like the world would end if she were nice to her sister, or a centaur told her not to
Excuse 1) The world will end if Lily is nice to her sister (with no source cited).
Excuse 2) A centaur told Lily not to give Petunia the potion (with no explanation of why not).
These are two completely separate assertions.
Furthermore,
Petunia states that Lily came up with a number of other, equally ridiculous excuses, which means those two shouldn't be assigned any special importance in the list.
From what we know of centaurs, they are rare and typically hostile to humans, which makes it highly improbable that Lily had any sort of meaningful conversation with one.
All prophecies we know of are highly cryptic, and there is no reason to believe that centaurs can decode them well enough to identify two specific, highly obscure humans.
Lily already has far better motives not to give Petunia the potion, namely 1) they dislike each other and Lily doesn't want to grant her sister's wish and/or 2) the potion is very dangerous to take and she doesn't want to endanger her sister's life. Prophecies of doom are a much less probable explanation than either.
If Lily heard what she thought was a prophecy of doom, she would be very stupid not to share it with anyone, say Dumbledore. Lily was not stupid, but there is no evidence that she told anyone about such a prophecy.
If Eliezer would have wanted to foreshadow the fact that rational Harry would go on to end the world in chapter 1, this is what it would look like.
Petunia states that Lily came up with a number of other, equally ridiculous excuses, which means those two shouldn't be assigned any special importance in the list.
When Petunia says "ricidulous excuses" it means that she doesn't understand the validity of the excuses.
What do you think is Eliezer's motivation for Lily giving ricidulous excuses? Making her look like the person that gives ricidulous excuses?
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 chapters 91 & 92 . 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, 17,18,19,20.
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: