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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Actually, it’s probably neither, just information, albeit with apparent weird rules about consciousness.[1] It’s enough for someone from the future to tell you something to prevent you from going back, even if you didn’t use a time-turner.

[1:] Otherwise, nobody could time-turn from inside the light-cone of someone who just time-turned six hours. The gravitational attraction from Amelia Bones’ stomach contents carries information about the future, for example. So something has to check for some kind of observers. Incidentally, that does sound plausible if the source of magic has specific rules for sapience, à la Prime Intellect.

I'd always just assumed that whatever force imposes the time turner rules just has a simple constraint that no history is permitted where "information" travels back further, and it freely reconfigures things in potentially very high entropy ways ("DO NOT MESS WITH TIME") to achieve that end. Amelia Bones' upon time travel was replace with a spherical null-information amelia bones which had no influence from the future except that which she would not covey— including by choice— to anyone that travels outside the constraint satisfaction w... (read more)