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Gabriel comments on Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 2 - Less Wrong
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This is what Eliezer has already done (in the early chapters). If Eliezer switched it up and made Sirius not the traitor it would undermine two of Eliezer's morals: "Conspiracy Theories, paranoia and schizophrenia" and "Courage isn't about being too awesome to need to be scared, it's about doing stuff even when you do have reason to be scared".
Funny, I've got the opposite impression -- that Eliezer was setting up to use Sirius' story as an example of how the obvious explanation is not always right and how reality is allowed to be weird and present you with evidence leading to wrong conclusions.
What puzzles me more is how Eliezer will explain the fact that Bill Weasley randomly guessed about Pettigrew and the others being animagi? That problem doesn't go away regardless of whether Sirius was the traitor or not. Did he really travel back in time? Schizophrenic wizards temporarily become seers? Maybe it's another emergent phenomenon?
Are we sure that, in MoR, they were?
I'm assuming that Eliezer makes major changes to canon only when it is neccessary to make the story work and that he will exploit resultant opportunities to mock canon, other fanfiction, conspiracy theories etc. but not go out of his way to create them. Yeah, that's a big assumption.
But also, there were hints. Lupin is poor so he is still a werewolf. When discussing the Weasleys' family rat story, Harry mentioned rumors that "Black deliberately tried to get a student killed during his time at Hogwarts". In canon, Black tried to trick Snape into following Lupin when the latter was about to turn during a full moon. So they knew. They still made the map (it was featured in one of the chapters, right?). Well, they didn't have to be animagi to do that, but come on, you can't take away a major aspect of their friendship and have everything else turn out exactly the same (except the teenage gay romance thing).
As I recall, In MoR, the Marauder's Map is an ancient artifact that's starting to break down a bit, so "Messers Moony, Padfoot, Wormtail, and Prongs" are not Lupin, Sirius, Peter, and James Potter under animagus-based nicknames. Unless Fred and George are wrong about the Map's origins, though being the master pranksters of the MoRniverse (and canon, for that matter) it seems likely that their judgment would be sound in this case. So, evidence that MoR!Pettigrew, et. al. are not necessarily animagi.
I interpreted it that the Messrs put their names on the front of this ancient artefact. From Chapter 25:
By the way, this reminds me that the Twins seem to have found a couple of errors on the map:
(That's why they might have shown it to Dumbledore, to get it fixed.) In canon, there are important (and only apparent) errors on the map in Book 3, showing Peter Pettigrew and Bartemius Crouch. What are they showing now?
Indeed, there has some skepticism about this expressed in the reviews
That's what I assumed that the secret in Chapter 42 was, until it wasn't.
I'd like to see that. Just because I really didn't like it when Bill got messed over like that.
Sometimes the world is just cruel for no reason.
I didn't mean to suggest that it was unrealistic. It is a far more likely interpretation of events and a rather clever observation. I just didn't like it. It make me sad. :)
I know. But I thought Eliezer may have been trying to make a deliberate point, and I wanted to draw it out.