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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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)
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]
Well, in seconds it's 234, which looks slightly less arbitrary.
Waait. Did whoever made it even use our time units?
Well, seconds have been used since the Babylonian time period. However, we also don't know how carefully Harry measured the recharge time.
Carefully enough not to round it up to 3:55. Presumably, it's within a second.
Wikipedia disagrees: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second#Before_mechanical_clocks
There are a lot of older units of time listed there, but none of them seem to fit.
Huh. That's fascinating. I had apparently wrongly assumed that because it had the same division into 60 that it also was as old. Apparently not.
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.
3'54" is almost 71 halakim.
Edited to add: which, according to Babylonian time (see the same article), is almost the amount of time it takes the Earth to rotate one degree.
Using the time it takes Earth to rotate one degree gives you 86400 seconds in a day /360 degrees = 240 seconds. But the length of the day has been getting larger as the Earth slows at a rate of about 1.7 ms/century wiki
To find when one degree was equal to 234 seconds, we can find when a day was approximately 234*360 degrees = 84240 seconds, or approximately 127 million years ago. Putting the creation of the stone right in the middle of the Cretaceous Period.
Coincidentally, this also solves the issue of how the T Rex got away with such tiny arms. They had wands!
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.
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.
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.
X to 1 stellar day as 366.24 stellar days to 1 mean year.
X = 235 seconds, 3:55.
Almost.
The more natural 365.24 is even worse.
We really want something like 370. That takes us back to the late Cretaceous, and I don't think that EY wants to push things that far back.
Another close figure: The sidereal day is 3 minutes, 56 seconds shorter than the solar day. If the solar day has a negative leap second, the difference is 3'55".
I do not know what some terms mean, but I think that is not another close figure, that is the same figure.
I mean, close to 3'54".
If the sidereal day and the solar day mean what I am guessing they mean, your 3:55 and Lumifer's 3:55 come from the same place.
No, what he did was divide the sidereal day by 366,24 and got 235 seconds, so there would be as many Stone's periods in a day as there are days in a year.
Yes, and my claim is that that is what you did too without knowing it. Think about what sidereal and solar day mean, and how you would calculate one from the other.
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
The stone was created at a time before the invention of minutes and seconds. The Atlantians likely didn't have 24 hours per day, 60 minutes per hour and 60 seconds per minute.
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.
So the Stone was created to be used no more than 400 times a day. This allows for the prediction that someone with a normal cycle should be able to use it every 1/400 of our normal days, or 216 seconds.
The limit might be the result of limited capacity rather than design.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
What's Brin's stupid ending?
http://davidbrin.blogspot.com/2015/03/a-quick-informal-post-on-yudkowskys.html
I think "stupid" is a little strong, personally. But I like the canon ending better.
Oh. Boy.
First of all, yes it was. Second of all, Brin's critique is based on literary tropes, not logic. If it's obvious that Voldemort were referring to the train, then the train wouldn't exactly be a prime target, would it.
Brin's response to the anonymous "troll" speaks to his arrogance.
Oh Brin reacts like that to everyone with slightly different ideas. That's nothing though, it actually seems to get personal when it's different ideas about shape of the future in particular. That is particularly amusing to watch.
I just read it, and stupid is precisely what it is.
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.)
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.
It's also not as good as most novels I've read.
Are you interested in making more bets of this type?
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.
Best-written chapter of this year, easily. Eliezer, congratulations on the good work :-)
I liked this chapter a lot too, though I liked 108, 111, and 115 a similar amount.
+1, yeah, great chapter. As Harry says, sometimes "that explains it" doesn't fully cover it.
…
Oops!
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.
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.)
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?
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.
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.
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>
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Phoenix's Price room held broken wands and other miscellaneous items reminding him of each of the friends he's lost in his battles.
"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.
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!
Maybe they are on to him, but they see little reason to let him know that until they have better evidence?
Sorry if I was unclear, I meant it turns out they weren't fooled and I'm glad of that.
Sorry I misunderstood. Thanks for the clarification.
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?)
My feeling is Harry doesn't want everyone knowing that he, 11-year-old warrior of light, killed 36 death eaters. People would always be wondering if you were evil after that.
But they'd also not take him for granted the way they had Munroe and Dumbledore, accepting their heroism like princes, with a sneer for the lateness of the payment. *blinks innocently*
More seriously: I only meant the closed circle he's talking to: Moody, Bones, McGonagall, and he still wouldn't have to admit to killing anyone, just let Bones know that Quirrel wasn't a good guy and Harry deserves the credit for the Light winning. We can still have Voldemort supposedly killing everyone else.
Spell her name right, and she'll be more receptive? (I'm sure that this will be fixed soon.)
For that matter, "mention" is misspelled as "mentio" in the A/N.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!"
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.
"Girl-Who-Revived" is... not a very euphonious phrase, is it?
I like "The Girl Who Lived Again".
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.
"Girl who came back".
I would have preferred Girl-Who-Returned.
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.
I don't see why they're still worried about Bellatrix, it looks like she's been rendered mostly 'armless.
Aww, so Dumbledore was the one who told Harry to look for Hermione on the train in chapter 6 :)
I'd been wondering that forever.
So, this is the single change that makes this story an AU?
I was thinking along those lines as well, but at that point in time Voldemort was already significantly different from 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...
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.
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.
Right at the front of the whole fic he says this isn't SPoD.
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?
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?)
From chapter 1:
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.
From chapter 38, when Harry buys the Quibbler:
EDIT: Then,
Which is also true, because of Voldemort inside him. Which leaves....
My bet is that the last bit will be polyamory in the epilogue.
But the betrothal has to have occurred before it was mentioned.
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.
Man, that's beautiful. What does Bellatrix Black want most, that Harry can offer?
She wants Tom Riddle to love her.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
"There's no way in hell or double hell- " - Mad Eye Moody
See! Double hell is real. Its where double witches go, twice.
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.
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.
Not sure how this version's supposed to be safer to keep.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Heh. From Chapter 17:
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.
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.
It's not clear for the wizards what it's supposed to mean that Hermoine is a unicorn.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.]
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 happens when Hermione finds she's getting credit for a heroic action she didn't do?
By that point, the story will have propagated far enough that people probably won't believe her even if she denies it, and it'll just make her look crazy.
Plus trying to reveal that Harry was lying will damage his reputation and sabotage his efforts to cure death etc. just as they're gearing up.
I was thinking about how she'd take it rather than how those who haven't been disabused by Harry will take it.
My opinion is that Harry's taught enough rationality at Hogwarts that the lie will fall apart.
Now that I think about it, shouldn't some Hogwarts students and/or teachers have figured out that they should be studying Muggle science? It's possible that this was mentioned, and I've forgotten it, or that (since EY probably won't write sequels, the subject will need to be left to fanfiction of HPMOR.
Not judging by everyone's reactions when Hermione was accused of murder. A select few individuals might manage to question it at best.
It hasn't been, except for Harry's suggestion in the latest chapter. Most people, though, still haven't been exposed to any noteworthy Muggle science except individual "clever tricks" as used by Harry - nothing to compare with the obvious power of magic.
I didn't give a time frame for when Harry's lie will fall apart. :-)
I can hope that the students having learned some rationality will cause them to keep getting better at it.
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.
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.
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.
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?