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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Why the 'true form' with the weird appearance? Unless perhaps that form came about via sacrificial rituals and thus must contain evidence of such sacrifices to retain power.

For whatever reason, Riddle seems to be planning to do some more stuff with his Voldemort persona; otherwise he wouldn't have summoned his Death Eaters etc. It follows that he needs to keep his pantomime-villain appearance at least in the short term, since that's what his followers expect.

I gather from the last few chapters (though I've suspected for a long time) that he didn't originally intend to look or behave like that long-term, that the form was chosen to match his deliberately over-the-top villain persona, but that he's stuck with it for the time being since the Death Eater thing has evolved beyond his expectations. Perhaps he'll eventually alter himself not to look like Nosferatu crossed with an extra from David Lynch's version of Dune, but that's something you'd want to do after you've reestablished your authority, not immediately after returning from a long absence and the decay of most of your network. Right now, the more Voldemort he can seem, the better.