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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Didn't Harry already point out that the time travel was not computable, and as a result it couldn't be a simulation? Although he didn't go to great lengths to prove that. He assumed that there was no force subtly manipulating events to make sure time travel is consistent. In fact, he is in a simulation run on the computer that is Eliezer's brain.

Time travel isn't fully computable, but that doesn't mean it can't be approximated, that you can't make hacks giving the impression of time travel to people inside the simulation.

It might even be possible that attempts to abuse time travel (like the one done by Harry at the beginning when he tried to factorize primes using the Time-Turner) raise an alert in the simulation, freezes the simulation until an operator manually inputs an acceptable solution ("don't mess with time" being the solution hand-crafted by the operator).

3Bugmaster11y

I don't know if he put it into exactly those terms, but a). Harry points out a lot of things that aren't true, like "you can't turn into a cat", and b). if the laws of reality are simulated, then they don't have to make sense; they could just be a giant "switch" statement somewhere in the Atlantean VM code.