Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 117

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 117.

Plans for next chapter release:

Ch. 118 will post on March 9th, 2015, at 12pm Pacific (7pm UTC).

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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 117.

Plans for next chapter release:

Ch. 118 will post on March 9th, 2015, at 12pm Pacific (7pm UTC).

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

One justification that I've heard is that a child has a longer life ahead of them. Kill a child, and you're removing 60 years of life and happiness from the future; kill an old adult, and you're removing 10 years. Another justification is innocence; although you specified that the adult is innocent, matching the innocence of a child is a tall order for an adult to reach, at least if you think of guilt as a cumulative effect.

I'm trying to answer ‘Why do people think […]’, not ‘Why is it true that […]’, which you didn't ask.

I'm pretty sure lifespan is just a justification, a rationalization, and not the actual reason people think that. If expected lifespan was the reason, people would treat healthy 20 year olds as more valuable than mature 50 year olds, and the oppposite is mostly true.

'Innocence' is more plausible. If a person alieves in a philosophy or theology that says people acquire guilt like bad karma, and it's OK (or more OK) to hurt them the more generalized guilt they have, then children would be hurt less. But again, on this theory you would expect older people to ... (read more)