Is it plausible that Harry would go along with this rescue? It is harder to accept than a Sirius rescue, which would’ve been based on the belief that Sirius was actually innocent (he hadn’t done the awful things he was convicted of). The extenuating circumstance of having become evil under the influence of the Dark Lord provides a much weaker reason to rescue someone, and requires much more trust in the person who is conveying the information (since they must not only get the facts right, but make some subtle and complex judgments about the prisoner’s character and what they deserve).
If Quirrell had just come straight out and asked Harry to help him break Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban, and to pretend to be Voldemort while doing it so that she would follow him out, I don’t think he would have done it. Far too many red flags. Sure, Harry wants to end Azkaban, but to start with Bellatrix, who undeniably did so many evil things? Quirrell’s case in favor of Bellatrix’s innocence sounds like what a partisan would say when trying to make their side seem favorable, not an argument that Harry would buy (just as he could see through Draco’s case against Dumbledore). Genre savvy Harry has read plenty of stories about villains with a sympathetic backstory.
Harry knows that Dumbledore doesn’t trust Quirrell, he can imagine how Hermione would react to this (and she was right about transfiguration experimentation), or how Neville would react (Neville, who said with his voice shaking that torturing his parents was “not even close to the worst thing she’s ever done”).
Or even how Draco would react: Bellatrix Black? She was one of the few who were truly evil (chp 47). Forget that nonsense about wanting to save a poor innocent person from the nasty Dementors (you really think that’s why Quirrell wants to break someone out of Azkaban?), this is obviously part of a plot. As Father would ask, who benefits? What kind of plot would involve breaking Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban?
But Quirrell didn’t just come right out and suggest that they go free Bellatrix from Azkaban, he gradually and artfully got Harry to buy into the plot. So if we’re going to wonder whether it’s plausible for Harry to go along with it, we’ll have to look at how Quirrell manipulated him into agreeing, and why Harry fell for the manipulations and wasn’t stopped by these red flags.
I think there’s two things going on here. The first is that Harry is psychologically in fantasy-mode during these chapters, and the second is Harry’s self-esteem issues regarding his own intelligence.
“You are about to invite me to join a secret organization full of interesting people like yourself,” said Harry, “one of whose goals is to reform or overthrow the government of magical Britain, and yes, I’m in.”
Fantasy-mode: Harry is being recruited by a secret group of highly interesting rebels. They fight against the stupid, evil, corrupt government of Magical Britain. Their cause and methods are righteous beyond question (otherwise Harry would ask a few, instead of immediately inducting himself).
Quirrell believes Magical Britain must be ruled under the dictatorship of a powerful leader, as we learned in chapters 34-35 (whereas Harry believes in democracy). So what kind of secret rebel organization is he likely to be a member of? It doesn’t matter. Harry is in fantasy-mode—he could be in a secret organization of interesting people whose goal it is to change the world!
Fantasy-mode is completely obvious throughout these chapters, especially at the start of 52.
Self-esteem issues: This thing with Quirrell being able to make “amazing deductions from scanty evidence” has been brought up before. Quirrell has also told him things like “You should have figured this out”, “you’re childish”, and sometimes it even seems like Quirrell is testing Harry’s intelligence. This is making Harry insecure, and even desperate now. He’s thinking a week in advance of how he’ll answer Quirrell’s questions, rather than suffer the humility of having not already deduced and fully understood the secret plan by the time he was asked.
Quirrell is playing Harry on at least these levels: “save the world” fantasy, and “you are not as intelligent as I” subtle cues. These weaknesses of Harry are apparent in a lot of previous chapters. Since these are established vulnerabilities, it’s plausible that Quirrell can successfully exploit them without Harry knowing.
Fantasy-mode is completely obvious throughout these chapters, especially at the start of 52.
Yes.
Which also makes me remember the titles of these chapters.
I originally thought the title was suggesting that we were going to explore the underlying motives of the Aurors/Dementors/prisoners… but the SPE has very little to do with prisons, really, and a lot to do with the ways in which people’s thinking and behavior gets distorted by the roles they adopt.
Much as Harry, as you point out, is distorting his own thinking by choosing the role of Noble Warrior in an Epic Fantasy.
I originally thought the title was suggesting that we were going to explore the underlying motives of the Aurors/Dementors/prisoners… but the SPE has very little to do with prisons, really, and a lot to do with the ways in which people’s thinking and behavior gets distorted by the roles they adopt.
IWICUTT.
(“I wish I could upvote this twice” deserves a shorthand around here.)
Quirrell gradually brought Harry into the plot, getting him to make a series of commitments so that by the time the full plot was revealed it would be hard for him to back out. The gradual escalation of commitment is reminiscent of the Milgram study, more than the Stanford prison experiment. Quirrell framed each step in general terms that would activate Harry’s noble motivations for going through with the plot or undermine his defenses and objections at later steps. And Harry was rushed, so that he wouldn’t have time to think things through fully on his own and analyze them from different angles, which made it much easier to lead Harry’s thoughts down the path that Quirrell wanted.
In chp 49 Quirrell revealed his secret illegal animagus form, which seemed innocent enough—Quirrell had voluntarily disclosed it for no clear benefit, which made it hard to hold it against him. But in doing so, he brought Harry into a conspiracy, where they had secrets from the rest of the world which Harry was comfortable with even though they might look bad to other people. He got Harry to set aside the law as a standard for evaluating what was happening. Harry knew that the law is flawed, but he also should have recognized that rules are often there for a reason (like the transfiguration safety rules) and so the law is a useful heuristic which should only be ignored with extreme caution. Proclaiming his lack of respect for the law also made it hard for Harry to later ask himself “what would Hermione think about this?” since he’d already crossed boundaries that she wouldn’t cross and it had seemed innocent enough.
At the start of their meeting in chp 51, Quirrell asked “do you trust me?” Harry considered and answered yes, since he trusted Quirrell on the whole, more than not. But trust should not be a binary yes/no question, but rather a question of how far and in what ways. Bringing a Dementor into Hogwarts was at the edge of how far Dumbledore would trust Quirrell, and Harry could have imagined what Dumbledore would think of the prison break, but at first the question was just “do you trust me?”, not “do you trust me for this very suspicious-sounding plot” or “do you trust me over Dumbledore?” (plus, Quirrell had had some success at getting Harry to distrust Dumbledore). Establishing trust in general made it harder for Harry to doubt Quirrell about the most relevant particulars. If you’re concerned that someone seems kind of Dark and has hidden motives, then it’s not smart to trust them to have good reasons for freeing Bellatrix Black, no matter how intelligent & clear-thinking they are or how helpful they have been to you personally. But with trust established, Harry didn’t think things through and connect those particular reasons for distrust to those particulars of what Quirrell was doing; he was willing to defer to Quirrell. Part of Harry’s problem was a kind of Aumann failure—since he trusted Quirrell’s rationality, he didn’t reason everything through on his own, which made it easier for Quirrell to trick him. There’s also the UFAI mistake where being impressed by someone’s intelligence makes you think that they share your goals—exacerbated, in this case, by how much Harry identified with Quirrell.
Quirrell introduced the Azkaban breakout plot as a way to free some unspecified innocent person. Harry wants to end Azkaban, and framing the breakout in this way makes it seem like a smaller version of that, which can be based on the same noble motives that capture Harry’s imagination (as we see at the start of chp 52). The sense of heroism makes Harry willing to take dramatic action—otherwise, he’d probably balk at something so extreme. In this heroic state of mind, and in a rush, Harry doesn’t stop to consider that Quirrell’s reasons for wanting to free Bellatrix probably aren’t the same as Harry’s reasons for wanting to end Azkaban or free innocents.
When Quirrell finally identifies Bellatrix as the target, is Harry really going to back out now? He’d break someone out of Azkaban, just not her? Sure, the case for Bellatrix’s innocence seems a little sketchy, but if Quirrell says it’s true then the details must fill out the argument convincingly—Quirrell can definitely think clearly about these things, and you trust him. And there’s no time now to get all the information that you’re missing and think it all through yourself. Sure, this would look bad to other people, or to the law, but this is a big dramatic heroic thing which is judged by a higher standard, which those other people don’t understand. Even Hermione wouldn’t understand what I want to do here.
So I can see how the versions of Hermione and Dumbledore that Harry has in his head could be neutralized. His inner Gryffindor is caught up in a heroic fervor about saving someone from the Dementors of Azkaban. His inner Ravenclaw is overawed by Quirrell’s superior intellect and has been wasting its efforts trying to impress Quirrell by guessing what he’ll say next. His inner Hufflepuff was shut down early in the process, and is being ignored by the time its warnings could seem most plausible to the rest of him. But what happened to his inner Slytherin, and the Draco inside his head? They, ironically, are the ones whose warnings (about suspicious plotting) should have the best chance of getting through to Harry. So I guess the question is whether it’s plausible that all of these psychological tricks would’ve been enough to quiet Harry’s suspicion. Is it plausible that it could happen, and is it likely enough to happen for Quirrell to try this risky plot?
But what happened to his inner Slytherin, and the Draco inside his head? They, ironically, are the ones whose warnings (about suspicious plotting) should have the best chance of getting through to Harry.
That’s an interesting point. In context of that, consider the following—Harry is now [end of chapter 54] without protection from the Dementors, thus gone entirely to the ‘dark side,’ which in Harry as in most is rather Slytherin. That means that Harry is now in the perfect position to see how he’s been manipulated, and act against on it: specifically, betraying Quirell and going with his first story “He made me do it.” He can even attribute his attacking an Auror who thought about Moody* to the Dementors and potentially get away with the whole thing.
One other thing that Quirrell did was to portray the government of magical Britain as the opposition, since he and Harry agree that it’s corrupt and incompetent. That made it easier for Harry to dismiss opposition to the plot as foolishness. It also bound Harry & Quirrell closer together in Harry’s mind, and made their shared rationality salient.
But it could have driven Harry & Quirrell apart, since this is one area where Harry knows something about Quirrell’s goals. They have talked about what kind of government would be best, and they disagree. They even had a kind of public debate about it. So why would Harry be so eager to join a secret organization to reform or overthrow the government of magical Britain, without at least worrying about what kind of government they’re trying to bring about?
That’s a worry that should carry over to Quirrell’s actual plot. It’s a very basic question: why is Quirrell doing this? What is he trying to accomplish? But one that Harry apparently never asks.
The extenuating circumstance of having become evil under the influence of the Dark Lord provides a much weaker reason to rescue someone, and requires much more trust in the person who is conveying the information (since they must not only get the facts right, but make some subtle and complex judgments about the prisoner’s character and what they deserve).
If Harry is a utilitarian, he shouldn’t need extenuating circumstances. He should want to free everyone from Azkaban and from all forms of torture and suffering, including truly evil people. The only reason not to free Bellatrix Black should be the danger of her attacking other people later on, and that’s the point on which he should seek reassurance from Quirrel (re: what they are going to do with her once freed).
But it seems Harry reverts to common human morals in the last few chapters. He attaches much weight to Bella’s innocence. He thinks he’d like to kill Voldemoret as revenge or punishment.
The only reason not to free Bellatrix Black should be the danger of her attacking other people later on, and that’s the point on which he should seek reassurance from Quirrel (re: what they are going to do with her once freed).
Another reason is that (as pointed out elsewhere) there could be other people much more deserving of being freed; freeing Bellatrix or freeing her first might cost him the opportunity of freeing any of them in the near future.
And failing to free her at all may cost him the opportunity to save the world. Harry should have had some doubts as to whether he was ready for the mission.
Failing that, the other thing that has been bothering me for a while is why did Quirrel take Harry to save Bellatrix now? If Quirrel was pure Voldy he wouldn’t care about Bellatrix, he doesn’t love her. Saving her now, by taking a young idealistic boy on an important high-stress mission, doesn’t seem like a good plan. How much does an evil overlord value saving henchwomen, what risk is worth it?
I am not sure that Quirrel is pure Voldy. I’m half tempted to predict that Quirrel is Harry-grown-old-and-dark transported through time in some fashion. Hence the extreme inability to touch each other and the fact that Quirrel’s priors are too good. There is a fair amount of evidence against that (lack of patronus, for one). But it is a fun idea.
Saving her now, by taking a young idealistic boy on an important high-stress mission, doesn’t seem like a good plan.
Unless the primary purpose is to change Harry. Duping Harry into rescuing Bellatrix Black creates some pretty hefty blackmail- most importantly by Harry against himself. Harry can name the fallacies involved, but that’s no guarantee he can overcome them.
Remember, pretty much every action Quirrel has taken so far has been pedagogical. It seems far more likely that he’s grooming Harry than that he’s rebuilding his power base.
Wait, can you explain why lacking a patronus is evidence against Quirrel being a time-traveling Harry? He would have the same super-bright human patronus that Harry does, which would be a bit of a tip that he was Harry-from-the-future. So obviously he would pretend to not have one.
If he had a patronus he could have saved Bellatrix a long time ago, by himself or using a more reliable ally than Harry. He seemed to have been waiting for Harry, thus either he doesn’t have a patronus or he needed Harry to do this task for some other unknown reason.
I’m still confused. I think because I assume that saving Bellatrix was definitely not the point of the trip, and whatever the real point was, it specifically has to do with Harry so Quirrel’s patronus status is irrelevant with respect to the Azkaban trip. Couldn’t Quirrel always have used an ally in the plot? They wouldn’t even necessarily have to be willing or reliable on their own, or can’t you summon a patronus under the imperius curse?
Now I feel like I did when reading the chapter on the final army battle. I think I’m an n-1 player.
I got the impression that Harry’s patronus was special and strong for shielding against the Dementors, perhaps no others would have been strong enough to hide an escaped felon? Why hadn’t more people been broken out?
Okay if saving Bellatrix is not about saving Bellatrix, could whatever it was about have been done in a more controlled environment? Could Quirrell have hired some goons to play a part in some formative point of Harry’s education/ensnarement rather than taking a teen into a live fire situation.
What would have happened if Harry hadn’t been able to cast Patronus? Could Quirrell have taught the lesson/ got a hold on Harry in a different way? If so why hadn’t Quirrell got this hold as soon as he could have? It seemed that Harry’s Patronus was the trigger for the Azkaban mission (Quirrell suggests it just after he finds out about it, why does Quirrell need to get the hold now).
The only explanation that makes sense in the “azkaban is not about bellatrix” scenario is that Quirrell wanted it to fail all along… I see insufficient incentive for Quirrell for the positive outcome to offset the severe risk of it going wrong.
I’m also confused. None of the explanations for what is going on make sense. Quirrell’s motivation/identity seems the most under explained.
Interesting. I’m not sure whether or not it’s better at shielding, because we’re told that people break in to Azkaban to shield the inmates so that they might have regular non-nightmare dreams, or just a half-day of patronus time. So we know that just one typical patronus is strong enough to protect people from the worst effects of a Dementor for 12 hours.
I don’t think we know enough about the defenses of Azkaban to say at what point the typical rescue operation would fail. But when we’re witnessing the aurors in the command center, I find it interesting that only attempts to relieve the pain of being in Azkaban through patronus-presence are brought up (in the bit about bribes), not escape attempts. Perhaps it has to do with the “perfect crime” logic.
As to what the actual purpose was in this whole excursion, I have no idea.
I’m not sure intentional failure is the only explanation. It could be some weird bonding experience. Maybe Quirrel always dreamed of raiding wizarding prisons, pulling off bank heists, and taking over the world with his son. Chapter 55: “Adoption Papers”
I think from the duel that we can infer that Quirrel didn’t expect to lose, even in a one-sided fight against a team of aurors. He was just playing games when it was one-on-one. Maybe he used the killing curse because he was (overly) confident that Harry was committed to trusting him completely with regards to this mission and didn’t expect to be blocked.
Maybe chapter 55 will answer all of our questions. Ha. Haha.
Someone talked about the chapter being in “fantasy mode”. My first thought was that they were saying that the chapter might be a dream. This doesn’t seem to be what they meant, but the chapter is so odd in terms of the overall story that I don’t want to entirely exclude the hypothesis.
At that point, the hard thing is thinking of a way that it being a dream or other sort of hallucination wouldn’t be completely infuriating. I’m not sure if it “Harry has an enemy who’s attacking him in his dreams” would be good enough, though that would be a very Harryish nightmare. Maybe it’s his subconscious telling him that Quirrell isn’t entirely trustworthy.
I usually do not like dream episodes if they are not well hinted at. It often feels like a cheap excuse to blow everything up without hurting the status Q.
If it did turn out to be that I’d be annoyed since a) old Harry time traveling back has been done before and b) it would be such a stretch from the standard plot that making it turn out that way would strike me as too far removed from the original.
Ah, but how does he kill Voldemort? Your scenario doesn’t provide any power-up to go from irrational prisoner in Azkaban to Dark Lord-killer.
I suggest that before that, Harry remembers Quirrel’s story about the Chamber of Secrets, and regretfully kills the basilisk as well (to keep the time-loop stable). Indeed, a time-loop might explain how Quirrel found about it in the first place—the search procedure was simply to systematically investigate every old legend, and the Chamber was simply the one that panned out.
It depends how far back in time he is sent. He might have plenty of time to power up. Being fairly dead inside he might’ve got close to Voldemort and learnt his secrets, pretending to be an ally and then betrayed him.
I don’t endorse the future-Harry theory at all, but that said, I do think this would be a principled extrapolation… that is, it wouldn’t come out of nowhere, narratively.
We’ve already seen Harry experiment with time (and be warned not to). And we’ve seen, during Harry’s experiments with transmutation, that previously binding constraints on magic can be overcome by adopting a different model of what the magic is doing (1).
I’m no more an expert on the nature of time than I am on the nature of matter, but on the face of it a constraint like “6h/24h” seems as arbitrary as “whole objects only” (2).
So it stands to reason that a similar exercise of using a more accurate model of time could cause that constraint to evaporate (3), allowing Harry to develop an improved Time Turner with no practical upper limit on temporal range.
All of that said, Fermi’s Paradox as applied to time travel is a real problem. OTOH, if we’re willing to believe that “muggles” don’t notice the existence of wizards, I guess it’s not implausible that temporal natives don’t notice the existence of temporal tourists.
(1) One explanation is that by adopting a more accurate model of the manipulation being performed, one can discard constraints that were only ever consequences of the inaccuracies in one’s earlier model. (This seems the most likely explanation, given the author’s philosophical sensibilities.)
(2) Perhaps more, actually. There is a difference between how a cluster of iron atoms interacts with the other iron atoms in a chunk of iron, and how it interacts with the surrounding atmosphere, and that difference could fundamentally affect how transmutation works. It doesn’t in the MORverse, it seems, but it could have. Whereas I can’t think of any meaningful difference between a 6-hour displacement in time (“distimement”?) and a N-hour displacement for any N that is not a significant fraction of the age of the universe.
(3) That said, Harry would be well advised to take far more precautions than are currently available to him before experimenting. It may be that the 6-hour limit is actually a safety factor derived from the maximum distance over which the Turner can adjust the user’s spatial coordinates to keep them on the surface of the Earth, for example.
Then again, the same could be said of experimenting with transmutation… at the very least, understanding where the extra energy goes seems like a good safety precaution.
Then again again, I guess that sort of attitude is why I’m not a protagonist in heroic fiction.
Guvf nyfb rkcynvaf jul gur Qrzragbef unir n orrs jvgu Dhveery, ur unf gur znex bs fbzrbar jub rfpncrq Nmxnona.
I believe that the Dementors have a beef with Quirrell because (rot13) gur Qrzragbef ner Qrngu vapneangr naq Dhveeryy qrsvrq qrngu ol perngvat n ubepehk, abg gb zragvba qlvat naq abg fgnlvat qrnq. Gurl jnag gur cevmr gung’f orra qravrq gurz.
Reading some wikis tell me that Dementors didn’t have a problem with Voldy in canon, and that condition applies there. So either that is a deviation from canon, due to a change in the nature of Dementors or something else is going on.
I think the general issue is that the overarching setting is essentially the same or very close to the original even if the details have changed. That’s an implicit pact that Eliezer has essentially made with the readers.
For what it is worth, prior to the end of the series there was a fair bit speculation that either Voldemort or Dumbledore was really a time traveling Harry (this speculation seemed most prominent after book 4 before book 5 came out).
At a general meta-level I also doubt Eliezer will do anything like this because this is still to a large extent Eliezer’s vehicle for trying to illustrate concepts about rationality and that sort of plot line would seriously distract from such a goal.
“Acausal” and “(T/U)DT” aren’t magic words that, upon invoking them, suddenly make it rational to act like a good Samaritan and against your own goals and interests.
Heh. If you had seen the part of my post I eventually deleted, you would have been digging a trench. Fortunately I didn’t feel yet ready to put such a broad accusation forward with the necessary confidence.
People aren’t very good at being utilitarians when there’s heavy emotional issues involved even if they are generally good at thinking rationally in other situations. For example, I’m generally a utilitarian, but when I read about this extremely disturbing story I wanted the people responsible to suffer badly for a very long time. And I still do. I don’t just want them to die to prevent future harm. I want them to burn. I want them to burn so much that it almost makes me wish there were a vengeful god to torture them. And if I had the choice between simply killing the people involved and making them die slow, agonizing deaths, I’d likely pick the second and them lie to myself and convince myself that that was somehow the utilitarian thing to do.
Humans have a lot of trouble being good utilitarians when the stakes are high.
he only reason not to free Bellatrix Black should be the danger of her attacking other people later on, and that’s the point on which he should seek reassurance from Quirrel (re: what they are going to do with her once freed).
Even if Harry’s not a utilitarian, I’d still like him to be smart enough to realise that this is still an important practical question to ask.
But he’s only 11, so I only hope that EY will let him realise his mistake later.
It is a lot more important than just deterring similar acts. A failure to punish after having made a commitment to punish removes a big part of the deterrent effectiveness of all kinds of punishment for all kinds of ‘bad things’. For that matter, it may decrease trust that the government/society will keep its other commitments—pension obligations, for example.
To add to this, what will be done with Bellatrix after she is freed? Wouldn’t Harry need an answer to this before cooperating with Quirrell?
Simply releasing Bellatrix to her own recognizance would be like releasing a hungry lion near a grade school during lunch hour. Without Voldemort personally directing her actions she would act out of her own sense of vengeance.
It isn’t obvious to me that a simple “trust me” from Quirrell would convince Harry to cooperate.
Quirrell’s case in favor of Bellatrix’s innocence sounds like what a partisan would say when trying to make their side seem favorable, not an argument that Harry would buy (just as he could see through Draco’s case against Dumbledore). Genre savvy Harry has read plenty of stories about villains with a sympathetic backstory.
This is the one thing that bothers me about this; Quirrell’s excuse for Bellatrix seems good enough to cover a lot of people. Hence I expect at least one of the following should hold:
Harry refuses to go along (this didn’t occur)
Harry insists on modifying the plot to break out more people (this didn’t occur)
Harry insists on going back to break out more people, to Quirrell’s dismay
Harry insists on going back to break out more people, just as Quirrell was going for
...though I guess those last two look a good deal less likely now that I’ve seen the extent to which they bungled the breakout.
chp 51-54 & A/N
Is it plausible that Harry would go along with this rescue? It is harder to accept than a Sirius rescue, which would’ve been based on the belief that Sirius was actually innocent (he hadn’t done the awful things he was convicted of). The extenuating circumstance of having become evil under the influence of the Dark Lord provides a much weaker reason to rescue someone, and requires much more trust in the person who is conveying the information (since they must not only get the facts right, but make some subtle and complex judgments about the prisoner’s character and what they deserve).
If Quirrell had just come straight out and asked Harry to help him break Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban, and to pretend to be Voldemort while doing it so that she would follow him out, I don’t think he would have done it. Far too many red flags. Sure, Harry wants to end Azkaban, but to start with Bellatrix, who undeniably did so many evil things? Quirrell’s case in favor of Bellatrix’s innocence sounds like what a partisan would say when trying to make their side seem favorable, not an argument that Harry would buy (just as he could see through Draco’s case against Dumbledore). Genre savvy Harry has read plenty of stories about villains with a sympathetic backstory.
Harry knows that Dumbledore doesn’t trust Quirrell, he can imagine how Hermione would react to this (and she was right about transfiguration experimentation), or how Neville would react (Neville, who said with his voice shaking that torturing his parents was “not even close to the worst thing she’s ever done”).
Or even how Draco would react: Bellatrix Black? She was one of the few who were truly evil (chp 47). Forget that nonsense about wanting to save a poor innocent person from the nasty Dementors (you really think that’s why Quirrell wants to break someone out of Azkaban?), this is obviously part of a plot. As Father would ask, who benefits? What kind of plot would involve breaking Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban?
But Quirrell didn’t just come right out and suggest that they go free Bellatrix from Azkaban, he gradually and artfully got Harry to buy into the plot. So if we’re going to wonder whether it’s plausible for Harry to go along with it, we’ll have to look at how Quirrell manipulated him into agreeing, and why Harry fell for the manipulations and wasn’t stopped by these red flags.
I think there’s two things going on here. The first is that Harry is psychologically in fantasy-mode during these chapters, and the second is Harry’s self-esteem issues regarding his own intelligence.
Fantasy-mode: Harry is being recruited by a secret group of highly interesting rebels. They fight against the stupid, evil, corrupt government of Magical Britain. Their cause and methods are righteous beyond question (otherwise Harry would ask a few, instead of immediately inducting himself).
Quirrell believes Magical Britain must be ruled under the dictatorship of a powerful leader, as we learned in chapters 34-35 (whereas Harry believes in democracy). So what kind of secret rebel organization is he likely to be a member of? It doesn’t matter. Harry is in fantasy-mode—he could be in a secret organization of interesting people whose goal it is to change the world!
Fantasy-mode is completely obvious throughout these chapters, especially at the start of 52.
Self-esteem issues: This thing with Quirrell being able to make “amazing deductions from scanty evidence” has been brought up before. Quirrell has also told him things like “You should have figured this out”, “you’re childish”, and sometimes it even seems like Quirrell is testing Harry’s intelligence. This is making Harry insecure, and even desperate now. He’s thinking a week in advance of how he’ll answer Quirrell’s questions, rather than suffer the humility of having not already deduced and fully understood the secret plan by the time he was asked.
Quirrell is playing Harry on at least these levels: “save the world” fantasy, and “you are not as intelligent as I” subtle cues. These weaknesses of Harry are apparent in a lot of previous chapters. Since these are established vulnerabilities, it’s plausible that Quirrell can successfully exploit them without Harry knowing.
Yes.
Which also makes me remember the titles of these chapters.
I originally thought the title was suggesting that we were going to explore the underlying motives of the Aurors/Dementors/prisoners… but the SPE has very little to do with prisons, really, and a lot to do with the ways in which people’s thinking and behavior gets distorted by the roles they adopt.
Much as Harry, as you point out, is distorting his own thinking by choosing the role of Noble Warrior in an Epic Fantasy.
IWICUTT.
(“I wish I could upvote this twice” deserves a shorthand around here.)
Quirrell gradually brought Harry into the plot, getting him to make a series of commitments so that by the time the full plot was revealed it would be hard for him to back out. The gradual escalation of commitment is reminiscent of the Milgram study, more than the Stanford prison experiment. Quirrell framed each step in general terms that would activate Harry’s noble motivations for going through with the plot or undermine his defenses and objections at later steps. And Harry was rushed, so that he wouldn’t have time to think things through fully on his own and analyze them from different angles, which made it much easier to lead Harry’s thoughts down the path that Quirrell wanted.
In chp 49 Quirrell revealed his secret illegal animagus form, which seemed innocent enough—Quirrell had voluntarily disclosed it for no clear benefit, which made it hard to hold it against him. But in doing so, he brought Harry into a conspiracy, where they had secrets from the rest of the world which Harry was comfortable with even though they might look bad to other people. He got Harry to set aside the law as a standard for evaluating what was happening. Harry knew that the law is flawed, but he also should have recognized that rules are often there for a reason (like the transfiguration safety rules) and so the law is a useful heuristic which should only be ignored with extreme caution. Proclaiming his lack of respect for the law also made it hard for Harry to later ask himself “what would Hermione think about this?” since he’d already crossed boundaries that she wouldn’t cross and it had seemed innocent enough.
At the start of their meeting in chp 51, Quirrell asked “do you trust me?” Harry considered and answered yes, since he trusted Quirrell on the whole, more than not. But trust should not be a binary yes/no question, but rather a question of how far and in what ways. Bringing a Dementor into Hogwarts was at the edge of how far Dumbledore would trust Quirrell, and Harry could have imagined what Dumbledore would think of the prison break, but at first the question was just “do you trust me?”, not “do you trust me for this very suspicious-sounding plot” or “do you trust me over Dumbledore?” (plus, Quirrell had had some success at getting Harry to distrust Dumbledore). Establishing trust in general made it harder for Harry to doubt Quirrell about the most relevant particulars. If you’re concerned that someone seems kind of Dark and has hidden motives, then it’s not smart to trust them to have good reasons for freeing Bellatrix Black, no matter how intelligent & clear-thinking they are or how helpful they have been to you personally. But with trust established, Harry didn’t think things through and connect those particular reasons for distrust to those particulars of what Quirrell was doing; he was willing to defer to Quirrell. Part of Harry’s problem was a kind of Aumann failure—since he trusted Quirrell’s rationality, he didn’t reason everything through on his own, which made it easier for Quirrell to trick him. There’s also the UFAI mistake where being impressed by someone’s intelligence makes you think that they share your goals—exacerbated, in this case, by how much Harry identified with Quirrell.
Quirrell introduced the Azkaban breakout plot as a way to free some unspecified innocent person. Harry wants to end Azkaban, and framing the breakout in this way makes it seem like a smaller version of that, which can be based on the same noble motives that capture Harry’s imagination (as we see at the start of chp 52). The sense of heroism makes Harry willing to take dramatic action—otherwise, he’d probably balk at something so extreme. In this heroic state of mind, and in a rush, Harry doesn’t stop to consider that Quirrell’s reasons for wanting to free Bellatrix probably aren’t the same as Harry’s reasons for wanting to end Azkaban or free innocents.
When Quirrell finally identifies Bellatrix as the target, is Harry really going to back out now? He’d break someone out of Azkaban, just not her? Sure, the case for Bellatrix’s innocence seems a little sketchy, but if Quirrell says it’s true then the details must fill out the argument convincingly—Quirrell can definitely think clearly about these things, and you trust him. And there’s no time now to get all the information that you’re missing and think it all through yourself. Sure, this would look bad to other people, or to the law, but this is a big dramatic heroic thing which is judged by a higher standard, which those other people don’t understand. Even Hermione wouldn’t understand what I want to do here.
So I can see how the versions of Hermione and Dumbledore that Harry has in his head could be neutralized. His inner Gryffindor is caught up in a heroic fervor about saving someone from the Dementors of Azkaban. His inner Ravenclaw is overawed by Quirrell’s superior intellect and has been wasting its efforts trying to impress Quirrell by guessing what he’ll say next. His inner Hufflepuff was shut down early in the process, and is being ignored by the time its warnings could seem most plausible to the rest of him. But what happened to his inner Slytherin, and the Draco inside his head? They, ironically, are the ones whose warnings (about suspicious plotting) should have the best chance of getting through to Harry. So I guess the question is whether it’s plausible that all of these psychological tricks would’ve been enough to quiet Harry’s suspicion. Is it plausible that it could happen, and is it likely enough to happen for Quirrell to try this risky plot?
That’s an interesting point. In context of that, consider the following—Harry is now [end of chapter 54] without protection from the Dementors, thus gone entirely to the ‘dark side,’ which in Harry as in most is rather Slytherin. That means that Harry is now in the perfect position to see how he’s been manipulated, and act against on it: specifically, betraying Quirell and going with his first story “He made me do it.” He can even attribute his attacking an Auror who thought about Moody* to the Dementors and potentially get away with the whole thing.
Just something to consider.
* I misread, but the point remains.
Not Moody, but a cameo Auror who thought about Moody
I was surprised that we basically did not get to hear Quirrell explain how he knew Bella was innocent nor Harry ask.
Quirrell explicitly said that he couldn’t tell him. There are a number of other interesting and important questions Harry could have asked, though.
One other thing that Quirrell did was to portray the government of magical Britain as the opposition, since he and Harry agree that it’s corrupt and incompetent. That made it easier for Harry to dismiss opposition to the plot as foolishness. It also bound Harry & Quirrell closer together in Harry’s mind, and made their shared rationality salient.
But it could have driven Harry & Quirrell apart, since this is one area where Harry knows something about Quirrell’s goals. They have talked about what kind of government would be best, and they disagree. They even had a kind of public debate about it. So why would Harry be so eager to join a secret organization to reform or overthrow the government of magical Britain, without at least worrying about what kind of government they’re trying to bring about?
That’s a worry that should carry over to Quirrell’s actual plot. It’s a very basic question: why is Quirrell doing this? What is he trying to accomplish? But one that Harry apparently never asks.
If Harry is a utilitarian, he shouldn’t need extenuating circumstances. He should want to free everyone from Azkaban and from all forms of torture and suffering, including truly evil people. The only reason not to free Bellatrix Black should be the danger of her attacking other people later on, and that’s the point on which he should seek reassurance from Quirrel (re: what they are going to do with her once freed).
But it seems Harry reverts to common human morals in the last few chapters. He attaches much weight to Bella’s innocence. He thinks he’d like to kill Voldemoret as revenge or punishment.
Another reason is that (as pointed out elsewhere) there could be other people much more deserving of being freed; freeing Bellatrix or freeing her first might cost him the opportunity of freeing any of them in the near future.
And failing to free her at all may cost him the opportunity to save the world. Harry should have had some doubts as to whether he was ready for the mission.
Failing that, the other thing that has been bothering me for a while is why did Quirrel take Harry to save Bellatrix now? If Quirrel was pure Voldy he wouldn’t care about Bellatrix, he doesn’t love her. Saving her now, by taking a young idealistic boy on an important high-stress mission, doesn’t seem like a good plan. How much does an evil overlord value saving henchwomen, what risk is worth it?
I am not sure that Quirrel is pure Voldy. I’m half tempted to predict that Quirrel is Harry-grown-old-and-dark transported through time in some fashion. Hence the extreme inability to touch each other and the fact that Quirrel’s priors are too good. There is a fair amount of evidence against that (lack of patronus, for one). But it is a fun idea.
Unless the primary purpose is to change Harry. Duping Harry into rescuing Bellatrix Black creates some pretty hefty blackmail- most importantly by Harry against himself. Harry can name the fallacies involved, but that’s no guarantee he can overcome them.
Remember, pretty much every action Quirrel has taken so far has been pedagogical. It seems far more likely that he’s grooming Harry than that he’s rebuilding his power base.
Wait, can you explain why lacking a patronus is evidence against Quirrel being a time-traveling Harry? He would have the same super-bright human patronus that Harry does, which would be a bit of a tip that he was Harry-from-the-future. So obviously he would pretend to not have one.
Alternative idea: You only get one patronus. Harry’s got hit by AK, so now he can’t cast patronus anymore.
Shhh, if you’re not careful, patronuses will be sentient next. Is it ethical to dismiss a sentient patronus?
If he had a patronus he could have saved Bellatrix a long time ago, by himself or using a more reliable ally than Harry. He seemed to have been waiting for Harry, thus either he doesn’t have a patronus or he needed Harry to do this task for some other unknown reason.
I’m still confused. I think because I assume that saving Bellatrix was definitely not the point of the trip, and whatever the real point was, it specifically has to do with Harry so Quirrel’s patronus status is irrelevant with respect to the Azkaban trip. Couldn’t Quirrel always have used an ally in the plot? They wouldn’t even necessarily have to be willing or reliable on their own, or can’t you summon a patronus under the imperius curse?
Now I feel like I did when reading the chapter on the final army battle. I think I’m an n-1 player.
I got the impression that Harry’s patronus was special and strong for shielding against the Dementors, perhaps no others would have been strong enough to hide an escaped felon? Why hadn’t more people been broken out?
Okay if saving Bellatrix is not about saving Bellatrix, could whatever it was about have been done in a more controlled environment? Could Quirrell have hired some goons to play a part in some formative point of Harry’s education/ensnarement rather than taking a teen into a live fire situation.
What would have happened if Harry hadn’t been able to cast Patronus? Could Quirrell have taught the lesson/ got a hold on Harry in a different way? If so why hadn’t Quirrell got this hold as soon as he could have? It seemed that Harry’s Patronus was the trigger for the Azkaban mission (Quirrell suggests it just after he finds out about it, why does Quirrell need to get the hold now).
The only explanation that makes sense in the “azkaban is not about bellatrix” scenario is that Quirrell wanted it to fail all along… I see insufficient incentive for Quirrell for the positive outcome to offset the severe risk of it going wrong.
I’m also confused. None of the explanations for what is going on make sense. Quirrell’s motivation/identity seems the most under explained.
Interesting. I’m not sure whether or not it’s better at shielding, because we’re told that people break in to Azkaban to shield the inmates so that they might have regular non-nightmare dreams, or just a half-day of patronus time. So we know that just one typical patronus is strong enough to protect people from the worst effects of a Dementor for 12 hours.
I don’t think we know enough about the defenses of Azkaban to say at what point the typical rescue operation would fail. But when we’re witnessing the aurors in the command center, I find it interesting that only attempts to relieve the pain of being in Azkaban through patronus-presence are brought up (in the bit about bribes), not escape attempts. Perhaps it has to do with the “perfect crime” logic.
As to what the actual purpose was in this whole excursion, I have no idea.
I’m not sure intentional failure is the only explanation. It could be some weird bonding experience. Maybe Quirrel always dreamed of raiding wizarding prisons, pulling off bank heists, and taking over the world with his son. Chapter 55: “Adoption Papers”
I think from the duel that we can infer that Quirrel didn’t expect to lose, even in a one-sided fight against a team of aurors. He was just playing games when it was one-on-one. Maybe he used the killing curse because he was (overly) confident that Harry was committed to trusting him completely with regards to this mission and didn’t expect to be blocked.
Maybe chapter 55 will answer all of our questions. Ha. Haha.
Someone talked about the chapter being in “fantasy mode”. My first thought was that they were saying that the chapter might be a dream. This doesn’t seem to be what they meant, but the chapter is so odd in terms of the overall story that I don’t want to entirely exclude the hypothesis.
At that point, the hard thing is thinking of a way that it being a dream or other sort of hallucination wouldn’t be completely infuriating. I’m not sure if it “Harry has an enemy who’s attacking him in his dreams” would be good enough, though that would be a very Harryish nightmare. Maybe it’s his subconscious telling him that Quirrell isn’t entirely trustworthy.
I usually do not like dream episodes if they are not well hinted at. It often feels like a cheap excuse to blow everything up without hurting the status Q.
If it did turn out to be that I’d be annoyed since a) old Harry time traveling back has been done before and b) it would be such a stretch from the standard plot that making it turn out that way would strike me as too far removed from the original.
I think it could make a decent story. I’m not sure that it hasn’t strayed too far from canon anyway.
Sngr/Fgnl Cbggre
Nsgre guvf qronpyr, Uneel trgf pncgherq naq chg va Nmxunona sbe n ovg. Ur ybfrf nyy uvf unccl zrzbevrf naq gur novyvgl gb pnfg Cngebahf (vg vf n unccl zrzbel) naq fbzr bs uvf engvbanyvgl genvavat. Ur rira sbetrgf ur vf Uneel Cbggre (ur yvxrq orvat n obl jvgu qrfgval).
Urzvbar/Dhveery/Qenpb naq gur jrnfyrlf zbhag n erfphr, jvgu Urezvbar univat yrneag cngebahf sebz Uneel’f abgr.
Uneel vf nffhzrq gb or gur qnex ybeq, ol gur nhgubevgvrf, fb vf abg fnsr ng guvf gvzr, ur jbhyq or uhagrq qbja, fb vf genafcbegrq onpx va gvzr.
Gurer ur xvyyf bss Ibyqrzbeg cebcre naq fybjyl orpbzrf Dhveery. Guvf nyfb rkcynvaf jul gur Qrzragbef unir n orrs jvgu Dhveery, ur unf gur znex bs fbzrbar jub rfpncrq Nmxnona.
Dhveery unf gb pbnpu Uneel va guvf jnl gb sbez n fgnoyr gvzr ybbc.
Abj V qba’g ernyyl guvax vg vf guvf. Ohg fgvyy vg jencf hc n ahzore bs fgenaqf. V nyfb unira’g ernq rabhtu snasvp be gur ynfg srj obbxf bs Uneel Cbggre fb zl frafr bs jung unf orra qbar be fubhyq or qbar vf abg irel fgebat.
Ah, but how does he kill Voldemort? Your scenario doesn’t provide any power-up to go from irrational prisoner in Azkaban to Dark Lord-killer.
I suggest that before that, Harry remembers Quirrel’s story about the Chamber of Secrets, and regretfully kills the basilisk as well (to keep the time-loop stable). Indeed, a time-loop might explain how Quirrel found about it in the first place—the search procedure was simply to systematically investigate every old legend, and the Chamber was simply the one that panned out.
It depends how far back in time he is sent. He might have plenty of time to power up. Being fairly dead inside he might’ve got close to Voldemort and learnt his secrets, pretending to be an ally and then betrayed him.
It was mentioned that the time turner only works for 6h/24h. He first would have to invent time travel for longer distances.
I don’t endorse the future-Harry theory at all, but that said, I do think this would be a principled extrapolation… that is, it wouldn’t come out of nowhere, narratively.
We’ve already seen Harry experiment with time (and be warned not to). And we’ve seen, during Harry’s experiments with transmutation, that previously binding constraints on magic can be overcome by adopting a different model of what the magic is doing (1).
I’m no more an expert on the nature of time than I am on the nature of matter, but on the face of it a constraint like “6h/24h” seems as arbitrary as “whole objects only” (2).
So it stands to reason that a similar exercise of using a more accurate model of time could cause that constraint to evaporate (3), allowing Harry to develop an improved Time Turner with no practical upper limit on temporal range.
All of that said, Fermi’s Paradox as applied to time travel is a real problem. OTOH, if we’re willing to believe that “muggles” don’t notice the existence of wizards, I guess it’s not implausible that temporal natives don’t notice the existence of temporal tourists.
(1) One explanation is that by adopting a more accurate model of the manipulation being performed, one can discard constraints that were only ever consequences of the inaccuracies in one’s earlier model. (This seems the most likely explanation, given the author’s philosophical sensibilities.)
(2) Perhaps more, actually. There is a difference between how a cluster of iron atoms interacts with the other iron atoms in a chunk of iron, and how it interacts with the surrounding atmosphere, and that difference could fundamentally affect how transmutation works. It doesn’t in the MORverse, it seems, but it could have. Whereas I can’t think of any meaningful difference between a 6-hour displacement in time (“distimement”?) and a N-hour displacement for any N that is not a significant fraction of the age of the universe.
(3) That said, Harry would be well advised to take far more precautions than are currently available to him before experimenting. It may be that the 6-hour limit is actually a safety factor derived from the maximum distance over which the Turner can adjust the user’s spatial coordinates to keep them on the surface of the Earth, for example. Then again, the same could be said of experimenting with transmutation… at the very least, understanding where the extra energy goes seems like a good safety precaution. Then again again, I guess that sort of attitude is why I’m not a protagonist in heroic fiction.
And then he could bring some venture capital to save a certain car manufacturer from bankruptcy
I believe that the Dementors have a beef with Quirrell because (rot13) gur Qrzragbef ner Qrngu vapneangr naq Dhveeryy qrsvrq qrngu ol perngvat n ubepehk, abg gb zragvba qlvat naq abg fgnlvat qrnq. Gurl jnag gur cevmr gung’f orra qravrq gurz.
Reading some wikis tell me that Dementors didn’t have a problem with Voldy in canon, and that condition applies there. So either that is a deviation from canon, due to a change in the nature of Dementors or something else is going on.
The Dementors don’t represent death in Rowling’s canon. They are identified with depression.
Potential spoiler:
Vg pbhyq or gung Uneel vf fvzcyl zvfgnxra nobhg gur gehr angher bs Qrzragbef: Gurl qb abg ercerfrag Qrngu (gung vf Yrguvsbyqf), ohg engure zntvpnyyl pbapragengrq rkvfgragvny natfg (spoiler). Uneel’f gubhtug va gur Uhznavfz frdhrapr vf uvf guvat gb cebgrpg (spoiler), juvpu (jura uryq fgebatyl) vf n engvbany pbhagre gb rkvfgragvny natfg. Navznyf ner rssrpgvir Cngebav orpnhfr gurl’er abg ersyrpgvir rabhtu gb srry rkvfgragvny natfg.
Gur ovttrfg ceboyrz jvgu guvf gurbel vf gung Oryyngevk qbrf unir “fbzrguvat gb cebgrpg”—ure vagrafr ybir sbe Ibyql. Guvf gubhtug fubhyq unir rvgure fuvryqrq ure sebz gur vasyhrapr bs Qrzragbef be orra sbetbggra nf cneg bs gur Qrzragbef’ trareny rssrpg.
Fbzrguvat gb guvax nobhg sbe n zber pnabavpny fcvabss, gubhtu.
Nfvqr: Sha naq rkpvgrzrag jbhyq nyfb jbex nf rssrpgvir pbhagref gb rkvfgragvny natfg. Cerqvpgvba: Serq naq Trbetr Jrnfyrl jvyy qrirybc na rira zber rssrpgvir Cngebahf ol erqvfpbirevat fbzr bs gur 31 ynjf bs Sha (spoiler).
Yes, in canon he eventually recruited the Dementors, IIRC. This seems like a change in the nature of the Dementors.
If you edit your rot13 comments to plain-text I’ll upvote.
I think the general issue is that the overarching setting is essentially the same or very close to the original even if the details have changed. That’s an implicit pact that Eliezer has essentially made with the readers.
For what it is worth, prior to the end of the series there was a fair bit speculation that either Voldemort or Dumbledore was really a time traveling Harry (this speculation seemed most prominent after book 4 before book 5 came out).
At a general meta-level I also doubt Eliezer will do anything like this because this is still to a large extent Eliezer’s vehicle for trying to illustrate concepts about rationality and that sort of plot line would seriously distract from such a goal.
Not worth it. But this is:
Which would not requiring a rescue mission, but just going in & out. Which—as we learned—is rather cheap to do.
Quirrel seems to not know some theoretical concepts that Harry does know.
Yeah, I have a theory for that. See my rot13′d reply to JoshuaZ.
Maybe Quirrel was (acausally) decision theoretically obliged to save her.
“Acausal” and “(T/U)DT” aren’t magic words that, upon invoking them, suddenly make it rational to act like a good Samaritan and against your own goals and interests.
I was thinking more that he might have promised to rescue her if she needed it, so that she would agree to help him.
No, they only make it seem rational to some people.
Heh. If you had seen the part of my post I eventually deleted, you would have been digging a trench. Fortunately I didn’t feel yet ready to put such a broad accusation forward with the necessary confidence.
People aren’t very good at being utilitarians when there’s heavy emotional issues involved even if they are generally good at thinking rationally in other situations. For example, I’m generally a utilitarian, but when I read about this extremely disturbing story I wanted the people responsible to suffer badly for a very long time. And I still do. I don’t just want them to die to prevent future harm. I want them to burn. I want them to burn so much that it almost makes me wish there were a vengeful god to torture them. And if I had the choice between simply killing the people involved and making them die slow, agonizing deaths, I’d likely pick the second and them lie to myself and convince myself that that was somehow the utilitarian thing to do.
Humans have a lot of trouble being good utilitarians when the stakes are high.
Even if Harry’s not a utilitarian, I’d still like him to be smart enough to realise that this is still an important practical question to ask.
But he’s only 11, so I only hope that EY will let him realise his mistake later.
There’s also the TDT idea that people who did evil things should be punished.
yeah, punishing agents for doing ‘bad things’ as a deterrence against other agents acting similarly is quite rational.
It is a lot more important than just deterring similar acts. A failure to punish after having made a commitment to punish removes a big part of the deterrent effectiveness of all kinds of punishment for all kinds of ‘bad things’. For that matter, it may decrease trust that the government/society will keep its other commitments—pension obligations, for example.
To add to this, what will be done with Bellatrix after she is freed? Wouldn’t Harry need an answer to this before cooperating with Quirrell?
Simply releasing Bellatrix to her own recognizance would be like releasing a hungry lion near a grade school during lunch hour. Without Voldemort personally directing her actions she would act out of her own sense of vengeance.
It isn’t obvious to me that a simple “trust me” from Quirrell would convince Harry to cooperate.
I thought this was weird too, but EY has a habit of revealing plans as they are enacted rather than beforehand.
This is the one thing that bothers me about this; Quirrell’s excuse for Bellatrix seems good enough to cover a lot of people. Hence I expect at least one of the following should hold:
Harry refuses to go along (this didn’t occur)
Harry insists on modifying the plot to break out more people (this didn’t occur)
Harry insists on going back to break out more people, to Quirrell’s dismay
Harry insists on going back to break out more people, just as Quirrell was going for
...though I guess those last two look a good deal less likely now that I’ve seen the extent to which they bungled the breakout.