The story looks more and more like it will end with Harry destroying the whole world. It would highlite the existential risk that comes from scientists who try to do everything in their power.
I’m expecting a positive ending for a few reasons, one of which is that since this is rationality propaganda I doubt Eliezer wants to portray Harry’s super-rationality as having ultimately bad results.
It’s rationality propaganda that isn’t supposed to encourage people to accelerate the way to unfriendly AI but rationality propaganda that is supposed to prevent unfriendly AI from happening.
As far as the story goes, Harry is very rational but Quirrell is on a level where he outplays Harry.
In the end Harry is a bit a projection of how Eliezer sees his own childhold self.
On the one hand Eliezer was very smart and rational. On the other hand he was delusional because he didn’t take unfriendly AI seriously as something that can actually happen in reality.
A little bit of knowledge is dangerous. Creating people with enough rationality to do damage but not enough rationality to see the dangers of the whole enterprise isn’t in the interests of MIRI.
If the reader learns that just being rational doesn’t mean that you and that you better think before you mess with powers outside your control like an AGI, Eliezer teaches a very valuable lesson.
The hero always wins isn’t a rationality lesson.
As far evidence in the story goes, Harry is rational because Petunia got a beauty portion from her sister.
He sister got told from a centaur that the world would end when she gave Petunia the portion.
It’s in chapter 1. (edit: I first mistakenly wrote chapter 10)
Now we have “HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.” at the end of chapter 89.
Quirrelmort takes it extremly seriously. He makes a point that when he was hypersmart Voldemort, he respected some sensible boundaries.
Quirrelmort is the person who fears that scientists will destroy the earth. He shares the fear to which Eliezer pledged his life.
As far evidence in the story goes, Harry is rational because Petunia got a beauty portion from her sister. He sister got told from a centaur that the world would end when she gave Petunia the portion.
-
“And Lily would tell me no, and make up the most ridiculous excuses, like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to—the most ridiculous things, and I hated her for it.”
You’re conflating two different reasons there. Also, Lily was not stupid. I find it hard to believe that she could receive an apocalypse prophecy and not share it with Dumbledore at the very least. There is no evidence whatsoever that Dumbledore is aware of a prophecy connecting Harry to the end of the world.
Edit: Also, having gone through Chapter 10, I can’t see anything there which supports your theory.
When Dumbledore showed Harry the comments he made in her potions textbook the potion he was commenting on was the Potion of Eagle’s Splendor, which is the potion for an increase in the Charisma stat (which technically doesn’t have to involve appearance but is often considered correlated with it) in 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons.
ETA: The other things which makes it more suggestive is that the potion Petunia took was dangerous or rare, else more witches would also have permanently improved their appearance, and a normal potion listed in the standard 5th year text presumably wouldn’t be; The suggestion presented was thestral blood, thestral blood was implied to have a role in the permanence of the Cloak and as Harry deduced that potions making isn’t creating magic but reshaping that which is there some component in Petunias potion must have an association with Permanence.
thestral blood was implied to have a role in the permanence of the Cloak
I know the blood is used to mark the Deathly Hallow symbol on the Cloak, but could you remind me where it says this relates to permanence? I rather assumed that, since thestrals are invisible to all those who have not seen and comprehended death, the relevance of thestral blood was to do with death and/or hiding from it.
the potion Petunia took was dangerous or rare (...) and a normal potion listed in the standard 5th year text presumably wouldn’t be
I really really wish I could believe that, but I can’t, not in the wizarding world. Felix Felicis, which is extremely difficult to make and disastrous if brewed wrong (and disastrously powerful when brewed right, especially in the hands of children), is to be found in the same textbook.
I know the blood is used to mark the Deathly Hallow symbol on the Cloak, but could you remind me where it says this relates to permanence?
Hmm, rereading the section of his Azkaban trip where Harry was making his Cloak related discoveries I seem to have confused the fact of the thestral blood symbol empowering the Cloak with someones conjecture in some discussion thread after we learned the law of potion conservation that the thestral blood suggested as a substitution in the eagle’s splendor potion could have served as a modifier to make it permanent.
Dumbledore opened the book, seemingly at random, and Harry leaned in to see.
“Do you see these notes,” Dumbledore said in a voice so low it was almost a whisper, “written in the margins of the book?”
Harry squinted slightly. The yellowing pages seemed to be describing something called a potion of eagle’s splendour, many of the ingredients being items that Harry didn’t recognise at all and whose names didn’t appear to derive from English. Scrawled in the margin was a handwritten annotation saying, I wonder what would happen if you used Thestral blood here instead of blueberries? and immediately beneath was a reply in different handwriting, You’d get sick for weeks and maybe die.
“I see them,” said Harry. “What about them?”
Dumbledore pointed to the second scrawl. “The ones in this handwriting,” he said, still in that low voice, “were written by your mother. And the ones in this handwriting,” moving his finger to indicate the first scrawl, “were written by me. I would turn myself invisible and sneak into her dorm room while she was sleeping. Lily thought one of her friends was writing them and they had the most amazing fights.”
Dumbledore scribbles nonsense in the margins of the Eagle’s Splendour recipe of Lily’s book =/= Dumbledore helps Lily brew Eagle’s Splendour. At most, it confirms that Lily knew how to brew said potion when she was in her fifth year.
Furthermore, even if Dumbledore helped Lily brew a fifth-year potion, there is no reason to believe that he did so secretly, or that he had ulterior motives beyond helping her. Lily was a student he paid rather creepy special attention to—why wouldn’t he help her with a special project?
Hmm, that’s interesting, Petunia really did get sick for weeks
“Anyway,” Petunia said, her voice small, “she gave in. She told me it was dangerous, and I said I didn’t care any more, and I drank this potion and I was sick for weeks, but when I got better my skin cleared up and I finally filled out and… I was beautiful, people were nice to me,” her voice broke, “and after that I couldn’t hate my sister any more, especially when I learned what her magic brought her in the end—”
“And Lily would tell me no, and make up the most ridiculous excuses, like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to – the most ridiculous things, and I hated her for it. And when I had just graduated, I was going out with this boy, Vernon Dursley, he was fat and he was the only boy who would talk to me in college. And he said he wanted children, and that his first son would be named Dudley. And I thought to myself,what kind of parent names their child Dudley Dursley? It was like I saw my whole future life stretching out in front of me, and I couldn’t stand it. And I wrote to my sister and told her that if she didn’t help me I’d rather just—”
Lily told Petunia that the world would end when Lily gave Petunia the beauty potion. Lily isn’t stupid and would tell that to her sister for no reason.
Let’s say a centaur just told Lily that the world would end when she gave Petunia the beauty potion without being in prophecy mode.
At the beginning that was enough for Lily to refuse. But in the end she didn’t saw how giving Petunia the beauty potion would end the world in any literal sense so she gave it to Petunia.
like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to
Excuse 1) The world will end if Lily is nice to her sister (with no source cited).
Excuse 2) A centaur told Lily not to give Petunia the potion (with no explanation of why not).
These are two completely separate assertions.
Furthermore,
Petunia states that Lily came up with a number of other, equally ridiculous excuses, which means those two shouldn’t be assigned any special importance in the list.
From what we know of centaurs, they are rare and typically hostile to humans, which makes it highly improbable that Lily had any sort of meaningful conversation with one.
All prophecies we know of are highly cryptic, and there is no reason to believe that centaurs can decode them well enough to identify two specific, highly obscure humans.
Lily already has far better motives not to give Petunia the potion, namely 1) they dislike each other and Lily doesn’t want to grant her sister’s wish and/or 2) the potion is very dangerous to take and she doesn’t want to endanger her sister’s life. Prophecies of doom are a much less probable explanation than either.
If Lily heard what she thought was a prophecy of doom, she would be very stupid not to share it with anyone, say Dumbledore. Lily was not stupid, but there is no evidence that she told anyone about such a prophecy.
If Eliezer would have wanted to foreshadow the fact that rational Harry would go on to end the world in chapter 1, this is what it would look like.
Petunia states that Lily came up with a number of other, equally ridiculous excuses, which means those two shouldn’t be assigned any special importance in the list.
When Petunia says “ricidulous excuses” it means that she doesn’t understand the validity of the excuses.
What do you think is Eliezer’s motivation for Lily giving ricidulous excuses? Making her look like the person that gives ricidulous excuses?
What do you think is Eliezer’s motivation for Lily giving ricidulous excuses? Making her look like the person that gives ricidulous excuses?
It’s established from the start that Petunia bullied Lily before Lily got magic, and later that Lily is not a very forgiving person, so it’s entirely plausible that she just didn’t want to use her potion-brewing skills for her sister’s benefit, and came up with off-the-cuff excuses not to do so.
The excuse section serves as character development for Petunia. It establishes her troubled relationship with Lily, and the excuses make Lily sound like a petty little girl (which it seems like she was at the time, based on her relationships with James and Severus) rather than cold and harsh as she would have seemed with a flat-out “no” with no reason given. It establishes why Petunia dated Vernon at all, and gives her a chance to talk about her self-image issues and how she wasn’t the kind of person who would gravitate to Vernon for his personality (the way canon!Petunia seems to be). It also makes her sympathetic by revealing the extent of her emotional vulnerability with the suicide threat.
We would get none of this had Lily just given Petunia the potion straight away.
Additionally, consider the timeline necessary for your theory to pan out:
Decades before the “power to vanquish” prophecy, which is only made after Harry’s birth, and the “HE IS COMING” prophecy, which is only made after Harry does certain things at Hogwarts, the centaurs already know that he is going to destroy the world.
In spite of the cryptic nature of prophecies, they manage to identify a completely random teenage witch and her Squib sister as the subjects, as well as one specific action Lily must perform to lead to Harry being brought up a rationalist.
They somehow convey their warning to Lily, despite the lack of contact between humans and centaurs, but not emphatically enough to actually stop her dooming the world.
After determining that the end of the world is nigh, they sit on their equestrian posteriors and do nothing for the rest of time, not even warning the likes of Dumbledore (for whom I believe they have respect).
Lily speaks to no-one of the terrible warning she has received from a race famed for their powers of divination.
Lily does the one thing that she has been told will doom the world.
Or...
A teenage girl who is bad at forgiving people comes up with excuses not to go out of her way to help the sister who used to bully her.
In fantasy fiction that runs on narrativium? Especially fiction that is known to be full of hints, foreshadowing, and clues that the author put there? The first.
The whole point of this story (or one of them) is that it is not intended to run on narrativium, that people make decisions and things happen for rational, believable, predictable reasons. It is a puzzle meant to be solved, using the information given rather than appeals to tropes and meta-thinking.
Also, even if you were right, this is just a really terrible scenario. While there is foreshadowing of Harry ending the world thanks to the latest prophecy, there have been no other clues whatsoever pointing at centaurs, or a special role for Lily in causing the apocalypse, or any other point whatsoever that the theory relies on.
The difference between the real world and narrativium is not that in the former people make decisions and things happen for rational, believable, predictable reasons and in the latter they don’t. That’s the difference between good narrativium and bad narrativium.
The difference between the real world and narrativium is that in the real world things happen in a variety of complex and interconnected ways without necessarily being goal driven. However in a story, HpMoR included, things happen to drive the story along. The author has designed the events of the story to reach his desired end state. That is, in fiction the ending causes the beginning whereas in real life the beginning causes the ending.
Real life doesn’t have a narrative. Fiction, rationalist fiction included, does.
The whole point of this story (or one of them) is that it is not intended to run on narrativium, that people make decisions and things happen for rational, believable, predictable reasons. It is a puzzle meant to be solved
The real world is chaos. The real world isn’t a puzzle that’s meant to be solved. Puzzles need narrativum.
Decades before the “power to vanquish” prophecy, which is only made after Harry’s birth, and the “HE IS COMING” prophecy, which is only made after Harry does certain things at Hogwarts, the centaurs already know that he is going to destroy the world.
You make a mistake in that you add additional details into your story for which there’s no reason.
A “beauty potion” → “end of the world” prediction wouldn’t need to mention Harry at all.
Centaur divination isn’t an exact science. Centaur are quite capable of making mistakes when it comes to interpreting the stars.
It’s quite possible that a centaur came up with the idea that “beauty potion” → “end of the world” is one possible explanation for the movement of stars that he saw.
There no certainity in the way they practice their craft. It’s quite possible that the prediction was at a strength that enough to produce a reluctance in handing out the potion but not strong enough to tell everybody about it.
A teenage girl who is bad at forgiving people comes up with excuses not to go out of her way to help the sister who used to bully her.
A smart person doesn’t come up with excuses that are ridiculous, but makes excuses that are credible.
A “beauty potion” → “end of the world” prediction wouldn’t need to mention Harry at all.
It is, however, a prophecy about Harry, whether anyone knows it or not, and all other prophecies about Harry were pronounced not long before or after the key events that caused fate to head in that direction (Voldemort’s confrontation with baby Harry, Harry’s grim resolution...). Your suggestion that there was a twenty or so-year gap with this one does not match this pattern.
A smart person doesn’t come up with excuses that are ridiculous, but makes excuses that are credible.
Only if their objective is to persuade. And if her objective had been to persuade Petunia that she was telling the truth, she’d have taken the time to explain what she’d been told until it no longer sounded like a ridiculous excuse.
There’s another aspect you seem to be missing: this event is a major part of the primary divergence between HPMR and canon, namely how Harry is brought up.
Your suggestion that there was a twenty or so-year gap with this one does not match this pattern.
I think that Petunia getting the beauty potion was a key event that caused fate to head in that direction.
If she didn’t she would be married to Dursley and Harry wouldn’t get his rational edcuation.
It is, however, a prophecy about Harry, whether anyone knows it or not, and all other prophecies about Harry were pronounced not long before or after the key events that caused fate to head in that direction
That’s probably not true. A lot of students have divination classes at hogwarts and make predictions on a constant basis.
I find it very unlikely that those devination classes all passed without any predictions that involved Harry.
Most future telling in the Harry Potter universe isn’t about prophecies of the kind where Trelawney goes into a trance and speaks the words of the prophecy.
Centaurs don’t do future telling that way. They do astrology which can take years to interpret.
And if her objective had been to persuade Petunia that she was telling the truth, she’d have taken the time to explain what she’d been told until it no longer sounded like a ridiculous excuse.
If I told you that a friend of my talked to his spirit guides and they told him, that I should write you an email, how long would it take for me to explain to you the fact in a way that doesn’t sound ridiculous?
You also seem to somehow assume that people persue every goal that they have with maximum energy.
That isn’t the case.
Conservation of detail. The two excuses mentioned can be assigned greater significance on a meta level.
And an apocalyptic prophecy is much like Pascal’s Mugger: the centaur may not be in prophecy mode, so fear-of-embarrassment might keep you from telling Dumbledore, but you’d still rather not take the risk.
“I talked to a centaur and he told me x” is hardly embarrassing. She wouldn’t even have to claim to believe it, just say “what do you think of this claim based on your superior experience?” And it’s obvious Dumbledore would want to know.
“Hey, most powerful wizard in the world. I know you’re very busy, but a centaur told me that if I give my sister a beauty potion the world will literally end.”
The story looks more and more like it will end with Harry destroying the whole world. It would highlite the existential risk that comes from scientists who try to do everything in their power.
I’m expecting a positive ending for a few reasons, one of which is that since this is rationality propaganda I doubt Eliezer wants to portray Harry’s super-rationality as having ultimately bad results.
It’s rationality propaganda that isn’t supposed to encourage people to accelerate the way to unfriendly AI but rationality propaganda that is supposed to prevent unfriendly AI from happening.
As far as the story goes, Harry is very rational but Quirrell is on a level where he outplays Harry. In the end Harry is a bit a projection of how Eliezer sees his own childhold self.
On the one hand Eliezer was very smart and rational. On the other hand he was delusional because he didn’t take unfriendly AI seriously as something that can actually happen in reality.
A little bit of knowledge is dangerous. Creating people with enough rationality to do damage but not enough rationality to see the dangers of the whole enterprise isn’t in the interests of MIRI.
If the reader learns that just being rational doesn’t mean that you and that you better think before you mess with powers outside your control like an AGI, Eliezer teaches a very valuable lesson.
The hero always wins isn’t a rationality lesson.
As far evidence in the story goes, Harry is rational because Petunia got a beauty portion from her sister. He sister got told from a centaur that the world would end when she gave Petunia the portion.
It’s in chapter 1. (edit: I first mistakenly wrote chapter 10)
Now we have “HE IS HERE. THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY STARS IN HEAVEN. HE IS HERE. HE IS THE END OF THE WORLD.” at the end of chapter 89.
Quirrelmort takes it extremly seriously. He makes a point that when he was hypersmart Voldemort, he respected some sensible boundaries.
Quirrelmort is the person who fears that scientists will destroy the earth. He shares the fear to which Eliezer pledged his life.
-
You’re conflating two different reasons there. Also, Lily was not stupid. I find it hard to believe that she could receive an apocalypse prophecy and not share it with Dumbledore at the very least. There is no evidence whatsoever that Dumbledore is aware of a prophecy connecting Harry to the end of the world.
Edit: Also, having gone through Chapter 10, I can’t see anything there which supports your theory.
Dumbledore knew something we don’t because he secretly helped Lily make a highly dangerous potion in the first place!
Why do you say Dumbledore helped Lily make the potion? Lily was a rising star of Potions herself.
When Dumbledore showed Harry the comments he made in her potions textbook the potion he was commenting on was the Potion of Eagle’s Splendor, which is the potion for an increase in the Charisma stat (which technically doesn’t have to involve appearance but is often considered correlated with it) in 3rd edition Dungeons and Dragons.
ETA: The other things which makes it more suggestive is that the potion Petunia took was dangerous or rare, else more witches would also have permanently improved their appearance, and a normal potion listed in the standard 5th year text presumably wouldn’t be; The suggestion presented was thestral blood, thestral blood was implied to have a role in the permanence of the Cloak and as Harry deduced that potions making isn’t creating magic but reshaping that which is there some component in Petunias potion must have an association with Permanence.
I know the blood is used to mark the Deathly Hallow symbol on the Cloak, but could you remind me where it says this relates to permanence? I rather assumed that, since thestrals are invisible to all those who have not seen and comprehended death, the relevance of thestral blood was to do with death and/or hiding from it.
I really really wish I could believe that, but I can’t, not in the wizarding world. Felix Felicis, which is extremely difficult to make and disastrous if brewed wrong (and disastrously powerful when brewed right, especially in the hands of children), is to be found in the same textbook.
Hmm, rereading the section of his Azkaban trip where Harry was making his Cloak related discoveries I seem to have confused the fact of the thestral blood symbol empowering the Cloak with someones conjecture in some discussion thread after we learned the law of potion conservation that the thestral blood suggested as a substitution in the eagle’s splendor potion could have served as a modifier to make it permanent.
Dumbledore scribbles nonsense in the margins of the Eagle’s Splendour recipe of Lily’s book =/= Dumbledore helps Lily brew Eagle’s Splendour. At most, it confirms that Lily knew how to brew said potion when she was in her fifth year.
Furthermore, even if Dumbledore helped Lily brew a fifth-year potion, there is no reason to believe that he did so secretly, or that he had ulterior motives beyond helping her. Lily was a student he paid rather creepy special attention to—why wouldn’t he help her with a special project?
Hmm, that’s interesting, Petunia really did get sick for weeks
Oh, my mistake. It says at the top http://hpmor.com/?post_type=chapter&p=10 so I thought it was chapter 10. It’s chapter 1.
I’m refering to the paragraph:
Lily told Petunia that the world would end when Lily gave Petunia the beauty potion. Lily isn’t stupid and would tell that to her sister for no reason.
Let’s say a centaur just told Lily that the world would end when she gave Petunia the beauty potion without being in prophecy mode.
At the beginning that was enough for Lily to refuse. But in the end she didn’t saw how giving Petunia the beauty potion would end the world in any literal sense so she gave it to Petunia.
Excuse 1) The world will end if Lily is nice to her sister (with no source cited).
Excuse 2) A centaur told Lily not to give Petunia the potion (with no explanation of why not).
These are two completely separate assertions.
Furthermore,
Petunia states that Lily came up with a number of other, equally ridiculous excuses, which means those two shouldn’t be assigned any special importance in the list.
From what we know of centaurs, they are rare and typically hostile to humans, which makes it highly improbable that Lily had any sort of meaningful conversation with one.
All prophecies we know of are highly cryptic, and there is no reason to believe that centaurs can decode them well enough to identify two specific, highly obscure humans.
Lily already has far better motives not to give Petunia the potion, namely 1) they dislike each other and Lily doesn’t want to grant her sister’s wish and/or 2) the potion is very dangerous to take and she doesn’t want to endanger her sister’s life. Prophecies of doom are a much less probable explanation than either.
If Lily heard what she thought was a prophecy of doom, she would be very stupid not to share it with anyone, say Dumbledore. Lily was not stupid, but there is no evidence that she told anyone about such a prophecy.
If Eliezer would have wanted to foreshadow the fact that rational Harry would go on to end the world in chapter 1, this is what it would look like.
When Petunia says “ricidulous excuses” it means that she doesn’t understand the validity of the excuses.
What do you think is Eliezer’s motivation for Lily giving ricidulous excuses? Making her look like the person that gives ricidulous excuses?
It’s established from the start that Petunia bullied Lily before Lily got magic, and later that Lily is not a very forgiving person, so it’s entirely plausible that she just didn’t want to use her potion-brewing skills for her sister’s benefit, and came up with off-the-cuff excuses not to do so.
The excuse section serves as character development for Petunia. It establishes her troubled relationship with Lily, and the excuses make Lily sound like a petty little girl (which it seems like she was at the time, based on her relationships with James and Severus) rather than cold and harsh as she would have seemed with a flat-out “no” with no reason given. It establishes why Petunia dated Vernon at all, and gives her a chance to talk about her self-image issues and how she wasn’t the kind of person who would gravitate to Vernon for his personality (the way canon!Petunia seems to be). It also makes her sympathetic by revealing the extent of her emotional vulnerability with the suicide threat.
We would get none of this had Lily just given Petunia the potion straight away.
Additionally, consider the timeline necessary for your theory to pan out:
Decades before the “power to vanquish” prophecy, which is only made after Harry’s birth, and the “HE IS COMING” prophecy, which is only made after Harry does certain things at Hogwarts, the centaurs already know that he is going to destroy the world.
In spite of the cryptic nature of prophecies, they manage to identify a completely random teenage witch and her Squib sister as the subjects, as well as one specific action Lily must perform to lead to Harry being brought up a rationalist.
They somehow convey their warning to Lily, despite the lack of contact between humans and centaurs, but not emphatically enough to actually stop her dooming the world.
After determining that the end of the world is nigh, they sit on their equestrian posteriors and do nothing for the rest of time, not even warning the likes of Dumbledore (for whom I believe they have respect).
Lily speaks to no-one of the terrible warning she has received from a race famed for their powers of divination.
Lily does the one thing that she has been told will doom the world.
Or...
A teenage girl who is bad at forgiving people comes up with excuses not to go out of her way to help the sister who used to bully her.
Which would you assign a higher probability?
In the real world? The second, unconditionally.
In fantasy fiction that runs on narrativium? Especially fiction that is known to be full of hints, foreshadowing, and clues that the author put there? The first.
The whole point of this story (or one of them) is that it is not intended to run on narrativium, that people make decisions and things happen for rational, believable, predictable reasons. It is a puzzle meant to be solved, using the information given rather than appeals to tropes and meta-thinking.
Also, even if you were right, this is just a really terrible scenario. While there is foreshadowing of Harry ending the world thanks to the latest prophecy, there have been no other clues whatsoever pointing at centaurs, or a special role for Lily in causing the apocalypse, or any other point whatsoever that the theory relies on.
The difference between the real world and narrativium is not that in the former people make decisions and things happen for rational, believable, predictable reasons and in the latter they don’t. That’s the difference between good narrativium and bad narrativium.
The difference between the real world and narrativium is that in the real world things happen in a variety of complex and interconnected ways without necessarily being goal driven. However in a story, HpMoR included, things happen to drive the story along. The author has designed the events of the story to reach his desired end state. That is, in fiction the ending causes the beginning whereas in real life the beginning causes the ending.
Real life doesn’t have a narrative. Fiction, rationalist fiction included, does.
The real world is chaos. The real world isn’t a puzzle that’s meant to be solved. Puzzles need narrativum.
You make a mistake in that you add additional details into your story for which there’s no reason.
A “beauty potion” → “end of the world” prediction wouldn’t need to mention Harry at all.
Centaur divination isn’t an exact science. Centaur are quite capable of making mistakes when it comes to interpreting the stars.
It’s quite possible that a centaur came up with the idea that “beauty potion” → “end of the world” is one possible explanation for the movement of stars that he saw.
There no certainity in the way they practice their craft. It’s quite possible that the prediction was at a strength that enough to produce a reluctance in handing out the potion but not strong enough to tell everybody about it.
A smart person doesn’t come up with excuses that are ridiculous, but makes excuses that are credible.
It is, however, a prophecy about Harry, whether anyone knows it or not, and all other prophecies about Harry were pronounced not long before or after the key events that caused fate to head in that direction (Voldemort’s confrontation with baby Harry, Harry’s grim resolution...). Your suggestion that there was a twenty or so-year gap with this one does not match this pattern.
Only if their objective is to persuade. And if her objective had been to persuade Petunia that she was telling the truth, she’d have taken the time to explain what she’d been told until it no longer sounded like a ridiculous excuse.
There’s another aspect you seem to be missing: this event is a major part of the primary divergence between HPMR and canon, namely how Harry is brought up.
I think that Petunia getting the beauty potion was a key event that caused fate to head in that direction. If she didn’t she would be married to Dursley and Harry wouldn’t get his rational edcuation.
That’s probably not true. A lot of students have divination classes at hogwarts and make predictions on a constant basis.
I find it very unlikely that those devination classes all passed without any predictions that involved Harry.
Most future telling in the Harry Potter universe isn’t about prophecies of the kind where Trelawney goes into a trance and speaks the words of the prophecy.
Centaurs don’t do future telling that way. They do astrology which can take years to interpret.
If I told you that a friend of my talked to his spirit guides and they told him, that I should write you an email, how long would it take for me to explain to you the fact in a way that doesn’t sound ridiculous?
You also seem to somehow assume that people persue every goal that they have with maximum energy. That isn’t the case.
Conservation of detail. The two excuses mentioned can be assigned greater significance on a meta level.
And an apocalyptic prophecy is much like Pascal’s Mugger: the centaur may not be in prophecy mode, so fear-of-embarrassment might keep you from telling Dumbledore, but you’d still rather not take the risk.
“I talked to a centaur and he told me x” is hardly embarrassing. She wouldn’t even have to claim to believe it, just say “what do you think of this claim based on your superior experience?” And it’s obvious Dumbledore would want to know.
Isn’t it?
“Hey, most powerful wizard in the world. I know you’re very busy, but a centaur told me that if I give my sister a beauty potion the world will literally end.”