we can't use it to shift belief again each time we rehearse it.
But what's the actual flaw in the logic? said Ravenclaw Two. In worlds with a smart Lord Voldemort, everyone in the Order of the Phoenix died in the first five minutes of the war. The world doesn't look like that, so we don't live in that world. QED.
Is that really certain? asked Ravenclaw Three, who'd been appointed as the defender. Maybe there was some reason Lord Voldemort wasn't fighting all- out back then -
Like what? demanded Ravenclaw Two. Furthermore, whatever your excuse, I demand that the probability of your hypothesis be penalized in accordance with its added complexity -
Let Three talk, said Ravenclaw One.
Okay... look, said Ravenclaw Three. First of all, we don't know that anyone can take over the Ministry just with mind control. Maybe magical Britain is really an oligarchy and you need enough military power to intimidate the family heads into submission -
Imperius them too, interjected Ravenclaw Two.
- and the oligarchs have Thief's Downfall in the entrances to their homes -
Complexity penalty! cried Ravenclaw Two. More epicycles!
- oh, be reasonable, said Ravenclaw Three. We haven't actually seen anyone taking over the Ministry with a couple of well-placed Imperius curses. We don't know that it can actually be done that easily.
But, said Ravenclaw Two, even taking that into account... it really seems like there should've been some other way. Ten years of failure, really? Using only conventional terrorist tactics? That's just... not even trying.
Maybe Lord Voldemort did have more creative ideas, replied Ravenclaw Three, but he didn't want to tip his hand to other countries' governments, didn't want them to know how vulnerable they were and install Thief's Downfall in their Ministries. Not until he had Britain as a base and enough servants to subvert all the other major governments simultaneously.
You're assuming he wants to conquer the whole world, noted Ravenclaw Two.
Trelawney prophesized that he would be our equal, intoned Ravenclaw Three solemnly. Therefore, he wanted to take over the world.
And if he is your equal, and you do have to fight him -
For an instant, Harry's mind tried to imagine the specter of two creative wizards fighting an all-out-war against each other.
Harry had noted all the Charms and Potions in his first-year books that could be creatively used to kill people. He hadn't been able to help himself. Literally. He'd tried to stop his brain from doing it each time, but it was like looking at a fish and trying to stop your brain from noticing it was a fish. What someone could creatively do with seventh-year, or Auror-level, or ancient lost magic such as Lord Voldemort had possessed... didn't bear thinking about. A magically-superpowered creative-genius psychopath wasn't a 'threat', it was an extinction event.
Then Harry shook his head, dismissing the gloomy line his reasoning had been going down. The question was whether there was a significant probability of facing anything so terrible as a Dark Rationalist in the first place.
Prior odds that someone attempting an immortality ritual would actually have it work...
Call it one to a thousand, at a generous overestimate; it was not the case that roughly one wizard in a thousand survived their death. Though, admittedly Harry didn't have data on how many had attempted immortality rituals first.
What if the Dark Lord is as smart as us? said Ravenclaw Three. You know, the way Trelawney prophesied him being our equal. Then he would make his immortality ritual work. P.S., don't forget that 'destroy all but a remnant of the other' line.
Requiring that level of intelligence was an additional burdensome detail; prior odds of a random population member being that intelligent were low...
But Lord Voldemort wasn't a randomly selected wizard, he was one particular wizard in the population who'd come to everyone's attention. The puzzle of the Mark implied a certain minimum level of intelligence, even if (hypothetically) the Dark Lord had taken longer to think it through. Then again, in the Muggle world, all of the extremely intelligent people Harry knew about from history had not become evil dictators or terrorists. The closest thing to that in the Muggle world was hedge-fund managers, and none of them had tried to take over so much as a third-world country, a point which put upper bounds on both their possible evil and possible goodness.
There were hypotheses where the Dark Lord was smart and the Order of the Phoenix didn't just instantly die, but those hypotheses were more complicated and ought to get complexity penalties. After the complexity penalties of the further excuses were factored in, there would be a large likelihood ratio from the hypotheses 'The Dark Lord is smart' versus 'The Dark Lord was stupid' to the observation, 'The Dark Lord did not instantly win the war'. That was probably worth a 10:1 likelihood ratio in favor of the Dark Lord being stupid... but maybe not 100:1. You couldn't actually say that 'The Dark Lord instantly wins' had a probability of more than 99 percent, assuming the Dark Lord started out smart; the sum over all possible excuses would be more than .01.
And then there was the Prophecy... which might or might not have originally included a line about how Lord Voldemort would immediately die if he confronted the Potters. Which Albus Dumbledore had then edited in Professor McGonagall's memory, in order to lure Lord Voldemort to his doom. If there was no such line, the Prophecy did sound
