Author: Eneasz

Restriction List

1. Harry must succeed via his own efforts. The cavalry is not coming.
Everyone who might want to help Harry thinks he is at a Quidditch game.

2. Harry may only use capabilities the story has already shown him to have;
he cannot develop wordless wandless Legilimency in the next 60 seconds.

3. Voldemort is evil and cannot be persuaded to be good;
the Dark Lord’s utility function cannot be changed by talking to him.

4. If Harry raises his wand or speaks in anything except Parseltongue,
the Death Eaters will fire on him immediately.

5. If the simplest timeline is otherwise one where Harry dies –
if Harry cannot reach his Time-Turner without Time-Turned help –
then the Time-Turner will not come into play.

6. It is impossible to tell lies in Parseltongue.

Within these constraints,
Harry is allowed to attain his full potential as a rationalist,
now in this moment or never,
regardless of his previous flaws.

Of course ‘the rational solution’,
if you are using the word ‘rational’ correctly,
is just a needlessly fancy way of saying ‘the best solution’
or ‘the solution I like’ or ‘the solution I think we should use’,
and you should usually say one of the latter instead.
(We only need the word ‘rational’ to talk about ways of thinking,
considered apart from any particular solutions.)

And by Vinge’s Principle,
if you know exactly what a smart mind would do,
you must be at least that smart yourself.
Asking someone “What would an optimal player think is the best move?”
should produce answers no better than “What do you think is best?”

So what I mean in practice,
when I say Harry is allowed to attain his full potential as a rationalist,
is that Harry is allowed to solve this problem
the way YOU would solve it.
If you can tell me exactly how to do something,
Harry is allowed to think of it.

But it does not serve as a solution to say, for example,
“Harry should persuade Voldemort to let him out of the box”
if you can’t yourself figure out how.

The thing about greatly reducing the pitch of a voice to anonymize the speaker is that if you do it to a whole bunch of people, they all sound very similar and it’s hard to tell them apart. For purposes of anonymity, I suppose this is a feature. But for the purpose of a podcast, it’s a bug. You want the voices to be distorted, but still discernible as different people. So I used a number of different distortion methods to alter the Death Eater voices, but still leave them distinct. I’m going to claim that Voldemort’s observation of Mr. Honor’s quickly transfigured armor and jury-rigged Voice Distortion Charm applied to the majority of the Death Eaters, so they all had their own unique distortion charm rather than a uniform one.

I’m going back to every-other-week for the remainder of the podcast. If my calculations are correct, and there are no major complications, the final episode will air the last week of December. Which is a hell of way to set myself up for a Planning Fallacy fail. But you gotta have goals!

WorldCon was AWESOME, I’m gonna go again next year.

I’m off to Spokane for WorldCon today! Wheeeeeee!

A quick personal note – you can now read the text of Red Legacy free from my fiction page, or buy it almost anywhere that sells eBooks.

You’ll notice that Voldemort has a new voice, one that more closely matches the voice described in the text (primarily high/shrieking/cold). It was a hell of a challenge finding a voice that was both high and evil-sounding. For a moment I considered doing something akin to Judge Doom, but I was worried that would grate on the ears after a very short time. In the end I went with a submission sent in by Alexander Jackson, and I think he’s pulled it off quite well!

If you re-download the Humanism chapter with the Voldemort flashback, you’ll notice I replaced Voldemort there with Alexander’s voice as well. And I’ve added an underlying “hiss” sound effect to everywhere in the HPMoR podcast that anyone spoke in Parseltounge. There were also a few touch-ups here and there thanks to proof-listening by Leonard Cohen, and some more will be coming in the next few months.

A number of people were quite affected by Hermione’s death when that first happened. I didn’t take it too badly, I dunno why. But I was really negatively affected by Quirrell actually being really evil and turning on Harry. I was much more emotionally attached to that character. So, regarding Voldemort in his True Form… (this is very similar to something I posted this in the /r/HPMOR subreddit back when the final arc was being published)

I very glad Quirrell has finally been replaced. There were a number of chapters where Quirrell was evil. Chapters I don’t care to reflect on. And then, Voldemort returned in truth. His voice changed, from a sardonic, controlled mentor, to a high, thin sound like nails on a chalkboard. His body became taller, bone-pale, his face disfigured. His eyes glowed red. This is not Quirrell. This is someone else.

And while I know, intellectually, that they are the same person… I do not see Quirrell. I see Voldemort. And my emotional core, seeing a different body there, doesn’t associate the two very strongly. This is a different person. This is evil. Quirrell had been murdered by this monster.

I am grateful, as this makes it easier for me to go forward. The effect is even a bit stronger in the podcast (at least for me), as there’s now a different voice actor and the change is audible with every word. I will miss Quirrell.

Regardless of your verbal deliberations on morality, your nonverbal emotional core sees no dead body and no blood; as far as it is concerned, I am just a talking hat.