I wondered before I got to the end if it was supposed to be the anthropic principle they were dealing with, or if there was some less obvious answer. In the main character’s place though, I don’t think I would have assumed that solution. If there is a near infinite number of universes in which all possible outcomes are expressed, we should expect there to be some worlds with such contrived looking histories, but the implications of a method that could summon entities from one universe to another would be so absurd that I would tend to conclude that that was not what had actually happened.
Desrtopa
At the risk of replying too late for any of the original interested parties to take notice, I’ve found the female characters in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series to be particularly compelling.
I confess that I’ve never looked at the question in terms of an author displaying exceptional understanding of the opposite sex, but rather their ability to express insight into other people who are distinctly not them, but Martin’s gotten rather high praise for his female (and male) characters from many sources, so perhaps some of them were looking at the issue in this light.
How exactly do you propose that they set up a radio to mimic human brain waves? Not only would this be extremely technically complicated, almost certainly beyond Harry’s resources or knowhow, even if the source of magic actually constantly reads wizards’ brain waves, what reason do we have to suspect that it would not be able to distinguish neurological activity from a radio transmitter projecting the same patterns?
It sounds like a huge amount of work for a test which stands a great chance of being completely useless given that Harry doesn’t have anywhere near enough data to home in on this as a meaningful avenue for investigation.
Considering that Quirrell is one of the most powerful and feared wizards ever to live, sheer competence is probably the simplest explanation for him being able to perform exceptional feats of magic while handicapped.
From Bahry’s perspective, the possibility that the unknown criminal he’s facing is secretly the most dangerous dark wizard of modern times is unlikely enough not to merit immediate consideration. From the readers’ perspective, it’s an established fact.
I find this quote a bit ironic in light of the stories attributed to various saints in which they supposedly achieved conversion of pagans by demonstrating the supernatural resilience of the bible against exposure to water and fire.
The AI’s plan of action sounds like a very poor application of fun theory. Being able to easily solve all of one’s problems and immediately attain anything upon desiring it doesn’t seem conducive to a great deal of happiness.
It reminds me of the time I activated the debug mode in Baldur’s Gate 2 in order to give my party a certain item listed in a guide to the game, which turned out to be a joke and did not really exist. However, once I was in the debug mode, I couldn’t resist the temptation to apply other cheats, and I quickly spoiled the game for myself by removing all the challenge, and as a result, have never finished the game to this day.
It was clearly within Quirrelmort’s power to subdue Bahry without escalating to the use of the killing curse. He wasn’t even exerting himself during the duel; if he needed to position Bahry for some reason, he could simply have started to pursue and maneuver. Bahry was clearly already on the psychological defensive, and was being forced to dodge his attacks, so using the killing curse is redundant for those purposes. Bahry’s own monologue notes that his magic was almost completely exhausted. He wouldn’t have been able to hold out much longer anyway.
If Quirrelmort had been forced to maneuver Bahry out of the way of his own curse, it would show Bahry that he was not actually trying to kill him, which stands to lower Bahry’s threat estimate of him and further galvanize his resistance, because Bahry will know Quirrelmort is committed to taking him alive. Bahry is certainly not going to decide to surrender because of Quirrelmort’s willingness to kill him, since he’s already been using potentially lethal spells, and he’s already aware that he’s outclassed. He’s implicitly prepared to go down fighting. It’s simply not clear how using the killing curse is useful in this situation.
When Quirrelmort used the killing curse, I noticed that I was confused, and after his explanation, I noticed that I was still confused. Quirrelmort’s explanation simply doesn’t add up.
I’m inclined to wonder if Harry’s ability to block the killing curse with his patronus might be enough to clue Quirrelmort in to how it works. Possibly any collision of their magics would have produced a similar effect, but if not, it still makes thematic sense that the patronus would be able to block a killing curse, since it represents defiance of death. Given that Harry has already told him that he made the patronus by thinking about the eradication of death, I wonder if Quirrelmort might have enough information to piece together the nature of Harry’s revelation.
The fact that the true invisibility cloak effectively hides one from dementors doesn’t necessarily mean that dementors personify death, only that whatever mechanism they use to detect people is also blocked by it. The cloak is said to be able to hide one from the gaze of death itself, but that doesn’t mean that if the cloak hides you from something’s gaze, that thing must be death. The hint Harry used doesn’t really carry in the opposite direction.
The life-eaters part does sound like a clue though.
Would a person have to think about universally conquering death to cast a true patronus, or is it enough to imagine personally conquering it? If all it requires is the latter, I can certainly see Quirrelmort managing it.
Considering that the true invisibility cloak is said to have a general ability to keep one hidden, rather than merely invisible, I don’t see how the fact that it hides one from dementors counts as evidence for the idea that dementors are personifications of death. It’s evidence that it’s a really kickass invisibility cloak.
There’s only one true invisibility cloak, and it’s not enough to get someone out on its own. What reason to we have to suppose that the aurors or the designers of Azkaban ever bothered to consider the question of whether it would hide someone from dementors? The aurors were surprised that Bellatrix had vanished from the senses of the dementors, but this is clearly an unusual occurrence that should not arise within ordinary experience, so we should not be surprised at their surprise. They do not have “someone sneaked in with the true invisibility cloak” as a cached explanation to check for plausibility in this situation.
Given that we don’t even know the approximate ages of either, Azkaban may even predate the true invisibility cloak’s creation.
Regular patronuses do not hide a person from dementors, so if a person came in with the true invisibility cloak, but not a true patronus, they would be noticed by the dementors as soon as they gave it to the escapee.
On further consideration, I suppose that it might work if you could slip them into a bag of holding and conceal them on your person, but the implications of readily available bags of holding that can contain untransformed people without harming them are so broad and incredibly broken that I’m inclined to suspect that you simply can’t do that, first because it would be a story breaker, and second because people would do it on a regular basis and it would have come up before.
The fact that nobody is supposed to be holding the idiot ball doesn’t mean that everyone is particularly intelligent or rational (in the wizarding world, this is clearly more the exception than the rule) or that they have access to the same information we do.
Remember that the Deathly Hallows, in canon, were widely believed to be mythical. It’s hardly fair to expect these people to even keep in mind that they exist, let alone contemplate exactly how powerful they might be and account for them in their plans.
Keep in mind that when we, the readers, are encouraged to think of artifacts of great power in this setting, the Deathly Hallows immediately come to mind, but to a person who’s grown up in the wizarding world, they’re just three out of perhaps thousands of possibly-real objects out of myth and story. From their perspective, it could be equally plausible that someone dominated the will of the dementors using the hand of Vecna or something.
Although it’s possible that the dementors would not quickly report an intruder who gave the true invisibility cloak to a prisoner, if they have that degree of reasoning ability, I suspect they would take more notice of a person leaving one of the cells who they hadn’t seen coming in than someone entering.
Santa Claus gave him the true invisibility cloak knowing what it was, and Dumbledore had been searching for the deathly hallows for much of his life, and had good reason to suspect one was in Harry’s possession. Snape is the odd one out, being the only one whose awareness of it does not have a clear explanation other than chance. He might have heard about James’s possession of it through Dumbledore at some point, but he’s also a professor who has conducted considerable research in various areas of magic, so his knowledge is probably well above average, and a single such mention could probably be marked down to chance.
I don’t recall Snape mentioning it at all though. Are you sure you aren’t thinking of Quirrel?
For true cloaks of invisibility to be more common to wizards per capita than jetpacks are to us, there would have to be fewer than three thousand jetpacks in the world. I can’t find any numbers on this online, but given that you can buy one for about $150,000 dollars, I’m inclined to doubt they’re anywhere near that rare. They’re still rare enough that I would not expect any number of FBI agents given a few hours to suggest one as a possibility in an apparently intractable but otherwise mundane mystery. All sorts of mysteries could be solved by applications of really rare and expensive technology, but much more often it comes down to a clever trick the detectives simply haven’t thought of.
Try reading reports of unsolved crimes, and imagine how you might have carried them out given an unlimited materials budget. I think you’ll find that the solutions you come up with are generally not ones put forward by the police.
This matches my own experience with exercise pretty closely. To be honest, I’ve never really learned to enjoy working out, but this hasn’t posed a particular barrier to getting in shape. It’s simply become something I do, and would feel uncomfortable not doing, like brushing my teeth. Once you cultivate habit, a new outlook may follow, but a change in outlook is not strictly necessary to conserve willpower.
In my own attempts to study philosophy, I’ve found classical monologue-based instruction almost invariably suffers in comparison to dialogues between multiple people genuinely trying to convince each other of their ideas. When the author cannot interact with and respond to their audience, it’s easy to become complacent. Dialogue forces one to refine both one’s ideas and the presentation of one’s ideas, and makes it much easier to realistically compare a point of view to the most compelling alternatives.
I feel like the state of philosophical education would be much improved if the students were given texts constructed collaboratively, or even adversarially, with multiple co-authors trying to convince each other of their positions.
Or, of course, you could simply send them off to follow a blog or forum with high standards of debate.
Chapter 59
I’m a bit miffed about Dumbledore apparently knowing about the requirements for Voldemort to cast the spell to restore his body. That wasn’t part of the prophesy, that was, in the original canon, magic of Voldemort’s own creation. Even if Dumbledore knows Voldemort to be capable of such a thing, he shouldn’t know how. One difficulty of compressing plot elements from a series that takes place over seven years into a one year space is that you have to be extra careful that people don’t suddenly start knowing things they shouldn’t know.
EDIT: Eliezer has addressed this point in the tvtropes thread for MoR. It seems that I misremembered, and canon Voldemort did in fact refer to the potion he used in The Goblet of Fire as an “old piece of dark magic,” thus robbing him of the one legitimate piece of ingenuity with which I still credited him.
I wonder if, given the nature of their relationship, Harry’s blood will not actually be useful for Voldemort’s spell? After all, in the original, Harry had opposed Voldemort-as-Quirrel, and destroyed one of his horcruxes, but the fact that he was ultimately responsible for Voldemort’s death was, as this version of Harry has already noted, in no way due to Harry’s own actions.
It might be enough that Harry is ideologically opposed to Voldemort, and intends to defeat him when he comes back, but practically everyone in the country ideologically opposes Voldemort. In the original, he noted that he could have used the blood of anyone who once fought against him, and chose Harry for the special protection that would confer upon him, but this Harry has never fought against him.
The spell doesn’t call for “blood of the student.”
I would think not, if we were going on the original canon’s rules, but in the original the potion didn’t require flesh of one’s most faithful servant, otherwise Wormtail would never have done.
Eliezer may have altered the requirements to make achieving the same goal more difficult for Quirrelmort, because if he wanted to he could easily have already gathered all the ingredients the original Voldemort did, and probably without anyone noticing to boot.
Requiring the blood of one’s worst enemy would neatly preserve the thematic symmetry in this version of the potion, so in that case it would make sense if Dumbledore is the only candidate.
I was operating on the assumption that horcruxes were supposed to make one nigh invulnerable, like the soul-displacement objects of myth by which they were inspired, with the unstoppable killing curse being an exception. Being left as a disembodied shade after death would be a side effect rather than the main purpose, so the body returning spell would not be a necessary complement. It made sense in light of what I thought horcruxes were actually for.
Apparently the conversation between Tom Riddle and Professor Slughorn in Half Blood Prince contradicts this, but I had forgotten it.
I’m afraid I haven’t a clue how I would set things up if I were Voldemort, because I’m still not clear on what it is he’s actually trying to accomplish. Assuming I were simply trying to defeat Dumbledore, I can think of what I might have done that would explain some of Quirrel’s actions, but not others.
Actually, on second thought, if my opponent were Dumbledore, I think I do know what I’d do, because it’s a Dark Lord strategy I’ve contemplated before which seems practically tailor made to the situation.
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- 12 Apr 2012 1:40 UTC; 2 points) 's comment on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84 by (
I was once in a debate in which I pursued that point at some length. I don’t think most people who believe in Hell find that particular point more difficult to rationalize than most of their other religious beliefs, but I bring it up because it led to a quote which, while only tangentially relating to rationality, strikes me as pretty memorable.
“That seems like an awfully selfish reason not to kill a million babies.”