Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 114 + chapter 115

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 114, and also, as a special case due to the exceptionally close posting times, chapter 115.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

I am glad to see that Stuporfy did the trick, and I did not see the Obliviate coming. My private (i.e. I would have posted it if I had more time/attention for HPMOR over the last two days and had vetted it) way to solve the Voldemort Problem would have been to time-turn him the violent way by shattering Harry's Time-Turner on him; but looking into it now it turns out I misremembered the scene of canon I was thinking of. (The shelf containing the Time-Turners gets bumped, and they all fall off, turning them- causing them to go back in time and fall again; I thought I remembered someone getting trapped in it. Perhaps that was an embellishment in the movie?)

I am not sure Harry has thought through what will happen to Voldemort. Will he be imprisoned? Killed? It seems like getting the person most likely to imprison him someplace other than Azkaban to be first on the scene is a better idea than just causing an explosion to attract interest.

But now Hermione gets to be The Girl Who Lived Again.

The shelf containing the Time-Turners gets bumped, and they all fall off, turning them- causing them to go back in time and fall again; I thought I remembered someone getting trapped in it. Perhaps that was an embellishment in the movie?

It was in the book, as I recall, but it didn't really make sense; Eliezer would never allow it.

9Jost11y

If I understand him correctly, H intends to keep V transformed until H is powerful enough to transform V’s body back to a healthy state (and make that permanent with the Stone). Imprisonment is a possibility after that, but depending on your views on the relation between identity and memories, this might not be appropriate after the obliviation.