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.
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.