Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115

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 114, and also, as a special case due to the exceptionally close posting times, chapter 115.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Nit: Harry correctly guessing before this chapter that the resonance affects mainly the caster in proportion to the caster's strength seems overly specific. His experience did indicate that the resonance was a greater threat to V than to himself, so his actions were justified, but his prediction should have been more disjunctive: Either the resonance mainly affects the caster in proportion to the caster's strength, or it affects both parties in proportion to their strength, or it mainly affects V regardless of who casts what due to some asymmetry, or it affects the caster in proportion to the spell's magical strength, or something else.

Agreed. This result wasn't my first guess about the nature of it. I'd assumed that it probably affected V most strongly regardless.