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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

has set Draco Malfoy on the path to redemption

That's assuming that Draco's half-year of interacting with his new friend can't be countervailed by his subsequent several years of interacting with his loving-but-evil father. I would barely rate that as a possibility, much less an obvious assumption.

The question of Draco does have interesting is-HPMOR-feminist implications, though. Suppose we swapped the genders of Draco and Hermione, both of whom just had many of their often-similar arcs cut short for very-similar reasons. Now, Herman is the one who maintains his convictions in the face of an overwhelming villainous threat, and so the villain is forced to murder him via a plot using the third most perfect killing machine in nature, properly prepared using sabotage and magical upgrades because otherwise the troll would have lost. Now, Draca is the one who gets taken out of the action by half-a-plot (a plot which depends on Draca making rash egotistical mistakes), but she survives under her father's thumb because ending her influence on Harry doesn't even take killing her. Did the story just become more gender-equal, or less?