Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119
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 119.
Plans for next chapter release:
Ch. 120 will post on March 12th, 2015 at 12PM Pacific Time (7PM UTC).
The next long chapter will be Ch. 122, posting on March 14th, 2015 at 9AM Pacific / 4PM 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.)
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
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Comments (339)
Giving your life so that your student has a chance to turn the world into what you'd want it to be... I cannot imagine a better fate for a mentor. And potentially being revived to see the fruits of yours and his labor, what a bonus! If only Harry wasn't so rush and not irreversibly destroyed his teacher's identity without first thinking 5 minutes about it.
If only his teacher hadn't been Lord Frickin' Voldemort.
He is not the LV of the canon by any stretch.
Not sure how this version's supposed to be safer to keep.
Quite true, but he has enough in common with canon LV that keeping him unobliviated would be really dangerous. I think Harry made a pretty good decision.
Here is my prediction about the end of the story
Harry will cause the Singularity, transforming all people (and later all matter in the Universe) into a kind of immortal meta-human mind, similar to Multivax or Celestia. He probably even knows the first story as it appeared in 1956.
That would be CelestAI, and that would be a colossal screwup.
I didn't say Harry will turn everyone into ponies, nor did I mean an uncontrollable rogue AI which will upload people against their will by a loophole it considers that they have given their consent. It was just another example besides "The Last Question" of a scenario which will turn all the matter in the Universe into computronium, serving/supporting humanity.
He's already partially responsible for turning Hermione into a unicorn, and Hermione is a prototype for how he wants all human beings to be (immortal and invulnerable). As long as he replaces or drops the Horcrux portion of the ritual, this seems like a realistic final ambition for him as far as means of defeating Death are concerned.
No love for Emma Watson?
There is no way Emma Watson can get behind a story that angered feminists so much.
With good reason. Hermione was essentially stuffed into the fridge (warning: TV Tropes!) for half the story. The story is great, but there are completely legitimate feminist criticisms of how it went.
I read the whole "unicorn/troll/horcrux" part of Hermione's arc as the author's ironic contrition.
"Antifeminist, am I? Preposterous! LOOK HOW SHINY THIS PEDESTAL IS!"
So, what you're saying is that in any story, the female characters cannot die or otherwise its sexist? This is even worse than the 'I'm a feminist and a strong independent woman, therefore I can beat a man twice my weight in a fight, despite us both being trained' which keeps ruining TV.
What would have happened if Draco had died instead? Hermione's mother would have gone before the Wizimagot and demanded... oh, wait, nevermind. Guess we'd just have to abandon that entire plot arc.
No. But what has been noticed here is an aggregate pattern: female characters who die as part of an attempt by a villain to impact a male character. That's the classic fridging and that's exactly what happened here.
And it also really doesn't help that Hermione was a character who was trying to be a heroine and her death saved no one at all.
But its not an aggregate pattern in EY's work specifically. Harry has to be the main character, its in the title of the story. If any main character is going to die, its going to be a sidekick.
Part of the reason for fridging female characters in general could be that they don't play an active role in the story, but in HPMOR Hermione was playing a major part.
A second reason is that people care more about women than about men - that's why reports of disasters are often phrased "X died, including Y women and children". But this is sexist against men.
In short, if Hermione had served no purpose except to generate emotions in Harry, then I could see your point. But she played a major role, if anything being more independent than in canon.
It isn't an aggregate pattern in almost anyone's work: it happens in individual cases and adds up. The problem is made all the more severe because it is very clear that Eliezer is aware of all these tropes and issues.
Sure. What about Neville or Draco?
Sometimes. Look at the trope page- there's a large amount of variation on how much of a role they've played prior to fridging. Moreover, Hermione while she did play a role, she also had the least power boost of anyone in the story.
Sure, and obvious way of helping get rid of this sexism is not to reinforce it in stories by using gender as a quick emotional tug.
That's not to say that there were not legitimate reasons to have Hermione be killed, and from a "is this a reasonable thing for Voldemort to try to do" perspective it makes some sense (although it does indicate that he may not understand the importance of martyrs for how people think). But there were many other options, and again, her death wasn't even heroic, she saved zero lives and wasn't even in a position to save lives. When she's explicitly trying to be a heroine out of feminist ideals, and she then gets quickly killed, what does that look like?
Hermione was the smartest student in canon-- what would a thoroughly power-boosted Hermione look like?
That's a good point. But I imagine a more powerful Hermione would not only have a good memory she'd be able to use it. If Harry makes an offhand comment like
"Most spells are from garbled Latin" she should be able to say something like:
"Around 80% of First Year spells fit that description. I noticed it when I was looking at my textbooks and based on linguistic analysis I suspect that the direction is actually reversed: Latin was at some point heavily influenced by spellwords. Here's my data and the linguistic evidence."
But that doesn't happen even to that extent. We don't get her making any discoveries at all. Instead the power boosted Harry makes fundamental discoveries about potions and transfiguration and about casting the Patronus. Why can't Hermione make any on her own?
She's 11/12. Harry Potter is Tom Riddle who is 65. This is why Harry acts like an adult, including making discoveries, while Hermione acts like a very intelligent child.
The tricks with the Basilisk and the Proddian[sic] charm seem like they could have been adaptable to HPMoR, but at the same time, canon Hermione was older when she accomplished those things.
Even in canon, discoveries in potions were plainly not her thing, at least; see Half Blood Prince.
That's a good point. Fortunately, HPMOR is hardly the last Harry Potter fanfic.
I don't have a link offhand, but I recall EY stating his reasons for not boosting Hermione:
Sure. Those are all reasons to not boost the character as much as the other characters get boosted. But that doesn't mean any boost is a problem. It isn't difficult to imagine what a slightly boosted Hermione might do. I gave an example elsewhere in this subthread. But one can easily imagine other similar examples.
As I said, Draco tries to kill Hermione wouldn't work, because Hermione's family don't have the influence to send Draco to Akazaban, which starts the chain of events leading to the death. Neville isn't as important a charicter as the other two.
Ron and Hagrid have both been presented as imbeciles when they were heroes in canon.
What if its wired into us at the biological level because a tribe can repopulate after losing 90% of the men more than after losing 90% of the women?
Neville in many ways had more actual character development than Hermione. If anything, Neville's death would have been far more tragic if he had died trying to be a hero in the sense of having an impact on Harry. Neville is only at all heroic because of Harry. It would have been a far more emotional rebuke to Harry if Neville had tried trying to be a hero.
Sure, but Ron was an idiot in canon also, and there are literally multiple subgenres of fanfic to get Ron out of the picture because so many people dislike his character. See for example Ron the Death Eater (again standard TVTropes warning.) And Hagrid being an imbecile is simply taking the issues with the character already and putting them into a serious context where actually harming children might actually have a real response. This is for example parts of Wait, What? (which in its own way is a rationalist fic).
That seems very strongly like a just-so story. I'd be very interested in seeing some sort of evidence backing up that this sort of attitude is strongly cross cultural. There are other cross-cultural reasons this might happen but that would be the minimum level.
Note also that just because something is innate doesn't mean it is a good thing: that's most of the point of learning to deal with cognitive biases for example.
My point is that Ron and Hagrid were not upgraded, and as such I see no overall pattern where the males are upgraded and females like Hermoine are not.
I'm neither an anthropologist nor an evolutionary psychologist, so I can't say whether this is the case with high certainty. I'm also not saying its a good thing to have substantially higher empathy for females over males, but if biases such as this exist, then it does make fridging a little more understandable. Even if you consciously believes in gender egalitarianism, you're still running on what is, from your POV, corrupted hardware.
I don't think this line of analysis works for determining that a work is sexist. At least, it's not sexist in a problematic way (i.e. we need to get rid of it, or at least be aware of the sexism when reading it), it's sexist because the world we live in is sexist and it's practically impossible to write anythong non-sexist. Does HPMOR do anything to advance the condition of women? No, but neither does it do anything to adress racism, ableism, homophobia and plenty of other societal issues. That's not why the book was written. On the other hand, it has two strong female characters that have agency, and no female "characters" that are boobs on a stick, or a reward for the hero, or anything of the sort. Remember that EY was working from canon and could not exactly add plenty of important characters unheard of in the book. He already promoted Daphne, Tracey and (to a lesser extent) Susan compared to their role in the series (although I guess that's partially to make up for the lack of Ginny or Luna in Harry's first year). If your strongest argument to say a work is sexist in a problematic way is "a secondary female character dies without accomplishing anything", then I feel that's too strong a criteria. Hell, even in "Blue is the warmest color" (the book, not the movie, which was admittedly quite sexist in its direction), the main character dies a stupid death without ever having accomplished anything, and you'd be hard pressed to find that book sexist. In Worm, an important secondary female character is killed in an anti-climatic way by a villain we had almost never heard of until the chapter where he kills her. Is Worm sexist? I don't think so.
Well, I'm not sure what it means for a work as a whole to be sexist. So in so far as that doesn't seem well-defined I agree.
Hang on. Full stop. The idea that any form of sexism in a work means we need to get rid of that work is something I strongly, and fundamentally disagree with. No amount of sexism is a reason for censorship.
Possibly, but there are degrees of sexism, and there are issues when reinforcing certain sexist norms. I'd point out that for example, Brandon Sanderson Mistborn series is an excellent example of a series without any sexism issues in how the author approach things. And that's far from the only example.
Actually, racism is definitely addressed in the context of Muggles v. wizards, and homophobia has been addressed- see the point where one of the young wizards suspects that claims about homophobia in the Muggle community are an anti-Muggle slur. That was meant as a humorous aside but it was a clear dig at certain attitudes.
I agree that Eliezer did a wonderful job of promoting Daphne and Tracey. If he hadn't the situation would look very different.
But the argument isn't just that Hermione died without accomplishing anything, but rather that it was in a context where the male wizards (Harry and Voldemort) both received substantial power boosts, where Hermione was trying to be a heroine for feminist reasons, where people had already complained about feminist issues being treated poorly in HPMoR, and then having Hermione killed without accomplishing anything specifically because the villain desired it to have an impact on the primary male protagonist. It is that totally of issues that made this so bad.
But you claim that any "sexism" (however you define it) in the work is bad.
That's because reality is 'sexist'.
This is both an incredible strawman and not at all relevant to what's even being discussed. The article you linked to discusses that average human male is strength is higher than average human female strength. That's accurate and utterly irrelevant to the characterizations in question.
Heck, I'll even spot you that average male IQ is higher than average female IQ and that male standard deviation is higher than female standard deviation of IQ so there are more very intelligent males than there are very intelligent females.
Still wouldn't matter.
We are talking about A) giving people a power boost. B) that Hermione didn't get any boost even as other major players, not just Harry, but Dumbeldore and Draco did and C) that this is in the context of her being killed off ignominiously.
If you think your comment is at all relevant to any of these issues, I'd be very much interested in hearing an explanation.
HPMOR somewhat examines the automatic lack of respect adults have for children.
I would rather if she'd been more part of the last long chunk of the story. It's not so much that her death had a major effect on Harry as that she was taken offstage.
There is one long chunk left; I would wager that Hermione will play a significant role in it.
I hope so, but (ambiguity around "last") Hermione wasn't part of the most recent bunch of chapters.
Apparently I missed the existence of an internet argument.
Good.
Can you expand on what you mean? I'm not sure I understand.
I'm glad I had zero idea about there being some kind of internet-controversy about feminism in HPMOR. I hate internet-controversies.
The fact that Harry Potter is male is an unforgivable offense, natch.
I was going to ignore this comment when it was at -5. But it is now at +7. so I'll respond (although I have to note that this is an oddly rapid change in a comment of this nature).
So to be clear: absolutely no one here has made any argument that Harry being male has anything wrong with it. That's a complete strawman which is utterly irrelevant to anything under discussion. The problem is not that Harry is male. The problem in a nutshell is the portrayal of the major female character and her role in the story. Everyone got a power boost in the story but Hermione. Major characters get to make serious novel discoveries about things, but Hermione. And when Hermione, based on her explicitly stated feminist ideals tries to be a heroine, she is ignominiously killed off. That collectively is the problem.
That's because I'm not participating in this discussion which resembles a bar-room brawl much more than a reasoned conversation. I'm just pointing a finger (well, maybe sticking it up X-D) and laughing.
Please don't deliberately damage the signal to noise ratio.
So, this is the single change that makes this story an AU?
There seem to be much more changes, even that is probably the most important one.
Time Turners don't work the same (in canon, there is no hard limit on 6 hours, it just becomes exponentially dangerous if you try that), the Sirius Black/Pettigrew thing doesn't turn out the same at all, the Free Transfiguration stuff doesn't seem to work the same, ...
And as others mentioned, Voldemort is much more competent.
From chapter 1:
Well, that and the differences in the setting/magic (there's no Free Transfiguration in canon, for instance, and the Mirror is different - there are less Mysterious Ancient Artefacts generally - and Horcruxes run on different mechanics ... stuff like that.)
And Voldemort is just inherently smarter than everyone else, too, for no in-story reason I can discern; he just is, it's part of the conceit. (Although maybe that was Albus' fault too, somehow?)
As a point of interest, wasn't it Merlin's original intent that, at minimum, everyone mentioned in a prophecy should have access to it? It was only centuries later that the Unspeakables sealed the prophecy records away, so why does the Line of Merlin Unbroken have a function for bypassing that seal, how does anyone know this, and why is using it forbidden?
The Line may not - in ch 86 Dumbledore hints he got in via phoenix travel:
It's possible that the Line reference is misleading, but if so it is an odd piece of phrasing.
Right at the front of the whole fic he says this isn't SPoD.
I was thinking along those lines as well, but at that point in time Voldemort was already significantly different from canon.
It seems like the single change (aside from aspects of how magic works) is that Voldemort is more competent, which forces his enemies to level up and go to more extreme measures. Looking at every prophecy is one of those extreme responses, which then triggered a bunch of other changes relative to canon.
As is Tom Riddle. I imagine the point of divergence is in Tom Riddle's childhood somewhere, which pushed Albus into consulting the maze of the future, which...
Hey gwern, you scared?
Context?
Context seems to be here.
I'm also willing to put, let's say, $100 on the line at 5:1 odds that this isn't going to get a Hugo for Best Novel. (Best Fan Writer is far more feasible, though I'd still give it less than even odds if there's a push for it, and less than that if there isn't.) Reasoning: it's an atypical work for the category, which already steeply discounts it; it doesn't display any particular literary fireworks or great innovations in terms of setting or speculative fiction conventions, which is what the Hugos have tended to look for (historically more the later; lately more the former); and it doesn't have any particular following in, or ties to, literary SF fandom as far as I'm aware.
You could argue its significance for the fanfic form but that's going to be a tough sell to Worldcon.
(My actual probability estimate is more along the lines of 50:1 or lower, but I'm not prepared to go through that kind of trouble to win a couple of bucks, nor to risk thousands of dollars on the off-chance that someone knows something I don't.)
It's also not as good as most novels I've read.
I'm a fan, but if I were EY I would be worried about getting the nomination and then coming in under No Award. That seems a more likely outcome than somehow winning Best Novel.
Conditional on it being nominated at all, I think it would definitely beat No Award. Have a look at the raw stats from 2013 and 2014; for Best Novel, No Award gets crushed by everything. In 2014, for example, No Award got 88 votes out of 3587 ballots. In a world where MOR made it into the top 5 for Best Novel, it can definitely do better than that.
(Okay, yes, it happened to Vox Day, but that was for Novella, or maybe Novellette, whichever).
EDIT: On re-reading, I think this is a little misleading. The Hugo uses preference voting, so it's possible for No Award to beat some particular candidate even if almost nobody picked it in the first round of voting. You can see this in the data but my summary was too casual.
But like most other commenters, I don't think we do live in that world.
Not in the least. As the endgame plays out, I'm more certain than ever I'll win my bet against it winning a Hugo for Best Novel.
To have a chance of winning, MoR needed two things:
The ending is pretty good but not fantastic, and one of the few professionals openly praising it, David Brin, has cooled a bit on it (in part because he's a lazy reader and in favor of his own much more stupid ending, true, but cooled nonetheless), so it has been doing neither and, as it uses up chapter after chapter, sealing its fate. Should've taken my offer to sell the bet at a discount.
I'm not convinced that winning the Best Novel takes professional support, but I'm interested in your argument.
Some best novel vote stats
My guess is that HPMOR isn't going to win-- it isn't obvious that it will be permitted as a nominee. It's a work of fan fiction that doesn't have the original author's permission, and that's made some fans I've talked with nervous.
Other than that, we don't know yet what the rest of the field looks like.
My guess is that if HPMOR wins, it will be because a substantial number of people who wouldn't normally vote for the Hugos vote for it.
Ted Chiang's "The Truth of Fact, The Truth of Feeling" got a Hugo? Nice, I didn't know that!
Every single story Ted Chiang ever published is original, clever and extremely precise. Too bad he only publishes one short story per year. Check him out if you haven't.
This chapter did blow my mind, and it does greatly improve the overall story. But yeah, it needs the professional following; the awarders don't care what blew my mind.
Aww, so Dumbledore was the one who told Harry to look for Hermione on the train in chapter 6 :)
Huh? Harry thought it was McGonagall. What in this chapter changes that?
The narration in the passage is extremely suggestive that someone other than McGonagall was at work. Dumbledore and Quirrell used to be the main candidate hypotheses for who it was, until this chapter basically confirmed it was Dumbledore.
We do not know for sure. Here are the quotes:
from chapter 6
from chapter 8
It doesn't look really like her style though.
Hm, any particular reason, if Harry is already discussing other vulnerable info like having a transfigured Voldemort, he won't fess up to the part where Quirrel was Voldemort and that he won single-handedly?
I gotta say, I've been wanting to know what intelligent people like Moody and Amelia made of Harry's derp story, and hoping that it wouldn't turn out that "Eliezer wants us to believe that everyone in Magical Britain really is that stupid" - and I got precisely what I wished for. Great!
Harry's upper hand relies on the idea that Dumbledore knew exactly what he was doing, and them that Dumbledore hired Voldemort to teach children for a year would undermine that.
Incidentally, my P(Dumbledore knew about Quirrelmort) just went way up this chapter.
Ugh, I hope not. The closer a story gets to "actually, everyone knew everything all the time, it was all just acting all along and the audience was being lied to and otherwise misled constantly" the more pointless such a story becomes in retrospect. The tricks and maneuvers that impressed you at the time, the emotional reactions that used to engage you (like Dumbledore's surprise at seeing Quirrel before the Mirror) all turn out meaningless.
(Can you tell I didn't like Ender's Shadow all that much?)
I don't see why they're still worried about Bellatrix, it looks like she's been rendered mostly 'armless.
Hum, did Harry suddenly forget about Time-Turners ? Or is he afraid what will happen if people "abuses" from them with the Stone ?
The Stone takes 234 seconds. That's 86400/234 = 369 people/day if you have "normal" 24 hours a day. But if you have 30 hours a day, as you do with a Time-Turner, it's actually 461 people you can heal each day.
There's a limit on a person going back, but I don't know about things. So maybe a bunch of people with time-turners could hand off the stone.
If I remember well, it's not just "person", but information. I can't use a Time Turner to go 6 hours back to the past, give a piece of paper to someone (or an information to that person), and have that person goes back for 6 more hours.
So while it is an interesting hypothesis, it would require no information to be carried... and isn't the fact that the Stone still exists and works an information in itself ? Or that's nitpicking ?
You can't do that to send information back more than six hours. I don't think the limitation applies to sending it through the same six hours repeatedly, although that would explain the whole DON'T MESS WITH TIME thing.
My feeling is things that are overwhelmingly likely do not get treated as information. For example, Harry's clothes go with him, but "Time" doesn't consider that to be information of his clothes still existing. It feels like that there's a Deus ex Machina aspect to how "Time" works and deals with information. Sometimes when you try to time-turn you just encounter Paradox.
So based on that I'd predict that if you try to time-turn with intention to get more uses out of the stone, you will encounter Paradox.
Then when someone says "I have information from 6 hours in the future", that would be information in and of itself. It means that 6 hours in the future life is still sustainable.
Magic doesn’t think of “information” like you do. Magic doesn’t work the way you expect it to work. If you suggest that it should, Magic will just look at you queerly, shrug its shoulders and continue to work the way wizards expect it to work. It’s "Oogely boogely!" all over again.
And yet Dumbledore doesn't treat such a statement as information about the future when using his Time-Turner, which suggests that maybe the 6-hour limit is something you can think your way around.
Or that it works like magic does which seems to be not very careful about pesky things like rigorous notions of what constitutes information in the same way that brooms can work off what amounts to pseudo-Aristotelian physics.
I figured that the two were equivalent. If we find something that magic does not consider information (but we do), we can use it to receive information from an arbitrarily far future.
For example, suppose that magic does not consider merely "Does a timeturned person show up at time T at this location or not" to be information, and we want to know if the world ends in the next 10 years.
Four people with time-turners agree to the following scheme (using Unbreakable Vows if necessary):
Also, they make sure that in case of anything not world-ending, they will have a substitute available so that the chain will not break.
After agreeing to this, if Alice sees Dan appear out of nowhere at 12:01 AM tomorrow, then they know that the world has not ended. If not, then something sufficiently bad to cause the chain to break must have happened in the next 10 years. (Either way, they must continue to implement the plan for as long as possible.)
Using further chains of Time-Turners, we can use our favorite unbounded binary search scheme to narrow down a more precise date for the world ending.
(Edit: actually, we can probably improve the resolution simply by using the Time-Turners at a different specified time depending on circumstances.)
I think this is taking "6 hour limit" way too literally, when by far the simplest explanation is that time turners can protect you against Time's tendency towards simplicity for 6 hours or so, but if you try to chain that, it becomes overwhelmingly computationally simpler (and therefore more likely) for the intention to set up such a chain to result in the death of everyone involved, than for the chain to work as designed.
I don't know how often Eliezer reads either these threads, or the ones on r/HPMOR. If he reads them often enough, hopefully he'll take great considerations like this one, and create a bonus or omake chapter in which Harry thinks all the best suggestions through. It would be of great service to us fans.
My guess is that he ignores this site completely these days, except for the Main posts, so better post what you want him to see there. Also, he replied to this particular point in r/hpmor.
About 10-15 chapters ago he responded in these threads to a similar "he doesn't read this anymore" comment. I think what he wrote was something like, "ahem"
"There's no way in hell or double hell- " - Mad Eye Moody
See! Double hell is real. Its where double witches go, twice.
Best-written chapter of this year, easily. Eliezer, congratulations on the good work :-)
+1, yeah, great chapter. As Harry says, sometimes "that explains it" doesn't fully cover it.
I liked this chapter a lot too, though I liked 108, 111, and 115 a similar amount.
From chapter 38, when Harry buys the Quibbler:
EDIT: Then,
Which is also true, because of Voldemort inside him. Which leaves....
Note that using the stone for human transfigureation, he can perform sex changes.
Boy-who-lived gets Draco Malfoy pregnant?
I remember I enjoyed reading Luminosity/Radiance a lot less on second reading, once I knew how it ended. The same thing was true for Friendship is Optimal.
I am starting to wonder if the same thing will happen with HPMoR, once I read the last chapters. It's like there's something about story endings written by transhumanists....
Interesting. I'm waiting to go and reread all of HPMoR from the start once it is done.
But there may be a substantial issue here: once one has that sort of ending everything else in the story may feel trivial in comparison. To test this it might make sense to look at books with similar sort of endings that aren't written by transhumanists. Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End might one to look at. How did people feel about rereading it?
Haven't read it, putting it on my list now.
Upon some reflection, the reason I liked Luminosity less on second reading seems to be at least partly that the protagonist started as a relative underdog (sympathetic) and ended up as dominant authority, one effective in their dominance to an oppressive degree, enforcing her ideas on everything and everyone. This moved me out of "yay, rationalist fiction, let's get into it from the pov of the protagonist" into a third person view... from which I started noticing how freakin' obnoxious rationalist!Bella is. Poor Edward.
I eventually rethought whether Childhood's End had a happy ending. It seemed as likely that the human race was eaten as that it transcended.
Some other candidates for discussion: The Cosmic Rape by Theodore Sturgeon and The Persistence of Vision by John Varley.
There's actually some explicit discussion of this in Worm's epilogue. That story had a relentless ramp of challenges always getting larger and larger until they were as large as possible (and then the story ended), but it was more of nireg n artngvir fvathynevgl naq gura yvir n abezny yvsr, vafgrnq bs oevat nebhaq n cbfvgvir fvathynevgl naq gura yvir n fgenatr yvsr.
Well, to be fair to Friendship is Optimal, the ending was in no way a twist. We even get to see Hanna planning it. So I dunno, it's okay on reread for me.
My bet is that the last bit will be polyamory in the epilogue.
That is probably what Eliezer was referring to as the epilogue stomping all over everything.
I want canon Harry/Hermione/Draco/Luna. :<
No-one in their right mind would bet against that.
But the betrothal has to have occurred before it was mentioned.
Man, that's beautiful. What does Bellatrix Black want most, that Harry can offer?
She wants Tom Riddle to love her.
Adding to my previous prediction comment:
Predictions: (I'll have to score them all after the epilogue is released, but hey, it means we get an epilogue.)
The "phoenix’s egg" password will (directly or indirectly) allow Harry to find Narcissa Malfoy. 70%
The Line of Merlin feeds information to its rightful holder when they’re holding it. 60%
At least one Legilimency conversation occurred during Chapter 119. 90%
Speculations:
What happens if Harry casts the True Patronus through the Elder Wand? Given that it’s a Deathly Hallow that raises the priors of something interesting happening with a spell embodying a preference for life over death, but with the "sense of strength and constrained danger, like a leashed wolf" Harry feels when holding it I’m not sure what the effect would be.
Responding to various people who have suggested that if the vow had some particular meaning: Harry might think of ways to get out of it or to get around it: This is not a thing-that-Harry-Potter-Would-Do. The only reason for trying to get out the vow would be in order to allow for the possibility of risking the destruction of the world (whatever this means), and the vow prevents Harry from allowing this risk. So it would directly prevent any attempts by Harry to get out of the vow, including attempts to get others to set up a dead man's switch or whatever.
This also implies that his Vow did in effect modify his terminal goals, as some have already suggested.
Wait a moment. I just realize that Voldemort has been made into a gem meant to contain his soul. He has been made into soul gem. Goddamn it Eliezer.
... You know, if I had had to predict which character would end up as a magical girl, Voldemort would've been at the bottom of my list...
Prediction: people who aren't Harry can use the stone once every 216 seconds (3:36).
(The idea being that the rule is "400 times a day" and Harry has a 26hr day.)
That is a very interesting suggestion. What probability do you assign to it?
Harry's sleep cycle has been adjusted to a 30-hour day in Chapter 65, in the same way that Dumbledore had previously adjusted it to a 26-hour day.
I think "Britpicking" is the appropriate term, but "crap" is an incongruous word for Moody to keep using the way he does. "Crap" as an interjection is a very American-sounding usage.
I noticed that too--I'm not sure what it is with Moody, but in an earlier revision of Chapter 97 he'd ended the chapter by saying "what the crap--" (it's now been changed to "WHAT -"). It's unclear if EY edited the earlier chapter because it wasn't very British or because it seemed out-of-place, but for whatever reason, he's saying it again now.
How does Harry think Hermione will figure out how to cast the true patronus? She needs to figure out that dementors are magical manifestations of death, which Voldemort / Dumbledore / loads of smart wizards seem not to have done. Did he tell her, is is he planning on telling her, or something else?
In Chapter 46, he gives her a sealed note containing the explanation.
One bit that feels unsatisfying is the complete underreaction to Harry's "oh btw Voldemort's alive, here, I brought him with me."
I immediately thought of a scene in the Eye of the World:
While that would be an over-reaction in the HPMoR scene, at least there should be, well, some reaction to discovering that Harry is wearing the biggest threat of their time on his finger.
What happens when Hermione finds she's getting credit for a heroic action she didn't do?
I find it funny that Dumbledore's efforts to subvert prophecies for his own ends resulted in something directly opposed to his claimed values. I wonder if that's a direct attribute of prophecy, or just coincidence, or both.
What's the something? He seems to have successfully caused Harry to defeat Voldemort
Dumbledore is fundamentally Deathist, and not only has he personally been locked out of mortality by his own trap, several of his interventions (most obviously killing a pet rock) were less related to making Harry oppose Voldemort effectively, and more into making Harry the sort of person that would promote transhumanist ideas including anti-Deathism.
Do we know that? Like we just got a reveal that HUGE portions of his life and actions were based on deliberately obfuscating what he believed and wanted to do.
Possible, but Dumbledore's discussions of death and mortality in chapter 39 seemed like he was trying to avoid becoming Harry's Mentor/Opponent -- ie, if he were trying to manipulate Harry with this deep emotional reveal, he'd have done so in a different way. He continues to treat death as a normal matter in chapter 110, even though he doesn't believe Harry to be nearby and does believe that the only listener will not be able to communicate his position to Harry, and Quirrelmort says that he'd expoused such positions long before he had access or cause to access the hall of prophecies.
If you can come up with a plausible reason why Dumbledore would pretend to be Deathist, I would love to hear it.
I think gattsuru is referring to global immortality, as Dumbledore is a Deathist.
Ok, so the Vow is definitely still in play and has not been resolved trivially. My estimation that the ending is going to be awesome has increased. I was a little worried for a few chapters.
Eliezer is planning an epilogue that takes place during the protagonists' 7th year at Hogwarts. It seems fairly safe to infer that by the end of chapter 122 Harry will not yet have torn the stars apart and gained root access to the Source of Magic.
[EDITED to add: On the other hand, there's a reasonable chance that we get to see Hermione taking out a lot of Dementors. That might be a bit awesome.]
For me, this has been the best chapter since the spade of updates in the last few weeks began. I mean, the one weekend where we needed to solve the Final Exam was the most gripping and exciting part for me. However, once that ended, especially with it only being a mere moment in canon, I felt as though the rest of the pieces fell into place as we would have expected. This chapter really struck me as thematic of earlier chapters, the ones which really drew me into this story, like the first time Harry imagined defeating death and killed a Dementor.
Harry has to some extent undone the work of Merlin. Merlin's interdict ensures that the most powerful magics slowly die out of the world as wizards and witches die with their secrets. Harry's scheme for immortality in the magical world puts a stop to the losses, and allows magical knowledge to be kept as it is re-discovered, however slowly. Previously the loss rate exceeded the discovery rate. I think that is about to be reversed. And the Interdict of Merlin was put in place to avoid a prophesied destruction of the world.
Ch. 80
Recent chapters make me wonder what "and his time" really means, as well as "the world and its magic."
I can understand destroying the world, but how can the Interdict make the loss of the world's magic less likely? Actually, are "magic" and "the world's magic" likely to refer to the same thing? Is the source of magic a physically embodied thing, and if so is it on Earth?
But then, Dumbledore seemed to think, after listening to all the prophecies, that the end of the world was inevitable, and that the optimal goal was not about preventing it.
I'm not sure if it's appropriate to also discuss the authors notes, but one solution to Eliezers writing obstacles is to publish under a pseudonym. Or why might that not qualify?
His explanation on Reddit is that his style is too distinctive to go undetected.
Hm. That's indeed plausible. More so in our age where software can reliably detect authors reliably based on their writing fingerprint. I wonder what will become of pseudonyms in the future.
Link, please? I seem to be failing at Google.
The last time I saw "writing fingerprint" software it was being used to "prove" that The Book of Mormon's purported authors were real, in a study whose designers clearly would have failed at the 2-4-6 task. I'm afraid I tossed the idea in a mental box alongside "phrenology" after that.
The useful words are "stylometry" and "authorship attribution".
The last time I read about this was here:
https://www.cs.drexel.edu/~sa499/papers/adversarial_stylometry.pdf
A quick google (for stylometry, fingerprinting) results in summaries e.g.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/software-helps-identify-anonymous-writers-or-helps-them-stay-that-way/?_r=0
Thank you both!
For one, it would mean he could never talk about his work "as himself", e.g. on Facebook or Reddit, unless he wanted to set up and constantly use dummy accounts, which is both time-consuming and sometimes in violation of site T&Cs.
Wizards seem to be overly skeptical of the information that they get from their magical detection spells, an analogue to what some muggle scientists call algorithm aversion. (As evidenced by the current confusion about Hermione's nature, and the lack of response when the wards previously identified The Defense Professor as her killer.)
This means that scheming wizards who want their plots to go undiscovered don't need to trick the magical detection spells, they just need to pursue strange enough plots so that other wizards won't believe what the detection spells tell them. Which makes Voldemort's creative uses of magic analogous to Dumbledore's ploy of pretending to be crazy.
When a magical detection spell says that a human is really a unicorn, is it likelier that the spell is accurate or that whatever Dark ritual fueled Hermione's resurrection has residual effects that interfere with the usual function of said detection spell?
It's not clear for the wizards what it's supposed to mean that Hermoine is a unicorn.
Well they know unicorn blood is a magical means of prolonging life, so it should make them suspect it was involved in the ritual that brought her back, if nothing else.
Excellent chapter! The last few were a bit short, but this one more than made up for it!
I really hadn't seen the twist with Dumbledore coming. I am really, really, really glad that Dumbledore turns out to be sane after all. I really liked Eliezer's take on Dumbledore. I was convinced he was much saner than most people believed, but I couldn't figure out what game he was playing either.
The reference to Harry's pet rock was brilliant. This story clearly has been planned out long in advance.
Heh. From Chapter 17:
What is a wibbler by the way? I google it and all I get doesn't make sense.
I think it's a mix of a wobbler and a wibble, the latter mostly in the metasyntactic variable sense :-)
This seems like Amelia misplaying her cards for no good reason. I would expect her first to ask Harry what the ghost would tell her before accepting that she prevents the ghost from anchoring. Especially if she wants to test Harry political skills it would make sense to push him harder.
I would expect her to first ask the ghost before mentioning its existence to Harry.
Might just be indications of one in magical instrumentation without an actual conversation being possible yet.
From the exchange it's not clear whether the ghost actually exists or just a rhetorical maneuver.
Even she is aware that when a powerful wizard tells you to do something as part of keeping a dark magic ritual secret, you do what you are told.
Keeping it secret to the public makes sense on the other hand keeping it secret to the order of the phoenix is a different matter.
You keep secret without asking from people who are your equal or higher than you in status. If you get asked by someone lower than you to keep something a secret than you at least want to know the secret yourself.
In this setting, there are things you avoid learning even if you're higher status than the secret-keeper. Some secrets are dangerous even to the listener.
I suspect Mrs. Bones includes anything rising from a fragment of Voldemort's torn soul, whether the trick that decapitated dozens or revived an ancient dark lord, in that set. Part of the reason she distrusts Harry is that she believe he's an eleven-year-old struggling with a dark spirit -- which gives him a comparative advantage of knowing what evils needs must be kept under wraps
She knows it killed all the death eaters and that it doesn't even register as magic on their wards. That's somethjng she couldn't do. And it's thh kind of dangerous weapon she might think should be a secret to everyone.
I read Harry's suggestion not to investigate, and her responding smirk, as indicating that's it's already tacitly understood that the good guys actually killed the death eaters somehow. This room seems likely to be pretty ok with that, maybe except McGonagall.
Yes, but she's likely to be interested in how it happened. Allowing the 11 year old Harry to keep it a secret towards her means to give up power to Harry.
Keep in mind that Amelia herself is a powerful witch, and thus "you are not meant to know" is kinda-sorta expected in those circles, and a most valid excuse for basically anything weird or unexplainable.
It depends on trusting the judgement of the other person. Otherwise it doesn't seem like she trusts Harry.
Two quotes that are scary together:
"There can only be one king upon the chessboard. There can only be one piece whose value is beyond price. That piece is not the world, it is the world's peoples, wizard and Muggle alike, goblins and house-elves and all." - Albus Dumbledore
"I shall not... by any act of mine... destroy the world... I shall take no chances... in not destroying the world..." - Harry Potter
Harry is unfriendly. When it comes time for harry to choose between saving all the people and a small chance at saving the world, you will all learn to regret helping him get out of the box.
In the text, they made it clear that the vow was based on the meaning of the words and not the words itself. V said that it was important that everyone understood the meaning.
Harry would not consider star lifting or terraforming or the creation of a virtual world at the expense of the actual one to be 'destroying the world'. He would considering 'destroying the world' to mean 'the ending of all life' or somesuch.
I think there is evidence that "magic" has natural language processing and is capable of taking context and intent into account. I don't know that Harry wouldn't be unable to interpret distorting the world as killing everyone. Particularly dice the person he gave the vow to was particularly concerned about and motivated by the death of people (or at least of one specific person).
So you mean that Voldie screwed it up AGAIN when he tried to mess with a prophecy? Man, some people are simply not meant to hear prophecies.
On the other hand, the Vow did not change Harry's terminal goals. While he may not work to undermine the Vow itself, it is possible that before coming to the horrible realization that he has to protect the world above its people, he lets enough slip to other so that they may find a way to remove the Vow (or put him back in a box). Also, the Vow has some loopholes:
If Coscott is right about the Vow protecting "the world" and not "its people", then it very much did change Harry's terminal values.
The intended meaning of the three persons making the vow have to match, or the Vow won't work. And I think that two randomly chosen Death Eaters, who have absolutely no idea that people could survive without the Earth, who don't even suspect that there's been manned spaceflight, would indeed think that "the world" is "the Earth".
OK, I misspoke. It did not change what Harry feels are good terminal values. He may not in any way choose to assist (even by being passive) someone who would want to change that terminal value, but as long as he has not realized what Coscott may have realized, then letting people with terminal value "make sure human life goes on" know about this Vow will not be in conflict with his Vow. They can then come to their own realization. Basically Harry is unfriendly, but he's not intelligent enough yet that he can predict the outcome of every action like, say, Celestia does. He can still accidentally out himself and be dealt with.
But the last part (when to ignore the Vow) depend only on Harry and Hermione's subjective evaluation. So what the Death Eaters think is not really in question.
Yes. I though that Harry's Unbreakable Vow was the perfect vehicle for EY to show the dangers of UFAI, but it doesn't look like he is going that way.
Harry, hurry up and read the instructions Voldie left you. You know, find out what dark sacrifice is needed before you make plans to revive Hermione yet again. If it requires a human sacrifice you might consider pacing the dementors out.
Indeed. Harry raised his hand against his mentor, the one who made him, the one he loved (‘Harry was in love. It would be a three-way wedding: him, the Time-Turner, and Professor Quirrell’), and was the cause of Dumbledore's downfall. Only, Dumbledore did not realize that he and Harry's mentor does not need to be the same person.
But didn't he note in the confrontation in the Defense Against the Dark Arts class that Harry had chosen Quirrell as his Wise Old Wizard?
Dumbledore's comment in his note just don't seem congruent with this comment earlier on, and it's this comment and not the note which seems congruent with reality.
To be fair, we don't know when he wrote the note.
"Girl-Who-Revived" is... not a very euphonious phrase, is it?
How about “Girl-Whose-Name-Contains-Too-Many-Hyphens”?
Hyphens? Just call her minus X-D
How about "Unicorn Troll Jesus"?
I would have preferred Girl-Who-Returned.
"Girl who came back".
Better than "Undead" X-)
I like Undead. "Hermione the Undead" ^^
The first two diagnostics are correct. If the third one is correct too, then Hermione is a perfect philosophical zombie now.
Not, it's much more akin to Dennett's "Where Am I?" or to becoming meguca.
The third one is simply a reference to the horcrux 2.0 that contains part of her soul.
I like "The Girl Who Lived Again".
Eliezer is going for broke on the requests here. Well, this is the chapter do it! I find myself wishing that I knew somebody famous, just so I could be responding to his pleas. Let's save the world, people!
I can't remember, what was respectively in the Phoenix's Price and Phoenix's Fate rooms. I though both were passwords for the broken wands and similar things, but the narration implies otherwise. I also wonder what will be in the Phoenix's Egg room. It can't be prophecies (which could otherwise be the obvious choice), and I don't think Dumbledore had the foresight to store frozen brains of wizards who died so that Harry could resurrect them.
Narcissa
"Phoenix's Price is the password that opens the stairwell to the room with broken wands, pictures and Pensieve vials. Phoenix's Fate is the password that opens the final door into that room. Both times Dumbledore takes Harry to the room, he speaks the first password, then the second.
Phoenix's Price room held broken wands and other miscellaneous items reminding him of each of the friends he's lost in his battles.
I think Harry should start requiring unbreakable vows for people using transfiguration. He also should hurry with colonizing other planets and moons, in case someone does transfigure something they shouldn't.
Transfiguration will get more powerful once they have some interesting material science classes. Having mass limits isn't much of a problem when you start transfiguring stuff into super-light nanotube-reinforced titanium nantorusses.
Honestly I think you just have to throw up your hands at the Unbreakable Vow. Nothing about Wizarding society makes the slightest bit of sense once you realize that they have the Unbreakable Vow. It wouldn't look like it does.
The unbreakable vow is basically giving people the death penalty with no way to ask for any kind of exemption due to unforeseen circumstances. It's not something to be used lightly. Also, in Methods of Rationality someone permanently has to lose some magic, which is also something not to be used lightly.
Hence the example I suggest - whatever price the Unbreakable Vow exacts, there will be things that are worth it, like not going to Azkaban.
Except people are cruel and many of them would rather see criminals in Azkaban than living a relatively normal life. Although to be honest, making criminals chose between Azkaban and the last part of A Clockwork Orangeis pretty awful already in my opinion.
People precommit to punishing criminals because having a precommitment discourages crime--if the criminal can figure out that you'll change your mind once the crime is over with, and not punish them, the prospect of punishment won't work as a deterrent. But if you have to follow through on the precommitment, that may mean you just "cruelly" punished a criminal "even though at this point causing the criminal harm doesn't benefit anyone".
Most people don't consciously think of it this way, but people don't usually know why their own memes spread.
The thing, if no wizards are dying any more, how do you get those Unbreakable Vows in any ethical way?
If a wizard wants the P Stone Treatment, they have to agree to two things: To sacrifice a little magic as part of the Vow of another and to take a Vow themselves.
A very brief oath, so everyone ends up sacrificing some power, but it's not a crippling loss.
<gaming>Since everyone is doing it, you can define a single one-syllable word for the full content of the oath, make sure everyone knows what it means, and then begin using that.</gaming>
I got the impression that there were already healthy wizards who would perform Unbreakable Vows for enough money, and the thing about using terminally ill wizards was just Harry's idea to do it more efficiently.
It's less ethical if they are going to live with slightly less magic for eternity.
I was under the impression that said Wizards had their Magic for the Vow extorted out of them by the Noble houses which had both vastly superior wealth and the ability to make them broke. I can't imagine someone willingly giving away their magic unless they had no real choice in the matter. It would be similar to giving away your legs.
So Dumbledore killed Harry's pet rock. Best twist ever.
I did find that reference quite amusing. I had assumed Harry was being sarcastic in chapter 6:
Nah, in chapter 33 we have Harry irrationally worried that Hermione is dying rather than just Somnium-ed:
(Which had me in stitches.)