A hypothesis: The ministry, large fractions of the ministry, or at least Dolores Umbridge, don't wind up being villians in this universe; they're also quasi-competent (on the level of canon Dumbledore).
Evidence:
a) Eliezer seemingly went to a fair amount of effort to demonstrate that both MoR!Harry and canon!Harry's thoughts were biased when regarding Umbridge- to the extent of naming the relevant chapter "The Horns Effect," and (IIRC) having this explicitly reference her
b) The Ministry seems to have gotten it right on convicting Sirius Black, even if they got the wrong actual person
c) The Ministry generally seems to be portrayed as fairly competent, to the point that the only person (that we know of) to have taken action regarding Quirrell was a Ministry employee (which, incidentally, might be how Umbridge could wind up with accurate information regarding Hermione)
c) The Ministry generally seems to be portrayed as fairly competent...
But I'm reminded of this exchange in Chapter 61:
...Madam Bones's voice continued. "We brought in Arthur Weasley from Misuse of Muggle Artifacts—he knows more about Muggle artifacts than any wizard alive—and gave him the descriptions from the Aurors on the scene, and he cracked it. It was a Muggle artifact called a rocker, and they call it that because you'd have to be off your rocker to ride one. Just six years ago one of their rockers blew up, killed hundreds of Muggles in a flas
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: