Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 111

b_sen

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 111.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 111.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 scenario is the only explanation I can think of for why Voldemort is prioritizing Hermione's body over his own, giving Harry all his options back, advertising his moment of weakness, and generally behaving like a second-rate Hollywood villain. Confidence: 25%.

So, Voldemort has two approaches to the "prevent Harry from destroying the universe" plan. First is killing Harry, second is turning Harry away from destructive paths.

He might reasonably be uncertain of how the first plan will work. Harry is Tom Riddle, and that means killing Harry might just put him in the Horcrux system, and now Good Tom and Bad Tom are having a psychic battle instead of a physical or a magical one. Given that Bad Tom has the upper hand in physical and magical battles, being reluctant to fight a psychic battle instead seems appropriately cautious.

The second plan involves niceness, which Voldemort is not very practiced at. It does have the upside of having another sane individual to play chess with, and with Hermione keeping Harry from doing anything too crazy the stars are safe (indeed, safer, because now there's a second Riddle working to improve things). But, more importantly, because Voldemort hasn't tried this one much before, he doesn't know how and when to expect it to go wrong. So he makes rookie mistakes.

This would explain mistakes particular to being nice, like fortifying Hermione's body first, but it does not explain more general errors like letting Harry keep his wand and pouch.