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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 14, chapter 82
The new discussion thread (part 15) is here.
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 82. The previous thread passed 1000 comments as of the time of this writing, and so has long passed 500. Comment in the 13th thread until you read chapter 82.
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: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
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Comments (790)
I just wanted to drop in to say that this song on the very popular nerdy YouTube channel vlogbrothers by Hank and John Green closely echoes the spirit and values of HP:MoR. Nerdfighters (the community centered around John and Hank's videos) would be a great potential audience for this fic. I think fans of Hank Green in particular would really appreciate this, because he is known as the "science and math" brother. Hank has often been excited about advancements in medicine in the past, and has supported things that the general public may consider icky, like genetic engineering and synthetic biology. I left a quick comment recommending MoR, but it will likely get swamped by the thousands of others. Repetition is power, though, so if you would like to leave a quick link to hpmor.com, that might help the cause of sanity (and entertaining fiction).
(I'm reposting from the older thread into the live one. Please don't vote up/down twice.)
Wow. Chapter 84 has a MAJOR revelation. Not something anyone has been trying to guess, I think, but might we want to start a new thread anyway? I think maybe people should get a chance to puzzle out the significance of 84 on their own, before reading others' speculations. And this thread is getting long besides. So I submit my commentary in rot13:
[Comment retracted to be put in new thread.]
Hermione is dead. Hermione Granger is doomed to die horribly. Hermione Granger will very soon die, and die horribly, dramatically, grotesquely, and utterly.
Fare thee well, Hermione Jean Granger. You escaped death once, at a cost of twice and a half your hero's capital. There is nothing remaining. There is no escape. You were saved once, by the will of your hero and the will of your enemy. You were offered a final escape, but like the heroine you are, you refused. Now only death awaits you. No savior hath the savior, least of all you. You will die horribly, and Harry Potter will watch, and Harry Potter will crack open and fall apart and explode, but even he in all his desperation and fury will not be able to save you. You are the cord binding Harry Potter to the Light, and you will be cut, and your blood, spilled by the hand of your enemy, will usher in Hell on Earth, rendered by the hand of your hero.
Goodbye, Hermione. May the peace and goodness you represent last not one second longer than you do.
Out of curiosity. Given that Eliezer's cited this post as his inspiration for creating SPHEW, how likely do you think it is that he's aware of the "women in refrigerators" trope, and if he's aware of it, that he would ignore the objections to it and use it anyway?
I'd be happy to record this, but I need some more specifics (I can't just say 'Hermione will die' - what if Eliezer fastforwards 10 billion years or some other mindblowing epilogue). Dies by what chapter? Or alternately, something like the end of the school year? What happens if she gets better?
"Record this"? What? Did I, like, fail to perceive some unwritten rule that every future-looking statement on lesswrong.com has to be a formal prediction written in academic prose with explicitly enumerated premises?
I just thought this last chapter represented Quirrell's final decision to kill Hermione, and I posted as though I was eulogizing her, to try to prepare myself for the darkness I believe is coming. I think it's all about to hit the fan, and I was expressing how I felt about it, not trying to score points in some game I didn't know existed.
gwern is referring to his use of PredictionBook.
Thank you. That helps, but it doesn't explain why my post was downvoted into oblivion (until people upvoted it to conform to Eliezer's opinion) apparently based on a rubric that judges posts solely on their suitability for copying and pasting into a prediction market.
Well, to give one data point: I downvoted your comment when it was at -1 for being (what seemed to me) pointless and depressing. When you explained it was supposed to be tongue-in-cheek I reverted the downvote, although to be honest I still don't get it.
I also downvoted Eliezer's comment for being weirdly irrelevant as far as I can tell, and upvoted Spencer_Sleep's criticism.
I think gwern might have just mixed up where your comment was posted; a lot of people have made top-level comments in his PB thread just containing similar predictions which he's asked for clarification of.
Predictions know no article bounds! Such confidence in predictions as 75th deserves either reward or punishment.
Heh. To be honest, I'm not that confident that Hermione will die. If this story has a happy ending, I would hope Harry has somebody close to him left after the dust settles. I do think this chapter means that Quirrell's plan is to kill Hermione, but I'm not supremely confident that Harry won't pull another trick out of his bag.
What I am supremely confident of is that when it does hit the fan, things are going to be bad. Harry hasn't gone through all that very much yet, he needs something tragic to happen. Hermione dying horribly is about the most tragic thing that could happen to him, and Eliezer knows that, and I don't trust or expect Eliezer to show mercy to Harry or Hermione or me.
So like I said elsewhere, my original post was not meant to establish a prediction that I can point to later, it was simply my attempt to look into the abyss, to be pessimistic, to imagine the worst possible thing happening, so hopefully nothing worse ends up happening.
I don't think Hermione dying is anywhere near the worst thing that could happen; I mean, come on, there's plenty of worse possibilities. Draco and Hermione could do a mutual slaying; Draco could kill Hermione and then Harry has to kill Draco; heck, Hermione could unjustly kill Draco and then Harry has to kill her. That sort of thing.
Why are people downvoting this? It's a testable prediction.
There's reasons besides unfalsifiability for downvoting. Like poor logic, or asserting p=1, or writing so melodramatically that my eyes glazed over.
Edit: I stand by my downvote, for the last two reasons, but I'll give him props for a correct prediction.
Thanks for having my back, but I have to ask if I've missed the boat on some Less Wrong policies or unspoken understandings somewhere. What I said may have been a testable prediction, but I wasn't aware that people's posts had to be testable predictions to deserve upvotes. Am I required to list all my supporting evidence every time I make a future-looking statement? If I don't, or even if I do, must I disclaim them the way corporations do on quarterly earnings conference calls?
gwern said above that (s)he'd "be happy to record" my prediction. I had no idea my predictions were being recorded at all. I thought this was just a discussion forum. Is Less Wrong actually a simulation of the prediction markets from Three Worlds Collide? Is Less Wrong a subsidiary of Intrade? Do I have cash or prizes waiting for me somewhere thanks to one of my earlier correct predictions?
No, it's severally sufficient, not necessary - testable predictions deserve upvotes.
Predictions about MoR are commonly recorded on PredictionBook, which sadly does not offer prizes but can tell you how good your past predictions were so you can get better.
If so, I missed the same boat. I looked at the downvotes and was like 'Wha?'
I can also make the testable prediction "The universe will cease to exist on May 19th, 2034 at 10:03:09PM", but unless I had some truly excellent supporting evidence which I posted along with that prediction, I would not expect people to think well of my statement (particularly if I made it in a rambling, melodramatic way that made it difficult to determine the purpose of the post).
I thought it was pretty obvious that it was a direct response to the information and imagery in the chapter posted last night.
Yes, it was rambling and melodramatic and over-the-top; it was supposed to be amusing, while at the same time accurately expressing my belief that some seriously dark shit is coming.
Sorry for offending everyone.
I think that anyone you offended is probably not worth apologizing to. Downvote should not only be for offensive content.
Or were you just being melodramatic again?
See my reply below; by "offending" I meant that people seemed to be downvoting me for breaking a rule, rather than just posting a crappy comment.
Melodramatic and without support.
Do you want to fill us in on your reasons or do you just want to try to make us sad?
Well duh, that's what I was going for. It was supposed to be ridiculously over-the-top to the point where someone somewhere might be amused by it. I guess that prediction was foolish.
Given the conversation we just read, and the imagery thereabout (lit by soft light at the beginning of the conversation, silhouetted as a black outline at the end), I hardly think it's without support. I think everything Hermione thought in that scene was absolutely correct. Quirrell was behind the plot, he did want her out of the way of his plans for Harry, and he will try to absolutely eliminate her next time.
Some actual tragedy in this story is far overdue, and Hermione's going to be the one to pay it.
It is said that bad jokes are downvoted. Subjectivity should be expected.
In its original form it was unsupported. Now you've added support in a child comment or two, so it is no longer unsupported. I'd probably remove my admittedly petty but legitimate downvote for bad joke if EY hadn't made it sound like downvote shouldn't happen to that comment. Now I'll have to think about whether I don't care as much about the bad joke or am just subject to what passes for demagoguery in this crowd.
But you've no reason to care about my control over little karma point.
Yeah, I don't care that much about being downvoted in general. If people didn't like my writing or understand my intent, that is a perfectly acceptable reason for being downvoted and I will take that into account for future posts.
What I was piqued by is that people seemed to be downvoting me not primarily for a bad joke, but rather for not presenting a "prediction" formally.
Did anyone notice the bit about the Philosopher's Stone? I had initially assumed that the PS was following canon, and the reason that the PS remained intact in Hogwarts was that Voldemort made no attempt on it and bypassing the incredibly elaborate protectings (per book 1) prompting its destruction by Dumbledore & Flamel.
But now we have Harry suggesting it be moved, Dumbledore agreeing and it not being moved because Flamel wants it at Hogwarts. Well, in book 1 when they discovered it could not be kept safe at safest place #2 (Gringotts) they moved it to safest place #1 (Hogwarts) and when safest place #1 failed, they just destroyed it. Dumbledore breathes no word of destroying it, despite both him and Flamel consenting to it in canon.
And notice, if you check MoR carefully, at no point is Harry aware that the guarded object is the Stone; nor has Flamel been mentioned anywhere near Harry as creator of the Stone - Flamel has only come up in conversations with Dumbledore/McGonagall/Snape/Quirrel. (Although the topic is one would expect to be of keen interest to Harry: the Stone, recall, grants immortality or at least anti-aging.)
Conclusion: Eliezer has diverged from canon and carefully kept Harry ignorant because the Stone is going to play a role in future plot events. Given its properties, probably a large role - it's now a massive Chekhov's gem.
EDIT: See especially http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/posts.php?discussion=722rasd1fu9p8mn5fdcbp572&page=89#2214
Ever since I read the Potter books, I knew that the Philosopher's Stone stood a very high chance of being MoR!Harry's weapon of choice.
(Yes, I read the actual Potter books for the first time after reading the first few dozen chapters of MoR.)
Slightly less Chekhovy though, since the removal of the reference from Chapter 4.
I must have read it after it was removed because I don't remember it there.
When Harry asked Griphook what he could do with a ton of silver, Griphook originally looked at him suspiciously and asked if he <strike>had</strike> EDIT: expected to soon /EDIT come into possession of a philosopher's stone. It seemed pretty awkward really - I'm glad it's gone.
No, but almost. Griphook said "are you expecting to find a Philosopher's Stone soon"? He was probing Harry to see if Harry knew that the Stone was at Hogwarts, and then McGonagall scolded him for giving away a hint. I liked it. And Harry totally missed the hint, which is reasonable but I was kind of bummed because I want him to be a superhero.
The problem is, hearing this would almost certainly cause Harry to research what a Philosopher's Stone is, and given his stance on immortality vs death, would almost certainly do everything he can to try to get one (unless there turn out to be insurmountable obstacles to using it to mass-produce elixir of life for general distribution).
There's an active prediction on PB.com that making Stones requires human sacrifice etc.
Only an issue if making the elixir consumes the stone (which is more what I was getting at) - one already exists, so it's a sunk cost.
It could also be an obstacle to mass production if the rate at which it can be produced with the existing supply of stones is insufficient to make enough volume for mass distribution.
The best "theory" I read was that only the person who makes the Stone can drink the Elixir, which would explain why only Mr and Mrs Flamel have benefited from it.
Yes, that is awkward. In alchemic lore, there are projections and steps in the process that would let you turn base metals into silver, but this is extremely obscure stuff and so Griphook jumping from 'ton of silver' to 'possession of a Philosopher's Stone' looks simply like an error on the author's part since 99.9% of everyone reading it only knows of the Stone turning base metals into gold and not silver.
The expression is "the medicine of metals", I think — the use of the Stone of the Wise to heal metals of the infirmity which causes them to be less noble than gold.
Quirrell to Snape, I think, not Harry.
Whups. Yes. So that makes Harry entirely ignorant of Flamel and also the stone.
Thought I'd post the two typos I found here, since there seems to be no other place aside from fanfic.net (and I don't know if EY is still looking there):
On Asch's Conformity experiment: The correct answer had obviously been C. The other 'subjects', the condeferates, had one after another said that X was the same length as B.
"There was the part of her which said that right was to go on being a heroine, and stay at Hogwarts, she didn't know what was going on but a heroine wouldn't just run away. The voice of every storybook she'd ever read with a hero, child or not, or who didn't run away."
If there's a way to parse that last bit, I can't find it. And with that done, a magnificent chapter, and I'll have trouble going back to my homework now.
The current chapter is destroying my head (like Quirrel's humming) - Bones's story is consistent with some of Quirrel, but has so many problems with other stuff.
But OK, we can assume that Bones is telling the truth 100% about the past person, even if Quirrel is not him or related to him, and speculate who it is. She specifies he's Noble, so we don't have a lot of canon characters to go through. I initially thought it was Regulus Black since it fit the Noble Houses last scion disappeared during the wizarding war.
And then I remembered a year was cited. He was born in 1926.
http://harrypotter.wikia.com/wiki/1926
Oh shit! House Gaunt, last scion (mother dead, uncle dead in Azkaban), disappeared during the Wizarding War... But the story gets strange since he disappears long before visiting Harry. Quirrel suggested playing a double-game to Harry, so this suggests Voldemort/Riddle was also a double-game - but why stop before 'a key vote'? Why return as Quirrel? Why the cataplexy (which made sense if he was Regulus Black, injured/cursed destroying the locket Horcrux, but not for the hero Riddle returned)? Does Dumbledore know? For that matter, has anyone figured out Riddle=Voldemort with this massive departure from canon? etc.
EDIT: Apparently this is on the wrong track entirely, as Eliezer has wiped the birth-year. Back to the starting point...
The first part of the description - date of birth / graduation, Slytherin, disappeared in Albania - was meant to make us think Bones figured out that Quirrell = Riddle. Shock! Then nothing after that tracks, and apparently she's talking about a good guy? Huh?
So, apparently what happened is that Voldemort waylaid one of his (usefully Noble) classmates in Albania early on, then decided to assume his identity part-time twenty five years later, with the goal of rising to power as the hero who vanquished the Dark Lord (who he also was). Bones thinks that Quirrell's Yule speech about a 'Mark of Britain' sounded familiar; so apparently he wasn't able to give up on the tyranny bit. I think we can take Quirrell's explanation to Hermione as roughly similar to fact; he saw that the hero wasn't getting respect, and people were falling all over themselves to grovel before the Dark Lord, and decided to stick with the persona he found more pleasant to assume.
Or Q. messed with Bones's head part-way through her little speech using some kind of wandless mind-magic. But that seems even less likely.
If Voldemort is capable of that, then this fic will entirely cease to be interesting. Mind control at a glance in the hands of an intelligent character is god-level powers.
Heck, I don't see why imperius in the hands of an intelligent character isn't a god-level power, especially when combined with memory charm and legilimency.
Not to be, er, pedantic, but there does seem to be a difference between Noble and Ancient houses. By Draco's reckoning, the House of Potter is Noble but not Most Ancient.
Good catch.
I'm not sure there is a difference:
"You know that spell?"
"Oh, no, it's the Charm of the Most Ancient Blade, it's only legal for Noble and Most Ancient Houses to use -"
Hermione stopped talking and looked at Harry, or Harry's grey hood rather.
"Well," said Harry's voice, "I guess I could take down the rest of the Sunshine Regiment by myself, then." She couldn't see his face, but his voice sounded like he was smiling.
Pretty sure that's "[Noble and Most Ancient] Houses", not "[Noble] and (Most Ancient) Houses".
Thank you, that's interesting. Come to think of it, all the other references for House Potter I saw just said "Noble House" too, I just thought it was a shortening. So there's only scions of three out of seven Ancient Houses in Harry's year.
So Riddle - who is indeed a Noble House descendent in canon - waylays and murders another Noble House descendant born in the same year? I see...
No, he's not. Gaunt isn't a Noble and Most Ancient House in canon. Neither is Malfoy, Greengrass, Potter or Longbottom. The only canonical Noble and Most Ancient House is Black.
And anyway, in Harry's current year there's Harry himself, Neville, Daphne and Draco. It's not that strange.
Something doesn't quite fit.
Dumbledore knows that Voldemort is Tom Riddle, so the double-game wouldn't have worked. Maybe Dumbledore only found out that they were one and the same later on?
Snape and Mad-eye Moody also know it's Riddle since they poison his father's grave. Minerva was present when Dumbledore said that, and did not comment on it ('surely not the heroic Riddle, our old ally!'). So we have multiple examples, but they're all trusted key members of the Order who even know about Horcruxes, so they don't tell us anything about when the identity was found (assuming I'm right).
Bones is clearly talking about Tom Riddle, Jr., who seems to have brilliantly played both sides of the field as he rose to power.
Senior was a muggle who was murdered by Junior, who later changed his name to Voldemort. As far as the wizards are concerned, Junior is the only Tom Riddle.
I noticed a typo:
"The old wizard nodded, but his eyes still seemed distant, fixed only on the road head."
Road head is a little bit different from road ahead.
I could not stop laughing for a whole minute.
And while we're at it: Albus says "The Department of Secrets is not lightly defied," in reference to a Time-Turner. But earlier in the fic (and in canon), we have
And at the end: I'm not sure, but I think the missing period after "so she started climbing up the stairs toward her dorm room" was a mistake, rather than stylistic.
I noticed this gem on my second reading of Chapter 81:
I actually didn't understand the third clause. My best guess is that it's hinting that the 88th Wizengamot broke out into open warfare/dueling among the factions? (And no one could leave until the head let them? That would be a sensible power for the Line holder to have.)
I just read it as a throwaway gag; Rowling's style often has funny little background references to violence or bizarre happenings. I took this as being something similar to Rowling specifying the Quidditch match that caused the rule banning broadswords to be introduced.
I thought that too, basically. Like, maybe in the past there were strict rules of order about when you could adjourn a session, so even the Chief Warlock couldn't adjourn until the formalities were concluded, and that in the 88th Wizengamot a war broke out in the chamber before the formalities were done.
My interpretation is that there was no time limit for sessions during the time of the 88th Wizengamot, and one session went on so long that some of the lords and ladies starved to death — or died of old age. I don't know which is funnier.
I'd like to give an updated version of my thinking about the Night of Godric's Hollow:
1) The official story requires Avada Kedavra to behave in very funny ways against a love shield (a normally invisible kill turning a body into a burnt crisp.) Furthermore, as far as I can tell, the only way it can be known to be true is if someone cast prior incantum on Voldemort's wand. Which seems unlikely, because Bellatrix snatched it (See Ch. 53).
2) This indicates the good guys are lying or deceived. Possible reasons
a) Godric's Hollow was a trap laid by the good guys, who don't want to reveal their methods, so they made up a story about how it happened to fool the Death Eaters. Unlikely, because if they had, they probably would have prevented Bellatrix from getting Voldemort's wand.
b) Voldemort faked his death. The good guys showed up, noticed they were confused, and figured Voldemort had just executed some inscrutable plot. They make up a story to prevent a panic.
c) Voldemort faked his death. Bellatrix switched a look-alike wand that had, recently, only been used to cast Avada Kedavra, fooling the good guys.
"Voldemort faked his death" is also supported by what we know of his intelligence.
The question is why did Voldemort fake his death? Everything we know about Eliezer's philosophy in this story suggests Voldemort should not have tried a plot that was more complicated than necessary. And it doesn't seem like this plot is necessary. The evidence we have indicates Voldemort was winning the war. So thus far, no theory I've seen for why he would do that looks convincing.
But perhaps, contrary to what we've been led to believe, Voldemort realized he would not win the war if he kept fighting it in a straightforward manner?
Assume for a moment that Quirelll was being honest with Hermione, in a twisted way. He was the hero and he invented Voldemort in order to defeat Voldemort. He then realized that being a hero wasn't working out for him, so he went away, but unlike his Riddle persona, Voldemort would continue to be hunted, so he had to fake his death.
Just back from reading the new chapter, and assumed it without a second thought when I read that scene.
[Editing rest of comment to put it in rot13, because I don't want to spoil chapter 84 for anyone who hasn't read it. May be unnecessary, but I'm erring on the side of caution.]
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Extremely unlikely. Dumbledore, Snape, McGonagall and Moody at a minimum know that Riddle = Voldemort; there would be no reason not to inform Amelia of this. Also, I'm pretty sure Dumbledore always knew Riddle = Voldemort- he wouldn't be foolish enough to use his real name for his hero persona.
2d) Something Voldemort didn't expect. If Slytherin's Monster transferred it's secrets with a Dark Ritual, Salazar could have planned for Rule 12 and plotted to transfer secrets to future heirs. How would you identify a baby as a parselmouth?
Why would (how would) the Basilisk transfer its secrets with a Dark Ritual rather than just, you know, talking?
Also, in canon Harry wasn't a Parselmouth until after that Halloween, and stopped being one when the Horcrux was destroyed.
Efficiency: speed & certainty. How many secrets would you be leaving behind before this incredibly baroque scheme was worth putting in place? How long would it take to communicate hundreds of ultra-advanced spells by one of the pre-eminent wizards of that golden age? How long can a student afford to be sneaking off to the Chamber?
We've seen legilimency used to read minds, but Order of the Phoenix also showed that it could be used to write to minds as well.
This seems to defeat the purpose somewhat. Isn't the point of the Basilisk to ensure that only Parselmouths can access the secrets? Presumably legilimency is, if not impossible, at least difficult to use on a creature with the Gaze of Death, but if there were rituals to transfer information from its mind to yours, obtaining consent under duress seems a small enough obstacle.
I don't follow. The Parseltongue requirements controls access to the Chamber and also communication with the Basilisk. What more is needed?
So you're thinking a Dark Ritual that only works for Parselmouths? That might work, I guess.
Your suggestions are based on a faulty premise. Even in canon, Avada Kedavra has varying effects. Usually it causes an instant, silent death. At the end of Half-Blood Prince, it blows Dumbledore's body over a railing and off the tower. In Godric's Hollow, the rebounded Killing Curse exploded the upstairs of a house, and we never actually hear what happened to Voldemort's body.
I don't think we're necessarily meant to suspect something amiss here; I think Eliezer just filled in a blank that was left open in the novels.
And I also don't necessarily think a "love shield" is what's involved in this story. In canon, Lily's nonviolent sacrifice is what protected Harry. Eliezer presumably doesn't believe that attempting to defend yourself makes your sacrifice any less noble, so it's probably something different here. I think the likely story in MoR is that when Voldemort sarcastically said "I accept the bargain, yourself to die and the child to live", he accidentally created a magically binding oath.
I actually think the clearest clue here is probably the "but how does anyone know that's what happened?" problem. Other problems: reference to souls, bizarre behavior of the killing curse, total lack of explanation for why a totally reliable spell backfired so spectacularly. But Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story.
Yes, but we saw the actual event in Humanism, part 1. We saw it right up until the moment Voldemort cast the Killing Curse. The "small, small note of confusion" refers to what Harry realized much later: "Dark Lords were not usually scared of infant children." The confusion was about the reason Voldemort was so intent on killing Harry in the first place.
The reference to souls is simply because that's what Dumbledore believes, not because of any plot. Yes, the Killing Curse behaved bizarrely, but we're supposed to think "Why did it behave bizarrely?", not "That must be a lie!", especially given that it sometimes behaved bizarrely in canon.
If "Eliezer has pretty much told us that something is wrong with the story" and we don't know what it is, that means he lied to us in Chapter 43.
You're misremembering the chapter, that scene ends like this:
Thank you for quoting the bit in chapter 46. I had forgotten it, and it is worth taking into account. But in context, I don't think it shows what you think it does:
So prior to recovering that memory, Harry didn't have nearly as much reason to think Voldemort had been afraid of him. In Ch. 3, for all Harry knew Voldemort was just the sort of person who would murder his enemies' children given the opportunity, and he would have been largely correct to think that.
But it seems Harry's inference that Voldemort meant to kill him may not be as safe as Harry assumes. It is equally consistent with everything Harry notices to think that Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry. Consider this part:
Suppose Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry other than kill him, and that he succeeded in doing whatever he meant to do. If so, "your death here will not save your child" would turn out to be true. In that case, perhaps what amused Voldemort was realizing that Lily had misunderstood what he was going to do to Harry, and that she had offered up her life to prevent something that was not going to happen anyway. In that case, "Yourself to die, and the child to live" also reflects Voldemort's true intentions.
At this point, it looks to me very much like Voldemort somehow decided killing baby Harry was not the right response to the prophecy. The prophecy looks like a key clue here; probably Voldemort wouldn't have bothered with such a complicated plot as he appears to be pursuing without the prophecy. But what thought process led to that plot?
Chris Hallquist wrote: "Suppose Voldemort meant to do something else to Harry other than kill him, and that he succeeded in doing whatever he meant to do. If so, "your death here will not save your child" would turn out to be true. In that case, perhaps what amused Voldemort was realizing that Lily had misunderstood what he was going to do to Harry, and that she had offered up her life to prevent something that was not going to happen anyway. In that case, "Yourself to die, and the child to live" also reflects Voldemort's true intentions."
That makes sense. Maybe all he wanted was to turn Harry into a horcrux, and suceeded. Since creating horcruxes requires killing someone, killing James Potter was a convenient horcrux-energy source, while killing Lily could be an extra, but unnecessary bonus.
An experienced mage making an unforced error of that magnitude sounds an awful lot like the Idiot Ball to me.
"Held the Idiot Ball" does not mean "made a large mistake". It means "behaved implausibly stupidly so as to cheaply advance the plot". If Voldemort could never make significant mistakes then Harry could never defeat him.
I agree with you about what "Held the Idiot Ball" means.
I evidently disagree with you about how implausibly stupid it is for Voldemort to accidentally, for no apparent reason, magically bind himself to the infant Harry in the middle of a fight.
Or do you imagine this to be a thing that happens a lot when wizards fight, such that it happening in this case is plausible?
I don't think it happens a lot, because I don't think such ironic offers are made very often. The reason for Voldemort to say what he said was to be prideful and cruel, to make Lily feel how futile her sacrifice would be. In the heat of the moment, in his cruelty, he might not have thought of the magical significance of verbally accepting such a bargain. If indeed this theory is correct, his first fall was a result of his hubris, which fits his character well; and it also fits his character well for him to have learned from it and to not make the same mistake again in the future.
I'm not married to this theory. I'd put it at maybe 50% or 55% confidence? But it seems clear to me that Voldemort made some large mistake that night, because no explanation I've seen for Voldemort willingly stopping his war in 1981 holds any water at all.
Still... one of the very first lessons of Quirrel was about pretending to lose when that gained you more than fighting would.
Granted that Voldemort back then was seen to be winning. But he was winning a war we still don't know his motivations for starting in the first place...
True, no explanation offered so far explains it convincingly, but I don't see the idea that an Avada Kedavra bounced off a baby holding any water either.
2b seems unlikely given Harry's memory of the night matching the official line. Did Dumbledore do a FMC on baby Harry?
Also, remember that for someone with Horcruxes, one can de facto fake one's own death by actually dying and waiting for the resurrection. There's no particular need to assume that he survived that night in the traditional sense of the word.
But Harry's memory didn't include Voldemort casting Avada Kedavra on Harry. That memory is neutral WRT the "rebounded Avada Kedavra" hypothesis.
Also, no part of a rebuttal to your comment, but re-reading the scene, what's with this line?:
legilimency of some sort? or simply dramatic license. I don't remember any example of that particular action being pointed out that wasn't leglimency.
In canon? In MoR eye-contact has happened a bunch of times since Harry got good enough to detect Legilimency, it's just been the usual dramatic device.
Didn't Moaning Myrtle recount something similar about her own death in canon, in which the glowing eyes were the Basilisk's?
It'd be funny if the rock Dumbledore gives Harry were actually a piece of petrified: a) James (and Dumbledore knows) b) Voldemort (and he doesn't) c) Harry himself (and the scenario for that would be ridiculous).
Brings a whole new meaning to the phrase "your father's rock", doesn't it?
A FMC is described as completely envisioned and controlled by the caster, putting as much time into it as the memory covers; so Dumbledore in FMCing a baby Harry is choosing every detail of the scene. Given that... why would Dumbledore direct a scene like Harry recollects? It has several oddities which reduce its value as a 'you killed my parents! In the name of the Moon, I will punish you!' memory.
This memory?
That's the one. It certainly came from somewhere - IIRC, it's got details he wasn't told that have been confirmed, which means that it's not an internally-generated false memory. So either it's real, or it's been implanted by someone familiar with the tale.
Or he imagined it and merely believed it to be a memory.
My memory may be in error on this point, but I did consider your hypothesis and explicitly reject it.
Perhaps one of the at-least-two people who downvoted me would like to tell me what these details are that make it impossible for the memory to have been internally generated.
So far, all I can come up with is this: on the basis of Voldemort's mild reluctance to kill his mother in this memory, Harry deduced (via a rather tenuous chain of reasoning) that Dumbledore told Snape about the prophecy, and when he confronted McGonagall with this she behaved in a manner consistent with what he deduced. This doesn't seem all that conclusive to me. What am I missing?
In fact, I'm pretty sure that events did not happen as Harry deduced them. In canon, Snape overheard the prophecy being given. This seems to match up with what Snape says in the chapter formerly known as 77:
Therefore I suggest that Dumbledore did not tell Snape about the prophecy. I'm not sure why or how McGonagall knows: possibly, in a departure from canon, she was conducting Trelawney's interview instead of Dumbledore himself.
The beginning of Harry's line of reasoning is that Voldemort was not terribly eager to kill Lily Potter. This seems likely to be true, but is also not indicative of anything. It's a mildly strange thing to imagine, but we imagine strange things all the time.
Quirrell suggests that Harry can see Thestrals due to his memory of that night, which would suggest that it's a true memory. But Harry seems to think that he saw the Thestrals because he has realized that Dementors are death, so that he has "seen death and comprehended it" in a more literal sense.
Yep:
Anyone remember this ....
Now he's gone and spent a hundred THOUSAND Galleons on a friend's folly, and I don't think Quirrelmort would've expected that.
I don't think any involved would consider any of Harry's friends to have been involved in much folly. And frankly, I don't think the Wizengamot were fools either, just people reasoning properly from the evidence they had.
On the other hand he internally declared war on magical Britain when it looked like they would cost him something dear to him, i.e., Hermione.
I, and others, interpret the scene exactly oppositly from how you seem to.
I'm not sure I get what Harry's evidence for being able to summon the Phoenix is. It seemed more like wishful thinking to me. Any ideas on why he believed he could do that?
Also, Fawkes did have some connection with Harry after he returned from Azkaban - he asked Harry to help him destroy the place, and it's clear he asked the same of Dumbledore (perhaps many times).
So he's not totally off the mark in thinking that Fawkes would come to him - in that case he'd be agreeing to do what Fawkes wants, instead of restraining him like Dumbledore usually does. I bet if Harry called to Fawkes with a wish to go to Azkaban and destroy it, Fawkes would be there to take him in a heartbeat.
Chapter 82,
(The following is a meta sort of question about the eventual total length of MoR, as it pertains to certain comments by the author.)
Crbcyr xrrc fnlvat gung jr unir Jbeq bs Tbq gung gur fgbel vf zber guna unysjnl jevggra. Ba jung qngr qvq Ryvrmre fnl guvf, naq jung jrer uvf rknpg jbeqf?
V'ir frra zber guna bar crefba fnl guvatf yvxr "gur fgbel vf jenccvat hc", ohg gung uneqyl frrzf cbffvoyr, hayrff jr fbzrubj jenc hc gur ubepehk vffhr va n fvatyr nep, be vtaber vg pbzcyrgryl. V guvax vg'f zhpu zber yvxryl gung jr'er, fnl, 55% guebhtu gur fgbel, engure guna 85%. Naq V qba'g oryvrir gung gur raq bs gur fpubby lrne vf tbvat gb znex gur raq bs gur fgbel.
He said it on March 26th, though if you look one comment up you'll see that he also may have said so at some point in the past.
Here.
I'm noticing the Hugo nominations just came out. I'm not sure about which category it would be eligible for, but I think it would be worth trying to push for a nomination next year. For one thing, HPMOR is definitely in the same class as Ender's Game, which did win a Hugo.
Ah, so you're an optimist.
From a cursory glance, it seems that the categories it'd be eligible for are "Best Novel"(>40k words) and "Best Fan Writer"(non-paid work). I'd advise the latter, because the competition will almost certainly be lighter.
When the book is done I'm going for the former, but the rules call for the book to be complete, I believe.
Why would you go for the former - what's the reasoning here? Yes, it's gotten praise from some writers, but not the kind of rapturous praise that would give it the most important prestigious prize they have. MoR is amazing for a fan work... and good for a novel. Is this some sort of satisficing reasoning, where it's better to be nominated for best novel than win best fan work?
I know I'm not an average voter, but HPMOR is literally the best book I have ever heard of. Are there some other books I have missed out on?
Try looking through the Hugo or Nebula best novel awards. Most of them are not didactic like MoR is which makes comparing MoR to them a little unfair since you lose out on the 'I want to base my life on this' effect, and MoR is length-wise at... a trilogy? now, so comparing them to MoR is unfair, and it definitely helps to have read multiple times the heavy influences on MoR like Godel, Escher, Bach or Ender's Game, but I am doing it anyway! Looking through the list, here are ones I've read (~1/3) and would rank as either not much inferior, equal or better than MoR:
And this is far from a complete list; for example, Blindsight is fantastic but was only nominated for a Hugo in 2006 (losing to Spin which I have not read).
I liked Spin a lot-- it's a perfect balance between a mainstreamish novel of character and big ideas science fiction. Gur rnegu vf chg va na nyvra rairybcr juvpu znxrf gvzr cnff zhpu snfgre-- nyy bs gur fhqqra, gur fha orpbzvat n erq tvnag vf n frevbhf ceboyrz.
It's gotten sufficiently rapturous praise. I see no reason not to try.
I found citations for ESR and David Brin (only the latter is a SF writer), who praised it but did not receive it rapturously; are there writers I have missed?
I am curious about your concern.
Do you want to save EY from a hubris born smackdown?
Do you want to keep public attention off fanfiction so you aren't tempted to publicly defend it and publicly identify as a fanfic fan?
Do you fear a loss of face for the Singularity Institute?
Forgive me for visiting your intentions, if that is unwelcome.
You only get one shot at the awards. My best calibrated guess is that MoR has a chance at best novel somewhere between 'not a chance in hell' and 5%, while best fanwork moves the odds of victory to 50+%. Which one do you think is better?
(I'm also a little concerned that EY is casually making what looks to me like an incredibly obvious mistake.)
You're assuming that Best Fan Writer and Best Novel are equally valuable awards. This is not even close to true.
There are people who make a practice of reading all the Best Novel nominees, for years after the award is given, and I think people are much more likely to read Best Novel nominees before voting than to get around to the fan writing awards.
If anyone can track down number of votes in the different categories, it would be a way of checking on my opinion.
I have twice already pointed out that possibility.
It would be good information, yes. As far as I can tell, there may be some very recent records of recommendations by the Nebula members (and also claims of considerable politicking, so an appeal by Eliezer to fans would be far from unprecedented nor especially effective).
The Hugo voting system is pretty complicated, but apparently they've released detailed statistics since the 1980s - one of the first quotes in that 1997 analysis is
The most recent data is for 2011. Best Novel took 1813 ballots, with 779 vs 753 for #1 vs #2 (as I said, complicated - it's IRV).
The fan categories are fanzine, fan artist, and fan writer; the last had 323 ballots, with 70 vs 40. So in other words, just to get within spitting distance of Best Novel #2, you would need almost twice as many ballots as were cast for the entire category of Best Fan Writer.
You see why I would give MoR for Best Novel 0-5%, and EY for Best Fan Writer 50+%?
I'm curious as to what would have been your original probability estimate for "Given that Eliezer writes a Harry Potter fanfiction, it becomes the most popular Harry Potter fanfiction on the Internet." Or, for that matter, getting out of the AI Box. Not everything impossible that I try, works - nobody coughed up $1.6 million to get faster HPMOR updates this time around, which I tried because, hey, why not - but to me, not trying for Best Novel, given feedback so far, just seems horribly, horribly non-Gryffindor. To me it seems like you're the one making this obvious, horrible mistake whose reference class of timidity errors could put a shadow over someone's entire life. Don't ask her out, don't interview at the hedge fund, don't try for the scholarship, go for Best Fan Work instead of Best Novel...
Offer 20-to-1 odds against HPMOR winning Best Novel and I'll buy in. Hm, now I'm curious as to which side of the bet Zvi or Kevin would take.
Very low. It struck me as a jawdroppingly stupid idea. Then I read it and it was rather good.
I would have assumed that the proper reference class was all your other fiction, which as much as I enjoyed them, were all short compared to MoR even the popular ones like 'Three Worlds Collide'. (One of my favorites, the Haruhi fanfic, was, what, 2 pages on FF.net?) Short fanfics cannot become the most popular, so I would have assigned it a very low probability. Had you asked an estimate for 'wrote a full trilogy of HP fanfic novels', my estimate would be quite different. I won't pretend to know what it would have been. (I remain surprised and amused that it has become as large and popular as it has been, and that you now procrastinate on both your rationality book(s) and the Center by writing MoR. Truly, fortune passes everywhere!)
Oh, I would've bet for you back on SL4. You already had succeeded in getting SIAI running, after all. (Although here again the counterfactual gets hard - I barely remember what I was like back in 2003-4 when I joined SL4 and IIRC you had already won an AI Box by then.)
Sure. I am poorer than a church mouse, so I can risk no more than ~$100. How's this:
"For any Worldcon 2013-2017, MoR will win the Hugo 'Best Novel' award. The stakes will be $100 against $5 (non-inflation adjusted). Payment by either Paypal or Bitcoin (at that day's exchange rate on the largest exchange eg. Mt.gox) to the winner or a charity of the winner's choice. In case of any dispute, the verdict will be judged by Carl Shulman or another person mutually acceptable to Eliezer Yudkowsky and gwern."
I've pinged them.
I expect you meant that as a rhetorical question, but I'm not sure it is. I generally agree with your confidence estimates, but of course it's also worth looking at the payoffs. It's also worth comparing the payoffs for being a Hugo nominee for best novel and a Hugo award winner for best fanwork.
I don't have an informed opinion about those payoffs, just saying that it's not as simple as "50+% chance of winning an award" vs "<5% chance of winning an award."
Which is precisely why I am asking these questions, because there are many ways Eliezer could conclude it's a good idea:
he has non-public information
the rules favor MoR in some way I am unaware of
etc.
Rachel Aaron (author of the Eli Monpress series, sample of "The Legend of Eli Monpress" currently on my Kindle being read) is I think the most effusive praise I've gotten from a published author, though I've heard rumors of certain others speaking in the halls of SF conventions. But you're probably thinking of the Nebula, which is voted on by members of the SFWA. The Hugo is a reader award, voted on by the attendees of Worldcon. Look at the review page of HPMOR if you're questioning whether the readers have been sufficiently enthusiastic.
I'm honestly a bit nonplussed at the idea that reader reception of HPMOR has been insufficiently enthusiastic to try for a Hugo. It's fairly routine for a review to say that HPMOR is the best thing they've ever read out of all of fiction. If that is insufficient enthusiasm to think, "Hm, I might as well try for Best Novel, or the Gryffindors will look at me funny for my sheer lack of courage", I don't know what level ought to be required.
Ranked preference voting, though. I'd expect a significant numbers of voters to rank "no award" ahead of any fanfic just on general principles. If it was just a single round of single preference voting the odds would look much better.
Not only the attendees. People with supporting memberships can vote as well.
OK, she's apparently not self-published, so I've added two interviews with her to the article as references. EDIT: And would you believe it, I forgot Hanson is a Notable person and so his recommendation on Overcoming Bias also counts.
I thought it was the other way around, but OK. That will help, but one wonders how much - the awards overlap a fair bit. (A quick count suggests 1/3 winners the same over the past 15ish years.)
The question is which Hugo.
Gee, I wonder how that could possibly be less-impressive-than-it-looks evidence...
Is the prior that low or something? What should the world look like if HPMOR does have a chance of winning Best Novel?
Yes. Can you name a single fanfic that has ever won either prize for best novel? I can't. Keeping in mind that fanfics long predate the Internet, that many noted authors got started as fans or were published in fanzines (Charles Stross being the most recent example I can think of), etc. So Laplace's law gives us a starting point of single percents, and it only gets worse if we take into account nominations as well...
Well, see above. Acceptable substitutes would include reviews and praise by the sort of people whose reviews & praise predict other nominees or winners - Brin is a good start, but we're talking novels that are discussed or reviewed in all the major SF organs and sell into the hundreds of thousands or millions, so the n should be into the dozens for starters.
My guess is there'd need to be more respect for fanfic among the older sf fans, but I could be wrong about that. I'm not the only person for whom HPMOR is the only fanfic I read. (I've read some other good fanfic, but I don't get around to fanfic generally speaking.)
I think a sufficiently high proportion of likely voters are on line, but this is based on a feeling of plausibility rather than actual knowledge.
When you talk about which award you're going for, is this just a matter of which award you encourage people to nominate it for?
In terms of prestige, I think you'd be much better off being nominated for Best Novel and losing than winning the Best Fan Writer award.
I find it hard to imagine you winning, but I also find it hard to imagine specific reasons that would make it extremely unlikely. It's quite possible that I'm just engaging in availability bias (all the other winners have been conventionally published) rather than anything more solid.
There was some interest in getting the podcast nominated but I guess that didn't amount to anything. I'm not familiar with the Hugo Award categories but since there was no concurrent push for the nomination of the fic in written form, I imagine there was some difficulty finding a category for it. Maybe the pool is a lot smaller for podcasts though and the Eneasz thought that the fic wasn't popular enough on its own to compete in a much larger bracket.
This has probably been mentioned before, but:
a) what if primary goal of this plot was never hurting Draco or Hermione, but to weaken Harry by making him relinquish his money/his claim to the debt from Lucius? Either the money or the claim to the debt that House Of Malfoy has towards him could be something that is dangerous to a hitherto unknown plan of H+C, which is why H+C devised a plot which would strip Harry of both. A genius (like Quirrelmort) could have predicted that Harry might offer either, in exchange for freeing Hermione. In fact, it might have been a win-win-situation for H+C: either Harry loses his Light soldier Hermione, or Harry loses his money.
Does anyone else find it strange that Hermione just happened to know the formula for swearing allegiance by heart? I mean, sure, she could have read it once and that would have been enough, but the fact that she knew it seems awfully convenient in the case that the plot was meant to end like this.
b) Dumbledore mentions that the House of Malfoy has "certain rights over Harry" now. This means that Harry is, to some extent, now alleged to both Slytherin and Ravenclaw.
Now, remember which two houses are supposed to win the House Cup, simultanously, according to Quirrel's "cunning plan"? (Ch. 54)
I agree with bogdanb. "Hermione knows X by heart" is usually equivalent to "Hermione saw X in a book", and Hermione seeks out books.
a) Unlikely, but I think it's a payoff that Voldemort will still consider to be worth the (rather trivial) costs of setting his plan into motion. It's not as ideal as denying Hermione to Harry, but it still imposed significant costs, which is all to the good.
b) Oh lord.
Gut reaction is the same, but the part of me that remembers the rule of rationalist fiction is thinking there's no way Quirrellmort could have predicted both Harry's and Lucius' actions that exactly.
Which is why I say my a). He had no believable way of predicting this outcome, and the one he almost certainly expected didn't happen(well, it partially did, p>0.5 Draco is lost to Harry now, but Hermione is not), but it's still a result that was worth the effort he put in, so I doubt he's shedding too many tears.
Feeling exactly the same.
Not really, she is indicated to be interested in history, and shown reading history books all the time. In another situation I would have be surprised by her willingness (given her wish to be “her own person”), but after being threatened with Dementors...
There's a passage for that in Chapter 9.
I'm actually annoyed by this. Since the next digit is 6, he should be rounding to 3.141593, not truncating at 3.141592.
The sixth decimal digit of pi after the decimal point is 2.
The value of the millionths place in the decimal expression of pi when rounded to the millionths place is 3.
The reason I know pi out to the sixth decimal digit past the decimal point is because the digits to the fifth fit into an easy rhyme, but the fifth decimal digit after the decimal point is a 9. If it were to round up there would be a little cascade, so it's good to know the next digit.
If Harry knew to round up the millionths place in the decimal expression of pi when rounded to the millionths place, he would know pi out to the ten millionths place, or the seventh decimal digit following the decimal point.
Rounding errors at the millionths place are errors of less than one part in a million.
The original text remains correct.
One doesn't need to remember what the digit past the rounded one is in order to memorize the rounded figure.
Did I say that the text was incorrect? I'm 99.999% sure I didn't, but looking back . . . no, still looks like I didn't. All I said was that I was annoyed, and what I think Harry should have memorized instead.
The difference between the two is 0.000001, and the difference in quality of approximation is roughly 0.0000003. So I don't think it matters as a practical preference. Aesthetically, the string of digits of Pi has a cultural significance of its own, quite apart from its numerical value, so I think it's preferable to memorize a number that's actually a prefix of that string.
Also, only if you truncate can you truly say that you've memorized "the first six digits of Pi after the decimal" as opposed to "An approximation of Pi to plus or minus 0.0000005 tolerance".
If this annoys you and so you always stop your approximations at a point where the next digit is 0..4, I think this biases your estimates of numbers (in a way that doesn't really matter for most purposes).
Why would I do that rather than simply round correctly for the number of sig figs I'm dealing with?
I don't particularly care how many digits Harry want to go to, just think he should pick 3, or 3.1, or 3.14, or 3.142, or 3.1416, or 3.14159, or 3.141593, or 3.1415927, or 3.14159265 . . . etc.
It's a risk for a hypothetical person who is bothered by having to round, which isn't precisely the thing you're bothered by. A person who doesn't decide in advance how many digits to use/remember.
Obviously Harry should go up to the Feynman point.
I'd like to predict that whatever actually happened with Dumbledore and Narcissa, it will turn out to have been foreshadowed by whatever happened in Chapter 17 between Dumbledore and the chicken.
That is, I can't actually figure out whether he seriously burned a chicken alive, made it look like he burned a chicken alive, or that actually is what a Phoenix looks like right before regenerating. But he appeared to set fire to a chicken, and I predict that he used essentially the same move on Narcissa, as suggested by the law of conservation of detail.
I don't think its possible that he just whisked her away with Phoenix-travel, as this apparently doesn't actually look anything like someone burning alive, viewed from the outside. But whatever he did with the chicken at least looked enough like burning to fool Harry:
But faking her death (and even the type of death) doesn’t really match the rest of the story. There’s no obvious reason not to return her after he thought Voldemort was gone, or at least to let Lucius know what happened in case she’s alive and didn’t want to return—which is unlikely, we had no indication that she was really unhappy or didn’t wish to be a part of her son’s life—or if she died in some much-less-objectionable way (he could give Lucius the memory).
Not doing this led to the last ten years being rather complicated due to Lucius’ enmity; Dumbledore mentions to Harry he’s quite constrained in his political actions. Eliezer also seems to write his stories such that serious actions have serious consequences.
None of it proof, of course, just strong evidence IMO that she really is dead and either Dumbledore or an ally he’s protected did it.
I'm not saying I think Narcissa is alive, but...
Except that Narcissa could then testify in front of the Wizengamot that Dumbledore kidnapped her.
Dumbledore believes Voldemort will return. This would limit his ability to threaten Death Eaters in the next war.
Point. I forgot he knew about the Horcruxes since basically the beginning.
But he never thought Voldemort was permanently gone in the first place. The Hogwarts inner circle knew Voldemort was still around as of the beginning of the story. And in any case, he's still maneuvering against Lucius, so he has an incentive to uphold the notion that he will not cooperate with blackmailers and that he will resort to equal retaliation, even while his greater enemy is absent.
I don't think Dumbledore would risk leaving her as a loose end, what I suspect is that he really did kill her, but only appeared to burn her alive.
Oh, no, he did much worse:
He switched her brain with that of a chicken (with Magic!), then burned the chicken alive—in her body—so that the chicken’s thrashing around in horrible agony left marks around the room (while he forced Narcissa to watch, with Magic!). Then he kept Narcissa alive (with Magic!) in the chicken’s body, to keep company to Fawkes; he kept her hidden (with Magic!) right near his perch, so that every time Fawkes re-spawned she was reminded of what her captor was capable of. Then he burned her in front of Harry (with Magic!) just because he thought it was funny :-)
By the way, Lucius is not actually mad because he killed her—Dumbledore told the first part the above to him, but he kept silent about the details because it was embarrassing to have his wife turned to a chicken. That’s why Dumbledore had trouble during the trial; he felt a bit embarrassed about having killed Narcissa after all.
Also, Draco actually picked “fire” as his army’s symbol because he’s secretly fantasizing about being burned alive.
It's chickens all the way down, isn't it?
This fits together so well I'm going to have trouble remembering that Dumbledore didn't switch Narcissa's brain with a chicken.
It all just clicks seamlessly into place!
Surely, you mean it all clucks seamlessly into place.
I think we're starting to outgrow the original spec for the lesswrong.com discussion functionality. Plenty of discussions from previous threads were not strictly related to the most recent chapter, and I can think of a few such threads I'd like to start, but I'm holding off because I know that as soon as a new chapter is posted, all past threads will be made obsolete by the creation of a new discussion page.
What are everyone's feelings about putting some dedicated forum software on a subdomain of hpmor.com?
I do know that these discussions are responsible for a significant percentage of Less Wrong's traffic, and obviously I don't know what the actual statistics are, but I do know that all my Less Wrong binge sessions have been instigated by links from commenters (which would still be made on external forums) or by links from the Author's Notes (which are not part of Less Wrong) or by other causes, none of which were related to my posting in the MoR discussions here.
So unless raw pageviews and user accounts are very important to this advertisement-free site, I think it's at least possible that Less Wrong might not be adversely affected by these discussions moving to a closely related external site. But again, I don't know any relevant statistics, and there may be a lot of considerations I haven't thought of, so please don't crucify me if this was a blasphemous suggestion.
One possible deterrent to implementing that might be that people who initially came here to discuss the story might also participate in other non-HP related reading activities, such as going through the Sequences and discussing other posts, becoming better rationalists in the process. I don't have the statistics either though so I don't know how accurate this is.
I read a couple of the Sequences as a result of these discussion threads, FWIW. I've been familiar with EY's work for some years, but this brought me back in.
If the 'How did you come to find less wrong' thread is accurate, a lot of people came here through HPMoR. I'm not sure how many would have come if the HPMoR forums were elsewhere, but it seems like a non-negligible fraction of the community.
I got here through HPMoR, too, but not at all because of these discussions; I got here through Eliezer's links in the Author's Notes. Indeed, I had no idea this was the primary venue for MoR discussions until the link on hpmor.com made it obvious. I don't think it was very obviously linked to from anywhere on FFN before; or at least, I never saw it.
If we had dedicated forums, I think a series of banner "ads" ("Learn everything Rationalist Harry knows by reading the Sequences at Less Wrong", etc.), in addition to the frequent links to MoR-related posts by commenters, might be just as good as (or maybe better than) these suboptimal discussion threads for awareness and traffic.
In his Author's Note, EY mentions that he's considering releasing the next plot arc in one fell swoop, instead of doing weekly chapter releases. Personally I prefer the weekly chapter releases for the following reasons:
I was wondering if other people felt the same way, or if I'm alone in preferring the weekly releases to a one-fell-swoop release.