Are you familiar with the story I was referencing?
The king had a favorite horse that he loved very much. It was a beautiful and very smart stallion, and the king had taught it all kinds of tricks. The king would ride the horse almost every day, and frequently parade it and show off its tricks to his guards.
A prisoner who was scheduled to be executed soon saw the king with his horse through his cell window and decided to send the king a message. The message said, "Your Royal Highness, if you will spare my life, and let me spend an hour each day with your favorite horse for a year, I will teach your horse to sing."
The king was amused by the offer and granted the request. So, each day the prisoner would be taken from his cell to the horse's paddock, and he would sing to the horse "La-la-la-la" and would feed the horse sugar and carrots and oats, and the horse would neigh. And, all the guards would laugh at him for being so foolish.
One day, one of the guards, who had become somewhat friendly with the prisoner, asked him, "Why do you do such a foolish thing every day singing to the horse, and letting everyone laugh at you? You know you can't teach a horse to sing. The year will pass, the horse will not sing, and the king will execute you."
The prisoner replied, "A year is a long time. Anything can happen. In a year the king may die. Or I may die. Or the horse may die. And if that fails, who knows? The horse may learn to sing. "
Delaying the inevitable is actually a perfectly rational thing to do.
Are you familiar with the story I was referencing?
I've heard it, it's cute and has a sometimes applicable moral. But my response is to the universal generalization across all intelligent creatures in all circumstances. Are you familiar with the "Mind Projection Fallacy" I linked to?
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 81, which should be published later today. The previous thread passed 400 comments as of the time of this writing, so it will pass 500 comments soon after the next chapter is posted, if not before. I suggest refraining from commenting here until chapter 81 is posted; comment in the 12th thread until you read chapter 81. After chapter 81 is posted, I suggest all discussion of previous guesses be kept here, with links to comments in the previous thread.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.) When posted, chapter 81 should appear here.
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight,nine, ten, eleven, twelve.
As a reminder, it’s often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically: