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 81, which should be published later today. The previous thread passed 400 comments as of the time of this writing, so it will pass 500 comments soon after the next chapter is posted, if not before. I suggest refraining from commenting here until chapter 81 is posted; comment in the 12th thread until you read chapter 81. After chapter 81 is posted, I suggest all discussion of previous guesses be kept here, with links to comments in the previous thread.
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.) When posted, chapter 81 should appear here.
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, eleven, twelve.
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:
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
Making gold probably breaks the 'no counterfeit' rule as far as the goblins are concerned. Before it was edited out, there was a bit where a goblin was suspicious of this in an early chapter. It was silver, but still.
Lucius has some kind of control over what Harry does because of the debt. That may limit some of these choices or just weaken them.
Harry doesn't need to use the Time Tuner to make money on a stoke market. He just needs to open a stock market.
But Dumbledore hasn't sacrificed his (twisted) ethics to suit his cause before. He is no more likely to do so now, just because it's convenient. This latest event is probably not strong enough to make him twist his ethics again, if you believe he twisted them in the past.
Of course, I could be wrong, but given that it was considered a legitimate source of "as much money and life as you could want" in canon, I'd expect HPMoR would be more explicit if it were considered illegitimate in HPMoR. Griphook's original reaction (which I have in a PDF I downloaded before the change) looked to me not like Griphook was wondering if Harry would be counterfeiting, and more like he thought Harry was p... (read more)