Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 110

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 110.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 110.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

My assumption was that Harry dies in the explosion, as promised by Quirrell, and that Quirrell is momentarily staggered by the resonance.

I assume that Quirrell can't get out of the trap by abandoning his body, because otherwise he could just kill his current host to get out, and D would have anticipated at least that, if not Quirrell's ability to detach voluntarily.

But I liked the point about abandoning his body. No body => no reflection, and hence can escape. I'm not sure the words Dumbledore used precisely details the actual constraints, but would expect him to anticipate Quirrell's self termination as a ploy he had to contend with.

It’s impossible to be certain, since we don’t know the detailed mechanisms of two pieces of magic that are involved (each of which is highly non-trivial on its own).

My guess was that Voldemort would still be able to leave his body as long as the Process of the Timeless has not quite snapped into place (which did not happened until a few moments after Harry lost the cloak.) Leaving his current body voluntarily might take some time, if the descriptions of the Sphere-of-Stars-spell is any indication, so he might not be able to finish that process in time. (Ki... (read more)