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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Then we should assign lower value to people the older they get. Yet it's typically considered worse to murder a very old person than a young adult. Do you disagree?

Personally I don't consider it really worse. In society in general, the murder of an eldery is usually considered worse because the eldery is weaker, but the accidental or "natural" (ie, disease) death of an eldery is considered much less bad than the same death of a young adult.

Everyone is equally unable to defend themselves against a gun, or a Death Eater with a wand. This may be relevant when you're talking about hitting someone, but not for murder.

It is not relevant for the murder itself, but it is relevant overall when considering how society protects people. Large-scale effects are often delt with broad heuristics (like deontology and virtues), and children being defenseless means a deontological injunction "doing harm to children is very very bad" being justified, and that injunction will apply to murder too, even if it's less justified there. Trying to exclude murder from the injunction will weaken it, make it much less of Schelling point, so overall I don't think it's something society should do.