Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 104

b_sen

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 104.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 104.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Things I notice I'm confused by: If Quirrel needs Harry's help to get the stone, why didn't he just ask? (Edit: okay, he did ask. But why didn't just ask earlier? And why is he playing all these tricky games?) I mean, it already worked for freeing Bellatrix. If there's a disturbance which Dumbledore suspects is a distraction, why did he send only Snape, rather than several aurors/coming himself?

What could Quirrel need Harry for? In canon, Harry could get the stone because he wanted to find it, not to use it, or something like that? But this Harry definitely wants to use it.

If there's a disturbance which Dumbledore suspects is a distraction, why did he send only Snape, rather than several aurors/coming himself?

Hypothesis: the situation is a trap for Voldemort. The corridor itself is blatantly a trap - it's easy to enter, but we know from Fred and George that it's full of invisible wards. Voldemort wouldn't risk confronting Dumbledore, and an unguarded corridor would be too suspicious, but Snape is just right in terms of difficulty level (and also has the option of going "my lord, you have returned!", surviving an... (read more)

0Vaniver11y

In canon, Dumbledore is called away for some business (Supreme Mugwump duties?), and I presume the same happens here. Now, why Dumbledore didn't time-turner to both be at that business and here is harder to say--unless Quirrel explicitly used the time-turner prevention on going back more than X hours to send a message to Dumbledore preventing him from using his time-turner? I didn't look closely enough at those rules to figure out whether or not it would be likely to work (and don't have the time to pull out the relevant bits of HPMOR).

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 104

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 104

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