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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

I didn't really check the LessWrong thread earlier, but I am happy to see that people here are a lot less willing to accept the unsatisfying solution than at r/HPMOR.

I used to really enjoy HPMOR, but it is now basically ruined for me - Voldemort holding the idiot ball, the one time where things really matter, and this is also when Harry's untested strategies work like a charm on the first try without him being noticed? I guess I was too quick to praise Eliezer on being able to write more believable scenes than Rowling.

What disappoints me almost as much is that the original answer was (from all that I can gather) to mainly just use the swerving hex. Hahahaha.

I'm pretty sure the original answer always had the partial transfiguration / nanotubes / garotte element. Consider the bit at the very start of chapter 1 (fraction of a line, robes falling, blood); the fact that in H&H's transfiguration experiments they use nanowires, verify that they're very strong, and verify that their length can be changed by transfiguration; arguably the bit in chapter 7 where Harry thinks what a good idea it would be just to decapitate all the Death Eaters; Dumbledore's insistence that partial transfiguration, being a power the Dark Lord knows not, may be vital to his victory.

8Velorien11y

While I am inclined to agree with the general spirit of your comment, I think you're being a little harsh. This is still miles more believable than much of Rowling's work. For one thing, recall that her Voldemort achieved the same terrifying results during the Wizarding War while being an idiot all the time.