Does anyone else feel like /r/hpmor (but not LW, thankfully) has been suffering from a lot of hindsight bias lately? First “Dumbledore was stupid with the mirror”, then “Harry/Voldemort was stupid with the Riddle curse”, then “Voldemort was stupid with letting Harry keep his wand”, and now “Harry should’ve thought to preserve the Death Eaters’ heads”? Apart from the wand thing (which I believe was pointed out by a few commenters before Chapter 114 was posted), pretty much all of those complaints were made after the fact. (No one talked about preserving the Death Eaters’ heads until after Chapter 117 came out, for example.) I don’t post on the subreddit, but I do read the comments there, and some of the complaints have honestly been fairly cringeworthy.
Honestly I think even the wand thing is way overblown.
In story, there was only a few minute or so between the making of the unbreakable vow (which did require Harry to have his wand) and Harry using it to kill the Death Eaters. Voldemort makes the “You have 1 minute to tell me your secrets or you die” offer immediately after the vow, after all.
Voldemort could have reasoned that he wanted to kill Harry as quickly as possible. Forcing him to drop his wand would have taken time. It also would have shown weakness in front of the Death Eaters. And Voldemort probably couldn’t imagine anything Harry could have done. He’s way too young for any really dangerous magic, despite his skill. Voldemort doesn’t know about nano-wires and all that stuff. It’s probably unimaginable for him that so little magic could have such a big effect.
Let’s not forget that forcing Harry to drop his wand first is not a proposition without any risk either. Voldemort wanted secrets Harry had. If he had demanded that Harry drop his wand, and Harry had refused, he would have been forced to kill him without learning any of his secrets. It’s very likely that Voldemort considered this a significant risk.
And let’s not forget that Voldemort is far from perfect. People keep saying “He always plays at one lever higher”. But the source of that statement was Voldemort himself! He’s obviously quite full of himself, but he’s definitely not without flaws. He makes quite a lot of mistakes throughout the story. He nearly died in Azkaban due to his own stupidity (casting a kill curse at an innocent in full view of a vital ally whom you know is absolutely against that in every way).
Voldemort could have reasoned that he wanted to kill Harry as quickly as possible. Forcing him to drop his wand would have taken time.
This is silly. He’d taken the time to do exactly that before. And now, if he’s going to give him a full minute just to think...
The whole thing falls to the “plausible excuse” vs “what you’d expect to happen” problem, which Harry explains in Answers and Riddles:
the laws governing what constitutes a good explanation don’t talk about plausible excuses you hear afterward. They talk about the probabilities we assign in advance. That’s why science makes people do advance predictions, instead of trusting explanations people come up with afterward. And I wouldn’t have predicted in advance for you to follow Snape and show up like that. Even if I’d known in advance that you could put a trace on Snape’s wand, I wouldn’t have expected you to do it and follow him just then.
If you only knew up to chapter 108 or 110 or so, and someone told you that Voldemort is going to take every precaution to contain Harry’s threat that he can think of, running a search of the sort that would generate such ideas as “put up elaborate wards, including ones against timelooping”, “keep him naked”, “have 36 Death Eaters point wands at him, some of them with different orders than others”, “murder him very elaborately and thoroughly”, “but first make him take a Vow”, “commit to guarding the place for six hours anyway” etc., would you expect one of those items not to be “disarm him”?
Agreed. Especially if we judge the story by usual storytelling standards. Though that’s harder to do after HPMoR itself has been teaching us the difference between story-logic and what is realistically probable, and mocking stories in general and the original Harry Potter in particular at every turn for that stuff.
I don’t think that hole was even necessary. Voldemort did need to let Harry keep his wand for the Unbreakable Vow. and could have intended to have someone disarm him afterwards. So just have Harry prepare the antimatter bomb while Voldemort is dictacting the Vow, and announce it before he could be disarmed. What do you think?
(Sure, that would probably mean no “final exam” for the readers. Now I hated the idea of holding the story hostage, and refused to even “try to try” for that reason, so that doesn’t bother me. I suspect I’m in the minority about that, though.)
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a plausible excuse for the wand thing except “Voldemort was careless”, and carelessness under such conditions simply hasn’t been part of his character at any point until now.
Word of God says that the plot of HPMOR was set in stone since the beginning. If there was some better reason for Harry to face the Final Exam with a wand in his hand, Eliezer would have known about it from the start, and could have seeded all the necessary foreshadowing for it way in advance.
In story, there was only a few minute or so between the making of the unbreakable vow (which did require Harry to have his wand) and Harry using it to kill the Death Eaters. Voldemort makes the “You have 1 minute to tell me your secrets or you die” offer immediately after the vow, after all.
Not so. At T-20 seconds, Harry starts verbally stalling while he keeps working on the transfiguration.
It also would have shown weakness in front of the Death Eaters.
After he’s already given them lengthy and detailed instructions about all the many different kinds of spell they must be ready to cast at this naked 11-year old boy at the first sign of trouble?
And Voldemort probably couldn’t imagine anything Harry could have done. He’s way too young for any really dangerous magic, despite his skill. Voldemort doesn’t know about nano-wires and all that stuff. It’s probably unimaginable for him that so little magic could have such a big effect.
He knows that the Harry is a walking extinction event waiting to happen, and that Harry knows secrets powerful enough to be worth learning (potentially even powerful enough to end him—cf. “power he knows not”). Indeed, these are the two facts motivating his actions immediately prior to his defeat.
If he had demanded that Harry drop his wand, and Harry had refused, he would have been forced to kill him without learning any of his secrets.
Why? Surely at least one of his Death Eaters knows Expelliarmus.
And let’s not forget that Voldemort is far from perfect. People keep saying “He always plays at one lever higher”. But the source of that statement was Voldemort himself!
A fine point. It is amusing how, through the reinforcement from the meme’s spreading, people have forgotten the reliability of this statement.
I don’t think Harry really could preserve the Death Eaters’ heads. Remember, he was out of magic, totally drained after the “Obliviate”. And he had to take of Voldemort first, to not take any chance of letting him escape. So even while Harry is good at “doing the impossible”, there is a limit to how much “impossible” he can do a limited time.
He might have a portable refrigerator set to 4 degrees C in that bag of tricks of his, but that’s a little much forward planning even for him. And that still leaves the problem of safely cooling ten times thirty-six pounds of meat down to that temperature without damage.
I talked about just dismembering their arms before the chapter was even posted. I suppose them surviving would mean Harry can’t make up a ridiculus story after the fact, though. HJPEV Gotta do an overly complicated plots that cost others more than he realizes at the time or else he just isn’t HJPEV. >_>
Then he’d be an eleven-year old surrounded by bleeding but live adult Death Eaters, and with only (and specifically) two tourniquets, with no easy way to get them medical attention or stun them.
There’s ways to incapacitate them less lethally, but you’d need to think a little further outside of the box, and they’re not really compatible with MoR!Harry’s outlook nor the narrative progression.
The wand objection has been a very good one, and don’t give me the “hindsight bias” crap, people were complaining about that in advance. No matter the bizarre excuses the author comes up with, it just doesn’t make sense to order 37 death eaters to shoot Harry if he raises his wand, rather than order one Harry to drop the damn wand. It certainly doesn’t make sense to be so paranoid as to strip Harry naked and nonetheless let him keep his wand.
If Voldemort is overconfident, then fine, LET HIM BE OVERCONFIDENT. But Eliezer wanted it both ways, both to treat Voldemort as super-ultra-cautious AND let Harry keep his damn wand.
Right, okay, I’m back, and on further reflection, I think I’ve actually decided that leaving Harry his wand isn’t even that bad of a mistake. So, let’s get started on why:
it just doesn’t make sense to order 37 death eaters to shoot Harry if he raises his wand, rather than order one Harry to drop the damn wand.
If Harry needed his wand to demonstrate something (which he very plausibly might have), it would have made no sense to take it away. From Voldemort’s perspective, the threat from letting Harry keep his wand (as opposed to, say, his Time-Turner or a hidden Portkey on his person) is close to none; with the precautions he took against Harry, Harry would have needed to pull off a wordless, movement-free, multi-targeting, incapacitating, direction-neutral attack, which is a tall order even for most grown wizards, much less a first-year at Hogwarts. If the threat is minimal and the benefit is high (demonstrating a secret spell), simple cost-benefit analysis would tell Voldemort to let Harry keep his wand. And so he did. The fact that Harry had an attack that just happened to fulfill all the aforementioned criteria is pure coincidence (I would have called it authorial fiat, if it weren’t so brilliantly foreshadowed), and the outside-view probability of such would have been extremely tiny.
strip Harry naked
Again, hidden Portkeys, Time-Turners, Transfigured threats, etc., are all possibilities, and indeed, given Harry’s planning tendencies, probabilities. Stripping him naked isn’t ultra-paranoia; it’s just common sense. Taking the wand, on the other hand, is ultra-paranoia, especially if Voldemort felt there was a benefit to be gained from letting Harry keep the wand; otherwise he’d basically be Pascal’s Mugging himself on the off-chance that Harry developed some never-before-seen magical ability off-camera.
But Eliezer wanted it both ways, both to treat Voldemort as super-ultra-cautious AND let Harry keep his damn wand.
Voldemort wasn’t “super-ultra-cautious”. He was “just cautious enough to succeed”. And had Harry not gone and invented partial Transfiguration from Muggle principles back in Chapter 28, he damn well would have.
And actually, thinking more about this has led me to formulate a reply to this as well (beyond my last reply, that is):
and don’t give me the “hindsight bias” crap, people were complaining about that in advance
The commenters knew about partial Transfiguration. Voldemort didn’t. Also, they had the opening quote from Chapter 1 to guide them. Again, Voldemort didn’t. That’s a huge informational advantage, and is not to be underestimated. (To see how enormous of an advantage it really is, just look at all of my above arguments, and count how many of them rely on Voldemort not knowing about partial Transfiguration. Answer: all of them.) Hindsight bias doesn’t necessarily just apply when you know the answer for a fact; it also applies when you have a bunch of additional information that makes you reasonably confident in a given answer. So yes, upon further reflection, I will “give [you] the ‘hindsight bias’ crap”, because upon further reflection, it’s not actually crap.
If Harry needed his wand to demonstrate something (which he very plausibly might have), it would have made no sense to take it away.
So have him drop it and a Death Eater confiscate it, and if he says he needs it to demonstrate something, Voldemort can ask “do you plan to usse it to attack me, sservantss, or to esscape?” before returning it to him. Then as soon as he’s done, confiscate it again. That’s an extra 10 seconds; which is a small price to pay to hedge against a Black Swan.
Voldemort doesn’t know about Partial Transfiguration, but he does know Harry has powers he knows not, which is what this entire charade was about in the first place! I would’ve done it it just in case.
There’s an easy way out of that one: Harry should precommit to not begin thinking of any possible plans of escape using his wand until after getting it back.
You can’t have it both ways. Either Harry is dangerous enough to justify the full suite of precautions, or he’s an idiot, in which case what you need isn’t “the full suite of precautions minus disarming”.
Voldemort has an absolute truth oracle, or at least a sufficiently good approximation thereof, available too him. If Harry needs his wand to teach V one of his secrets, make him say so in Parseltongue. If H does demand his wand, make him state whether he intends to use it for anything but demonstrating a secret.
The wonderful thing here is that this gives all kinds of opportunities for V to screw up without realizing he’s screwing up. PT is a secret for which H needs his wand. H is, in a sense, demonstrating PT. Unless V was very careful about making H state his exact and full intentions, we could have had a plausible reason for H to have his wand. There’s really no plausible reason for V to just let him have it, though; disarming him (there’s even a spell which does exactly that, and one would hope his followers know it...) costs nothing but a small amount of time, and gains V potential defense against “a power he knows not”… the existence of such things being the whole reason V didn’t just have H killed immediately!
I’m not addressing the meat of your comment right now (I may do so later—I’m a bit short on time right now), but this part specifically caught my attention:
and don’t give me the “hindsight bias” crap, people were complaining about that in advance.
Voldemort was powerful enough that he could defeat a couple of fully armed Aurors with wands pointing at him, so the threat of Harry raising his wand and casting a spell at him was negligible, as proved by him dodging a killing curse cast by a much stronger wizard than Harry.
Even if Harry was so powerful to be able to raise his wand, cast a spell quick enough at Voldemort so that he couldn’t dodge it, the Death Eaters would have stunned Harry instantly, and even if a spell cast by Harry destroyed the body of Voldemort, he could easily make himself a new one.
So what was your prior on Voldemort being more afraid of Harry keeping his socks than of keeping his wand? What was your prior that Voldemort, afraid of Harry, would rather screech at 37 Death Eater to make sure Harry doesn’t raise his wand, rather than just order Harry to drop the wand?
All these arguments are backwards—you start from the conclusion that Harry needed to keep his wand for an authorial reason, and excuses are being made to explain that.
But the breaking of suspension of disbelief comes exactly when we see the authorial hand too strongly overriding what would have been the natural character decisions, much like Harry’s suspension of disbelief couldn’t accept four different groups arriving at the same time at the door, if a single mind wasn’t orchestrating it. It doesn’t have to do with excuses you give afterwards, it has to do with the plausibility you’d give the events in advance.
What was your prior that Voldemort, afraid of Harry, would rather screech at 37 Death Eater to make sure Harry doesn’t raise his wand, rather than just order Harry to drop the wand?
Voldemort knows that Harry understands game theory, and has no incentive to drop his wand if he ends up dead and cannot save everyone anyway. If he orders Harry to drop his wand, Harry might refuse, and then he has to kill him before being able to extract information out of him.
We have to weight the probability of Harry being able to raise his wand before the Death Eaters can cast (deemed impossible, as we’ve seen how fast a grownup wizard can cast) and cast a spell which defeats Voldemort against the probability of Harry refusing to drop the wand and being required to be killed before telling any secrets. I strongly suspect the later one is many orders of magnitudes larger.
Voldemort knows Harry has knowledge he has not, but this doesn’t necessarily mean Harry knows spells or has the magical power required to cast strong enough spells to harm him.
Voldemort knows that Harry understands game theory, and has no incentive to drop his wand if he ends up dead and cannot save everyone anyway
So now you’re saying that Voldemort can order Harry to keep his wand lowered and threaten him with death if he raises it, but he can’t order Harry to drop the wand and threaten him with death if he refuses?
I somehow doubt that you would have come to this rather very specific conclusion if you hadn’t needed to explain-after-the-fact the things we saw occur in the story.
I can’t prove it because I didn’t write it down, but this very question bothered me after reading chapter 113, and I made up this explanation before reading chapter 114.
Voldemort knows that Harry understands game theory, and has no incentive to drop his wand if he ends up dead and cannot save everyone anyway. If he orders Harry to drop his wand, Harry might refuse, and then he has to kill him before being able to extract information out of him.
There are two possible answers to this argument.
1) If Harry is refusing to give up his wand, this suggests that Harry thinks that with the wand he has a non-0% chance of escape. In that event, getting the wand off him takes priority over questioning.
2) Expelliarmus. One of Voldemort’s 36 followers must know it, and if not, frankly Voldemort could probably teach them on the spot.
Voldemort knows Harry has knowledge he has not, but this doesn’t necessarily mean Harry knows spells or has the magical power required to cast strong enough spells to harm him.
“Power he knows not” strongly implies the ability to do or achieve something, rather than abstract knowledge with no immediate applications.
But that isn’t relevant. It doesn’t matter what Voldemort’s assessment of Harry’s abilities is. He knows three things:
1) Harry has unknown powerful secrets
2) Prophecy says Harry has power Voldemort knows not
3) Any failure on Voldemort’s part to stop Harry could be all it takes to end the world
When you know for a fact that you are missing information, and you know for a fact that you can’t afford the consequences of failure, you take every step you can think of to ensure success. Voldemort has already shown that he knows this with his plan of how to kill Harry.
The step of disarming Harry is both obvious and carries no costs to Voldemort, so it should be one of the first steps he takes.
Ah, there we go. I must’ve missed that one. Perils of not double-checking, I suppose (though in my defense, the subreddit has a heck of a lot of threads right now, so that one might have been buried under a lot of other threads).
I might have been looking at r/HPMOR when I saw it. To be fair, preserving 37 heads would have taken a long time- as in, he might not have had the magic to cool them all, so most would be warm and dead anyway. It would also be hard to maintain the transfigureations.
Actually, I had just assumed that Harry had decided that Lucius deserved to die, and had blamed it on LV partially so that he could continue his friendship with Draco.
“Voldemort was stupid with letting Harry keep his wand”
Count me as guilty. He should have taken the wand, particularly when having a discussion to extract extra super powers that he suspects Harry to have.
Preserving the Death Eater’s heads isn’t hindsight bias, it’s just silly. The world is full of people dying who Harry could save much easier than warm headless corpses.
I don’t know what’s on /r/hpmor, you’d probably have to ask there. On Less Wrong, people discussed both of the last two in the comments on Chapter 113.
“Harry should’ve thought to preserve the Death Eaters’ heads”
pretty much all of those complaints were made after the fact.
Did you even go to r/hpmor after Chapter 114? A bunch of people were saying that he should at least cool them, or try to revive them after he uses his time-turner or то incapacitate instead of kill or anything. Given that it also occurred to me immediately and was discussed multiple times on ##HPMOR, I’m pretty sure there was no hindsight involved..
I fail to see how “Harry should’ve thought to preserve the Death Eaters’ heads” thing has anything to do with hindsight bias. These comments were a response to current events, not to a later outcome making it look like a better idea than it seemed at the time.
Does anyone else feel like /r/hpmor (but not LW, thankfully) has been suffering from a lot of hindsight bias lately? First “Dumbledore was stupid with the mirror”, then “Harry/Voldemort was stupid with the Riddle curse”, then “Voldemort was stupid with letting Harry keep his wand”, and now “Harry should’ve thought to preserve the Death Eaters’ heads”? Apart from the wand thing (which I believe was pointed out by a few commenters before Chapter 114 was posted), pretty much all of those complaints were made after the fact. (No one talked about preserving the Death Eaters’ heads until after Chapter 117 came out, for example.) I don’t post on the subreddit, but I do read the comments there, and some of the complaints have honestly been fairly cringeworthy.
Honestly I think even the wand thing is way overblown.
In story, there was only a few minute or so between the making of the unbreakable vow (which did require Harry to have his wand) and Harry using it to kill the Death Eaters. Voldemort makes the “You have 1 minute to tell me your secrets or you die” offer immediately after the vow, after all.
Voldemort could have reasoned that he wanted to kill Harry as quickly as possible. Forcing him to drop his wand would have taken time. It also would have shown weakness in front of the Death Eaters. And Voldemort probably couldn’t imagine anything Harry could have done. He’s way too young for any really dangerous magic, despite his skill. Voldemort doesn’t know about nano-wires and all that stuff. It’s probably unimaginable for him that so little magic could have such a big effect.
Let’s not forget that forcing Harry to drop his wand first is not a proposition without any risk either. Voldemort wanted secrets Harry had. If he had demanded that Harry drop his wand, and Harry had refused, he would have been forced to kill him without learning any of his secrets. It’s very likely that Voldemort considered this a significant risk.
And let’s not forget that Voldemort is far from perfect. People keep saying “He always plays at one lever higher”. But the source of that statement was Voldemort himself! He’s obviously quite full of himself, but he’s definitely not without flaws. He makes quite a lot of mistakes throughout the story. He nearly died in Azkaban due to his own stupidity (casting a kill curse at an innocent in full view of a vital ally whom you know is absolutely against that in every way).
This is silly. He’d taken the time to do exactly that before. And now, if he’s going to give him a full minute just to think...
The whole thing falls to the “plausible excuse” vs “what you’d expect to happen” problem, which Harry explains in Answers and Riddles:
If you only knew up to chapter 108 or 110 or so, and someone told you that Voldemort is going to take every precaution to contain Harry’s threat that he can think of, running a search of the sort that would generate such ideas as “put up elaborate wards, including ones against timelooping”, “keep him naked”, “have 36 Death Eaters point wands at him, some of them with different orders than others”, “murder him very elaborately and thoroughly”, “but first make him take a Vow”, “commit to guarding the place for six hours anyway” etc., would you expect one of those items not to be “disarm him”?
Certainly, but if you must leave Harry a way out, better to have a plausible excuse instead of no excuse at all.
Agreed. Especially if we judge the story by usual storytelling standards. Though that’s harder to do after HPMoR itself has been teaching us the difference between story-logic and what is realistically probable, and mocking stories in general and the original Harry Potter in particular at every turn for that stuff.
I don’t think that hole was even necessary. Voldemort did need to let Harry keep his wand for the Unbreakable Vow. and could have intended to have someone disarm him afterwards. So just have Harry prepare the antimatter bomb while Voldemort is dictacting the Vow, and announce it before he could be disarmed. What do you think?
(Sure, that would probably mean no “final exam” for the readers. Now I hated the idea of holding the story hostage, and refused to even “try to try” for that reason, so that doesn’t bother me. I suspect I’m in the minority about that, though.)
Well, ‘hate’ is a strong word, but I certainly wasn’t going to be bullied into leaving a review.
The problem is that there doesn’t seem to be a plausible excuse for the wand thing except “Voldemort was careless”, and carelessness under such conditions simply hasn’t been part of his character at any point until now.
Word of God says that the plot of HPMOR was set in stone since the beginning. If there was some better reason for Harry to face the Final Exam with a wand in his hand, Eliezer would have known about it from the start, and could have seeded all the necessary foreshadowing for it way in advance.
Not so. At T-20 seconds, Harry starts verbally stalling while he keeps working on the transfiguration.
After he’s already given them lengthy and detailed instructions about all the many different kinds of spell they must be ready to cast at this naked 11-year old boy at the first sign of trouble?
He knows that the Harry is a walking extinction event waiting to happen, and that Harry knows secrets powerful enough to be worth learning (potentially even powerful enough to end him—cf. “power he knows not”). Indeed, these are the two facts motivating his actions immediately prior to his defeat.
Why? Surely at least one of his Death Eaters knows Expelliarmus.
A fine point. It is amusing how, through the reinforcement from the meme’s spreading, people have forgotten the reliability of this statement.
I don’t think Harry really could preserve the Death Eaters’ heads. Remember, he was out of magic, totally drained after the “Obliviate”. And he had to take of Voldemort first, to not take any chance of letting him escape. So even while Harry is good at “doing the impossible”, there is a limit to how much “impossible” he can do a limited time.
He might have a portable refrigerator set to 4 degrees C in that bag of tricks of his, but that’s a little much forward planning even for him. And that still leaves the problem of safely cooling ten times thirty-six pounds of meat down to that temperature without damage.
I can’t give you evidence, but I saw lots of posts about freezing the death eater’s heads before today.
I talked about just dismembering their arms before the chapter was even posted. I suppose them surviving would mean Harry can’t make up a ridiculus story after the fact, though. HJPEV Gotta do an overly complicated plots that cost others more than he realizes at the time or else he just isn’t HJPEV. >_>
Unlike Harry, the death eaters have lots of wandless options. Not just one.
Also don’t forget that Harry had less than a minute to make up a plan.
Then he’d be an eleven-year old surrounded by bleeding but live adult Death Eaters, and with only (and specifically) two tourniquets, with no easy way to get them medical attention or stun them.
There’s ways to incapacitate them less lethally, but you’d need to think a little further outside of the box, and they’re not really compatible with MoR!Harry’s outlook nor the narrative progression.
The wand objection has been a very good one, and don’t give me the “hindsight bias” crap, people were complaining about that in advance. No matter the bizarre excuses the author comes up with, it just doesn’t make sense to order 37 death eaters to shoot Harry if he raises his wand, rather than order one Harry to drop the damn wand. It certainly doesn’t make sense to be so paranoid as to strip Harry naked and nonetheless let him keep his wand.
If Voldemort is overconfident, then fine, LET HIM BE OVERCONFIDENT. But Eliezer wanted it both ways, both to treat Voldemort as super-ultra-cautious AND let Harry keep his damn wand.
Right, okay, I’m back, and on further reflection, I think I’ve actually decided that leaving Harry his wand isn’t even that bad of a mistake. So, let’s get started on why:
If Harry needed his wand to demonstrate something (which he very plausibly might have), it would have made no sense to take it away. From Voldemort’s perspective, the threat from letting Harry keep his wand (as opposed to, say, his Time-Turner or a hidden Portkey on his person) is close to none; with the precautions he took against Harry, Harry would have needed to pull off a wordless, movement-free, multi-targeting, incapacitating, direction-neutral attack, which is a tall order even for most grown wizards, much less a first-year at Hogwarts. If the threat is minimal and the benefit is high (demonstrating a secret spell), simple cost-benefit analysis would tell Voldemort to let Harry keep his wand. And so he did. The fact that Harry had an attack that just happened to fulfill all the aforementioned criteria is pure coincidence (I would have called it authorial fiat, if it weren’t so brilliantly foreshadowed), and the outside-view probability of such would have been extremely tiny.
Again, hidden Portkeys, Time-Turners, Transfigured threats, etc., are all possibilities, and indeed, given Harry’s planning tendencies, probabilities. Stripping him naked isn’t ultra-paranoia; it’s just common sense. Taking the wand, on the other hand, is ultra-paranoia, especially if Voldemort felt there was a benefit to be gained from letting Harry keep the wand; otherwise he’d basically be Pascal’s Mugging himself on the off-chance that Harry developed some never-before-seen magical ability off-camera.
Voldemort wasn’t “super-ultra-cautious”. He was “just cautious enough to succeed”. And had Harry not gone and invented partial Transfiguration from Muggle principles back in Chapter 28, he damn well would have.
And actually, thinking more about this has led me to formulate a reply to this as well (beyond my last reply, that is):
The commenters knew about partial Transfiguration. Voldemort didn’t. Also, they had the opening quote from Chapter 1 to guide them. Again, Voldemort didn’t. That’s a huge informational advantage, and is not to be underestimated. (To see how enormous of an advantage it really is, just look at all of my above arguments, and count how many of them rely on Voldemort not knowing about partial Transfiguration. Answer: all of them.) Hindsight bias doesn’t necessarily just apply when you know the answer for a fact; it also applies when you have a bunch of additional information that makes you reasonably confident in a given answer. So yes, upon further reflection, I will “give [you] the ‘hindsight bias’ crap”, because upon further reflection, it’s not actually crap.
So have him drop it and a Death Eater confiscate it, and if he says he needs it to demonstrate something, Voldemort can ask “do you plan to usse it to attack me, sservantss, or to esscape?” before returning it to him. Then as soon as he’s done, confiscate it again. That’s an extra 10 seconds; which is a small price to pay to hedge against a Black Swan.
Voldemort doesn’t know about Partial Transfiguration, but he does know Harry has powers he knows not, which is what this entire charade was about in the first place! I would’ve done it it just in case.
There’s an easy way out of that one: Harry should precommit to not begin thinking of any possible plans of escape using his wand until after getting it back.
From LV’s perpsective, that would still be an improvement. It seriously curtails Harry’s thinking time.
Because you hadn’t decided shortly before that Harry was an idiot.
You can’t have it both ways. Either Harry is dangerous enough to justify the full suite of precautions, or he’s an idiot, in which case what you need isn’t “the full suite of precautions minus disarming”.
Voldemort has an absolute truth oracle, or at least a sufficiently good approximation thereof, available too him. If Harry needs his wand to teach V one of his secrets, make him say so in Parseltongue. If H does demand his wand, make him state whether he intends to use it for anything but demonstrating a secret.
The wonderful thing here is that this gives all kinds of opportunities for V to screw up without realizing he’s screwing up. PT is a secret for which H needs his wand. H is, in a sense, demonstrating PT. Unless V was very careful about making H state his exact and full intentions, we could have had a plausible reason for H to have his wand. There’s really no plausible reason for V to just let him have it, though; disarming him (there’s even a spell which does exactly that, and one would hope his followers know it...) costs nothing but a small amount of time, and gains V potential defense against “a power he knows not”… the existence of such things being the whole reason V didn’t just have H killed immediately!
I’m not addressing the meat of your comment right now (I may do so later—I’m a bit short on time right now), but this part specifically caught my attention:
Ahem. From my original comment:
Just sayin’.
Voldemort was powerful enough that he could defeat a couple of fully armed Aurors with wands pointing at him, so the threat of Harry raising his wand and casting a spell at him was negligible, as proved by him dodging a killing curse cast by a much stronger wizard than Harry.
Even if Harry was so powerful to be able to raise his wand, cast a spell quick enough at Voldemort so that he couldn’t dodge it, the Death Eaters would have stunned Harry instantly, and even if a spell cast by Harry destroyed the body of Voldemort, he could easily make himself a new one.
So what was your prior on Voldemort being more afraid of Harry keeping his socks than of keeping his wand? What was your prior that Voldemort, afraid of Harry, would rather screech at 37 Death Eater to make sure Harry doesn’t raise his wand, rather than just order Harry to drop the wand?
All these arguments are backwards—you start from the conclusion that Harry needed to keep his wand for an authorial reason, and excuses are being made to explain that.
But the breaking of suspension of disbelief comes exactly when we see the authorial hand too strongly overriding what would have been the natural character decisions, much like Harry’s suspension of disbelief couldn’t accept four different groups arriving at the same time at the door, if a single mind wasn’t orchestrating it. It doesn’t have to do with excuses you give afterwards, it has to do with the plausibility you’d give the events in advance.
Voldemort knows that Harry understands game theory, and has no incentive to drop his wand if he ends up dead and cannot save everyone anyway. If he orders Harry to drop his wand, Harry might refuse, and then he has to kill him before being able to extract information out of him.
We have to weight the probability of Harry being able to raise his wand before the Death Eaters can cast (deemed impossible, as we’ve seen how fast a grownup wizard can cast) and cast a spell which defeats Voldemort against the probability of Harry refusing to drop the wand and being required to be killed before telling any secrets. I strongly suspect the later one is many orders of magnitudes larger.
Voldemort knows Harry has knowledge he has not, but this doesn’t necessarily mean Harry knows spells or has the magical power required to cast strong enough spells to harm him.
So now you’re saying that Voldemort can order Harry to keep his wand lowered and threaten him with death if he raises it, but he can’t order Harry to drop the wand and threaten him with death if he refuses?
I somehow doubt that you would have come to this rather very specific conclusion if you hadn’t needed to explain-after-the-fact the things we saw occur in the story.
I can’t prove it because I didn’t write it down, but this very question bothered me after reading chapter 113, and I made up this explanation before reading chapter 114.
There are two possible answers to this argument.
1) If Harry is refusing to give up his wand, this suggests that Harry thinks that with the wand he has a non-0% chance of escape. In that event, getting the wand off him takes priority over questioning.
2) Expelliarmus. One of Voldemort’s 36 followers must know it, and if not, frankly Voldemort could probably teach them on the spot.
“Power he knows not” strongly implies the ability to do or achieve something, rather than abstract knowledge with no immediate applications.
But that isn’t relevant. It doesn’t matter what Voldemort’s assessment of Harry’s abilities is. He knows three things:
1) Harry has unknown powerful secrets
2) Prophecy says Harry has power Voldemort knows not
3) Any failure on Voldemort’s part to stop Harry could be all it takes to end the world
When you know for a fact that you are missing information, and you know for a fact that you can’t afford the consequences of failure, you take every step you can think of to ensure success. Voldemort has already shown that he knows this with his plan of how to kill Harry.
The step of disarming Harry is both obvious and carries no costs to Voldemort, so it should be one of the first steps he takes.
I’m pretty sure some people did, actually.
Did they? I don’t recall seeing any.
See here for a thread posted shortly after chapter 115:
http://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/2xtdi5/ch_115_so/
Ah, there we go. I must’ve missed that one. Perils of not double-checking, I suppose (though in my defense, the subreddit has a heck of a lot of threads right now, so that one might have been buried under a lot of other threads).
I might have been looking at r/HPMOR when I saw it. To be fair, preserving 37 heads would have taken a long time- as in, he might not have had the magic to cool them all, so most would be warm and dead anyway. It would also be hard to maintain the transfigureations.
Actually, I had just assumed that Harry had decided that Lucius deserved to die, and had blamed it on LV partially so that he could continue his friendship with Draco.
Count me as guilty. He should have taken the wand, particularly when having a discussion to extract extra super powers that he suspects Harry to have.
Preserving the Death Eater’s heads isn’t hindsight bias, it’s just silly. The world is full of people dying who Harry could save much easier than warm headless corpses.
I don’t know what’s on /r/hpmor, you’d probably have to ask there. On Less Wrong, people discussed both of the last two in the comments on Chapter 113.
With the hype surrounding the final arc, the quality of /r/HPMOR is declining in general.
Did you even go to r/hpmor after Chapter 114? A bunch of people were saying that he should at least cool them, or try to revive them after he uses his time-turner or то incapacitate instead of kill or anything. Given that it also occurred to me immediately and was discussed multiple times on ##HPMOR, I’m pretty sure there was no hindsight involved..
HELL FREAKING YES, even on LessWrong. That said, it hasn’t been as bad as I was expecting.
I fail to see how “Harry should’ve thought to preserve the Death Eaters’ heads” thing has anything to do with hindsight bias. These comments were a response to current events, not to a later outcome making it look like a better idea than it seemed at the time.