Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 16, chapter 85

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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 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.

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, 15.

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:

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.

The next discussion thread is here.

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:

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.

Beneath the moonlight glints a tiny fragment of silver, a fraction of a line...

(black robes, falling)

...blood spills out in liters, and someone screams a word.

That, of course, appears before the start of Chapter 1. It's gotten a lot of attention and a lot of speculation. Clearly it depicts something that happened in the past, or that will happen in the future, and we'll all get lots and lots of goosebumps when we figure out what it is.

But that passage has a little brother that I haven't seen anyone talk about. Before the start of Chapter 2, we get this:

"Of course it was my fault. There's no one else here who could be responsible for anything."

That doesn't sound that significant. It sounds like Harry Potter, to be sure, but it sounds like it could happen anywhere. The little blurbs before the chapters that follow do appear in those chapters, or at least in chapters nearby (I believe the Chapter 3 blurb appears in Chapter 6, and most of the rest appear in the body of the chapter they preface).

But this one does not. As far as I can tell with both grep and Google, this passage has not yet appeared in the story, 84 chapters later. Clearly it either (a) slipped Eliezer's mind and hasn't been revised in his several retcon binges, or (b) is way more important than it sounds.

To me, if I accept that this line must be important, it maybe sounds like something Harry would say after doing something really dark and evil, while he's in the depths of his Dark Side. Like, something horrible happens and it's not 100% clear that he did it, or someone like Dumbledore is in disbelief that he did it, and instead of denying it he just says "Of course it was me, idiot, who else?" Or maybe it's after he's out of his Dark Side, he realizes what he's done, and instead of trying to save himself he's just completely numb and confesses in a monotone.

EDIT: Or it might be Quirrell, sarcastically referring to everyone else's suspicion that all bad things must be the Defense Professor's fault. If so he's probably either confessing for real because he's beyond caring whether people know, or maybe he's hiding the truth in plain sight with false irony.

But I haven't been around for very long, so it's possible that people have whole edifices of theory about this quote and just don't talk about it because it's old news. Has it been talked about? If so, what's been guessed? If not, what do y'all think?

It reminded me very much of Harry's line to Remus in Chapter 42 when Remus tells him not to judge his father too harshly, as they were only kids, and Harry says "I'm eleven and I judge myself"

6grautry14y

What it reminds me the most of is Harry's discussion with Hermione about the need for heroic responsibility - about always shouldering the responsibility for any final outcome of events, instead of thinking that your job is done when you, say, go to Professor McGonagall and tell her to do something about it. My guess(though I wouldn't assign a very high probability to this) is that it will be uttered by Harry while he's away from anyone he considers to be sane or responsible(like, say, Quirrell) and he fails to prevent something tragic from happening. A more specific hypothesis: Quirrell's identity is revealed by him doing something unspeakably evil and Harry blames himself for not piercing the disguise earlier.

4CuSithBell14y

Hm. Personally, I read that as how Harry sees everything that goes wrong - every poor choice that he allows other people to make, every tragedy he didn't adequately anticipate - as expressed, among other places, in his discussions in Diagon Alley with McGonagall about the difficulties growing up smarter than his parents and the potential necessity of a magical first aid kit. But yes, now that you mention it, it certainly could be something to be echoed darkly in the endgame - though I am likewise unaware of the potential edifices of theory surrounding it.