Well. We have five days to think of something. This seems to mean that Harry will think of something, and we have five days to guess what it may be. Presumably it will be something in one of the following categories:
Something about Lucius Malfoy
Something about the Wizengamot
Something about the laws of magical Britain
Anything about some person or thing within range of his vision
I propose we start by making a list of everything in the courtroom:
Three Aurors
One of whom is named Gawain Robards
A dementor
Minerva McGonagall
Harry Potter
And everything in his pouch
A Prophet reporter
Dolores Umbridge
Lucius Malfoy
Augusta Longbottom
Dumbledore
A man with a scarred face sitting next to Lucius; Fenrir Greyback?
Amelia Bones
What do we know about any of these people that Harry might use to sway the crowd?
I’m pretty sure the solution is as follows (I’ve already posted it in TV tropes forum). I’m ROT13, if anyone still wants to figure it out:
Yhpvhf Znysbl pynvzrq gb unir orra haqre Vzcrevhf ol Ibyqrzbeg. Ibyqrzbeg jnf qrsrngrq ol Uneel Cbggre. Sebz Serq & Trbetr’f cenax jr xabj gung xvyyvat gur jvmneq gung unf lbh haqre gur Vzcrevhf phefr perngrf n qrog. Erfhyg: Yhpvhf Znysbl naq rirel bgure Qrngu rngre pynvzvat gb unir orra vzcrevbfrq ner abj haqre yvsr qrog gb Uneel Cbggre. Ur pna fgneg erqrrzvat.
Point of order: vg whfg fnlf “n qrog”, abg n yvsr-qrog.
“Vg jbhyq frrz,” fnvq Uneel, njr va uvf ibvpr, “gung bar Ze. Neguhe Jrnfyrl jnf cynprq haqre gur Vzcrevhf Phefr ol n Qrngu Rngre jubz zl sngure xvyyrq, guhf perngvat n qrog gb gur Aboyr Ubhfr bs Cbggre, juvpu zl sngure qrznaqrq or ercnvq ol gur unaq va zneevntr bs gur erpragyl obea Tvarien Jrnfyrl.
Also, it would need to be explained why no one ever thought of this before.
Also, it would need to be explained why no one ever thought of this before.
Yeah, I was going ‘wow, that might actually work’ and then it occurred to me that they already discussed whether they had any debts from Lucius they could call in. So unless this is so subtle that no one has ever called in such a debt before, someone must have been holding an idiotball.
EDIT: Logos01 suggests that the debt be invoked of all the Wizengamot members who also claimed to be Imperiused, to swing the vote on whether or not to convict. This might work, but I would personally dislike it as we have no idea how many such people there are.
Still unusually speculative; we’re told previously that an Imperius debt is not a life-debt, so it already has a burden of improbability (did they misspeak or simply mean to imply that a debt of some sort is created without reference to how heavy it is?).
And the latter suggestion, while very clever, has the problem that it requires the numbers to work out, so we couldn’t conclude that it will work without numbers, so a fair author will not expect us to work it out without numbers, Eliezer is a fair author, and Eliezer hasn’t given us the numbers. (We don’t know what the margin for conviction is, or how much of the margin is former Death Eaters who used the Imperius defense, or that they all said it was Voldemort who Imperiused them and not, say, an unknown Death Eater whom Harry did not defeat.)
Technically, the numbers don’t have to work out—Lucius is the one on who’s request the trial be held, If his debt can make him withdraw charges or clear Hermione’s debt, that alone should suffice.
Still, while this is a clever idea, it doesn’t sound very “Taboo Trade-off” or “Think of the Wizengamot as individuals instead of wallpaper”.
The great thing about being the author is that you get to go “BUURRRNNN” seven days before everyone else.
More seriously—I don’t think Aris Katsaris was being overconfident. Methods is meant to be solvable; correct solutions should snap firmly into place. The vast amount of overcomplication and hint-denial and stretching that goes on elsewhere shouldn’t make people less confident if they’re perceiving actual solutions, because those still snap just as firmly into place.
Your concern is reasonable. The only person on these forums who has any reason to trust me with money is Mitchell_Porter. Would his word be sufficient?
If Mitchell vouches for you, I’m willing to make a bet specified as follows:
I’m willing to bet 7 of my dollars to every 3 of yours (to provide me with sufficient margin to make the bet profitable for me, including any uncertainty of followthrough) from a minimum of $35 of mine ($15 of yours), up to a maximum of $210 of mine (90$ of yours)
If invoking the debt Lucius owes to Harry is only part of Harry’s solution, that still counts as a successful prediction for me. It also doesn’t need be called a “life-debt”, if it’s a lesser type of debt, that still counts. If Harry only threatens to invoke or redeem it, but doesn’t actually officially “invoke” or “redeem”, that still counts. If Harry claims it for a debt but the Wizengamot disagrees it is one, that still counts. (And if Eliezer states outright I figured it out, ofcourse I win then too)
Paypal would be my preferred method of money transfer.
I will take this bet, with the following stipulations:
I’m putting up $30 against your $70.
If Harry merely mentions the debt, you don’t win—it must be a significant part of the solution. (If necessary, “significant” can be decided by a mutually agreed-upon third party.)
If Eliezer congratulates you for thinking of a better solution than Harry’s, you don’t win.
If for some reason Mitchell doesn’t vouch for me, no one owes anyone anything.
You’re obviously a sock puppet (not a bad one, just an anonymous one.) So I just pictured Eliezer making a sock puppet account specifically to take bets on what’s going to happen in HPMoR.
My model of EY says that isn’t something he would do, but I find the concept hilarious, nonetheless. (And had many giggles while imagining scheming!Eliezer posting good plot ideas he DIDN’T use under a sock account, and then swooping in as another sock to offer bets on said idea, while laughing evilly (can’t ignore the Evil Laugh), and raking in the dough :P)
At Anna and Carl’s wedding, I advanced a MoR prediction, which Eliezer offered to confirm/deny iff I first made bets with all present, and I won something like $50 =)
I don’t mind the downvote—but consider reversing it if my theory is proven right next chapter. :-)
If I know Vladimir at all then he will not—because to do so would be an error. Overconfidence is a function of your confidence and the information that you have available at the time. Vladimir finding out that it so happens that Eliezer writes the same solution that you do does not significantly alter his perception of how much information you had at the time you wrote that comment.
Even if you win a lottery buying the lottery ticket was still a bad decision.
I understand your point, but I’m not sure the analogy is quite correct. In the case of the lottery, where the probabilities are well known, to make a bad bet is just bad (even if chances goes your way).
In this case however, our estimated probabilities derive ultimately from our models of Eliezer in his authoring capacity. If Vladimir derives a lower probability than the one I derived on Harry using the solution I stated, and it ends up my theory is indeed correct, that is evidence that his model of Eliezer is worse than mine. So he should update his model accordingly, and indeed reconsider whether I was actually overconfident or not. (Ofcourse he may reach the conclusion that even with his updated model, I was still overconfident)
I think Eliezer’s policy as expressed here is better.
And, looking at the context, not particularly relevant.
When they are not yet shown to be right downvoting is perfectly reasonable. Changing your votes retrospectively is not always correct.
Unless Eliezer believes the information available to AK is sufficient to justify being ‘Very Sure’ I do not believe Eliezer’s actual or expressed policy suggests reversing votes if he is lucky. In fact my comment about lottery mistakes is a massively understated reference to what he has written on the subject (if I recall correctly).
Not that I advocate deferring to Eliezer here. If he thinks you can’t be overconfident and right at the same time he is just plain wrong. This is one of the most prevalent human biases.
I believe Eliezer’s policy is to criticize people when they’re wrong. If they say something right for the wrong reason, wait; they’ll say something wrong soon enough.
A number of reviewers said they learned important lessons in rationality from the exercise, seeing the reasoning that got it right contrasted to the reasoning that got it wrong. Did you?
A number of reviewers said they learned important lessons in rationality from the exercise, seeing the reasoning that got it right contrasted to the reasoning that got it wrong. Did you?
What do you mean by ‘right’ here? Do you mean “made correct predictions about which decisions Eliezer would choose for Harry?” While exploring the solutions I am rather careful to keep evaluations of how practical, rational (and, I’ll admit, “how awesome”) a solution is completely distinct from predictions about which particular practical, rational and possibly awesome solution an author will choose. I tend to focus on the former far more because I hate guessing passwords.
I’ll respond again when I’ve had a chance to do more than skim the chapter and evaluate the reasoning properly.
Even if you win a lottery buying the lottery ticket was still a bad decision.
Nonsense. That’s like saying that two-boxing Newcomb’s problem is “right”. If you win, you made the right decision. Your decision-making method may be garbage, but it’s garbage that did a good job that one time, and that’s enough to not regret it.
Actually, its a bad decision with respect to the information you had when you made it, unlike one-boxing instead of two-boxing, you can’t have expected to win the lottery.
I distinguish between the decision itself and the decision-making process. If you win, you made the right decision, and if you lose, you made the wrong one, and that is true without reference to which decision made the most sense at the time. The decision-making algorithm’s job is to give you the highest chance of making the right decision given your prior knowledge, but any such algorithm is imperfect when applied to a vague future. It’s perfectly possible to get the right decision from a bad algorithm or the wrong decision from a good algorithm.
Also, when we’re discussing things as vague as the intention of an author who is foreshadowing heavily, there’s an immense amount of room for judgement calls and intuition, because it’s not like we can actually put concrete values on our probabilities. The measure of a person’s judgement of such things is how often they’re ultimately right, so if he gets it right then I’d have to say that’s evidence that he’s doing his guessing well. How else are we supposed to judge a predictor? If he’s good then he’s allowed to put tight confidence intervals on, and if he’s bad then he’s not. We’ll get some evidence about how good he is on Tuesday.
But you are ignorant—you know the probabilities well enough, but you’re ignorant of which numbers will be drawn, which is the most important part of the whole operation. If I said for whatever reason “If I ever buy a lottery ticket, my numbers will be 5, 11, 17, 33, 36, and 42”, and those numbers come up next Friday, you will have been retrospectively wrong not to have bought, even if “Never buy a ticket” is statistically the best strategy. We cannot make decisions retrospectively, of course, but if you randomly took a flier and bought a ticket for Friday’s draw, then...well, I’d sound pretty stupid if I made fun of you for it, you know?
you will have been retrospectively wrong not to have bought
Not really; Before you know the outcome, saying “my numbers will be 5, 11, 17, 33, 36, and 42” is privileging the hypothesis. (unless you had other information which allowed you to select that specific combination)
And even if those numbers, by pure chance, were correct, there is still a reason it was a bad decision (in the ‘maximizing expected utility’ sense) to buy a ticket. Which is what I meant when I said that you can’t have expected to win.
I just needed an example using definite numbers(so you can judge retrospectively), and not a sequence that millions of people would pick like 1,2,3,4,5,6. For sake of argument, assume I found them on the back of a fortune cookie. Or better yet, just stick a WLOG at the front of my sentence.
And I agree, buying lottery tickets implies a bad way to make decisions, even if you wind up winning. I’m hardly trying to shill for Powerball here. Just saying winning the lottery is always a good thing, even if playing it isn’t.
I think my problem is with this “Judge Retrospectively” thing. Here’s what I think:
Decisions are what’s to be judged, not outcomes. And decisions should be judged relative to the information you had at the time of making them.
In the lottery example, assuming you didn’t know what number would win, the decision to buy a ticket is Bad regardless of whether you won or not.
What I got from this:
you will have been retrospectively wrong not to have bought
Is that you think that if you had a (presumably random) number in mind, but did not buy a ticket, and that number ended up winning, then your decision of not buying the ticket was Wrong and that you should Regret it.
My problem is that this doesn’t make sense: We agree that playing a lottery is Bad (Negative sum game and all that), and we don’t seem to regret not heaving played with the specific number that happened to have won. Which is good, since (to me at least) Regretting decisions made in full knowledge you had at the time of decision seems Wrong.
If this is not what you meant and I’m just bashing a Straw Man, please tell me.
I think there’s a difference between a decision made badly and a bad decision. Playing the lottery is a decision made badly, because you have no special information and it’s -EV. But if you win, it’s a good decision, no matter how badly made it was—the correct response is “That was kind of dumb, I guess, but who cares?”.
Of course, the lottery example is cold math, so there’s no room for disagreement about probabilities. It’s rather different in the case of things like literary analysis, to get back to where we started.
I will not argue about the definition of ‘right decision’, that is at least ambiguous. Yet when it comes to overconfidence in a given prediction that is a property of the comment itself and the information on which it was based upon. New information doesn’t change it.
I’m confused. “I’m pretty sure” is extremely vague. I would not expect to be able to confidently call something like that “overconfidence”. Is there some formalization of such terms that I’m missing?
Interesting…
Ohg jbhyq univat n phefr erobhaq bss lbh ernyyl ubyq hc nf “qrsrngvat” va n pbheg bs Ynj? Fancr’f nanybtl bs n zna gevccvat ba n onol pbzrf gb zvaq. Fgvyy, vg zvtug yrnq gb na vairfgvtngvba vagb gur znggre, juvpu pbhyq fgnyy guvatf.
Context: Harry’s dark side is amoral, destructive, will take any available option which leads to its target no matter how it may escalate or what the risks are, and cares about nothing else other than achieving regular Harry’s current subgoal. (I’m convinced Eliezer regards the dark side as basically a UFAI.) Emphasis added:
...Harry plunged himself into his dark side...offering his dark side anything if it would only solve this problem for him
Who are the major players here that Harry can affect? Harry has no hold on the Wizengamot, as I pointed out any threat on Azkaban is more easily dealt with by attacking Harry.
So Dumbledore and Lucius are the keys. What can Harry do with Dumbledore—no matter the cost to Dumbledore, Harry, or anyone else—that would free Hermione? There’s little he can testify to, as an Occlumens, so he can’t even sacrifice himself (Lucius would refuse it), and it’s not obvious how any of his magic 2.0 abilities could somehow convince the Wizengamot that Hermione is innocent or Lucius to let her go—what is he going to do, promise some more magic to an aristocrat who can buy all the magic he wants?
The answer is so obvious I’m surprised that no one seems to have suggested it yet here or in the reviews: Harry can use his leverage on Dumbledore to trade him for Hermione—“tradeoff”. Dumbledore practically says as much:
“I would not do that to you,” the old wizard said, a terrible weariness seeming to suffuse him as he turned to go. “Still less to Hermione. But I have no rabbits in my hat, Harry. We can only see what Lucius Malfoy wants.”
What does Lucius want? Well, he is perfectly clear:
When Lucius Malfoy spoke again his voice seemed to tremble ever so slightly, as though the stern control on it was failing. “Blood calls for repayment, the blood of my family. Not for any price will I sell the blood debt owed my son. You would not understand that, who never had love or child of your own. Still, there is more than one debt owed to House Malfoy, and I think that my son, if he stood among us, would rather be repaid for his mother’s blood than for his own. Confess your own crime to the Wizengamot, as you confessed it to me, and I shall—”
Why would Dumbledore do it? Because he’s already half-way to turning himself in (viz his little dialogue with Madam Bones):
...The old wizard stood at the podium, his face twisting, untwisting - …
and he really thinks Harry is on the path to darkness (in a way few others are, because Dumbledore is one of the only knowers of the Prophecy) and this Hermione incident would be more than enough to turn Harry, convince him that the system is irredeemably corrupt and turn his mission to ‘taking over Magical England’, as indeed the omniscient narrator tells us Harry has already done to the point of no longer caring about not being called a Dark Lord… Sacrificing himself to keep Harry on the side of good is a good deal. This is consistent with canon Dumbledore losing power and respect, and ultimately dying in the war with Voldemort while working on the Horcruxes to aid Harry’s ultimate victory; and for that matter, who replaces Dumbledore as headmaster in canon? A character which just showed up in MoR for the first time ever...
It will come at a major cost—Dumbledore will either be in Azkaban or he will flee or something like that and his entire faction discredited. “Tradeoff”.
To me, this is the most compelling scenario, which I give a full 40% probability of having; but I also like the debt (30%/20%) and time-turner strategies (35%), although the latter is more because time-turners are so general and powerful that I have to assume my inability to think of a really solid strategy is my inability alone.
A man with a scarred face sitting next to Lucius; Fenrir Greyback?
Wasn’t that one of Lucius’s lackeys from the previous chapters where they watched the battle?
It doesn’t matter who was the real culprit as long as Dumbledore confesses. He’s an occlumens and i would be doubtful if any legilimens can read his mind and find the truth.
True, but unless Harry looks like he’s about to do something immensely stupid(and the only thing stupid enough that I can think of would be admitting to the Azkaban breakout, which Dumbledore doesn’t know about), he’s not at risk.
Maybe I’m getting too attached to my own new solution. It does seem to me that getting Hermione to swear an Unbreakable Vow to seek vengeance on Narcissa’s killer would work better.
Lucius, we think, does not know what ‘Harrymort’ wants. If Hermione takes the Vow then Lucius will think he has the answer: “The Dark Lord’s been setting up a way to take down Dumbledore, a way that looks like the work of D’s own allies.” Even if D kills his Muggle-born pawn, that would look suspicious and perhaps lead to his political destruction. Then the noble, grieving-but-honest Harry Potter steps into the vacuum?
Bones isn’t taking the attitude of ‘don’t turn me in, Albus, you owe me’, but ‘Albus, don’t turn yourself in, you know it’s the right thing but the consequences would be too bad’. At least, it’s clear to me that Bones is not the bone to be thrown to Lucius.
I thought she might be taking the attitude of ‘don’t turn me in, Albus, you know it’s the right thing but the consequences would be too bad right now’. Read: lose the head of the Aurors as an ally just when Voldemort has become active again, and the rest of the Ministry and Amelia’s replacement wouldn’t believe Dumbledore about it (going by canon).
Harry didn’t hear Hermione’s testimony. Therefore, he can go back in time and change it to anything that would produce the audience reaction he saw, without causing paradox.
If he could change part of the testimony to something demonstrably false, that no one else in the room knew at the time, he could prove that her mind had been compromised. Actually changing the memory would be a problem, and it doesn’t seem like a likely solution to me, but it’s still possible.
I was under the impression that we can actually influence the events of the story based upon how good our ideas are. If I may ask, Eliezer, are we trying to pick your brain for a True ending (something you have written already that we’re trying to guess) or are we coming up with a Good one?
cold!Harry activates his Patronus charm, which depends on the wish to destroy Death, and therefore can be cast while “cold”. This is done to disrupt the proceedings by destroying the Dementor. Since Harry never actually did this while at Azkaban, he wouldn’t necessarily be associated w/ the prisonbreak of Bellatrix.
In the confusion, Harry cloaks himself, and timeturns back an hour. This is done to give himself time to contemplate exactly what he needs to say and do. Sicne he will be cloaked, this preserves the secret of the Time turner.
(version A) Immediately after destroying the Dementor, and the loop is closed, still-cloaked Harry takes advantage of his ability to get past any guards/defenses and whispers in Parseltongue into LM’s ears: “No power can stop me. Even here in the Wizengamot I could reach you. If you do not relinquish your claim on Hermione your son is dead.” IF LM doesn’t understand Parseltongue, he would at least recognize it, and Harry could repeat himself in English.
Harry Time turns again, and uncloaks in a side hall, intentionally getting himself seen during the same time that cloaked!Harry was threatening Draco’s life (the sole real leverage over LM Harry has.)
This is the scenario I view being conducted.
3 (version B): instead of repeating his words in English, he could leave the his mother’s potions book at LM’s feet, with a note in English that says the same… with the added phrase, “Contained within this manual is the key to a terrible secret that would destroy Dumbledore. You have gained, this day, Lucius Malfoy. I have uses for the Granger child yet. Do not interfere in my plans.” This has the added benefit of ensuring that LM is likely to stay quiet about the threat—because the pot was sweetened in favor of blackmail of Dumbledore by Lucius.
You don’t? I think he’s already got it subconsciously:
And in the Most Ancient Hall of the Wizengamot an icy voice rang out, speech the color of liquid nitrogen, pitched too high for that it came from too young a throat, and that voice said, “Lucius Malfoy.”
seemed a pretty clear reference to
Then the other voice spoke, high-pitched like the hiss of a teakettle, and it was like dry ice laid on Harry’s every nerve, like a brand of metal cooled to liquid helium temperatures and laid on every part of him.
Sure, but coming out with a scary voice when he’s trying to sound intimidating is a lot less odd than coming out sounding like a snake. If he didn’t notice the latter, he’s not likely to notice the former, in canon or in MoR.
that plan relies on Harry realizing that Malfoy thinks he’s Voldemort.
… I genuinely didn’t think of the Voldemort angle. That only sweetens the pot. I think that ArisKatsaris’s solution is far more effective/elegant than my own. (Especially since it’s foreshadowed by the part about how Harry thought of the Wizengamot as ‘wallpaper’ and that ‘this would change’. -- that could be viewed as a dropped-hint that the solution lies in manipulating the votes. I can’t think of another way Harry could achieve that than through the former Death Eaters.)
“It is clear, from the stories, that the Dark Lords who return by possessing another’s form, wield lesser magics than they once knew. I do not think Voldemort would be satisfied with that. He would take some other avenue to life. But Voldemort was more Slytherin than Salazar, grasping at every opportunity. He would use his pitiful state, use his power of possession, if he had reason. If he could benefit by another’s… inexplicable fury.” Albus’s voice had fallen to almost a whisper. “That is what I suspect happened to Miss Granger.”
So now that he knows it’s theoretically possible...
Edit: I’m an idiot. He’s known it was possible since Quirrell told him to pretend he was possessed by Voldemort in TSPE.
Maybe not to others, but he himself would know Harry had broken Bella out of Azkaban and then lied to him about it. He would definitely force Veritaserum or Legilimency on Harry to find out the complete truth of what happened that day.
In fact, that’s a point I haven’t considered before. Why haven’t Quirrel offered to Obliviate Harry of that day’s events, maybe using a Pensieve first? This would protect them both a lot. It makes no sense if what Quirrel wanted was the lost lore of Slytherin that Bella might possess, or even Bella herself for some unknown purpose. But it makes perfect sense if Quirrel just wanted Azkaban to produce the emotional effect that it did on Harry. As a sort of prerequisite for this trial of Hermione.
The third party doesn’t need to know what the memories being obliviated are. Just that they’re being paid to obliviate everything that happened that day, and that they will be obliviated themselves of this act immediately afterwards.
The distinction is that perfect Occlumens can show false thoughts to a Legilimens; regular Occlumens, of which Harry is one, are perfectly capable of blocking Legilimens from learning anything, they just know they’ve been blocked.
We know that Occlumens can project the persona of a rock in order to thwart Legilimency. Do we also know that there is no brute-force method for getting past the defenses?
There’s no way Lucius will settle for a highly dubious IOU on Dumbledore’s head after almost nailing Hermione and suffering a highly visible defeat, so this is not sufficient on its own. There’s no need to bring it in.
There’s no way Lucius will settle for a highly dubious IOU on Dumbledore’s head after almost nailing Hermione and suffering a highly visible defeat, so this is not sufficient on its own.
Of course not. That’s why 3B’s additional verbiage was supplemental to 3A. So consider everything said in 3A and what’s said in 3B, when assigning it a probability of success.
There’s no need to bring it in.
Sure there is. To keep it quiet, thereby allowing Harry to “get away with it.” There is no victory like total victory. There is no kill like overkill. And cold!Harry is a Sith: he deals in absolutes.
He doesn’t need to. He can just walk out of the Wizengamot while cloaked and then walk back in. Each turning gives him an hour, after all, and while he used up his six for the previous day he hadn’t used any for the day of the vote itself, as of chapter 80.
Since when? A while ago he convinced Dumbledore to give him the full six hours rather than two, but I don’t think we were ever told that he can use it at will now.
ETA: From Chapter 77, Self-Actualization Aftermaths, emphasis mine:
(Some time later, an earlier version of Harry, who had invisibly waited next to the gargoyles since 9PM, followed the Deputy Headmistress through the opening that parted for her, stood quietly behind her on the turning stairs until they came to the top, and then, still under the Cloak, spun his Time-Turner thrice.)
The Dementor is literally death. The “sword that has slain a woman and rope that has hanged a man” ritual will almost certainly summon one, but that’s known Dark, and thus probably not something that can be used in the middle of a Wizengamot proceeding. And other than altering the punishment, how would this help? Even killing the Dementor outright will just make them mildly annoyed.
Dumbledore did (plausibly) burn Narcissa alive, and Potter saying so openly might be enough to swing something. It’d be unlikely to turn out well—Dumbledore would of course deny it, Potter’s alliance would instantly be sundered, and unless Dumbledore wound up in jail, it wouldn’t save Hermione. But, it might be tried.
The scarred man is likely Jugson, not Greyback. Isn’t Greyback in Azkaban right now? Not a solution, but it should be noted.
If he’s learned Avada Kedavra, there’s always the option of blinding everyone with a super-Patronus and then committing mass murder until your side has a majority. Somehow, I don’t see that one happening.
Snape and/or Quirrell(or someone else—Padma Patil would be a funny choice) comes to the rescue. Vanishingly unlikely, and hardly in keeping with the message of the story, but not strictly impossible.
Hermione figures out the super-Patronus, with Harry’s prompting. This one is actually the least crazy of the lot, I think—the super-Patronus works on the principle of love for all human life. Someone who casts it ought to be damn near incapable of murder, and if the principle could be explained to the Wizengamot without ruining everything, the fact that Hermione managed it would actually constitute exculpatory evidence. It likely wouldn’t be believed, but it’s closer to possible than most of the others.
As I said below though, these plans all share one common feature—they suck. I can’t think of one that isn’t either vanishingly unlikely or obviously stupid, and too stupid at that to be used even by a despairing child trying to save his girlfriend from a fate asymptotically approaching death.
This one is actually the least crazy of the lot, I think—the super-Patronus works on the principle of love for all human life. Someone who casts it ought to be damn near incapable of murder, and if the principle could be explained to the Wizengamot without ruining everything, the fact that Hermione managed it would actually constitute exculpatory evidence.
Love of all human life does not translate into an inability to do math or unwillingness to murder.
As well, it’s not clear that guilty Hermione feels good enough about herself or all human life that she would be able to cast it.
It’s not a likely case, just less IMO unlikely than the others I listed. I’d put the odds at perhaps 10-20%. The rot13′d answer is the one I think is solidly the most likely.
If he’s learned Avada Kedavra, there’s always the option of blinding everyone with a super-Patronus and then committing mass murder until your side has a majority.
You don’t need that particular spell to commit mass murder. Harry would likely use transfiguration or napalm. That said, Harry-who-can-murder is not Harry-who-can-Patronus.
If he is, I don’t think we know this. He’s at the stage of being able to block veritaserum, and thus probably to put up a block to stop anyone reading his mind, but I don’t think we’ve been given any indication that he’s reached the point of being able to show false thoughts to someone attempting to read his mind.
I would add that he knows Voldemort is probably alive. If he were to testify by placing his memories into a pensieve, he could show that the Hogwarts inner circle has strong reason to suspect that Voldemort is alive and behind this plot. This might create a measure of doubt among the Wizengamot, at the cost of probably throwing the country into turmoil, so we can call this the Stupid Sentimental Hero Option.
I find it odd that Harry made no attempt to contact Lucius, or that that attempt failed, before the trial. Your list is also missing Cornelius Fudge.
The first thing that came to mind was declaring that Dumbledore killed Narcissa, but he doesn’t have any evidence for that besides Draco’s testimony, which is already fourth-hand.
It is worthwhile to note that Harry is a member of a Noble House too, and so there may be some obligation of Draco to him (remember that time Draco ‘tried to kill him’ by dropping him off the roof, and he actually was in danger because of the mob of girls?) or Hermione to him (can’t think of one there, though). But those don’t seem like things that he could easily pull out in the Wizengamot after a vote has been called.
I think the most likely outcome is that Harry does not, in fact, think of something. Hermione is sent to Azkaban, Draco is now his enemy, and Quirrel wins.
I think the most likely outcome is that Harry does not, in fact, think of something. Hermione is sent to Azkaban, Draco is now his enemy, and Quirrel wins.
If this were the case, then good serial pacing would be to put that at the end of this installment, to leave on a clear down-note.
Leaving it on a cliff-hanger promises some answer to the last question. By the text, it looks like that question is, “How will I save Hermione?” not, “Can I save Hermione?”
A central part of Eliezer’s worldview is that it is possible to lose, and lose big. An Al-Ghazali can come along and destroy the bright future of your society. A UFAI can destroy the bright future of your society. A Quirrel can destroy the bright future of Harry Potter.
If the fic is coming to an end soon, which I think has been implied, Harry’s implosion and Quirrel’s victory are a good place to end things.
(I should clarify that, by “most likely outcome,” I mean “more likely than any other specific outcome,” not “more likely than its complement.” I think there’s more than half chance that Harry will think of something, and I think ArisKatsaris has proposed the most likely way Harry will get out of this, but still think it’s somewhat more likely Harry will fail than win that way.
Chapter breaks are a meta-aspect not in the story itself. If it were a continual story this might make sense. Dramatic pacing of the story elements with a bad ending wouldn’t be an in universe lesson but an out of universe lesson. Also, I suspect that Eliezer is smart enough to realize that having a downer ending would likely turn off a lot of people to rationality who might otherwise be take some interest in it simply from the halo effect. Having a downer ending would substantially undermine that.
I didn’t read the wikipedia article fully, and so didn’t notice that it only hinted at the primary reason he was important.
The Islamic Golden Age, from ~750 to ~1250, was the period where Islam was the intellectual center of the world. Many Greek texts only survived because they had been preserved by Muslims and/or translated into Arabic, and scholars living in Muslim lands (Muslims, Christians, Jews, and atheists) were at the forefront of science, mathematics, and philosophy. Baghdad was the commercial and intellectual center of the world. Francis Bacon may have formalized the scientific method, but the main advance in empiricism before him came from al-Haytham, six hundred years earlier.
Al-Ghazali was an influential thinker who said that the Greek philosophers were ignorant infidels and that science and mathematics were dangerous because they could lead to loss of faith.
Ibn Rushd, famously depicted in the School of Athens, argued against Al-Ghazali- that the Greeks made valuable contributions, that science and mathematics were valuable. He was too little, too late; Muslim opinion swung Al-Ghazali’s way, though a few Europeans took Ibn Rushd’s arguments seriously, like Thomas Aquinas (who was also heavily influenced by Al-Ghazali, but agreed with Ibn Rushd’s conclusions).
Al-Ghazali, essentially, was the intellectual standard-bearer for the movement to replace openness and inquiry with closedness and faith in the Muslim world. He can’t be entirely blamed for the collapse of the Islamic Golden Age, as both the barbarous Christians and Mongols were beating on the doors, but that Islam never really recovered as an intellectual force appears to be centered around him.
(Neil de Grasse Tyson tells this story here (3:24), though he simplifies it somewhat.)
Is there a book you’d recommend on the thinkers of Al-Ghazali’s time? The only one that came up for me in a quick Google on his name was a screed with all the hallmarks of cherry-picking history to support a point of view about present-day politics.
And yet, he did an entire arc about the role of a hero and supporting characters. I don’t think we can be sure that his decisions won’t be influenced by story concerns.
Of course his decisions are influenced by story concerns: the way to make the point “this is not a story” is to do it in a sickening matter. Let people pattern-match on “this is the bleak moment where Harry will do the impossible and win,” and then reveal that the impossible is, in fact, impossible.
(Note there is a problem with the “you have five days to come up with a solution” approach if EY has taken this plan- EY would have to be pretty confident that no plan existed to hope that fans would not come up with one.)
I am aware. My point is that if you say “X is impossible” and then someone points out a way to do X, you now have a plot hole / have to admit that the fan is cleverer than the character or author. That’s genre savvy evidence against the prediction that EY will say “X is impossible,” whereas “he would end the chapter on a downer” isn’t because he would get the desired effect more strongly if he ended the chapter on a cliffhanger, and then had the character fall off the cliff.
Destroys the dementors by destroying himself? Destroys the dementors, and lets out the criminals of wizarding Britain? Destroys the dementors, and is put down for rebellion?
The person in custody is not necessarily Quirrell, or “unlikely to be released” can be circumvented a number of different ways. The only way the Quirrell is just sitting in custody is if that’s what he wants, and I still think he’s sort of a Byronic hero.
Well, the simplest explanation is that he’s sitting in custody because he doesn’t want to be in Hogwarts while Dumbledore scans it for Tom Riddle’s soul with the Map, etc. If he doesn’t have a particular plot to carry out during the trial, it’s easiest to stay in custody then too, until the Aurors choose to release him after the whole matter is considered closed.
If he wanted, he could almost certainly leave, I agree. But why? If this whole thing is his plot, it’s going on well enough without him, and on the other hand he possibly can’t be officially present at the trial (unless invited by Dumbledore) to rescue it if something goes wrong. OTOH, if it’s not his plot, it would still seem to align with his interests—he has more to gain by offering Harry to help rescue Hermione, once Harry has declared the government etc. his enemies, than he does by offering Harry to help sway the trial.
The obvious guess is that Harry will destroy the Dementor in full view of everyone. But this seems far too obvious for Eliezer to taunt us so.
Harry knows nothing about the aurors, the Prophet reporter, Umbridge, Fenrir Greyback (if that’s a correct identification), or Amelia Bones.
That leaves
The dementor
Minerva
Lucius
Neville’s grandmother
Himself
The dementor he can destroy, but that’s the obvious answer. Minerva he knows nothing shocking or incriminating about, and I can’t think of anything that would help. Same goes for Madam Longbottom, I think.
That leaves
The dementor
Lucius
Harry himself — Oh, and I forgot: Everything in Harry’s pouch.
What could Harry say about himself that’s shocking? He could confess to his role in the Azkaban breakout, but I can’t see how that would help Hermione. None of his scientific knowledge or magical discoveries would impress the Wizengamot, if they could even understand him.
Does he know anything incriminating about Lucius? Well, he knows he was a Death Eater. But Harry is immune to Veritaserum and can’t testify.
Is there anything he can do about or with the dementor other than destroy it, which is far too obvious?
Is there anything he can do about or with the dementor other than destroy it, which is far too obvious?
He might be able to do something fancy the same way he commanded a dozen of them to “Turn and go and do not speak of this to anyone” in TSPE. Maybe silently tell it to spread the word to its brethren that no Dementor is to go near Hermione? Which still leaves her stuck in a cold metal box for ten years, so it doesn’t seem to help much.
Is there anything he can do about or with the dementor other than destroy it, which is far too obvious?
Go in front of it and let the horrible personality possess him again. After making some sort of precommitment, I suppose. This solution was foreshadowed in the omake “Lord of the rationality”.
But in truth, I lost faith in Eliezer’s ability to come up with realistic solutions when Harry miraculously survived the first dementor attack in Azkaban. He will probably just have Harry use his main character powers again.
Azkaban drains magic, he can be stupefied and tossed in, and without his wand he’s going to have a hard time anyway. It’s perfectly possible to just toss Harry in Azkaban and regard his threat as neutralized.
Hell, this wouldn’t even work. They’d have him immediately arrested for destruction of Ministry Property, and never let him near Azkaban.
I doubt they’d have him arrested for destruction of Ministry property, because it would be such a PR disaster.
“Boy Who Lived Destroys Dementor, Arrested For Destruction Of Ministry Property.”
It would definitely limit his ability to carry out any sort of breakouts in future though, and possibly incriminate him with respect to the Bellatrix breakout.
I seriously doubt that if the Boy Who Lived killed a dementor in front of the Wizengamot, their response would be “let’s let a dementor eat him to make an example of him.” They may not respect him, but these are still people who’ve been celebrating Harry Potter Day for years.
Just because the members of the Wizengamot are stuck in a hate-spiral with respect to Hermione doesn’t mean that they’re exceptionally evil people regarding other issues (this is as good a place as any to take note of the chapter title.)
I seriously doubt that if the Boy Who Lived killed a dementor in front of the Wizengamot, their response would be “let’s let a dementor eat him to make an example of him.”
CHAPTER 80 SPOILERS BELOW
Well. We have five days to think of something. This seems to mean that Harry will think of something, and we have five days to guess what it may be. Presumably it will be something in one of the following categories:
Something about Lucius Malfoy
Something about the Wizengamot
Something about the laws of magical Britain
Anything about some person or thing within range of his vision
I propose we start by making a list of everything in the courtroom:
Three Aurors
One of whom is named Gawain Robards
A dementor
Minerva McGonagall
Harry Potter
And everything in his pouch
A Prophet reporter
Dolores Umbridge
Lucius Malfoy
Augusta Longbottom
Dumbledore
A man with a scarred face sitting next to Lucius; Fenrir Greyback?
Amelia Bones
What do we know about any of these people that Harry might use to sway the crowd?
I’m pretty sure the solution is as follows (I’ve already posted it in TV tropes forum). I’m ROT13, if anyone still wants to figure it out: Yhpvhf Znysbl pynvzrq gb unir orra haqre Vzcrevhf ol Ibyqrzbeg. Ibyqrzbeg jnf qrsrngrq ol Uneel Cbggre. Sebz Serq & Trbetr’f cenax jr xabj gung xvyyvat gur jvmneq gung unf lbh haqre gur Vzcrevhf phefr perngrf n qrog. Erfhyg: Yhpvhf Znysbl naq rirel bgure Qrngu rngre pynvzvat gb unir orra vzcrevbfrq ner abj haqre yvsr qrog gb Uneel Cbggre. Ur pna fgneg erqrrzvat.
Point of order: vg whfg fnlf “n qrog”, abg n yvsr-qrog.
Also, it would need to be explained why no one ever thought of this before.
Yeah, I was going ‘wow, that might actually work’ and then it occurred to me that they already discussed whether they had any debts from Lucius they could call in. So unless this is so subtle that no one has ever called in such a debt before, someone must have been holding an idiotball.
EDIT: Logos01 suggests that the debt be invoked of all the Wizengamot members who also claimed to be Imperiused, to swing the vote on whether or not to convict. This might work, but I would personally dislike it as we have no idea how many such people there are.
Gurl qvfphffrq gur npghny qrogf, ohg gurl qvqa’g qvfphff guvf bar, abg rira nf n cbgragvnyvgl, fb V guvax vg qvq whfg fyvc gurve zvaqf, orpnhfr Uneel naq Qhzoyrqber qba’g oryvrir Yhpvhf gb unir orra haqre Vzcrevhf naq guhf gurl pbafvqre Ibyqrzbeg’f qrsrng gb or n oybj ntnvafg Yhpvhf, abg n snibhe gb Yhpvhf perngvat n qrog. Fb, lrnu, V guvax vg whfg qvqa’g pebff gurve zvaqf. Vg qvqa’g pebff zl zvaq rvgure gur jubyr cnfg jrrx, naq V jnf yrff ohfl (gubhtu yrff qrfcrengr sbe n fbyhgvba) guna Uneel be Nyohf jrer.
Lrnu, vg qvq gnxr zr abj bayl 10-15 zvahgrf be fb sbe zr gb pbzr hc jvgu vg, ohg V unq gur fvtavsvpnag nqinagntr bs xabjvat gurer rkvfgrq n fbyhgvba, gung V unq orra tvira fhssvpvrag vasbezngvba fhssvpvragyl sberfunqbjrq, naq gung gur fbyhgvba zbfg yvxryl qrcraqrq ba gur ynjf naq phfgbzf bs zntvpny Oevgnva, nf gur ynfg cnentencu bs gur puncgre vzcyvrf.
Still unusually speculative; we’re told previously that an Imperius debt is not a life-debt, so it already has a burden of improbability (did they misspeak or simply mean to imply that a debt of some sort is created without reference to how heavy it is?).
And the latter suggestion, while very clever, has the problem that it requires the numbers to work out, so we couldn’t conclude that it will work without numbers, so a fair author will not expect us to work it out without numbers, Eliezer is a fair author, and Eliezer hasn’t given us the numbers. (We don’t know what the margin for conviction is, or how much of the margin is former Death Eaters who used the Imperius defense, or that they all said it was Voldemort who Imperiused them and not, say, an unknown Death Eater whom Harry did not defeat.)
Well, we’ll see in a few days.
Not quite. We’re told it’s a debt, we don’t know what sort of debt it is.
Technically, the numbers don’t have to work out—Lucius is the one on who’s request the trial be held, If his debt can make him withdraw charges or clear Hermione’s debt, that alone should suffice.
Still, while this is a clever idea, it doesn’t sound very “Taboo Trade-off” or “Think of the Wizengamot as individuals instead of wallpaper”.
You misunderstand, the point is there are 2 possible debt strategies; for one of them, the numbers do have to work out.
I’d say Logos01′s strategy exemplifies thinking of them as individuals, actually...
How about: invoke Lucius’s life debt. Trade it for Hermione’s.
Great idea, but where’s the Taboo Trade off?
Congratulations on correctly guessing (most of) the solution.
Downvoted for the overconfident “I’m pretty sure”.
I don’t mind the downvote—but consider reversing it if my theory is proven right next chapter. :-)
The great thing about being the author is that you get to go “BUURRRNNN” seven days before everyone else.
More seriously—I don’t think Aris Katsaris was being overconfident. Methods is meant to be solvable; correct solutions should snap firmly into place. The vast amount of overcomplication and hint-denial and stretching that goes on elsewhere shouldn’t make people less confident if they’re perceiving actual solutions, because those still snap just as firmly into place.
How sure are you?
85%
Bet?
I don’t know you. Can you get someone whose word I reasonably trust, like Alicorn or Nancylebov or Yvain or Eliezer to vouch for you?
Your concern is reasonable. The only person on these forums who has any reason to trust me with money is Mitchell_Porter. Would his word be sufficient?
If Mitchell vouches for you, I’m willing to make a bet specified as follows:
I’m willing to bet 7 of my dollars to every 3 of yours (to provide me with sufficient margin to make the bet profitable for me, including any uncertainty of followthrough) from a minimum of $35 of mine ($15 of yours), up to a maximum of $210 of mine (90$ of yours)
If invoking the debt Lucius owes to Harry is only part of Harry’s solution, that still counts as a successful prediction for me. It also doesn’t need be called a “life-debt”, if it’s a lesser type of debt, that still counts. If Harry only threatens to invoke or redeem it, but doesn’t actually officially “invoke” or “redeem”, that still counts. If Harry claims it for a debt but the Wizengamot disagrees it is one, that still counts. (And if Eliezer states outright I figured it out, ofcourse I win then too)
Paypal would be my preferred method of money transfer.
I will take this bet, with the following stipulations:
I’m putting up $30 against your $70.
If Harry merely mentions the debt, you don’t win—it must be a significant part of the solution. (If necessary, “significant” can be decided by a mutually agreed-upon third party.)
If Eliezer congratulates you for thinking of a better solution than Harry’s, you don’t win.
If for some reason Mitchell doesn’t vouch for me, no one owes anyone anything.
Done.
Please PM paypal info.
The money has been received, thank you!
Awesome
You’re obviously a sock puppet (not a bad one, just an anonymous one.) So I just pictured Eliezer making a sock puppet account specifically to take bets on what’s going to happen in HPMoR.
My model of EY says that isn’t something he would do, but I find the concept hilarious, nonetheless. (And had many giggles while imagining scheming!Eliezer posting good plot ideas he DIDN’T use under a sock account, and then swooping in as another sock to offer bets on said idea, while laughing evilly (can’t ignore the Evil Laugh), and raking in the dough :P)
At Anna and Carl’s wedding, I advanced a MoR prediction, which Eliezer offered to confirm/deny iff I first made bets with all present, and I won something like $50 =)
I was present and permitted to not-bet.
I vouch. :-)
Voting up all comments in this exchange for being virtuous.
If I know Vladimir at all then he will not—because to do so would be an error. Overconfidence is a function of your confidence and the information that you have available at the time. Vladimir finding out that it so happens that Eliezer writes the same solution that you do does not significantly alter his perception of how much information you had at the time you wrote that comment.
Even if you win a lottery buying the lottery ticket was still a bad decision.
I understand your point, but I’m not sure the analogy is quite correct. In the case of the lottery, where the probabilities are well known, to make a bad bet is just bad (even if chances goes your way).
In this case however, our estimated probabilities derive ultimately from our models of Eliezer in his authoring capacity. If Vladimir derives a lower probability than the one I derived on Harry using the solution I stated, and it ends up my theory is indeed correct, that is evidence that his model of Eliezer is worse than mine. So he should update his model accordingly, and indeed reconsider whether I was actually overconfident or not. (Ofcourse he may reach the conclusion that even with his updated model, I was still overconfident)
I think Eliezer’s policy as expressed here is better.
And, looking at the context, not particularly relevant.
When they are not yet shown to be right downvoting is perfectly reasonable. Changing your votes retrospectively is not always correct.
Unless Eliezer believes the information available to AK is sufficient to justify being ‘Very Sure’ I do not believe Eliezer’s actual or expressed policy suggests reversing votes if he is lucky. In fact my comment about lottery mistakes is a massively understated reference to what he has written on the subject (if I recall correctly).
Not that I advocate deferring to Eliezer here. If he thinks you can’t be overconfident and right at the same time he is just plain wrong. This is one of the most prevalent human biases.
I believe Eliezer’s policy is to criticize people when they’re wrong. If they say something right for the wrong reason, wait; they’ll say something wrong soon enough.
A number of reviewers said they learned important lessons in rationality from the exercise, seeing the reasoning that got it right contrasted to the reasoning that got it wrong. Did you?
What do you mean by ‘right’ here? Do you mean “made correct predictions about which decisions Eliezer would choose for Harry?” While exploring the solutions I am rather careful to keep evaluations of how practical, rational (and, I’ll admit, “how awesome”) a solution is completely distinct from predictions about which particular practical, rational and possibly awesome solution an author will choose. I tend to focus on the former far more because I hate guessing passwords.
I’ll respond again when I’ve had a chance to do more than skim the chapter and evaluate the reasoning properly.
Nonsense. That’s like saying that two-boxing Newcomb’s problem is “right”. If you win, you made the right decision. Your decision-making method may be garbage, but it’s garbage that did a good job that one time, and that’s enough to not regret it.
Actually, its a bad decision with respect to the information you had when you made it, unlike one-boxing instead of two-boxing, you can’t have expected to win the lottery.
I distinguish between the decision itself and the decision-making process. If you win, you made the right decision, and if you lose, you made the wrong one, and that is true without reference to which decision made the most sense at the time. The decision-making algorithm’s job is to give you the highest chance of making the right decision given your prior knowledge, but any such algorithm is imperfect when applied to a vague future. It’s perfectly possible to get the right decision from a bad algorithm or the wrong decision from a good algorithm.
Also, when we’re discussing things as vague as the intention of an author who is foreshadowing heavily, there’s an immense amount of room for judgement calls and intuition, because it’s not like we can actually put concrete values on our probabilities. The measure of a person’s judgement of such things is how often they’re ultimately right, so if he gets it right then I’d have to say that’s evidence that he’s doing his guessing well. How else are we supposed to judge a predictor? If he’s good then he’s allowed to put tight confidence intervals on, and if he’s bad then he’s not. We’ll get some evidence about how good he is on Tuesday.
I agree with the principle, but lottery is a really poor example of this, since it implies ignorance.
But you are ignorant—you know the probabilities well enough, but you’re ignorant of which numbers will be drawn, which is the most important part of the whole operation. If I said for whatever reason “If I ever buy a lottery ticket, my numbers will be 5, 11, 17, 33, 36, and 42”, and those numbers come up next Friday, you will have been retrospectively wrong not to have bought, even if “Never buy a ticket” is statistically the best strategy. We cannot make decisions retrospectively, of course, but if you randomly took a flier and bought a ticket for Friday’s draw, then...well, I’d sound pretty stupid if I made fun of you for it, you know?
Not really; Before you know the outcome, saying “my numbers will be 5, 11, 17, 33, 36, and 42” is privileging the hypothesis. (unless you had other information which allowed you to select that specific combination)
And even if those numbers, by pure chance, were correct, there is still a reason it was a bad decision (in the ‘maximizing expected utility’ sense) to buy a ticket. Which is what I meant when I said that you can’t have expected to win.
I just needed an example using definite numbers(so you can judge retrospectively), and not a sequence that millions of people would pick like 1,2,3,4,5,6. For sake of argument, assume I found them on the back of a fortune cookie. Or better yet, just stick a WLOG at the front of my sentence.
And I agree, buying lottery tickets implies a bad way to make decisions, even if you wind up winning. I’m hardly trying to shill for Powerball here. Just saying winning the lottery is always a good thing, even if playing it isn’t.
I think my problem is with this “Judge Retrospectively” thing. Here’s what I think:
Decisions are what’s to be judged, not outcomes. And decisions should be judged relative to the information you had at the time of making them.
In the lottery example, assuming you didn’t know what number would win, the decision to buy a ticket is Bad regardless of whether you won or not.
What I got from this:
Is that you think that if you had a (presumably random) number in mind, but did not buy a ticket, and that number ended up winning, then your decision of not buying the ticket was Wrong and that you should Regret it.
My problem is that this doesn’t make sense: We agree that playing a lottery is Bad (Negative sum game and all that), and we don’t seem to regret not heaving played with the specific number that happened to have won. Which is good, since (to me at least) Regretting decisions made in full knowledge you had at the time of decision seems Wrong.
If this is not what you meant and I’m just bashing a Straw Man, please tell me.
I think there’s a difference between a decision made badly and a bad decision. Playing the lottery is a decision made badly, because you have no special information and it’s -EV. But if you win, it’s a good decision, no matter how badly made it was—the correct response is “That was kind of dumb, I guess, but who cares?”.
Of course, the lottery example is cold math, so there’s no room for disagreement about probabilities. It’s rather different in the case of things like literary analysis, to get back to where we started.
I will not argue about the definition of ‘right decision’, that is at least ambiguous. Yet when it comes to overconfidence in a given prediction that is a property of the comment itself and the information on which it was based upon. New information doesn’t change it.
I’m confused. “I’m pretty sure” is extremely vague. I would not expect to be able to confidently call something like that “overconfidence”. Is there some formalization of such terms that I’m missing?
Interesting… Ohg jbhyq univat n phefr erobhaq bss lbh ernyyl ubyq hc nf “qrsrngvat” va n pbheg bs Ynj? Fancr’f nanybtl bs n zna gevccvat ba n onol pbzrf gb zvaq. Fgvyy, vg zvtug yrnq gb na vairfgvtngvba vagb gur znggre, juvpu pbhyq fgnyy guvatf.
V qba’g guvax gung Uneel’f ntr vf eryrinag urer. Abobql qvfhchgrf Ibyqrzbeg’f qrngu jnf qhr gb uvf nggnpx ba Yvyl, Wnzrf, naq Uneel Cbggre; guhf, gur qrog jbhyq or gb gur Aboyr Ubhfr bs Cbggre, bs juvpu Uneel vf gur bayl yvivat zrzore. N qrog gb uvf Ubhfr jbhyq gurersber or n qrog gb uvz.
motherofgod.jpg
I think you’ve hit on it. Well done.
Don’t forget the phoenix.
Context: Harry’s dark side is amoral, destructive, will take any available option which leads to its target no matter how it may escalate or what the risks are, and cares about nothing else other than achieving regular Harry’s current subgoal. (I’m convinced Eliezer regards the dark side as basically a UFAI.) Emphasis added:
Who are the major players here that Harry can affect? Harry has no hold on the Wizengamot, as I pointed out any threat on Azkaban is more easily dealt with by attacking Harry.
So Dumbledore and Lucius are the keys. What can Harry do with Dumbledore—no matter the cost to Dumbledore, Harry, or anyone else—that would free Hermione? There’s little he can testify to, as an Occlumens, so he can’t even sacrifice himself (Lucius would refuse it), and it’s not obvious how any of his magic 2.0 abilities could somehow convince the Wizengamot that Hermione is innocent or Lucius to let her go—what is he going to do, promise some more magic to an aristocrat who can buy all the magic he wants?
The answer is so obvious I’m surprised that no one seems to have suggested it yet here or in the reviews: Harry can use his leverage on Dumbledore to trade him for Hermione—“tradeoff”. Dumbledore practically says as much:
What does Lucius want? Well, he is perfectly clear:
Why would Dumbledore do it? Because he’s already half-way to turning himself in (viz his little dialogue with Madam Bones):
and he really thinks Harry is on the path to darkness (in a way few others are, because Dumbledore is one of the only knowers of the Prophecy) and this Hermione incident would be more than enough to turn Harry, convince him that the system is irredeemably corrupt and turn his mission to ‘taking over Magical England’, as indeed the omniscient narrator tells us Harry has already done to the point of no longer caring about not being called a Dark Lord… Sacrificing himself to keep Harry on the side of good is a good deal. This is consistent with canon Dumbledore losing power and respect, and ultimately dying in the war with Voldemort while working on the Horcruxes to aid Harry’s ultimate victory; and for that matter, who replaces Dumbledore as headmaster in canon? A character which just showed up in MoR for the first time ever...
It will come at a major cost—Dumbledore will either be in Azkaban or he will flee or something like that and his entire faction discredited. “Tradeoff”.
To me, this is the most compelling scenario, which I give a full 40% probability of having; but I also like the debt (30%/20%) and time-turner strategies (35%), although the latter is more because time-turners are so general and powerful that I have to assume my inability to think of a really solid strategy is my inability alone.
Wasn’t that one of Lucius’s lackeys from the previous chapters where they watched the battle?
That is the optimistic view of Dumbledore.
It doesn’t matter who was the real culprit as long as Dumbledore confesses. He’s an occlumens and i would be doubtful if any legilimens can read his mind and find the truth.
Yes, but he won’t. Dumbledore’s a vastly more valuable piece than Hermione, and he won’t give himself up for that paltry of stakes.
He wouldn’t be giving himself up for a piece like Hermione, but a piece like Harry.
True, but unless Harry looks like he’s about to do something immensely stupid(and the only thing stupid enough that I can think of would be admitting to the Azkaban breakout, which Dumbledore doesn’t know about), he’s not at risk.
He’s already given himself up to the dark side—see his internal narration!
Which Dumbledore also doesn’t know about, though he might be able to predict it.
Maybe I’m getting too attached to my own new solution. It does seem to me that getting Hermione to swear an Unbreakable Vow to seek vengeance on Narcissa’s killer would work better.
Lucius, we think, does not know what ‘Harrymort’ wants. If Hermione takes the Vow then Lucius will think he has the answer: “The Dark Lord’s been setting up a way to take down Dumbledore, a way that looks like the work of D’s own allies.” Even if D kills his Muggle-born pawn, that would look suspicious and perhaps lead to his political destruction. Then the noble, grieving-but-honest Harry Potter steps into the vacuum?
A Hermione in the hand is worth publicly backing down and 2 Unbreakable Vows in the bush.
I read that as possibly saying he was half-way to turning Madam Bones, the real culprit, in.
Bones isn’t taking the attitude of ‘don’t turn me in, Albus, you owe me’, but ‘Albus, don’t turn yourself in, you know it’s the right thing but the consequences would be too bad’. At least, it’s clear to me that Bones is not the bone to be thrown to Lucius.
I thought she might be taking the attitude of ‘don’t turn me in, Albus, you know it’s the right thing but the consequences would be too bad right now’. Read: lose the head of the Aurors as an ally just when Voldemort has become active again, and the rest of the Ministry and Amelia’s replacement wouldn’t believe Dumbledore about it (going by canon).
Harry didn’t hear Hermione’s testimony. Therefore, he can go back in time and change it to anything that would produce the audience reaction he saw, without causing paradox.
But since the audience’s (extended) reaction includes voting to send Hermoine to Azkaban, how will changing her testimony help?
If he could change part of the testimony to something demonstrably false, that no one else in the room knew at the time, he could prove that her mind had been compromised. Actually changing the memory would be a problem, and it doesn’t seem like a likely solution to me, but it’s still possible.
I was under the impression that we can actually influence the events of the story based upon how good our ideas are. If I may ask, Eliezer, are we trying to pick your brain for a True ending (something you have written already that we’re trying to guess) or are we coming up with a Good one?
In this case the True ending is already written, and anyone who comes up with a better solution than Harry would obviously win points.
Here’s mine:
cold!Harry activates his Patronus charm, which depends on the wish to destroy Death, and therefore can be cast while “cold”. This is done to disrupt the proceedings by destroying the Dementor. Since Harry never actually did this while at Azkaban, he wouldn’t necessarily be associated w/ the prisonbreak of Bellatrix.
In the confusion, Harry cloaks himself, and timeturns back an hour. This is done to give himself time to contemplate exactly what he needs to say and do. Sicne he will be cloaked, this preserves the secret of the Time turner.
(version A) Immediately after destroying the Dementor, and the loop is closed, still-cloaked Harry takes advantage of his ability to get past any guards/defenses and whispers in Parseltongue into LM’s ears: “No power can stop me. Even here in the Wizengamot I could reach you. If you do not relinquish your claim on Hermione your son is dead.” IF LM doesn’t understand Parseltongue, he would at least recognize it, and Harry could repeat himself in English.
Harry Time turns again, and uncloaks in a side hall, intentionally getting himself seen during the same time that cloaked!Harry was threatening Draco’s life (the sole real leverage over LM Harry has.)
This is the scenario I view being conducted.
3 (version B): instead of repeating his words in English, he could leave the his mother’s potions book at LM’s feet, with a note in English that says the same… with the added phrase, “Contained within this manual is the key to a terrible secret that would destroy Dumbledore. You have gained, this day, Lucius Malfoy. I have uses for the Granger child yet. Do not interfere in my plans.” This has the added benefit of ensuring that LM is likely to stay quiet about the threat—because the pot was sweetened in favor of blackmail of Dumbledore by Lucius.
The problem is, that plan relies on Harry realizing that Malfoy thinks he’s Voldemort. I don’t think he has the evidence to reach that conclusion.
You don’t? I think he’s already got it subconsciously:
seemed a pretty clear reference to
We’re talking about a kid who literally spoke a language designed for a different species without noticing.
True, but that’s in canon also. It may just be that instinctive.
Sure, but coming out with a scary voice when he’s trying to sound intimidating is a lot less odd than coming out sounding like a snake. If he didn’t notice the latter, he’s not likely to notice the former, in canon or in MoR.
… I genuinely didn’t think of the Voldemort angle. That only sweetens the pot. I think that ArisKatsaris’s solution is far more effective/elegant than my own. (Especially since it’s foreshadowed by the part about how Harry thought of the Wizengamot as ‘wallpaper’ and that ‘this would change’. -- that could be viewed as a dropped-hint that the solution lies in manipulating the votes. I can’t think of another way Harry could achieve that than through the former Death Eaters.)
He has the conversation to interpret. (Also, Dumbledore probably figured that out.)
In addition, he was just recently told
So now that he knows it’s theoretically possible...
Edit: I’m an idiot. He’s known it was possible since Quirrell told him to pretend he was possessed by Voldemort in TSPE.
But Dumbledore’s Patronus can identify Harry’s Patronus, and so Dumbledore could find out that Harry was in Azkaban when Bella was broken out.
This would require Dumbledore to have his Patronus out, though.
He certainly might do it if the Dementor started acting oddly. Edit: oops, wrong scenario.
What are you talking about? The scenario under discussion is that Harry casts his Patronus out of the blue, destroying the Dementor.
Oops, right. I got confused from all the suggestions of Harry controlling the dementor in different threads.
Still Dumbledore might get suspicious and bring out his patronus to identify Harry’s, but it’s an acceptably small risk to take, I guess.
Plus—would Dumbledore even sell out Harry?
Maybe not to others, but he himself would know Harry had broken Bella out of Azkaban and then lied to him about it. He would definitely force Veritaserum or Legilimency on Harry to find out the complete truth of what happened that day.
In fact, that’s a point I haven’t considered before. Why haven’t Quirrel offered to Obliviate Harry of that day’s events, maybe using a Pensieve first? This would protect them both a lot. It makes no sense if what Quirrel wanted was the lost lore of Slytherin that Bella might possess, or even Bella herself for some unknown purpose. But it makes perfect sense if Quirrel just wanted Azkaban to produce the emotional effect that it did on Harry. As a sort of prerequisite for this trial of Hermione.
That would require bringing someone else in on the secret. Quirrell can’t cast magic on Harry directly, remember?
Obliviate the third party afterwards?
The third party doesn’t need to know what the memories being obliviated are. Just that they’re being paid to obliviate everything that happened that day, and that they will be obliviated themselves of this act immediately afterwards.
Yeah, in retrospect that’s not really much of an impediment- he could just Imperius, say, Sprout into Obliviating Harry, then Obliviate her.
Why bother? It’s been made clear that people with mental powers are commercially available. Remember Harry’s Occlumency instructor.
Harry is an Occlumens. Neither of these strategies would work.
Legilimency would work, he’s not a perfect Occlumens yet.
The distinction is that perfect Occlumens can show false thoughts to a Legilimens; regular Occlumens, of which Harry is one, are perfectly capable of blocking Legilimens from learning anything, they just know they’ve been blocked.
We know that Occlumens can project the persona of a rock in order to thwart Legilimency. Do we also know that there is no brute-force method for getting past the defenses?
I was wrong, then. Thanks.
Hmm.
There’s no way Lucius will settle for a highly dubious IOU on Dumbledore’s head after almost nailing Hermione and suffering a highly visible defeat, so this is not sufficient on its own. There’s no need to bring it in.
Of course not. That’s why 3B’s additional verbiage was supplemental to 3A. So consider everything said in 3A and what’s said in 3B, when assigning it a probability of success.
Sure there is. To keep it quiet, thereby allowing Harry to “get away with it.” There is no victory like total victory. There is no kill like overkill. And cold!Harry is a Sith: he deals in absolutes.
How does he hold the inner hourglass motionless without disturbing the Unspeakable’s protections?
He doesn’t need to. He can just walk out of the Wizengamot while cloaked and then walk back in. Each turning gives him an hour, after all, and while he used up his six for the previous day he hadn’t used any for the day of the vote itself, as of chapter 80.
What do you mean he doesn’t need to? That’s the only way to use it before it unlocks at 9pm. Unless you think the trial is after that?
… Harry’s already beaten that restriction.
Since when? A while ago he convinced Dumbledore to give him the full six hours rather than two, but I don’t think we were ever told that he can use it at will now.
ETA: From Chapter 77, Self-Actualization Aftermaths, emphasis mine:
I seem to have been mistaken. Still; Harry could simply destroy the protective measure.
Quirrell did, I don’t think that Harry knows the spell that Quirrell used.
The entire arc is already written, is my understanding.
The Dementor is literally death. The “sword that has slain a woman and rope that has hanged a man” ritual will almost certainly summon one, but that’s known Dark, and thus probably not something that can be used in the middle of a Wizengamot proceeding. And other than altering the punishment, how would this help? Even killing the Dementor outright will just make them mildly annoyed.
Dumbledore did (plausibly) burn Narcissa alive, and Potter saying so openly might be enough to swing something. It’d be unlikely to turn out well—Dumbledore would of course deny it, Potter’s alliance would instantly be sundered, and unless Dumbledore wound up in jail, it wouldn’t save Hermione. But, it might be tried.
The scarred man is likely Jugson, not Greyback. Isn’t Greyback in Azkaban right now? Not a solution, but it should be noted.
If he’s learned Avada Kedavra, there’s always the option of blinding everyone with a super-Patronus and then committing mass murder until your side has a majority. Somehow, I don’t see that one happening.
Snape and/or Quirrell(or someone else—Padma Patil would be a funny choice) comes to the rescue. Vanishingly unlikely, and hardly in keeping with the message of the story, but not strictly impossible.
Hermione figures out the super-Patronus, with Harry’s prompting. This one is actually the least crazy of the lot, I think—the super-Patronus works on the principle of love for all human life. Someone who casts it ought to be damn near incapable of murder, and if the principle could be explained to the Wizengamot without ruining everything, the fact that Hermione managed it would actually constitute exculpatory evidence. It likely wouldn’t be believed, but it’s closer to possible than most of the others.
As I said below though, these plans all share one common feature—they suck. I can’t think of one that isn’t either vanishingly unlikely or obviously stupid, and too stupid at that to be used even by a despairing child trying to save his girlfriend from a fate asymptotically approaching death.
Love of all human life does not translate into an inability to do math or unwillingness to murder.
As well, it’s not clear that guilty Hermione feels good enough about herself or all human life that she would be able to cast it.
It’s not a likely case, just less IMO unlikely than the others I listed. I’d put the odds at perhaps 10-20%. The rot13′d answer is the one I think is solidly the most likely.
You don’t need that particular spell to commit mass murder. Harry would likely use transfiguration or napalm. That said, Harry-who-can-murder is not Harry-who-can-Patronus.
We should also make an account Harry’s capabilities
Can create a Patrunus 2.0
Partial Transfiguration
Knowledge of Muggle Science
May have Lucius convinced that he is Voldemort
Is a part of the Prophecy, though only Dumbledore knows this
Is an almost-perfect Occlumens
Has non-public knowledge about Dumbledore and Quirrell
Not much use if he hasn’t figured this out.
If he is, I don’t think we know this. He’s at the stage of being able to block veritaserum, and thus probably to put up a block to stop anyone reading his mind, but I don’t think we’ve been given any indication that he’s reached the point of being able to show false thoughts to someone attempting to read his mind.
I would add that he knows Voldemort is probably alive. If he were to testify by placing his memories into a pensieve, he could show that the Hogwarts inner circle has strong reason to suspect that Voldemort is alive and behind this plot. This might create a measure of doubt among the Wizengamot, at the cost of probably throwing the country into turmoil, so we can call this the Stupid Sentimental Hero Option.
I find it odd that Harry made no attempt to contact Lucius, or that that attempt failed, before the trial. Your list is also missing Cornelius Fudge.
The first thing that came to mind was declaring that Dumbledore killed Narcissa, but he doesn’t have any evidence for that besides Draco’s testimony, which is already fourth-hand.
It is worthwhile to note that Harry is a member of a Noble House too, and so there may be some obligation of Draco to him (remember that time Draco ‘tried to kill him’ by dropping him off the roof, and he actually was in danger because of the mob of girls?) or Hermione to him (can’t think of one there, though). But those don’t seem like things that he could easily pull out in the Wizengamot after a vote has been called.
I think the most likely outcome is that Harry does not, in fact, think of something. Hermione is sent to Azkaban, Draco is now his enemy, and Quirrel wins.
If this were the case, then good serial pacing would be to put that at the end of this installment, to leave on a clear down-note.
Leaving it on a cliff-hanger promises some answer to the last question. By the text, it looks like that question is, “How will I save Hermione?” not, “Can I save Hermione?”
Reality does not have to obey dramatic pacing.
A central part of Eliezer’s worldview is that it is possible to lose, and lose big. An Al-Ghazali can come along and destroy the bright future of your society. A UFAI can destroy the bright future of your society. A Quirrel can destroy the bright future of Harry Potter.
If the fic is coming to an end soon, which I think has been implied, Harry’s implosion and Quirrel’s victory are a good place to end things.
(I should clarify that, by “most likely outcome,” I mean “more likely than any other specific outcome,” not “more likely than its complement.” I think there’s more than half chance that Harry will think of something, and I think ArisKatsaris has proposed the most likely way Harry will get out of this, but still think it’s somewhat more likely Harry will fail than win that way.
Chapter breaks are a meta-aspect not in the story itself. If it were a continual story this might make sense. Dramatic pacing of the story elements with a bad ending wouldn’t be an in universe lesson but an out of universe lesson. Also, I suspect that Eliezer is smart enough to realize that having a downer ending would likely turn off a lot of people to rationality who might otherwise be take some interest in it simply from the halo effect. Having a downer ending would substantially undermine that.
What did Al-Ghazali do, exactly? Wikipedia isn’t illuminating.
I didn’t read the wikipedia article fully, and so didn’t notice that it only hinted at the primary reason he was important.
The Islamic Golden Age, from ~750 to ~1250, was the period where Islam was the intellectual center of the world. Many Greek texts only survived because they had been preserved by Muslims and/or translated into Arabic, and scholars living in Muslim lands (Muslims, Christians, Jews, and atheists) were at the forefront of science, mathematics, and philosophy. Baghdad was the commercial and intellectual center of the world. Francis Bacon may have formalized the scientific method, but the main advance in empiricism before him came from al-Haytham, six hundred years earlier.
Al-Ghazali was an influential thinker who said that the Greek philosophers were ignorant infidels and that science and mathematics were dangerous because they could lead to loss of faith.
Ibn Rushd, famously depicted in the School of Athens, argued against Al-Ghazali- that the Greeks made valuable contributions, that science and mathematics were valuable. He was too little, too late; Muslim opinion swung Al-Ghazali’s way, though a few Europeans took Ibn Rushd’s arguments seriously, like Thomas Aquinas (who was also heavily influenced by Al-Ghazali, but agreed with Ibn Rushd’s conclusions).
Al-Ghazali, essentially, was the intellectual standard-bearer for the movement to replace openness and inquiry with closedness and faith in the Muslim world. He can’t be entirely blamed for the collapse of the Islamic Golden Age, as both the barbarous Christians and Mongols were beating on the doors, but that Islam never really recovered as an intellectual force appears to be centered around him.
(Neil de Grasse Tyson tells this story here (3:24), though he simplifies it somewhat.)
Is there a book you’d recommend on the thinkers of Al-Ghazali’s time? The only one that came up for me in a quick Google on his name was a screed with all the hallmarks of cherry-picking history to support a point of view about present-day politics.
I am not an expert in Islamic philosophy, but if I come across such a book I’ll point it your way.
And yet, he did an entire arc about the role of a hero and supporting characters. I don’t think we can be sure that his decisions won’t be influenced by story concerns.
Of course his decisions are influenced by story concerns: the way to make the point “this is not a story” is to do it in a sickening matter. Let people pattern-match on “this is the bleak moment where Harry will do the impossible and win,” and then reveal that the impossible is, in fact, impossible.
(Note there is a problem with the “you have five days to come up with a solution” approach if EY has taken this plan- EY would have to be pretty confident that no plan existed to hope that fans would not come up with one.)
Read above. There is a True End planned and pre-written.
I am aware. My point is that if you say “X is impossible” and then someone points out a way to do X, you now have a plot hole / have to admit that the fan is cleverer than the character or author. That’s genre savvy evidence against the prediction that EY will say “X is impossible,” whereas “he would end the chapter on a downer” isn’t because he would get the desired effect more strongly if he ended the chapter on a cliffhanger, and then had the character fall off the cliff.
This would be interesting. And then, Harry goes there in the next hour, destroy all the dementors and save Herminone.
A happy ending.
Destroys the dementors by destroying himself? Destroys the dementors, and lets out the criminals of wizarding Britain? Destroys the dementors, and is put down for rebellion?
There are no happy endings down that path.
I am impressed that you managed to avoid listing any of the members of the “crowd” as things in the courtroom.
I wonder where Quirrell has been all this time. Maybe he can show up to save the day.
In custody at the Ministry. Unlikely to be released before trial is concluded.
The person in custody is not necessarily Quirrell, or “unlikely to be released” can be circumvented a number of different ways. The only way the Quirrell is just sitting in custody is if that’s what he wants, and I still think he’s sort of a Byronic hero.
Well, the simplest explanation is that he’s sitting in custody because he doesn’t want to be in Hogwarts while Dumbledore scans it for Tom Riddle’s soul with the Map, etc. If he doesn’t have a particular plot to carry out during the trial, it’s easiest to stay in custody then too, until the Aurors choose to release him after the whole matter is considered closed.
If he wanted, he could almost certainly leave, I agree. But why? If this whole thing is his plot, it’s going on well enough without him, and on the other hand he possibly can’t be officially present at the trial (unless invited by Dumbledore) to rescue it if something goes wrong. OTOH, if it’s not his plot, it would still seem to align with his interests—he has more to gain by offering Harry to help rescue Hermione, once Harry has declared the government etc. his enemies, than he does by offering Harry to help sway the trial.
(removed after the parent comment was changed)
I think that person was just being helpful and pointing out a flaw in the reasoning :D
The obvious guess is that Harry will destroy the Dementor in full view of everyone. But this seems far too obvious for Eliezer to taunt us so.
Harry knows nothing about the aurors, the Prophet reporter, Umbridge, Fenrir Greyback (if that’s a correct identification), or Amelia Bones.
That leaves
The dementor
Minerva
Lucius
Neville’s grandmother
Himself
The dementor he can destroy, but that’s the obvious answer. Minerva he knows nothing shocking or incriminating about, and I can’t think of anything that would help. Same goes for Madam Longbottom, I think.
That leaves
The dementor
Lucius
Harry himself — Oh, and I forgot: Everything in Harry’s pouch.
What could Harry say about himself that’s shocking? He could confess to his role in the Azkaban breakout, but I can’t see how that would help Hermione. None of his scientific knowledge or magical discoveries would impress the Wizengamot, if they could even understand him.
Does he know anything incriminating about Lucius? Well, he knows he was a Death Eater. But Harry is immune to Veritaserum and can’t testify.
Is there anything he can do about or with the dementor other than destroy it, which is far too obvious?
He might be able to do something fancy the same way he commanded a dozen of them to “Turn and go and do not speak of this to anyone” in TSPE. Maybe silently tell it to spread the word to its brethren that no Dementor is to go near Hermione? Which still leaves her stuck in a cold metal box for ten years, so it doesn’t seem to help much.
Maybe. On the other hand, he’s in a hall of people who all strongly believe that Dementors would never do any such thing and will obey their commands.
So you’re going with Harry’s initial idea, that Dementors are controlled by expectations? If that’s the case, then yeah, it probably won’t work.
Go in front of it and let the horrible personality possess him again. After making some sort of precommitment, I suppose. This solution was foreshadowed in the omake “Lord of the rationality”.
But in truth, I lost faith in Eliezer’s ability to come up with realistic solutions when Harry miraculously survived the first dementor attack in Azkaban. He will probably just have Harry use his main character powers again.
Hell, this wouldn’t even work. They’d have him immediately arrested for destruction of Ministry Property, and never let him near Azkaban.
Erm...isn’t the usual followup to an arrest to throw people in prison? I don’t think you’re thinking your comments through.
I don’t think they throw every wizard criminal into Azkaban. There must be prisons for harmless criminals like Mundungus Fletcher.
Azkaban drains magic, he can be stupefied and tossed in, and without his wand he’s going to have a hard time anyway. It’s perfectly possible to just toss Harry in Azkaban and regard his threat as neutralized.
Agreed, but the precise form of his comment was sort of silly.
I doubt they’d have him arrested for destruction of Ministry property, because it would be such a PR disaster.
“Boy Who Lived Destroys Dementor, Arrested For Destruction Of Ministry Property.”
It would definitely limit his ability to carry out any sort of breakouts in future though, and possibly incriminate him with respect to the Bellatrix breakout.
Doesn’t seem like anything a few lies and coercion of a non-free press couldn’t handle.
Or, say, stun him then let a different dementor eat him then show everyone how the delusional fool died trying.
I seriously doubt that if the Boy Who Lived killed a dementor in front of the Wizengamot, their response would be “let’s let a dementor eat him to make an example of him.” They may not respect him, but these are still people who’ve been celebrating Harry Potter Day for years.
Just because the members of the Wizengamot are stuck in a hate-spiral with respect to Hermione doesn’t mean that they’re exceptionally evil people regarding other issues (this is as good a place as any to take note of the chapter title.)
Just be careful when you try to control people through their PR incentives. What makes them look good is not the same as them being nice.
Addition: Fawkes, he was there on Dumbledore’s shoulder.
My bets on possible solutions:
Destroy the dementor (not terribly smart, but given the stress. . .) or do something else ‘impossible’.
Start talking about Voldemort being behind things. (This would be a pretty good distraction in the books. Less so here, though.)
Challenge Lucius to a duel.
Work out that Lucius thinks he is Voldemort and use that to manipulate him.
All of these look pretty obvious, though. I expect something a little more unexpected (possibly including there not being a solution).