Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (42 page)

“So,” Draco said. “Science. You’re going to tell me about blood.”

“We’re going to
find out
about blood,” Harry Potter said. “By doing experiments.”

“All right,” Draco said. “What sort of experiments?”

Harry Potter smiled evilly beneath his cowl, and said, “You tell me.”

Draco had heard of something called the Socratic Method, which was teaching by asking questions (named after an ancient philosopher who had been too smart to be a real Muggle and hence had been a disguised pureblood wizard). One of his tutors had used Socratic teaching a lot. It had been annoying but effective.

Then there was the Potter Method, which was insane.

To be fair, Draco had to admit that Harry Potter had tried the Socratic Method first and it hadn’t been working too well.

Harry Potter had asked how Draco would go about
disproving
the blood purist hypothesis that wizards couldn’t do the neat stuff now that they’d done eight centuries ago because they had interbred with Muggleborns and Squibs.

Draco had said that he did not understand how Harry Potter could sit there with a straight face and claim this was not a trap.

Harry Potter had replied, still with a straight face, that if it was a trap it would have been so pathetically obvious that
he
ought to be ground up and fed to pet snakes, but it was
not
a trap, it was simply a rule of how scientists operated that you had to try to disprove your own theories, and if you made an honest effort and failed, that was victory.

Draco had tried to point out the staggering stupidity of this by suggesting that the key to surviving a duel was to cast Avada Kedavra on your own foot and miss.

Harry Potter had
nodded
.

Draco had shaken his head.

Harry Potter had then presented the idea that scientists watched ideas fight to see which ones won, and you
couldn’t fight without an opponent,
so Draco needed to figure out opponents for the blood purist hypothesis to fight so that blood purism could win, which Draco understood a little better even though Harry Potter had said it with a rather distasteful look. Like, it was clear that if blood purism was the way the world really was, then the sky just had to be blue, and if some other theory was true, the sky just had to be green; and nobody had seen the sky yet; and then you went outside and looked and the blood purists won; and after this had happened six times in a row, people would start noticing the trend.

Harry Potter had then proceeded to claim that all the opponents Draco was inventing were too weak, so blood purism wouldn’t get credit for defeating them because the battle wouldn’t be impressive enough. Draco had understood that too.
Wizards have gotten weaker because house elves are stealing our magic
hadn’t sounded impressive to him either.

(Though Harry Potter
had
said that one at least was testable, in that they could try to check if house elves had gotten stronger over time, and even draw a picture representing the increasing strength of house elves and another picture representing the decreasing strength of wizards and if the two pictures matched that would point to the house elves, all said in such completely serious tones that Draco had felt an impulse to ask Dobby a few pointed questions under Veritaserum before snapping out of it.)

And Harry Potter had finally said that Draco
couldn’t
fix the battle, scientists weren’t dumb, it would be
obvious
if you fixed the battle, it had to be a
real fight,
between two different theories that might both
really
be true, with a test that only the
true
hypothesis would win, something that actually
would
come out different ways depending on which hypothesis was actually correct, and there would be experienced scientists watching to make sure that was exactly what happened. Harry Potter had claimed that he himself just wanted to know
how blood really worked
and for that he need to see blood purism
really win
and Draco wasn’t going to fool
him
with theories that were just there to be knocked down.

Even having seen the point, Draco hadn’t been able to invent any “plausible alternatives”, as Harry Potter put it, to the idea that wizards were getting less powerful because they were mixing their blood with mud. It was too obviously true.

It was then that Harry Potter had said, rather frustrated, that he couldn’t imagine Draco was
really
this bad at considering different viewpoints,
surely
there’d been Death Eaters who’d posed as enemies of blood purism and had come up with much more plausible-sounding arguments against their own side than Draco was offering. If Draco had been trying to pose as a member of Dumbledore’s faction, and come up with the house elf hypothesis, he wouldn’t have fooled anyone for a second.

Draco had been forced to admit this was a point.

Hence the Potter Method.

“Please, Dr. Malfoy,” whined Harry Potter, “why won’t you accept my paper?”

Harry Potter had needed to repeat the phrase “just pretend to be pretending to be a scientist” three times before Draco had understood.

In that moment Draco had realized that there was something deeply
wrong
with Harry Potter’s brain, and anyone who tried Legilimency on it would probably never come back out again.

Harry Potter had then gone into further and considerable detail: Draco was to pretend to be a Death Eater who was posing as the editor of a scientific journal, Dr. Malfoy, who wanted to reject his enemy Dr. Potter’s paper “On the Heritability of Magical Ability”, and if the Death Eater didn’t act like a real scientist would, he would be revealed as a Death Eater and executed, while Dr. Malfoy was also being watched by his own rivals and needed to
appear
to reject Dr. Potter’s paper for neutral scientific reasons or he would lose his position as journal editor.

It was a wonder the Sorting Hat wasn’t gibbering madly in St. Mungo’s.

It was also the most complicated thing anyone had
ever
asked Draco to pretend and there was no possible way he could have refused the challenge.

Right now they were, as Harry Potter had put it, getting in the mood.

“I’m afraid, Dr. Potter, that you wrote this in the wrong color of ink,” Draco said. “Next!”

Dr. Potter’s face did an excellent job of crumpling in despair, and Draco couldn’t help but feel a flash of Dr. Malfoy’s glee, even though the Death Eater was only pretending to be Dr. Malfoy.

This part was
fun.
He could have done this all day long.

Dr. Potter got up from the chair, slumped over in dismay, and trudged off, and turned into Harry Potter, who gave Draco a thumbs-up, and then turned back into Dr. Potter again, now approaching with an eager smile.

Dr. Potter sat down and presented Dr. Malfoy with a piece of parchment on which was written:

On the Heritability of Magical Ability

Dr. H. J. Potter-Evans-Verres, Institute for Sufficiently Advanced Science

My observation:

Today’s wizards can’t do things as impressive as
what wizards used to do 800 years ago.

My conclusion:

Wizardkind has become weaker by mixing
their blood with Muggleborns and Squibs.

“Dr. Malfoy,” said Dr. Potter with a hopeful look, “I was wondering if the
Journal of Irreproducible Results
could consider for publication my paper entitled ‘On the Heritability of Magical Ability’.”

Draco looked at the parchment, smiling while he considered possible rejections. If he was a professor, he would have refused the essay as too short, so -

“It’s too long, Dr. Potter,” said Dr. Malfoy.

For a moment there was genuine incredulity on Dr. Potter’s face.

“Ah…” said Dr. Potter. “How about if I get rid of the separate lines for observations and conclusions, and just put in a
therefore
-”

“Then it’ll be too short. Next!”

Dr. Potter trudged off.

“All right,” said Harry Potter, “you’re getting
too
good at this. Two more times to practice, and then third time is for real, no interruptions between, I’ll just come in straight at you and that time you’ll reject the paper based on the actual content, remember, your scientific rivals are watching.”

Dr. Potter’s next paper was perfect in every way, a marvel of its kind, but unfortunately had to be rejected because Dr. Malfoy’s journal was having trouble with the letter E. Dr. Potter offered to rewrite it without those words, and Dr. Malfoy explained that it was really more of a vowel problem.

The paper after that was rejected because it was Tuesday.

It was, in fact, Saturday.

Dr. Potter tried to point this out and was told “Next!”

(Draco was starting to understand why Snape had used his hold over Dumbledore just to get a position that let him be awful to students.)

And then -

Dr. Potter was approaching with a superior smirk on his face.

“This is my latest paper,
On the Heritability of Magical Ability,
” Dr. Potter stated confidently, and thrust out the parchment. “I have decided to allow your journal to publish it, and have prepared it in perfect accordance with your guidelines so that you may publish it quickly.”

The Death Eater decided to track down and kill Dr. Potter after his mission was done. Dr. Malfoy kept a polite smile on his face, since his rivals were watching, and said…

(The pause stretched, with Dr. Potter looking at him impatiently.)

…”Let me look at that, please.”

Dr. Malfoy took the parchment and perused it carefully.

The Death Eater was starting to get nervous about the fact that he wasn’t a real scientist, and Draco was trying to remember how to talk like Harry Potter.

“You, ah, need to consider other possible explanations for your, um, observation, besides just this one -”

“Really?” interrupted Dr. Potter. “Like what, exactly?
House elves are stealing our magic?
My data admit of only one possible conclusion, Dr. Malfoy. There
are
no other plausible hypotheses.”

Draco was trying furiously to order his brain to think, what would he say if he was posing as a member of Dumbledore’s faction, what
did
they claim was the explanation for wizardkind’s decline, Draco had never bothered to actually ask that…

“If you can’t think of any other way to explain my data, you’ll have to publish my paper,
Dr. Malfoy.
”

It was the sneer on Dr. Potter’s face that did it.

“Oh yeah?” snapped Dr. Malfoy. “How do you know that magic itself isn’t fading away?”

Time stopped.

Draco and Harry Potter exchanged looks of appalled horror.

Then Harry Potter spat something that was probably an extremely bad word if you’d been raised by Muggles. “
I didn’t think of that!
” said Harry Potter. “And I should have. The magic goes away.
Damn, damn, damn!
”

The alarm in Harry Potter’s voice was contagious. Without even thinking about it, Draco’s hand went into his robes and clutched at his wand. He’d thought the House of Malfoy was
safe,
so long as you only married into families that could trace their bloodlines back four generations you were supposed to be
safe,
it had never occurred to him before that there might be nothing anyone could do to stop the end of magic. “Harry, what do we do?” Draco’s voice was rising in panic. “
What do we do?
”

“
Let me think!
”

After a few moments, Harry grabbed from a nearby desk the same quill and roll of parchment he’d used to write his pretend paper, and started scribbling something.

“We’ll figure it out,” Harry said, his voice tight, “if magic is fading out of the world we’ll figure out how fast it’s fading and how much time we have left to do something, and then we’ll figure out why it’s fading, and then we’ll do something about it. Draco, have wizarding powers been declining at a steady rate, or have there been sudden drops?”

“I… I don’t know…”

“You told me that no one had matched the four founders of Hogwarts. So it’s been going on for at least eight centuries, then? You can’t remember hearing anything about the problems suddenly appearing five centuries ago or anything like that?”

Draco was trying frantically to think. “I always heard that nobody was as good as Merlin and then after that nobody was as good as the Founders of Hogwarts.”

“All right,” Harry said. He was still scribbling. “Because three centuries ago is when Muggles started to not believe in magic, which I thought might have something to do with it. And about a century and a half ago was when Muggles began using a kind of technology that stops working around magic and I was wondering if it might also go the other way around.”

Draco exploded out of his chair, so angry he could hardly even speak. “It’s the
Muggles
-”

“
Damn it!
” roared Harry. “Weren’t you even listening to
yourself?
It’s been going on for eight centuries at least and the Muggles weren’t doing anything interesting then!
We have to figure out the real truth!
The Muggles
might
have something to do with this but if they
don’t
and you go blaming everything on them and that stops us from figuring out what’s
really
going on then one day you’re going to wake up in the morning and find out that your wand is just a stick of wood!”

Draco’s breath stopped in his throat. His father often said
our wands will break in our hands
in his speeches but Draco had never really thought before about what that
meant
, it wasn’t going to happen to
him
after all. And now suddenly it seemed very real.
Just a stick of wood.
Draco could imagine just what it would be like to take out his wand and try to cast a spell and find that nothing was happening…

That could happen to
everyone
.