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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Putting Harry into political power was certainly part of the original plan (spelled out by Quirrel in parseltongue, even), although I'm not sure if the rest of the original plan was "make Harry do all the work" (in which case why constantly try to make him less altruistic?) or "possess Harry and enjoy that power".

I'd assume the new plan must revolve more around "stop Harry from ripping apart the stars and ending the world", and indeed Voldemort confirms "all I have done, iss to ssmassh that desstiny at every point of intervention". But you'd think the new plan wouldn't be "1. Make it possible to kill Harry. 2. Leave Harry with his wand and tell him not to interfere with next moves. 3. ???" it would be "1. Make it possible to kill Harry. 2. Kill Harry."

(Random aside: we have someone named "Jossed" coming up with theories about fan fiction? That's marvelous. Or possibly morfinous; I've heard a rational world wouldn't have conveniently-coincidental names.)

Seems like this theory got jossed in chapter 113 …

3TobyBartels11y

Upvoted for random aside.