Free Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky Page A

Harry said, and slowly smiled. “I shall take it as a very great compliment. But would you mind if I offered an alternative explanation?”
    “Please do.”
    “Children aren’t meant to be too much smarter than their parents,” Harry said. “Or too much saner, maybe - my father could probably outsmart me if he was, you know, actually
trying,
instead of using his adult intelligence mainly to come up with new reasons not to change his mind -” Harry stopped. “I’m too smart, Professor. I’ve got nothing to say to normal children. Adults don’t respect me enough to really talk to me. And frankly, even if they did, they wouldn’t sound as smart as Richard Feynman, so I might as well read something Richard Feynman wrote instead. I’m
isolated
, Professor McGonagall. I’ve been isolated my whole life. Maybe that has some of the same effects as being locked in a cellar. And I’m too intelligent to look up to my parents the way that children are designed to do. My parents love me, but they don’t feel obliged to respond to reason, and sometimes I feel like they’re the children - children who
won’t listen
and have absolute authority over my whole existence. I try not to be too bitter about it, but I also try to be
honest
with myself, so, yes, I’m bitter. And I also have an anger management problem, but I’m working on it. That’s all.”
    “
That’s all?
”
    Harry nodded firmly. “That’s all. Surely, Professor McGonagall, even in magical Britain, the normal explanation is always worth
considering?
”
----
    It was later in the day, the sun lowering in the summer sky and shoppers beginning to peter out from the streets. Some shops had already closed; Harry and Professor McGonagall had bought his textbooks from Flourish and Blotts just under the deadline. With only a slight explosion when Harry had made a beeline for the keyword “Arithmancy” and discovered that the seventh-year textbooks invoked nothing more mathematically advanced than trigonometry.
    At this moment, though, dreams of low-hanging research fruit were far from Harry’s mind.
    At this moment, the two of them were walking out of Ollivander’s, and Harry was staring at his wand. He’d waved it, and produced multicoloured sparks, which really shouldn’t have come as such an extra shock after everything else he’d seen, but somehow -
    I can do magic.
    Me. As in, me personally. I am magical; I am a wizard.
    He had
felt
the magic pouring up his arm, and in that instant, realised that he had always had that sense, that he had possessed it his whole life, the sense that was not sight or sound or smell or taste or touch but only magic. Like having eyes but keeping them always closed, so that you didn’t even realise that you were seeing darkness; and then one day the eye opened, and saw the world. The shock of it had poured through him, touching pieces of himself, awakening them, and then died away in seconds; leaving only the certain knowledge that he was now a wizard, and always had been, and had even, in some strange way, always known it.
    And -
    “It is very curious indeed that you should be destined for this wand when its brother why, its brother gave you that scar.”
    That could not
possibly
be coincidence. There had been
thousands
of wands in that shop. Well, okay, actually it
could
be coincidence, there were six billion people in the world and thousand-to-one coincidences happened every day. But Bayes’s Theorem said that any reasonable hypothesis which made it
more
likely than a thousand-to-one that he’d end up with the brother to the Dark Lord’s wand, was going to have an advantage.
    Professor McGonagall had simply said
how peculiar
and left it at that, which had put Harry into a state of shock at the sheer, overwhelming
uncuriosity
of wizards and witches. In no
imaginable
world would Harry have just went “Hm” and walked out of the shop without even
trying
to come up with a hypothesis for what was going on.
    His left hand