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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

A possible Voldemort failure mode: due to them both being Tom Riddle, Voldemort's Horcrux network might accept Harry upon his death and somehow hurt Voldemort (leaving Harry able to coordinate others through Resurrection Stone). Killing Harry is either the next step of Voldemort's plan, or a possible move on Harry's part. Killing Harry seems prudent, alluded to in Ch. 108 and throughout in Harry's internal monologue:

"So use an axe, it's hard to get a prophecy-fulfilling spell backfire out of an axe," Harry said and then shut up.

"I decided the safest path was to try to fulfill the prophecy on my own terms," Professor Quirrell said. "Needless to say, the next time I hear a prophecy I do not like, I will tear it apart at every possible point of intervention, rather than trying to play along."

This time, the potential problem is not the spells used in the killing (where an axe would be a workaround), but the consequences of death governed by Horcrux 2.0. Problems with Voldemort's Horcrux due to some sort of interference (feint with Hermine) and also Voldemort's limited understanding due to insufficient testing were foreshadowed. A more careful plan might be to recreate the whole setup on disposable victims, together with infant copies that are grown up, and check how Horcrux 2.0 responds to the death of a copy who doesn't have a Horcrux of their own; and how it responds to a copy creating a Horcrux 2.0 of their own etc., while keeping Harry sedated somewhere in a way that wouldn't register as death.

Even after re-reading the horcrux stuff a couple times, I'm still confused.

There are two types of horcuxes, v1 and v2. v1 only captures your mindstate as it was at the time of creation. v2 updates all horcruxes to the current mindstate. v1s were hidden in the canonical places (diadem, slytherian's locket, etc), v2 in the hard to reach ones (mariana trench, pioneer probe).

After 10/31/1981, Tom's mindstate bounced around the v2 horcruxes. In 1992, Quirrell found a v1 horcrux ("one of my earliest"). How does that work? How can a v1, which hasn't upd... (read more)