Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 109

Gondolinian

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 109.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

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 109.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

"Baba Yaga and her 52 apprentices"? That's possible, but I'm not actually sure how this can become a battle because the obvious move is for Riddle to "bombarda" his own skull.

I'm thinking we are going to get some more talking. And it is pretty likely we are about to have explained to us how he already lost...

Wait. Are we at all sure the Tom's are still outside the mirror? If the plan was to trap Voldemort in the mirror, how do we know that didn't already happen, and this is years later when they finally finished tracking down the horcruxes? Because the best mirror-plane prison would be one with no passage of time in it.

This also fits the prophecy, because in this case, Harry did defeat him, by being willing to go down with him. Which is a power he knows not.

Hmm, "Both Toms are trapped in the mirror, Myst-style" would explain a bit of my confusion, to wit: how is it that the first invocation of the mirror was only visible to Voldemort, but the trap-invocation seems visible to both Riddles, even though Harry is under the True Cloak and thus not visible to the mirror? (On the other hand, if that's true, how did the trap get sprung on him?)