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Notes -
Even contemporaneously with the release of the story, Yudkowsky was complaining at length that people read both Harry and Quirrel as both far more correct and far more competent than they actually were, whether not noticing their failures or overstating their accomplishments. Reality ended up pushing that even further, for Harry -- the first twenty chapters are filled with a lot of pop social science that was iffy to start with and didn't really survive the replication crisis -- but there are other errors that I think were intentional, even fairly early on.
Great post. I think many LWers and HPMOR readers were probably so starved for a single decent teacher in their entire schooling that they latched onto themselves as Harry and yearned for someone with Quirrel's attitude to BS.
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