The more I think about this the more that bit in ch. 48 seems like a mistake by the author. Harry did tell her. She presumably still has the “42” envelope containing the piece of paper where Harry wrote the secret obliquely. Ch. 48 reads like EY forgot that.
Edit: OK, technically Harry implied back then that she should avoid reading it unless she had to, so Hermione followed his wishes when she put the paper away unread. How do they expect this to work?
“That feels like a dementor. Better apparate away—oops, can’t do that, another wizard must have made an anti-apparation hex. Better pull out that wax-sealed paper I always carry and calmly open it with one hand, using the other to hold my wand in case I need it to defend against my postulated wizard opponent, and then calmly read Harry’s hint while hoping the dementor doesn’t make me forget who Harry is, and then figure out what he meant, and then apply the knowledge to the problem of duplicating a spell that Harry prepared carefully in a relatively safe situation.”
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law. I’m a currently unemployed library school graduate with a fondness for rationality. I believe as a child I read most of Korzybski’s Bible of general-semantics, which I now think breaks its own rules about probability but still tends to have value for the people most likely to believe in it.
I didn’t plan to mention it before seeing this, but I practice an atheistic form of Crowley’s mystical path. I hope to learn how to produce certain experiences in myself (for whoever I saw arguing about a priori certainty, call them non-Kantian experiences) while connected to whatever brain-scanners exist fourteen-odd years from now.
In that Crowley thread I saw a few bits that seem misleading, and I think I can explain some of them if people here still have an interest. Oh, and did Yvain really link to a copy of this without telling people to beware the quotation marks? That’s just mean. ^_^
I also think Friendly AI seems like a fine idea, and I hope if the SIAI doesn’t produce an FAI in EY’s lifetime, they at least publicize a more detailed theory of Friendliness.