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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

OK. was the whole thing with the soup? I think it can only be one of two things:

1) A shout-out/reference to another piece of fiction. HPMOR does this a lot, and I would not be surprised if this was yet another one of those. I do not recognise what piece of fiction it is referencing though. Can I get confirmation from anyone on if they recognise it from anywhere?

2) Otherwise, it must be important to the story. Remember, HPMOR is a rationalist story. There there are not meant to be red herrings. You are supposed to be able to figure it out. So, if this is the case, how has this got to do with the events of the story. Perhaps some weird time travel thing? I do not know. I notice I am confused.

It could just have been an excuse to list the professors present and note Dumbledore's absence.

1Qiaochu_Yuan13y

In the context of the next chapter, I assume it's a side effect of the temporal pressure building up before Trelawney's next prophecy.

8robryk13y

I don't quite see why. Real world contains a lot of those.