I'm reading MOR with considerable interest and enjoyment-- and recommending it-- but.....
There's a big emotional difference between HP and MOR. In the original, Harry has no friends or allies at the Dursley's. In MOR, his family life isn't great and he doesn't seem to have any friends or anyone he's expecting to miss, but he isn't under constant attack.
Part of the emotional hook in HP is that Harry is almost immediately in a circle of friends and acquires a family in the Weasleys.
In MOR, his best emotional connection is to McGonagle, but it's complicated by his intellectual dominance. None of his close friends from HP are worth being close to (or did I miss someone?). His nearest approach to a friend his own age is Draco, and that's very much complicated by Draco having been raised to be a sociopath, and by Harry's need to manage Draco.
Part of the charm of HP was that Hermione's memory, intelligence, and conscientiousness are presented as more valuable than annoying, though the annoyance for the other characters is still there. This is a rationalist feature of HP which seems to be lost in MOR-- Hermione is interested in getting things right for the sake of status.
Her delight at being in a Romance completely eclipsing the question of whether she likes Harry is depressing, but within the human range, I think.
QuirrelMort setting up the Harry's structured humiliation no doubt has plot reasons, but I can also model it as organizational hysteresis-- after Harry made such a strong power grab in re Snape, it's plausible that great efforts will be made to remind him that he's just a student.
I have a notion that it wasn't just his mother's sacrifice that saved Harry, it was also something he did, and his reflexive rage and need to win is hooked to what he did to survive when he was a baby.
is the training that Draco is getting from Lucius based in anything from the novels? The Dracos never impressed me. They just seemed to be rich and mean, and the Pure Blood campaign is weirdly abstract and idealistic compared to their temperaments. (Is there a reverse halo effect where all bad qualities accrete something which is considered to be bad? The Dracos are bullies, so of course it's reasonable to turn them into Nazis.) To my mind Slughorn is part of the real range of Slytherin possibilities.
that's very much complicated by Draco having been raised to be a sociopath
I need to object pretty strongly to this particular phrase. Draco is not being raised to be a sociopath; he's being raised to be a high-status member of a hierarchical society. Draco and his father very much love each other, and are perfectly capable of making real emotional bonds with people that they have identified unequivocally as 'pack'. EY has actually done very well at showing Draco as what a perfectly normal child becomes in that environment.
This is an important distinct...
Update: Please post new comments in the latest HPMOR discussion thread, now in the discussion section, since this thread and its first few successors have grown unwieldy (direct links: two, three, four, five, six, seven).
As many of you already know, Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing a Harry Potter fanfic, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, starring a rationalist Harry Potter with ambitions to transform the world by bringing the rationalist/scientific method to magic. But of course a more powerful Potter requires a more challenging wizarding world, and ... well, you can see for yourself how that plays out.
This thread is for discussion of anything related to the story, including insights, confusions, questions, speculation, jokes, discussion of rationality issues raised in the story, attempts at fanfic spinoffs, comments about related fanfictions, and meta-discussion about the fact that Eliezer Yudkowsky is writing Harry Potter fan-fiction (presumably as a means of raising the sanity waterline).
I'm making this a top-level post to create a centralized location for that discussion, since I'm guessing people have things to say (I know I do) and there isn't a great place to put them. fanfiction.net has a different set of users (plus no threading or karma), the main discussion here has been in an old open thread which has petered out and is already near the unwieldy size that would call for a top-level post, and we've had discussions come up in a few other places. So let's have that discussion here.
Comments here will obviously be full of spoilers, and I don't think it makes sense to rot13 the whole thread, so consider this a spoiler warning: this thread contains unrot13'd spoilers for Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality up to the current chapter and for the original Harry Potter series. Please continue to use rot13 for spoilers to other works of fiction, or if you have insider knowledge of future chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.
A suggestion: mention at the top of your comment which chapter you're commenting on, or what chapter you're up to, so that people can understand the context of your comment even after more chapters have been posted. This can also help people avoid reading spoilers for a new chapter before they realize that there is a new chapter.