More questions. I'll just gather them here, instead of making a new comment for each one.
1) Making horcruxes for your friends doesn't actually test the horcrux spell, you also have to kill your friends. So it makes more sense to test on a minion, which doesn't require you to be nice in the first place. Why didn't Quirrell think of that?
2) Why did Quirrell offer Hermione to leave before killing her? The plot against Malfoy wouldn't be served by her departure, only by her death.
3) If magical resonance can kill, why didn't it kill or otherwise affect baby Harry?
4) If Quirrell's problem is that he's bored and doesn't see the fun in anything, why didn't he solve that problem long ago by using mind magic on himself?
5) In Ch. 107, why not just call mind-controlled Snape and ask him to explain what's up with his room? Eliezer has said that wouldn't work because Snape is a perfect Occlumens, but Quirrell don't need to read Snape's mind, just threaten him and demand the truth.
6) Why kill Hermione to plot against Lucius? What's so difficult about killing Lucius to begin with?
Edited to add:
7) If Riddle wished for magical Britain to become more competent, why did he kill Yermy Wibble?
(1). What did you think about my argument here? That Quirrel couldn't think of a plan that started by teaching his most powerful and secret magic to a minion.
(3). Maybe the backlash is proportional to the strength of one's magic, so in Azkaban Quirrel was affected a lot more than Harry, and baby Harry wasn't affected at all. That matches the fact that Quirrel's new strategy for surviving such moments is to stop using magic, throw away his wand and abandon the very shape of a wizard.
(5). If he tortured or threatened Snape, he couldn't trust anything Snape m...
New long chapter! Since I expect its discussion to generate more than 160 comments (which would push the previous thread over the 500 comment limit) before the next chapter is posted, here is a new thread.
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 108
(and chapter 109, once it comes out on Monday).EDIT: There have now been two separate calls for having one thread per chapter, along with a poll in this thread. If the poll in this thread indicates a majority preference for one thread per chapter by Monday, I will edit this post to make it for chapter 108 only. In that case a new thread for chapter 109 should be posted by whoever gets a chance and wants to after the chapter is released.
EDIT 2: The poll indicates a large majority (currently 78%) in favor of one thread per chapter. This post has been edited accordingly.
There is 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.)
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: