Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94

elharo

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 94. The previous thread has passed 200 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, 21, 22.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

On a side note, the actual skill that HPMOR is teaching its readers seems to be not science but rather Talmudism, the skill of finding clever interpretations to some words written in a book. It would be cool to see a fanfic that tried to teach science by similar incentives.

This seems to be my impression as well, which is somewhat unfortunate. (This is one of the reasons I try to avoid speculation in my commentaries, though it makes its way in from time to time.)

I think this is the case because there's an author intending the story. The correct way to predict the story is to predict the human writing the story, which is not the correct way to predict the fabric of reality. The story is also (mostly) non-interactive. Identifying an experimental intervention which could have a high information impact, while the backbone of science, is inaccessible to readers. Instead, observational data must be interpreted, which makes it difficult to distinguish between interpretations that agree with the existing evidence but disagree on other features.

And so you could have a game that teaches science (in some ways, Nethack does this, and similar games are easy to imagine), but I don't think you can have a fanfic which does.

Maybe you could have an mspaintadventure that teaches science.

For some reason that reminded me of the beautiful MSPA wizardfic. Not that it's scientific or anything!