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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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)
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...
I was thinking of this. Note that the Soul Gem is green...
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.)
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.
That is a very interesting suggestion. What probability do you assign to it?
Why is Harry special? His sleep cycle? Anybody can use a time turner.
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.
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....
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.
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.
Man, that's beautiful. What does Bellatrix Black want most, that Harry can offer?
She wants Tom Riddle to love her.
Aww crap
My bet is that the last bit will be polyamory in the epilogue.
No-one in their right mind would bet against that.
That is probably what Eliezer was referring to as the epilogue stomping all over everything.
I want canon Harry/Hermione/Draco/Luna. :<
But the betrothal has to have occurred before it was mentioned.
The kid part of him with Hermione, Luna, and Draco; the adult part of him with Bellatrix?
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 :-)
"There's no way in hell or double hell- " - Mad Eye Moody
See! Double hell is real. Its where double witches go, twice.
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.
Saying nothing is a reaction. We're talking about poeple who knows how to keep their reactions shut down and seems to have secret agenda to hide from each other. They underreact also about Harry's being Tom Riddle Jr.
I don't think Moody is trying to keep a poker face here.
You're right, I just re-read it, and there is other passages where they react a lot more. I guess the silence is a way to show their astonishment and perhaps remains of disbelief.
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.
I think you are right. I hadn't considered that, and I don't think Harry has either, but while Harry was thinking that "destroying the world" meant killing all the dudes, the Death Eaters were thinking of the ground blowing up, and there were two of them, so their interpretation probably prevails.
As further evidence that the vow blocks killing all the people consider this.
The vow blocks Harry from telling muggels about magic and starting mass healing. At the time it blocks him the ideas he thought of were transfiguring nuclear weapons and plagues that could replicate before the transfiguration wore off. Neither of those poses any danger to "the world" but they pose great danger to the worlds people. Harry doesn't think of up quarks until after he has already been blocked. So the vow seems to be interpreted as killing everyone being the end of the world. Which is quite possibly how Harry understood it.
He also thought of antimatter, negatively charged strangelets, black holes, and up quarks, any one of which could, potentially, physically destroy the Earth.
Note also that if the vow interprets the words to mean the physical Earth, then future starlifting Harry could make a replica Earth and move all the muggles there, then tell them about magic.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
Right, but she didn't have a reason to look at the note before she died, doesn't have the note on her person in the hospital, and even if she did she doesn't have a reason to look at the note now.
I'm not sure what you're arguing against. In the event that she decides to destroy the Dementors, which Harry anticipates to happen quite soon, she knows that the information she needs to be able to do so is already in her possession.
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.
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.
I don't see why they're still worried about Bellatrix, it looks like she's been rendered mostly 'armless.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
He also made no fewer than four posts just a few threads ago, and one in the thread after that.
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.
I'd been wondering that forever.
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?)
Gwah! Dumbledore, Best Hero.
The more I come back to this story, the more I like him, and I had felt he was well written to begin with. There are moments I find not just believable but moving, like after Harry rejects his phoenix:
It always stops me when I get to that part.
And there were ones that were moving in a not-sad way, like his talking about all the Tolkien copies he's received and how he treasures them. I remember that bringing a real smile to my face.
Hopefully the apparent time limit on the Philosopher's Stone isn't going to get worse over time. Harry also hasn't considered that it may only be good for some finite number of permanent transfigurations. He's going to try to use it many more times than it probably has been used in a very long time.
Good point. A time limit of 3:54 does seem too arbitrary to be hard-coded.
At least he only intends to use the Stone as a stop-gap measure for fighting death until he is able to properly end the world.
[edited]
Hrm. Maybe it's exactly one Atlantean time unit? Unsafe to assume that the units we are used to are the same units that the Stone's maker would find natural.
3:54 is 234 seconds, which is exactly 1/400 of 26 hours, which happens to be Harry's extended sleep cycle. I have no idea if this is significant, but just throwing it out there.
It's also almost exactly 368 and 2/9 uses per siderial day, the actual period of rotation of the earth without reference to the sun.
It would've been exactly that figure about 5,300 years ago.
Based on that timing the stone was Gilgamesh's pearl
And guess who steals Gilgamesh's How-the-Old-Man-Once-Again-Becomes-A-Young-Man plant? That's right, a snake.
Ain't numerology grand?
It occurs to me that this limit means Flame could, in theory, have been using the stone flat out for five hundred years without anyone catching on. 56 million people died this year. If the stone was used to save as many of them as possible, at random, then with only moderate use of magic for coverup purposes compared to shit we already know the magical world is pulling of, that is just going to be utterly undetectable. "Here have a second chance at life. Also a magical compulsion to keep your mouth shut".
So what would he have been doing? Saving victims of accident so that they end up being fine after a small hospital stay? Miraculously curing terminally ill people? I find it unlikely that he could do anything else with long-term benefits without anyone catching on. But yeah, I like that alternate character interpretation of Flamel.
Mostly, resurrecting dead children. The population used to be lower, but kids also used to have piss-poor odds of making it to adult-hood. In terms of QALY, this would have been the best use, and if a child goes missing from a sickbed only to wander into the kitchen feeling chipper and fine, noone would even think twice.
Unexplained recoveries are a real thing. Everyone just shrugs and celebrates, or maybe credits God or the ginko biloba. It's been Flamel all along.
I Googled 3:54 and found a Quran verse:
And the disbelievers planned, but Allah planned. And Allah is the best of planners.
I googled "234 seconds" and found out that, apparently, the Philospher's Stone needs to post everything to the totalwar.org forums and, moreover, already got warning points for that. Who knew? X-D
Very appropriately, Google gives 3'54" as the length of these songs:
Timeless by Reece Mastin
Touch the Rock by Gent Mason
Sweeter than Fiction by Taylor Swift
Also, 'Lore of the Ancients', 'Particle Brain', 'Limitless Skies', 'A Lesson from Teacher', and 'Sacratus Bellator' Overclocked Remixes
Well, in seconds it's 234, which looks slightly less arbitrary.
Waait. Did whoever made it even use our time units?
Fair point; I didn't think of that. Does anyone know of a unit of time in which the equivalent of 3:54 would be a Schelling point of some sort?
Time Turners use units of one hour, so at least some kinds of magical items use our units.
Can you use the time turner in different increments, and possibly with a different maximum, if you fully understand hours are arbitrary? This sounds exactly like partial transfiguration.
(Alternatively, you go back some fixed amount of time for every grain of time sand in the turner, and you could build one of other increments by using a different quantity of sand.)
How does Time Turner select reference frame? What if you use it in the orbit, will you see Earth rotational angle jump by 90°? Assuming the reference frame is fixed to Earth surface, going sufficiently far away will give you FTL which can be used to create arbitrarily long time loops. Assuming it is not, what happens if you are moving at relativistic speeds (relative to Earth) and use the Time Turner?
EDIT: We not even need to consider relativity - what if you are flying on a broomstick (constant speed) or on a moving train and use Time Turner? This experiment is simple enough and can reveal a lot.
DO NOT MESS WITH TIME. Obviously if you attempt to use it in the stated way something very bad will happen.
X to 1 stellar day as 366.24 stellar days to 1 mean year.
X = 235 seconds, 3:55.
Almost.
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.
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.
…
Oops!
No love for Emma Watson?
There is no way Emma Watson can get behind a story that angered feminists so much.
Hey gwern, you scared?
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.
I may be the only person who thought that story was too obvious, though I've been enthusiastic about most of Chiang's work.
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.
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.
Nor I, but most of the novels I've read tend to fall on the spectrum of hard to extremely hard SF, with a preponderance of stuff like Egan, so that's not saying much. What do you usually 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.
So, this is the single change that makes this story an AU?
From chapter 1:
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.
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.
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...
Right at the front of the whole fic he says this isn't SPoD.
"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 like "The Girl Who Lived Again".
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.
The third one is simply a reference to the horcrux 2.0 that contains part of her soul.
Not, it's much more akin to Dennett's "Where Am I?" or to becoming meguca.
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.]
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!
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 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.
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 would expect her to first ask the ghost before mentioning its existence to Harry.
From the exchange it's not clear whether the ghost actually exists or just a rhetorical maneuver.
Might just be indications of one in magical instrumentation without an actual conversation being possible yet.
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.
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.
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.
Don't follow. You see "making an actually binding promise" as equivalent to dying?
I suspect the Unbreakable Vow is being parsed here as adding high-level terms to someone's utility function, and that that's being interpreted as equivalent to erasing the previous personality.
I'm not so convinced, myself, neither that that's the right way to look at the spell nor that values are that tightly linked to... not sure what I want to call it. Personhood? Unique agency? Whatever we actually care about when we object to murder, anyway.
EDIT: Never mind, after looking through a page or so of DanielLC's comments I think that sentence actually expands to "[presumptively] giving people the death penalty [for breaking their Vow] with no way to ask for [...] exemption[s..., etc]." Pretty sure that's not how the Vow works in Eliezer's world, though, after reading the bit where Harry undergoes it.
I interpreted it to mean that people could no longer kill in self-defense, and there was no guarantee that they could be safe without ever killing in self-defense.
Hence the example I suggest - whatever price the Unbreakable Vow exacts, there will be things that are worth it, like not going to Azkaban.
You mean like the fact that criminals can make Unbreakable Vows not to commit crimes, as an alternative to permanent trauma and probable death in Azkaban? (other criminals can power them for a reduction in sentence time or as part of the same type of bargain - permanent loss of some magical power is still better than Azkaban)
Sure, but that's only just scratching the surface.
Why can anyone commit crimes? Why can wizards lie, or fight except in self defense? The Trust Machine is the pearl of great price, and even wizards would build it.
If everyone was under an unbreakable vow not to commit crimes, Voldemort (who has horcruxes and can't die from something as simple as an unbreakable vow) would just need to get one law passed saying that all must obey him. Vows against lying can be bypassed with memory charms, so they're not really any better then veritaserum.
The Vow doesn't kill you if you violate it, it makes you unable to violate it.
Voldemort can't get the law passed that everyone must obey him because the law-passers are vowed not to be intimidated by snake-nazis.
Its vows all the way down.
It kills you if you violate it.
That's the official version. Given the details in the chapter where Harry makes the vow and the details in this chapter where it mentions Harry being unable to give the final order, it seems like in the HPMoR verse that isn't how it works.
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.
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.
I've been wondering how much deception Harry can get away with.... considering that the universe is one thing.
Any bets until his whole fake version of Voldemort's death gets revealed?
All this being said, great chapter, great novel. I expect it will be nominated for best novel for the Hugo, and then things will get interesting.
The Author's Note mention of the delayed epilogue (combined with some of the foreshadowing in HPMOR) feels to me like an invitation to write the obvious continuation fic Harry Potter and the Methods of Self-Modification, set between the ending of HPMOR and the epilogue. Does anyone else find this the obvious continuation?
I'm also not sure if writing the fic would actually be a good idea; anyone want to help me evaluate it?
Well, you might want to figure out whether the fanfic would bootstrap itself and airgap the computer you write it on. I'm sure that will work to contain it....
By "fanfic" do you mean: 1) the written content itself, 2) the model of the fictional universe (including characters) generated in the process of writing that content, 3) the model of the fictional universe (including characters) generated in the process of reading that content, or 4) something else?
The written content is unlikely to bootstrap itself on account of not being code, but its effects on the minds that read it are less clear.
In all seriousness, though, if I had a fully mapped out path for bootstrapping well beyond human intelligence I would have better uses for it than writing recursive Harry Potter fanfiction. I was thinking more along the lines of Harry fixing his dark side and interpreting the Unbreakable Vow.
I was being facetious.
There is no higher purpose in life than writing recursive Harry Potter fanfiction!