Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

Why did wordless Transfiguration require you to make a complete mental separation between the concept of form and concept of material?

Harry might not be done with this problem by the time he graduated Hogwarts. He could still be working on this problem when he was thirty years old. Hermione had been right, Harry hadn't realized that on a gut level before. He'd just given an inspiring speech about determination.

Harry's mind briefly considered whether to get on a gut level that he might never solve the problem at all, then decided that would be taking things much too far.

Besides, so long as he could get as far as immortality in the first few decades, he'd be fine.

What method had the Dark Lord used? Come to think, the fact that the Dark Lord had somehow managed to survive the death of his first body was almost infinitely more important than the fact that he'd tried to take over magical Britain -

'Excuse me,' said an expected voice from behind him in very unexpected tones. 'At your convenience, Mr. Malfoy requests the favor of a conversation.'

Harry did not choke on his breakfast cereal. Instead he turned around and beheld Mr. Crabbe.

'Excuse me,' said Harry. 'Don't you mean 'Da boss wants ta talk wid youse?''

Mr. Crabbe didn't look happy. 'Mr. Malfoy instructed me to speak properly.'

'I can't hear you,' Harry said. 'You're not speaking properly.' He turned back to his bowl of tiny blue crystal snowflakes and deliberately ate another spoonful.

'Da boss wants to talk with youse,' came a threatening voice from behind him. 'Ya'd better come see him if ya know what's good for ya.'

There. Now everything was going according to plan.

Act 1:

'A reason?' said the old wizard. He restrained the fury from his face. The boy before him had been the victim, and certainly did not need to be frightened any further. 'There is nothing that can excuse -'

'What I did to him was worse.'

The old wizard stiffened in sudden horror. 'Harry, what have you done?'

'I tricked Draco into believing that I'd tricked him into participating in a ritual that sacrificed his belief in blood purism. And that meant he couldn't be a Death Eater when he grew up. He'd lost everything, Headmaster.'

There was a long quiet in the office, broken only by the tiny puffs and whistles of the fiddly things, which after enough time had come to seem like silence.

'Dear me,' said the old wizard, 'I do feel silly. And here I was expecting you might try to redeem the heir of Malfoy by, say, showing him true friendship and kindness.'

'Ha! Yeah, like that would have worked.'

The old wizard sighed. This was taking it too far. 'Tell me, Harry. Did it even occur to you that there was something incongruous about setting out to redeem someone through lies and trickery?'

'I did it without telling any direct lies, and since we're talking about Draco Malfoy here, I think the word you're looking for is congruous.' The boy looked rather smug.

The old wizard shook his head in despair. 'And this is the hero. We're all doomed.'

Act 5:

The long, narrow tunnel of rough stone, unlit except by a child's wand, seemed to stretch on for miles.

The reason for this was simple: It did stretch on for miles.

The time was three in the morning, and Fred and George were starting the long way down the secret passage that led from a statue of a one-eyed witch in Hogwarts, to the cellar of the Honeydukes candyshop in Hogsmeade.

'How's it doing?' said Fred in a low voice.

(Not that there'd be anyone listening, but there was something odd about talking in a normal voice when you were going through a secret passage.)

'Still on the fritz,' said George.

'Both, or -'

'Intermittent one fixed itself again. Other one's same as ever.'

The Map was an extraordinarily powerful artifact, capable of tracking every sentient being on the school grounds, in real time, by name. Almost certainly, it had been created during the original raising of Hogwarts. It was not good that errors were starting to pop up. Chances were that no one except Dumbledore could fix it if it was broken.

And the Weasley twins weren't about to turn the Map over to Dumbledore. It would have been an unforgivable insult to the Marauders - the four unknowns who'd managed to steal part of the Hogwarts security system, something probably forged by Salazar Slytherin himself, and twist it into a tool for student pranking.

Some might have considered it disrespectful.

Some might have considered it criminal.