Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (47 page)

Fred and George decided that Fred would speak.

“Not exactly, Mr. Flume,” said Fred. “We were hoping you could help us with something considerably more… interesting.”

“Now, boys,” said Flume, sounding severe, “I hope you didn’t wake me up just so I could tell you again that I’m not selling you any merchandise that could get you into real trouble. Not until you’re sixteen, anyways -”

George drew forth an item from his robes, and wordlessly passed it to Flume. “Have you seen this?” said Fred.

Flume looked at yesterday’s edition of the
Daily Prophet
and nodded, scowling. The headline on the paper read THE NEXT DARK LORD? and showed a young boy which some student’s camera had managed to catch in an uncharacteristically cold and grim expression.

“I can’t believe that Malfoy,” Flume snapped. “Going after the boy when he’s only eleven! The man ought to be ground up and used to make chocolates!”

Fred and George blinked in unison.
Malfoy
was behind Rita Skeeter? Harry Potter hadn’t warned them about that… which surely meant that Harry didn’t know. He never would have brought them in if he did…

Fred and George exchanged glances. Well, Harry didn’t
need
to know until after the job was done.

“Mr. Flume,” Fred said quietly, “the Boy-Who-Lived needs your help.”

Flume looked at them both.

Then he let out his breath with a sigh.

“All right,” said Flume, “what do you want?”

Act 6:

When Rita Skeeter was intent on a tasty prey, she didn’t tend to notice the scurrying ants who constituted the rest of the universe, which was how she almost bumped into the balding young man who’d stepped into her pathway.

“Miss Skeeter,” said the man, sounding rather severe and cold for someone whose face looked that young. “Fancy running into you here.”

“Out of my way, buster!” snapped Rita, and tried to step around him.

The man in her pathway matched the movement so perfectly that it was like neither of them had moved at all, just stood still while the street shifted around them.

Rita’s eyes narrowed. “Who do you think you are?”

“How very foolish,” the man said dryly. “It would have been wise to memorize the face of the disguised Death Eater training Harry Potter to be the next Dark Lord. After all,” a thin smile, “
that
certainly sounds like someone you wouldn’t want to run into on the street, especially after doing a hatchet job on him in the newspaper.”

Rita took a moment to place the reference.
This
was Quirinus Quirrell? He looked too young and too old at the same time; his face, if it relaxed from its severe and condescending pose, would belong to someone in his late thirties. And his hair was already falling out? Couldn’t he afford a healer?

No, that wasn’t important, she had a time and a place and a beetle to be. She’d just received an anonymous tip about Madam Bones making time with one of her younger assistants. That would be worth quite a bonus if she could manage to verify it, Bones was high on the hit list. The tipster had said that Bones and her young assistant were due to eat lunch in a special room at Mary’s Place, a very popular room for certain purposes; a room which, she’d found, was secure against all listening devices, but not proof against a beautiful blue beetle nestled up against one wall…

“Out of my
way!
” Rita said, and tried to push Quirrell from her path. Quirrell’s arm brushed her own, deflecting, and Rita staggered as the thrust went into the thin air.

Quirrell pulled up the sleeve of his left robe, showing his left arm. “Observe,” said Quirrell, “no Dark Mark. I would like your paper to publish a retraction.”

Rita let out an incredulous laugh. Of course the man wasn’t a real Death Eater. The paper wouldn’t have published it if he was. “Forget it, buster. Now take a hike.”

Quirrell stared at her for a moment.

Then he smiled.

“Miss Skeeter,” said Quirrell, “I had hoped to find some lever that would prove persuasive. Yet I find that I cannot deny myself the pleasure of simply crushing you.”

“It’s been tried. Now get out of my way, buster, or I’ll find some Aurors and have you arrested for obstruction of journalism.”

Quirrell swept her a small bow, and then walked past. “Goodbye, Rita Skeeter,” said his voice from behind her.

As Rita bulled on ahead, she noted in the back of her mind that the man was whistling a tune as he walked away.

Like
that
would scare her.

Act 4:

“Sorry, count me out,” said Lee Jordan. “I’m more the giant spider type.”

The Boy-Who-Lived had said that he had
important
work for the Order of Chaos, something serious and secret, more significant and difficult than their usual run of pranks.

And then Harry Potter had launched into a speech that was inspiring, yet vague. A speech to the effect that Fred and George and Lee had tremendous potential if they could just learn to be
weirder.
To make people’s lives
surreal,
instead of just surprising them with the equivalents of buckets of water propped above doors. (Fred and George had exchanged interested looks, they’d never thought of that one.) Harry Potter had invoked a picture of the prank they’d pulled on Neville - which, Harry had mentioned with some remorse, the Sorting Hat had chewed him out on - but which must have made Neville
doubt his own sanity.
For Neville it would have felt like being suddenly transported into an alternate universe. The same way everyone else had felt when they’d seen Snape apologize. That was the
true power of pranking.

Are you with me?
Harry Potter had cried, and Lee Jordan had answered no.

“Count us
in
,” said Fred, or possibly George, for there was no doubt that Godric Gryffindor would have said yes.

Lee Jordan gave a regretful grin, and stood up, and left the deserted and Quieted corridor where the four members of the Order of Chaos had met and sat down in a conspiratorial circle.

The three members of the Order of Chaos got down to business.

(It wasn’t
that
sad. Fred and George would still work with Lee on giant spider pranks, same as ever. They’d only started calling it the Order of Chaos in order to recruit Harry Potter, after Ron had told them about Harry being weird and evil, and Fred and George had decided to save Harry by showing him true friendship and kindness. Thankfully this no longer seemed necessary - although they weren’t
quite
sure about that…)

“So,” said one of the twins, “what’s this about?”

“Rita Skeeter,” said Harry. “Do you know who she is?”

Fred and George nodded, frowning.

“She’s been asking questions about me.”

That wasn’t good news.

“Can you guess what I want you to do?”

Fred and George looked at each other, a bit puzzled. “You want us to slip her some of our more interesting candies?”

“No,” said Harry. “No, no,
no!
That’s giant-spider thinking! Come on, what would
you
do if you heard that Rita Skeeter was looking for rumors about
you?
”

That made it obvious.

Grins slowly started on the faces of Fred and George.

“Start rumors about ourselves,” they replied.

“
Exactly,
” said Harry, grinning widely. “But these can’t be just
any
rumors. I want to teach people never to believe what the newspaper says about Harry Potter, any more than Muggles believe what the newspaper says about Elvis. At first I just thought about flooding Rita Skeeter with so many rumors that she wouldn’t know what to believe, but then she’ll just cherry-pick the ones that sound plausible and bad. So what I want you to do is create a fake story about me, and get Rita Skeeter to believe it somehow. But it has to be something that, afterward, everyone will
know
was fake. We want to fool Rita Skeeter and her editors, and
afterward
have the proof come out that it was false. And of course - given that those are the requirements - the story has to be as
ridiculous
as it can possibly be, and still get printed. Do you understand what I want you to do?”

“Not exactly…” Fred or George said slowly. “You want us to
invent
the story?”

“I want you to do
all
of it,” Harry Potter said. “I’m sort of busy right now, plus I want to be able to say truthfully that I had no idea what was coming. Surprise me.”

For a moment there was a very evil grin on the faces of Fred and George.

Then they turned serious. “But Harry, we don’t really know how to do anything like that -”

“So figure it out,” Harry said. “I have confidence in you. Not
total
confidence, but if you
can’t
do it,
tell
me that, and I’ll try someone else, or do it myself. If you have a really good idea - for both the ridiculous story, and how to convince Rita Skeeter and her editors to print it - then you can go ahead and do it. But don’t go with something mediocre. If you can’t come up with something
awesome
, just say so.”

Fred and George exchanged worried glances.

“I can’t think of anything,” said George.

“Neither can I,” said Fred. “Sorry.”

Harry stared at them.

And then Harry began to explain how you went about thinking of things.

It had been known to take longer than two seconds, said Harry.

You
never
called
any
question impossible, said Harry, until you had taken an actual clock and thought about it for five minutes, by the motion of the minute hand. Not five minutes metaphorically, five minutes by a physical clock.

And
furthermore,
Harry said, his voice emphatic and his right hand thumping hard on the floor, you did
not
start out immediately looking for solutions.

Harry then launched into an explanation of a test done by someone named Norman Maier, who was something called an organizational psychologist, and who’d asked two different sets of problem-solving groups to tackle a problem.

The problem, Harry said, had involved three employees doing three jobs. The junior employee wanted to just do the easiest job. The senior employee wanted to rotate between jobs, to avoid boredom. An efficiency expert had recommended giving the junior person the easiest job and the senior person the hardest job, which would be 20% more productive.

One
set of problem-solving groups had been given the instruction “Do not propose solutions until the problem has been discussed as thoroughly as possible without suggesting any.”

The other set of problem-solving groups had been given no instructions. And those people had done the natural thing, and reacted to the presence of a problem by proposing solutions. And people had gotten attached to those solutions, and started fighting about them, and arguing about the relative importance of freedom versus efficiency and so on.

The first set of problem-solving groups, the ones given instructions to
discuss
the problem first and
then
solve it, had been far more likely to hit upon the solution of letting the junior employee keep the easiest job and rotating the other two people between the other two jobs, for what the expert’s data said would be a 19% improvement.

Starting out by looking for solutions was taking things
entirely out of order.
Like starting a meal with dessert, only
bad.

(Harry also quoted someone named Robyn Dawes as saying that the harder a problem was, the more likely people were to try to solve it immediately.)

So Harry was going to leave this problem to Fred and George, and they would discuss all the aspects of it and brainstorm anything they thought might be remotely relevant. And they shouldn’t try to come up with an actual solution until they’d finished doing that, unless of course they
did
happen to randomly think of something awesome, in which case they could write it down for afterward and then go back to thinking. And he didn’t want to hear back from them about any so-called
failures to think of anything
for at least a week. Some people spent
decades
trying to think of things.

“Any questions?” said Harry.

Fred and George stared at each other.

“I can’t think of any.”

“Neither can I.”

Harry coughed gently. “You didn’t ask about your budget.”

Budget?
they thought.

“I could just tell you the amount,” Harry said. “But I think
this
will be more
inspiring
.”

Harry’s hands dipped into his robe, and brought forth -

Fred and George almost fell over, even though they were sitting down.

“Don’t spend it for the sake of spending it,” Harry said. On the stone floor in front of them gleamed an absolutely ridiculous amount of money. “Only spend it if awesomeness requires; and what awesomeness does require, don’t hesitate to spend. If there’s anything left over, just return it afterward, I trust you. Oh, and you get ten percent of what’s there, regardless of how much you end up spending -”

“We
can’t!
” blurted one of the twins. “We don’t accept money for that sort of thing!”

(The twins never took money for doing anything illegal. Unknown to Ambrosius Flume, they were selling all of his merchandise at zero percent markup. Fred and George wanted to be able to testify - under Veritaserum if necessary - that they had not been profiteering criminals, just providing a public service.)

Harry frowned at them. “But I’m asking you to put in some real work here. A grownup would get paid for doing something like this, and it would
still
count as a favor for a friend. You can’t just hire people for this sort of thing.”

Fred and George shook their heads.

“Fine,” Harry said. “I’ll just get you expensive Christmas presents, and if you try returning them to me I’ll burn them. Now you don’t even
know
how much I’m going to spend on you, except, obviously, that it’s going to be more than if you’d just taken the money. And I’m going to buy you those presents
anyway,
so think about
that
before you tell me
you can’t think of anything awesome
.”