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Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/print-edition/2012/12/28/radical-science-finds-savior-in-thiel.html posted:

The Thiel Foundation’s Breakout Labs funds high-risk but potentially disruptive science that would have a hard time attracting funding from conventional sources such as venture firms because it’s too complicated, too expensive or too far from commercialization for investors to feel comfortable.

So, they're literally a league of mad scientists. :science:

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Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

i81icu812 posted:

Yud coined a neologism! He even wrote a whole blog post about it. http://lesswrong.com/lw/iw/positive_bias_look_into_the_dark/ Actual distinction between confirmation bias and Yud's thinking? Who knows.

:goonsay: There's a slight difference. Confirmation bias is assessing evidence by emotion rather then dispassionately, so you agree with what you like and discount what you don't like. "Positive bias" refers to the situation where you're not even aware there's another possibility, so you keep trying to prop up what you know works rather then seeking a deeper understanding. It's the idea that the phrase "think outside the box" is supposed to evoke.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

LowellDND posted:

Its been a few years since I actually sat down and read these, but good lord Eliezarry is a monster.

He's like this little bully-tyrant running around with no understanding or appreciation for other people.

To be slightly fair, he is very eventually called out on this kind of crap and does agree he was being a bully. This story is allegedly supposed to be a coming-of-age story where the annoying little prick realizes his annoying prick status and reforms, but the realization happens WAY at the end and we never see any reform.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

JosephWongKS posted:

“You can't just mix two different species together and get viable offspring?” Really? Seriously?

How is it possible that someone as well-read as Eliezarry has never heard of or read about mules or ligers or other hybrid animals? Mules have been bred since antiquity, and ligers have been known since the 19th century and bred since the early 20th century, before the 1990s in which this series takes place.


This keeps coming up for some reason. That statement is true by definition. Two animals who can produce viable offspring together are of the same species. Mules, ligers, and other crossbreeds are not viable because they cannot reproduce. Such animals are sterile and cannot produce children, even with the opposite gender of the same crossbreed.

e: Although I guess we don't know whether the professor in question is sterile or not, so it's still a dumb statement. :v:

Added Space fucked around with this message at 05:34 on Apr 6, 2015

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
I'm going to say I like the hat as a character, since this is the only time in the story that this twit gets the verbal pantsing he so richly deserves.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

Tunicate posted:

Wasn't there some review-whoring involved in this chapter as well?

Last one. The author said he'd spill his glorious plot to anyone who could guess the twist of the hat becoming self-aware.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

JosephWongKS posted:

Chapter 12: Impulse Control
Part 4


But if you’ve deliberately and knowingly changed your sense of humor to make a single thing “surprising” for the express purpose of ensuring the occurrence of that thing, how can that thing still be a “surprise”? A surprise has to be “unexpected”, after all.

:goonsay: Obliviate, which he already knows about.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
If it helps, what he wanted to do isn't an experiment since there were absolutely no controls. Taking a step back and taking another approach is the wisest thing to do here. Not that that what he's going to do either.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Did Big Yud kidnap JWKS and upload his brain into an AI? :ohdear:

While we're waiting, more odd Harry Potter fanfic:

http://archiveofourown.org/series/149352

Harry is now Harriet! Because she's a girl, she's able to recruit all kinds of new original characters. They range from good to tokens to silly. Also, this story has a more teenage bent so there's a lot more sex and social issues brought up. Such as the main character's love of Nancy Drew books leading to her being a 14 year old bisexual with a bondage fetish.

Granted, this is probably the most steady and respectful depiction of a 13 year old girl with a bondage fetish I've ever seen...

please don't arrest me

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

The Shortest Path posted:

And the fact that it's terrible even for fanfiction is just ridiculous. Out of the probably thousands of pieces of fanfiction I've forced myself to read over the past decade, there is only a single one that actually stands on its own merits as a story, and that's more because it's not really fanfiction at all and is instead a completely original story where some of the protagonists share names with anime lesbians but bear no actual resemblance to said characters or setting or plot.

Basically gently caress fanfiction, and gently caress myself for still reading it sometimes.

Allow me to show sympathy for doing the terrible task of occasionally reading something you don't want to read. Fanfiction addiction is a serious problem affecting tens of people throughout the world! :allears:

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
The Force and the Jedi philosophy vary depending on the source. The movies, particularly the prequels, are the most restrictive. You can't feel any emotion, not fear, not love for family, nothing. Once you're a Jedi you have no will of your own, you do whatever the force tells you to do. It's very puritanical, in its own way.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

Then why the gently caress have you been freaking out so badly every time you've been faced with a mystery you can't immediately explain? I don't know if Yudkowsky is doing this deliberately, but surely this directly contradicts what Harry has actually been doing.

:goonsay: In this context, being intimidated means giving up and not questioning things. Sure, someone can turn into a cat, gently caress it, it's magic. Being freaked out is a completely appropriate response, indicating that you are putting some thought into the subject. It's like if you found out Apollo and his sun-chariot was literally real and had a home on Earth - any decent scientist should be reduced to gibbering madness by this, at least for a little while.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
It had to do with Yud's proposed solution to Newcomb's Paradox. In this thought experiment, a mysterious Oracle want to play a game with you. In box A is $1000, and box B is closed and may or may not contain $1 million. You can choose to take box B alone, or to take both A and B. The Oracle is going to predict your response. If he thinks you'll take box B by itself, he'll have already filled it with the $1 million. If he thinks you'll take both, then box B will be empty.

There's a dispute over the proper course of action that divides closely related branches of skepticism, induced by the fictional nature of the the paradox and the Oracle's predictive powers. One camp says there's no reasonable way his predictive powers could work, so any claims to them are nonsense. It doesn't matter what your choice is, since by the time you make it the box is already either full or empty. You might as well take both to get the extra $1000.

The second camp would stand back and let others play the game and track his hit rate. Assuming there is a hit rate better then chance, it wouldn't matter how he was making the prediction. If it made no sense considering what we know about the universe, all that means is that what we know about the universe is wrong. Considering the gap between $1 million and 0 is huge, even 1% over chance is a high enough hit rate to risk playing along. He knows what you're going to guess, somehow, and you have to accept the evidence of it.

Yud's proposal, which I don't completely understand, says that the information is somehow going back in time. Part of it is something like a code of honor; you always know what the Paladin will choose to do, so you can predict his behavior. So long as you make the decision that is best for your future self, your future self will act in a consistent and predictable way. There's also a bunch of nonsense I can't quite follow tacked on. In the basilisk situation, somehow the torture of your electronic future selves would be passed back to the original, and should influence your behavior.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

It hinges on the (incredibly improbable) idea of you basing your decisions on what you predict a super-AI will do, and the super-AI then predicting what you will have already done based on what it predicts that you predicted about it. Yeah.

e: Have you ever seen the wine scene from The Princess Bride? That's basically what's going on: two intelligences trying to predict each other recursively until they both, assuming they are perfectly capable of predicting each other (ahem), come to a conclusion on what to do, acasually, even though they've never met and never will.

I think you're describing one facet of the Halting problem, where predicting predictions becomes provably impossible. According to Yud, the halting problem would not exist between two copies of the same entity, because through some kind of philosophical mysticism they'd be connected and reach the same conclusion. In the basilisk problem, you might not have done what the AI wanted until the electronic copy facing torture mystically passed that information back to you.

You see, it's not acausal. That's why he made so much hay over the Comed-Tea in the story; it's only acausal if you discount the possibility of the cause going backward in time.

Added Space fucked around with this message at 17:20 on Sep 7, 2015

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Yeah, I'm willing to give him this whole conceit. This is classic fanfic. Take something ambiguous in canon, come up with a system for how it works, and figure out how the consistent application would affect the story. Granted he's being a bit pedantic about it, but the pedantry fits the characters here so I'd give it a pass. Transfiguration is valuable but dangerous, in the same way we teach ten-year-olds how fire works even though it kills hundreds of children ever year.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

DmitriX posted:

No, because "damage" is just a more major shift if you think about it. And if it pulled them away from wherever they are that could cause a great deal of other problems...
I presume that if someone turned you into a loaf of bread and then just sorta squuezed you a bunch, then even if all of the bread was retained, you would come out mishappen as a result.

That's clearly what is was going for, along with what was described in that John Crichton time travel novel. You come out of the process with some of your capillaries out of alignment, or 1% of the cells in your body having broken strands of DNA. As a narrative device it's fine, as science... ambiguous, but who the gently caress knows how magic works, so not something that could be dismissed per se.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
This situation is, in some ways, a lower-stakes version of the Milgram Experiment where subjects are asked to "kill" a subject and nearly everyone obeys. I know he references that at some point, but I'm not sure if he's aware of the comparison here.

e: f,b

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

The Shortest Path posted:

Nah he actually does get some pretty serious consequences for misusing the Time Turner, though they get worked around or something.

The "consequences" are that he gets to keep it, and a mildly effective lock is added.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
:justpost:

Chapter 18: Dominance Hierarchies

HPMOR relentlessly follows what TV Tropes calls "The Stations of the Canon". Every major event of the first Harry Potter book is replicated with a bunch of new material crammed in, because this is fanfiction and longer equals better. When we left off, we had just passed the First Potions Class. Harriezer responded to mild provocation by threatening to run away, and then abused two magical artifacts to try to avoid consequences. Of course you can't evade social consequences by turning invisible, so he ends up in front of the Headmaster anyway. Only at this point does he call out Snape with legitimate performance complaints, but that's been completely undermined since it looks like a cover for his own bad behavior. We resume:

HPMOR posted:

Severus was giving her a look of utter contempt. Minerva raised her chin and bore it. She knew it was deserved.

Oh, god. In this fic, Dumbledore, Snape, Harry and Voldemort are Serious People doing Serious Things and everyone else is a disappointing pawn. Minerva and Hermione tend to catch the worst of it, with entire sections dedicated to how foolish they are. I don't think it's intended to be sexist, but that's certainly how it comes off.

They enter a long and boring negotiation, with Harry threatening to run away if things don't go his way and Dumbledore humoring him out of seeming madness. A compromise is struck; Snape will be less abusive, and he and Harry will both apologize for acting like idiots.

quote:

"I think, Professor McGonagall, that you considerably overestimate the importance of what you call school discipline, as compared to having History taught by a live teacher or not torturing your students. Maintaining the current status hierarchy and enforcing its rules seems ever so much more wise and moral and important when you are on the top and doing the enforcing than when you are on the bottom, and I can cite studies to this effect if required. I could go on for several hours about this point, but I will leave it at that."

Minerva shook her head. "Mr. Potter, you underestimate the importance of discipline because you are not in need of it yourself -" She paused. That hadn't come out right, and Severus, Dumbledore, and even Harry were giving her strange looks. "To learn, I mean. Not every child can learn in the absence of authority. And it is the other children who will be hurt, Mr. Potter, if they see your example as one to be followed."

Harry's lips curved into a twisted smile. "The first and last resort is the truth. The truth is that I shouldn't have gotten angry, I shouldn't have disrupted the class, I shouldn't have done what I did, and I set a bad example for everyone. The truth is also that Severus Snape behaved in a fashion unbecoming a Hogwarts professor, and that from now on he will be more mindful of the injured feelings of students in their fourth year and under. The two of us could both get up and speak the truth. I could live with that."

:smuggo: Does everyone see how much smarter and wiser Harriezer is then that old fuddypants McGonagall? Has it been drilled into your head hard enough?

Yud almost has a good point here. Society does contain a lot of arbitrary rules and practices which solely exist to maintain the authority of those already in charge. People with ASD especially have trouble accepting rules that have no practical purpose. As we have seen with the Civil Rights movement or the Stonewall Riots, sometimes authority must be visibly defied before anything will change. Except, of course, an authentic idealist won't start a revolution just to duck personal responsibility.

Of course, this common sense is just too much for Minerva.

quote:

Minerva rose from her chair and almost fell. There was too much adrenaline in her blood, her heart was beating too fast.

People with heart conditions should consult their doctor before listening to Harriezer. :rolleyes:

Dumbledore lends her Fawkes so her delicate dumb lady constitution doesn't give out while she hands out Harry's punishment.

quote:

When she stood up she found it hard to speak. But she had to ask. "What happened today, Harry?"

"I don't know the answers to any of the important questions either. Aside from that I'd really rather not think about it for a while."

Minerva took his hand in hers again, and they walked the rest of the way in silence.

It was only a short trip, since naturally the office of the Deputy was close to the office of the Headmaster.

A rare moment of actual humility from our lead - conveniently timed to happen right before a punishment he can't wiggle out of. That is, the sensible action that should already have been taken of limiting his Time-Turner use. He can only use it in the evenings, and they'll do spot checks to make sure he's only using two turns a day.

quote:

"Mr. Potter," she said gently, "there are students who cannot be entrusted with Time-Turners, because they become addicted to them. We give them a potion which lengthens their sleep cycle by the necessary amount, but they end up using the Time-Turner for more than just attending their classes. And so we must take them back. Mr. Potter, you have taken to using the Time-Turner as your solution to everything, often very foolishly so. You used it to get back a Remembrall. You vanished from a closet in a fashion apparent to other students, instead of going back after you were out and getting me or someone else to come and open the door."

From the look on Harry's face he hadn't thought of that.

Harriezer, powerful and creative enough to convince half the school he's a reality warper though snapping, but blind to the obvious consequences of abusing his power. Our hero.

Once again, if you have a potion which can alter sleep cycles, why do you not just use that instead of the dangerous, addictive artifact? There's something to be said when the author realizes the intellectual laziness of his character for abusing a power, but doesn't realize his own intellectual laziness of doing the exact same thing.

Harry whines and cries about this, despite being told that Dumbledore is taking the heat for the blatant crimes Harriezer committed.

quote:

"I'm, sorry," he whispered, voice now choked and broken. "I'm sorry, to have, disappointed you..."

...

It was too much. It was just all too much. Harry had almost gone over to the Dark Side, his dark side had done things that seemed in retrospect insane, his dark side had won an impossible victory that might have been real and might have been a pure whim of a crazy Headmaster, his dark side had protected his friends. He just couldn't handle it any more. He needed Fawkes to sing to him again. He needed to use the Time-Turner to go off and take a quiet hour to recover but that wasn't an option any more and the loss was like a hole in his existence but he couldn't think about that because then he might start laughing.

I thought you'd all enjoy the rare moments of Harriezer in misery. You're a bum, Harry. You need to get off the juice, it's eating you up.

Anyway, Harry seems to have had a revelation. He realizes how much his wild actions are creating problems, he feels remorse and a need for reflection. He gets up in front of the school and delivers his apology without a hint of snideness or sarcasm. Maybe we're seeing some growth from this char...

quote:

Until Harry raised his hand.

He did not raise it high. That might have appeared preemptory. He certainly did not raise it toward Severus. Harry simply raised his hand to chest level, and softly snapped his fingers, a gesture that was seen more than heard. It was possible that most of the Head Table wouldn't see it at all.

This seeming gesture of defiance won sudden smiles from the younger students and Gryffindors, and coldly superior sneers from Slytherin, and frowns and worried looks from all others.

Harry kept his face expressionless. "Thank you," he said. "That's all."

"Thank you, Mr. Potter," said the Headmaster. "And now Professor Snape has something to share with us as well."

...

And from that day onward, no matter what Hermione tried to tell anyone, it would be an accepted legend of Hogwarts that Harry Potter could make absolutely anything happen by snapping his fingers.

Never loving mind. :suicide:

Added Space fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Jan 6, 2017

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Chapter 19: Delayed Gratification

This is one of the more infamous chapters for containing an extended scene of child abuse. I have no idea what the author was trying to accomplish with this scene, but I'll be leaving out that part when we get to it.

We instead start on the deep ~*political intrigue*~ of eleven year olds that HPMOR is known for.

HPMOR posted:

Draco had a stern expression on his face, and his green-trimmed robes somehow looked far more formal, serious, and well-turned-out than the same exact robes as worn by the two boys behind him.

"Talk," said Draco.

"Yeah! Talk!"

"You heard da boss! Talk!"

"You two, on the other hand, shut up."

Comedy! Laugh, drat you!

quote:

Harry was hoping that this class would be non-stressful, and that the brilliant Professor Quirrell would realize this was perhaps not the best time to single out Harry for anything. Harry had recovered a little, but...

Oh yeah, I'm sure you're beaten up. That prank you pulled in front of the whole school really shows how much this situation has been weighing on you.

Also, foreshadowing!

Draco corners Harriezer before the super edgy Battle Magic class to try to get him to say what dirt he had on Snape. Harry postures for a bit before saying anything.

quote:

"Anyway," Harry said. "Trade. I tell you a fact that isn't on the grapevine, and does not go on the grapevine, and in particular does not go to your father, and in return you tell me what you and Slytherin think about the whole business."

"Deal!"

Now to make this as vague as possible... something that wouldn't hurt much even if it did get out... "What I said was true. I did discover one of Severus's secrets, and I did do some blackmail. But Severus wasn't the only person involved."

"I knew it! " Draco said exultantly.

Draco's end of the bargin is that Slytherin came to the same conclusion, that Harry had some moderately good blackmail material on Dumbledore. The idea that it was an extremely undramatic example of 'I'm holding myself hostage!' doesn't occur to Draco, which is probably to his credit. Draco is a least smart enough to realize that Harriezer can barely be trusted to tie his own shoes.

quote:

"Harry," Draco said, "you've obviously got incredible talent, but you've got no training and no mentors and you do stupid things sometimes and you really need an advisor who knows how to do this or you're going to get hurt! " Draco's face was fierce.

"Ah," Harry said. "An advisor like Lucius?"

"Like me! " said Draco. "I'll promise to keep your secrets from Father, from everyone, I'll just help you figure out whatever you want to do! ... we should maybe hurry up and become closer friends."

"I'm open to that," said Harry, who was already trying to figure out how to exploit it.

Remember everybody, telling people that you want to be their friends so that you can manipulate them is the height of subterfuge. And Draco's first wonderful piece of political advice?

quote:

"Push your mudblood rival Granger into a wall or something, everyone in Slytherin will know what that means -"

Thank goodness Quirrell shows up or nothing would stop this brain trust from taking over the world.

Battle Magic was going to start with shielding, but instead we have a Very Special Lesson plan. Quirrell goes on about he made an Evil Overlord List as a young Slytherin, and pesters Draco a bit before turning to Harry.

quote:

Harry giggled before he could stop himself.

"Yes, Mr. Potter, very amusing. So, Mr. Potter, can you guess what was the very first item on that list?"

Great. "Um... never use a complicated way of dealing with an enemy when you can just Abracadabra them?"

"The term, Mr. Potter, is Avada Kedavra," Professor Quirrell's voice sounded a bit sharp for some reason, "and no, that was not on the list I made at age thirteen. Would you care to guess again?"

"Ah... never brag to anyone about your evil master plan?"

Professor Quirrell laughed. "Ah, now that was number two. My, Mr. Potter, have we been reading the same books?"

There was more laughter, with an undertone of nervousness. Harry clenched his jaw tightly shut and said nothing. A denial would accomplish nothing.

"But no. The first item was, 'I will not go around provoking strong, vicious enemies.' The history of the world would be very different if Mornelithe Falconsbane or Hitler had grasped that elementary point. Now if, Mr. Potter - just if by some chance you harbor an ambition similar to the one I held as a young Slytherin - even so, I hope it is not your ambition to become a stupid Dark Lord."

"Professor Quirrell," Harry said, gritting his teeth, "I am a Ravenclaw and it is not my ambition to be stupid, period. I know that what I did today was dumb. But it wasn't Dark! I was not the one who threw the first punch in that fight!"

"You, Mr. Potter, are an idiot. But then so was I at your age. Thus I anticipated your answer and altered today's lesson plan accordingly. Mr. Gregory Goyle, if you would come forward, please?"

I'm not sure the point about Hitler would work in either continuity. In our world Hitler got in the most trouble fighting Russia, and fighting Russia was most of the point of his rise to power. In the HPMOR continuity I'm fairly sure Hitler was a puppet of Grindelwald who was using the Holocaust to fuel his own power.

In any case, this lesson for every first year student in Hogwarts has now been hijacked in order to teach HP a lesson. Instead of reciting the abuse, I'll settle for listing the ways this is similar to cult behavior. Quirrell has isolated Harriezer and held up him for public scrutiny as an example, a cult staple. We take a brief pause as Goyle and Quirrell have a kung fu fight, in which Quirrell takes a dive and begs for mercy. There was apparently a point to this.

quote:

"The vitally important technique which I demonstrated," said Professor Quirrell, "was how to lose. You may go, Mr. Goyle, thank you."

Mr. Goyle walked off the platform, looking rather bewildered. Harry felt the same way.

Professor Quirrell walked back to his desk and resumed leaning on it. "Sometimes we forget the most basic things, since it has been too long since we learned them. I realized I had done the same with my own lesson plan. You do not teach students to throw until you have taught them to fall. And I must not teach you to fight if you do not understand how to lose."

Now I know this is Hogwarts where students routinely get sent to the nurse for pranks gone wrong, but I'm pretty sure you don't have to actively teach children not to kill each other. Or, if you do, the rest of your coursework is questionable. This leads us to cult point number two, making your cult members afraid that any one of them could turn and hurt the others, and therefore everyone has to surrender power to the leadership for their own safety.

Quirrell spins a tale of how he trained in the mystic ways of kung fu in the far east.

quote:

"I learned how to lose in a dojo in Asia, which, as any Muggle knows, is where all the good martial artists live."

More of the Big Yud signature racial sensitivity. One day he got angry and took a swing in anger at a sparring partner. The head of the dojo told him to stand still and let all the other students take swings at him while he begged for mercy. FORESHADOWING. He says he took the lesson to heart, but by total coincidence Voldemort rolls up six months later to torture and kill everyone there. This leads us to our somewhat true lesson for the chapter.

quote:

"Understand that the Dark Lord did not win that day. His goal was to learn martial arts, and yet he left without a single lesson. The Dark Lord was foolish to wish that story retold. It did not show his strength, but rather an exploitable weakness."

Anger is a weapon that turns on the wielder, kids. Unless of course you're smart enough that none can hold you accountable, then you're free to indulge.

quote:

"What you demonstrated today, Mr. Potter, is that - unlike those animals who keep their claws sheathed and accept the results - you do not know how to lose a dominance contest. When a Hogwarts professor challenged you, you did not back down. When it looked like you might lose, you unsheathed your claws, heedless of the danger. You escalated, and then you escalated again. It started with a slap at you from Professor Snape, who was obviously dominant over you. Instead of losing, you slapped back and lost ten points from Ravenclaw. Soon you were talking about leaving Hogwarts. The fact that you escalated even further in some unknown direction, and somehow won at the end, does not change the fact that you are an idiot."

And other one for Quirrell. Harry had some valid points, but lacked any kind of wisdom for when and how he should have made that confrontation. When an authority figure has you dead to rights, you bow your head and wait for a safer time to respond. The ritual 'surrender' in this case was supposed to be Harriezer's public apology, but he quite obviously hosed that up and showed he had no awareness of these social conventions. This is certainly a lesson Harriezer needs to learn, but what actually happens is just about the worst possible venue and method.

Quirrell starts dropping heavy hints that Harry is now due for a public beatdown. The boy once again tries to evade the consequences of his bad decisions by delaying or stopping things before they happen, but this time I'm on his side. Quirrell browbeats him into accepting by playing on Harriezer's paranoia about his Evil Within. The professor then calls for volunteers from the audience.

quote:

"{D}o any of you wish to show your dominance over the Boy-Who-Lived? Shove him around, push him to the ground, hear him beg for your mercy?"

Five hands went up.

"Everyone with your hand raised, you are an absolute idiot. What part of pretending to lose did you not understand? If Harry Potter does become the next Dark Lord he will hunt you down and kill you after he graduates."

We're on to another cult facet here. Cult leaders rarely punish followers with their own hands; this risks the lower ranks having common cause to rally against their superiors. Instead, leaders get members of the lower ranks to dole out punishments. This keeps them divided by fear and guilt, while the leadership claims benevolence. Draco tries to show unity by volunteering to stand next to Harriezer, but Quirrell brushes this off.

Harry is then beaten up by a group of older students while his peers watch in enforced silence. Public corporeal punishment is another clear cult practice and I refuse to repeat even a single line of this part. Enough to say it goes on far too long.

Draco steps up after the beating to condemn the volunteers as thugs. That rings extremely hollow from the guy who suggested 'push a girl into a wall' not too long ago. We come to the denouement.

quote:

"Will you remember how you lost?"

"Yes."

"Will you be able to lose?"

"I... think so..."

"I think so too." Professor Quirrell bowed so low that his thin hair almost touched the floor. "Congratulations, Harry Potter, you win."

There was no single source, no first mover, the applause started all at once like a massive thunderclap.

:barf: Here we get to the true evil of cults. After the violence and coercion, get everyone to express positive feelings about their torment and how it was deep and meaningful.

quote:

"Your extraordinary achievement in my class deserves an extraordinary reward, Harry Potter. Please accept it with my compliments on behalf of my House, and remember from this day forward that not all Slytherins are alike. There are Slytherins, and then there are Slytherins." Professor Quirrell was smiling quite broadly as he said this. "Fifty-one points to Ravenclaw."

There was a shocked pause and then pandemonium broke out among the Ravenclaw students, howling and whistling and cheering.

(And in the same moment Harry felt something wrong about that, Professor McGonagall had been right, there should have been consequences, there should have been a cost and a price to be paid, you couldn't just put everything back the way it was like that -)

But Harry saw the elated faces in Ravenclaw and knew he couldn't possibly say no.

Even when she's not in the room, we can't forget to take a big dump on McGonagall. Undermining traditional authority and promising great rewards if you obey, welcome to the cult of Quirrellmort, praise be to Slytherin. Harry gets a break and some snacks, and the rest of the class somehow still has enough class time to learn basic shields.

Added Space fucked around with this message at 18:47 on Jan 2, 2017

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

stone cold posted:

How racist does the kung fu section get, and how Orientalist is his depiction of the 'Far East'?

I'm guessing it's real bad :allears:

I'm the one who added 'kung fu'. His reference is "I learned how to lose in a dojo in Asia, which, as any Muggle knows, is where all the good martial artists live."

The word 'dojo' does originate from China, but only seems to mean 'martial arts training facility' in Japan. I actually mentally edited out the second half of that sentence or else I should have included it on the first pass.

Added Space fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Dec 29, 2016

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Chapter 20: Bayes's Theorem

This chapter consists almost entirely of 'clever' dialogue between Quirrellmort and Harriezer. Given that Yud seems to have religious reverence for Bayes, I can only assume that this sort of somewhat intelligent wordplay is a favorite topic in his writing. Harry is still on break after last chapter and seems to still be on an emotional high.

quote:

Funny how Harry's brain just seemed to keep on running and running, never shutting down no matter how tired it got. It got stupider but it refused to switch off.

But there was, there really and truly was a feeling of triumph.

Anti-Dark-Lord-Harry program, +1 point didn't begin to cover it. Harry wondered what the Sorting Hat would say now, if he could put it on his head.

No wonder Professor Quirrell had accused Harry of heading down the path of a Dark Lord. Harry had been too slow on the uptake, he should have seen the parallel right away -

Understand that the Dark Lord did not win that day. His goal was to learn martial arts, and yet he left without a single lesson.

Harry had entered the Potions class with the intent to learn Potions. He'd left without a single lesson.

And Professor Quirrell had heard, and understood with frightening precision, and reached out and yanked Harry off that path, the path that led to his becoming a copy of You-Know-Who.

There was a knock at the door. "Classes are over," said Professor Quirrell's quiet voice.

I'm going to be charitable and say that this is a good example of actual manipulation in practice. Quirrell is toying with Harry's emotions to earn his trust, and we'll see that manipulation pay huge dividends in later chapters. You can say from a reader's perspective that this is incredibly obvious and evil, but intelligent people in the real world do fall for these kind of techniques with depressing frequency.

In relation to Bayes, you could say that Harry lacked the correct priors to evaluate Quirrell's story. If you knew that he was also Voldemort the pattern of vengeance and knowledge hoarding would be clear.

Harry is looking for validation that he is not evil, which Quirrell does not want to provide. Being happy and forgiving his tormentors after enduring a beating is too abnormal to be anything but an act, Quirrell claims. He approves of Harry wanting to win approval and gain power, but he should at least be honest with himself. Harryiezer has a different explanation.

quote:

"Actually, I think I know what's confusing you here," Harry said. "That was what I wanted to talk to you about, in fact. Professor Quirrell, I think that what you're seeing is my mysterious dark side."

There was a pause.

"Your... dark side..."

Harry sat up. Professor Quirrell was regarding him with one of the strangest expressions Harry had seen on anyone's face, let alone anyone as dignified as Professor Quirrell.

"It happens when I get angry," Harry explained. "My blood runs cold, everything gets cold, everything seems perfectly clear..."

Quirrellmort is only slightly surprised to have a student tell him of their barely restrained schizophrenia and resolves that the best solution is to train these murderous impulses. Obviously, Harry is really a Slytherin who secretly wants to a dark lord. The hat's prank must have been Dumbledore interfering. Here, it's Quirrell's turn to be missing information and come to a wrong conclusion.

quote:

"The Sorting Hat did seem to think I was going to end up as a Dark Lord unless I went to Hufflepuff," Harry said. "But I don't want to be one."

"Mr. Potter..." said Professor Quirrell. "Don't take this the wrong way. I promise you will not be graded on the answer. I only want to know your own, honest reply. Why not?"

Harry had that helpless feeling again. Thou shalt not become a Dark Lord was such an obvious theorem in his moral system that it was hard to describe the actual proof steps. "Um, people would get hurt?"

"Surely you've wanted to hurt people," said Professor Quirrell. "You wanted to hurt those bullies today. Being a Dark Lord means that people you want to hurt get hurt."

Harry floundered for words and then decided to simply go with the obvious. "First of all, just because I want to hurt someone doesn't mean it's right -"

"What makes something right, if not your wanting it?"

That's a fairly decent replacement for the "There is only power, and those too weak to seek it" line. Quirrellmort thinks Harriezer is operating on a naive, authoritarian morality. Harriezer accuses the professor of naked egocentrism while taking a dig at Ayn Rand. Harry holds up both sets of his parents as good people who would be betrayed if he turned to evil.

quote:

"In any case, Mr. Potter, you have not answered my original question," said Professor Quirrell finally. "What is your ambition?"

"Oh," said Harry. "Um.." He organized his thoughts. "To understand everything important there is to know about the universe, apply that knowledge to become omnipotent, and use that power to rewrite reality because I have some objections to the way it works now."

There was a slight pause.

"Forgive me if this is a stupid question, Mr. Potter," said Professor Quirrell, "but are you sure you did not just confess to wanting to be a Dark Lord?"

"That's only if you use your power for evil," explained Harry. "If you use the power for good, you're a Light Lord."

"I see," Professor Quirrell said. He tapped his other cheek with a finger. "I suppose I can work with that. But Mr. Potter, while the scope of your ambition is worthy of Salazar himself, how exactly do you propose to go about it? Is step one to become a great fighting wizard, or Head Unspeakable, or Minister of Magic, or -"

"Step one is to become a scientist."

In the course of one conversation Harry has openly announced he has an evil side he can't control and a god complex. He doesn't even have the excuse of being a teenager. This is a massively mentally unstable child. Hey Harriezer, what are the priors on people who openly announce they want to obtain ultimate power? I'm guessing they are not very favorable. This only underlines the lead's self-serving hypocrisy.

Quirrell hates scientists for creating the means of mass destruction and then telling other people. Dangerous knowledge should be kept secret.

quote:

"Yes, nuclear weapons!" Professor Quirrell was almost shouting now. "Even He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named never used those, perhaps because he didn't want to rule over a heap of ash! They never should have been made! And it will only get worse with time!" Professor Quirrell was standing up straight instead of leaning on his desk. "There are gates you do not open, there are seals you do not breach! The fools who can't resist meddling are killed by the lesser perils early on, and the survivors all know that there are secrets you do not share with anyone who lacks the intelligence and the discipline to discover them for themselves! Every powerful wizard knows that! Even the most terrible Dark Wizards know that! And those idiot Muggles can't seem to figure it out! The eager little fools who discovered the secret of nuclear weapons didn't keep it to themselves, they told their fool politicians and now we must live under the constant threat of annihilation!"

This was a rather different way of looking at things than Harry had grown up with. It had never occurred to him that nuclear physicists should have formed a conspiracy of silence to keep the secret of nuclear weapons from anyone not smart enough to be a nuclear physicist. The thought was intriguing, if nothing else. Would they have had secret passwords? Would they have had masks?

(Actually, for all Harry knew, there were all sorts of incredibly destructive secrets which physicists kept to themselves, and the secret of nuclear weapons was the only one that had escaped into the wild. The world would look the same to him either way.)

"I'll have to think about that," Harry said to Professor Quirrell. "It's a new idea to me."

This represents a critical misunderstanding of how the scientific process operates. The time of individuals making significant new discoveries on their own has been over for centuries. This 'secret club' mentality would bring the discovery rate of those who followed it to a grinding halt, which would quickly make them irrelevant.

This is also the central theme of this entire work. Hand over agency to people who know more than you because they can make better decisions than you can. Dumb sheeple who raise their voices are only wasting the time of the philosopher-kings and endangering themselves. The only difference between Harriezer and Quirrellmort is that Harry is collectivist and Voldemort is individualist. Since they're meant to be foils of each other, this means the central conflict can be phrased as the question 'Should I care about the stupid, annoying meat sacks around me?' Harry's uplifting response can be paraphrased as "Yes, because amid all this dross there's a few flakes of gold and that's what really matters."

This sort of conflict has been present in many great works of literature, including Harry Potter. Although not openly addressed, the question of why Harry is standing up for such a corrupt society looms large over Deathly Hallows. However, the answer is certainly not the paternalistic, misanthropic bilge that HPMOR advocates.

Quirrell does calm down a bit and announces that he approves of space travel so that wizards can get away from the rest of humanity. This is the plot of the harem/fighting anime Negima. I'm not sure if this is a reference, or just coincidence since that story also borrows from Harry Potter. He even has a space-viewing spell he likes to cast.

quote:

Harry stood on a small circle of white marble in the midst of an endless field of stars, burning terribly bright and unwavering. There was no Earth, no Moon, no Sun that Harry recognized. Professor Quirrell stood in the same place as before, floating in the midst of the starfield. The Milky Way was already visible as a great wash of light and it grew brighter as Harry's vision adjusted to the darkness.

The sight wrenched at Harry's heart like nothing he had ever seen.

"Are we... in space...?"

"No," said Professor Quirrell. His voice was sad, and reverent. "But it is a true image."

Tears came into Harry's eyes. He wiped them away frantically, he would not miss this for some stupid water blurring his vision.

The stars were no longer tiny jewels set in a giant velvet dome, as they were in the night sky of Earth. Here there was no sky above, no surrounding sphere. Only points of perfect light against perfect blackness, an infinite and empty void with countless tiny holes through which shone the brilliance from some unimaginable realm beyond.

In space, the stars looked terribly, terribly, terribly far away.

Harry kept on wiping his eyes, over and over.

"Sometimes," Professor Quirrell said in a voice so quiet it almost wasn't there, "when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been. I cannot seem to imagine what that place might be, and if I can't even imagine it then how can I believe it exists? And yet the universe is so very, very wide, and perhaps it might exist anyway? But the stars are so very, very far away. It would take a long, long time to get there, even if I knew the way. And I wonder what I would dream about, if I slept for a long, long time..."

Though it felt like sacrilege, Harry managed a whisper. "Please let me stay here awhile."

Professor Quirrell nodded, where he stood unsupported against the stars.

It was easy to forget the small circle of marble on which you stood, and your own body, and become a point of awareness which might have been still, or might have been moving. With all distances incalculable there was no way to tell.

There was a time of no time.

I know people have all sorts of weird religious experiences, which can include looking up at the night sky, but this degree of reverence seems odd. I'm struck with an image of Harriezer at a young age nearly passing out at a planetarium on a school field trip and then biting his teacher when told it was time to leave. Then again, maybe it's fitting that Harry's greatest moment of joy is being isolated far away from people he doesn't respect (nearly everyone). The thought of this prick trapped in deep space brings me a little joy too.

This is interrupted when Dumbledore busts in demanding to know why a professor organized a public beating of a minor. Harry and Quirrell are quick to defend the act since it all worked out. This is evidenced by Harry being able to hold his tongue after a stern warning to be respectful. Wonders never cease.

quote:

Professor Quirrell nodded. "He wasn't expecting (51 house points), but it seemed appropriate. Tell Professor McGonagall that I think the story of what Mr. Potter went through to earn back the lost points will do just as well to make her point. No, Headmaster, Mr. Potter didn't tell me anything. It's easy to see which part of today's events are her work,"

God drat, do you really need to insult McGonagall again? Can anyone tell me why the author has a vendetta against this character? She's been nothing but reasonable.

Dumbledore does a quick bit of mind reading to double check that Harriezer hasn't been whammied, and Quirrellmort takes the opportunity to call this out as a dick move.

quote:

"You have now made it more difficult to confirm his mental privacy on future occasions," Dumbledore said. He favored Professor Quirrell with a cold look. "Was that your intention, I wonder?"

Professor Quirrell's expression was implacable. "There are too many Legilimens in this school. I insist that Mr. Potter receive instruction in Occlumency. Will you permit me to be his tutor?"

"Absolutely not," Dumbledore said at once.

"I did not think so. Then since you have deprived him of my free services, you will pay for Mr. Potter's tutoring by a licensed Occlumency instructor."

"Such services do not come cheaply," Dumbledore said, looking at Professor Quirrell in some surprise. "Although I do have certain connections -"

Professor Quirrell shook his head firmly. "No. Mr. Potter will ask his account manager at Gringotts to recommend a neutral instructor. With respect, Headmaster Dumbledore, after the events of this morning I must protest you or your friends having access to Mr. Potter's mind. I must also insist that the instructor have taken an Unbreakable Vow to reveal nothing, and that he agree to be Obliviated of each session immediately afterward."

Dumbledore was frowning. "Such services are extremely expensive, as you well know, and I cannot help but wonder why you deem them necessary."

"If it's money that's the problem," Harry spoke up, "I have some ideas for making large amounts of money quickly -"

"Thank you Quirinus, your wisdom is now quite evident and I am sorry for disputing it. Your concern for Harry Potter does you credit, as well."

Continuity!

"The events of this morning" were Harry getting into a fight with Snape and being called to the Headmaster's office. I don't know how that creates a need for Harry to be able to keep secrets. Harriezer's stupid and unworkable plans to overthrow wizarding society are a slightly better justification, but not by much. I'm not even sure why Quirrelmort wants this since he eventually wants Harriezer dead. I suppose he wants to milk any discoveries Harriezer makes this year without Dumbledore getting them as well, but this only makes it harder for him to get that information. This entire plot development makes no sense.

Perhaps it's only a gambit to earn more trust since Harriezer announces Quirrell as his mentor. Dumbledore mentions the Defense position curse, but that is quickly waved off. Dumbledore leaves and they go back to discussing space.

quote:

"I subscribe to a Muggle bulletin which keeps me informed of progress on space travel. I didn't hear about Pioneer 10 until they reported its launch. But when I discovered that Pioneer 11 would also be leaving the Solar System forever," Professor Quirrell said, his grin the widest that Harry had yet seen from him, "I snuck into NASA, I did, and I cast a lovely little spell on that lovely golden plaque which will make it last a lot longer than it otherwise would."

Estimates say that Pioneer's golden plaque and Voyager's golden record will last between one million and one billion years. How the hell would you determine that magic would increase that number? This is a great opportunity to expand on the 'scientific investigation of magic' promise of the story, but this gets completely ignored. Harry is far too starstruck to question this and rains compliments on Quirrell.

quote:

A further thought occurred to Harry. "You didn't add any extra information to the plaque, did you?"

"Extra information?" said Professor Quirrell, sounding as if the idea had never occurred to him before and he was quite intrigued.

Which made Harry rather suspicious, considering that it'd taken less than a minute for Harry to think of it.

"Maybe you included a holographic message like in Star Wars? " said Harry. "Or... hm. A portrait seems to store a whole human brain's worth of information... you couldn't have added any extra mass to the probe, but maybe you could've turned an existing part into a portrait of yourself? Or you found a volunteer dying of a terminal illness, snuck them into NASA, and cast a spell to make sure their ghost ended up in the plaque -"

"Mr. Potter," Professor Quirrell said, his voice suddenly sharp, "a spell requiring a human death would certainly be classified by the Ministry as Dark Arts, regardless of circumstances. Students should not be heard talking about such things."

And the amazing thing about the way Professor Quirrell said it was how perfectly it maintained plausible deniability.

I'm totally not a murderer, kid. :ninja:

This highlights a major problem with the writing. The author has slipped him a note about what a Horcrux is, so Harriezer comes up with the idea out of the pure blue sky. He eventually finds out about the nature of Horcruxes. As an exercise, try to guess how long it takes him to demonstrate intelligence by combining this insight with that information and realize that Quirrellmort is a psychopathic killer.

Harry drops a few more compliments and then leaves, ending the chapter.

Added Space fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Jan 2, 2017

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

Red Mike posted:

It's meant to be the cliche of "you want what, but that's insane! <second character does thing that makes it obvious why thing is preferred> ..ah." but it falls flat because the two bits are too far apart to make a proper gag, and the second bit isn't telegraphed enough.

e: also your skipping of random bits of text make it really hard to follow the text, as someone who's sadly read it before but luckily long enough ago that he's forgotten the majority of it.

I get the part about forbidden knowledge, but why does Quirrell care? He has to know Harry's plans are unworkable, if for no other reason than he's already exploited them to the maximum feasible extent.

I'm summarizing blocks of text in order to avoid the whole line-by-line quagmire that drove off the OP.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Chapter 21: Rationalization

This chapter is intended as a wrap up of the first twenty chapters and the first week at Hogwarts. As with the rest of the fic this goes on for far too long. We start with Hermoine, who we really haven't seen for a while.

HPMOR posted:

Hermione Granger had worried she was turning Bad.

The difference between Good and Bad was usually easy to grasp, she'd never understood why other people had so much trouble. At Hogwarts, "Good" was Professor Flitwick and Professor McGonagall and Professor Sprout. "Bad" was Professor Snape and Professor Quirrell and Draco Malfoy. Harry Potter... was one of those unusual cases where you couldn't tell just by looking. She was still trying to figure out where he belonged.

But when it came to herself...

Hermione was having too much fun crushing Harry Potter.

She'd done better than him in every single class they'd taken. (Except for broomstick riding which was like gym class, it didn't count.) She'd gotten real House points almost every day of their first week, not for weird heroic things, but smart things like learning spells quickly and helping other students. She knew those kinds of House points were better, and the best part was, Harry Potter knew it too. She could see it in his eyes every time she won another real House point.

If you were Good, you weren't supposed to enjoy winning this much.

It had started on the day of the train ride, though it had taken a while for the whirlwind to sink in. It wasn't until later that night that Hermione had begun to realize just how much she'd let that boy walk all over her.

Before she'd met Harry Potter she hadn't had anyone she'd wanted to crush. If someone wasn't doing as well as her in class, it was her job to help them, not rub it in. That was what it meant to be Good.

And now...

...now she was winning, Harry Potter was flinching every time she got another House point, and it was so much fun, her parents had warned her against drugs and she suspected this was more fun than that.

... OK, this isn't TOO bad. Her moral philosophy really isn't any less sophisticated then Harriezer; he just uses a lot more psychobabble. She's smart, competitive, straightlaced, and she's got moral awareness. Her thoughts are a bit simplistic, but she's eleven. I'm approving of this Hermione and her entirely correct desire to show up that jerk.

She marinates a bit more before coming to a conclusion.

quote:

She and Harry were getting into a Romance! Of course! Everyone knew what it meant when a boy and a girl started fighting all the time. They were courting one another! There was nothing Bad about that.

Danger! DANGER!

In case you've forgotten, Harry and Hermoine made a bet on the Hogwarts Express that Harry could read more books in a week, and that bet is coming due.

quote:

Ten seconds left, and he still hadn't raised his hand.

Five seconds left.

2:47pm.

Harry Potter carefully placed a bookmark into his book, closed it, and laid it aside.

"I would like to note for the benefit of posterity," said the Boy-Who-Lived in a clear voice, "that I had only half a book left, and that I ran into a number of unexpected delays -"

"You lost! " shrieked Hermione. "You did! You lost our contest! "

There was a collective exhalation as everyone started breathing again.

Harry Potter shot her a Look of Flaming Fire, but she was floating in a halo of pure white happiness and nothing could touch her.

"Do you realize what kind of week I've had? " said Harry Potter. "Any lesser being would have been hard-pressed to read eight Dr. Seuss books!"

"You set the time limit."

Harry's Look of Flaming Fire grew even hotter. "I did not have any logical way of knowing I'd have to save the entire school from Professor Snape, or get beaten up in Defense class, and if I told you how I lost all the time between 5pm and dinner on Thursday you would think I was insane -"

"Awww, it sounds like someone fell prey to the planning fallacy."

Raw shock showed on Harry Potter's face.

"Oh that reminds me, I finished reading the first batch of books you lent me," Hermione said with her best innocent look. A couple of them had been hard books, too. She wondered how long it had taken him to finish reading them.

You go Hermione! Teach that little poo poo a lesson! Harry even thinks about how he used his Time Turner to cheat and he still lost, thus proving that he has listened to no-one else this whole time.

quote:

"Someday," said the Boy-Who-Lived, "when the distant descendants of Homo sapiens are looking back over the history of the galaxy and wondering how it all went so wrong, they will conclude that the original mistake was when someone taught Hermione Granger how to read."

:cripes: :barf: :cripes: The happy trail of misogyny just keeps rollin' along. No wonder JWKS was forced to stop, this poo poo just keeps getting worse.

The rest of the Ravenclaw girls team up to demand a forfeit for losing the bet. Scene change to the dungeons three hours later, where Harry is meeting up with Draco.

quote:

"I want you to know, Draco Malfoy," said the silhouette in tones of deadly calm, "that I do not blame you for my recent defeat."

Draco opened his mouth in unthinking protest, there was no possible reason why he should be blamed -

"It was due, more than anything else, to my own stupidity," continued that shadowy figure. "There were many other things I could have done, at any step along the way. You did not ask me to do exactly what I did. You only asked for help. I was the one who unwisely chose that particular method. But the fact remains that I lost the contest by half a book. The actions of your pet idiot, and the favor you asked for, and, yes, my own foolishness in going about it, caused me to lose time. More time than you know. Time which, in the end, proved critical. The fact remains, Draco Malfoy, that if you had not asked that favor, I would have won. And not... instead... lost."

Draco had already heard about Harry's loss, and the forfeit Granger had claimed from him. The news had spread faster than owls could have carried it.

"I understand," Draco said. "I'm sorry." There was nothing else he could say if he wanted Harry Potter to be friends with him.

"I am not asking for understanding or sorrow," said the dark silhouette, still with that deadly calm. "But I have just spent two full hours in the presence of Hermione Granger, dressed in such clothing as was provided me, visiting such fascinating places in Hogwarts as a tiny burbling waterfall of what looked to me like snot, accompanied by a number of other girls who insisted on such helpful activities as strewing our path with Transfigured rose petals. I have been on a date, scion of Malfoy. My first date. And when I call that favor due, you will pay it."

Draco nodded solemnly. Before arriving he had taken the wise precaution of learning every available detail of Harry's date, so that he could get all of his hysterical laughing done before their appointed meeting time, and would not commit a faux pas by giggling continuously until he lost consciousness.

Some credit, Yud can sneak in foreshadowing in nonobvious ways. "The news had spread faster than owls could have carried it" is literally true, and it will become a plot point later. It's nicely buried in the humor here so you don't think about it too much.

quote:

"Spread the word in Slytherin that the Granger girl is mine and anyone who meddles in my affairs will have their remains scattered over an area wide enough to include twelve different spoken languages. And since I am not in Gryffindor and I use cunning rather than immediate frontal attacks, they should not panic if I am seen smiling at her."

"Or if you're seen on a second date?" Draco said, allowing just a tiny note of skepticism into his voice.

"There will be no second date," said the green-lit silhouette in a voice so fearsome that it sounded, not only like a Death Eater, but like Amycus Carrow that one time just before Father told him to stop it, he wasn't the Dark Lord.

Of course it was still a young boy's high unbroken voice and when you combined that with the actual words, well, it just didn't work. If Harry Potter did become the next Dark Lord someday, Draco would use a Pensieve to store a copy of this memory somewhere safe, and Harry Potter would never dare betray him.

If you can bring yourself to ignore the one little poo poo nugget about not teaching women to read (and to be fair, you're reading fanfiction, your standards are not that high) this first act of the chapter works fairly well as a light comedy and character piece. The second act is also comedy, but not quite for the same reasons.

Harriezer and Draco have decided to follow Quirrellmort's advice and start their own Secret Club of Magical Science.

quote:

"I offer you power," said the shadowy figure, "and I will tell you of that power and its price. The power comes from knowing the shape of reality and so gaining control over it. What you understand, you can command, and that is power enough to walk upon the Moon. The price of that power is that you must learn to ask questions of Nature, and far more difficult, accept Nature's answers. You will do experiments, perform tests and see what happens. And you must accept the meaning of those results when they tell you that you are mistaken. You will have to learn how to lose, not to me, but to Nature. When you find yourself arguing with reality, you will have to let reality win. You will find this painful, Draco Malfoy, and I do not know if you are strong in that way. Knowing the price, is it still your wish to learn the human power?"

Draco took a deep breath. He'd thought about this. And it was hard to see how he could answer any other way. He'd been instructed to take every avenue of friendship with Harry Potter. It was just learning, he wasn't promising to do anything. He could always stop the lessons at any time...

There were certainly any number of things about the situation which made it look like a trap, but in all honesty, Draco didn't see how this could go wrong.

Plus Draco did kind of want to rule the world.

"Yes," said Draco.

I tend to agree. One of my personal peeves is people who can't tell the difference between fact and opinion.

Harriezer starts offering study courses. The first is about psychology and I can only presume that course is the titular Methods of Rationality. On the one hand, thank loving god that we won't have to sit through them. On the other hand, that's the name of the fic and the author should have committed to the premise if that's what he really wants to talk about.

The second course is physics, which even Harriezer realizes is pointless because Draco doesn't know calculus.

The third course is genetics, and that's a winner for blood purist Draco.

quote:

The figure nodded. "I thought you might say as much. But I think it will be the most painful path for you, Draco. What if your family and friends, the blood purists, say one thing, and you find that the experimental test says another?"

"Then I'll figure out how to make the experimental test say the right answer!"

There was a pause, as the shadowy figure stood there with its mouth open for a short while.

"Um," said the shadowy figure. "It doesn't really work like that. That's what I was trying to warn you about here, Draco. You can't make the answer come out to be anything you like."

"You can always make the answer come out your way," said Draco. That had been practically the first thing his tutors had taught him. "It's just a matter of finding the right arguments."

:allears: It's not like either side is wrong. As we see from the modern climate change debate, political truths are far removed from anything as banal as data.

Draco and Harriezer have a back and forth about trusting experiments and whether Harry is going to lie, but eventually Draco caves.

quote:

"Excellent," said the figure, and smiled. "Congratulations on being willing to ask the question."

"Thanks," Draco said, not quite managing to keep the irony out of his voice.

"Hey, did you think going to the Moon was easy? Be glad this just involves changing your mind sometimes, and not a human sacrifice!"

"Human sacrifice would be way easier!"

There was a slight pause, and then the figure nodded. "Fair point."

As long as it's one of those bossy, mean girls. :chord:

Draco asks if they can just skip to what's already known, but Harriezer invokes the fear of dangerous secrets and tells Draco he has to prove himself by running some experiments on his own first. Second order of business for Secret Science Club, better costumes.

quote:

"We're going to need better robes," said the shadowy figure, "with hoods and so on -"

"I was just thinking that," said Draco. "We don't need whole new robes, though, just cowled cloaks to put on. I have a friend in Slytherin, she'll take your measurements -"

"Don't tell her what it's for, though -"

"I'm not stupid! "

"And no masks for now, not when it's just you and me -" said the shadowy figure.

"Right! But later on we should have some sort of special mark that all our servants have, the Mark of Science, like a snake eating the Moon on their right arms -"

"It's called a PhD and wouldn't that make it too easy to identify our people?"

"Huh?"

"I mean, what if someone is like 'okay, now everyone pull up their robes over their right arms' and our guy is like 'whoops, sorry, looks like I'm a spy' -"

"Forget I said anything," said Draco, sweat suddenly springing out all over his body. He needed a distraction, fast - "And what do we call ourselves? The Science Eaters?"

"No," said the shadowy figure slowly. "That doesn't sound right..."

Draco wiped his robed arm across his forehead, wiping away beads of moisture. What had the Dark Lord been thinking? Father had said the Dark Lord was smart!

"I've got it!" said the shadowy figure suddenly. "You won't understand yet, but trust me, it fits."

Right now Draco would have accepted 'Malfoy Munchers' as long as it changed the subject. "What is it?"

And standing amid the dusty desks in an unused classroom in the dungeons of Hogwarts, the green-lit silhouette of Harry Potter spread his arms dramatically and said, "This day shall mark the dawn of... the Bayesian Conspiracy."

Isn't that the name of Yud's not-a-cult? There's some serious mixed messages here. Do you want to create a science cult that keeps its findings secret, or do you want to uplift the unwashed masses through Rationality? Do you only want to do the latter until the former becomes an option? What are you trying to accomplish, Mr. Yudkowsky?

There's an interlude where Harry returns to his dorm room and finds a present.

quote:

This revealed a note, two golden Galleons, and a book titled Occlumency: The Hidden Arte.

Harry picked up the note and read:

My, you do get yourself into trouble and quickly. Your father was no match for you.

You have made a powerful enemy. Snape commands the loyalty, admiration, and fear of all House Slytherin. You cannot trust any of that House now, whether they come to you in friendly guise or fearsome.

From now on you must not meet Snape's eyes. He is a Legilimens and can read your mind if you do. I have enclosed a book which may help you learn to protect yourself, though there is only so far you can get without a tutor. Still you may hope to at least detect intrusion.

So that you may find some extra time in which to study Occlumency, I have enclosed 2 Galleons, which is the price of answer sheets and homework for the first-year History of Magic class (Professor Binns having given the same tests and same assignments every year since he died). Your newfound friends the Weasley twins should be able to sell you a copy. It goes without saying that you must not get caught with it in your possession.

Of Professor Quirrell I know little. He is a Slytherin and a Defense Professor, and that is two marks against him. Consider carefully any advice he gives you, and tell him nothing you do not wish known.

Dumbledore only pretends to be insane. He is extremely intelligent, and if you continue to step into closets and vanish, he will certainly deduce your possession of an invisibility cloak if he has not done so already. Avoid him whenever possible, hide the Cloak of Invisibility somewhere safe (NOT your pouch) any time you cannot avoid him, and step with great care in his presence.

Please be more careful in the future, Harry Potter.

- Santa Claus

I don't think it's ever fully revealed who sent this note. It might be Dumbledore, who does a lot of of seemingly random things for reasons that are explained later. It may be Peter Pettigrew, who in this fic has swapped roles with Sirius Black for no real reason.

Harry himself realizes the pointlessness of this scene and falls asleep.

The next morning in the Great Hall, Harriezer is wary of the Weasley twins approaching, but they're just giving him a cake with twelve candles for some reason.

quote:

"That's not right," said someone. "Harry Potter was born on the thirty-first of Jul-"

"HE IS COMING," said a huge hollow voice that cut through all conversation like a sword of ice. "THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY -"

Dumbledore had leapt out of his throne and run straight over the Head Table and seized hold of the woman speaking those awful words, Fawkes had appeared in a flash, and all three of them vanished in a crack of fire.

There was a shocked pause...

...followed by heads turning in the direction of Harry Potter.

"I didn't do it," Harry said in a tired voice.

"That was a prophecy! " someone at the table hissed. "And I bet it's about you! "

Harry sighed.

He stood up from his seat, raised his voice, and said very loudly over the conversations that were starting up, "It's not about me! Obviously! I'm not coming here, I'm already here! "

The prophecy is totally about Harry and his stupid little club.

Harry jumps to the next conclusion, Voldemort. We the reader know he's already there too, so that's just a mystery for now.

The chapter ends with Harry considering what to write home about.

quote:

Harry stared down at the blank sheet of paper. Let's see...

After leaving his parents at the train station, he'd...

...gotten acquainted with a boy raised by Darth Vader, become friends with the three most infamous pranksters in Hogwarts, met Hermione, then there'd been the Incident with the Sorting Hat... Monday he'd been given a time machine to treat his sleep disorder, gotten a legendary invisibility cloak from an unknown benefactor, rescued seven Hufflepuffs by staring down five scary older boys one of whom had threatened to break his finger, realized that he possessed a mysterious dark side, learned to cast Frigideiro in Charms class, and gotten started on his rivalry with Hermione... Tuesday had introduced Astronomy taught by Professor Aurora Sinistra who was nice, and History of Magic taught by a ghost who ought to be exorcised and replaced with a tape recorder... Wednesday, he'd been pronounced the Most Dangerous Student in the Classroom... Thursday, let's not even think about Thursday... Friday, the Incident in Potions Class, followed by his blackmailing the Headmaster, followed by the Defense Professor having him beaten up in class, followed by the Defense Professor turning out to be the most awesome human being who still walked the face of the Earth... Saturday he'd lost a bet and gone on his first date and started redeeming Draco... and then this morning Professor Trelawney's unheard prophecy might or might not indicate that an immortal Dark Lord was about to attack Hogwarts.

Harry mentally organized his material, and started writing.

Dear Mum and Dad:

Hogwarts is lots of fun. I learned how to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics in Charms class, and I met a girl named Hermione Granger who reads faster than I do.

I'd better leave it at that.

Your loving son,
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.

As usual, this writing needs to be ruthlessly cut down by a chainsaw-wielding editor, but this is certainly one of the better chapters. Comedy, childish intrigue, and a fresh mystery.

Added Space fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Jan 2, 2017

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Chapter 22: The Scientific Method

This chapter has a 'Start of Book 2' vibe to it. It opens with a Dramatis Personae, foreword and title section; none of which are interesting. The story then finally delivers on one of its basic premises; a scientific look at magic. This section is generally considered to be the best by reviewers, and so I will quote it in its entirety.

HPMOR posted:

A small study room, near but not in the Ravenclaw dorm, one of the many many unused rooms of Hogwarts. Gray stone the floors, red brick the walls, dark stained wood the ceiling, four glowing glass globes set into the four walls of the room. A circular table that looked like a wide slab of black marble set on thick black marble legs for columns, but which had proved to be very light (weight and mass both) and wasn't difficult to pick up and move around if necessary. Two comfortably cushioned chairs which had seemed at first to be locked to the floor in inconvenient places, but which would, the two of them had finally discovered, scoot around to where you stood as soon as you leaned over in a posture that looked like you were about to sit down.

There also seemed to be a number of bats flying around the room.

That was where, future historians would one day record - if the whole project ever actually amounted to anything - the scientific study of magic had begun, with two young first-year Hogwarts students.

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, theorist.

And Hermione Jean Granger, experimenter and test subject.

Harry was doing better in classes now, at least the classes he considered interesting. He'd read more books, and not books for eleven-year-olds either. He'd practiced Transfiguration over and over during one of his extra hours every day, taking the other hour for beginning Occlumency. He was taking the worthwhile classes seriously, not just turning in his homework every day, but using his free time to learn more than was required, to read other books beyond the given textbooks, looking to master the subject and not just memorize a few test answers, to excel. You didn't see that much outside Ravenclaw. And now even within Ravenclaw, his only remaining competitors were Padma Patil (whose parents came from a non-English-speaking culture and thus had raised her with an actual work ethic), Anthony Goldstein (out of a certain tiny ethnic group that won 25% of the Nobel Prizes), and of course, striding far above everyone like a Titan strolling through a pack of puppies, Hermione Granger.

To run this particular experiment you needed the test subject to learn sixteen new spells, on their own, without help or correction. That meant the test subject was Hermione. Period.

It should be mentioned at this point that the bats flying around the room were not glowing.

Harry was having trouble accepting the implications of this.

"Oogely boogely! " Hermione said again.

Again, at the tip of Hermione's wand, there was the abrupt, transitionless appearance of a bat. One moment, empty air. The next moment, bat. Its wings seemed to be already moving in the instant when it appeared.

And it still wasn't glowing.

"Can I stop now?" said Hermione.

"Are you sure," Harry said through what seemed to be a block in his throat, "that maybe with a bit more practice you couldn't get it to glow?" He was violating the experimental procedure he'd written down beforehand, which was a sin, and he was violating it because he didn't like the results he was getting, which was a mortal sin, you could go to Science Hell for that, but it didn't seem to be mattering anyway.

"What did you change this time?" Hermione said, sounding a little weary.

"The durations of the oo, eh, and ee sounds. It's supposed to be 3 to 2 to 2, not 3 to 1 to 1."

"Oogely boogely! " said Hermione.

The bat materialized with only one wing and spun pathetically to the floor, flopping around in a circle on the gray stone.

"Now what is it really?" said Hermione.

"3 to 2 to 1."

"Oogely boogely! "

This time the bat didn't have any wings at all and fell with a plop like a dead mouse.

"3 to 1 to 2."

And lo the bat did materialize and it did fly up at once toward the ceiling, healthy and glowing a bright green.

Hermione nodded in satisfaction. "Okay, what next?"

There was a long pause.

"Seriously? You seriously have to say Oogely boogely with the duration of the oo, eh, and ee sounds having a ratio of 3 to 1 to 2, or the bat won't glow? Why? Why? For the love of all that is sacred, why? "

"Why not?"

"AAAAAAAAARRRRRRGHHHH! "

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Harry had thought about the nature of magic for a while, and then designed a series of experiments based on the premise that virtually everything wizards believed about magic was wrong.

You couldn't really need to say 'Wingardium Leviosa' in exactly the right way in order to levitate something, because, come on, 'Wingardium Leviosa'? The universe was going to check that you said 'Wingardium Leviosa' in exactly the right way and otherwise it wouldn't make the quill float?

No. Obviously no, once you thought about it seriously. Someone, quite possibly an actual preschool child, but at any rate some English-speaking magic user, who thought that 'Wingardium Leviosa' sounded all flyish and floaty, had originally spoken those words while casting the spell for the first time. And then told everyone else it was necessary.

But (Harry had reasoned) it didn't have to be that way, it wasn't built into the universe, it was built into you.

There was an old story passed down among scientists, a cautionary tale, the story of Blondlot and the N-Rays.

Shortly after the discovery of X-Rays, an eminent French physicist named Prosper-Rene Blondlot - who had been first to measure the speed of radio waves and show that they propagated at the speed of light - had announced the discovery of an amazing new phenomenon, N-Rays, which would induce a faint brightening of a screen. You had to look hard to see it, but it was there. N-Rays had all sorts of interesting properties. They were bent by aluminium and could be focused by an aluminium prism into striking a treated thread of cadmium sulfide, which would then glow faintly in the dark...

Soon dozens of other scientists had confirmed Blondlot's results, especially in France.

But there were still other scientists, in England and Germany, who said they weren't quite sure they could see that faint glow.

Blondlot had said they were probably setting up the machinery wrong.

One day Blondlot had given a demonstration of N-Rays. The lights had turned out, and his assistant had called off the brightening and darkening as Blondlot performed his manipulations.

It had been a normal demonstration, all the results going as expected.

Even though an American scientist named Robert Wood had quietly stolen the aluminium prism from the center of Blondlot's mechanism.

And that had been the end of N-Rays.

Reality, Philip K. Dick had once said, is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

Blondlot's sin had been obvious in retrospect. He shouldn't have told his assistant what he was doing. Blondlot should have made sure the assistant didn't know what was being tried or when it was being tried, before asking him to describe the screen's brightness. It could have been that simple.

Nowadays it was called "blinding" and it was one of the things modern scientists took for granted. If you were doing a psychology experiment to see whether people got angrier when they were hit over the head with red truncheons than with green truncheons, you didn't get to look at the subjects yourself and decide how "angry" they were. You would snap photos of them after they'd been hit with the truncheon, and send the photos off to a panel of raters, who would rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how angry each person looked, obviously without knowing what color of truncheon they'd been hit with. Indeed there was no good reason to tell the raters what the experiment was about, at all. You certainly wouldn't tell the experimental subjects that you thought they ought to be angrier when hit by red truncheons. You'd just offer them 20 pounds, lure them into a test room, hit them with a truncheon, color randomly assigned of course, and snap the photo. In fact the truncheon-hitting and photo-snapping would be done by an assistant who hadn't been told about the hypothesis, so he couldn't look expectant, hit harder, or snap the photo at just the right time.

Blondlot had destroyed his reputation with the sort of mistake that would get a failing grade and probably derisive laughter from the T.A. in a first-year undergraduate course on experimental design... in 1991.

But this had been a bit longer ago, in 1904, and so it had taken months before Robert Wood had formulated the obvious alternative hypothesis and figured out how to test it, and dozens of other scientists had been sucked in.

More than two centuries after science had gotten started. That late in scientific history, it still hadn't been obvious.

Which made it entirely plausible that in the tiny wizarding world, where science didn't seem much known at all, no one had ever tried the first, the simplest, the most obvious thing that any modern scientist would think to check.

The books were full of complicated instructions for all the things you had to do exactly right in order to cast a spell. And, Harry had hypothesized, the process of obeying those instructions, of checking that you were following them correctly, probably did do something. It forced you to concentrate on the spell. Being told to just wave your wand and wish probably wouldn't work as well. And once you believed the spell was supposed to work a certain way, once you had practiced it that way, you might not be able to convince yourself that it could work any other way...

...if you did the simple but wrong thing, and tried to test alternative forms yourself.

But what if you didn't know what the original spell had been like?

What if you gave Hermione a list of spells she hadn't studied yet, taken from a book of silly prank spells in the Hogwarts library, and some of those spells had the correct and original instructions, while others had one changed gesture, one changed word? What if you kept the instructions constant, but told her that a spell supposed to create a red worm was supposed to create a blue worm instead?

Well, in that case, it had turned out...

...Harry was having trouble believing his results here...

...if you told Hermione to say "Oogely boogely" with the vowel durations in the ratio of 3 to 1 to 1, instead of the correct ratio of 3 to 1 to 2, you still got the bat but it wouldn't glow any more.

Not that belief was irrelevant here. Not that only the words and wand movements mattered.

If you gave Hermione completely incorrect information about what a spell was supposed to do, it would stop working.

If you didn't tell her at all what the spell was supposed to do, it would stop working.

If she knew in very vague terms what the spell was supposed to do, or she was only partially wrong, then the spell would work as originally described in the book, not the way she'd been told it should.

Harry was, at this moment, literally banging his head against the brick wall. Not hard. He didn't want to damage his precious brains. But if he didn't have some outlet for his frustration, he would spontaneously catch on fire.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

It seemed the universe actually did want you to say 'Wingardium Leviosa' and it wanted you to say it in a certain exact way and it didn't care what you thought the pronunciation should be any more than it cared how you felt about gravity.

WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY?

The worst part of it was the smug, amused look on Hermione's face.

Hermione had not been okay with sitting around obediently following Harry's instructions without being told why.

So Harry had explained to her what they were testing.

Harry had explained why they were testing it.

Harry had explained why probably no wizard had tried it before them.

Harry had explained that he was actually fairly confident of his prediction.

Because, Harry had said, there was no way that the universe actually wanted you to say 'Wingardium Leviosa'.

Hermione had pointed out that this was not what her books said. Hermione had asked if Harry really thought he was smarter, at eleven years old and just over a month into his Hogwarts education, than all the other wizards in the world who disagreed with him.

Harry had said the following exact words:

"Of course."

Now Harry was staring at the red brick directly in front of him and contemplating how hard he would have to hit his head in order to give himself a concussion that would interfere with long-term memory formation and prevent him from remembering this later. Hermione wasn't laughing, but he could feel her intent to laugh radiating out from behind him like a dreadful pressure on his skin, sort of like knowing you were being stalked by a serial killer only worse.

"Say it," Harry said.

"I wasn't going to," said the kindly voice of Hermione Granger. "It didn't seem nice."

"Just get it over with," said Harry.

"Okay! So you gave me this whole long lecture about how hard it was to do basic science and how we might need to stay on the problem for thirty-five years, and then you went and expected us to make the greatest discovery in the history of magic in the first hour we were working together. You didn't just hope, you really expected it. You're silly."

"Thank you. Now -"

"I've read all the books you gave me and I still don't know what to call that. Overconfidence? Planning fallacy? Super duper Lake Wobegon effect? They'll have to name it after you. Harry Bias."

"All right! "

"But it is cute. It's such a boy thing to do."

"Drop dead."

"Aw, you say the most romantic things."

Thud. Thud. Thud.

"So what's next?" said Hermione.

Harry rested his head against the bricks. His forehead was starting to hurt where he'd been banging it. "Nothing. I have to go back and design different experiments."

Over the last month, Harry had carefully worked out, in advance, a course of experimentation for them that would have lasted until December.

It would have been a great set of experiments if the very first test had not falsified the basic premise.

Harry could not believe he had been this dumb.

"Let me correct myself," said Harry. "I need to design one new experiment. I'll let you know when we've got it, and we'll do it, and then I'll design the next one. How does that sound?"

"It sounds like someone wasted a whole lot of effort."

Thud. Ow. He'd done that a bit harder than he'd planned.

"So," said Hermione. She was leaning back in her chair and the smug look was back on her face. "What did we discover today?"

"I discovered," said Harry through gritted teeth, "that when it comes to doing truly basic research on a genuinely confusing problem where you have no clue what's going on, my books on scientific methodology aren't worth crap -"

"Language, Mr. Potter! Some of us are innocent young girls!"

"Fine. But if my books were worth a carp, that's a kind of fish not anything bad, they would have given me the following important piece of advice: When there's a confusing problem and you're just starting out and you have a falsifiable hypothesis, go test it. Find some simple, easy way of doing a basic check and do it right away. Don't worry about designing an elaborate course of experiments that would make a grant proposal look impressive to a funding agency. Just check as fast as possible whether your ideas are false before you start investing huge amounts of effort in them. How does that sound for a moral?"

"Mmm... okay," said Hermione. "But I was also hoping for something like 'Hermione's books aren't worthless. They're written by wise old wizards who know way more about magic than I do. I should pay attention to what Hermione's books say.' Can we have that moral too?"

Harry's jaw seemed to be clenched too tightly to let any words out, so he just nodded.

"Great!" Hermione said. "I liked this experiment. We learned a lot from it and it only took me an hour or so."

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!"

Starting by citing foreigners and Jews as superior students is not exactly promising, but at this point we just have to accept our main character has some socially inappropriate beliefs. We get a decent scientific protocol, a surprising result, and a lesson in humility. The chemistry between these two characters is great.

However, we can also see the problem. Harry's intuition was wrong and people he doesn't like were right. This causes him to completely lose his poo poo, scream, and bang his head like a child with conduct disorder. Later in this same chapter Harry himself recites something he calls the Litany of Tarski. Paraphasing: "If X is true, I want to believe X. If X is not true, I want not to believe X. Let me not become attached to beliefs I may not want." He says that to Draco without a moment of hesitation, but when it's Harry's beliefs that are on the line he can't handle himself.

From now on, the author will spare Harriezer from this torment by making every intuition instantly correct. All science from this point on is abandoned in favor of the Aristotelian "A smart guy said so, therefore it's true."

The second half of this chapter is a long meeting between Harry and Draco's secret club. Draco still suggests the brilliant solution of "Beat up Hermione" to play to the Slytherin cheap seats, but Harry wants to take the higher road.

quote:

"What do you care what other people think? Are you really going to live your life needing to explain everything you do to the dumbest idiots in Slytherin, letting them judge you? I'm sorry, Draco, but I'm not lowering my cunning plots to the level of what the dumbest Slytherins can understand, just because it might make you look bad otherwise. Not even your friendship is worth that. It would take all the fun out of life. Tell me you haven't ever thought the same thing when someone in Slytherin is being too stupid to breathe, that it's beneath the dignity of a Malfoy to have to pander to them."

Draco genuinely hadn't. Ever. Pandering to idiots was like breathing, you did it without thinking about it.

They yell at each other for a bit, but Harry eventually acknowledges that Draco has a point and they can't be seen as too closely aligned for now. Rita Skeeter gets name checked, but nothing will ever come of that.

Next, Harry comes up with an absurd plan to teach Draco about falsifiablity and competing hypotheses using blood purity as the subject.

quote:

Harry Potter had then gone into further and considerable detail: Draco was to pretend to be a Death Eater who was posing as the editor of a scientific journal, Dr. Malfoy, who wanted to reject his enemy Dr. Potter's paper "On the Heritability of Magical Ability", and if the Death Eater didn't act like a real scientist would, he would be revealed as a Death Eater and executed, while Dr. Malfoy was also being watched by his own rivals and needed to appear to reject Dr. Potter's paper for neutral scientific reasons or he would lose his position as journal editor.

There's a lot of padding before we actually get to the point.

quote:

On the Heritability of Magical Ability

Dr. H. J. Potter-Evans-Verres, Institute for Sufficiently Advanced Science

My observation:

Today's wizards can't do things as impressive as
what wizards used to do 800 years ago.

My conclusion:

Wizardkind has become weaker by mixing
their blood with Muggleborns and Squibs.

...

"You, ah, need to consider other possible explanations for your, um, observation, besides just this one -"

"Really?" interrupted Dr. Potter. "Like what, exactly? House elves are stealing our magic? My data admit of only one possible conclusion, Dr. Malfoy. There are no other plausible hypotheses."

Draco was trying furiously to order his brain to think, what would he say if he was posing as a member of Dumbledore's faction, what did they claim was the explanation for wizardkind's decline, Draco had never bothered to actually ask that...

"If you can't think of any other way to explain my data, you'll have to publish my paper, Dr. Malfoy."

It was the sneer on Dr. Potter's face that did it.

"Oh yeah?" snapped Dr. Malfoy. "How do you know that magic itself isn't fading away?"

Time stopped.

Draco and Harry Potter exchanged looks of appalled horror.

This WOULD be a good moment, if it weren't immediately undercut. What Harry is actually doing is trying to distract Draco and slip in his own hypothesis in a way that Draco won't nitpick. He adds three more ideas on top of blood purism and fading magic, then wordily rules out two of them. It's not mentioned in this chapter, but the idea he slips in can be summarized as a Mendelian wizard gene. Between Harry and Draco's conjectures, take your own guess which one is right.

Harry will check out the "Magic is fading" hypothesis by asking teachers and ghosts if spells are getting harder to cast. Draco is tasked with collecting family records of Squibs to check the genetic hypothesis. With Harry shoving Draco out the door, the chapter ends.

Added Space fucked around with this message at 18:41 on Jan 2, 2017

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

Tiggum posted:

It's interesting that Harry doesn't seem to consider what seems to me the most obvious solution to all his problems with accepting the existence of magic. He can't believe it works in the way it apparently does because he's assuming it's a product of the natural world. What if it's alien nanobots or something? If it's designed then it can work however the designer wanted it to. "The universe" doesn't care how you say "wingardium leviosa", but for some reason this ancient meddling alien really did/does.

Unless you can demonstrate these aliens or nanobots, that's not really a solution to the mystery. It's an appeal to an unsolvable mystery, not really any better than attributing magic to a god. I think the best anyone can do is say that Atlantis somehow produced magic. Atlantis was comprehensively destroyed so no-one can say what the exact process was.


NihilCredo posted:

Added Space, could you please paste a link to the chapter being reviewed at the start of the post? This way those who want to check out the abridged parts can do it quickly.

Done, chapter titles are now links that chapter on the author's website. I'm using that since ff.net has a script to make copy/paste difficult.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Chapter 23: Belief in Belief

I personally like some of the ideas brought up in this chapter. "Belief in belief" could be rephrased as having inauthentic beliefs. I remember when I was working in a high school in 2012, when so many students told me that they absolutely believed the 'end of the world' nonsense. I asked them why were still in school and not engaging in reckless indulgence, and all I got was blank looks. At the same time I saw on a reality TV show a family that had taken out long-term loans and gone on several vacations. That family had an authentic belief; those dumb teenagers did not. Even if I thought that family was wrong, I could at least somewhat respect their authenticity.

Harry and Draco reconvene with the results of their research. Mostly people are using the same spells as they did centuries ago, but there's a snag.

HPMOR posted:

Harry Potter's fist struck a desk, hard. "drat it. All right. My own experiment was a failure, Draco. There's something called the Interdict of Merlin -"

Draco hit himself on the forehead, realizing.

"- which stops anyone from getting knowledge of powerful spells out of books, even if you find and read a powerful wizard's notes they won't make sense to you, it has to go from one living mind to another. I couldn't find any powerful spells that we had the instructions for but couldn't cast. But if you can't get them out of old books, why would anyone bother passing them on by word of mouth after they stopped working? Did you get the data on the Squib couples?"

I remember reading, possibly in this very thread, that someone thought the Interdict of Merlin was canon to Harry Potter and was upset when they found out it was Yud's invention. I didn't understand their anger. To me this is why I love fanfiction, when some other writer can seamlessly inject their own concepts into an existing work and thereby expand the story. Something like the Interdict explains neatly why there is a positive correlation between the age of an artifact and its power in the Harry Potter books. If Yudkowsky had chosen to do this more often instead of deriding the original concepts this would have been a much better work.

Harry interjects with an explanation of Mendelian genetics and predicts that one-fourth the children of two squibs will be full wizards. Sure enough, six of twenty-eight were. Wizard Gene Confirmed.

quote:

"What now?" Draco whispered.

He'd never been so terrified.

"It's not definite yet," said Harry Potter. "My experiment failed, remember? I need you to design another test, Draco."

"I, I..." Draco said. His voice was breaking. "I can't do this Harry, it's too much for me."

Harry's look was fierce. "Yes you can, because you have to. I thought about it myself, too, after I found out about the Interdict of Merlin. Draco, is there any way of observing the strength of magic directly? Some way that doesn't have anything to do with wizards' blood or the spells we learn?"

Draco's mind was just blank.

"Anything that affects magic affects wizards," said Harry. "But then we can't tell if it's the wizards or the magic. What does magic affect that isn't a wizard?"

"Magical creatures, obviously," said Draco without even thinking about it.

Harry Potter slowly smiled. "Draco, that's brilliant."

It's the sort of dumb question you'd only ask in the first place if you'd been raised by Muggles.

Then the sickness in Draco's stomach got even worse as he realized what it would mean if magical creatures were getting weaker. They would know for certain then that magic was fading, and there was a part of Draco that was already sure that was exactly what they would find. He didn't want to see this, he didn't want to know...

Harry Potter was already halfway to the door. "Come on, Draco! There's a portrait not far from here, we'll just ask them to go get someone old and find out right away! We're cloaked, if someone sees us we can just run away! Let's go!"

Mind Flayers were wiped out by Harold Shea (a reference to a classic sci-fi series), but otherwise the same creatures are around.

quote:

... So when you add it all up, it looks like knowledge is being lost."

And the trap snapped shut.

As soon as the panic went away, as soon as Draco understood that magic wasn't fading out, it took all of five seconds to realize.

Draco shoved himself away from the desk and stood up so hard that his chair skittered with a scraping noise across the floor and fell over.

"So it was all just a stupid trick, then."

Harry Potter stared at him for a moment, still sitting. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. "It was a fair test, Draco. If it had come out a different way, I would have accepted it. That's not something I would ever cheat on. Ever. I didn't look at your data before I made my predictions. I told you up front when the Interdict of Merlin invalidated the first experiment -"

"Oh," Draco said, the anger starting to come out into his voice, "you didn't know how the whole thing was going to come out?"

"I didn't know anything you didn't know," Harry said, still quietly. "I admit that I suspected. Hermione Granger was too powerful, she should have been barely magical and she wasn't, how can a Muggleborn be the best spellcaster in Hogwarts? And she's getting the best grades on her essays too, it's too much coincidence for one girl to be the strongest magically and academically unless there's a single cause. Hermione Granger's existence pointed to there being only one thing that makes you a wizard, something you either have or you don't, and the power differences coming from how much we know and how much we practice. And there weren't different classes for purebloods and Muggleborns, and so on. There were too many ways the world didn't look the way it would look if you were right. But Draco, I didn't see anything you couldn't see too. I didn't perform any tests I didn't tell you about. I didn't cheat, Draco. I wanted us to work out the answer together. And I never thought that magic might be fading out of the world until you said it. It was a scary idea for me, too."

"Whatever," Draco said. He was working very hard to control his voice and not just start screaming at Harry. "You claim you're not going to run off and tell anyone else about this."

"Not without consulting you first," Harry said. He opened his hands in a pleading gesture. "Draco, I'm being as nice as I can but the world turned out to just not be that way."

"Fine. Then you and I are through. I'm going to just walk away and forget any of this ever happened."

Draco spun around, feeling the burning sensation in his throat, the sense of betrayal, and that was when he realized he really had liked Harry Potter, and that thought didn't slow him down for a moment as he strode toward the classroom door.

And Harry Potter's voice came, now louder, and worried:

"Draco... you can't forget. Don't you understand? That was your sacrifice."

Draco stopped in midstride and turned around. "What are you talking about?"

But there was already a freezing coldness in Draco's spine.

He knew even before Harry Potter said it.

We're expected to believe that Draco is experiencing something akin to an unwanted religious conversion to the glorious cause of Science. I've heard of people being convinced by science, I've heard of people undergoing conversion, but I have never heard of a situation like this. This is more like something out of Lovecraft than anything to do with social psychology.

Harriezer offers to test Hermione's parents to confirm she's the true child of muggles and Draco weasels. The chapter title comes in as Harry calls him on being inauthentic, and how he is now inescapably a True Scientist. Draco freaks out about how he'll have to go back and live among extremists now that he no longer believes in the root of their cause. Harriezer should have warned him more. Draco sensibly blames the prick, and a little less sensibly resorts to violence.

quote:

"Expelliarmus! "

Harry's wand flew across the room.

"Gom jabbar! "

A pulse of inky blackness struck Harry's left hand.

"That's a torture spell," said Draco. "It's for getting information out of people. I'm just going to leave it on you and lock the door behind me when I go. Maybe I'll set the locking spell to wear off after a few hours. Maybe it won't wear off until you die in here. Have fun."

Draco moved smoothly backward, wand still on Harry. Draco's hand dipped down, picked up his bookbag, without his aim wavering.

The pain was already showing in Harry Potter's face as he spoke. "Malfoys are above the underage magic laws, I take it? It's not because your blood is stronger. It's because you already practiced. In the beginning you were as weak as any of us. Is my prediction wrong?"

Draco's hand whitened on his wand, but his aim stayed steady.

"Just so you know," Harry said through gritted teeth, "if you'd told me I was wrong I would have listened. I won't ever torture you when you show me that I'm wrong. And you will. Someday. You're awakened as a scientist now, and even if you never learn to use your power, you'll always," Harry gasped, "be looking, for ways, to test, your beliefs -"

Draco's backing away was less smooth, now, a little faster, and he had to work to keep his wand on Harry as he reached back to open the door and stepped back out of the classroom.

Then Draco shut the door again.

He cast the most powerful locking Charm he knew.

Draco waited until he heard Harry's first scream before casting the Quietus.

And then he walked away.

Harry manages to get out the magical first aid kit he bought and hits himself with painkillers, although he only has a half-hour's worth. Points for cleverness there.

quote:

Harry pulled himself to his feet.

Took a deep breath.

Exhaled.

Smiled.

It wasn't much of a smile, but it was a smile nonetheless.

Thank you, Professor Quirrell, I couldn't have lost without you.

He hadn't redeemed Draco yet, not even close. Contrary to what Draco himself might now believe, Draco was still the child of a Death Eater, through and through. Still a boy who'd grown up thinking "rape" was something the cool older kids did. But it was one heck of a start.

Harry couldn't claim it had all gone just as planned. It had all gone just as completely made up on the spot. The plan hadn't called for this to happen until December or thereabouts, after Harry had taught Draco the techniques not to deny the evidence when he saw it.

But he'd seen the look of fear on Draco's face, realized that Draco was already taking an alternative hypothesis seriously, and seized the moment. One case of true curiosity had the same sort of redeeming power in rationality that one case of true love had in movies.

In retrospect, Harry had given himself hours to make the most important discovery in the history of magic, and months to break through the undeveloped mental barriers of an eleven-year-old boy. This could indicate that Harry had some sort of major cognitive deficit with respect to estimating task completion times.

Umm... Harriezer, the only 'losing' you did was allowing your friend to hit you with a possibly fatal spell. That doesn't help with redemption. Quirrell also reminded you that a scientific mindset was no protection from performing dangerous and immoral acts. Merlin's beard, even when you like an adult you still can't learn poo poo from them.

quote:

Draco wished it were Pansy screaming. That would have felt better.

See? See? Then again, this is Harriezer we're talking about, he might approve.

Draco has run off to have a cry while Harry tries in vain to get through the door. Facing hours of torture and possible death, Harriezer is finally faced with the last, terrible resort of listening to McGonagal's advice. He checks the time and resolves to discreetly use his Time Turner to tell a teacher. Minutes later Professor Flitwick opens the door.

Added Space fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Jan 4, 2017

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Jul 13, 2012

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i81icu812 posted:

Yeah, I'm also having a hard time following this with the amount of text skipped, as much as I appreciate this coming back from the dead.

It's not like the stuff I'm skipping is clear. Most of it is long winded, nonsensical, or keeps repeating things that have already been said. I could honestly summarize the entire next chapter as "Harry and Draco try to out-:smuggo: each other" and you won't have lost much.

However, if the thread thinks I should include everything I will.

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Jul 13, 2012

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Thanks, guys.

Harry Potter and Gregor Mendel

Yudkowsky often incorporates real experiments and science into his work. Some is accurate, some is unproven, and some is wrong. Today we're going back to middle school and investigating genetics. Harry explains the concept of Mendelian inheritance and Punnett squares.

HPMOR posted:

"The secret of blood," said Harry Potter, an intense look on his face, "is something called deoxyribonucleic acid. You don't say that name in front of anyone who's not a scientist. Deoxyribonucleic acid is the recipe that tells your body how to grow, two legs, two arms, short or tall, whether you have brown eyes or green. It's a material thing, you can see it if you have microscopes, which are like telescopes only they look at things that are very small instead of very far away. And that recipe has two copies of everything, always, in case one copy is broken. Imagine two long rows of pieces of paper. At each place in the row, there are two pieces of paper, and when you have children, your body selects one piece of paper at random from each place in the row, and the mother's body will do the same, and so the child also gets two pieces of paper at each place in the row. Two copies of everything, one from your mother, one from your father, and when you have children they get one piece of paper from you at random in each place."

As Harry spoke, his fingers ranged over the paired scraps of paper, pointing to one part of the pair when he said "from your mother", the other when he said "from your father". And as Harry talked about picking a piece of paper at random, his hand pulled a Knut out of his robes and flipped it; Harry looked at the coin, and then pointed to the top piece of paper. All without a pause in the speech.

"Now when it comes to something like being short or tall, there's a lot of places in the recipe that make little differences. So if a tall father marries a short mother, the child gets some pieces of paper saying 'tall' and some pieces of paper saying 'short', and usually the child ends up middle-sized. But not always. By luck, the child might get a lot of pieces saying 'tall', and not many papers saying 'short', and grow up pretty tall. You could have a tall father with five papers saying 'tall' and a tall mother with five papers saying 'tall' and by amazing luck the child gets all ten papers saying 'tall' and ends up taller than both of them. You see? Blood isn't a perfect fluid, it doesn't mix perfectly. Deoxyribonucleic acid is made up of lots of little pieces, like a glass of pebbles instead of a glass of water. That's why a child isn't always exactly in the middle of the parents."

Draco listened with his mouth open. How in Merlin's name had the Muggles figured all this out? They could see the recipe?

"Now," Harry Potter said, "suppose that, just like with tallness, there's lots of little places in the recipe where you can have a piece of paper that says 'magic' or 'not magic'. If you have enough pieces of paper saying 'magic' you're a wizard, if you have a lot of pieces of paper you're a powerful wizard, if you have too few you're a Muggle, and in between you're a Squib. Then, when two Squibs marry, most of the time the children should also be Squibs, but once in a while a child will get lucky and get most of the father's magic papers and most of the mother's magic papers, and be strong enough to be a wizard. But probably not a very powerful one. If you started out with a lot of powerful wizards and they married only each other, they would stay powerful. But if they started marrying Muggleborns who were just barely magical, or Squibs... you see? The blood wouldn't mix perfectly, it would be a glass of pebbles, not a glass of water, because that's just the way blood works. There would still be powerful wizards now and then, when they got a lot of magic papers by luck. But they wouldn't be as powerful as the most powerful wizards from earlier."

Draco nodded slowly. He'd never heard it explained that way before. There was a surprising beauty to how exactly it fit.

"But," Harry said. "That's only one hypothesis. Suppose that instead there's only a single place in the recipe that makes you a wizard. Only one place where a piece of paper can say 'magic' or 'not magic'. And there are two copies of everything, always. So then there are only three possibilities. Both copies can say 'magic'. One copy can say 'magic' and one copy can say 'not magic'. Or both copies can say 'not magic'. Wizards, Squibs, and Muggles. Two copies and you can cast spells, one copy and you can still use potions or magic devices, and zero copies means you might even have trouble looking straight at magic. Muggleborns wouldn't really be born to Muggles, they would be born to two Squibs, two parents each with one magic copy who'd grown up in the Muggle world. Now imagine a witch marries a Squib. Each child will get one paper saying 'magic' from the mother, always, it doesn't matter which piece gets picked at random, both say 'magic'. But like flipping a coin, half the time the child will get a paper saying 'magic' from the father, and half the time the child will get the father's paper saying 'not magic'. When a witch marries a Squib, the result won't be a lot of weak wizarding children. Half the children will be wizards and witches just as powerful as their mother, and half the children will be Squibs. Because if there's just one place in the recipe that makes you a wizard, then magic isn't like a glass of pebbles that can mix. It's like a single magical pebble, a sorcerer's stone."

Harry arranged three pairs of papers side by side. On one pair he wrote 'magic' and 'magic'. On another pair he wrote 'magic' on the top paper only. And the third pair he left blank.

"In which case," Harry said, "either you have two stones or you don't. Either you're a wizard or not. Powerful wizards would get that way by studying harder and practicing more. And if wizards get inherently less powerful, not because of spells being lost but because people can't cast them... then maybe they're eating the wrong foods or something. But if it's gotten steadily worse over eight hundred years, then that could mean magic itself is fading out of the world."

Harry arranged another two pairs of papers side by side, and took out a quill. Soon each pair had one piece of paper saying 'magic' and the other paper blank.

"And that brings me to the prediction," said Harry. "What happens when two Squibs marry. Flip a coin twice. It can come up heads and heads, heads and tails, tails and heads, or tails and tails. So one quarter of the time you'll get two heads, one quarter of the time you'll get two tails, and half the time you'll get one heads and one tail. Same thing if two Squibs marry. One quarter of the children would come up magic and magic, and be wizards. One quarter would come up not-magic and not-magic, and be Muggles. The other half would be Squibs. It's a very old and very classic pattern. It was discovered by Gregor Mendel who is not forgotten, and it was the first hint ever uncovered for how the recipe worked. Anyone who knows anything about blood science would recognize that pattern in an instant. It wouldn't be exact, any more than if you flip a coin twice forty times you'll always get exactly ten pairs of two heads. But if it's seven or thirteen wizards out of forty children that'll be a strong indicator. That's the test I had you do. Now let's see your data."

What Harry is proposing is something like this:



Where w is the wizard gene. People with ww are wizards, rw are squibs, and rr are muggles. This would imply that Hermione's parents are also squibs but this is never followed up on.

Draco would propose something more like -

code:
Draco      wwwwwwwwww
Harry      wwwwwrrwrw
Hermione   rrwwrwrwwr
Filch      rrrrwrwrrr
Since Harry has had his one allotted scientific failure, he is of course correct.

I can spot one error in his explanation. Height is not just genetic, it's also epigeentic. Things like disease and diet can change the expression of genes in gametes, leading to an offspring that's notably different then either parent. This explains why two five-foot immigrants from a long line of five-foot people can have a six-foot son. The change in genetic expression would be due to changes in their environment from their move. To be fair, this epigenetic discovery may have happened after this fic was written.

The author himself noted that there are other genetic factors beyond a simple presence of a gene that could cause a similar outcome.

I'm not sure why Draco is freaking out so much since the Wizard Gene hypothesis can be adapted to blood purism with a bit of tweaking. It would suggest things like wizards should only reproduce with wizards and squibs only with squibs. Pureblood families could still hold themselves as superior for having no squibs in their line. There could even be a dramatic proposal to screen the muggle population for squibs and pair them off to squeeze out more wizards. Apply the smallest amount of spin and this could be a real boost for blood purism.

Added Space fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Jan 5, 2017

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Jul 13, 2012

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i81icu812 posted:

The biggest problem is that if the magic gene is recessive then squibs are impossible for two magical parents. This implication should be important and and obvious but is never addressed.


The other issue this raises, as you note, is that all muggleborns have two squib parents, which raises population genetics issues or is the product of some seriously weird artificial behavior.

Not impossible. There could still be things like duplication errors that could 'break' one copy of the wizard gene. The rate would be fairly low but still detectable over a wizarding population in the tens or hundreds of thousands.

It's not out of question that squibs married into the muggle population and passed down their wizard gene. There are a bit less then 700,000 births in the UK every year, and only single digits of muggleborns. I'm not a statistician but I'd guess that's actually low.

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Jul 13, 2012

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Chapter 24: Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis

aka MAXIMUM :smuggo:

The next morning, Draco is nervously sitting in the Great Hall.

quote:

Harry Potter came into sight. His face was carefully neutral, but his blue-trimmed robes looked oddly askew, as if they hadn't been put on quite right -

"Your hand," Draco said without thinking about it at all.

Harry raised his left arm, as though to look at it himself.

The hand dangled limply from it, like something dead.

"Madam Pomfrey said it's not permanent," Harry said quietly. "She said it should mostly recover by the time classes start tomorrow."

For a single instant the news came as a relief.

And then Draco realized.

"You went to Madam Pomfrey," whispered Draco.

"Of course I did," said Harry Potter, as though stating the obvious. "My hand wasn't working."

It was slowly dawning on Draco what an absolute fool he'd been, far worse than the older Slytherins he'd chewed out.

He'd just taken for granted that no one would go to the authorities when a Malfoy did something to them. That no one would want Lucius Malfoy's eye on them, ever.

But Harry Potter wasn't a frightened little Hufflepuff trying to stay out of the game. He was already playing it, and Father's eye was already on him.

"What else did Madam Pomfrey say?" said Draco, his heart in his throat.

"Professor Flitwick said that the spell cast on my hand had been a Dark torture hex and extremely serious business, and that refusing to say who did it was absolutely unacceptable."

Harry covers for Draco and Dumbledore covers for Harry, but Harry makes it clear that this is the only time he can wave off torture.

quote:

Father had warned Draco against people like this, people who could ruin you and still be so likable that it was hard to hate them properly.

"After which," Harry said, "the Headmaster told Professor Flitwick that this was, indeed, a secret and delicate matter of which he had already been informed, and that he did not think pressing it at this time would help me or anyone. Professor Flitwick started to say something about the Headmaster's usual plotting going much too far, and I had to interrupt at that point and explain that it had been my own idea and not anything the Headmaster forced me into, so Professor Flitwick spun around and started lecturing me, and the Headmaster interrupted him and said that as the Boy-Who-Lived I was doomed to have weird and dangerous adventures so I was safer if I got into them on purpose instead of waiting for them to happen by accident, and that was when Professor Flitwick threw up his little hands and started shrieking in a high-pitched voice at both of us about how he didn't care what we were cooking up together, but this wasn't ever to happen again for as long as I was in Ravenclaw House or he would have me thrown out and I could go to Gryffindor which was where all this Dumbledoring belonged -"

Harry was making it very hard for Draco to hate him.

Umm... is Harriezer's babbling supposed to be likable? Is there any evidence that anyone besides the Weasley twins actually likes him?

quote:

"Why... didn't you?"

Harry walked over to the window, into the small beam of sunlight shining into the alcove, and turned his head outward, toward the green grounds of Hogwarts. The brightness shone on him, on his robes, on his face.

"Why didn't I?" Harry said. His voice caught. "I guess because I just couldn't get angry at you. I knew I'd hurt you first. I won't even call it fair, because what I did to you was worse than what you did to me."

...

"Even so," Harry said, and now his voice was lower, almost a whisper, "please don't do that again, Draco. It hurt, and I'm not sure I could forgive you a second time. I'm not sure I'd be able to want to."

Draco just didn't get it.

Was Harry trying to be friends with him?

There was no way Harry Potter could be dumb enough to believe that was still possible after what he'd done.

I don't know, I can believe Harriezer is that dumb. I know that pointing the finger wouldn't push either Malfroy out from the table considering what Lucius could talk his way out of. However, it would give them a serious black eye. They're already your committed enemies. It's not like Lucius would be baited into drastic, obvious action based on this provocation. Not taking this opportunity and insisting on a ridiculous gamble of secular conversion only makes Harry's situation worse. This would be fine for a tragic work, but not one where your main character eventually becomes an immortal wizard prince.

quote:

But then Draco didn't understand what else Harry could be trying.

And a strange thought came to Draco then, something Harry had kept talking about yesterday.

And the thought was: Test it.

You're awakened as a scientist now, Harry had said, and even if you never learn to use your power, you'll always, be looking, for ways, to test, your beliefs... Those ominous words, spoken in gasps of agony, had kept running through Draco's mind.

If Harry was pretending to be the repentant friend who had accidentally hurt someone...

"You planned what you did to me!" Draco said, managing to put a note of accusation in his voice. "You didn't do it because you got angry, you did it because you wanted to!"

I thought I abused commas. When did Harry ever sound angry?

Harry makes his pitch that knowing the truth is in Draco's best interest, but Draco still has doubts.

quote:

"What was your plan?"

"Well," Harry said, "you're Lucius's heir, and believe it or not, Dumbledore thinks I belong to him. So we could grow up and fight their battles with each other. Or we could do something else."

Slowly, Draco's mind wrapped around this. "You want to provoke a fight to the finish between them, then seize power after they're both exhausted." Draco felt cold dread in his chest. He would have to try and stop that no matter the cost to himself -

But Harry shook his head. "Stars above, no! "

"No...?"

"You wouldn't go along with that and neither would I," said Harry. "This is our world, we don't want to break it. But imagine, say, Lucius thought the Conspiracy was your tool and you were on his side, Dumbledore thought the Conspiracy was my tool and I was on his side, Lucius thought that you'd turned me and Dumbledore believed the Conspiracy was mine, Dumbledore thought that I'd turned you and Lucius believed the Conspiracy was yours, and so they both helped us out but only in ways that the other one wouldn't notice."

Draco did not have to fake being speechless.

Father had once taken him to see a play called The Tragedy of Light, about {Death Note}.

Afterward, Father had asked Draco if he understood why they had gone to see this play.

Draco had said it was to teach him to be as cunning as Light and Lawliet when he grew up.

Father had said that Draco couldn't possibly be more wrong, and pointed out that while Lawliet had cleverly concealed his face there had been no good reason for him to tell Light his name. Father had then gone on to demolish almost every part of the play, while Draco listened with his eyes growing wider and wider. And Father had finished by saying that plays like this were always unrealistic, because if the playwright had known what someone actually as smart as Light would actually do, the playwright would have tried to take over the world himself instead of just writing plays about it.

That was when Father had told Draco about the Rule of Three, which was that any plot which required more than three different things to happen would never work in real life.

Father had further explained that since only a fool would attempt a plot that was as complicated as possible, the real limit was two.

Draco couldn't even find words to describe the sheer gargantuan unworkability of Harry's master plan.

But it was just the sort of mistake you would make if you didn't have any mentors and thought you were clever and had learned about plotting by watching plays.

The "Rule of Three" here has gotten traction in the fanfiction community. I see it pop up from time to time. Yudkowsky does have some clever ideas when he's not going on about subjects he barely understands.

When confronted with Harry's latest round of insanity, Draco resolves to smile, nod, and keep a hidden knife ready.

quote:

"I know that I've abused our friendship terribly," Harry said finally. "But please realize, Draco, that in the end, I just wanted the two of us to find the truth together. Is that something you can forgive?"

A fork with two paths, but with only one path easy to go back on later if Draco changed his mind...

"I guess I understand what you were trying to do," Draco lied, "so yes."

Harry's eyes lit up. "I'm glad to hear that, Draco," he said softly.

The two students stood in that alcove, Harry still dipped in the lone sunbeam, Draco in shadow.

And Draco realized with a note of horror and despair, that although it was a terrifying fate indeed to be Harry's friend, Harry now had so many different avenues for threatening Draco that being his enemy would be even worse.

Not really? By not turning you in right away Harry has pretty much whiffed on his best opportunity. Get your father to buy you a new wand and you're in the clear.

Harry asks for some money and Draco agrees to loan him some. They decide they can't take in new members to their secret club.

quote:

"Because I don't know enough science," Draco said, carefully keeping his voice neutral.

Harry shook his head at that. "The problem isn't that you're ignorant of specific science things like deoxyribonucleic acid. That wouldn't stop you from being my equal. The problem is that you aren't trained in the methods of rationality, the deeper secret knowledge behind how all those discoveries got made in the first place. I'll try to teach you those, but they're a lot harder to learn. Think of what we did yesterday, Draco. Yes, you did some of the work. But I was the only one in control. You answered some of the questions. I asked all of them. You helped push. I did the steering by myself. And without the methods of rationality, Draco, you can't possibly steer the Conspiracy where it needs to go."

"I see," said Draco, his voice sounding disappointed.

Harry's voice tried to gentle itself even more. "I'll try to respect your expertise, Draco, about things like people stuff. But you need to respect my expertise too, and there's just no way you could be my equal when it comes to steering the Conspiracy. You've only been a scientist for one day, you know one secret about deoxyribonucleic acid, and you aren't trained in any of the methods of rationality."

"I understand," said Draco.

And he did.

People stuff, Harry had said. Seizing control of the Conspiracy probably wouldn't even be difficult. And afterward, he would kill Harry Potter just to be sure -

The memory rose up in Draco of how sick inside it had felt last night, knowing Harry was screaming.

Draco thought some more bad words.

Fine. He wouldn't kill Harry. Harry had been raised by Muggles, it wasn't his fault he was insane.

Instead, Harry would live on, just so that Draco could tell him that it had all been for Harry's own good, really, he ought to be grateful -

And with a sudden twitch of surprised pleasure, Draco realized that it actually was for Harry's own good. If Harry tried to carry out his plan of playing Dumbledore and Father for fools, he would die.

Harry will worry about the nonsense psychobabble, and Draco is in charge of the people. How is it that Harriezer has read deep psychological studies but never heard of Mao or Stalin?

Draco plans for the inevitable backstab.

quote:

...unless all that was exactly what Harry wanted Draco to do as part of some even larger plot which Draco would play right into by trying to foil this one, Harry might even know that his plan was unworkable, it might have no purpose except luring Draco to thwart it -

No. That way lay madness. There had to be a limit. The Dark Lord himself hadn't been that twisty. That sort of thing didn't happen in real life, only in Father's silly bedtime stories about foolish gargoyles who always ended up furthering the hero's plans every time they tried to stop him.

And now we have to imagine Lucius as a secret animation nerd.

Harriezer, in the mean time, is smirking to himself about how insufferably clever all this is.

quote:

{B}eside Draco, Harry walked along with a smile on his face, thinking about the evolutionary origins of human intelligence.

...

It really made you appreciate what millions of years of hominids trying to outwit each other - an evolutionary arms race without limit - had led to in the way of increased mental capacity.

This bit of "science" doesn't warrant a separate examination, since evolutionary psychology is unverifiable conjecture at best.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

Liquid Communism posted:

I can't believe you let this blatantly racist poo poo fly under the radar.

Added Space posted:

Starting by citing foreigners and Jews as superior students is not exactly promising, but at this point we just have to accept our main character has some socially inappropriate beliefs.

Looks like someone has a case of selective reading bias. :colbert: It's already been established that this character is a mild racist, I'm not going to flip out every time he says something a little stupid.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Chapter 25: Hold Off on Proposing Solutions

HPMOR posted:

Note: Since the science in this story is usually all correct, I include a warning that in Ch. 22-25 Harry overlooks many possibilities, the most important of which is that there are lots of magical genes but they're all on one chromosome (which wouldn't happen naturally, but the chromosome might have been engineered). In this case, the inheritance pattern would be Mendelian, but the magical chromosome could still be degraded by chromosomal crossover with its nonmagical homologue. (Harry has read about Mendel and chromosomes in science history books, but he hasn't studied enough actual genetics to know about chromosomal crossover. Hey, he's only eleven.) However, although a modern science journal would find a lot more nits to pick, everything Harry presents as strong evidence is in fact strong evidence - the other possibilities are improbable.

Welp. Make of that what you will. Anyone want to fact check this one?

For some reason this chapter is split up into "Acts" that are listed in random order. Last chapter was Act 3. gently caress this postmodern, out of place nonsense, I'm listing them in order.

Act 1:

quote:

"A reason? " said the old wizard. He restrained the fury from his face. The boy before him had been the victim, and certainly did not need to be frightened any further. "There is nothing that can excuse -"

"What I did to him was worse."

The old wizard stiffened in sudden horror. "Harry, what have you done? "

"I tricked Draco into believing that I'd tricked him into participating in a ritual that sacrificed his belief in blood purism. And that meant he couldn't be a Death Eater when he grew up. He'd lost everything, Headmaster."

There was a long quiet in the office, broken only by the tiny puffs and whistles of the fiddly things, which after enough time had come to seem like silence.

"Dear me," said the old wizard, "I do feel silly. And here I was expecting you might try to redeem the heir of Malfoy by, say, showing him true friendship and kindness."

"Ha! Yeah, like that would have worked."

The old wizard sighed. This was taking it too far. "Tell me, Harry. Did it even occur to you that there was something incongruous about setting out to redeem someone through lies and trickery?"

"I did it without telling any direct lies, and since we're talking about Draco Malfoy here, I think the word you're looking for is congruous." The boy looked rather smug.

The old wizard shook his head in despair. "And this is the hero. We're all doomed."

I am moderately curious what Harry thinks 'redeem' means in this context. There's nothing suggesting he wants Draco to be more moral or ethical.

Act 2:

Harry is contemplating genetics and his Wizard Gene hypothesis.

quote:

Magic came from somewhere else.

...

And for some reason the Source of Magic was paying attention to a particular DNA marker among individuals who were ordinary ape-descended humans in every other way.

...

If magic had been like that, a big complex adaptation with lots of necessary genes, then a wizard mating with a Muggle would have resulted in a child with only half those parts and half the machine wouldn't do much. And so there would have been no Muggleborns, ever. Even if all the pieces had individually gotten into the Muggle gene pool, they'd never reassemble all in one place to form a wizard.

There hadn't been some genetically isolated valley of humans that had stumbled onto an evolutionary pathway leading to sophisticated magical sections of the brain. That complex genetic machinery, if wizards interbred with Muggles, would never have reassembled into Muggleborns.

So however your genes made you a wizard, it wasn't by containing the blueprints for complicated machinery.

That was the other reason Harry had guessed the Mendelian pattern would be there. If magical genes weren't complicated, why would there be more than one?

That question seems perilously close to affirming the consequent. Harry is falling into the trap he warned Hermione about on the train, where he's so in favor of his pet theory that he's looking only for things that confirm it.

quote:

And yet magic itself seemed pretty complicated. A door-locking spell would prevent the door from opening and prevent you from Transfiguring the hinges and resist Finite Incantatem and Alohomora. Many elements all pointing in the same direction: you could call that goal-orientation, or in simpler language, purposefulness.

There were only two known causes of purposeful complexity. Natural selection, which produced things like butterflies. And intelligent engineering, which produced things like cars.

Magic didn't seem like something that had self-replicated into existence. Spells were purposefully complicated, but not, like a butterfly, complicated for the purpose of making copies of themselves. Spells were complicated for the purpose of serving their user, like a car.

Some intelligent engineer, then, had created the Source of Magic, and told it to pay attention to a particular DNA marker.



Or rather, Atlantis. They must have made the source of magic and programmed it to act the way that it did.

quote:

The chain of logic was inexorable.

And it led inevitably toward a single final conclusion.

The ancient forebears of the wizards, thousands of years earlier, had told the Source of Magic to only levitate things if you said...

'Wingardium Leviosa.'

Harry slumped over at the breakfast table, resting his forehead wearily on his right hand.

Harriezer is overwhelmed by the scope of this problem and decides he should concentrate on immortality first.

quote:

"Excuse me," said an expected voice from behind him in very unexpected tones. "At your convenience, Mr. Malfoy requests the favor of a conversation."

Harry did not choke on his breakfast cereal. Instead he turned around and beheld Mr. Crabbe.

"Excuse me," said Harry. "Don't you mean 'Da boss wants ta talk wid youse?'"

Mr. Crabbe didn't look happy. "Mr. Malfoy instructed me to speak properly."

"I can't hear you," Harry said. "You're not speaking properly." He turned back to his bowl of tiny blue crystal snowflakes and deliberately ate another spoonful.

"Da boss wants to talk with youse," came a threatening voice from behind him. "Ya'd better come see him if ya know what's good for ya."

There. Now everything was going according to plan.

Never, EVER deny Harry the pleasure of reducing people to stereotypes. It's the only way he can relate to them.

Act 3: :smuggo:

Act 4:

Harry meets with the Weasley twins to commission them for a prank. Lee Jordan shows himself as the smartest person we've seen so far by bailing immediately. The idea is to gaslight Rita Skeeter into writing a bad story to discredit her. To be fair, Harry has been in the magical world for less then a month and probably doesn't realize she's already a tabloid sensationalist.

quote:

"I can't think of anything," said George.

"Neither can I," said Fred. "Sorry."

Harry stared at them.

And then Harry began to explain how you went about thinking of things.

It had been known to take longer than two seconds, said Harry.

You never called any question impossible, said Harry, until you had taken an actual clock and thought about it for five minutes, by the motion of the minute hand. Not five minutes metaphorically, five minutes by a physical clock.

And furthermore, Harry said, his voice emphatic and his right hand thumping hard on the floor, you did not start out immediately looking for solutions.

Harry then launched into an explanation of a test done by someone named Norman Maier, who was something called an organizational psychologist, and who'd asked two different sets of problem-solving groups to tackle a problem.

The problem, Harry said, had involved three employees doing three jobs. The junior employee wanted to just do the easiest job. The senior employee wanted to rotate between jobs, to avoid boredom. An efficiency expert had recommended giving the junior person the easiest job and the senior person the hardest job, which would be 20% more productive.

One set of problem-solving groups had been given the instruction "Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any."

The other set of problem-solving groups had been given no instructions. And those people had done the natural thing, and reacted to the presence of a problem by proposing solutions. And people had gotten attached to those solutions, and started fighting about them, and arguing about the relative importance of freedom versus efficiency and so on.

The first set of problem-solving groups, the ones given instructions to discuss the problem first and then solve it, had been far more likely to hit upon the solution of letting the junior employee keep the easiest job and rotating the other two people between the other two jobs, for what the expert's data said would be a 19% improvement.

Starting out by looking for solutions was taking things entirely out of order. Like starting a meal with dessert, only bad.

(Harry also quoted someone named Robyn Dawes as saying that the harder a problem was, the more likely people were to try to solve it immediately.)

Good advice and decent social psychology. However, the author should have picked a better subject. Fred and George are some of the most elaborate and creative planners in canon, and here they're just tossed under the Knight Bus to give Harriezer yet another chance to exposit at the audience.

Harry gives them the stack of money he got from Draco and tells them not to involve Quirrell. They immediately decide to start a hit piece of Quirrell and move on to planning what they'll do for Harry.

Act 5:

Fred and George are going to meet with their supplier, Mr. Ambrosius Flume, at Honeyduke's.

quote:

"Still on the fritz," said George.

"Both, or -"

"Intermittent one fixed itself again. Other one's same as ever."

The Map was an extraordinarily powerful artifact, capable of tracking every sentient being on the school grounds, in real time, by name. Almost certainly, it had been created during the original raising of Hogwarts. It was not good that errors were starting to pop up. Chances were that no one except Dumbledore could fix it if it was broken.

And the Weasley twins weren't about to turn the Map over to Dumbledore. It would have been an unforgivable insult to the Marauders - the four unknowns who'd managed to steal part of the Hogwarts security system, something probably forged by Salazar Slytherin himself, and twist it into a tool for student pranking.

I have no clue what they're talking about.

Act 6:

Rita Skeeter has published her hit piece on Quirrell and is on to the next scandal when she runs into the man himself in a dark alley. He demands she print a retraction but she tells him off.

quote:

Quirrell stared at her for a moment.

Then he smiled.

"Miss Skeeter," said Quirrell, "I had hoped to find some lever that would prove persuasive. Yet I find that I cannot deny myself the pleasure of simply crushing you."

FORESHADO yeah he's going to murder her and this entire plot thread goes nowhere.

Added Space fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Jan 6, 2017

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Chapter 26: Noticing Confusion

Here's another subject that I find myself agreeing with. As I've grown in critical thinking, I've found that I've become less likely to immediately accept any explanation given. It's a good habit to question how sensible the things you hear and experience are.

HPMOR posted:

Professor Quirrell's office hours consisted of 11:40 to 11:55 AM on Thursday. That was for all of his students in all years. It cost a Quirrell point just to knock on the door, and if he didn't think your reason was worth his time, you would lose another fifty.

:psyduck: And Harry complained about Snape being a bad teacher? I guess this is neglectful instead of actively malicious, but still.

Quirrell is in a bad mood and Harry offers to cheer him up.

quote:

"A sixth-year Gryffindor cast a curse at one of my more promising students, a sixth-year Slytherin."

Harry swallowed. "What... sort of curse?"

And the fury on Professor Quirrell's face was no longer contained. "Why bother to ask an unimportant question like that, Mr. Potter? Our friend the sixth-year Gryffindor did not think it was important!"

"Are you serious? " Harry said before he could stop himself.

"No, I'm in a terrible mood today for no particular reason. Yes I'm serious, you fool! He didn't know. He actually didn't know. I didn't believe it until the Aurors confirmed it under Veritaserum. He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did."

"You don't mean," Harry said, "that he was mistaken about what it did, that he somehow read the wrong spell description -"

"All he knew was that it was meant to be directed at an enemy. He knew that was all he knew."

And that had been enough to cast the spell. "I do not understand how anything with that small a brain could walk upright."

"Indeed, Mr. Potter," said Professor Quirrell.

There was a pause. Professor Quirrell leaned forward and picked up the silver inkwell from his desk, turning it around in his hands, staring at it as though wondering how he could go about torturing an inkwell to death.

"Was the sixth-year Slytherin seriously hurt?" said Harry.

"Yes."

"Was the sixth-year Gryffindor raised by Muggles?"

"Yes."

"Is Dumbledore refusing to expel him because the poor boy didn't know?"

Professor Quirrell's hands whitened on the inkwell. "Do you have a point, Mr. Potter, or are you just stating the obvious? "

"Professor Quirrell," said Harry gravely, "all the Muggle-raised students in Hogwarts need a safety lecture in which they are told the things so ridiculously obvious that no wizardborn would ever think to mention them. Don't cast curses if you don't know what they do, if you discover something dangerous don't tell the world about it, don't brew high-level potions without supervision in a bathroom, the reason why there are underage magic laws, all the basics."

"Why?" said Professor Quirrell. "Let the stupid ones die before they breed."

"If you don't mind losing a few sixth-year Slytherins along with them."

This is a reference to a scene in Half Blood Prince where Harry casts a spell he learned from Snape's old schoolbook without knowing what it does. This might undermine the whole idea of the Interdict of Merlin, but the interdict only prevents "powerful" magic from being written down and that's never defined. This act along with Hermione brewing polyjuice in the loo are called out as stupid in canon, so I don't know what the point of referencing them here is.

quote:

The inkwell caught fire in Professor Quirrell's hands and burned with a terrible slowness, hideous black-orange flames tearing at the metal and seeming to take tiny bites from it, the silver twisting as it melted, as though it were trying and failing to escape. There was a tinny shrieking sound, as though the metal were screaming.

"I suppose you are right," Professor Quirrell said with a resigned smile. "I shall design a lecture to ensure that Muggleborns who are too stupid to live do not take anyone valuable with them as they depart."

The inkwell went on screaming and burning in Professor Quirrell's hands, tiny droplets of metal, still on fire, now dripping to the desk, as though the inkwell were crying.

"You're not running away," observed Professor Quirrell.

Harry opened his mouth -

"If you're about to say you're not scared of me," said Professor Quirrell, "don't."

"You are the scariest person I know," Harry said, "and one of the top reasons for that is your control. I simply can't imagine hearing that you'd hurt someone you had not made a deliberate decision to hurt."

The fire in Professor Quirrell's hands winked out, and he carefully placed the ruined inkwell on his desk. "You say the nicest things, Mr. Potter. Have you been taking lessons in flattery? From, perhaps, Mr. Malfoy?"

Harry kept his expression blank, and realized one second too late that it might as well have been a signed confession. Professor Quirrell didn't care what your expression looked like, he cared which states of mind made it likely.

"I see," said Professor Quirrell. "Mr. Malfoy is a useful friend to have, Mr. Potter, and there is much he can teach you, but I hope you have not made the mistake of trusting him with too many confidences."

"He knows nothing which I fear becoming known," said Harry.

I think it's nice that these two horrible sociopaths have formed a bond. If nothing else they surely deserve each other.

The real reason Harry came by is to schedule a man date on Sunday to look for Occlumency teachers. Sunday morning comes with everyone giggling about a story about Harry in the paper. He's his usual peevish self, shouting at everyone until he manages to snag a copy from a Diagon Alley bookstore.

quote:

The headline read:

HARRY POTTER
SECRETLY BETROTHED
TO GINEVRA WEASLEY

Harry stared.

He lifted the newspaper off the counter, softly, reverently, like he was handling an original Escher artwork, and unbent it to read...

...about the evidence that had convinced Rita Skeeter.

...and some interesting further details.

...and yet more evidence.

Fred and George had cleared it with their sister first, surely? Yes, of course they had. There was a picture of Ginevra Weasley sighing longingly over what Harry could see, looking closely, was a photo of himself. That had to have been staged.

But how on Earth...?

Quirrell comes by and makes a big scene about how shocking this story is and how it absolutely must be true. Harry just smirks and says he contracted the work to an unnamed student.

I know this fic changes a lot of people, did he make Rita Skeeter a serious and hard nosed journalist and forget to mention it? Last we saw her she was chasing down a rumor about an auror dating her younger coworker, not exactly Pulitzer material.I'm going to be charitable again and say this is an example of the chapter theme and we the audience should be suspicious over how credulous Quirrell is being.

quote:

"I have a feeling," Harry said finally, "that we're coming at this from the wrong angle. There's a tale I once heard about some students who came into a physics class, and the teacher showed them a large metal plate near a fire. She ordered them to feel the metal plate, and they felt that the metal nearer the fire was cooler, and the metal further away was warmer. And she said, write down your guess for why this happens. So some students wrote down 'because of how the metal conducts heat', and some students wrote down 'because of how the air moves', and no one said 'this just seems impossible', and the real answer was that before the students came into the room, the teacher turned the plate around."

"Interesting," said Professor Quirrell. "That does sound similar. Is there a moral?"

"That your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality," said Harry. "If you're equally good at explaining any outcome, you have zero knowledge. The students thought they could use words like 'because of heat conduction' to explain anything, even a metal plate being cooler on the side nearer the fire. So they didn't notice how confused they were, and that meant they couldn't be more confused by falsehood than by truth. If you tell me that the centaurs were under the Imperius Curse, I still have the feeling of something being not quite right. I notice that I'm still confused even after hearing your explanation."

"Hm," said Professor Quirrell.

They walked on further.

"I don't suppose," said Harry, "that it's possible to actually swap people into alternate universes? Like, this isn't our own Rita Skeeter, or they temporarily sent her somewhere else?"

"If that was possible," Professor Quirrell said, his voice rather dry, "would I still be here? "

And just as they were almost to the huge white front of the Gringotts building, Professor Quirrell said:

"Ah. Of course. I see it now. Let me guess, the Weasley twins?"

"What? " said Harry, his voice going up another octave in pitch. "How? "

You said 'they', Harry, and then confirmed his speculation with your reaction. This is like something out of a cartoon.

Also, Harry, you said your number one priority was to investigate mental magic, you've read a book about Occlumency, and yet you haven't heard of memory charms or confundus yet? Rita Skeeter's memory represents a single point of failure that explains everything she wrote. Everything in this chapter is unlikely. I'm confused if this is a brilliant act of metanarrative or just coincidence.

They head into Gringott's

quote:

The first part of the mission, to find an Occlumency instructor, had been a success. Professor Quirrell, smiling evilly, had told Griphook to recommend the best he knew, and not worry about the expense, since Dumbledore was paying it; and the goblin had smiled in return. There might have been a certain amount of smiling on Harry's part as well.

The second part of the plan had been a complete failure.

Harry was not allowed to take money out of his vault without Headmaster Dumbledore or some other school official present, and Professor Quirrell had not been given the vault key. Harry's Muggle parents could not authorize it because they were Muggles, and Muggles had around the same legal standing as children or kittens: they were cute, so if you tortured them in public you could get arrested, but they weren't people. Some reluctant provision had been made for recognizing the parents of Muggleborns as human in a limited sense, but Harry's adoptive parents did not fall into that legal category.

It seemed that Harry was effectively an orphan in the eyes of the wizarding world. As such, the Headmaster of Hogwarts, or his designees within the school system, were Harry's guardians until he graduated. Harry could breathe without Dumbledore's permission, but only so long as the Headmaster did not specifically prohibit it.

Harry had then asked if he could simply tell Griphook how to diversify his investments beyond stacks of gold coins sitting in his vault.

Griphook had stared blankly and asked what 'diversify' meant.

Banks, it seemed, did not make investments. Banks stored your gold coins in secure vaults for an annual fee.

The wizarding world did not have a concept of stock. Or equity. Or corporations. Businesses were run by families out of their personal vaults.

Loans were made by rich people, not banks. Though Gringotts would witness the contract, for a fee, and enforce its collection, for a much larger fee.

Good rich people let their friends borrow money and pay it back whenever. Bad rich people charged you interest.

There was no secondary market in loans.

Evil rich people charged you annual interest rates of at least 20%.

Harry had stood up, turned away, and rested his head against the wall.

Harry had asked if he needed the Headmaster's permission before he could start a bank.

Professor Quirrell had interrupted at this point, saying that it was time for lunch, and swiftly conducted a fuming Harry out of the bronze doors of Gringotts, through Diagon Alley, and to a fine restaurant called Mary's Place, where a room had been reserved for them.

Now, here's a better method of pointing out something silly in the books without seeming mean. Goblin banking practices are absolutely antiquated, and it impacts the original books. There's things like the Weasley twins not being able to get a business loan for their joke shop. The legal status of muggles is a constant point of contention. Maybe Yud blew all of his good ideas in the first few chapters and now has to rely on recycling them for decent content.

Mary's room is a reference to a thought experiment. Raise Mary from birth in a black and white room while teaching her every academic fact about color and how it's perceived. Then, let her out of the room to experience color. The thought experiment argues for 'qualia', that there is a quality to perceptions aside from their factual content.

The room is warded for privacy, but that's not enough for the paranoid Quirrellmort.

quote:

Professor Quirrell then spoke no fewer than four different Charms, none of which Harry recognized.

"Even that does not really suffice," said Professor Quirrell. "If we were doing anything of truly great import, it would be necessary to perform another twenty-three checks besides those. If, say, Rita Skeeter knew or guessed that we would come here, it is possible that she could be in this room wearing the true Cloak of Invisibility. Or she could be an Animagus with a tiny form, perhaps. There are tests to rule out such rare possibilities, but to perform all of them would be arduous. Still, I wonder if I should do them anyway, just so as not to teach you bad habits?" And Professor Quirrell tapped a finger on his cheek, looking abstracted.

He's not saying that for Harry's benefit.

Quirrell goes all "good job son" about putting one over on Rita Skeeter, saying that she has no doubt disappointed Lucius Malfroy and will now have to flee the country. Once again Harry has acted with malicious intent and no thought at all about the consequences, and starts to get nervous once he's called out.

quote:

But she would get fired from her job, of course she would be fired, she might have children going through Hogwarts for all Harry knew, and now it was worse, much worse -

"Is Lucius going to have her killed?" Harry said in a barely audible voice. Somewhere in his head, the Sorting Hat was screaming at him.

Professor Quirrell smiled dryly. "If you have not dealt with journalists before, take it from me that the world gets a little brighter every time one dies."

Harry jumped out of his chair with a convulsive movement, he had to find Rita Skeeter and warn her before it was too late -

"Sit down," Professor Quirrell said sharply. "No, Lucius won't kill her. But Lucius makes life extremely unpleasant for those who serve him ill. Miss Skeeter will flee and start her life over with a new name. Sit down, Mr. Potter; there is nothing you can do at this point, and you have a lesson to learn."

Harry sat down, slowly. There was a disappointed, annoyed look on Professor Quirrell's face that was doing more to stop him than the words.

"There are times," Professor Quirrell said, his voice cutting, "when I worry that your brilliant Slytherin mind is simply wasted on you. Repeat after me. Rita Skeeter was a vile, disgusting woman."

"Rita Skeeter was a vile, disgusting woman," Harry said. He wasn't comfortable saying it, but there didn't seem to be any other possible actions, none at all.

"Rita Skeeter tried to destroy my reputation, but I executed an ingenious plan and destroyed her reputation first."

"Rita Skeeter challenged me. She lost the game, and I won."

"Rita Skeeter was an obstacle to my future plans. I had no choice but to deal with her if I wanted those plans to succeed."

"Rita Skeeter was my enemy."

"I cannot possibly get anything done in life if I am not willing to defeat my enemies."

"I have defeated one of my enemies today."

"I am a good boy."

"I deserve a special reward."

We've got a Twilight situation on our hands. If the author would just acknowledge that their lead was a horrible, irresponsible person the story would be much more interesting. We'd have a great villain/minion moment here. What we end up with is something cultish and with pedophilic undertones.

Quirrell wants to give Harry a stolen book, and Harry is reluctant to take it.

quote:

"What is it?" breathed Harry.

"A diary," said Professor Quirrell.

"Whose?"

"That of a famous person." Professor Quirrell was smiling broadly.

...

Harry's mouth opened, then halted that way, an agonized look on his face.

Professor Quirrell seemed to be quite enjoying himself. He had balanced the book on its corner, on one finger, and was keeping it upright while humming a little tune.

There came a knock at the door.

The book vanished back into Professor Quirrell's robes, and he rose up from his chair. Professor Quirrell started to walk over to the door -

- and staggered, suddenly lurching into the wall.

"It's all right," said Professor Quirrell's voice, which suddenly sounded a lot weaker than usual. "Sit down, Mr. Potter, it's just a dizzy spell. Sit down."

This moment of weakness and the arrival of lunch is enough to soften Harry and he takes the book.

quote:

Harry opened the book with ingrained, instinctive care. The pages seemed too thick, with a texture unlike either Muggle paper or wizarding parchment. And the contents were...

...blank?

"Am I supposed to be seeing -"

"Look nearer the beginning," said Professor Quirrell, and Harry (again with that helpless, ingrained care) turned a block of pages back.

The lettering was obviously handwritten, and very hard to read, but Harry thought the words might be Latin.

"What is this?" said Harry.

"That," said Professor Quirrell, "is a record of the magical researches of a Muggleborn who never came to Hogwarts. He refused his letter, and conducted his own small investigations, which never did get very far without a wand. From the description on the placard, I expect that his name bears rather more significance to you than to me. That, Harry Potter, is the diary of Roger Bacon."

Harry almost fainted.

Nestled up against the wall, where Professor Quirrell had stumbled, glistened the crushed remains of a beautiful blue beetle.

It took rereading this chapter right now for me to realize that this was intended to be a plot twist. We were supposed to think he was offering up the horcrux from Chamber of Secrets. This explains why Harry never seems to read this very cool sounding book and the story completely forgets about it. In a bit of mirroring, we see Quirrelmort making another horcrux using Skeeter's death.

Skeeter's murder is telegraphed very well. She was investigating Mary's Room when she ran into Quirrell last chapter; no doubt he was the one who tipped her off to it. He used an ambiguous phrase to signal how she would die. Her animagus form is referenced in the chapter to remind the audience. We see a smooth villain getting away with murder in style, and his young victim being none the wiser. Harry is really dropping the ball, showing that that he can't demonstrate intelligence by putting facts together. He can only succeed when the author passes him notes.

Added Space fucked around with this message at 07:49 on Jan 7, 2017

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Chapter 27: Empathy

I think I'm done complimenting this fic for a while. This chapter starts many insufferable plot arcs that last for a long drat time.

In the chapter opening Harry is asking the twins how they pulled off their prank. They refuse to answer him, then remind each other that they got memory wiped. They also don't make the obvious leap that someone altered Skeeter's memories.

HPMOR posted:

Unsurprisingly, Rita Skeeter and the editor of the Daily Prophet had both vanished and were probably in another country by now. They would've liked to be able to tell their family about that part. Dad would have congratulated them, they thought, after Mum had finished killing them and Ginny had burned the remains.

But everything was still all right, they'd tell Dad someday, and meanwhile...

...meanwhile Dumbledore had happened to sneeze while passing them in the hallway, and a small package had accidentally dropped out of his pockets, and inside had been two matched wardbreaker's monocles of incredible quality. The Weasley twins had tested their new monocles on the "forbidden" third-floor corridor, making a quick trip to the magic mirror and back, and they hadn't been able to see all the detection webs clearly, but the monocles had shown a lot more than they'd seen the first time.

Of course they would have to be very careful never to get caught with the monocles in their possession, or they would end up in the Headmaster's office getting a stern lecture and maybe even threats of expulsion.

It was good to know that not everyone who got Sorted into Gryffindor grew up to be Professor McGonagall.

This is a densely concentrated ball of stupid. I'm excusing Dumbledore, who has good reasons for everything he does. Otherwise, I count seven idiots committing an uncountable number of inexplicable actions. You could play along and count for yourself, but that would raise the total to eight idiots.

We then have a hard scene transition to Harry's Occlumency lessons.

quote:

A human mind, Harry's Occlumency book had said, was only exposed to a Legilimens along certain surfaces. If you failed to defend your surfaces, the Legilimens would go through and be able to access any part of you which their own mind was able to comprehend...

...which tended not to be much. Human minds, it seemed, were hard for humans to understand on any level but the shallowest. Harry had wondered if knowing lots of cognitive science could make him an incredibly powerful Legilimens, but repeated experience had finally driven into him the lesson that he needed to get a little less excited in his anticipations about this sort of thing. It wasn't as if any cognitive scientist understood humans well enough to make one.

To learn the counter, Occlumency, the first step was to imagine yourself to be a different person, pretending it as thoroughly as you could, immersing yourself entirely in that alternate persona. You wouldn't always have to do that, but in the beginning, it was how you learned where your surfaces were. The Legilimens would try to read you, and you would feel it happening if you paid close enough attention, you would sense them trying to enter. And your job was to make sure that they always touched your imaginary persona and not the real one.

When you were good enough at that, you could imagine being a very simple sort of person, pretend to be a rock, and make a habit of leaving the pretense in place where all your surfaces were. That was a standard Occlumency barrier. Pretending to be a rock was hard to learn, but easy to do afterward, and the exposed surface of a mind was much shallower than its interior, so with enough practice you could keep it up as a background habit.

Or if you were a perfect Occlumens, you could race ahead of any probes, answering queries as fast as they were asked, so that the Legilimens would enter through your surfaces and see a mind indistinguishable from whoever you were pretending to be.

Even the best Legilimens could be fooled that way. If a perfect Occlumens claimed they were dropping their Occlumency barriers, there was no way to know if they were lying. Worse, you might not know you were dealing with a perfect Occlumens. They were rare, but the fact that they existed meant you couldn't trust Legilimency on anyone.

It was a sad commentary on how little human beings understood each other, how little any wizard comprehended the depths lying beneath the mind's surface, that you could fool the best human telepaths by pretending to be someone else.

But then human beings only understood each other in the first place by pretending. You didn't make predictions about people by modeling the hundred trillion synapses in their brain as separate objects. Ask the best social manipulator on Earth to build you an Artificial Intelligence from scratch, and they'd just give you a dumb look. You predicted people by telling your brain to act like theirs. You put yourself in their place. If you wanted to know what an angry person would do, you activated your own brain's anger circuitry, and whatever that circuitry output, that was your prediction. What did the neural circuitry for anger actually look like inside? Who knew? The best social manipulator on Earth might not know what neurons were, and neither might the best Legilimens.

I've only had entry level psychological training, but this certainly sounds like bullshit. If people were only capable of guessing what other people would do based on their own reactions, social manipulators would not get very far at all.

quote:

And then Harry turned into someone else entirely, someone who had seemed appropriate to the occasion.

...in a white room, windowless, featureless, sitting before a desk, facing an expressionless man in formal robes of solid black.

Kimball Kinnison regarded the black-robed man who thought he was going to read the mind of a Second-Stage Lensman of the Galactic Patrol.

To say that Kimball Kinnison was confident of the outcome would be an understatement. He had been trained by Mentor of Arisia, the most powerful mind known to this or any other universe, and the mere wizard sitting across from him would see precisely what the Gray Lensman wanted him to see...

...the mind of the boy he was currently disguised as, an innocent child named Harry Potter.

"I'm ready," said Kimball Kinnison in nervous tones that were exactly appropriate for an eleven-year-old boy.

"Legilimens," said the black-robed wizard.

There was a pause.

The black-robed wizard blinked, as if he'd seen something so shocking that it had been enough to make even his eyelids move. His voice wasn't quite toneless as he said, "The Boy-Who-Lived has a mysterious dark side? "

The heat slowly crept up into Harry's cheeks.

...

"Did you feel anything as I read your mind?"

Harry shook his head, now blushing furiously.

"Then pay closer attention next time. The goal is not to create a perfect image on your first day of lessons. The goal is to learn where your surfaces are. Prepare yourself."

Aww, Harry thought he wasn't stupidly overconfident this time. That's almost cute.

More padding and another hard scene change back to Hogwarts. Harriezer is salty due to Quidditch scores being added to the house cup run.

quote:

"We should kill them," Harry said to Hermione, who was walking beside him with an equally offended air.

"Who?" said Hermione. "The Quidditch team?"

"I was thinking of everyone involved in any way with Quidditch anywhere, but the Ravenclaw team would be a start, yes."

Hermione's lips were pursed disapprovingly. "You do know that killing people is wrong, Harry?"

"Yes," Harry said.

"Okay, just checking," Hermione said. "Let's get the Seeker first. I've read some Agatha Christie mysteries, do you know how we can get her onto a train?"

"Two students plotting murder," said a dry voice. "How shocking."

From around a nearby corner strolled a man in lightly spotted robes, his greasy hair falling long and unkempt about his shoulders. Deadly danger seemed to radiate out from him, filling the hallway with improperly mixed potions and accidental falls and people dying in bed of what the Aurors would rule to be natural causes.

Without thinking about it at all, Harry stepped in front of Hermione.

There was an intake of breath from behind him, and then a moment later Hermione brushed past and stepped in front of him. "Run, Harry!" she said. "Boys shouldn't have to be in danger."

I like the Hermione who has dedicated herself to hanging out with Harriezer and endlessly trolling him.

quote:

"I don't suppose you could explain," Severus said dryly, "why the two of you were plotting to murder Cho Chang?"

"I don't suppose you could explain," Harry said dryly, "in your capacity as an official of the Hogwarts school system, why catching a golden mosquito is deemed an academic accomplishment worthy of a hundred and fifty House points?"

A smile crossed Severus's lips. "Dear me, and I thought you were supposed to be perceptive. Are you truly so incapable of understanding your classmates, Potter, or do you dislike them too much to try? If Quidditch scores did not count toward the House Cup then none of them would care about House points at all. It would merely be an obscure contest for students like you and Miss Granger."

It was a shockingly good answer.

And that shock brought Harry's mind fully awake.

In retrospect it shouldn't have been surprising that Severus understood his students, understood them very well indeed.

He had been reading their minds.

And...

...the book said that a successful Legilimens was extremely rare, rarer than a perfect Occlumens, because almost no one had enough mental discipline.

Mental discipline?

Harry had collected stories about a man who routinely lost his temper in class and blew up at young children.

...but this same man, when Harry had spoken of the Dark Lord still being alive, had responded instantly and perfectly - reacting in precisely the way that someone completely ignorant would react.

The man stalked about Hogwarts with the air of an assassin, radiating danger...

...which was exactly not what a real assassin should do. Real assassins should look like meek little accountants until they killed you.

He was the Head of House for proud and aristocratic Slytherin, and he wore a robe with spotted stains from bits of potions and ingredients, which two minutes of magic could have removed.

Harry noticed that he was confused.

And his threat estimate of the Head of House Slytherin shot up astronomically.

He's actually showing respect for someone, and all it took was a offhand comment that "people like sports"? This whole "I know you know I know" nonsense is like the video game logic version of social interaction. Harry even thinks of it in terms of "levels". Quoting from later in this chapter:

quote:

(Professor Quirrell had remarked over their lunch that Harry really needed to conceal his state of mind better than putting on a blank face when someone discussed a dangerous topic, and had explained about one-level deceptions, two-level deceptions, and so on. So either Severus was in fact modeling Harry as a one-level player, which made Severus himself two-level, and Harry's three-level move had been successful; or Severus was a four-level player and wanted Harry to think the deception had been successful. Harry, smiling, had asked Professor Quirrell what level he played at, and Professor Quirrell, also smiling, had responded, One level higher than you.)

It is physically painful to watch these idiots natter at each other.

Snape pulls Harry aside and dangles another chance to gently caress up.

quote:

Severus was watching Harry intently. "You said once in the Headmaster's office that you would not tolerate bullying or abuse. And so I wonder, Harry Potter. Just how much do you resemble your father?"

"Unless we're talking about Michael Verres-Evans," Harry said, "the answer is that I know very little about James Potter."

Severus nodded, as though to himself. "There is a fifth-year Slytherin. A boy named Lesath Lestrange. He is being bullied by Gryffindors. I am... constrained, in my ability to deal with such situations. You could help him, perhaps. If you wished. I am not asking you for a favor, and will not owe you one. It is simply an opportunity to do as you will."

Lesath is the son of Bellatrix, and the Gryffindors are dumb jocks. Snape gives Harry a time and place and we go there to see Lesath dangling out a window. Someone goes to help him - and it turns out to be Neville, who Harry has decided to involve as another misguided attempt to 'fix' him. The bullies are not impressed.

quote:

"I think he's a traitor," said one of the other Gryffindors, and there was a sudden sinking sensation in Neville's stomach.

He'd known it, he'd just known it. Harry Potter had been wrong after all. Bullies wouldn't stop only because Neville Longbottom told them to stop.

The handsome one took a step forward, and the three others followed.

"So that's how it is for you," Neville said, amazed at how steady his voice was. "It doesn't matter to you if it's Lesath Lestrange or Neville Longbottom."

Lesath Lestrange let out a sudden gasp, from where he was lying on the floor.

"Evil is evil," snarled the same boy who'd spoken before, "and if you're friends with evil, you're evil too."

I've been bullied, I've seen other bullied, and I've had to deal with bullies as a teacher. None of them sounded even remotely like this. Bullies are a complex topic, but they are rarely morally zealous crusaders who will attack anyone who questions them. If nothing else people are lazy and will generally back off if someone calls them on their actions. We've swapped genres from mystery to revenge. Harry Potter vs All The Dumb Bullies is a plot cancer that goes nowhere and results in no-one learning any sort of moral lesson.

Neville does a bit of stage acting to "summon" Harry who was waiting in the wings.

quote:

"Ahem," said Harry Potter from behind them, leaning against the wall by the window, in the dead end of the hallway, where nobody could possibly have gotten to without being seen.

If watching people scream always felt this good, Neville could sort of understand why people became bullies.

Harry Potter stalked forward, placing himself between Lesath Lestrange and the others. He swept his icy gaze across the boys in red-trimmed robes, and then his eyes came to rest on the handsome one, the ringleader. "Mr. Carl Sloper," said Harry Potter. "I believe I have comprehended this situation fully. If Lesath Lestrange has ever committed a single evil himself, rather than being born to the wrong parents, the fact is not known to you. If I am mistaken in this, Mr. Sloper, I suggest you inform me at once."

Neville saw the fear and awe on the other boys' faces. He was feeling it himself. Harry had claimed it would all be a trick, but how could it be?

"But he's a Lestrange," said the ringleader.

"He's a boy who lost his parents," Harry Potter said, his voice growing even colder.

This time all three of the other Gryffindors flinched.

This is sort of a good point. Harry and Neville both grew up without their biological parents and have some amount of moral authority here. Of course, they're going to completely ignore that and resolve this through threats.

quote:

"So Lessy snarked to you," said the ringleader coldly.

...

"Are you threatening to snark on us?" said the handsome Gryffindor, his voice trying to be angry, and rather wavering. "Bad things happen to snarkers."

You mean narc, you idiot. "Snark" is a portmanteau of "snide remark" and Harriezer hasn't used snark any time in my memory.

Harry bluffs and blusters until the bullies run off. He and Neville are happy, but Lesath isn't.

quote:

"You think you know how it is?" said Lesath, his voice high and shaking. "You think you know? My parents are in Azkaban, I try not to think about it and they always remind me, they think it's great that Mother is there in the cold and the dark with the Dementors sucking away her life, I wish I was like Harry Potter, at least his parents aren't hurting, my parents are always hurting, every second of every day, I wish I was like you, at least you can see your parents sometimes, at least you know they loved you, if Mother ever loved me the Dementors will have eaten that thought by now -"

Neville's eyes were wide with shock. He hadn't expected this.

Lesath turned to Harry Potter, whose eyes were full of horror.

Lesath flung himself on the floor in front of Harry Potter, touched his forehead to the ground, and whispered, "Help me, Lord."

I... don't even know. Terrible staged incident that relies on Harry not knowing what humans sound like? The author not knowing what people sound like? This whole scene is absurd melodrama.

Harry tries to explain all the stunts he pulled were staged, but Lesath gets pissed, insults him and runs off.

quote:

"He thought I could help him," Harry said, his voice hoarse. "He had hope for the first time in years."

Neville swallowed, and said it. "I'm sorry."

"Wha?" said Harry, sounding totally confused.

"I wasn't grateful when you helped me -"

"Every single thing you said before was completely right," said the Boy-Who-Lived.

"No," Neville said, "it wasn't."

They simultaneously gave brief sad smiles, each condescending to the other.

"I know this wasn't real," said Neville, "I know I couldn't have done anything if you hadn't been here, but thanks for letting me pretend."

"Give me a break," said Harry.

Harry had turned from Neville, and was staring out the window at the gloomy clouds.

A completely ridiculous thought came to Neville. "Are you feeling guilty because you can't get Lesath's parents out of Azkaban?"

"No," said Harry.

A few seconds went by.

"Yes," said Harry.

"You're silly," said Neville.

"I am aware of this," said Harry.

"Do you have to do literally anything anyone asks you?"

The Boy-Who-Lived turned back and looked at Neville again. "Do? No. Feel guilty about not doing? Yes."

Neville was having trouble finding words. "Once the Dark Lord died, Bellatrix Black was literally the most evil person in the entire world and that was before she went to Azkaban. She tortured my mother and father into insanity because she wanted to find out what happened to the Dark Lord -"

"I know," Harry said quietly. "I get that, but -"

"No! You don't! She had a reason for doing that, and my parents were both Aurors! It's not even close to the worst thing she's ever done!" Neville's voice was shaking.

"Even so," said the Boy-Who-Lived, his eyes distant as they stared off into somewhere else, some other place that Neville couldn't imagine. "There might be some incredibly clever solution that makes it possible to save everyone and let them all live happily ever after, and if only I was smart enough I would have thought of it by now -"

"You have problems," said Neville. "You think you ought to be what Lesath Lestrange thinks you are."

"Yeah," said the Boy-Who-Lived, "that pretty much nails it. Every time someone cries out in prayer and I can't answer, I feel guilty about not being God."

Neville didn't quite understand that, but... "That doesn't sound good."

Harry sighed. "I understand that I have a problem, and I know what I need to do to solve it, all right? I'm working on it."

Harry watched Neville leave.

Of course Harry hadn't said what the solution was.

The solution, obviously, was to hurry up and become God.

I'm convinced that Harriezer is against bullies out of jealousy. He wants to be the one with all the power to push people around and force them to do what he thinks is right and just.

Snape rolls in and he and Harry engage in more 'clever' back and forth, until Snape poses a hypothetical.

quote:

"I should like to ask your advice about something," Severus said, his voice casual. "I know of another fifth-year Slytherin who was being bullied by Gryffindors. He was wooing a beautiful Muggleborn girl, who came across him being bullied, and tried to rescue him. And he called her a mudblood, and that was the end for them. He apologized, many times, but she never forgave him. Have you any thoughts for what he could have said or done, to win from her the forgiveness you gave Lestrange?"

"Erm," Harry said, "based on only that information, I'm not sure he was the main one who had a problem. I'd have told him not to date someone that incapable of forgiveness. Suppose they'd gotten married, can you imagine life in that household?"

There was a pause.

"Oh, but she could forgive," Severus said with amusement in his voice. "Why, afterward, she went off and became the girlfriend of the bully. Tell me, why would she forgive the bully, and not the bullied?"

Harry shrugged. "At a wild guess, because the bully had hurt someone else very badly, and the bullied had hurt her just a little, and to her that just felt far more unforgivable somehow. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, was the bully handsome? Or for that matter, rich?"

There was another pause.

"Yes to both," said Severus.

"And there you have it," said Harry. "Not that I've ever been through high school myself, but my books give me to understand that there's a certain kind of teenage girl who'll be outraged by a single insult if the boy is plain or poor, yet who can somehow find room in her heart to forgive a rich and handsome boy his bullying. She was shallow, in other words. Tell whoever it was that she wasn't worthy of him and he needs to get over it and move on and next time date girls who are deep instead of pretty."

There's only one woman in the situation so clearly she's to blame! This is some PUA poo poo right here. "I insulted this bitch and she got all offended, she's so shallow."

quote:

"So," Harry said. "Did I pass your test, whatever it was?"

"I think," Severus said, "that there should be no more conversations between us, Potter, and you would be exceedingly wise never to speak of this one."

Harry blinked. "Would you mind telling me what I did wrong?"

"You offended me," said Severus. "And I no longer trust your cunning."

Harry stared at Severus, taken rather aback.

"But you have given me well-meant advice," said Severus Snape, "and so I will give you true advice in return." His voice was almost perfectly steady. Like a string stretched almost perfectly horizontal, despite the massive weight hanging from its middle, by a million tons of tension pulling at either end. "You almost died today, Potter. In the future, never share your wisdom with anyone unless you know exactly what you are both talking about."

Harry's mind finally made the connection.

"You were that -"

Harry's mouth snapped shut as the almost died part sank in, two seconds too late.

"Yes," said Severus, "I was."

And the terrible tension flooded back into the room like water pressurized at the bottom of the ocean.

Harry couldn't breathe.

Lose. Now.

"I didn't know," Harry whispered. "I'm s-"

"No," said Severus. Just that one word.

Ha! Suck it, dumbass! Continue to not learn the simple lesson to not run your drat mouth.

quote:

"Your books betrayed you, Potter," said Severus, still in that voice stretched tight by a million tons of pull. "They did not tell you the one thing you needed to know. You cannot learn from stories what it is like to lose the one you love. That is something you could never understand without feeling it yourself."

"My father," Harry whispered. It was his best guess, the one thing that might save him. "My father tried to protect you from the bullies."

A ghastly smile stretched across Severus's face, and the man moved toward Harry.

And past him.

"Goodbye, Potter," said Severus, not looking back on his way out. "We shall have little to say to each other from today on."

And at the corner, the man stopped, and without turning, spoke one final time.

"Your father was the bully," said Severus Snape, "and what your mother saw in him was something I never did understand until this day."

He left.

Harry, desperate to think about any other subject than improving his own annoying cocksure behavior, thinks about how his parents were jerks for a moment before settling on Azkaban.

quote:

Lesath would be imagining himself in his mother's place, in the cold and the darkness and the fear, alone with all of her worst memories, even in her dreams, every second of every day.

For an instant Harry imagined his own Mum and Dad in Azkaban with the Dementors sucking out their life, draining away the happy memories of their love for him. Just for an instant, before his imagination blew a fuse and called an emergency shutdown and told him never to imagine that again.

Was it right to do that to anyone, even the second most evil person in the world?

No, said the wisdom of Harry's books, not if there's any other way, any other way at all.

And unless the wizarding justice system was as perfect as their prisons - and that sounded rather improbable, all things considered - somewhere in Azkaban was a person who was entirely innocent, and probably more than one.

There was a burning sensation in Harry's throat, and moisture gathering in his eyes, and he wanted to teleport all of Azkaban's prisoners to safety and call down fire from the sky and blast that terrible place down to bedrock. But he couldn't, because he wasn't God.

And Harry remembered what Professor Quirrell had said beneath the starlight: Sometimes, when this flawed world seems unusually hateful, I wonder whether there might be some other place, far away, where I should have been... But the stars are so very, very far away... And I wonder what I would dream about, if I slept for a long, long time.

Right now this flawed world seemed unusually hateful.

And Harry couldn't understand Professor Quirrell's words, it might have been an alien that had spoken, or an Artificial Intelligence, something built along such different lines from Harry that his brain couldn't be forced to operate in that mode.

You couldn't leave your home planet while it still contained a place like Azkaban.

You had to stay and fight.

Ok, I can appreciate that Harry wants to make a positive change in his world. Bullying is traumatic, and prisons are morally questionable for all sorts of reasons. However, with all his supposed knowledge of psychology and cleverness, the only solution he can think of is to gain overwhelming power and force everyone to do things his way. He's more morally reprehensible than anyone he's fighting; the only difference is that he doesn't yet have the power to commit the atrocities he wants to. Our Hero.

Open question because I think it's interesting: Does Bellatrix LeStrange, a woman who tortured, murdered, and often both at once deserve a life sentence in Azkaban? A place of unending misery and slowly failing health?

Added Space fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Jan 9, 2017

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
People familiar with this fic know large sections are derivative of Ender's Game, a classic novel about a child genius who is forced into military wargame training. What I recently realized is that the borrowing started last chapter. A major structural feature of Ender's Game is a group of completely psychotic and unreasonable bullies set against the protagonist for unclear reasons. This allows the protagonist to succeed through violent means while remaining sympathetic. Here's a link to a great essay on the subject.

Creating the Innocent Killer

Chapter 28: Reductionism

HPMOR posted:

"Okay," Harry said, swallowing. "Okay, Hermione, it's enough, you can stop."

The white sugar pill in front of Hermione still hadn't changed shape or color at all, even though she was concentrating harder than Harry had ever seen, her eyes squeezed shut, beads of sweat on her forehead, hand trembling as it gripped the wand -

"Hermione, stop! It's not going to work, Hermione, I don't think we can make things that don't exist yet!"

Slowly, Hermione's hand relaxed its grasp on the wand.

"I thought I felt it," she said in a bare whisper. "I thought I felt it start to Transfigure, just for a second."

There was a lump in Harry's throat. "You were probably imagining it. Hoping too hard."

"I probably was," she said. She looked like she wanted to cry.

Slowly, Harry took his mechanical pencil in his hand, and reached over to the sheet of paper with all the items crossed out, and drew a line through the item that said 'ALZHEIMER'S CURE'.

They couldn't have fed anyone a Transfigured pill. But Transfiguration, at least the kind they could do, didn't enchant the targets - it wouldn't Transfigure a regular broomstick into a flying one. So if Hermione had been able to make a pill at all, it would have been a nonmagical pill, one that worked for ordinary material reasons. They could have secretly made pills for a Muggle science lab, let them study the pills and try to reverse-engineer them before the Transfiguration wore off... no one in either world would need to know that magic had been involved, it would just be another scientific breakthrough...

It hadn't been the sort of thing a wizard would think of, either. They didn't respect mere patterns of atoms that much, they didn't think of unenchanted material things as objects of power. If it wasn't magical, it wasn't interesting.

This plan is still stupid, but it's at least sweet. Harry is finally using his power to try to help others and do good in the world. Maybe he's learned some compassion and thought for others.

quote:

Earlier, Harry had very secretly - he hadn't even told Hermione - tried to Transfigure nanotechnology a la Eric Drexler. (He'd tried to produce a desktop nanofactory, of course, not tiny self-replicating assemblers, Harry wasn't insane.) It would have been godhood in a single shot if it'd worked.

drat YOU HARRIEZER! :argh: Eric Drexler is the guy who first hypothesized grey goo nanobots.

One last experiment does succeed in creating carbon nanotubes, but Hermione is unenthusiastic.

quote:

"Harry, I don't think this is working out."

"You mean our relationship?" Harry said. "Great! Let's break up."

That got a slight grin out of her. "I mean our research."

"Oh, Hermione, how could you?"

"You're sweet when you're mean," she said. "But Harry, this is nuts, I'm twelve, you're eleven, it's silly to think we're going to discover anything that no one's ever figured out before."

"Are you really saying we should give up on unraveling the secrets of magic after trying for less than one month? " Harry said, trying to put a note of challenge into his voice. Honestly he was feeling some of the same fatigue as Hermione. None of the good ideas ever worked. He'd made just one discovery worth mentioning, the Mendelian pattern, and he couldn't tell Hermione about it without breaking his promise to Draco.

"No," Hermione said. Her young face was looking very serious and adult. "I'm saying right now we should be studying all the magic that wizards already know, so we can do this sort of thing after we graduate from Hogwarts."

"Um..." Harry said. "Hermione, I hate to put it this way, but imagine we'd decided to hold off on research until later, and the first thing we tried after we graduated was Transfiguring an Alzheimer's cure, and it worked. We'd feel... I don't think the word stupid would adequately describe how we'd feel. What if there's something else like that and it does work?"

"That's not fair, Harry!" Hermione said. Her voice was trembling like she was on the verge of breaking out crying. "You can't put that on people! It's not our job to do that sort of thing, we're kids! "

For a moment Harry wondered what would happen if someone told Hermione she had to fight an immortal Dark Lord, if she would turn into one of the whiny self-pitying heroes that Harry could never stand reading about in his books.

"Anyway," Hermione said. Her voice shook. "I don't want to keep doing this. I don't believe children can do things that grownups can't, that's only in stories."

There was silence in the classroom.

Hermione started to look a little scared, and Harry knew that his own expression had gotten colder.

It might not have hurt so much if the same thought hadn't already come to Harry - that, while thirty might be old for a scientific revolutionary and twenty about right, while there were people who got doctorates when they were seventeen and fourteen-year-old heirs who'd been great kings or generals, there wasn't really anyone who'd made the history books at eleven.

"All right," Harry said. "Figure out how to do something a grownup can't. Is that your challenge?"

"I didn't mean it like that," Hermione said, her voice coming out in a frightened whisper.

Harriezer, tormenting the one person who will willingly spend time with him in order to become famous faster.

He chases her off by acting like a spoiled little monster, then sits down to plan.

quote:

The wizarding world was tiny, they didn't think like scientists, they didn't know science, they didn't question what they'd grown up with, they hadn't put protective shells on their time machines, they played Quidditch, all of magical Britain was smaller than a small Muggle city, the greatest wizarding school only educated up to the age of seventeen, silly wasn't challenging that at eleven, silly was assuming wizards knew what they were doing and had already exhausted all the low-hanging fruit a scientific polymath would see.

Step One had been to make a list of every magical constraint Harry could remember, all the things you supposedly couldn't do.

Step Two, mark the constraints that seemed to make the least sense from a scientific perspective.

Step Three, prioritize constraints that a wizard would be unlikely to question if they didn't know science.

Step Four, come up with avenues for attacking them.

This is done so much better in the Arthimancer series. In that story Hermione follows her interests and explores what's possible. None of this petty, patriarchal guff about knowing better than everyone.

Harry keeps on with Transfiguration, figuring a modern understanding of particles will offer new avenues. Prepare for a load of SCIENCE to the face.

quote:

You could only Transfigure whole objects as wholes. You couldn't Transfigure half a match into a needle, you had to Transfigure the whole thing. Back when Harry had been trapped in that classroom by Draco, it had been the reason he couldn't just Transfigure a thin cylindrical cross-section of the walls into sponge, and punch out a chunk of stone large enough for him to fit through the hole. He would have needed to impose a new form on the whole wall, and maybe a whole section of Hogwarts, just in order to change that little cross-section.

...

Harry wanted to kill his eraser.

He'd been trying to change a single spot on the pink rectangle into steel, apart from the rest of the rubber, and the eraser wasn't cooperating.

It had to be a conceptual limitation, not a real one. Had to be.

Things were made of atoms, and every atom was a tiny separate thing. Atoms were held together by a quantum mist of shared electrons, for covalent bonds, or sometimes just magnetism at close ranges, for ionic bonds or van der Waals forces.

If it came down to that, the protons and neutrons inside the nuclei were tiny separate things. The quarks inside the protons and neutrons were tiny separate things! There simply wasn't anything in reality, the world-out-there, that corresponded to people's conceit of solid objects. It was all just little dots.

And free Transfiguration was all in the mind to begin with, wasn't it? No words, no gestures. Only the pure concept of form, kept strictly separate from substance, imposed on the substance, conceived of apart from its form. That and the wand and whatever made you a wizard.

The wizards couldn't transform parts of things, could only transform what their minds perceived as wholes, because they didn't know in their bones that it was all just atoms deep down.

Harry had focused on that knowledge as hard as he could, the true fact that the eraser was just a collection of atoms, everything was just collections of atoms, and the atoms of the little patch he was trying to Transfigure formed just as valid a collection as any other collection he cared to think about.

And Harry still hadn't been able to change that single part of the eraser, the Transfiguration wasn't going anywhere.

This. Was. Ridiculous.

Harry's knuckles were whitening on his wand again. He was sick of getting experimental results that didn't make sense.

Maybe the fact that some part of his mind was still thinking in terms of objects was stopping the Transfiguration from going through. He had thought of a collection of atoms that was an eraser. He had thought of a collection that was a little patch.

Time to kick it up a notch.

Harry pressed his wand harder against that tiny section of eraser, and tried to see through the illusion that nonscientists thought was reality, the world of desks and chairs, air and erasers and people.

When you walked through a park, the immersive world that surrounded you was something that existed inside your own brain as a pattern of neurons firing. The sensation of a bright blue sky wasn't something high above you, it was something in your visual cortex, and your visual cortex was in the back of your brain. All the sensations of that bright world were really happening in that quiet cave of bone you called your skull, the place where you lived and never, ever left. If you really wanted to say hello to someone, to the actual person, you wouldn't shake their hand, you'd knock gently on their skull and say "How are you doing in there?" That was what people were, that was where they really lived. And the picture of the park that you thought you were walking through was something that was visualized inside your brain as it processed the signals sent down from your eyes and retina.

It wasn't a lie like the Buddhists thought, there wasn't something terribly mystical and unexpected behind the veil of Maya, what lay beyond the illusion of the park was just the actual park, but it was all still illusion.

Harry wasn't sitting inside the classroom.

He wasn't looking at the eraser.

Harry was inside Harry's skull.

He was experiencing a processed picture his brain had decoded from the signals sent down by his retina.

The real eraser was somewhere else, somewhere that wasn't the picture.

And the real eraser wasn't like the picture Harry's brain had of it. The idea of the eraser as a solid object was something that existed only inside his own brain, inside the parietal cortex that processed his sense of shape and space. The real eraser was a collection of atoms held together by electromagnetic forces and shared covalent electrons, while nearby, air molecules bounced off each other and bounced off the eraser-molecules.

The real eraser was far away, and Harry, inside his skull, could never quite touch it, could only imagine ideas about it. But his wand had the power, it could change things out there in reality, it was only Harry's own preconceptions that were limiting it. Somewhere beyond the veil of Maya, the truth behind Harry's concept of "my wand" was touching the collection of atoms that Harry's mind thought of as "a patch on the eraser", and if that wand could change the collection of atoms that Harry considered "the whole eraser", there was absolutely no reason why it couldn't change the other collection too...

The Transfiguration still wasn't going through.

Harry's teeth clenched together, and he kicked it up another notch.

The concept Harry's mind had of the eraser as a single object was obvious nonsense.

It was a map that didn't and couldn't match the territory.

Human beings modeled the world using stratified levels of organization, they had separate thoughts about how countries worked, how people worked, how organs worked, how cells worked, how molecules worked, how quarks worked.

When Harry's brain needed to think about the eraser, it would think about the rules that governed erasers, like "erasers can get rid of pencil-marks". Only if Harry's brain needed to predict what would happen on the lower chemical level, only then would Harry's brain start thinking - as though it were a separate fact - about rubber molecules.

But that was all in the mind.

Harry's mind might have separate beliefs about rules that governed erasers, but there was no separate law of physics that governed erasers.

Harry's mind modeled reality using multiple levels of organization, with different beliefs about each level. But that was all in the map, the true territory wasn't like that, reality itself had only a single level of organization, the quarks, it was a unified low-level process obeying mathematically simple rules.

Or at least that was what Harry had believed before he'd found out about magic, but the eraser wasn't magical.

And even if the eraser had been magical, the idea that there could really exist a single solid eraser was impossible. Things like erasers couldn't be basic elements of reality, they were too big and complicated to be atoms, they had to be made of parts. You couldn't have things that were fundamentally complicated. The implicit belief that Harry's brain had in the eraser as a single object wasn't just wrong, it was a map-territory confusion, the eraser only existed as a separate concept in Harry's multi-level model of the world, not as a separate element of single-level reality.

...the Transfiguration still wasn't happening.

Harry was breathing heavily, failed Transfiguration was almost as tiring as successful Transfiguration, but damned if he'd give up now.

All right, screw this nineteenth-century garbage.

Reality wasn't atoms, it wasn't a set of tiny billiard balls bopping around. That was just another lie. The notion of atoms as little dots was just another convenient hallucination that people clung to because they didn't want to confront the inhumanly alien shape of the underlying reality. No wonder, then, that his attempts to Transfigure based on that hadn't worked. If he wanted power, he had to abandon his humanity, and force his thoughts to conform to the true math of quantum mechanics.

There were no particles, there were just clouds of amplitude in a multiparticle configuration space and what his brain fondly imagined to be an eraser was nothing except a gigantic factor in a wavefunction that happened to factorize, it didn't have a separate existence any more than there was a particular solid factor of 3 hidden inside the number 6, if his wand was capable of altering factors in an approximately factorizable wavefunction then it should drat well be able to alter the slightly smaller factor that Harry's brain visualized as a patch of material on the eraser -

Hermione bursts back into the room and undoes all their work, having remembered that Transfiguration is supposed to be super dangerous.

quote:

"Right..." Harry said slowly. "That's probably one of those things they don't even bother telling you not to do because it's too obvious. Don't test brilliant new ideas for Transfiguration by yourselves in an unused classroom without consulting any professors."

"You could have gotten us killed, Harry!" Hermione knew it wasn't fair, she'd made the mistake too, but she still felt angry at him, he always sounded so confident and that had dragged her unthinkingly along in his wake. "We could have spoiled Professor McGonagall's perfect record! "

"Yes," said Harry, "let's not tell her about this, shall we?"

"We have to stop," Hermione said. "We have to stop this or we're going to get hurt. We're too young, Harry, we can't do this, not yet."

A weak grin crossed Harry's face. "Um, you're sort of wrong about that."

And he held out a small pink rectangle, a rubber eraser with a bright metal patch on it.

Hermione stared at it, puzzled.

"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."

Hermione raised her wand again, pointed it at the eraser.

For a moment anger crossed Harry's face, but he didn't make any move to stop her.

"Finite Incantatem," said Hermione. "Check with Professor McGonagall before you try it again."

Harry nodded, though his face was still a bit tight.

"And we still have to stop," said Hermione.

"Why? " said Harry. "Don't you see what this means, Hermione? Wizards don't know everything! There's too few of them, even fewer who know any science, they haven't exhausted the low-hanging fruit -"

"It's not safe," Hermione said. "If we can find out new things it's even less safe! We're too young! We made one big mistake already, next time we could just die! "

Then Hermione flinched.

Harry looked away from her, and started taking slow, deep breaths.

"Please don't try to do it alone, Harry," Hermione said, her voice trembling. "Please."

Please don't make me have to decide whether to tell Professor Flitwick.

There was a long pause.

"So you want us to study," Harry said. She could tell he was trying to keep the anger out of his voice. "Just study."

Hermione wasn't sure if she should say anything, but... "Like you studied, um, timeless physics, right?"

Harry looked back at her.

"That thing you did," Hermione said, her voice tentative, "it wasn't because of our experiments, right? You could do it because you'd read lots of books."

Harry opened his mouth, and then he shut it again. There was a frustrated look on his face.

I bet I know exactly what Harriezer is thinking right now. He's thinking it wasn't the work of others that he studied that helped him succeed, it was his personal devotion to the ideals of Rationalism. That would be a great big Attribution Error right there.

Also, timeless physics is the usual kind of speculative bunk that Quantum Physics attracts. Harry now has a third power to abuse to solve all his problems, and it's all based on technobabble nonsense.

quote:

"All right," Harry said. "How about this. We study, and if I think of anything that seems really worth trying, we'll try it after I ask a professor."

"Okay," Hermione said. She didn't fall over with relief, but only because she was already sitting down.

"Shall we get lunch?" Harry said cautiously.

Hermione nodded. Yes. Lunch sounded good. For real, this time.

She carefully began to push herself off the stone floor, wincing as her body screamed at her -

Harry pointed his wand at her and said "Wingardium Leviosa."

Hermione blinked as the huge weight on her legs diminished to something bearable.

A smile quirked across Harry's face. "You can lift something without being able to Hover it completely," he said. "Remember that experiment?"

Hermione smiled back helplessly, although she thought she ought to still be angry.

And she started walking back toward the Great Hall, feeling remarkably and wonderfully light on her feet, as Harry carefully kept his wand trained on her.

He only managed to keep it up for five minutes, but it was the thought that counted.

These moments of caring really make Harriezer much more awful of a person. He's not a remorseless psychopath who doesn't understand how he's tormenting others. He can be nice. It's that he chooses not to be so much more frequently.

Harry actually does go to Minerva and Dumbledore to explain the idea he had and totally didn't already attempt. Minerva's thoughts and words pound over and over how impossible this idea is and how them Duke boys will never make it over that ravine.

quote:

The two of them started setting up the wards and detection webs. The most important web was the one that checked to make sure no Transfigured material had entered the air. Harry would be enclosed in a separate shell of force with its own air supply just to be certain, only his wand allowed to leave the shield, and the interface tight. They were inside Hogwarts so they couldn't automatically Apparate out any material that showed signs of spontaneous combustion, but they could launch it out a skylight almost as fast, the windows all folded outward for exactly that reason. Harry himself would go out a different skylight at the first sign of trouble.

Harry watched them working, his face looking a little frightened.

"Don't worry," said Professor McGonagall in the middle of her running description, "this almost certainly won't be necessary, Mr. Potter. If we expected anything to go wrong you would not be allowed to try. It's just ordinary precautions for any Transfiguration no one has ever tried before."

Harry swallowed and nodded.

And a few minutes later, Harry was strapped into the safety chair and resting his wand against a metal ball - one that, based on his current test scores, should have been too large for him to Transfigure in less than thirty minutes.

And a few minutes after that, Minerva was leaning against the wall, feeling faint.

There was a small patch of glass on the ball where Harry's wand had rested.

Harry didn't say I told you so, but the smug look on his sweating face said it for him.

I'm surprised she can tell the difference from his resting smug face. Once again, no fussy old lady is a match for our Boy Genius!

They are duly impressed by his success.

quote:

"Congratulations, Mr. Potter!" said Professor McGonagall, and meant it. She would have bet almost anything against that working.

"Congratulations indeed," said Dumbledore. "Even I did not make any original discoveries in Transfiguration before the age of fourteen. Not since the day of Dorotea Senjak has any genius flowered so early."

"Thanks," Harry said, sounding a little surprised.

And now Harry is thinking that he's not the first famous eleven year old after all.

Harry is allowed to practice with Hermione, but they have to keep this a secret. Now he's keeping a secret from Draco, he's keeping the Wizard Gene a secret from Hermione and Dumbledore - do you see the problem yet? Of course not, as long as Harriezer is at the center of the web all these secrets won't hamper progress at all. :rolleyes:

quote:

Just before Harry left the workroom, with his hand on the doorhandle, the boy turned back and said, "As long as we're here, have either of you noticed anything different about Professor Snape?"

"Different?" said the Headmaster.

Minerva didn't let her wry smile show on her face. Of course the boy was apprehensive about the 'evil Potions Master', since he had no way of knowing why Severus was to be trusted. It would have been odd to say the least, explaining to Harry that Severus was still in love with his mother.

"I mean, has his behavior changed recently in any way?" said Harry.

"Not that I have seen..." the Headmaster said slowly. "Why do you ask?"

Harry shook his head. "I don't want to prejudice your own observations by saying. Just keep an eye out, maybe?"

That sent a quiver of unease through Minerva in a way that no outright accusation of Severus could have.

Harry bowed to both of them respectfully, and took his leave.

"Albus," Minerva said after the boy had gone, "how did you know to take Harry seriously? I would have thought his idea merely impossible!"

The old wizard's face turned grave. "The same reason it must be kept secret, Minerva. The same reason I told you to come to me, if Harry made any such claim. Because it is a power that Voldemort knows not."

The words took a few seconds to sink in.

And then the cold shiver went down her spine, as it always did when she remembered.

It had started out as an ordinary job interview, Sybill Trelawney applying for the position of Professor of Divination.

THE ONE WITH THE POWER TO VANQUISH THE DARK LORD APPROACHES,
BORN TO THOSE WHO HAVE THRICE DEFIED HIM,
BORN AS THE SEVENTH MONTH DIES,
AND THE DARK LORD WILL MARK HIM AS HIS EQUAL,
BUT HE WILL HAVE POWER THE DARK LORD KNOWS NOT,
AND EITHER MUST DESTROY ALL BUT A REMNANT OF THE OTHER,
FOR THOSE TWO DIFFERENT SPIRITS CANNOT EXIST IN THE SAME WORLD.

Those dreadful words, spoken in that terrible booming voice, didn't seem to fit something like partial Transfiguration.

"Perhaps not, then," Dumbledore said after Minerva tried to explain. "I confess I had been hoping for something that would help in finding Voldemort's horcrux, wherever he may have hidden it. But..." The old wizard shrugged. "Prophecies are tricky things, Minerva, and it is best to take no chances. The smallest thing may prove decisive if it remains unexpected."

"And what do you suppose he meant about Severus? " said Minerva.

"There I have no idea," sighed Dumbledore. "Unless Harry is making a move against Severus, and thought that an open question might be taken seriously where a direct allegation would be dismissed. And if that was indeed what happened, Harry correctly reasoned that I would not trust that it was so. Let us simply keep watch, without prejudice, as he asks."

Aftermath, 1:

"Um, Hermione?" Harry said in a very small voice. "I think I owe you a really, really, really big apology."

Dear god, have one loving ounce of humility and you won't have to keep sniveling about your rash actions later. Harriezer reminds me of the 80s incarnation of Starscream. Always going own about his own power and cleverness and how he should lead, coming up with hare-brained schemes to gain power over others, and then on his knees apologizing when they inevitably fail.

For some reason we now have an interlude where a young girl is making googly eyes at Professor Snape.

quote:

After class, Alissa approached the desk. Part of her wanted to stand there meekly with her face abashed and her hands clasped penitently behind her back, just in case, but some quiet instinct told her this might be a bad idea. So instead she just stood there with her face neutral, in a posture that was very proper for a young lady, and said, "Professor?"

"Miss Cornfoot," Snape said without looking up from the sheets he was grading, "I do not return your affections, I begin to find your stares disturbing, and you will restrain your eyes henceforth. Is that quite clear?"

"Yes," said Alissa in a strangled squeak, and Snape dismissed her, and she fled the classroom with her cheeks flaming like molten lava.

That's it - wait, I missed the foreword.

quote:

This should again go without saying, but views expressed by Severus Snape are not necessarily those of the author.

Big Yud would totally get some of that schoolgirl action. :pervert:

Added Space fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Jan 12, 2017

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

The Iron Rose posted:

oh of course he would.


anyways the arithmancer really does all this better, but kinda gets boring and goes off the rails in the sequel. I mean I hesitate to use the term Mary Sue, but... that's basically what Hermione turns in to.

I'd mostly disagree. There is an unfortunate block of chapters where the same plot of "Umbridge is a horrible bitch, she changes the rules to mess with the main characters, and Hermione fails at metallurgy" is repeated again and again, but for the most part it's solid.

OctaviusBeaver posted:

What was the point of Snape asking about James' bullying and then getting mad when Harriezer answer? He doesn't like that Harry called Lilly a gold digger? I don't understand the point of that conversation.

I think the point was to make the reader question Snape's loyalty. Something like, "Onoz, he only sided with Dumbledore because he loved Lily, now that love is broken and he'll be evil!" Of course Snape is too smart to listen to a little poo poo like Harriezer. I think that's also why we have this little sidestory about a schoolgirl crush.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Chapter 29: Egocentric Bias

Finally, a subject that Big Yud is an undisputed expert in. :smuggo:

I've struggled with this chapter since I have so little so say about it. This is HPMOR : Ender's Game : The Prologue, and goes on far too long while barely saying anything.

I'm going to act as Yud's editor and stitch together something far closer to what this should have been, one section of a different chapter.

HPMOR posted:

The idea of getting into a Romance with Harry had seemed like an appealing idea at first. She'd read books like that, and if there was anyone in Hogwarts who was a candidate for the heroine's love interest it was obviously Harry Potter. Bright, funny, famous, sometimes scary...

So she'd forced Harry into going on a date with her.

And now she was his love interest.

Or worse, one of the options on his dinner menu.

It was a hard trap to climb out of once you fell in. No matter how high you scored in class, even if you did something that deserved a special dinnertime announcement, it just meant you were rivaling Harry Potter again.

But she thought she'd come up with a way.

Hermione raised her hand to knock upon (Quirrel's) terrible door.

Her hand quite failed to touch the door.

And then the door swung open anyway.

----

(Harry met Hermione in the hallway outside the Defense Professor's office.)

"Um, Hermione, just to check, you know tomorrow is the last day to sign up for Professor Quirrell's armies, right?"

"Yes," Hermione said. "The armies of the evil Professor Quirrell." Her voice was a little angry, though Harry didn't know why, of course.

"Hermione," Harry said, his voice exasperated, "he's not evil. He's a little bit Dark and a whole lot Slytherin. It's not the same as being evil. I've talked to older students," Harry said. "Professor Quirrell could be the only competent Defense Professor we get in all seven years at Hogwarts. Anything else we can learn later. If we want to study Defense, we have to do it this year. The students who sign up for the extracurricular stuff are going to be learning huge amounts..."

"I already signed up, actually," Hermione said, her voice a little quiet.

"So you will be in the armies, then?" Harry's voice was suddenly enthusiastic. "That's awesome, Hermione! I've already gotten my list of soldiers, but I'm sure Professor Quirrell will let me add one more, or trade -"

"I'm not joining your army." Hermione's voice was sharp. She knew it was a reasonable assumption but it still annoyed her.

Harry blinked. "Not Draco Malfoy's, surely. So you want to be in the third army? Even though we don't know who the general is yet?" Harry sounded surprised and a little wounded, and she couldn't blame him, though of course she did blame him, since in fact it was all his fault. "But why not mine?"

"Think about it," Hermione snapped, "and maybe you'll work it out!"

And she sped up her stride and left Harry gaping behind her.

----

"Professor Quirrell," Draco said in his most formal voice, "I must protest your appointment of Hermione Granger as the third general."

"Professor Quirrell," said Harry Potter beside him, "with all due respect to Miss Granger's many outstanding academic talents and the Quirrell points she has justly earned in your classes, her personality is not suited to military command."

"Well then," Professor Quirrell said. "Neither of you seem to have considered a very simple question. Who could I appoint instead of Miss Granger?"

"Blaise Zabini," Draco said without hesitation.

Professor Quirrell looked at Draco. "Mr. Malfoy, no matter how hard he tries, he'll never be able to keep up with you or Mr. Potter."

The shock of it staggered Draco. "You can't believe Granger is going to -"

"He's gambling on her," Harry said quietly. "It's not guaranteed. The odds aren't even good. She'll probably never give us a good fight, and even if she does, it may take her months to learn. But she's the only one in our year with any chance at all of growing to beat us."

"She asked me for the position, Mr. Potter, I did not ask her. She will have a much easier time with the rigors of her position than either of you suspect, and that she will put up a good fight much sooner than you think.""

----

"We should just attack the Granger girl first and get her out of our way," said Draco. "After we crush her, we can have our own contest without any distractions."

"Now that doesn't really seem fair to her, does it?" said Harry in a mild voice.

"What do you care?" said Draco. "She's your rival, right?" Then, with just the right note of suspicion in his voice, "Don't tell me you've started really liking her, after being her rival all this time..."

"Founders forbid," said Harry. "What can I say, Draco? I merely have a natural sense of justice. Granger does too, you know. She has a very firm grasp on good and evil, and she's probably going to attack evil first. Having a name like 'Malfoy' is just asking for it, you know."

drat IT!

A whole lot of the dead weight of this chapter is endless repetition of these basic points. Hermione is sick of being overshadowed, Quirrel likes manipulating children, and Harry and Draco don't have faith in her.

On the chopping room floor we have:

A cute moment.

quote:

It was after lunch on Thursday afternoon, and Hermione and Harry were ensconced in a little library nook, with a Quietus field up so they could talk. Harry was lying stomach-down on the ground with his elbows resting on the floor and his head in his hands and his feet kicking up casually behind him. Hermione was occupying a stuffed chair much too large for her, like she was the Hermione center of a candy shell.

Harry had suggested that they could, as a first pass, read just the titles of all the books in the library, and then Hermione could read all the tables of contents.

Hermione had thought this was a brilliant idea. She'd never done that with a library before.

Unfortunately there was a slight flaw in this plan.

Namely, they were both Ravenclaws.

Hermione was reading a book called Magical Mnemonics.

Harry was reading a book called The Skeptical Wizard.

Each had thought it was just one special exception they would make only this one time, and neither had yet realized it was impossible for either of them to ever finish reading all the book titles no matter how hard they tried.

A ridiculous dig at the "Peggy Sue" genre, wherein someone does a Quantum Leap with future knowledge.

quote:

"Right," Harry said. "Well, to make a long story short, Bill Weasley decided that his little brother Percy's pet rat was Pettigrew's Animagus form -"

Hermione's jaw dropped.

"Yes," Harry said, "you wouldn't exactly expect Evil Pettigrew to be living a sad and furtive life as the pet rat of an enemy wizarding family, he'd either be with the Malfoys or, more likely, off in the Carribean after a bit of plastic surgery. Anyway, Bill knocks out his little brother Percy, stuns and grabs the rat, sends out all these emergency owl messages -"

"Oh, no! " Hermione said, the words torn out of her.

"- and somehow manages to gather Dumbledore, the Minister of Magic, and the Head Auror -"

"He didn't! " said Hermione.

"And of course when they get there they think he's crazy, but they use Veritas Oculum on the rat anyway, just to be sure, and what do they discover?"

She would've died. "A rat."

"You win a cookie! So they dragged poor Bill Weasley off to St. Mungo's and it turned out to be a pretty standard schizophrenic break, it just happens to some people, especially young men around what we'd consider college age. Guy was convinced he was ninety-seven years old and had died and gone back in time to his younger self via train station. And he responded perfectly well to antipsychotics and is back to normal and everything's fine now, except people don't talk as much anymore about Sirius Black conspiracy theories, and you don't ever ask the Weasleys about the family rat."

Draco tries to rattle and/or bribe Hermione, which is just weird and not worth quoting.

And, at the end of the chapter, we skip over Halloween.

quote:

Interlude:

There was a time when October 31st had been called Halloween in magical Britain.

Now it was Harry Potter Day.

Harry had turned down all the offers, even the one from Minister Fudge which might have been good for future political favors and which he really should have gritted his teeth and taken. But to Harry, October 31st would always be The Dark Lord Killed My Parents Day. There should have been a quiet, dignified memorial service somewhere, and if there was one, he hadn't been invited.

Hogwarts got the day off to celebrate. Even the Slytherins didn't dare wear black outside their own dorm. There were special events and special foods and the teachers looked the other way if anyone ran through the hallways. It was the tenth anniversary, after all.

Harry spent the day in his trunk so as not to spoil it for anyone else, eating snack bars in place of meals, reading some of his sadder science fiction books (no fantasy), and writing a letter to Mum and Dad that was much longer than the ones he usually sent.

That's the only bit really worth reading. It's a bit revisionist, but still makes sense in context.

drat this chapter is a slog.

Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!
Sorry, my reply got eaten by Chrome three times. Also, I stopped caring. Thanks Xander77!

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Added Space
Jul 13, 2012

Free Markets
Free People

Curse you Hayard-Gunnes!

I'm not so good with sarcasm... do you want me to take the baton back? I could, but I don't know how good my scheduling would be.

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