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 95. 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, 21, 22, 23, 24.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
This is so contrived as to be almost silly, but I just realized that if you squint hard enough Sybill’s original prophecy might have referred to Harry as the Dark Lord and Quirrell as the one who “approaches”.
The “Defense Professor” is a persona, and in chatting with Harry Quirrell basically claims that he becomes whoever he’s playing the role of. The prophecy could interpret the creation of that persona as “birth”. “Mark” is ambiguous enough (in English it could just mean “notice”), and besides, the prophecy doesn’t say when he will be marked. And he certainly has powers Harry knows not; his weird doomy link with Harry (which we just learned gives him partial access to Harry’s mind) being only the most obvious example, and remarkable from the fact that Harry doesn’t seem to ever think about it.
Again, it’s quite contrived, but it could be a nice twist to pull on your readers, though I assign a very low probability that Eliezer would do that given his statements.