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 122, which is the final chapter of the story.
Happy once-in-a-century Pi Day! (3/14/15 == 3.1415)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
That was a great fanfic. The characters were amazingly written, and many of the scenes were genuinely emotional and moving. What's more, the ending actually worked, in a way that I hadn't expected it to work. We didn't get a resolution to the prophecies about apocalypse, the prophecies about ending death, the nature of magic, the nature of time travel, phoenix fire, and many other things... but that actually feels okay. We've been reading an origin story all along, and a great origin story it is. Eliezer, thank you!
That said, now I have a wishlist for some other fanfics I'd like to read:
1) A fanfic where Harry and Hermione use the scientific method to research the nature of magic.
2) A fanfic where smarter versions of canon characters fight each other with complicated plots.
3) A fanfic where most of Harry's successes come from making surprising but rational decisions.
Much of the promise of HPMOR was that it hinted at being all of these things, but now I feel that it doesn't do any of them really well. Maybe my standards have gone up, or maybe the promise is still there to be realized by some other author. Or has it already been done?
Hogwarts Battle School