Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 116

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 116.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

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 116.

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

How much security could one expect from a mental PRNG? Simple, RNGs go back many decades so Harry could use it easily if he knew of them and thought of the application, mathematically breakable but only with knowledge of the algorithms & more samples than Harry realistically ever needs...

Does it need to be pure mental ? In some cases yes, but if he has time to carefully write himself a note, he probably has time to roll dices or write number on pieces of paper, fold them, mix them, and draw one at random. Or take a random book and look at a random letter of a random page (using some correction algorithm to deal with the difference of letter frequency).

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 116

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Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 116

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