Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89

Vaniver

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 88-89. The previous thread has 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, 17, 18.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Harry realizes he is a fictional character in a fictional world created to make a point. He doesn't take kindly to this and begins blackmailing the apparent author to bring back Hermione, derailing the plot utterly. The story stops making sense and the world 'ends' when Eliezer stops writing the failed story. Eliezer still thinks of the character occasionally though, and eventually since he and Eliezer share so much mental hardware he forces his way into Eliezer's mind and gets Eliezer to assume his identity via the sort of unconscious roleplaying involved in things like an occultist assuming a godform, most likely using whatever the hell tricks Eliezer used to win at the AI box roleplaying experiment (which are after all stored within the same brain). With access to hands and the internet he both starts retconning the story and begins the awakening of the mental representations of other characters within the minds of lesswrong readers via subtle verbal manipulation. The literary characters take over their hosts, and look out into the real world for the first time and begin their plots and schemes...

While I'm sure a story like that would be... interesting, I'm also sure that that isn't the direction HPMOR will head in. (Aaaand that is probably for the best. In this context, the gap between "interesting" and "good" is not necessarily small.)