Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 19, chapter 88-89

Vaniver

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 88-89. 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, 18.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Lucius is probably afraid to try to actually kill Harry, or attack him directly. If he fails, or is discovered, the repercussions would be huge. And if he succeeded, Dumbledore and others would exert their full power to find the guilty party. In short, he probably doesn't want to declare total war on Harry's party.

By killing Hermione he doesn't harm Harry much, but he hurts him a lot. He also happens to have a grudge against Hermione. If he was caught in the act, it would harm him much less politically. And his grudge against Harry is in the first place a struggle over punishing Hermione vs. protecting her. So killing her makes perfect sense.

So killing her makes perfect sense.

For the reasons previously given I would grant Lucius idiot ball status for executing this reasoning. It is of course realistic as the behaviour of a high status dark arts amateur with known irrationality tendencies and a poorly calibrated vindication heuristic. This is the kind of thing that Harry should expect to happen when he goes about drawing the attention of and provoking people like Lucius. It just isn't what a sane Lucius would do, nor is it what he would do if acting as an avatar of (metaphoric) Dark Arts str... (read more)