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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Most everything about him in MoR, except for the part where he's immortal, lines up quite well with the historical figure: he published his findings regarding the Philosopher's stone, diagrams included. Of note is that the supposed real-world philosopher's stone did not immediately give Flammel the results he wanted; according to the book published in his name, some years passed between him getting it to transmute silver and getting it to transmute gold.

Historical Flammel also has an official grave site in France (Paris, if I remember correctly); I want to think he lived to his eighties, but it's been a few months since I last read about him.

The book-supposedly-by-Flammel mentions a mysterious old mage that helped him along the way; I would expect myself to go "SQUEEEE!" if it turned out Flammel's mysterious old wizard got mentioned in HPMoR.

Historical Flammel also has an official grave site in France (Paris, if I remember correctly); I want to think he lived to his eighties, but it's been a few months since I last read about him.

I recall hearing that "grave" does not contain a body, although I'm not sure how the person who told me that knew. (They were suggesting using him in fiction, much as HPMOR did.)