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 85. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments. Comment in the 15th thread until you read chapter 85.
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, 15.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
Justification for voting applies to whether one clicks the "vote up" or "vote down" button. Ideally, this is done without reference to a comment's current score. +50 just means that 50 of the readers (on net) thought it was upvote-worthy, and there are many more than 50 readers of the site.
FWIW, votes on articles (in main) are worth 10x the karma.
Downvoting is our method of curation. It hides bad comments from casual readers. Curation is important because otherwise everything devolves into Reddit. See this post by Jeff Atwood.
In my opinion, roughly 1/3 of all comments you read should be downvoted. Sadly, that is not feasible in practice due to downvote limits. Others think that policy is too 'harsh', but are free to use a different algorithm for voting.
This has the effect of making unpopular opinions invisible.
I don't see how there's a risk this turns into Reddit. The post you linked to said that people are more likely to upvote funny memes, rather than useful stuff, given some of pedanterrific's comment that has basically already happened here. I don't think humor is even that bad. And the question of whether we should not do so many upvotes doesn't impact whether we should do more downvotes on already neutral posts, which is what I'm concerned with.
Having moderators solves the Reddit problem.
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