Harry Potter And The Methods Of Rationality

Well, the most obvious impending terrible horrible cliffhanger that I would not want to be left alone with for a few months would be Harry figuring the Quirrellmort thing out. So I'm going to assume it's that.

I for one can't wait. I wonder how hard it would be to get him another week off to work on Methods?

edited 2nd Mar '13 8:14:56 PM by Exetera

Potential cliffhangers:

Granger money making schemes of entirely inappropriate scale:

"I acquired access to Rowena's vault."

"This philosopher stone malarky was surprisingly simple to do. Made five for starters, auction?"

"found a workaround for the Interdict of Merlin! and there are some really fun books in the library! How much should I charge for tutoring in Al-hazims Greater Gate?"

Harry side sillyness:

"Quirrelmort" ".. so, you have been keeping the stone locked up in the basement of the castle all year?"

Left field; "Snape just ran off with the philosophers stone."

"Bellatrix just used a nuclear device on Azkaban."

edited 3rd Mar '13 3:56:26 AM by Izeinspring

If either of the latter two happen, then "money" just suddenly became entirely a side concern.

If any of Hermione's get-rich-quick schemes pans out, I'll eat my hat. I see why Eliezer included them - to demonstrate Hermione's sense of obligation - but there's no reason for them to actually work out.

Sure there is. Specifically, her making the stone successfully gets Quirrelmort cured of whatever ails him without having to get through the entirely excessive traps around Flamel's stone. And it would be pretty funny. I can think of good story reasons for other schemes to work out, too. For startera, it would re-equalize the relationship between H and Hr some, and at this point, that is needed.

edited 3rd Mar '13 7:28:55 PM by Izeinspring

Yes, but it's a giant Deus ex Machina. The story would end with Harry turning the oceans into Elixir.

The elixir is "perfect health, including youth" Not "immunity to violence". Introducing the stone gets them out of bankruptcy - which is pretty darn irrelevant until they reach their majority - and out of debt to Lucius, which may actually antagonize him further. It does not resolve any of the major conflicts, and could make Hermoine more of a target, so it does not void the plot. It could derail it, if any attention was given to the wider impact, but Hogwarts is a school. The grand total of the impact on their immediate surroundings would be their transfiguration teacher suddenly being a stone fox, and the only characters likely to even react to that are the Weasley twins.

If Quirrelmort gets access to it, it immediately escalates the conflict. There does, however, need to be some reason for her to succeed where a lot of people since Flamel have failed. This is not overly difficult since alchemy has not had it's rules established at all, but ideally, she would do it based on her strengths - intelligence, research skills, conscientiousness and a sound respect for the value of the existing lore and work of others.

Hmm.. So, track down Flamel using muggle methods to avoid his no-doubt impressive anti-scrying spells, get enough of a hint directly to bypass the interdict? A consistent record of failure would indicate that the problem is likely the interdict fucking with people.

Or, if you want to take things up a notch, have her shatter the interdict itself. If I tried, I do not think I could come up with an idea more likely to offend the sensibilities of Hermione Granger. There is a spell in effect that keeps you from learning entire classes of important things from books!

Downscaling things, if the author does not want to deal with the stone, having her source some cash in some other hilarious fashion is also on the table.

edited 4th Mar '13 9:10:40 AM by Izeinspring

I think that with the interdict in place, no one has even bothered to write down how to do spells in quite some time; breaking it would help to halt the current downward spiral of knowledge, but it wouldn't instantly raise them to the heights of the past again.

Well people obviously write down how to do basic spells, as evidenced by the Hogwarts textbooks.

That's true, and it's an interesting question how that works. Is the Interdict broken for spells you've already been taught in person how to do? Does it not hold for spells below a certain level of sophistication? I can't recall precisely how it's described in Methods, and anyway it's probable that the speaker when it's described (Harry, IIRC, probably going off a book) isn't entirely precise or correct. (In canon Hermione is able to do the spells out of her schoolbook without any teacher or prior experience. Is this still true in Methods?)

Yes, it is still possible in Methods to learn low-level magic purely from books. In Chapter 67, Hermione successfully casts the Stunning Hex from reference to books only.

edited 5th Mar '13 8:16:12 PM by Exetera

Incidentally, if Voldemort knows the entire prophecy in this version, and Prophecies Are Always Right, Voldemort really shouldn't ever have tried to kill Harry. As soon as he does, the prophecy is fulfilled, and for all he knows somebody else will kill Voldemort tomorrow. But until he kills Harry, Harry is the only person who could kill Voldemort, meaning Voldemort has about 17 years of being relatively fearless before Harry becomes a real threat.

This doesn't apply to canon!Voldemort, who presumably knew that Harry has "the power to destroy him," but not that either must kill the other. If he'd known the whole prophecy, his best move might've been to leave baby Harry alone, destroy all of his own Horcruxes, then battle Dumbledore to the death.

"Destroy all of his own horcruxes"

Why?

Because while the Horcruxes still exist a defeat against Dumbledore wouldn't lead to his death and is therefore possible. Still has a loophole, though, as Dumbledore could capture him alive and then let baby Harry feed him some poison or something.

Note that this is also assuming that there are no ulterior motives going on with Voldemort, which I very highly doubt.

edited 5th Mar '13 10:21:54 PM by Exetera

In canon, Dumbledore believes that the validity of prophecies is contingent on one or more of the people involved deciding to play into them. It's possible that Rationalmort believes the same thing.

It's been a while since I read it, but I thought the Interdict of Merlin was described as only applying to really high level magic. The stuff they learn at Hogwarts should be unaffected.

That gets into the same issue Snape raised before though. If all the baby did was feed Voldemort poison after being put directly into position to do so, would you really say the baby has "the power to vanquish" the Dark Lord? That's taking some pretty extreme interpretive liberties.

Which is a good reason for Rational Mort to not pick a fight with baby Harry - Murdering an infant is hardly a Vanquishing, after all, so it will fail.

Good lord. That could be the entire reason he is the Defense teacher. He is anticipating a later conflict, and is both scouting and shaping the enemy. It is a reasonable theory, anyway. There are a fair few plausible backgrounds for him to end up there.

After reading Friendship Is Optimal, I keep wondering if there is a way to write a Rationalist fic about The Sims and Brain Uploading or Inside a Computer System, but can't think of anything good to be done with it... Does anyone knows where I can research about stuff like this?

EDIT: It occured to me that this might be too off-topic... it is sort-ish under Less Wrong interests.

edited 6th Mar '13 1:24:30 PM by Bluelantern2814

I wouldn't try that if I were in his place and knew about the prophesy, it seems like a probable way to screw myself over.

edited 6th Mar '13 4:16:44 PM by Desertopa

I think I came up with a theory earlier on in the thread that there was no way that Riddle wasn't going to try and kill off Harry and his parents, having learned of the complete text of the prophecy from Severus Snape via Minerva Mc Gonagall, Albus Dumbledore and Sybill Trelawney. But just in case I didn't - having no medium term memory is a severe handicap, I think I will try to come up with a short version.

Anyway, I think (I am not sure, so don't sue me) that Tom Riddle, in this incarnation at least, was smart enough to realize that he was falling into a pattern that would have ended up with him being not just dead but most sincerely dead^ at some point in the future and decided to risk something which he knew was going to have severe long term consequences for him in exchange for a chance of finding a new pattern.

Slim chance of revival is much better than completely assured obliteration. Yeah, I think having that special horcrux ISN'T foolproof.

^and yeah, I am a friend of Dorothy? Why you ask, Willis?

How is Harry going to deal with the Probe Horcrux? Even if there is a way to get to it with magic, that means Quirrellmort can throw more Horcruxes into space by the same method. Finding the Pioneer Probe is hard enough, but finding a Horcruxed rock tossed into Jupiter is a whole different order of problem.

The fact that there's a spell to see out of it strongly suggests that there's a spell to get to it - but only to it; not to any odd location in space.

Yep. As my instructor told me when I was learning how to use military radio many years ago, if you can hear or see it, you can hit it. I don't think there are any spells outside of the AK that are without counters or abilities to subvert them.

I'll be pretty surprised if Harry ends up trying to take out each of Horcruxes in turn. That's not a very HJPEV solution.