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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

I do think it's a bit odd that he holds criticism of the work at this point to be categorically unfair, since he seems perfectly happy to accept praise.

In an early author's note that has since been removed (the one that pbasvezrq Dhveeryy vf gur ningne bs Ibyqrzbeg), EY mentioned having to be meak about accepting praise prior to revealing that there is a certain spell on the Pioneer Plaque, which seems somewhat similar to (if weaker than) what he said in the rant, about the criticism not being wholely warranted until people see where the story winds up. At the same time, he opened the rant by stating that if people overwhelmingly missed the point, it reflects on his skill as an author. (Also from the redacted author's notes are counterpoints to this, where he shows exasperation that people fail at understanding things like "No, I do not, in fact, advocate what the villain does".)

I believe it was stated that those notes were redacted because it was pointed out to him that readers like to self-handycap their analysis of the story for sake of suspense (aka why there are still loads of people convinced Quirrell != Voldemort), or restrict their understanding to that of the viewpoint character, etc. With this in mind, he's kinda had to deal with it from all sides: praise/criticism/speculation/etc are all littered with people missing something crutial, and he seems to have given up on pointing this out at some point in the middle of the fic, at least until the shitstorm that spawned around these last few chapters.