Harry talks a big game about the scientific method and how a priori reasoning doesn’t actually work for coming to grips with how reality actually works—you have to test things, and you should expect to be really confused a lot of the time. But in the actual text of the story he repeatedly encounters a situation, reasons about how the world must be (sometimes on the basis of scientific knowledge like timeless physics[1] or “astrology is fake, obviously”[2] which he should be legitimately way less certain of after chapter 1, and often via extremely flimsy lines of reasoning or speculation[3]), and comes to confident conclusions about how the world must be. And repeatedly, the story has it that his first guess/hypothesis/a priori conclusion iscorrect, and he either gets a new munchkin-superpower (which no one in the world had previously discovered), or impresses the other characters, and the audience with his brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like deductions.
The only only place where his a priori reasoning clearly doesn’t work, because reality is more confusing than his theories is about the nature of magic. But the after a few scenes, the story basically completely drops that thread. There’s no payoff.
Overall, the story gives lip service what real science and rationality and entails, but doesn’t reliably live up to that standard.
“Quantum mechanics wasn’t enough,” Harry said. “I had to go all the way down to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a relation between separate past and future realities, instead of changing anything over time—but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of objects, and I bet there’s not a single other wizard in the world who could have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum stuff, they wouldn’t see that it was reality, accept that the world they knew was just a hallucination. I Transfigured part of the eraser without changing the whole thing.”
“Cometary orbits are also set thousands of years in advance so they shouldn’t correlate much to current events. And the light of the stars takes years to travel from the stars to Earth, and the stars don’t move much at all, not visibly. So the obvious hypothesis is that centaurs have a native magical talent for Divination which you just, well, project onto the night sky.”(https://hpmor.com/chapter/101)
(This one is not as bad, actually. Making an argument more than just confidently asserting a conclusion.)
“If the Dementor could not reach through your Patronus on some level, Albus Dumbledore, you would not see a naked man painful to look upon...”
″It’s not like Dementors can actually talk, or think; the structure they have is borrowed from your own mind and expectations...” (https://hpmor.com/chapter/45)
And then later...
”They had no intelligence of their own, they were just wounds in the world, their form and structure was borrowed from others’ expectations. People had been able to negotiate with them, offer them victims in exchange for cooperation, only because they believed Dementors would bargain. So if Harry believed hard enough that the voids would turn and go, they would turn and go.” (https://hpmor.com/chapter/57)
What?! Dude, what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? You literally just came up with some ideas that seem to make sense to you, and you’re confidently acting on them as if you know that they’re true.
Some other criticisms:
Harry talks a big game about the scientific method and how a priori reasoning doesn’t actually work for coming to grips with how reality actually works—you have to test things, and you should expect to be really confused a lot of the time. But in the actual text of the story he repeatedly encounters a situation, reasons about how the world must be (sometimes on the basis of scientific knowledge like timeless physics[1] or “astrology is fake, obviously”[2] which he should be legitimately way less certain of after chapter 1, and often via extremely flimsy lines of reasoning or speculation[3]), and comes to confident conclusions about how the world must be. And repeatedly, the story has it that his first guess/hypothesis/a priori conclusion is correct, and he either gets a new munchkin-superpower (which no one in the world had previously discovered), or impresses the other characters, and the audience with his brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like deductions.
The only only place where his a priori reasoning clearly doesn’t work, because reality is more confusing than his theories is about the nature of magic. But the after a few scenes, the story basically completely drops that thread. There’s no payoff.
Overall, the story gives lip service what real science and rationality and entails, but doesn’t reliably live up to that standard.
“Quantum mechanics wasn’t enough,” Harry said. “I had to go all the way down to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a relation between separate past and future realities, instead of changing anything over time—but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of objects, and I bet there’s not a single other wizard in the world who could have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum stuff, they wouldn’t see that it was reality, accept that the world they knew was just a hallucination. I Transfigured part of the eraser without changing the whole thing.”
(https://hpmor.com/chapter/28)
“Cometary orbits are also set thousands of years in advance so they shouldn’t correlate much to current events. And the light of the stars takes years to travel from the stars to Earth, and the stars don’t move much at all, not visibly. So the obvious hypothesis is that centaurs have a native magical talent for Divination which you just, well, project onto the night sky.”(https://hpmor.com/chapter/101)
(This one is not as bad, actually. Making an argument more than just confidently asserting a conclusion.)
“If the Dementor could not reach through your Patronus on some level, Albus Dumbledore, you would not see a naked man painful to look upon...”
″It’s not like Dementors can actually talk, or think; the structure they have is borrowed from your own mind and expectations...” (https://hpmor.com/chapter/45)
And then later...
”They had no intelligence of their own, they were just wounds in the world, their form and structure was borrowed from others’ expectations. People had been able to negotiate with them, offer them victims in exchange for cooperation, only because they believed Dementors would bargain. So if Harry believed hard enough that the voids would turn and go, they would turn and go.” (https://hpmor.com/chapter/57)
What?! Dude, what do you think you know, and how do you think you know it? You literally just came up with some ideas that seem to make sense to you, and you’re confidently acting on them as if you know that they’re true.