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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

I do not, for one second, that Harry Potter is going to pull that off in his first year at Hogwarts. Or ever. I'd find it easier to believe that he beat Entropy than that he figured how to bring back the dead.

While it's true that he's already done things Beyond The Impossible before, all the rules of the setting seem to indicate that Death Is Final. Even his dreams of "immortality for everyone" seemed to be about stopping people from dying, not bringing them back.

While I'm putting it at over 90% that Hermione will be resurrected somehow, someway, it doesn't need to be in his first year.

11derefr13y

Not wanting to give anything away, I would remind you that what we have seen of Harry so far in the story was intended to resemble the persona of an 18-year-old Eliezer. Whatever Harry has done so far that you would consider to be "Beyond The Impossible", take measure of Eliezer's own life before and after a particular critical event. I would suggest that everything Harry has wrought until this moment has been the work of a child with no greater goal--and that, whatever supporting beams of the setting you feel are currently impervious to being knocked down, well, they haven't even had a motivated rationalist give them even a moment of attention, yet. I mean, it's not like Harry can't extract a perfect copy of Hermione's material information-theoretic mass (both body and mind) using a combination of a fully-dissected time-turner, a pensieve containing complete braindumps of everyone else she's ever interacted with, a computer cluster manipulating the mirror of Erised into flipping through alternate timelines to explore Hermione's reactions to various hypotheticals, or various other devices strewn about the HP continuum. He might end up with a new baby Hermione (who has Hermione's utility function and memories) who he has to raise into being Hermione again, but just because something doesn't instantly restore her, doesn't mean it isn't worth doing. Or he might end up with a "real" copy of Hermione running in his head, which he'll then allow to manifest as a parallel-alter, using illusion charms along with the same mental hardware he uses for occlumency. In fact, he could have probably done either of those things before, completely lacking in the motivation he has now. With it? I have no idea what will happen. A narrative Singularity-event, one might say.