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 113.
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.)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
IMPORTANT -- From the end of chapter 113:
This is your final exam.
You have 60 hours.
Your solution must at least allow Harry to evade immediate death,
despite being naked, holding only his wand, facing 36 Death Eaters
plus the fully resurrected Lord Voldemort.If a viable solution is posted before
*12:01AM Pacific Time* (8:01AM UTC) on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015,
the story will continue to Ch. 121.Otherwise you will get a shorter and sadder ending.
Keep in mind the following:
1. Harry must succeed via his own efforts. The cavalry is not coming.
Everyone who might want to help Harry thinks he is at a Quidditch game.2. Harry may only use capabilities the story has already shown him to have;
he cannot develop wordless wandless Legilimency in the next 60 seconds.3. Voldemort is evil and cannot be persuaded to be good;
the Dark Lord's utility function cannot be changed by talking to him.4. If Harry raises his wand or speaks in anything except Parseltongue,
the Death Eaters will fire on him immediately.5. If the simplest timeline is otherwise one where Harry dies -
if Harry cannot reach his Time-Turner without Time-Turned help -
then the Time-Turner will not come into play.6. It is impossible to tell lies in Parseltongue.
Within these constraints,
Harry is allowed to attain his full potential as a rationalist,
now in this moment or never,
regardless of his previous flaws.Of course 'the rational solution',
if you are using the word 'rational' correctly,
is just a needlessly fancy way of saying 'the best solution'
or 'the solution I like' or 'the solution I think we should use',
and you should usually say one of the latter instead.
(We only need the word 'rational' to talk about ways of thinking,
considered apart from any particular solutions.)And by Vinge's Principle,
if you know exactly what a smart mind would do,
you must be at least that smart yourself.
Asking someone "What would an optimal player think is the best move?"
should produce answers no better than "What do you think is best?"So what I mean in practice,
when I say Harry is allowed to attain his full potential as a rationalist,
is that Harry is allowed to solve this problem
the way YOU would solve it.
If you can tell me exactly how to do something,
Harry is allowed to think of it.But it does not serve as a solution to say, for example,
"Harry should persuade Voldemort to let him out of the box"
if you can't yourself figure out how.The rules on Fanfiction dot Net allow at most one review per chapter.
Please submit *ONLY ONE* review of Ch. 113,
to submit one suggested solution.For the best experience, if you have not already been following
Internet conversations about recent chapters, I suggest not doing so,
trying to complete this exam on your own,
not looking at other reviews,
and waiting for Ch. 114 to see how you did.I wish you all the best of luck, or rather the best of skill.
Ch. 114 will post at 10AM Pacific (6PM UTC) on Tuesday, March 3rd, 2015.
ADDED:
If you have pending exams,
then even though the bystander effect is a thing,
I expect that the collective effect of
'everyone with more urgent life issues stays out of the effort'
shifts the probabilities very little
(because diminishing marginal returns on more eyes
and an already-huge population that is participating).So if you can't take the time, then please don't.
Like any author, I enjoy the delicious taste of my readers' suffering,
finer than any chocolate; but I don't want to *hurt* you.Likewise, if you hate hate hate this sort of thing, then don't participate!
Other people ARE enjoying it. Just come back in a few days.
I shouldn't even need to point this out.I remind you again that you have hours to think.
Use the Hold Off On Proposing Solutions, Luke.And really truly, I do mean it,
Harry cannot develop any new magical powers
or transcend previously stated constraints on them
in the next sixty seconds.
Let's see. First off, let's consider the problem as thoroughly as possible without proposing solutions. Harry is surrounded by Death Eaters with orders to fire should he move, speak in any language other than Parseltongue (and probably if he makes any sound other than a hiss), raise his wand, and presumably if he does anything else suspicious (such as casting a visible spell without raising his wand or speaking an incantation). Lord Voldemort will presumably order his death (and likely shoot at him) if he does not appear to be complying with the instructions to tell the Dark Lord as many secrets as possible.
Therefore, he needs a countermeasure that can be used without giving any sign until it's too late, or a way to convince the Dark Lord of his cooperation, either to the point of making his continued survival valuable to Riddle Sr., or to the point of buying enough time to use a countermeasure.
Cooperating, or at least plausibly faking cooperation should be fairly simple. He can explain his understanding of Dementors, telling Voldemort that his desire to keep it secret was to prevent an infohazard to conventional Patronus casters; as Voldemort is not one such he will not be harmed by the information. He can explain partial transfiguration-it's not likely a difficult concept for the Dark Lord to grasp, but it seems to be one he hasn't thought of. Buying time is not a problem.
More difficult is what to do while/after buying time. He either needs that countermeasure, or else a way to convince Lord Voldemort that he is worth more alive than dead. As Voldemort fears existential risk greatly, the main way to convince him would be to point out that Harry is not the only source of x-risk, and that he very well may now be a means of reducing it. Prophecies are spoken to those with the power to fulfill or avert them, the "tear apart the very stars in the heavens" prophecy was spoken to Voldemort, suggesting that he might be able to alter the future, and may well have already done so (resurrecting Hermione, binding Harry with the Vow). As such, Harry is no longer necessarily a universal threat. Furthermore, he's not THAT special. He's highly intelligent and a wizard; that's about the sum total of his unusual powers, and it's hardly that rare of a combination (rare enough that we've only heard of one/two Riddle-level intelligent wizards in the story, but if Voldemort plans to live forever, another one will surely arise in the absence of dire action taken to prevent it and/or a catastrophe).
As such, if Harry could have destroyed the stars, another wizard will likely emerge as a threat to do exactly that. For that matter, depending on the method of stellar annihilation, it might be possible for a Muggle to accomplish this as well, or for Muggle actions to end the world as we know it (nuclear weapons, anyone?). Therefore, Lord Voldemort must either drastically repress Mankind to reduce x-risk (and this seems likely to be deadly dull for him, consider his horrified reaction to the possibility of spending his eternity in a dead world-he may not care about humanity the way a normal person does, but he finds us amusing enough to be worth preserving to some extent; also consider that he valued having an equal/near equal enough to make a copy of himself and dragged out his war with Dumbledore far beyond the point he could have easily beaten him, so suppressing intelligence and creativity for fear of their misuse is likely to be repugnant to Voldemort), be destroyed/spend eternity in a dead world, or find an intelligent solution to avert x-risk without taking drastic actions that make the world boring. The last of these options is the only one that Lord Voldemort seems likely to consider acceptable, and Harry might be a useful asset in finding a solution.
Alternatively, he could point out that the prophecy might refer to some form of apotheosis, rather than calamity. Tearing apart the stars for energy/to prevent the loss of negentropy, which seems like a reasonable post-singularity plan. Voldemort is unlikely to want to take the risk, but both of these arguments together might sway him, or at least buy more time. Of course, this may well require hearing the prophecy to learn enough details to craft a convincing argument, but the incident with Firenze might give Harry enough information to start without learning any more from Voldemort.
This might at least avert Harry's immediate death, and thus is one potential solution to Eliezer's challenge. The other option is to find a countermeasure.
The Boy-Who-Lived is naked save for his wand and glasses. Preempting/evading/deterring the Death Eater's curses seems impossible without magic, with suggests that a countermeasure would involve the wand and/or glasses. By the time he speaks an incantation, he will be cursed, suggesting that we need wordless, invisible magic (at least invisible until it's too late!)
Transfiguration is wordless, and Harry can even reverse transfiguration without a wand. Do we see any other spells he's capable of casting without words? If not, we're probably looking at untransfiguring his glasses-air can't be transfigured, and his wand isn't touching anything else. Unless there's a range on transfiguration? He's only done it before on things his wand has been touching, but that doesn't make any sense-the effect isn't limited to a one molecule layer that's "actually touching" the wand, and when you look at the quantum structure of objects there isn't a hard line between "contact" and "not in contact" anyway! That would allow him to transfigure the ground his wand is pointing at. He'd need a weapon or device that was too small to be noticed-possibly nanites or nano-scale line? That could allow him to strike back at the Death Eaters and/or threaten to do so, and explaining secrets/arguing for his continued existence as an x-risk mitigator should give him enough time to do so.
Nanites might provide x-risk in their own right, which means that the Vow might not allow it, but if he could limit them enough (cannot replicate, or can't replicate beyond a few generations?) he might have a shot. Or transfigure the ground into a gas-Harry'd be affected too, but he only needs to avoid immediate death, and if he can get the Stone, otherwise-fatal transfiguration poisoning could be cured.
On the bright side, touching Voldemort with anything magical (and transfigured material should count!) will trigger the resonance, and the Death Eaters are nowhere nearly as formidable as their master. We don't know the exact rules on the resonance, but if the "stronger magic means stronger backlash" theory is correct Harry might be able to incapacitate Voldemort while remaining upright himself.
The main difficulty with this approach is that even though Harry might be able to trigger the resonance with a fairly innocuous gas (heck, just make a little more air!), the Death Eaters would presumably fire the moment their master was affected. Poisonous/soporific gas would work on the Eaters as well, but it would impact Harry too-is there a substance so fast-acting that he could simply hold his breath/keep exhaling while talking to Voldemort, and then everyone inhaling would be dropped? I don't know of any gas that fast-acting, but if one exists it might provide another solution.
To sum up:
Potential solutions that I can think of-
Non-HPMOR related note-I found organizing my thoughts far easier while typing this than while trying to figure solutions out before. Has anyone else noticed a writing makes thinking easier effect, and could this be a useful technique?