Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (108 page)

If you went high enough in Hogwarts, you didn’t see many other people around, which suited Harry.

There were much worse places to be trapped, Harry supposed. In fact you probably couldn’t think of anywhere
better
to be trapped than an ancient castle with a fractal ever-changing structure that meant you couldn’t ever run out of places to explore, full of interesting people and interesting books and incredibly important knowledge unknown to Muggle science.

If Harry hadn’t been told that he
couldn’t
leave, he probably would’ve
jumped
at the chance to spend more time in Hogwarts, he would’ve plotted and connived to get it. Hogwarts was literally
optimal,
not in all the realms of possibility maybe, but certainly on the real planet Earth, it was the Maximum Fun Location.

How could the castle and its grounds seem so much smaller, so much more confining, how could the rest of the world become so much more interesting and important, the instant Harry had been told that he wasn’t allowed to leave? He’d spent
months
here and hadn’t felt claustrophobic
then.

You
know
the research on this,
observed some part of himself,
it’s just standard scarcity effects, like that time where as soon as a county outlawed phosphate detergents, people who’d never cared before drove to the next county in order to buy huge loads of phosphate detergent, and surveys showed that they rated phosphate detergents as gentler and more effective and even easier-pouring… and if you give two-year-olds a choice between a toy in the open and one protected by a barrier they can go around, they’ll ignore the toy in the open and go for the one behind the barrier… salespeople know that they can sell things just by telling the customer it might not be available… it was all in Cialdini’s book
Influence,
everything you’re feeling right now, the grass is always greener on the side that’s not allowed.

If Harry hadn’t been told that he couldn’t leave, he probably would’ve
jumped
at the chance to stay at Hogwarts over the summer…

…but not the rest of his life.

That was sort of the problem, really.

Who knew whether there
was
still a Dark Lord Voldemort for him to defeat?

Who knew whether He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named still existed outside of the imagination of a possibly-not-just-pretending-to-be-crazy old wizard?

Lord Voldemort’s body had been found burned to a crisp, there couldn’t really be such things as souls. How could Lord Voldemort still be alive? How did Dumbledore
know
that he was alive?

And if there wasn’t a Dark Lord, Harry couldn’t defeat him, and he would be trapped in Hogwarts forever.

…maybe he would be legally allowed to escape after he graduated his seventh year, six years and four months and three weeks from now. It wasn’t
that
long as lengths of time went, it only
seemed
like long enough for protons to decay.

Only it wasn’t
just
that.

It wasn’t
just
Harry’s freedom that was at stake.

The Headmaster of Hogwarts, the Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, the Supreme Mugwump of the International Confederation of Wizards, was quietly sounding the alarm.

A
false
alarm.

A false alarm which
Harry
had triggered.

You know,
said the part of him that refined his skills,
didn’t you sort of ponder, once, how every different profession has a different way to be excellent, how an excellent teacher isn’t like an excellent plumber; but they all have in common certain methods of not being stupid; and that one of the most important such techniques is to face up to your little mistakes before they turn into BIG mistakes?

…although this already seemed to qualify as a BIG mistake, actually…

The point being,
said his inner monitor,
it’s getting worse literally by the minute. The way spies turn people is, they get them to commit a little sin, and then they use the little sin to blackmail them into a bigger sin, and then they use THAT sin to make them do even bigger things and then the blackmailer owns their soul.

Didn’t you once think about how the person being blackmailed, if they could foresee the whole path, would just decide to take the punch on the first step, take the hit of exposing that first sin? Didn’t you decide that you would do that, if anyone ever tried to blackmail you into doing something major in order to conceal something little? Do you see the similarity here, Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres?

Only it wasn’t little, it already wasn’t little, there would be a lot of very powerful people extremely angry at Harry, not just for the false alarm but for
freeing Bellatrix from Azkaban,
if the Dark Lord
did
exist and did come after him later, that war might already be lost -

You don’t think they’ll be impressed by your honesty and rationality and foresight in stopping this before it snowballs even further?

Harry did
not
, in fact, think this; and after a moment’s reflection, whichever part of himself he was talking to, had to agree that this was absurdly optimistic.

His wandering feet took him near an open window, and Harry went over, and leaned his arms on the ledge, and stared down at the grounds of Hogwarts from high above.

Brown that was barren trees, yellow that was dead grass, ice-colored ice that was frozen creeks and frozen streams… whichever school official had dubbed it ‘The Forbidden Forest’ really hadn’t understood marketing, the name just made you want to go there even more. The sun was sinking in the sky, for Harry had been thinking for some hours now, thinking mostly the same thoughts over and over, but with key differences each time, like his thoughts were not going in circles, but climbing a spiral, or descending it.

He still couldn’t believe that he’d gone through the
entire
thing with Azkaban - he’d switched off his Patronus before it took all his life, he’d stunned an Auror, he’d figured out how to hide Bella from the Dementors, he’d faced down twelve Dementors and scared them away, he’d invented the rocket-assisted broomstick, and ridden it - he’d gone through the
entire
thing without ever
once
rallying himself by thinking,
I have to do this… because… I promised Hermione I’d come back from lunch!
It felt like an irrevocably missed opportunity; like, having done it wrong
that
time, he would never be able to get it
right
no matter what sort of challenge he faced next time, or what promise he made. Because then he would just be doing it awkwardly and deliberately to make up for having missed it the
first
time around, instead of making the heroic declarations he could’ve made if he’d remembered his promise to Hermione. Like that one wrong turn was irrevocable, you only got one chance, had to do it right on the first try…

He should’ve remembered that promise to Hermione
before
going to Azkaban.

Why had he decided to do that, again?

My working hypothesis is that you’re stupid,
said Hufflepuff.

That is not a useful fault analysis,
thought Harry.

If you want a little more detail,
said Hufflepuff,
the Defense Professor of Hogwarts was all like ‘Let’s get Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban!’ and you were like ‘Okay!’

Hold on, THAT’S not fair -

Hey,
said Hufflepuff,
notice how, once you’re all the way up here, and the individual trees sort of blur together, you can actually see the shape of the forest?

Why
had
he done it…?

Not because of any cost-benefit calculation, that was for sure. He’d been too embarrassed to pull out a sheet of paper and start calculating expected utilities, he’d worried that Professor Quirrell would stop respecting him if he said no or even hesitated too much to help a maiden in distress.

He’d thought, somewhere deep inside him, that if your mysterious teacher offered you the first mission, the first chance, the call to adventure, and you said
no
, then your mysterious teacher walked away from you in disgust, and you never got another chance to be a hero…

…yeah, that had been it. In retrospect, that had been it. He’d gone and started thinking his life had a plot and here was a plot twist, as opposed to, oh, say, here was a proposal to
break Bellatrix Black out of Azkaban.
That had been the true and original reason for the decision in the split second where it had been made, his brain perceptually recognizing the narrative where he said ‘no’ as dissonant. And when you thought about it, that wasn’t a rational way to make decisions. Professor Quirrell’s ulterior motive to obtain the last remains of Slytherin’s lost lore, before Bellatrix died and it was irrevocably forgotten, seemed impressively sane by comparison; a benefit commensurate with what had appeared at the time as a small risk.

It didn’t seem fair, it didn’t seem
fair
, that
this
was what 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
didn’t
want to confess and ruin his reputation forever and get everyone angry at him and maybe end up killed by the Dark Lord later. He’d rather be trapped in Hogwarts for six years than face that. That was how he felt. And so it was in fact helpful, a relief, to be able to cling to a single decisive factor, which was that if Harry confessed, Professor Quirrell would go to Azkaban and die there.

(A catch, a break, a stutter in Harry’s breathing.)

If you phrased it
that
way… why, you could even pretend to be a hero, instead of a coward.

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
really
in trouble and Harry Potter was not one of them.

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
sounded
a lot wiser than Professor Quirrell. Better and brighter, more moral, more
convenient,
wouldn’t it be nice if it were true. And the thing to remember was that Dumbledore believed things
because
they sounded nice, but Professor Quirrell was the one who was
sane
.

(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
wrong,
either.

And if the Defense Professor
did
have a flaw in his sanity, it was that his outlook on life was
too negative.

Really?
inquired the part of Harry that had read eighteen million experimental results about people being too optimistic and overconfident.
Professor Quirrell is too pessimistic? So pessimistic that his expectations routinely
undershoot
reality? Stuff him and put him in a museum, he’s unique. Which one of you two planned the perfect crime, and
then
put in all the error margin and fallbacks that ended up saving your butt,
just in case
the perfect crime went wrong? Hint hint, his name wasn’t Harry Potter.

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
really
cared about water.

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,
following
the analogy, if Azkaban existed, then maybe it
did
prove that the 90% good part was there for other reasons, people trying to
make a show of kindness
as Professor Quirrell had put it. For if they were truly kind they would not have made Azkaban, they would storm the fortress to tear it down… wouldn’t they?

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
obedience,
to see if Germans were, for some reason, more liable to obey harmful orders from authority figures.

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’.