Harry could still get a false negative. Remember, Harry will feel the impulse to offer a drink to Alice if and only if if Alice is about to be surprised. So not feeling an impulse to offer her a drink would indicate that either that Alice would not be surprised that Voldemort is alive, or that Harry will not actually end up telling her.
Harry could still get a false negative. Remember, Harry will feel the impulse to offer a drink to Alice if and only if if Alice is about to be surprised.
Again, we don't know that. The soda working in two steps as you seem to suggest (detecting future surprise, then determining whether that surprise is sufficient to cause soda spitting when drunk at the right time) is consistent with what we know about the soda. But that's not the only possibility consistent with what we know. The soda could also work in a single step and detect whether soda drunk at various points would be spit, without directly detecting surprise at all.
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: