Edit: New thread posted 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 86. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments.
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, 16.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
No — they simply have not chosen to prove themselves to Harry, the viewpoint character.
I expect we'll find, soon, that Harry's model is wildly out of whack — adult wizards are, by and large, competent but flawed, especially the leaders and heroes. They simply do not let on to children everything they can do, nor their level of control over the world. Why? Because gifted children are not really all that rare, and teaching kids more magic than they are responsible enough to cope with is how you get Dark Lords — and dead kids.
Expanding on this — The purpose of magical education (e.g. Hogwarts) is not to teach kids as much magic as possible, to enable them to fix the world as Harry wants to do. The purpose of magical education is to safely and gradually expose them to magic, to maintain the current status quo and certainly to prevent any dumbass kids from destroying the world or killing each other. It also includes giving them chances to prove themselves responsible and skilled enough to wield more, and to put them in touch with adult wizards who might choose to individually teach more. But none of this is served by powerful wizards flaunting their top abilities in blatant and imitable fashion in front of the kiddies.
Well, that's true, at least.