Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

burning in her throat.

We don't have to talk about it. That was what Harry had just said, more or less. It felt like cheating, maybe even like a lie. Nothing was normal. Everything wrong was still horribly wrong, everything left unsaid still needed to be said...

"Okay," said Hermione, because there wasn't anything else to say, anything else at all.

"I'm sorry I wasn't waiting when you woke up," Harry said, as they started to walk. "Madam Pomfrey wouldn't let me in, so I just stayed out here." He gave a small, sad-looking shrug. "I suppose I should be out there trying to run damage control on public relations, but... honestly I've never been good at that, I just end up speaking sharply at people."

"How bad is it?" She thought her voice should have come out in a whisper, a croak, but it didn't.

"Well -" Harry said with obvious hesitation. "The thing you've got to understand, Hermione, is that you had a lot of defenders at breakfast-time today, but everyone on your side was... making stuff up. Draco tried to kill you first, things like that. It was Granger versus Malfoy, that's how people saw it, like a seesaw where pushing his side down meant pushing your side up. I told them you were probably both innocent, that you'd both been Memory-Charmed. They didn't listen, both sides treated me like a traitor trying to play the middle. And then people heard that Draco had testified under Veritaserum that he'd been trying to help you before the battle - stop making that expression, Hermione, you didn't actually do anything to him. Anyway, all people understood was that the pro-Malfoy faction had been right and the pro-Granger faction had been wrong." Harry gave a small sigh. "I told them that when the truth came out later they'd be embarrassed..."

"How bad is it?" she said again. This time her voice did come out weaker.

"Remember Asch's conformity experiment?" Harry said, turning his head to give her a serious look.

Her mind was slow to remember for a few seconds, which frightened her, but then the reference came back. In 1951, Solomon Asch had taken some experimental subjects, and each one had been put among a row of other people who looked like them, seeming like other experimental subjects, but actually confederates of the experimenter. They'd shown a reference line on a screen, labeled X, next to three other lines, labeled A, B, and C. The experimenter had asked which line X was the same length as. The correct answer had obviously been C. The other 'subjects', the confederates, had one after another said that X was the same length as B. The real subject had been put second-to-last in the order, so as not to arouse suspicion by being last. The test had been to see whether the real subject would 'conform' to the standard wrong answer of B, or voice the obviously correct answer of C.

75% of the subjects had 'conformed' at least once. A third of the subjects had conformed more than half the time. Some had reported afterward actually believing that X was the same length as B. And that had been in a case where the subjects hadn't known any of the confederates. If you put people around others who belonged to the same group as them, like someone in a wheelchair next to other people in a wheelchair, the conformity effect got even stronger...

Hermione had a sickening feeling where this was going. "I remember," she whispered.

"I gave the Chaos Legion anti-conformity training, you know. I had each Legionnaire stand in the middle and say 'Twice two is four!' or 'Grass is green!' while everyone else in the Chaos Legion called them idiots or sneered at them - Allen Flint did really good sneers - or even just gave them blank looks and then walked away. The thing you've got to remember is, only the Chaos Legion has ever practiced anything like that. Nobody else in Hogwarts even knows what conformity is."

"Harry!" Her voice was wobbling. "How bad is it?"

Harry gave another sad-looking shrug. "Everyone in the second year and above, since they don't know you. Everyone in Dragon Army. All of Slytherin, of course. And, well, most of the rest of magical Britain too, I think. Remember, Lucius Malfoy controls the Daily Prophet."

"Everyone?" she whispered. Her limbs had started to feel cold, like she'd just gotten out of an unheated swimming pool.

"What people really believe doesn't feel like a belief, it feels like the way the world is. You and I are standing in a private little bubble of the universe where Hermione Granger got Memory-Charmed. Everyone else is living in the world where Hermione Granger tried to murder Draco Malfoy. If Ernie Macmillian -"

Her breath caught in her throat. Captain Macmillian -

"- thinks he's ethically prohibited from being your friend now, well, he's trying to do the right thing as he understands it, in the world he thinks he lives in." Harry's eyes were very serious. "Hermione, you've told me a lot of times that I look down too much on other people. But if I expected too much of them - if I expected people to get things right - I really would hate them, then. Idealism aside, Hogwarts students don't actually know enough cognitive science to take responsibility for how their own minds work. It's not their fault they're crazy." Harry's voice was strangely gentle, almost like an adult's. "I know it's going to be harder on you than it would be on me. But remember, eventually the real culprit gets nailed. The truth comes out, everyone who was confidently wrong gets embarrassed."

"And if the real culprit doesn't get caught?" she said in a trembling voice.

...or if it turns out to be me after all?

"Then you can leave Hogwarts and go to the Salem Witches' Institute in America."

"Leave Hogwarts?" She'd never even thought of that possibility except as an ultimate punishment.

"I... Hermione, I think you might want to do that anyway. Hogwarts isn't a castle, it's insanity with walls. You have got other options."

"I'll..." she stammered. "I'll have... to think about it..."

Harry nodded. " At least nobody's going to try hexing you, not after what the Headmaster said at dinner tonight. Oh, and Ron Weasley came up to me, looking very serious, and told me that if I saw you first, I should tell you that he's sorry for having thought badly of you, and he'll never speak ill of you again."

"Ron believes I'm innocent?" said Hermione.