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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Can't perfect Occlumens protect themselves from mind-altering spells even when unconscious ?

I don't think we've seen any evidence of that in the story.

If you can just Obliviate even the most powerful Occlumens so easily, why didn't either Voldemort or the Order (Moody or Dumbledore) think about it and use that trick massively ?

For what purpose? If you've got your enemy at your mercy with their shields down, you either kill them, or you do something more useful with them (e.g. Imperius). I don't see what you'd get out of Obliviating them instead of either of those options.

Imperius isn't fail-safe, you can't Imperius strong-willed persons (at least not in cannon), I don't think you can Imperius Voldemort, Lucius Malfoy, Dumbledore, Moody, ... Even Harry can resist the Imperius in cannon.

And while it's true for the "bad guys", AK is more efficient than Obliviate, for the "good guys" who have restraints in killing (like Dumbledore and at least half of the Order of the Phoenix) using Obliviate on death eaters would seem much better than killing them or sending them to Azkaban. I always assumed they didn't do it because it wasn't that easy (long/delicate casting, don't work on Occlumens, ...) to wipe memories massively like that.