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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

"Basically we have a very surprising and useful result for a self-reported self-experiment with a sample size of one, that has not been replicated in hundreds of years despite known attempts by known competent, motivated, and resourceful people provided with (allegedly) clear and complete documentation. Nobody even managed to steal either the stone or the elixir it’s supposed to make. (And IIRC, it’s claimed that Flamel needs to use the elixir repeatedly.)"

-well... If it were purely a real-life situation I would agree. but we have priors from...cannon... Oh. Right. it never actually DOES anything onscreen that couldn't be done by a pretty red(?) rock. There's still a high chance that Cannon!Stone works as advertised, though...

I shall refer to "the McGuffin". the McGuffin may or may not be a working philosopher's stone. lets see.

Quirrelmort has some way of detecting the McGuffin.
Quirrelmort thinks it's valuable.
Dumbledore REFUSES to hide it outside of hogwarts.
Harry notes that Wizards have obunoculars. I note that wizards think they're great devices to watch Quidditch from a distance, and might not have thought to look at something CLOSE with them. -conclusion: hm....quite the mixed bag. Quite the mixed bag indeed...

p.s. Do you REALLY think there's any significant chance that MoR unicorn blood works as advertised in Cannon? I once fantasized about asking a unicorn for a sample of blood in order to totally bypass the downside.

...now that i'm thinking about unicorns, who's blood Cannon Quirrel drank, I find it rather likely that Quirrelmort's zombie-mode is the side-effect of drinking unicorn blood, and that it would be worse if he were killing unicorns. Or maybe not as bad; he could also be letting them live to avoid attracting centaur attention.

any significant chance that MoR unicorn blood works as advertised in Cannon

I’m not even sure what it did in canon. I only mentioned it as a potential example. But note that even if there are no souls in MoR, magic immortality itself is certainly possible. (I.e., if it resurrected in canon, it probably won’t do that in MoR, but it might prolong life.)