Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (40 page)

The portrait on the door asked Harry some dumb riddle meant for eleven-year-olds that he answered without the words even passing through his conscious mind, and then Harry staggered up the stairs to his dorm room, changed into his pajamas and collapsed into bed.

And found that his pillow seemed rather lumpy.

Harry groaned. He sat up reluctantly, twisted in bed, and lifted up his pillow.

This revealed a note, two golden Galleons, and a book titled
Occlumency: The Hidden Arte.

Harry picked up the note and read:

My, you do get yourself into trouble and quickly. Your father was no match for you.

You have made a powerful enemy. Snape commands the loyalty, admiration, and fear of all House Slytherin. You cannot trust any of that House now, whether they come to you in friendly guise or fearsome.

From now on you must not meet Snape’s eyes. He is a Legilimens and can read your mind if you do. I have enclosed a book which may help you learn to protect yourself, though there is only so far you can get without a tutor. Still you may hope to at least detect intrusion.

So that you may find some extra time in which to study Occlumency, I have enclosed 2 Galleons, which is the price of answer sheets and homework for the first-year History of Magic class (Professor Binns having given the same tests and same assignments every year since he died). Your newfound friends the Weasley twins should be able to sell you a copy. It goes without saying that you must not get caught with it in your possession.

Of Professor Quirrell I know little. He is a Slytherin and a Defense Professor, and that is two marks against him. Consider carefully any advice he gives you, and tell him nothing you do not wish known.

Dumbledore only pretends to be insane. He is extremely intelligent, and if you continue to step into closets and vanish, he will certainly deduce your possession of an invisibility cloak if he has not done so already. Avoid him whenever possible, hide the Cloak of Invisibility somewhere safe (NOT your pouch) any time you cannot avoid him, and step with great care in his presence.

Please be more careful in the future, Harry Potter.

- Santa Claus

Harry stared at the note.

It
did
seem to be pretty good advice. Of course Harry wasn’t going to cheat in History class even if they gave him a dead monkey for a professor. But Severus’s Legilimency… whoever’d sent this note knew a lot of important, secret things and was willing to tell Harry about them. The note was still warning him against Dumbledore stealing the Cloak but at this point Harry honestly had no clue if that was a bad sign, it could just be an understandable mistake.

There seemed to be some sort of intrigue going on inside Hogwarts. Maybe if Harry
compared stories
between Dumbledore and the note-sender, he could work out a
combined
picture that would be accurate? Like if they
both
agreed on something, then…

…whatever…

Harry stuffed everything into his pouch and turned up the Quieter and pulled the cover over his head and died.

It was Sunday morning and Harry was eating pancakes in the Great Hall, sharp quick bites, glancing nervously at his watch every few seconds.

It was 8:02am, and in precisely two hours and one minute, it would be
exactly one week
since he’d seen the Weasleys and crossed over onto Platform Nine and Three-Quarters.

And the thought had occurred to him… Harry didn’t know if this was a valid way to think about the universe, he didn’t know anything any more, but it
seemed possible…

That…

Not enough interesting things had happened to him over the last week.

When he was done eating breakfast, Harry planned to go straight up to his room and hide in the bottom level of his trunk and not talk to anyone until 10:03am.

And that was when Harry saw the Weasley twins walking toward him. One of them was carrying something concealed behind his back.

He should scream and run away.

He should scream and run away.

Whatever this was… it could very well be…

…the
grand finale…

He really should just scream and run away.

With a resigned feeling that the universe would come and get him
anyway
, Harry continued slicing at the pancake with his fork and knife. He couldn’t muster the energy. That was the sad truth. Harry knew now how people felt when they were tired of running, tired of trying to escape fate, and they just fell to the ground and let the horrifically befanged and tentacled demons of the darkest abyss drag them off to their unspeakable destiny.

The Weasley twins drew closer.

And yet closer.

Harry ate another bite of pancake.

The Weasley twins arrived, grinning brightly.

“Hello, Fred,” Harry said dully. One of the twins nodded. “Hello, George.” The other twin nodded.

“You sound tired,” said George.

“You should cheer up,” said Fred.

“Look what
we
got you!”

And George took, from behind Fred’s back -

A cake with twelve flaming candles.

There was a pause, as the Ravenclaw table stared at them.

“That’s not right,” said someone. “Harry Potter was born on the thirty-first of Jul-”

“
HE IS COMING
,” said a huge hollow voice that cut through all conversation like a sword of ice. “
THE ONE WHO WILL TEAR APART THE VERY -
”

Dumbledore had leapt out of his throne and run straight over the Head Table and seized hold of the woman speaking those awful words, Fawkes had appeared in a flash, and all three of them vanished in a crack of fire.

There was a shocked pause…

…followed by heads turning in the direction of Harry Potter.

“I didn’t do it,” Harry said in a tired voice.

“That was a
prophecy!
” someone at the table hissed. “And I bet it’s about
you!
”

Harry sighed.

He stood up from his seat, raised his voice, and said very loudly over the conversations that were starting up, “
It’s not about me! Obviously! I’m not coming here, I’m already here!
”

Harry sat back down again.

The people who had been looking at him turned away again.

Someone else at the table said, “Then who
is
it about?”

And with a dull, leaden sensation, Harry realized who
wasn’t
already at Hogwarts.

Call it a wild guess, but Harry had a feeling the undead Dark Lord would be showing up one of these days.

The conversation continued on around him.

“Not to mention, tear apart the very
what?
”

“I thought I heard Trelawney start to say something with an ‘S’ just before the Headmaster grabbed her.”

“Like… soul? Sun?”

“If someone’s going to tear apart the Sun we’re
really
in trouble!”

That seemed rather unlikely to Harry, unless the world contained scary things which had heard of David Criswell’s ideas about star lifting.

“So,” Harry said in tired tones, “this happens every Sunday breakfast, does it?”

“No,” said a student who might have been in his seventh year, frowning grimly. “It doesn’t.”

Harry shrugged. “Whatever. Anyone want some birthday cake?”

“But it’s
not
your birthday!” said the same student who’d objected last time.

That was the cue for Fred and George to start laughing, of course.

Even Harry managed a weary smile.

As the first slice was served to him, Harry said, “I’ve had a
really long week
.”

And Harry was sitting in the cavern level of his trunk, slid shut and locked so no one could get in, a blanket pulled over his head, waiting for the week to be over.

10:01.

10:02.

10:03, but just to be sure…

10:04 and the first week was done.

Harry breathed a sigh of relief, and gingerly pulled the blanket off of his head.

A few moments later, he had emerged into the bright sunlit air of his dorm.

Shortly after, and he was in the Ravenclaw common room. A few people looked at him, but no one said anything or tried to talk to him.

Harry found a nice wide writing desk, pulled back a comfortable chair, and sat down. From his pouch he drew a sheet of paper and a pencil.

Mum and Dad had told Harry in no uncertain terms that while they understood his enthusiasm for leaving home and getting away from his parents, he was to write them
every week without fail
, just so that they knew he was alive, unharmed, and not in prison.

Harry stared down at the blank sheet of paper.
Let’s see…

After leaving his parents at the train station, he’d…

…gotten acquainted with a boy raised by Darth Vader, become friends with the three most infamous pranksters in Hogwarts, met Hermione, then there’d been the Incident with the Sorting Hat… Monday he’d been given a time machine to treat his sleep disorder, gotten a legendary invisibility cloak from an unknown benefactor, rescued seven Hufflepuffs by staring down five scary older boys one of whom had threatened to break his finger, realized that he possessed a mysterious dark side, learned to cast
Frigideiro
in Charms class, and gotten started on his rivalry with Hermione… Tuesday had introduced Astronomy taught by Professor Aurora Sinistra who was nice, and History of Magic taught by a ghost who ought to be exorcised and replaced with a tape recorder… Wednesday, he’d been pronounced the Most Dangerous Student in the Classroom… Thursday, let’s not even think about Thursday… Friday, the Incident in Potions Class, followed by his blackmailing the Headmaster, followed by the Defense Professor having him beaten up in class, followed by the Defense Professor turning out to be the most awesome human being who still walked the face of the Earth… Saturday he’d lost a bet and gone on his first date and started redeeming Draco… and then this morning Professor Trelawney’s unheard prophecy might or might not indicate that an immortal Dark Lord was about to attack Hogwarts.

Harry mentally organized his material, and started writing.

Dear Mum and Dad:

Hogwarts is lots of fun. I learned how to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics in Charms class, and I met a girl named Hermione Granger who reads faster than I do.

I’d better leave it at that.

Your loving son,
Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres.

Something, somewhere, somewhen, must have happened differently…

PETUNIA EVANS married Michael Verres, a Professor of Biochemistry at Oxford.

HARRY JAMES POTTER-EVANS-VERRES grew up in a house filled to the brim with books. He once bit a math teacher who didn’t know what a logarithm was. He’s read
Godel, Escher, Bach
and
Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases
and volume one of
The Feynman Lectures on Physics.
And despite what everyone who’s met him seems to fear, he doesn’t want to become the next Dark Lord. He was raised better than that. He wants to discover the laws of magic and become a god.

HERMIONE GRANGER is doing better than him in every class except broomstick riding.

DRACO MALFOY is exactly what you would expect an eleven-year-old boy to be like if Darth Vader were his doting father.

PROFESSOR QUIRRELL is living his lifelong dream of teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts, or as he prefers to call his class, Battle Magic. His students are all wondering what’s going to go wrong with the Defense Professor this time.

DUMBLEDORE is either insane, or playing some vastly deeper game which involved setting fire to a chicken.

DEPUTY HEADMISTRESS MINERVA MCGONAGALL needs to go off somewhere private and scream for a while.

Presenting:

HARRY POTTER AND THE METHODS OF RATIONALITY

You ain’t guessin’ where this one’s going.

Some notes:

The opinions of characters in this story are not necessarily those of the author. What warm!Harry thinks is
often
meant as a good pattern to follow, especially if Harry thinks about how he can cite scientific studies to back up a particular principle. But not everything Harry does or thinks is a good idea. That wouldn’t work as a story. And the less warm characters may sometimes have valuable lessons to offer, but those lessons may also be dangerously double-edged.

If you haven’t visited
HPMOR DOT COM
, don’t forget to do that at some point; otherwise you’ll miss out on the fan art, how to learn everything Harry knows, and more.

If you haven’t just enjoyed this fic, but learned something from it, then please consider blogging it or tweeting it. A work like this only does as much good as there are people who read it.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled fic…

The key to strategy is not to choose
a
path to J. K. Rowling, but to choose so that
all
paths lead to a J. K. Rowling.

A small study room, near but not in the Ravenclaw dorm, one of the many many unused rooms of Hogwarts. Gray stone the floors, red brick the walls, dark stained wood the ceiling, four glowing glass globes set into the four walls of the room. A circular table that looked like a wide slab of black marble set on thick black marble legs for columns, but which had proved to be very light (weight and mass both) and wasn’t difficult to pick up and move around if necessary. Two comfortably cushioned chairs which had seemed at first to be locked to the floor in inconvenient places, but which would, the two of them had finally discovered, scoot around to where you stood as soon as you leaned over in a posture that looked like you were about to sit down.

There also seemed to be a number of bats flying around the room.

That was where, future historians would one day record -
if
the whole project ever actually amounted to anything - the scientific study of magic had begun, with two young first-year Hogwarts students.

Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres, theorist.

And Hermione Jean Granger, experimenter and test subject.

Harry was doing better in classes now, at least the classes he considered interesting. He’d read more books, and not books for eleven-year-olds either. He’d practiced Transfiguration over and over during one of his extra hours every day, taking the other hour for beginning Occlumency. He was taking the worthwhile classes
seriously,
not just turning in his homework every day, but using his free time to learn more than was required, to read other books beyond the given textbooks, looking to master the subject and not just memorize a few test answers, to excel. You didn’t see that much outside Ravenclaw. And now even
within
Ravenclaw, his only remaining competitors were Padma Patil (whose parents came from a non-English-speaking culture and thus had raised her with an actual work ethic), Anthony Goldstein (out of a certain tiny ethnic group that won 25% of the Nobel Prizes), and of course, striding far above everyone like a Titan strolling through a pack of puppies, Hermione Granger.

To run this particular experiment you needed the test subject to learn sixteen new spells, on their own, without help or correction. That meant the test subject was Hermione. Period.

It should be mentioned at this point that the bats flying around the room were
not
glowing.

Harry was having trouble accepting the implications of this.

“
Oogely boogely!
” Hermione said again.

Again, at the tip of Hermione’s wand, there was the abrupt, transitionless appearance of a bat. One moment, empty air. The next moment, bat. Its wings seemed to be already moving in the instant when it appeared.

And it
still wasn’t glowing.

“Can I stop now?” said Hermione.

“Are you sure,” Harry said through what seemed to be a block in his throat, “that maybe with a bit more practice you couldn’t get it to glow?” He was violating the experimental procedure he’d written down beforehand, which was a sin, and he was violating it because he didn’t like the results he was getting, which was a
mortal
sin, you could go to Science Hell for that, but it didn’t seem to be mattering anyway.

“What did you change this time?” Hermione said, sounding a little weary.

“The durations of the
oo,
eh,
and
ee
sounds. It’s supposed to be 3 to 2 to 2, not 3 to 1 to 1.”

“
Oogely boogely!
” said Hermione.

The bat materialized with only one wing and spun pathetically to the floor, flopping around in a circle on the gray stone.

“Now what is it really?” said Hermione.

“3 to 2 to 1.”

“
Oogely boogely!
”

This time the bat didn’t have any wings at all and fell with a plop like a dead mouse.

“3 to 1 to 2.”

And lo the bat did materialize and it did fly up at once toward the ceiling, healthy and glowing a bright green.

Hermione nodded in satisfaction. “Okay, what next?”

There was a long pause.

“
Seriously?
You
seriously
have to say
Oogely boogely
with the duration of the
oo,
eh,
and
ee
sounds having a ratio of 3 to 1 to 2, or the bat won’t glow?
Why? Why? For the love of all that is sacred, why?
”

“Why not?”

“
AAAAAAAAARRRRRRGHHHH!
”

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Harry had thought about the nature of magic for a while, and then designed a series of experiments based on the premise that virtually everything wizards believed about magic was wrong.

You couldn’t
really
need to say ‘Wingardium Leviosa’ in exactly the right way in order to levitate something, because, come on, ‘Wingardium Leviosa’? The universe was going to check that you said ‘Wingardium Leviosa’ in exactly the right way and otherwise it wouldn’t make the quill float?

No. Obviously no, once you thought about it seriously. Someone, quite possibly an actual preschool child, but at any rate some English-speaking magic user, who thought that ‘Wingardium Leviosa’ sounded all flyish and floaty, had originally spoken those words while casting the spell for the first time. And then told everyone else it was necessary.

But (Harry had reasoned) it didn’t
have
to be that way, it wasn’t built into the universe, it was built into
you
.

There was an old story passed down among scientists, a cautionary tale, the story of Blondlot and the N-Rays.

Shortly after the discovery of X-Rays, an eminent French physicist named Prosper-Rene Blondlot - who had been first to measure the speed of radio waves and show that they propagated at the speed of light - had announced the discovery of an amazing new phenomenon, N-Rays, which would induce a faint brightening of a screen. You had to look hard to see it, but it was there. N-Rays had all sorts of interesting properties. They were bent by aluminium and could be focused by an aluminium prism into striking a treated thread of cadmium sulfide, which would then glow faintly in the dark…

Soon dozens of other scientists had confirmed Blondlot’s results, especially in France.

But there were still other scientists, in England and Germany, who said they weren’t quite sure they could see that faint glow.

Blondlot had said they were probably setting up the machinery wrong.

One day Blondlot had given a demonstration of N-Rays. The lights had turned out, and his assistant had called off the brightening and darkening as Blondlot performed his manipulations.

It had been a normal demonstration, all the results going as expected.

Even though an American scientist named Robert Wood had quietly stolen the aluminium prism from the center of Blondlot’s mechanism.

And that had been the end of N-Rays.

Reality,
Philip K. Dick had once said,
is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.

Blondlot’s sin had been obvious in retrospect. He shouldn’t have told his assistant what he was doing. Blondlot should have made sure the assistant
didn’t
know what was being tried or when it was being tried, before asking him to describe the screen’s brightness. It could have been that simple.

Nowadays it was called “blinding” and it was one of the things modern scientists took for granted. If you were doing a psychology experiment to see whether people got angrier when they were hit over the head with red truncheons than with green truncheons, you didn’t get to look at the subjects yourself and decide how “angry” they were. You would snap photos of them after they’d been hit with the truncheon, and send the photos off to a panel of raters, who would rate on a scale of 1 to 10 how angry each person looked, obviously
without
knowing what color of truncheon they’d been hit with. Indeed there was no good reason to tell the raters what the experiment was about, at all. You
certainly
wouldn’t tell the experimental subjects that
you thought
they ought to be angrier when hit by red truncheons. You’d just offer them 20 pounds, lure them into a test room, hit them with a truncheon, color randomly assigned of course, and snap the photo. In fact the truncheon-hitting and photo-snapping would be done by an assistant who hadn’t been told about the hypothesis, so he couldn’t look expectant, hit harder, or snap the photo at just the right time.

Blondlot had destroyed his reputation with the sort of mistake that would get a failing grade and probably derisive laughter from the T.A. in a first-year undergraduate course on experimental design… in 1991.

But this had been a bit longer ago, in 1904, and so it had taken months before Robert Wood had formulated the obvious alternative hypothesis and figured out how to test it, and dozens of other scientists had been sucked in.

More than two centuries after science had gotten started. That late in scientific history, it still hadn’t been obvious.

Which made it
entirely
plausible that in the tiny wizarding world, where science didn’t seem much known at all, no one had ever tried the first, the simplest, the most obvious thing that any modern scientist would think to check.

The books were full of complicated instructions for all the things you had to do
exactly right
in order to cast a spell. And, Harry had hypothesized, the process of obeying those instructions, of checking that you were following them correctly, probably
did
do something. It
forced you to concentrate on the spell
. Being told to just wave your wand and wish probably
wouldn’t
work as well. And once you believed the spell was supposed to work a certain way, once you had practiced it that way, you might not be able to convince yourself that it could work any
other
way…

…if you did the simple but wrong thing, and tried to test alternative forms
yourself.

But what if you
didn’t know
what the original spell had been like?

What if you gave Hermione a list of spells she hadn’t studied yet, taken from a book of silly prank spells in the Hogwarts library, and some of those spells had the correct and original instructions, while others had one changed gesture, one changed word? What if you kept the instructions constant, but told her that a spell supposed to create a red worm was supposed to create a blue worm instead?

Well, in that case, it had turned out…

…Harry was having trouble believing his results here…

…if you told Hermione to say “Oogely boogely” with the vowel durations in the ratio of 3 to 1 to 1, instead of the correct ratio of 3 to 1 to 2, you still got the bat but it wouldn’t glow any more.

Not that belief was
irrelevant
here. Not that
only
the words and wand movements mattered.

If you gave Hermione completely incorrect information about what a spell was supposed to do, it would stop working.

If you didn’t tell her at all what the spell was supposed to do, it would stop working.

If she knew in very vague terms what the spell was supposed to do, or she was only partially wrong, then the spell would work as originally described in the book, not the way she’d been told it should.

Harry was, at this moment, literally banging his head against the brick wall. Not hard. He didn’t want to damage his precious brains. But if he didn’t have some outlet for his frustration, he would spontaneously catch on fire.

Thud. Thud. Thud.