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.
Alsadius
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Did the survey. I’m not terribly interested in karma, but if you feel the need to upvote, then upvote away.
One answer I gave that may confuse—I put “atheist” down under “other” for my religion, because I do believe that a) atheism is properly defined as an active belief in the lack of god(s), b) I hold this belief, c) there can be no actual direct evidence for this belief, and d) being a belief about the nature of god(s)(or lack thereof) is sufficient to make something a religion.
(Oddly, I also put 5% down as my probability of there being a god, but this is mostly because the definition is a superset of the simulation hypothesis, and I don’t regard a big computer as being a god in any sense we use the term to mean)
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.
She’s a teacher. This is a default state for anyone who spends their life around 11-17 year olds, because about 90% of the time it’s true.
Actually, the password was originally “12345”. Flamel was just the first wizard to use Arabic numerals, and he changed it. Merlin kept typing in “MMMMMMMMMMMMCCCXLV”, and never understood why it didn’t work.
I think I preferred the old version of 85 more than the new one. “The phoenix only comes once” seems a lot more made-up than Harry’s original determination to abandon comic-book morality as soon as someone died, which felt very much in character.
86 is certainly interesting, even if it largely felt like a wrapping-up restatement of what we knew. That said, I loved the Moody duel, and after six months a bit of restatement is quite useful. Also, I’m torn between how to interpret Snape’s last question—my first thought was that he was verifying the truth of a story he had been told(“Your master tortured her, now join the light side already!” being the most likely), but upon rereading, I wonder if he was worried that she had been used as Horcrux fuel.
Parseltongue is a low-information-density language—it lacks a lot of technical terms, colloquial phrases, and the like. Communication is much faster in English.
I think that this thread will go better, by the established norms of LW, if we stick to single, small topics that can actually be taken apart. The question you ask has far too many nested unknowns—definition of party platforms is hard, and economic outcomes of various policies is even harder—and too many places for discussion to go off the rails. Even with this group, that debate will devolve into talking points within three layers of replies. I’d rather have that sort of discussion in an ordinary group, and use LW for political debate of the sort LW actually has an advantage at.
Actually, it spreads as an Airy disc, which gives it a radius of about 300 metres at the far side of the planet, and the effect is divided among all the souls it hits. If you hit a city on the other side of the planet, you just take a couple days off everybody’s life. (The technical term is “statistical homicide”)
You know what they say, sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic.
I have a friend who’s tried it on two occasions. The first time, she and her best friend shared a boyfriend. It didn’t last terribly long, but it seems to have ended amicably. The second time, she and her then-boyfriend decided to merge up with another couple into a foursome. Her original boyfriend eventually ran off with the new girl, leaving her and the other guy single(they weren’t as into each other, and decided not to bother continuing after their other partners left).
Overall, she’s mostly unhappy with her experimentation, and has said she intends to remain monogamous in future.
I think what they’re afraid of is something like the sickness occupying Hollywood, where they’re very good at following a couple formulas and very bad at doing anything that’ll actually amuse the sort of people who watch a lot of movies and have gotten bored of the formulas. Used in moderation this is a good thing, but marketing culture is very bad at taking profitable ideas in moderation.
A) He doesn’t need to ask a professor, he can just ask a seventh-year.
The problem is, Fawkes fits a little too well into the Spaceballs maxim—“Evil will always prevail, because good is dumb”. Fawkes certainly has a purity of intent that’d put any of the human characters to shame, but the consequences are not always quite so good as would be hoped.
(Incidentally, the comparison you drew makes me notice something—if Harry is searching for eternal life, there’s a path to resurrection that neither MoR!Harry nor canon!Voldemort has noticed—phoenixes seem pretty good at that sort of thing. Mentioning them as an absolute contrast to dementors makes me wonder just how strong an antithesis they actually are, and if that might be an answer.)
“owner of a transportation company that won the 19th-century shipping wars… monopoly on oh-tee-threes”
I literally facepalmed.
Also, wow, Harry must absolutely love the taste of foot.
He admits freely that Moody would have kicked his ass in a real fight, so I’m not sure how much actual superiority was established there.
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.
But only in an obviously joking way. Snape seems to be the one all the girls go for, so he assumes that he’d do the same if he were gay.
Honestly, Hermione seems the least unbelievable of the major child characters. Harry is just a freak of nature—I was a gigantic multi-sigma outlier nerd at that age, and I couldn’t have held a candle to Harry. There is no way any 11 year old has read and understood the entire corpus of quantum mechanics, cognitive science, science fiction, and rationalism writings, no matter how much of a bibliophile they are. Draco is less unreasonable, but he still carries himself like someone much older than 11. Hermione, on the other hand, is basically just a smart girl with a good memory, who’s struggling to keep up with a force of nature and fighting with the evil chancellor’s kid.
Ultimately, 11-year-old girls are supposed to be silly sometimes. Hermione still manages to be more serious than most of the actual people that age I know. I think our expectations are just skewed by the university-aged kids in middle school.