Is it really elitist to not make friends with people you don't like (Ron) or people you might not have time for (Hagrid)?
It depends on why you don't like them or don't have time for them. It's more a comparison to the original than it is a lack of justification in-world (the class balance of the protagonists and antagonists has shifted significantly). If Ron is just a snot that wants to exclude Malfoy from everything, then sure, don't be friends with him. But is that really all Eliezer saw in him?
(have you?)
I make it a priority to befriend support staff, but so far that hasn't included any janitors; mostly secretaries.
If "losing" means deciding to make the world a better place, eliminating Azkaban and/or death, and preventing future atrocities then I'm all for this sort of loss.
Do you have any evidence beyond wishful thinking that's what'll happen? So far, it looks to me like "losing" means getting tricked by your prophesied enemy into releasing his strongest follower. I put the odds at pretty strong that the story will turn into a UFAI cautionary tale, where Harry and/or Quirrel FOOMs and the results are not pretty.
Quirrel has been playing Harry like a fiddle from day one. We might have some information about Harry's goals, but Quirrel's goals are the ones that will be put into place.
I put the odds at pretty strong that the story will turn into a UFAI cautionary tale, where Harry and/or Quirrel FOOMs and the results are not pretty.
I put those odds quite low, because it's a story about rationality and only incidentally about the Singularity. The overall moral of the story has to be consistent with EY's conviction that becoming truly rational helps (rather than hurts) you in moral dilemmas. To quote an analogous bit of the story:
...And if Harry had thought 'rational' people did defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, then he wouldn't have do
Update: Discussion has moved on to a new thread.
After 61 chapters of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and 5 discussion threads with over 500 comments each, HPMOR discussion has graduated from the main page and moved into the Less Wrong discussion section (which seems like a more appropriate location). You can post all of your insights, speculation, and, well, discussion about Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter fanfic here.
Previous threads are available under the harry_potter tag on the main page (or: one, two, three, four, five); this and future threads will be found under the discussion section tag (since there is a separate tag system for the discussion section). See also the author page for (almost) all things HPMOR, and AdeleneDawner's Author's Notes archive for one thing that the author page is missing.
As a reminder, it's useful to indicate at the start of your comment which chapter you are commenting on. Time passes but your comment stays the same.
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: