Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102

David_Gerard

New chapter!

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 102.

There is 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.)

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

New chapter!

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 102.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Anyone else find the stuff about indifference to be rather deepish? Indifference has no power at all, it's the absence of power.

And now we learn that to cast Avada Kevada, you have to either want the person dead, or not care whether they live or die? So, I guess that means the only condition in which you can't cast is if you want the person to live, in which case you wouldn't want to cast it anyway.

deepish

Typo for "derpish"? Reference to the notion of deepities? Something else? (I'm guessing the second of those.)

9Velorien12y

You're going to have to define "power" for that statement to be meaningful. [...] I thought the point was that by default, a psychologically healthy human being assigns others' lives a value above zero, even strangers, and for Avada Kedavra you have to either overcome this with hatred (by assigning them a value below zero) or by indifference (by assigning them a value of zero). Both achieve the goal of expressing a preference for death (zero or below) over life (positive value), but the former requires an increasing amount of effort (because you're deliberately making yourself feel something) while the latter is "always on" and theferore doesn't. I still don't see why repeat castings with hatred would require higher amounts of effort each time, but otherwise the concept is not incoherent.

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, July 2014, chapter 102

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