happened if he lost his grip on his rationality for just a tiny fraction of a second, the tiny fraction of a second required for his brain to decide to be more comfortable with 'yes' arguments than 'no' arguments during the discussion that had followed.
From high above, far enough above that the individual trees blurred together, Harry stared out at the forest.
Harry
(A catch, a break, a stutter in Harry's breathing.)
If you phrased it
Harry lifted his eyes from the Forbidden Forest, looked up at the clear blue forbidden sky.
Stared out the glass panes at the big bright burning thing, the fluffy things, the mysterious endless blue in which they were embedded, that strange new unknown place.
It... actually did help, it helped quite a lot, to think that his own troubles were nothing compared to being in Azkaban. That there were people in the world who were
What was he going to do about Azkaban?
What was he going to do about magical Britain?
...which side was he on, now?
In the bright light of day, everything that Albus Dumbledore had said certainly
(Again the catch in his breathing, it happened each time he thought of Professor Quirrell.)
But just because something sounded nice, didn't make it
And if the Defense Professor
But "pessimistic" wasn't the correct word to describe Professor Quirrell's problem - if a problem it truly was, and not the superior wisdom of experience. But to Harry it looked like Professor Quirrell was constantly interpreting everything in the worst possible light. If you handed Professor Quirrell a glass that was 90% full, he'd tell you that the 10% empty part proved that no one
That was a very good analogy, now that Harry thought about it. Not all of magical Britain was like Azkaban, that glass was well over half full...
Harry stared up at the bright blue sky.
...although,
Harry stared up at the bright blue sky. If you wanted to be a rationalist you had to read an awful lot of papers on flaws in human nature, and some of those flaws were innocent logical failures, and some of them looked a lot darker.
Harry stared up at the bright blue sky, and thought of the Milgram experiment.
Stanley Milgram had done it to investigate the causes of World War II, to try to understand why the citizens of Germany had obeyed Hitler.
So he had designed an experiment to investigate
First he'd run a pilot version of his experiment on American subjects, as a control.
And afterward he hadn't bothered trying it in Germany.
Experimental apparatus: A series of 30 switches set in a horizontal line, with labels starting at '15 volts' and going up to '450 volts', with labels for each group of four switches. The first group of four labeled 'Slight Shock', the sixth group labeled 'Extreme Intensity Shock', the seventh group labeled 'Danger: Severe Shock', and the two last switches left over labeled just 'XXX'.
And an actor, a confederate of the experimenter, who had appeared to the true subjects to be someone just like them: someone who had answered the same ad for participants in an experiment on learning, and who had lost a (rigged) lottery and been strapped into a chair, along with the electrodes. The true experimental subjects had been given a slight shock from the electrodes, just so that they could see that it worked.
The true subject had been told that the experiment was on the effects of punishment on learning and memory, and that part of the test was to see if it made a difference what sort of person administered the punishment; and that the person strapped to the chair would try to memorize sets of word pairs, and that each time the 'learner' got one wrong, the 'teacher' was to administer a successively stronger shock.
At the 300-volt level, the actor would stop trying to call out answers and begin kicking at the wall, after which