Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 109

Gondolinian

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 109.

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:

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 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 109.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

… which is exactly what the mirror would say, if this were a parody of Eliezer-written Harry Potter-fanfiction.

(On the other hand, Eliezer frequently likes to play some pretty absurd things straight (the Comed-Tea induced Quibbler headline, the Yaoi fangirls, …), so … I’m not quite sure what to think. My estimate for P(the ending of HPMoR will be incomprehensible to non-LWers) just went up a bit, but not by much.)

I think the reason this looks like a parody is that it is not an original idea. Eliezer took it from here (http://lesswrong.com/lw/7jd/harry_potter_and_the_methods_of_rationality/4wqy), presumably because he thought it was funny.

Still, one could think there is not a huge difference between "heart's desire" and "coherent extrapolated volition" anyway, so it is not that unreasonable.