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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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'm going to repost something I wrote in another bit of the discussion:

if people reason about V as an optimization process rather than a character, they will never be satisfied by V losing a duel because V is defined by his duel-winning property. So the only winning move is not to play, but there are satisfying ways for that to happen.

V has established that he is willing to try to intervene at every possible point when it comes to breaking the prophecy. So he would paralyze Harry, and take Harry's wand from him, and destroy Harry's wand. Especially in the context of V asking Harry to share secrets V doesn't have.

It seems to me the simplest place to intervene is the characterization of V. Have Harry, during one of his bleak "how the heck am I going to defeat V" moments (or possibly at the start of 114), remember what gattsuru talks about here. V is sharp but limited; Harry can use those limits against him. Then Harry surprising V makes more sense, and every idea Harry uses could explicitly be linked to one of V's weaknesses. (For example, Stuporfy works because V disdains dueling.)

Even then, I do not think it will work fully, and some readers will only be satisfied by a 'mutual victory' ending. I have in mind an ending that would work for that that I'll write up when I have time for fiction (tonight?), but it requires more changes earlier and may not match at all your goals for the fic.

(Incidentally, if I were in V's position and knew about Time-Turners, those could be used to add a further layer of security. I would precommit to Time-Turning back an hour and asking Harry to reveal his secrets in the presence of my original version iff Harry in fact revealed his secrets to the future copy of me that appeared and then died quietly; otherwise I would kill him immediately. This might violate the "use Time-Turners for arbitrary computation" rule, but I don't think so; it seems closer to asking Flitwick to rescue past-you, or the original Time-Turner prank, or a minor modification of it could move it into that class.)

Incidentally, if I were in V's position and knew about Time-Turners

I realized this morning that I should be clearer: obviously, V knows that Time-Turners exist. But does he know enough about their function to know exactly how the information-backpropagation prevention works, and which loops you can reliably create, and which ones you can't? That seems like the sort of thing that would require extensive experimentation that he may or may not have done.

0buybuydandavis11y

And intervening with the prophecy is about removing Harry as a threat. He only let Harry speak because he wanted his secrets. Got greedy and overconfident. Fine. But I see no reason Harry needs to have his wand to have that chat. Paralyzing him would be another precaution, but that would be secondary to taking his wand - without his wand, he's a very smart little boy. If an edit could be found to justify letting Harry keep his wand, I think that would do it for me. Hmmmm. On EY's new scenario, would magical paralysis automatically wear off if the person who cast the spell dies? Does Voldemort need his wand to leave his body? Seems a pretty hard row to hoe for even just a paralyzed Harry, to keep Voldemort from leaving his body or otherwise escaping.