Harry is just a freak of nature... There is no way any 11 year old has read and understood the entire corpus of quantum mechanics, cognitive science, science fiction, and rationalism writings, no matter how much of a bibliophile they are.
Agreed. It works in the story because you don't think about it normally, and can mentally substitute him for an adult and forget he's nominally supposed to be 11. But it's really jarring when attention is called to it as in this chapter.
Admittedly this is an issue with a lot of child based literature, but I suppose its especially noticeable in HPMOR because attention is being explicitly directed at the internal mental processes of the characters.
Either that, or HPMOR has magic even stronger than parental love in it.
(I allow every work of fiction a quirk or two that isn't actually plausible, because to not do so is to vastly reduce the variety of stories that I could read. HJPEV I can tolerate, but another divergence from sanity on the same scale would start to really strain my disbelief)
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 87. The previous thread has 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, 17.
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: