Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119

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 119.

Plans for next chapter release:

Ch. 120 will post on March 12th, 2015 at 12PM Pacific Time (7PM UTC).

The next long chapter will be Ch. 122, posting on March 14th, 2015 at 9AM Pacific / 4PM 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.)

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 119.

Plans for next chapter release:

Ch. 120 will post on March 12th, 2015 at 12PM Pacific Time (7PM UTC).

The next long chapter will be Ch. 122, posting on March 14th, 2015 at 9AM Pacific / 4PM UTC.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

You really do seem to like downvoting people you disagree with. Interesting. How mindkilled are you? And you didn't provide the question explanation.

I'm not sure what you mean by question 1. But assuming you mean, something like "If HPMoR existed in in a world without Harry Potter, would the gender issues be problematic" the answer would be yes, because all the other important male characters are substantially more resourceful than the female ones, and because of Hermione's death and the events surrounding it.

Question 2- No. Please don't be stupid.

Question 3- Are you seriously trying to implicitly argue that the literal on average physical difference between human males and human females is at all relevant here? Because it seems like you are trying to make such a connection. That's both silly (for reasons I already explained to you), and stupid for other reasons: villains in stories have things like wands and guns. They don't need to physically stuff someone into a fridge while they are fighting back. If you think I'm misinterpreting your third point, I'd be interested in hearing an explanation, but frankly, I assign a very high probability that you are hopelessly mindkilled, which is unfortunate because everyone else in this conversation was having a nice, interesting conversation. I thought that skeptical_lurker brought up some very good points as did Nancy.

How mindkilled are you?

That is a delightfully awful question. The more I think about it, the more it becomes clear that there's no hope of an accurate answer if you include the presupposition that the person being asked is actually somewhat mindkilled.