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 117.
Plans for next chapter release:
Ch. 118 will post on March 9th, 2015, at 12pm Pacific (7pm UTC).
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.)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
The wand objection has been a very good one, and don't give me the "hindsight bias" crap, people were complaining about that in advance. No matter the bizarre excuses the author comes up with, it just doesn't make sense to order 37 death eaters to shoot Harry if he raises his wand, rather than order one Harry to drop the damn wand. It certainly doesn't make sense to be so paranoid as to strip Harry naked and nonetheless let him keep his wand.
If Voldemort is overconfident, then fine, LET HIM BE OVERCONFIDENT. But Eliezer wanted it both ways, both to treat Voldemort as super-ultra-cautious AND let Harry keep his damn wand.
Voldemort was powerful enough that he could defeat a couple of fully armed Aurors with wands pointing at him, so the threat of Harry raising his wand and casting a spell at him was negligible, as proved by him dodging a killing curse cast by a much stronger wizard than Harry.
Even if Harry was so powerful to be able to raise his wand, cast a spell quick enough at Voldemort so that he couldn't dodge it, the Death Eaters would have stunned Harry instantly, and even if a spell cast by Harry destroyed the body of Voldemort, he could easily make himself a new one.