Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 22, chapter 93

daenerys

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 93. The previous thread has passed 300 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:

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

At the end of his rant over the anti-feminism complained Eliezer said

I’ll state outright that at the end of the story Hermione comes back as an alicorn princess.

One interpretation would be that Hermione goes FOOM.

Harry already knows how to create sentinent artificial entities. He made the hat sentinent.

He knows that trolls are magicial creates that constantly self transmute.

He likely has put hermonine's body into a safe place. At the end of chapter 91 he wants a last one and a half minutes with the body of hermoine.

When the door opened again, Harry seemed to have changed, as though that minute and a half had passed over the course of lifetimes.

"Seal up the room," Harry said quietly, "and let's go, Professor McGonagall."

The fact that he wants her to seal the room suggests that he used his time turner during the time in the room to bring hermoine's body to safety and telling McGonagall to seal the room prevents other people from finding out that the body is gone.

The fact that he wants her to seal the room suggests [...] the body is gone

At the end of chapter 91, McGonagall looks into the room and sees (something that looks sufficiently like) Hermione's body. So whatever's meant to have happened by that point, it isn't that Harry has just taken it away without any measures to make it look as if he hasn't.

2gjm13y

Another, which I find more plausible, is that Eliezer was just making a joke, the whole point of which is that he isn't revealing anything. (I don't think it's completely impossible that he did mean something by it, but I wouldn't give that more than 5% probability.)