Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 15, chapter 84

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The next discussion thread 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 84. The previous thread has passed 500 comments. Comment in the 14th thread until you read chapter 84.

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, 14.

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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.

The next discussion thread is here.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.

I'm wondering if EY is going to come through on this whole "Dumbledore is the Dark Lord and Quirrelmort was in the right all along" approach that he has hinted at recently. There's a precedent here which raises my probability estimate of this slightly, [rot13 for spoilers from another EY story] va uvf fgbel "Gur Fjbeq bs Tbbq" gur gjvfg jnf gung gur ureb'f pubvpr orgjrra tbbq naq rivy jnfa'g n pubvpr bs juvpu bar gb sbyybj (gung jbhyq or boivbhf, pyrneyl) vg jnf gur zhpu uneqre pubvpr bs juvpu jnf juvpu. Gur "tbbq thlf" ghearq bhg gb or rivy naq gur "onq thlf" ghearq bhg gb or tbbq.

So from recent chapters it seems like we're supposed to at least be considering the possibility of that Quirrelmort has been playing some colossal super-villain gambit this whole time in order to set up the rise of Light Lord Harry and defeat death once and for all, and that the Dark Lord prophesied to oppose all this is Dumbledore, who has marked Harry for his equal by nominating him as the future leader of the people he mistakenly believes to be The Good Guys and who wants us all to embrace death when it comes.

This concerns me a little bit, not because I don't like the idea of Voldemort being secretly good but because it would be tragic for Dumbledore to turn out to be so evil. Don't get me wrong, Dumbledore is greatly mistaken on many points but on the surface it doesn't seem fair to call him a Dark Lord. His intentions seem to be better than almost every other person in the wizarding world, and it seems a bit rich to brand him with that label just because he opposed someone who was doing a very good job of pretending to be EVIL with a capital everything.

This, of course, is WORSE because it means that EY won't do it like that - if Quirrel turns out to be good it will mean that Dumbledore has known the Voldemort gambit was a ploy all along, and has been actively opposing Quirrel's attempt to reform the world because he doesn't think the end justifies the means. And now he's been broken further and further, forced to do more and more horrible things and turned into a monster just because he didn't want monstrous things to happen! I just can't help but think that it would have been better for Quirrel to sit down and talk this all out with Dumbles, but even if for some reason he couldn't, I dunno if it's fair to Dumbles to call him a Dark Lord since he was trying hard but got it wrong.

Of course there's always the possibility that Dumbledore doesn't care about the means and is just opposed to Quirrel because Quirrel wants to kill death. That would make Dumbledore more evil but be less tragic. It also seems a bit less believable that Dumbledore could be so smart but so intractable in his wrongness on this one point, though.

What do you guys think?

I don't think the guy who doesn't think twice about torturing or murdering anyone who slights him will turn out to be in the right all along.

1chaosmosis14y

My viewpoint is essentially opposite yours, lolz. I don't really think it's probable that Dumbledore will become the next Dark Lord. The only thing that has happened so far to suggest this is the one line by Dumbledore in Chapter 84 (there might be other evidence but it would help if you would explicitly point it out). And I suppose there's an argument to be made that Voldemort couldn't have "marked Harry as an equal" since Harry was a baby who Voldemort expected to easily kill (which is why Voldemort didn't bring reinforcements). And there's probably some people on here who think Narcissa was burned alive (but I am almost certain that Dumbledore faked her death and that she is living in a secret OOTP base somewhere). But I think the counter evidence is stronger. It's too late in the story to suddenly change the villain, and Dumbledore probably wouldn't have the opportunity or motive to cause mass death. Those points seem simpler and like stronger arguments than the above. Consider that, in canon, Voldemort attacking a baby was apparently enough to mark Harry as an equal. Also consider that Dumbledore was completely hysterical when he mentioned the possibility that he would become the next Dark Lord. It would help if we actually knew what some of the unheard prophecies say. Maybe Dumbledore was misinterpreting one of them, and he doesn't have to be a Dark Lord at all, but Harry would still fight him. That's not a great solution and it's actually less probable than anything above, but it does represent a kind of middle ground based on details and possibilities not yet made known to us. And, I actually like the idea of Dumbledore being a Dark Lord who was corrupted by his power. I really don't think it would be sad, because I'm not attached to canon Dumbledore very much. I actually don't really care about any of the Canon!Harry Potter main characters, I just realized that. I only care about the minor characters, and thus far HPMOR has only improved those character

-2Xachariah14y

I think you're confused about the meaning of Sword of Good. Without giving away too much, that is not the meaning I came up with. Instead I came away with the idea that everyone is the hero of their own story. Nobody is born innately evil Dumbledore is good. Quirrell is good. Harry is good. Malfoy is good. But they're each only playing out the morality they've learned. Malfoy's morality about maintaining 1600s era stability and order and bringing prestige to the family. Dumbledore's is a conservative evolution of his imperial/nationalist era morality that turned sour. Quirrel's morality is difficult to discern, but I'd guess he was based on Randian Objectivism or Nietzschean philosophy. Harry's morality is rationalist and singularitarian. It's obvious to me that Harry's morality is the only one that's truly good. But then again I'm a rationalist singularitarian, and I bet people from other eras would look at the moralities differently. I think the story is set up like this because that's the way the world works. Everyone thinks they're doing the good-and-right thing, but everyone has different starting points for their moralities. Wars occur because people have different ideas about what good-and-right is and how to achieve it. In real life, two good people sit down and talk to each other and neither one changes their mind, and the wars still happen. And the wars are not between good guys and bad guys, they're between good guys and good guys. But that's the world we live in.