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NancyLebovitz comments on Open Thread: June 2010 - Less Wrong
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Checking wikipedia, it looks possible but not likely that Harry could have seen the list in 1991.
Well, he and his father are described as being huge science fiction fans, so it's not that unlikely that they heard about the list at conventions, or had someone show them an early version of the list printed from email discussions, even if they didn't have Internet access back then.
I'm pretty sure they did have internet access back then. It was more available through universities than it was to the general public.
I meant even if Harry's parents didn't have access back then, someone could still have printed out the list and showed it to them.
That doesn't sound very rational. The simplest answer seems to be, "Eliezer thought it would be funny" and he would have included the Evil Overlord List in the fanfic even if the Evil Overlord he was talking about was Caligula.
Of course it was included because Eliezer thought it would be funny. But I don't see what's so irrational about Harry reading the printed copy of the list.
Yes, but that's not the same as saying Eliezer actually went and looked up the earliest conceivable date to give Harry a reasonable chance of reading the list, or that he could pass the joke up even if he did.
Well, would Harry have started laughing if he had just seen just a list before? I'm not sure, but the impression I got was that Harry was laughing because someone had made list identical in form to a well-known geek list. If he had just happened to have seen such a list before, would it be as funny? Moreover, would that be what the reader would have expected to understand from the text?
Maybe 'Quirrell' posted his version to FidoNet.
Would not then Harry have noticed that Quirrel's list overlapped with the one he had seen?
Harry did correctly guess Item #2...