Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 20, chapter 90

palladias

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 90. The previous thread has passed 750 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, 17,18,19.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

A troll entered hogwarts.

In general the troll runs faster than any human. It was luck that Argus Filch is alive to tell the people in the Great Hall about the troll.

This is not to be expected by the person who smuggled the troll into Hogwart. It would be likely that the first contact of the troll with a human would be with a student and the student would be dead.

Hogwarts wards don't go off on troll attacks so the troll might already have killed someone but if time turned people where around they could prevent that student kill.

The politics of a student getting killed after the affair is Draco is complicated.

Wait to see what it's distracting you from, and then start burning resources.

You can't undo things that are already happened with time turners. You also need to be in a position where you can communicate.

Unless you want Bones to be out of time-turns when she finds out that she needs to go back an extra ten minutes.

Then send a patronous to Bones in the now to ask whether it's safe to send her information 6 hours into the past.

In general the heuristic I advocate is when under attack is to communicate the information to everyone who could use it to help defend you.