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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 mostly agree with the first part, and it's an important reason for which I didn't like the "final exam" concept, there is just too much we don't really know about how HPMOR world works. It's fine from a pure story-telling point of view, because we can assume Harry knows more about it than we do (he's living in it after all, he did read many books about magic, do many experiments, attend to lessons, ...) but it's not fair to ask us to outguess such things.

For the second part, I don't really agree. Think about the emotional state of Harry. He got through a very very stressy times, and despite all odds, he won. I must be feeling some euphoria for that. And at the same time, he killed dozens fo people. In self-defense, sure. But he, the anti-deathist just killed dozens of people. In such a situation, the mixing of euphoria of winning against all odds and the horror of having just killed, wondering what the future ethical transhuman civilization would do and think about all that feels totally appropriate to me. It's exactly what I would expect of Harry, the one who (re-)invented True Patronus.

wondering what the future ethical transhuman civilization would do and think about all that feels totally appropriate to me. It's exactly what I would expect of Harry, the one who (re-)invented True Patronus.

I concede this. I think I just don't like this part of Harry that much, but that is not the same as saying it's not in character.

The rest of my point remains, that after all all the pressure built up in the previous 8 chapters, this one is too relaxed and lacking in precautionary thinking.

It's fine from a pure story-telling point of view, because

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