Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93

daenerys

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 93. The previous thread has passed 300 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, 17,18,19,20.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Maybe we should try harder to decode the prophecies. For example, there was a cool theory on Reddit that "the very stars in heaven" refers to members of the Black family, who are all named after stars. In particular, Bellatrix might be feeling like she's in heaven right now.

But I'm more interested in the first prophecy. What does it mean that "these two different spirits cannot exist in the same world"? The word "cannot" seems to say it's impossible from some point of view, not just dangerous.

1) Maybe any interaction between Harry's and Quirrell's spells would cause a time travel paradox for some reason?

2) Maybe any interaction would trigger a bug in the Source of Magic and cause it to crash, because Harry and Quirrell are using the same username and password to access magic, which the developers assumed cannot happen?

Or else "cannot exist in the same cauldron", which I like to take rather literally (hence my "Big Potion" theory which tears apart the stars not as a side effect but as an ingredient, and fails if quirrel interacts with its creation.)

1elharo13y

I really like the idea of "the very stars in heaven" referring to the Black family for several reasons. For one, Sirius has been alluded to several times, but has not shown up yet. "He is coming" and "He is here" don't really seem like they could apply to Harry or Quirrell or anyone else we've actually seen at Hogwarts so far. The question of what happened to Sirius and Pettigrew in this reality is one of several dangling plot threads I expect the author to wrap up before ending the story, and Eliezer doesn't have many chapters left in which to do it. It seems likely this happens at the same time he answers what really happened in Godric's Hollow on October 31, 1981; and perhaps leads to Harry's final break with Quirrell. There are a couple of other dangling plot threads that could be wrapped up here too: why did the Remembrall light up, and what about Bellatrix? Secondly, although Harry's clearly interested in the source of magic and the nature of reality, the story becomes too much of a Monty Haul if he really does achieve star-destroying omnipotence. Stories about omnipotent beings just aren't very much fun (insert citations to several hundred Marvel Comics storylines of the last 30 years) and I think Eliezer is just too good an author to fall prey to that. On the other hand the story has huge amounts of interest and foreshadowing around matters of time: ComedTea where the future causes the past, time turners, prophecies, timeless quantum mechanics, timeless decision theory (used repeatedly by Harry but not identified as such by name) and I've probably forgotten one or two. I expect Harry to at least try something funny involving time to save Hermione. And if it works I expect we're going to realize we should have seen it coming. However I will be very disappointed if it's nothing more than a deus ex machina resurrection like Superman II.

2DanArmak13y

It's a prophecy: information about the future. Maybe it's simply saying that either one could win, but there's no possible future where both exist (except for a remnant). Any "why" is a just-so story for human consumption; the raw prophecied fact is simply that fork in the road.