Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

  Padma stared down at her plate.

  "Hermione wouldn't just do that!" yelled Mandy Brocklehurst, who was practically in tears, in fact she was in tears, her voice would have been loud enough to silence the Great Hall if it hadn't been for all the other students also screaming at each other. "I - I bet Malfoy tried to - to do things to her -"

  "Our General would never do that!" Kevin Entwhistle yelled even louder than Mandy.

  "Of course he would!" shouted Anthony Goldstein. "Malfoy's the son of a Death Eater!"

  Padma stared down at her plate.

  Draco was the General of her army.

  Hermione was the founder of S.P.H.E.W.

  Draco had trusted her to be his second-in-command.

  Hermione was her fellow Ravenclaw.

  Both of them were her friends, maybe the two best friends she had.

  Padma stared down at her plate. She was glad the Sorting Hat hadn't offered her Hufflepuff. If she'd been Sorted into Hufflepuff it would probably have been much more painful, trying to decide where her divided loyalties lay...

  She blinked and realized that her vision had gotten blurry again, and raised a trembling hand to wipe once more at her eyes.

  Morag MacDougal snorted so loudly it was audible even amid the pandemonium of lunch, and said in a loud voice, "I bet Granger cheated in her battle yesterday, I bet that's why Malfoy challenged her -"

  "All of you SHUT UP!" roared Harry Potter, as he hit the table with his fists so hard that plates rattled all the way along it.

  At any other time it would have gotten Professors reprimanding him, this time it just got a few nearby students to look.

  "I'd wanted to eat lunch," Harry Potter said, "and then get back to investigating, so I wasn't going to talk. But you're all being silly, and when the truth comes out you're going to regret what you said about innocent people. Draco didn't do anything, Hermione didn't do anything, they were both False-Memory-Charmed!" Harry Potter's voice had been rising on the last words. "How is that not BLOODY OBVIOUS?"

  "You think we'll believe that?" Kevin Entwhistle yelled right back at him. "That's what everyone says! 'I didn't do it, it was all just a False Memory Charm!' You think we're stupid?"

  And Morag nodded right along with him, with a condescending look.

  The look that came over Harry Potter's face then made Padma flinch.

  "I see," Harry Potter said, it wasn't a shout so Padma had to strain to hear it. "Professor Quirrell isn't here to explain to me how stupid people are, but I bet this time I can get it on my own. People do something dumb and get caught and are given Veritaserum. Not romantic master criminals, because they wouldn't get caught, they would have learned Occlumency. Sad, pathetic, incompetent criminals get caught, and confess under Veritaserum, and they're desperate to stay out of Azkaban so they say they were False-Memory-Charmed. Right? So your brain, by sheer Pavlovian association, links the idea of False Memory Charms to pathetic criminals with unbelievable excuses. You don't have to consider the specific details, your brain just pattern-matches the hypothesis into a bucket of things you don't believe, and you're done. Just like my father thought that magical hypotheses could never be believed, because he'd heard so many stupid people talking about magic. Believing a hypothesis that involves False Memory Charms is low-status."

  "What are you blithering about?" said Morag, looking down her nose at the Boy-Who-Lived.

  "You think we'd believe anything you say?" yelled a slightly older-looking Ravenclaw witch who Padma didn't recognize. "When you turned Granger Dark?"

  "And I'm not going to complain," Harry Potter said in an eerily calm voice, "about wizards not having any logic and believing the craziest things. Because I said that to Professor Quirrell once, and he just gave me this look and said that if I wasn't blinded by my upbringing I could think of a hundred more ridiculous things that lots of Muggles believe. What you're all doing is very human and very normal and doesn't make you unusually bad people, so I'm not going to complain." The Boy-Who-Lived rose up from his bench. "I'll see you all later."

  And Harry Potter walked away from them, walked away from all of them.

  "You're not thinking he's right, are you?" said Su Li from beside her, in a tone which made it clear what she thought.

  "I -" said Padma. Her words seemed to be caught in her throat, her thoughts seemed to be caught in her head. "I - I mean - I -"

  If you think hard enough you can do the impossible.

  (It had always been an article of faith with Harry. There'd been a time when he'd acknowledged the laws of physics as ultimate limitations, and now he suspected there were no true limits at all.)

  If you think fast enough you can sometimes do the impossible quickly...

  ...sometimes.

  Only sometimes.

  Not always.

  Not reliably.

  The Boy-Who-Lived stared around the trophy room, surrounded by awards and cups and plates and shields and statues and medals kept behind thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of crystal glass displays. For as many centuries as Hogwarts had existed, this room had been accumulating details. A week, a month, maybe even a year, wouldn't have sufficed to take the 'examine' option on every item in the room. With Professor Flitwick gone, Harry had asked Professor Vector if there was any way to detect damage to the wards around the crystal cases, verify the residue that a real duel should have left behind. Harry had raced through the Hogwarts library looking for spells to tell the difference between old fingerprints and new fingerprints, or to detect lingering exhalations in a room. And all those attempts at playing detective had failed.

  There were no clues, none that he was smart enough to find.

  Professor Snape had said that the portkey led to an empty house in London, with no sign of anyone or anything else.

  Professor Snape hadn't found any notes in Hermione's dorm.

  Headmaster Dumbledore had said that Voldemort's spirit was probably hiding out in the Chamber of Secrets where the Hogwarts security system couldn't find him. Harry had snuck into the Slytherin dungeons under the Cloak of Invisibility and spent the rest of the afternoon looking through all the obvious places, but he hadn't found anything snaky that answered back when spoken to. The entrance to the Chamber of Secrets, it seemed, hadn't been meant to be found in a day.

  Harry had talked to all of Hermione's friends that would still talk to him, and none of them had remembered Hermione saying anything specific about why she'd believed that Draco was plotting against her.

  Professor Quirrell hadn't come back from the Ministry as of dinnertime. The older students seemed to think that this year's Defense Professor would probably end up being blamed for the incident, and fired for teaching Hogwarts students to be too violent. They'd talked about the Defense Professor as though he were already gone.

  Harry had used up all six hours from his Time-Turner, and there were still no clues, and he had to go to sleep now if he wanted to be functional at Hermione's trial the next day.

  The Boy-Who-Destroyed-A-Dementor was standing in the middle of the Hogwarts trophy room, his wand dropped at his feet.

  He was crying.

  Sometimes you call your brain and it doesn't answer.

  The trial of Hermione Granger started on schedule the next day.

  Chapter 80: Taboo Tradeoffs, Pt 2, The Horns Effect

  The Most Ancient Hall of the Wizengamot is cool and dark, with concentric half-circles of stone rising up from the lowest center, and simple wooden benches set down upon those elevated half-circles. There is no source of light, but the chamber is well-lit, without any apparent cause or reason; it is simply a brute fact that the hall is well-lit. The walls like the floor are stone, dark stone, some elegant and mysterious conjugation of rock most fine to gaze upon, with a smooth texture that seems to flow and shift beneath its surface. This is the Most Ancient Hall, the oldest place of wizardry that has lasted into the modern day; every other place of power was destroyed in one war or another. This is the Hall
of the Wizengamot, which is most ancient because the wars ended with the building of this place.

  This is the Hall of the Wizengamot; there are older places, but they are hidden. Legend holds that the walls of dark stone were conjured, created, willed into existence by Merlin, when he gathered the most powerful wizards left in the world and awed them into accepting him as their chief. And when (the legend continues) the Seers continued to foretell that not enough had yet been done to prevent the end of the world and its magic, then (the story goes) Merlin sacrificed his life, and his wizardry, and his time, to lay in force the Interdict of Merlin. It was not an act without cost, for a place like this one could not be raised again by any power still known to wizardkind. Nor yet destroyed, for those walls of dark stone would pass unharmed, and perhaps unwarmed, through the heart of a nuclear explosion. It is a pity that nobody knows how to make them anymore.

  In the highest of the rising half-circles of the Wizengamot, on the topmost level of dark stone, there is a podium. At that podium stands an old man, with care-lined face and a silver beard that stretches down below his waist; this is Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore. His right hand bears a wand of power, upon his shoulder perches a bird of fire. His left hand holds a short rod, thin and featureless and forged of the same dark stone as the walls, and this is the Line of Merlin Unbroken, the device of the Chief Warlock. Karen Dutton bequeathed the Line to Albus Dumbledore on the last day of her life, scant hours after he returned half-dead from his defeat of Grindelwald with a phoenix flaming brightly at his side. She in turn received the Line from the perfectionist Nicodemus Capernaum, each wizard passing it to their chosen successor, back and back in unbroken chain to the day Merlin laid down his life. That (if you were wondering) is how the country of magical Britain managed to elect Cornelius Fudge for its Minister, and yet end up with Albus Dumbledore for its Chief Warlock. Not by law (for written law can be rewritten) but by most ancient tradition, the Wizengamot does not choose who shall preside over its follies. Since the day of Merlin's sacrifice, the most important duty of any Chief Warlock has been to exercise the highest caution in their choice of people who are both good and able to discern good successors. You would expect that chain of light to miss a step, sometime down through the centuries; that it would go astray at least once, and then never return. But it has not. The Line of Merlin continues, unbroken.

  (Or so say those of Dumbledore's faction. Lord Malfoy would tell you otherwise. And in Asia they tell other tales entirely, which may not make Britain's version wrong.)

  Upon the bottommost platform of the Ancient Hall there is a high-backed chair, legged and armed and without cushions, of dark metal rather than dark stone, which Merlin did not place there.

  The Ministry building that grew up around this place is wood-paneled and gold-washed, bright and fire-lit, filled with bustling foolishness. This place is different. It is the stone heart of magical Britain, and it is neither gold-washed nor wood-paneled, neither fire-lit nor bright.

  Filing solemnly into this room are witches and wizards in plum-colored robes each embroidered with a silver W. They carry themselves with an air of seriousness showing that they are well aware that they are terribly, terribly important. They are meeting in the Most Ancient Hall, after all. They are the Lords and Ladies of the Wizengamot, and they consider themselves the greatest folk of the world's greatest magical country. Lesser folk have fallen before them on bended knee in supplication; they are powerful, they are wealthy, they are noble; are they not great?

  Albus Dumbledore knows everyone in this room by name. He has taught many of them, though too few have learned. Some are his allies, some his opponents, the rest he courts within the careful dance of their neutrality. All of them, to him, are people.

  The current Defense Professor of Hogwarts, if you asked him for his opinion of the Lords and Ladies, would say that while many of them are ambitious, few have any ambition. He would observe that the Wizengamot is exactly where someone like that would end up - that it is exactly the sort of opportunity you would grasp, if you had nothing better to do. Such folk are rarely interesting, but they are often useful; pieces to be manipulated, points to be scored, by the true players of the game.

  Not among the rising half-circles, but off to one side among a raised arc for the spectators, next to a witch in pointed hat whose face is lined with apprehension, there sits a boy dressed in the most formal black robes that he owns. His eyes are green ice and abstraction, and he hardly glances at the Lords and Ladies as they bustle in. To him they are just a collection of murmuring plum-colored robes to decorate the wooden benches, visual background for the scene of the Most Ancient Hall. If there is an enemy here, or something to be manipulated, it is merely "the Wizengamot". The wealthy elites of magical Britain have collective force, but not individual agency; their goals are too alien and trivial for them to have personal roles in the tale. As of now, this present time, the boy neither likes nor dislikes the plum-colored robes, because his brain does not assign them enough agenthood to be the subjects of moral judgment. He is a PC, and they are wallpaper.

  This view is about to change.

  Harry gazed unseeing around the hall of the Wizengamot; it looked quite old and historic and there was no doubt that Hermione could have lectured him about the place for hours on end. The plum-colored robes had stopped arriving, and Harry's pocketwatch, advancing at the rate of three minutes every half-hour, said that the trial was almost due to start.

  Professor McGonagall was sitting beside him, and her eyes never left him for more than twenty consecutive seconds.

  Harry had read the Daily Prophet that morning. The headline had been "MAD MUGGLEBORN TRIES TO END ANCIENT LINE" and the rest of the paper had been the same. When Harry was nine years old the IRA had blown up a British barracks, and he'd watched on TV as all the politicians contested to see who could be the most loudly outraged. And the thought had occurred to Harry - even then, before he'd known much about psychology - that it looked like everyone was competing to see who could be most angry, and nobody would've been allowed to suggest that anyone was being too angry, even if they'd just proposed the saturation nuclear bombing of Ireland. He'd been struck, even then, by an essential emptiness in the indignation of politicians - though he hadn't had the words to describe it, at that age - a sense that they were trying to score cheap points by hitting at the same safe target as everyone else.

  Harry had always possessed that sense of hollowness about political indignation, but it was strange how very much more obvious it seemed, when you were reading a dozen articles in the Daily Prophet beating on Hermione Granger.

  The leading article, written by some name that Harry didn't recognize, had called for the minimum age for Azkaban to be lowered, just so that the twisted mudblood who had defaced the honor of Scotland with her savage, unprovoked attack upon the last heir of a Most Ancient House within the sacred refuge of Hogwarts could be sent to the Dementors that were the only punishment commensurate with the severity of her unspeakable crime. Only this would be enough to discourage any other foreign, subhuman brutes who similarly believed in their twisted insanity that they could evade the majesty of the Wizengamot's inevitable and merciless scourging of all that threatened the honorable nobility of etcetera etcetera etcetera.

  The next article had said the same thing in less eloquent words.

  Earlier, Albus Dumbledore had told him,

  "I will not try to keep you from this trial." The old wizard's voice quiet and unyielding. "I can well foresee how that would go. But I would have you treat me with equal courtesy in return. The politics of the Wizengamot are delicate, and of them you know nothing. Dare any folly and it shall be to Hermione Granger's cost; and you will remember that folly for the rest of your days, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres."

  "I understand," Harry said. "I know. Just - if you're planning to pull a rabbit out of your hat and save the day at the last minute when everything seems lost, please tell me now instead of letting me
sit and worry -"

  "I would not do that to you," the old wizard said, a terrible weariness seeming to suffuse him as he turned to go. "Still less to Hermione. But I have no rabbits in my hat, Harry. We can only see what Lucius Malfoy wants."

  There was a small sharp rap, a single brief sound that somehow silenced the entire room and caused Harry's head to jerk around and upward. High above, Dumbledore had just tapped his podium with the dark rod he held in his left hand.

  "The ninetieth session of the two-hundred-and-eighth Wizengamot is convened at the request of Lord Lucius Malfoy," the old wizard said tonelessly.

  At once, far to the side of the podium but also in the highest circle, rose a tall man with a mane of long white spilling down from his head over the shoulders of his plum-colored robes. "I present a witness for questioning under Veritaserum," Lucius Malfoy said, his cool tone clear throughout the room, smoothly controlled with only a slight undertone of righteous fury. "Let Hermione, the first Granger, be brought forth."

  "I ask you all to remember that she is a first-year of Hogwarts," Dumbledore said. "I will brook no abuse of this witness -"

  Someone in the benches quite audibly said "Pfah!" and there was a spread of disgusted snorts, even one or two jeers.

  Harry stared at the plum-colored robes, his eyes narrowing.

  And with the growing anger came something else, a rising sense of disquiet, of something horribly skewed, like reality itself was being disrupted. Harry knew that, somehow, but he couldn't figure out what was awry, or why his mind thought it was getting worse...

  "Order!" Dumbledore bellowed. He rapped the stone rod twice against the podium, producing two more small clicks that overrode all noise. "I will have order here!"

  The door through which the witness was brought forth was set directly beneath Harry's own seat, so it wasn't until the entire group had emerged fully into the stone hall that Harry saw -