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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

The following seems like a very obvious observation, but I don't recall seeing it made so far.

Tom Riddle Jr #1 (aka Lord Voldemort, aka Quirinus Quirrell) attempted to create an intelligent being in his own image, with the intention that it would share his values and cooperate with him in bringing about the sort of future he wanted.

This didn't go well, for reasons including (1) that Tom Riddle Jr #2 turned out not to share TR#1's values after all, and (2) that TR#2 developed new abilities TR#1 never suspected and that TR#2 was able to use against TR#1 when they happened to come into conflict.

Oh, and TR#2 might just destroy the world.

Application of all this to a problem Eliezer is known to be interested in is left as an exercise to the interested reader.

(The suggestion that Harry might be kinda like an UFAI has been made here before and my response was that Quirrelmort was a better candidate. But Quirrelmort is probably out of the picture at this point.)

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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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