But if you had done such arduous research as, say, reading the Wikipedia page for the NCP, you would see that a sum over histories using only non-paradoxical timelines apparently works. Not that I really understand that in more than a superficial way, but it sure as hell sounds like an answer to your point.
There are only guaranteed to be non-paradoxical timelines if you have an infinite number of realities, which is what I was saying from the beginning.
You could look for all the timelines that are within delta of being a paradox. I think the shadowing theorem guarantees that, for small enough delta, this is epsilon-close to a non-paradoxical history. I don't think it tells you what delta is, and I don't think it's guaranteed that every non-paradoxical history will be shadowed. This would mean that you're not randomly picking the choice of history. More importantly, it might be that none of the non-paradoxical histories are shadowed, and you'll have no idea what to look at.
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: