Chapter 26, "Noticing Confusion" : Don't know if anyone has pointed this out yet, but Quirrell says, "I...need to go off and set something in motion," before apparently going off to accost Rita Skeeter. During their conversation (Ch 25) she thinks about the alleged fact that a tipster directed her to Mary's Room, where she will shortly die. Now she may have thought this before meeting Quirrell -- she definitely had somewhere to be -- but then why would he bother to speak with her?
I just looked at the passage again, and it seems worse than that. She actually thinks,
And his hair was already falling out? Couldn't he afford a healer?
No, that wasn't important, she had a time and a place and a beetle to be.
My reading:
In 25 Harry asked the Weasley twins for help, and told them not to involve Quirrell in their plot, because he didn't like publicity. The Weasley twins agree, but are amused that Harry doesn't know them that well or he wouldn't have brought up Quirrell at all, and say they'll do Quirrell on their own time.
This part is never explicitly stated, but I assume they alert Rita to Quirrell and manufacture some silly rumors about him being a former Death Eater and training Harry to be the Next Dark Lord.
Rita then publishes an article making those exact ...
EDIT: New discussion thread here.
This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky's Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. With two chapters recently the previous thread has very quickly reached 500 comments. The latest chapter as of 17th March 2012 is Ch. 79.
There is now 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.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
As a reminder, it's often useful to start your comment by indicating which chapter you are commenting on.
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: