Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, part 23, chapter 94

elharo

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 94. The previous thread has passed 200 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, 21, 22.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

You can request, but campaigning for accurate spelling on the Internet, even in this particularly educated corner of it, is an exercise in futility. For those who care, they will already have corrected themselves after seeing the correct spelling in hundreds and hundreds of posts. For those who do not, a mere request will not change their values.

It depends on the word. For "McGonagall", a person would probably have low confidence in their being able to spell it from memory, and would check if they cared, so misspelling it is strong evidence of not caring. "Cannon", on the other hand, is the correct spelling for homophone of "canon", and so it is less indicative of not caring. "Phase", another misspelling that appears in this thread, is even more indicative of ignorance rather than apathy. Confusion between "loose" and "lose" is probably i... (read more)

3TimS13y

You are right the Qiaochu_Yuan's request is probably hopeless - but I just don't understand mis-speller's reasoning on these particular words. Ok, cannon v. canon is understandable, but why go to the effort of writing out all those letters if one is going to get McGonagall wrong? Something like "McG" seems better in every way - more accurate, less effort to type. But obviously I'm thinking about this wrong in some way, given observed behavior.