Eliezer Yudkowsky - Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

"Okay, I guess," Hermione said leadenly. "Fine. You do everything. You gather all the clues and talk to all the suspects while I just sit here in the library. Let me know after it turns out that it was Professor Quirrell who did it."

"Hermione..." Harry said. "Why is it so important who does what? Shouldn't it be more important to get everything solved, than who solves it?"

"I guess you're right," Hermione said. She lifted her hands to press up at her eyes. "I guess it doesn't matter any more. Everyone's going to think - I know it's not your fault, Harry, you were - you were being Good, you were a perfect gentleman - but no matter what I do now, they'll all think that I'm just - someone for you to rescue." She paused, and said, with her voice quivering, "And maybe they're right , Harry."

"Whoa, whoa, hold on there a second -"

"I can't scare Dementors. I can get Outstandings in Charms class, but I can't scare Dementors."

" I've got a mysterious dark side! " Harry hissed, after his head turned around to scan the library. (There was one boy in a distant corner, who did look in their direction occasionally, but he would've been too far away to hear anything even without the Quieting Barrier.) "I've got a dark side that definitely isn't a child, and who knows what other crazy magical stuff going on in my head - Professor Quirrell claimed that I become whoever I believe I am - that's all cheating, don't you see, Hermione? There's an arrangement that the school administration made that I'm not supposed to talk about, so that the Boy-Who-Lived could have more time to study every day, I'm cheating and you're still beating me in Charms class. I'm - I'm probably not - the Boy-Who-Lived probably isn't even something that you could properly call a child - and you're still competing with that. Don't you realize, if it wasn't for people paying attention to me, you'd look like the most powerful witch to come along in a century? When you can fight three older bullies by yourself, and win?"

"I don't know," she said, pressing her hands again over her eyes, with her voice wavering. "All I know is - even if that's all true - nobody's ever going to see me for myself anymore, ever."

"All right," Harry said after a while. "I see what you mean. Instead of the famous Potter-and-Granger research team, there'll be Harry Potter and his lab assistant. Um... here's an idea. How about if I don't focus on making money for a while? I mean, the debt doesn't come due until I graduate Hogwarts. So you can do it yourself and show the world you've still got it. And if you coincidentally crack the secret of immortality along the way, we'll just call it a bonus."

The thought of Harry relying on her to come up with a solution seemed... like a crushing burden of responsibility to dump on a poor traumatized twelve-year-old girl, and she wanted to hug him for offering her a way to restore her self-respect as a heroine, and it was what she deserved for being a horrible person and speaking sharply to Harry all the time, when all along he'd been a truer friend to her than she'd ever been to him, and it was good that he still thought she could do things, and...

"Is there some amazing rational thing you do when your mind's running in all different directions?" she managed.

"My own approach is usually to identify the different desires, give them names, conceive of them as separate individuals, and let them argue it out inside my head. So far the main persistent ones are my Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, Gryffindor, and Slytherin sides, my Inner Critic, and my simulated copies of you, Neville, Draco, Professor McGonagall, Professor Flitwick, Professor Quirrell, Dad, Mum, Richard Feynman, and Douglas Hofstadter."

Hermione considered trying this before her Common Sense warned that it might be a dangerous sort of thing to pretend. "There's a copy of me inside your head?"

"Of course there is!" Harry said. The boy suddenly looked a bit more vulnerable. "You mean there isn't a copy of me living in your head?"

There was, she realized; and not only that, it talked in Harry's exact voice.

"It's rather unnerving now that I think about it," said Hermione. "I do have a copy of you living in my head. It's talking to me right now using your voice, arguing how this is perfectly normal."

"Good," Harry said seriously. "I mean, I don't see how people could be friends without that."

She continued reading her book, then, Harry seeming content to watch the pages over her shoulder.

She'd gotten all the way to number seventy, Katherine Scott, who'd apparently invented a way to turn small animals into lemon tarts, when she finally worked up the courage to speak.

"Harry?" she said. (She was leaning a bit away from him now, though she didn't realize it.) "If there's a copy of Draco Malfoy in your head, does that mean you're friends with Draco Malfoy?"

"Well..." Harry said. He sighed. "Yeah, I'd been meaning to talk with you about this anyway. I kind of wish I'd talked to you sooner. Anyway, how can I put this... I was corrupting him?"

"What do you mean corrupting? "

"Tempting him to the Light Side of the Force."

Her mouth just stayed open.

"You know, like the Emperor and Darth Vader, only in reverse."

" Draco Malfoy ," she said. "Harry, do you have any idea - "

"Yes."

"- the sort of things Malfoy has been saying about me? What he said he'd do to me, as soon as he got the chance? I don't know what he told to you, but Daphne Greengrass told me what Malfoy says when he's in Slytherin. It's unspeakable, Harry! It's unspeakable in the completely literal sense that I can't say it out loud!"

"When was this?" Harry said. "At the start of the year? Did Daphne say when this was?"

"No," Hermione said. "Because it doesn't matter when, Harry. Anyone who said things - like Malfoy said - they can't be a good person. It doesn't matter what you tempted him to, he's still a rotten person, because no matter what a good person would never -"

"You're wrong." Harry said, looking her straight in the eyes. "I can guess what Draco threatened to do to you, because the second time I met him, he talked about doing it to a ten-year-old girl. But don't you see, on the day Draco Malfoy arrived in Hogwarts, he'd spent his whole previous life being raised by Death Eaters. It would've required a supernatural intervention for him to have your morality given his environment -"

Hermione was shaking her head violently. " No, Harry. Nobody has to tell you that hurting people is wrong, it's not something you don't do because the teacher says it's not allowed, it's something you don't do because - because you can see when people are hurting, don't you know that, Harry?" Her voice was shaking now. "That's not - that's not a rule people follow like the rules for algebra! If you can't see it, if you can't feel it here, " her hand slapped down over the center of her chest, not quite where her heart was located, but that didn't matter because it was all really in the brain anyway, "then you just don't have it!"

The thought came to her, then, that Harry might not have it.

"There's history books you haven't read," Harry said quietly. "There's books you haven't read yet, Hermione, and they might give you a sense of perspective. A few centuries earlier - I think it was definitely still around in the seventeenth century - it was a popular village entertainment to take a wicker basket, or a bundle, with a dozen live cats in it, and -"

"Stop," she said.