I don't think the rule right now prevents any spoilage. It is implausible that anyone learns anything from hearing "Eliezer said X" that they don't already have (including the inevitable conclusion that Eliezer must have, in fact, said X) from seeing everyone else treat X as unquestioned fact. The rule should, if anything, be expanded to require people to either rot13 those parts of these posts, go through the motions of treating it as a hypothesis, and at the very least avoid casually tossing off allusions to X when it's not central to what they're posting about.
P.S. "it's extremely easy to follow" of course it is, that's the problem - it's easy to follow because it is written to avoid inconveniencing people except for people who don't know the secret handshake. A real rule that actually had a chance of preventing people from being spoiled would impose inconvenience on people who actually matter and might get pushback from people whose karma you can't wipe out.
I don't think the rule right now prevents any spoilage.
Unless you argue that it actually causes spoilage (which is implausible), it's highly implausible that it's effect is exactly zero.
Such guidelines as you suggest are perhaps nice to be followed voluntarily, but obliging people to follow them would impose an additional cost and burden -- when it seems that atleast two people in this thread have a problem with the rule being as much of a burden on them as it currently is.
The next discussion thread is here.
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 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.
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.)
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: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14.
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: