This chapter, and the update to Chapter 85, are both fantastic. I hadn't noticed until now that Moody is the avatar of being pessimistic enough that your expectations overshoot and undershoot reality appropriately often (in the same way that Fred and George are the avatar of Aumann's agreement theorem), and I'm wondering what other avatars I'm missing.
This won't exactly be a new observation, but one thing I really like about reading MoR is that some of the most important events involve characters updating their beliefs, and in pretty much any other story the only way this happens is when characters announce themselves or other characters doing this, e.g. "Aha! So it was you who killed Prince So-and-so! You traitor!" and instead MoR characters update their beliefs inside their heads like sensible people and the reader has to figure out the nature of the update for themselves. I don't think I've seen this happen in any other story I've read, it is a great rationality exercise, and I more or less completely missed it the first time I read through. (That is, I noticed Harry doing a lot of updating because it's text instead of subtext, but it didn't occur to me that I would understand the story better if I kept track of updates going on in minds other than Harry's.)
I hadn't noticed until now that Moody is the avatar of being pessimistic enough that your expectations overshoot and undershoot reality appropriately often
Didn't get that until just now.
Edit: New thread posted 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 86. The previous thread has long passed 500 comments.
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, 16.
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: