Funny how karma never adds up in those polls.
There should be a house rule about always linking to the karma sink in the poll choices.
Not that it matters that EY or anyone else gets a few points of extra karma, it's just my "defective mechanism detected" brain lobe giving me OCD.
I worry that Draco may be more or less written out of this fic - I can't imagine Lucius sending his son back into Voldemort's maw. There are other schools, even if none are as good.
What are the benefits of servitude over marriage?
Fewer shrieks of horror from their parents? Also Hermione doesn't need to change her name into Hermione Potter-Evans-Verres-Granger.
Did he actually say anything? Or did McGonagall come up with the idea right before?
He didn't. It was right before. Harry knew of only marriage as a way to induct Hermione into his House. McGonagall knew of a somewhat simpler way, and one less emotionally charged than marriage.
And then didn't mention to Harry that she was making Hermione his servant instead of his wife?
I think he realized it the moment he heard the words McGonagall was having Hermione say. Keep in mind that it's not as if McGonaggal realized Harry was considering marriage at all.
Nah, snapping fingers doesn't possess meaning for the Wizengamot, that's what Harry is known for in Hogwarts. "Boo!" is better in the circumstances.
Sorry, the reason for the stereotype is the fact that fanfiction is findable only on unmoderated internet archives where anyone can post. If you had to look on the internet for all your original fiction, you'd have the same problem. Also, it's in some ways harder to use someone else's voice and be bound by characters that maybe have traits you're scared to write about than to be able to write in your own voice and avoid certain kinds of characters.
But when you compare cherry-picked original fiction weeded through by editors until you get to read only a fraction of the total submitted for consideration and utterly unmoderated, undifferentiated fanfiction by good and bad authors alike side-by-side in the same archive, of course the original fic is going to be better.
I was amazed that the readership collectively got almost every element of Harry’s solution, except for the monetary payment, and Harry spooking the Dementor instead of destroying it. (Looking up Philip Tetlock’s original experiment on taboo tradeoffs, taking the definition literally instead of reaching, and then reading the relevant section of Ch. 26 while keeping in mind Conservation of Detail, might have solved the monetary part.)
Well, if you make enough guesses, sometimes one of them will be partly right...
My prediction doesn't seem to have paid off in anything but karma, so I'm wondering how Eliezer's clue about Harry seeing the members of the Wizingamot as player characters has played out or if we're going to see something of the sort in future chapters.
The problem is that he did not - he treated them as a passive audience without any consideration of how they view him. So now some of them have reached the same conclusion as Lucius, and think he is a case of bodysnatching. Possession is a real possibility in the universe he inhabits, and he is showing all the signs. That is quite likely to get him killed by people with the best of intentions. At best, I am expecting kidnapping attempts aimed at extracting voldemort from his host. Also, Harry really should listen to Malfoy. Scaring Lucius is not a good idea.
"You can't put a price on a human life."
"I agree, but unfortunately reality has already put a price on human life, and that price is much less than 5 million dollars. By refusing to accept this, you are only refusing to make an informed decision about which lives to purchase."
"Yes," said Dumbledore, as he descended to the bottom of the dark stone stairs. "Let us all go home, indeed." His blue eyes were locked on Harry, as hard as sapphires.
It suddenly occurs to me that Dumbledore has seen two interactions between Harry and a Dementor. In the first one, it almost destroys him. In the second, he casts a Patronus that destroys it. Neither would seem to provide the kind of evidence that you would need to confidently assume that other Dementors would run away from you if you said "Boo" to them.
So, is this enough evidence for Dumbledore to decide that he's wrong about who broke Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban?
No, as I pointed out, one would expect, based on its past performance, the dark side to come up with disastrous yet simple and effective solutions, and this expectation is another desiderata. Which that solution filled as well.
(A token 'dispel the Patronuses and make the Dementors eat people' is at least a gesture in the right direction, for all that I find Harry's belief he can cripple Aurors like that to be risible - if you yell at a pilot 'actually it doesn't run on the Bernouilli effect but spiral vortices' or whatever, does he immediately panic and fl...
Do you feel the same way about published by known publishing houses fiction that based on other fiction? I'm thinking about The Once and Future King, Wicked, The Ayre Affair.....
You are here for the class that has been taught at Hogwarts for eight hundred years! Welcome to your first year of Battle Magic!
and
I'm the General of Sunshine, but even before that, I'm Hermione Granger of Ravenclaw, and I'm proud to be part of a House that's eight hundred years old.
and
You told me that no one had matched the four founders of Hogwarts. So it's been going on for at least eight centuries, then?
ETA: Oh, haha, maybe I should have just gone with
...Harry winced. Hermione had been the one to explain to him about the Sorting Hat, but she
Only Quirrel and Dumbledore know of it, since even the three accompanying Aurors were False-Memory-Charmed.
We don't know what the cover story was that Dumbledore thought up to justify the lost Dementor.
Honest dilemma: Should Hermione decide to get the memories of casting the Blood-chilling Charm obliviated?
On one hand, one would think that messing even more with Hermione's mind should be a no-no. On the other hand, we're pretty sure it's a false memory, and it seems grossly unfair for her to have to remember attempting to commit a murder that she didn't truly attempt.
Second question: Regardless of what Hermione should do, will she so decide it?
Third question: If she doesn't so decide, will some helpful other person override said choice for her sake and obliviate her anyway?
There are so many ways for Harry to get money - I hope the debt doesn't become a major plot point. If there are downsides to the debt in terms of obligations to Lucius, Harry should just get the money and be done with it.
If the Supreme Mugwump doesn't want Harry to be indebted to Lucius, shouldn't he be able to call in a few favors and have it paid off tomorrow? There's the general blood debt to Harry. The general goodwill to Harry. The desire by others not to have the Boy Who Lived in debt to Malfoy.
There should be enough people in the Wizarding world w...
Get him an internet connection in Hogwarts and play the market using his time turner.
Early '90s. That'd be a JANET connection, which was an academic network. I expect AOL or Compuserve might be possible. We're talking about the mists of prehistory here, i.e. before 1995. Heck, it was even before the National Lottery was operating in the UK (that started 1994). The stock market would be playable, if he had a suitable adult to front for him.
No, how he makes serious money in the muggle world in 1991 Britain may require actual research.
Pretty closely, I think; we have
Emmeline wasn't a member of the Order of the Phoenix any more, they had disbanded after the end of the last war. And during the war, she'd known, they'd all known, that Director Crouch had quietly approved of their off-the-books battle.
Director Bones wasn't Crouch.
and
[...] while Amelia tried to weigh her own thoughts. She must not leave this prison alive... Albus Dumbledore wouldn't turn into Bartemius Crouch without a strong reason.
re-reading chapter 76 made me realise the prophecy could not be about Voldemort at all :
Let's look at this prophecy in detail :
"The one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord approaches,"
Vanquish, as Snape said, is a strange word to describe a baby accidentally toasting Voldemort, especially since we have evidence that this might not be what really happened. "Dark Lord" is used by EY quite loosely, and not as something specifically relating to Voldemort. Indeed, Dumbledore seems to worry that he could be this Dark Lord. Now, if we ste...
Almost all the possible consequences of Quirrell's plot with Hermione might have helped Quirrellmort somehow:
- Hermione goes to Azkaban and Harry goes permanently Dark.
- Hermione goes to Azkaban and Harry goes permanently Light, killing himself to destroy it.
- Harry saves Hermione, further antagonizing Draco's father and thereby Draco himself.
- The wedge is driven further between Harry and Dumbledore.
- Harry looks very Dark in front of all of wizarding Britain, losing him Light allies.
- Harry looks very powerful in front of all of wizarding Britain, gaining him
Thoughts on the whole "guess the solution" situation from last chapter.
When I first reached the end of the chapter and the "You have 5 days to find the solution" bit, for some frantic moments I was worried that Eliezer would let get Hermione go to Azkaban if we weren't sufficiently clever to find the solution. It seemed rather unlikely, because we didn't seem to be so very near the end of the whole of HPMOR (and surely Hermione's effective killing would have major repercussions).. but I had already known about the similar situation in T...
"Squib" is a nonmagical child of magical parents, at least in canon. MoR seems to be using it as a genetic marker, which I'm honestly not sure is compatible with canon.
(Now that I think about it, if Harry's genetic theory is correct, doesn't a squib child of a wizarding couple imply that Mom was getting some on the side?)
In canonical!HP, halfbloods are wizards/witches with one witch/wizard parent and one Muggle parent. "Dad's a Muggle, Mum's a witch. Bit of a nasty shock for him when he found out." Muggleborns have two Muggle parents.
Sometimes people with a Muggleborn and a pureblood for parents are called halfbloods (Harry is one of these). Finer gradations aren't referred to (I'm not sure what Harry and Ginny's kids would be called).
Good bit, though a bit of a hodgepodge. I presume the real culprit will be found, but that doesn't necessarily counter the debt - the Wizengamot would have to agree, and the truth could be found out in a way that leaves little actual proof, even aside issues of Wizengamot's fairness. I'll be disappointed if paying the debt turns out to be too arduous though, but of course depending on the methods chosen there may be side effects. (One way would be for Draco to accept a counterdebt, having been convinced of the truth of the matter and seeing that being on g...
Why, indeed, would wizards with enough status and wealth to turn their hands to almost any endeavor, choose to spend their lives fighting over lucrative monopolies on ink importation
Oh god, why did you have to go there. Whyyyy
Edit: at least you didn't mention the squid
In fairness, circulating air in a castle whose geometry is best represented by an arbitrarily connected graph (not necessarily acyclic), is a non-trivial engineering challenge. After a few student asphyxiated, they may just have gone a little overboard.
I now declare this to be MoR!canon. (That large magical dwellings in general have large highly-connected, possibly magical air-ducts, by tradition, to prevent the occasional cases where somebody asphyxiated; and that Salazar used this as his excuse for why Hogwarts's ventilation ducts had to be so large.)
Aguamenti creates water out of nothing, which you can drink. The Bubble-Head Charm could, in theory, work some way other than creating thin air out of thin air, but personally I doubt it does.
I think he has six and a quarter years to turn zero galleons into sixty thousand - I interpreted it as him having to pay what he could immediately.
Personally, I'd be inclined to just Imperius Lucius into cancelling the rest of the debt, then obliviate him and memory charm him into remembering doing it of his own free will, but perhaps I'm a little more Dark Harry than Light Harry.
He's got a time machine and the stock market exists.
Give him a few days a month outside of Hogwarts (or just a telephone/television) and he could own every gold mine, hell, own everything in the muggle world. I could pull that off with just a time machine.
Why on earth did this not immediately occur to me? This is usually my first thought in time-travel stories. Clearly my dislike of Lucius is clouding my judgement.
He has a hundred in his back yard. Worst comes to worst, he arbitrages that up to 60k.
Edit: or time machine+stock market. In retrospect, that's a much better solution.
April 1991 price of silver was $3.9707/oz troy, gold was $358.38/oz troy. That's a 90:1 silver-gold ratio, ounce to ounce.
Now, the Sickle-Galleon ratio is 17:1. But a Galleon is larger than a Sickle, by a significant amount, as can be seen here; , and gold is denser than silver, by a significant amount. Assuming the coins are similar thickness, the Galleon is about 1.7 times larger than the Sickle, and about 3.1 times heavier. So the ratio by weight is around 5.4:1 silver-to-gold.
That means each cycle of arbitrage is a multiplication by, well, we'll round down to 16 for various transaction costs in our Fermi estimate. 100 Galleons becomes 1,600 after one cycle, and 1,600 becomes 25,600 after cycle 2.
Okay, that "couple times" didn't quite get us all the way there from 100. Harry needs to manage to get his hands on (considering the uncertainties on transaction costs) more than 234 but almost certainly less than 300 Galleons and run through the arbitrage cycle twice to get the 60,000 galleons.
It's easy to do an arbitrage chain a couple times, but people will start to get suspicious fast.
Suspicious? Sure, but will they care? He is dealing with Gringotts, or more specifically with specific goblins at Gringotts. They will be following their job specifications, probably their legal obligation, giving their company a profit and adhering to tradition. Gringotts wins, Harry wins, law is followed.
The people who lose are anyone who has invested in wizard cash (which is being inflated). But they aren't involved in the transaction and don't lose enough or rapidly enough that they would object before he has finished farming. In fact they only start experiencing negative effects once Harry starts spending.
Perhaps you're expected to gracefully retract at some point.
I think the striken out posts can't be further down voted and you are expected to use that tool to defend yourself against excessive down votes. That is entirely a guess and I am new here.
(in the relevant sense, this refers to why don't various charities just rain megatons of food, water, schools and hospitals from the sky, given how much private 1st world citizens have to spare)
This is much harder to do then you seem to think.
Am I the only one that doesn't think Harry is going to pay off Lucius as fast as possible? Unless the demands on Harry are seriously onerous this is a superb opportunity to learn about the most powerful family and one of the most powerful wizards in Magical Britain. From a story perspective, it gives Eliezer an easy way to add difficulty to Harry's life at any point and a good chance to keep writing about villains like Lucius instead of boring villains like the Jugson kid. I think Harry will end up working with Lucius to uncover who framed Hermione.
I would say that the "most wise" one among Dumbledore, Quirrell, and Harry is definitely not the one whose model does not account for observed reality.
they also believe that Merlin fought the dread Totoro and imprisoned the Ree.
Oh god where are they being held?
Considering that at least part of the correct solution was found within 24 hours, I think you're right, Locke. It might affect accessibility, though -- I know I would be sad if I logged on only to find that the discussion had closed already.
Having read through the speculation, I even found most of the chapter quite anticlimactic. Recognizing the correct predictions removed all the tension, since MOR's tension relies so much on plotting.
That said, though, reading through the discussion gave me a harmless and very insightful lesson into how predictions work. I learned what makes a prediction probable versus plausible, in a way that not only allows me to understand it, but to think about how I would apply it to my life (I hadn't really internalized that the percents of all possible outcomes have to add to a hundred, even though in hindsight that's fairly obvious. I also learned about the betting-real-money threshold).
All in all, despite getting in the way of the chapter, it was a nice, closed-environment rationalist lesson. Thank you for prompting the discussion, Eliezer!
Vote up if you think that the experience of reading the chapter was better for all the speculation.
It did make it better. But please don't make people solve a puzzle to get a happy ending. The downside of getting only a sad ending if people fail at that is too high. Not just in terms of how many people will get negative utility from that, but also it will substantially reduce how many people will be willing to recommend the story to others (once it is finished). The potential downside to that is simply too large.
Where is the vote that "all the speculation was a better than the chapter itself"?
That's no slight on the chapter, mind. The discussion was both entertaining and useful.
I enjoyed the process of coming up with and justifying my 'throw Dumbledore under the bus' theory
That's a very bad mental habit to get into. As Bryan Caplan explains here.
The key difference between a normal utilitarian and a Leninist: When a normal utilitarian concludes that mass murder would maximize social utility, he checks his work! He goes over his calculations with a fine-tooth comb, hoping to discover a way to implement beneficial policy changes without horrific atrocities. The Leninist, in contrast, reasons backwards from the atrocities that emotionally inspire him to the utilitarian argument that morally justifies his atrocities.
Strongly disagree. Puzzles that can't be solved aren't puzzles, they are authors being obnoxious. There's no talent in making an unsolvable puzzle any more than there is in making a Zendo rule that no one can solve. And there's no fun in it for most people either. We shouldn't be in a situation where at the last minute we're informed that no one but a dark wizard would put mustard on top of the sauerkraut (Standard TVTropes warning).
It was disappointing to me because it wasn't the first time I'd heard the solution. It was like I had a spoiler for the chapter, because I was reasonably confident as to what it was. And while I've seen research linked to on LW that says spoilers don't decrease enjoyment, I definitely find they do, at least for me.
It was redeeming, however, that more complications were added on top of the imperius!debt. If it had simply been Harry winning with it, I think would have found the chapter dull.
Hmm, haven't we seen something like that before? "I know you arranged my father's death." [pause] "No. -- I am your father."
I don't think Harry is actually taking the piss, and nor does he see it as a literal proof. It helps to remember who he's talking to. He's trying to get Dumbledore to consider not just death, sometime in the far abstract future, but a thing that you might actually welcome even just one day after a day when you didn't welcome it. Not a proof but a rhetorical device.
Since we're doing this by chapter now, I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but I'm not sure where to put it otherwise.
I was rereading chapter 26, Noticing Confusion, and-- maybe I'm not the first person to notice this-- I was thinking of a certain other indestructible diary.
Surely Quirrelmort wouldn't give Harry that diary, right? But if the book is indestructible, and made of paper, there is magic involved. He does say Bacon was a wizard, but also that his experiments never got very far without a wand. Making books indestructible does not seem like not getting very far.
I notice that I am confused.
I've been doubting Quirrel being Mr. Hat on a story-obviousness-basis, being partial to twists. But rationally, it makes no sense to very much doubt the obvious solution with no comparably well-supported alternatives (despite having reached for ones). I wouldn't wonder if that was even the moral there.
Next of kin would be the mother (surely?). She now has an incentive to legally kill a wealthy heir to take their estate. That's... something of a moral hazard or at least an unpleasant tradeoff to thrust upon someone.
The foreign exchange(i.e., currency) market is both very liquid and very volatile. With advance knowledge of major changes from a Time Turner, it's easy to make very fast exponential growth of your seed money - even a 1% change per day, in any direction, multiplies your money by a factor of 12 every year(or x3 million before he graduates Hogwarts). Of course, anyone with that sort of record would get investigated hard and fast, but a more cautious approach can still result in absurd growth.
One thing I noticed about Harry's language - increasing talk in computer terms. PC, SYSTEM ERROR, Internal Consistency Checker.
His Dark Side is tremendously efficient at information recall and causal inference. Interesting that Quirrell remarked on the value of memory recall to a wizard. I've wondered if the Dark Side was just an interface to a computing system, but it's clear that's not all that it is.
It seems like the Dark Side is two things, an efficient computation engine, and the dark emotions related to Death: the terror and hatred. Why are those linked? Why does a computation and recall engine have to be linked to emotions at all, and if it's going to be emotions, why not positive Mr. Glowy Person feelings?
If using time travel in this way is possible (I maintain it already has been explained it isn't)
You are wrong. We've already seen more complicated information exploitation scenarios than this.
that opens up a million plot holes and so I predict EY won't go there.
Narrative necessity dictates that he probably won't.
I think that's probably true -- but not for the reasons you seem to be implying, and not with any particular implications for authors' romantic success. Fanfic seems to be a highly generational phenomenon; there have been shared universes and exchanges of what we now call fanfic going back arguably to the Twenties (the weird fiction genre was highly incestuous), but the form only really took off with the arrival of the Internet. So its authorship's going to be heavily skewed towards younger writers, who are almost by definition less competent and experie...
What was dark about any of what Harry did?
Risky as all get out, but Hermione is easily worth an otherwise useless debt and substantially all of Harry's material wealth - especially if the actual villain gets caught, which helps lead to the rule of law in Magical Britain.
I don't think Harry's dark side is supposed to be limited to dark solutions, it just happens to be an ultra proficient problem solver. It may have dark tendencies by virtue of being an embedded copy of the mind of Voldemort, but there's no obvious reason it can't be used for good.
So Harry has an advanced intelligence of questionable tendencies locked away, but it's tantalizingly offering to be ultra useful to him if he'll only give it freer reign outside of its box?
This is sounding awfully familiar...
What was dark about any of what Harry did?
Who said the solution had to be dark?
Now, ofcourse, his Plan B would have been to let the Dementor feast on the souls of the Malfoy faction of the wizengamot. That's dark. Slightly so. :-)
Question entirely unrelated to the current events of the story:
What would happen if a person bought a pack of Comed-Tea and committed to drinking one every morning with breakfast?
« And so remained only Harry, Professor Quirrell, Headmaster Dumbledore, and an Auror trio.
It would have been better to get rid of the trio first, but Harry couldn't think of a good way to do that.» from chapter 45
Harry ensured that very few people saw him destroying it.
I believe that the Auror trio was memory charmed.
There was a distinct body-hitting-the-ground-with-a-thuddish sort of sound.
"Thank you for taking care of that, Quirinus," said Dumbledore to Professor Quirrell, who was now standing above and behind the unconscious forms of the three Aurors. "I confess I am still feeling a bit peaky. Though I shall handle the Memory Charms myself."
However, both McGonagall and Snape know that Harry has developed a charm which can affect the behavior of Dementors:
Albus nodded grimly. "Unfortunately there is now another wizard who laughs at impossibilities. A wizard who, not long ago, developed a new and powerful Charm which could have blinded the Dementors to Bellatrix Black's escape.
Is there anyone keeping a history of the story? I suspect there are some clues to be gleamed from the edits.
(Note: I originally specifically asked for what was chapter 76 but now 77, but I realized that the thing I was looking for was there all along. Regardless I am still interested in a history.)
Um... I haven't been participating in these threads until now (will do so vigorously now), but what are current theories on the reasons behind what Quirrellmort has done so far?
It's clear to me that Hat and Cloak = Quirrellmort. So what did Quirrellmort stand to gain from this ploy? Was he trying to deprive Harry of allies, to eventually force him to rely more on Quirrellmort? Or specifically remove Hermione as a Morality Chain? Is this about maneuvering Harry into a position where he will eventually feel he must make war on Magical Britain, with Quirrellm...
"Lessson I learned is not to try plotss that would make girl-child friend think I am evil or boy-child friend think I am sstupid," Harry snapped back. He'd been planning a more temporizing response than that, but somehow the words had just slipped out.
Harry named two people in particular - Hermione and Draco - who made him less susceptible to Quirrelmort's influence. This plot nearly removed both of them from Harry.
Let's assume that Hermione had actually been sentenced to Azkaban. How many advantages would Quirrelmort have gained?
- Discredited Dumbledore somewhat with a student almost being killed
- Directly eliminated a Light-side witch showing skill at military command and Battle Magic
- Made Harry more vulnerable by knocking out an ally/friend/moral compass
- Driven a wedge between Harry and House Malfoy, eliminating Draco as an ally/friend and ensuring no Malfoy-Potter alliance could form against a resurgent Voldemort
- Broken the Dumbledore-Harry alliance forever if Dumbledore actually let Hermione go to Azkaban; otherwise force Dumbledore to go into open rebellion against the law.
- Made Harry take the majority of the Wizengamot as enemies who needed to be punished, both encouraging him to become darker and the members to have reason to be hostile to Harry in turn.
- Provoked Harry into a (possibly) suicidal effort to destroy Azkaban, which (possibly) could enable a mass breakout of Voldemort supporters from same.
- Isolated Magical Britain from the rest of the wizarding world for sentencing a child to Azkaban.
- Delegitimized the Wizengamot in the eyes of everyone in Magical Britain horrified at the sentence.
There may be more that aren't coming to mind, but, well, the potential payoffs for Quirrelmort were pretty high.
Mostly good points, but one issue:
Directly eliminated a Light-side witch showing skill at military command and Battle Magic
If Quirrel were worried about this, he could have just not put all the effort into teaching her military command and battle magic (at a level so far beyond what is expected of his position). If light-side heroes like Hermione are something he's worried about, best to just not go around creating them.
He also has a father who teaches at Oxford. I suspect he could run stuff through Dad if that was the biggest stumbling block.
I wonder if the exchange rate of 1 Galleon = 17 sickles = 493 knuts is fixed by law or a floating exchange rate that just happens to be currently at that value. Perhaps that would explain the unusual ratios that are in use.
Does anyone know what countries did back when coins were actually made of precious metals?
Mostly - fail.
For a detailed explanation, I recommend "The Big Problem of Small Change" - Thomas J. Sargent, François R. Velde published in 2002 isbn 0-691-02932-6
A common strategy was to ignore the problem and hope it goes away. It didn't - see Gresham's law
- bad money drives out good. Another strategy was to debase the more valuable coins (make them of less pure metals), which has approximately the same effect.
All of which leads to "economic hardships" on the poor, which sounds a lot nicer than "the poor died in droves."
It seems strange, but the idea of a representational currency, coins that you can officially exchange for a fixed amount of gold, is actually a relatively recent invention. Not to be confused with fiat money - coins that you can't officially exchange for anything.
Edit: Did you mean "how did countries set the exchange rate in the old days?" If so, then typically the government reserved the right to mint coins, and the exchange rate was set by law.
I would be surprised if this did not quickly lead to the revocation of his time turner, but presuming he asks McGonagall and it's deemed responsible that is also an option.
I have a confusion!
Way back in Chapter 39, Harry says:
"I want to live one more day. Tomorrow I will still want to live one more day. Therefore I want to live forever, proof by induction on the positive integers."
This immediately caught my attention, given that Harry talks in earlier chapters about his worldview relying on Bayesian inference. Yet, for induction over an infinite sequence of unknown, informative experiences to hold, he has to have assigned an integral prior. Hijinks!
My first thought was that this was a clue dropped by the author...
Eliezer has used that line in nonfiction too; I'm very confident that Harry's pro-immortality stance is endorsed by the author, but that the "induction proof" is meant rhetorically and should not be construed to imply infinite certainty.
So if Hermione is vassal of Harry, and Harry is temporary vassal of Lucius, then is Hermione vassal of Lucius?
Or do the muggle medieval rule "the vassal of my vassal is not my vassal" works in magical Brittain also?
Being in debt is probably not the same thing as being a vassal, even temporarily.
(Well, maybe... Dumbledore still hasn't told us what rights Lucius now has over Harry.)
True. Maybe they were just so stunned by everything.
On the other hand, Lucius gets 100,000 gold and Potter in his debt, which apparently gives him some kind of control. And maybe he realized Hermione wasn't the actual killer, but couldn't back down at that point because he'd lose face. So it's not like he ends up with a bad deal.
Alternatively, if he thinks Harry is his real enemy and Hermione just a minion, maybe having Harry in his debt is just as good as putting Hermione in the clank, according to his utility function.
Insanity plea is a legitimate one, you know. Even if she did do it, she was severely manipulated, to the point that I'd argue it's similar to just manually reaching in and changing the weighting functions in her brain.
IIRC, canon!Harry met a vampire in book VI. Does anyone know if they exist in the MORverse?
My instinct would be that rational!Harry would have already encountered them while researching immortality - especially since he frequently compares the wizarding world with D&D, where the primary form of magical immortality is to become an undead wizard, or "lich", although I doubt he would actually accept immortality via vampirism - they may be bound by magical law (or at least the Statute of Secrecy) but I expect it still screw with your utility func...
Maybe "magic" is what gives you a free will, ie the explanation of how a will can exist with a certain measure of independence from the neurons.
That would send a message quite contrary to lots of what LessWrong is about; so it'd be highly unlikely for Eliezer to have something like that in HPMoR.
Besides you are confusing at least three different concepts -- (a) "free will" in the sense of being active agents who make our decisions based on our own inner drives, (b) "consciousness" in the sense of being qualia-possessing se...
I'm running with the theory (from Donny) that the prophecy was planted by Dumbledore as a plot to lure Voldemort into a trap, where Lily completed a dark ritual to protect Harry and destroy Voldemort should he attack Harry.
Objection. I don't believe Lily completed a ritual. She's not the one who spoke the words in the correct order. I don't think Voldemort would accidentally confer a protection upon an intended victim, either.
My version of this theory has Dumbledore creating the same setup as in canon because he thought it would lead to the same result...
This is a legitimate usage of the term, "to lose", and I really don't see why you're so vehemently opposed to it.
Because there is already a contextual definition of "lose" with association to war that is so well established that it's assumed by default.
If Voldemort hadn't started the war, they would almost certainly be better off. We would also be better off if we never got dustspecks in our eyes. Some utility hits are for practical purposes unavoidable. But Dumbledore's faction resisted, and resisted successfully; they were not ove...
I started writing a counter-argument and remembered the date. This is meant as an April 1st joke, right?
Which part of this is goalpost-moving?
Exception to general claims countered by more proof for specific claims (which are trivial and not denied.)
For instance I still maintain this:
You don't generally accomplish that by antagonizing the one guy who can kill you.
Unless they already plan to kill you, in which case antagonizing them can potentially reduce their threat.
Yet clearly would not apply it in the specific case where a dementor is guarunteed to fail in the short term. ie. When their threat reamains at 100% and has not been reduced.
You perceive this as an argument, but I have no interest in arguing about anything in particular, except to point out that technical inaccuracy about the meaning of "wanting" in your original comment (which you should judge on object level, based on what you conclude from reading the linked posts, if you choose to do so, not from how you perceive the context of me linking to those posts). That is all I meant to do, but arguing about what I meant to do is similarly beside the point, so I'm bowing out.
We are told that Occlumens can beat Veritaserum.
We are not told that promise-makers can beat Veritaserum.
Quirrel stopped the polyjuice spell to be intimidating, same as how he was manipulating the lights. Misdirecting the Aurors to polyjuice makes them more worried, and about the wrong thing.
But I think really it doesn't matter, because the reason in my mind why Voldemort isn't on Quirrel's head is because that would be fucking stupid. Plenty of changes from canon are simply people getting smarter, and this is one really obvious one. If his face HAS to be sticking out of whoever's body he is riding, the back of the head is basically the worst place to put i...
There is no reason to think he doesn't need his wand for actual Dementor crushing. The Dementor scaring wasn't him casting anything. It was due to Dementor's own ability to commune with Harry turned against it (plus, hypothetically, some expectation manipulation - the "BOO" there was probably more than just for show, but also to prime Harry's mind into expecting the thing to be spooked).
"SF/Fantasy is as good as realistic fiction". It's a point I agree with, I just think it was overdone.
I'm wondering why Lucius tried to get out of the deal.
If Harry is Voldemort in hiding, he should guess that Harrymort needs Hermione for something (a dark ritual perhaps ?) and shouldn't get out of the deal.
If Harry isn't Voldemort in hiding, then Lucius would get two benefits in one : a payment of the blood debt he has towards House Potter (which could cost him a lot in the game of politics), and a debt from the Boy-Who-Lived, which could grant him a lot in the same game. And lots of money in addition, which is always a good thing to have.
I know that Dra...
I've seen a few variations on "why does Lucius prefer vengeance to maintaining/expanding his political power?" First of all, for someone like Lucius, what's the point of power if you can't get stuff you want, like vengeance for your family members? Like how it's pointless to save if you're never going to spend.
And second, something that's on my mind because I just finished The Origins of Virtue by Matt Ridley. Emotions like vengeance evolved for a reason. Harry sees it as a weakness of Lucius's that he would give up anything politically to avenge his son. And it's true, that can be manipulated by people who want to see him lose his political power. However, it is also a powerful deterrent to his enemies. If Lucius is publically known as someone who would stop at nothing to avenge his family, then those that would provoke him will be few and far between, and he will probably not have to make the sacrifices that his vengefulness commits him to.
When he accused Dumbledore in public of the murder of his wife, even at political cost, I'm sure everyone got the message: "if I hurt Malfoy's family, even if I make sure it would be very politically costly for him to pursue me f...
I don't get how a cunning Slytherin like him can discard such an advantage for pure vengeance over an "attempt" which didn't do any real harm.
On the contrary:
And Draco was getting angry again. "Dumbledore killed Mother, it's not enough to just say it's sad! I don't understand what you think you have to do, but the Malfoys have to take revenge!" Not avenging the deaths of family went beyond weakness, beyond dishonor, you might as well not exist.
Lucius never meant for Harry to accept the monetary bargain. This is clear from his reaction. He wanted his revenge, and Harry was interfering.
I'm wondering why Lucius tried to get out of the deal.
I see it as a status game. Previously Lucius had suggested that Dumbledore take Hermione's place in Azkaban, not because Lucius thought there was much of a chance that Dumbledore accept this offer, but rather to strike at the idea of Dumbledore's supposed heroic altruism.
Now when Lucius named 100,000 galleons as the price to erase the debt, he was trying a similar tactic -- Lucius didn't expect that Harry accept this, Lucius wanted to strike at the idea of his enemies being heroic and altruistic.
But Harry accepts - which in terms of impressiveness is a blow in Harry's favor and against Lucius, despite the fact that Harry's now endebted to Lucius, and because the sum named is so outrageously large.
But then Lucius thought he saw a opportunity to strike back at Dumbledore and Harry, because he thought they were pretending a play to raise Harry's status even further (not just heroically altruistic, but super-heroically tough, able to destroy Azkaban, all by himself).
So he attempted to call Harry and Dumbledore's bluff. And it failed again.
After Hermione failed to make a Patronus and Harry realized how to make a super-Patronus, he gave he a note telling her how to figure out super-Patronus so she wouldn't think she was evil. But he warned her that there were consequences for reading the note, so she decided not to.
Edit: Here it is, in the aftermath.
Given that Hermione's recent mental processes have essentially been put through a cheese shredder by various magic spells, I'm not sure such a moment actually occurred.
Incidentally, if one believes a certain piece of what seems like well-founded speculation about the Dread Totoro, the Merlin-Totoro legend mirrors Harry's escapades quite nicely.
Earlier I noted that EY has a good bit of foreshadowing. Really spells things out.
A lot of that comes out in the dialogue. It occurred to me that dialogue is the closest thing we get to an unvarnished measurement in a story. The description of scenes and events are the voice of the author, but a character says what he says.
Except for cute things like "I'm not serious."
Time Braid is far, far better than Chunin Exam Day. For many reasons, including not being written by a sociopath.
Why is there so much HPMoR talk all of a sudden? And how much fun am I missing out on if I wait until all the chapters are released before reading them (and thereby not participate in the discussions in real time)?
Well we'd need a better developed Theory of Fun to quantitatively answer that. How about, "a lot"?
ETA: and there's so much talk because Eliezer resumed posting new chapters (and a new arc) a couple of weeks ago after a long hiatus. And the new chapters have already set up a very dangerous situation and all end in cliffhangers and Eliezer added notes asking people to try to out-think Harry in solving the crisis before the next chapter is out. Which resulted in a lot of theories and suggestions being posted.
Eliezer added notes asking people to try to out-think Harry in solving the crisis before the next chapter is out. Which resulted in a lot of theories and suggestions being posted.
"Eliezer told us to" -> Good answer.
A comparatively small amount, relative to the fun involved in reading the chapters. I think waiting is probably a good idea - you're spared the agony of waiting. It's too late for all of us, though.
For all those wandering WHY wizards don't use their powers to get money from the Muggle economy...
Canon!Lucius does, according to Rowling (from her website Pottermore): The Malfoy name comes from old French and translates as 'bad faith'. Like many other progenitors of noble English families, the wizard Armand Malfoy arrived in Britain with William the Conqueror as part of the invading Norman army. Having rendered unknown, shady (and almost certainly magical) services to King William I, Malfoy was given a prime piece of land in Wiltshire, seized from local ...
Can we get a sub-reddit? I'm tired of finding out which is the right thread for the present, and all the posts are scrambled over multiple threads, etc.
A sub-reddit might also get new people to hpmor, as opposed to being on lesswrong.com
I don't have a reddit account, but I'd create one if hpmor was there.
So instead of a war, let's look at a potential asteroid strike. It takes an enormously expensive project to deflect an asteroid which has absolutely no motive to hit the earth, and nothing to gain from it. It's just there, and unless we funnel countless billions of dollars into stopping it, civilization is screwed. Would the project to stop it be pointless and futile? If not, what distinguishes it from the Voldemort scenario?
In any case, Voldemort almost certainly had motives for going to war (MoR Quirrelmort at least is very much not a "for the hell...
So yes. Please update your modal thinking. Yours is not the only legitimate usage of "to lose" here. After all; they did not lose the war but they sure as hell all lost something/someone. And for no good reason.
If they lost things "for no good reason," every war of defense ever engaged in is pointless and futile. You might be able to define your terms such that this is the case, but it's tremendously misleading. Sometimes we have to expend efforts to stop bad things from happening, not just to cause good things that wouldn't otherwise have happened.
I'd say trying to have a 12 year old girl tortured to death is a better example of villainous behavior. I also don't see much evidence of Lucius doing any of this to help Harrymort. It seems more like a desperate attempt to sabotage him out of fear and anger.
2/3 of those are false claims. Seriously, for a rationalist site, this is an astonishingly poor argument to see getting thrown around.
I think you are equivocating political power and political capital. Scaring dementors doesn't show legitimacy quite the way winning elections does. In other words, political capital is a kind of political power, but not the only kind.
The blood debt was political capital. Scaring the dementor will create political power of another kind.
"Slow"? Edit: or no, that's the same thing, isn't it. Um. Probably a dumb question, but what's wrong with "dumb"?
But I'm still confused; why not? What are the benefits of servitude over marriage?
Non-violation of bigamy laws if you marry someone else.
"I told you, no kissing!" and then some.
Before McGonagall's stunt, I was worried the marriage would require consummation to be legally binding.
This doesn't strike me as much of an issue. Considering what was at stake it would be an utterly trivial cost and a requirement comparatively easy to fulfill. Just another taboo tradeoff.
"Let's see... is drastically underage sex with my girlfriend better than her death by torture?". Death by torture really makes decision making easy at times!
He'll say that publicly, but how's anyone else supposed to believe he didn't give contradictory orders in private?
434 comments. Is it getting to be time to start a new thread?
Opinions about whether Harry could actually destroy Azkaban?
That's an interesting possibility, but I favour the interpretation that this is the source of dementors:
Even so, the most terrible ritual known to me demands only a rope which has hanged a man and a sword which has slain a woman; and that for a ritual which promised to summon Death itself - though what is truly meant by that I do not know and do not care to discover, since it was also said that the counterspell to dismiss Death had been lost.
- Quirrell, Chapter 74
It fits very nicely. Dementors (Death) were unkillable (undismissable) because the "true" patronus charm (counterspell) had been lost.
Oh, of course. He just reminds me a lot of the obnoxious little shit that I was at that age(albeit much more well-read, which is a feat), and has some of the same gaping flaws in his mental model of the world.
This may be pushing the limits of Harry's control over his Patronus, but humans can speak in funny voices even without magic, and doing so to prevent characters from recognizing who they are is a standard trope. This deserves mention, though, so I'll edit to include one.
Re: the debt. I think Lucius may have been playing very high speed chess when he picked the amount. The point isnt to have Harry in debt to him, the point is to afford ex-deatheaters loyal to Lucius the oppertunity to trade in a blood debt to Harry for a monetary one to him. If this is so, the debts are likely to be paid off long before Harry can set any money making schemes in motion. - This would count as a downside to being in debt to Lucius - He cannot refuse cash in lieu as long as he is a debtor.
The ending note of that trial couldnt have been more p...
I think Lucius may have been playing very high speed chess when he picked the amount. The point isnt to have Harry in debt to him, the point is to afford ex-deatheaters loyal to Lucius the oppertunity to trade in a blood debt to Harry for a monetary one to him.
I don't think so. It's clear from his reaction that he did not want Harry to accept the trade:
It was clear that Lucius Malfoy had not been expecting that reply.
And later:
"I withdraw my offer!" shouted the Lord of Malfoy. "I will not accept the debt to House Potter in payment, not even for a hundred thousand Galleons! The girl's blood debt to House Malfoy stands!"
Indeed, it is a taboo tradeoff from Lucius perspective. He has traded justice for his son for money and the resolution of a political (though not moral) debt to Harry. He picked the amount because he thought there was no possibility that Harry would accept such a large amount.
Anyone know if Galleons are solid?
Harry estimated their weight at 5 grams, about 1/10th of what a solid gold coin about 38.6 mm in diameter would weigh.
Harry: Use magic to cheat on gambling, or do the arbitrage-y thing.
Lucius: Suddenly you don't understand anything.
I actually found it fairly enjoyable as well for the first few chapters. I didn't realize how much I hated it until I came to Qhzoyrqber'f guvegrragu Ubepehk.
Of course, the mere existence of that spoiler may make you want to read more just to find out how on earth such a thing could happen.
The fanfiction.net mirror has chapter 81 posted. Meanwhile, hpmor.com has today's Author's Note up, but not #81 itself. This is a shame, since I think that hpmor.com provides a substantially better reading experience...
Edit: And now it has #81 up too. Sorry about that.
I'm not sure if this is the place for it, but I haven't found somewhere better and I don't see how it could be plot-critical. Nevertheless, warning for very minor spoilers about chapter 86.
I gave my mother a description of the vrooping device, and she had no idea. I said that it was one of a collection of odd devices with bizarre uses, and the conversation progressed as follows:
"Well in that case, it was an egg coddler." "An egg coddler?" "Coddling is like poaching but slower and gentler." "What about the pulsing lig...
For all those wandering WHY wizards don't use their powers to get money from the Muggle economy...
Canon!Lucius does, according to Rowling (from her website Pottermore):
" The Malfoy name comes from old French and translates as 'bad faith'. Like many other progenitors of noble English families, the wizard Armand Malfoy arrived in Britain with William the Conqueror as part of the invading Norman army. Having rendered unknown, shady (and almost certainly magical) services to King William I, Malfoy was given a prime piece of land in Wiltshire, seized from ...
I'd love to see a list of spoilers about things that were hinted at and reasonably sounding hypotheses, if anyone ever made one. Please do reply to this post with your discoveries and speculations. I'm also going to post mine, once I finish rereading HPMOR.
I just wanted to drop in to say that this song on the very popular nerdy YouTube channel vlogbrothers by Hank and John Green closely echoes the spirit and values of HP:MoR. Nerdfighters (the community centered around John and Hank's videos) would be a great potential audience for this fic. I think fans of Hank Green in particular would really appreciate this, because he is known as the "science and math" brother. Hank has often been excited about advancements in medicine in the past, and has supported things that the general public may consider i...
Am I the only one who interprets the most recent XKCD as a Sorting Hat shoutout?
The wording isn't quite identical, and the sentiment isn't especially singular, so I'm probably wrong to do so, but I'm wondering if I'm alone in that likely wrongness.
How well supported at this point is the theory that HJPEV is... unmodified, if you will? I.e., that the person we know as our protagonist is the product of James and Lily's son progressing linearly through eleven years in exactly the way that we've heard from various in-story sources, and not the product of any other, unknown influence whatsoever.
I am almost convinced that there's some other influence at work, but I don't know what to attribute it to. His oddities, especially his "dark side," could be from the Horcrux (assuming he is one in this ...
Ok, this is quite old stuff, and maybe it has been discussed already, but I couldn't find it,. Chapter 25:
...And by similar logic: The words a wizard spoke, the wand movements, those weren't complicated enough of themselves to build up the spell effects from scratch - not the way that the three billion base pairs of human DNA actually were complicated enough to build a human body from scratch, not the way that computer programs took up thousands of bytes of data.
So the words and wand movements were just triggers, levers pulled on some hidden and more comple
With Eliezer's comments about how plots are better when they aren't needlessly complicated and the point isn't to trick the reader into wildly off-base or over-the-top-speculation, I've increased my probability of Harry being placed into Slytherin by the actual Sorting Hat up to 50%. If we assume that it was Dumbledore that veto'd the Hat's choice, why didn't he place Harry into Gryffindor? He would have been much closer to MacGonagal, Dumbledore's most loyal agent. Was he trying to keep him close to Hermione? Can anyone recall support for that in the text?
This is another case of an issue that's supposed to be mysterious to the characters, but not to the readers. We know what actually happened: the Sorting Hat said "SLYTHERIN!" to try to scare the crap out of Harry, to make his life flash before his eyes, to make him think that his hopes and dreams were ruined, so he would get serious and vow right then and there not to become the next Dark Lord. But the Hat actually, truly meant him to go to Ravenclaw.
Harry acknowledges that this is what happened: "It had been an awfully cruel prank the Hat had played on him, but you couldn't argue with the results on consequentialist grounds."
No other characters know what happened, so it adds to Harry's mystique for them, but we, who saw the whole thing from Harry's point of view, ought to know better.
Your "neutral interpretation of the facts" apparently ignores the facts that the Sorting Hat has never been self-aware before, that Harry is aware that the Hat is self-aware now, and that the Hat is borrowing a lot of knowledge and a little bit of personality from Harry's own brain at the time of the prank.
I just fail to see how you can take an explanation that fits 100% of the known facts, and then somehow, by applying
Eliezer's comments about how plots are better when they aren't needlessly complicated and the point isn't to trick the reader into wildly off-base or over-the-top-speculation
, you come up with a needlessly complicated and speculative idea that assumes the existence of secrets we have no clues about.
If you suffer far lesser consequences than if your opponent were victorious, you didn't lose. Obviously, yes, you lose things in the process, unless you have a ludicrous mismatch like the Anglo-Zanzibar War, but if you're going by a definition by which nearly anyone who has fought in a war on any side has lost, you're being misleading and abusing your words.
A couple of questions on HP lore:
1) If Lucius should happen to have an “accident”, does Draco have any living adult relatives close enough to manage his inheritance until majority? Lucius seems to have no siblings, his mother is dead, he never mentions grand-parents—in fact, I can’t actually recall any living Malfoy being mentioned, and other than Sirius and Belatrix I don’t know any Blacks alive. This tree has a Nymphadora Tonks as a cousin (or maybe aunt?), but I don’t think she qualifies. (Sirius is even less closely-related to Harry and did get tempora...
Interesting fact: just making her angry was not enough for setting up the murder attempt. She had to accuse Draco of plotting and overcome his magic, in public, to have him forced into a duel. Also, if the death-blow itself was faked, a public duel would not have been enough, Draco had to think of the first private duel.
Thus, if it is a plot to frame Hermione, whoever did it was really good (or ridiculously lucky) at predicting the consequences, not just Hermione’s reaction. So either its an extremely good Xanathos gambit, and everything was anticipated, o...
No, for a qualitative change in various probabilities we can ask if Dumbledore has unpleasant associations with burning -- like a memory of something he wishes he didn't (have to) do, or of a sad time for his family. These would reduce the chance that he sees "setting fire to a chicken" as clever.
Seems like a sadistic DD who killed Narcissa would enjoy alluding to this event, in a way that would disturb Harry without making him suspect the purpose behind it. But that seems to me like a more complicated hypothesis than a Dumbledore who shares Donny's suspicions, given that DD looks like a 'bad guy' of a radically different kind.
Weird - I didn't see that the first time.
Out of curiosity, is there a relevant distinction between "extra powers" and "certain rights" as used here?
To me the "boo" issue is somehow a way for Harry to remind everyone he's still a child, to both unsettle them a bit more and make them more prone to forgive his impertinence.
Or maybe it's not that calculated. After all, Harry is still a child, as smart and rationalist as he is, and it just pleased him to say "boo" and he didn't think much about that part, not sure.
It sounds like a modern thing, such retirements usually have loopholes or exceptions, and Patronus casting would start either in Hogwarts or Auror training; all of which could push Aurors well over the century mark.
You don't inherit from the fetus, the fetus is the one getting the inheritance. Which makes sense, since she is related to the person who died. This might cause problems once someone makes a kid with frozen sperm of a dead person.
Mudblood means non-pure ancestry, and is thus broader than muggleborn; the children of two muggleborns would still be considered to be mudblooded, despite both parents being wizards.
A) Dumbledore argues that Dumbledore is a better moral ideal than Fawks, but he doesn't do it very well
B) Even if we are in a universe that runs on causality, we often misunderstand how the causality mechanics interact with us. Likewise, Dumbledor thinks he is the eccentric mentor when sometimes he is the obstructive zealout.
I can't speak to silver, but I know that gold had two important dates - there was 1933, when FDR banned private gold ownership, and then there was IIRC 1971, when Bretton Woods collapsed and Nixon formally ended gold convertibility. For the decades in between, gold notes were formally convertible, but not to ordinary citizens, only to banks(generally, foreign central banks).
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 81, which should be published later today. The previous thread passed 400 comments as of the time of this writing, so it will pass 500 comments soon after the next chapter is posted, if not before. I suggest refraining from commenting here until chapter 81 is posted; comment in the 12th thread until you read chapter 81. After chapter 81 is posted, I suggest all discussion of previous guesses be kept here, with links to comments in the previous thread.
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.) When posted, chapter 81 should appear here.
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: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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: