Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5

NihilCredo

- This thread has run its course. You will find newer threads in the discussion section.

Another discussion thread - the fourth - has reached the (arbitrary?) 500 comments threshold, so it's time for a new thread for Eliezer Yudkowsky's widely-praised Harry Potter fanfic.

Most of the paratext and fan-made resources are listed on Mr. LessWrong's author page. There is also AdeleneDawner's collection of most of the previously-published Author's Notes.

Older threads: one, two, three, four. By tag.

Newer threads are in the Discussion section, starting from Part 6.

Spoiler policy as suggested by Unnamed and approved by Eliezer, me, and at least three other upmodders:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.

It would also be quite sensible and welcome to continue the practice of declaring at the top of your post which chapters you are about to discuss, especially for newly-published ones, so that people who haven't yet seen them can stop reading in time.

- This thread has run its course. You will find newer threads in the discussion section.

Another discussion thread - the fourth - has reached the (arbitrary?) 500 comments threshold, so it's time for a new thread for Eliezer Yudkowsky's widely-praised Harry Potter fanfic.

Most of the paratext and fan-made resources are listed on Mr. LessWrong's author page. There is also AdeleneDawner's collection of most of the previously-published Author's Notes.

Older threads: one, two, three, four. By tag.

Newer threads are in the Discussion section, starting from Part 6.

Spoiler policy as suggested by Unnamed and approved by Eliezer, me, and at least three other upmodders:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it's fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that "Eliezer said X is true" unless you use rot13.

Kids like that are already brought up by books. And Hermione talks like that in the story too. No, it's a common careless HP fanfic author failure mode, not anything clever or intentional.

I don't really see it as careless; it's just a work obviously written by an American.

Well, I guess I do see it as careless, in the sense that "I don't care".

5Risto_Saarelma16y

This seems like something that would take some amount of work to fix in case the author did care. Problem with speech pattern differences is that you have no idea they're there if you're not familiar with the target speech pattern, so it's not like regular fact checking where you can generally tell when you're dealing with something tricky. I'm not terribly familiar with spoken English and had no idea about incongruent Americanese in the lines, though I can't think of anyone sounding very British either now that you mention it. The most straightforward fix would seem to be to run the dialogue through a native British English speaking editor, and that's a bit heavyweight for a fanfic.

1shokwave16y

Fair enough, this is a derivative work and shouldn't deviate from the established canon except where it needs to. I am tempted to argue for a special exemption in the case of Harry Potter fanfictions written by authors more skilled than Rowling.

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 5

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