Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, February 2015, chapter 112

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 112.

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 112.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

in canon it's relevant that their wands both have Fawkes's feathers in their core.

And since this fact is explicitly mentioned in chapter 6 (see quote below), I expect this to play a role in one of the future chapters. (“Law of Conservation of Detail”)

"It is very curious indeed that you should be destined for this wand when its brother why, its brother gave you that scar."

That could not possibly be coincidence. There had been thousands of wands in that shop. Well, okay, actually it could be coincidence, there were six billion people in the world and thousand-to-one coincidences happened every day. But Bayes's Theorem said that any reasonable hypothesis which made it more likely than a thousand-to-one that he'd end up with the brother to the Dark Lord's wand, was going to have an advantage.

Professor McGonagall had simply said how peculiar and left it at that, which had put Harry into a state of shock at the sheer, overwhelming uncuriosity of wizards and witches. In no imaginable world would Harry have just went "Hm" and walked out of the shop without even trying to come up with a hypothesis for what was going on.

(edited for formatting)

In canon it's fundamentally a coincidence; in story terms it functions as foreshadowing for the Horcrux reveal, but since Horcruces in canon don't seem to affect people's personalities or magic there's really no good reason for it, unless we want to grant wands magical Horcrux-detection powers that we've never seen elsewhere.

Here, though, Harry isn't just a vessel for Voldemort; he's actually a copy of the same soul. It makes perfect sense for the wands to be very similar, and it makes sense from an authorial perspective to emphasize that: it looks like an echo of canon in the event, but it's the sort of thing that enriches the story on a second reading.