Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 119

Gondolinian

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 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.)

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

This is a new thread to discuss Eliezer Yudkowsky’s Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality and anything related to it. This thread is intended for discussing chapter 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.

Spoiler Warning: this thread is full of spoilers. With few exceptions, spoilers for MOR and canon are fair game to post, without warning or rot13. More specifically:

You do not need to rot13 anything about HP:MoR or the original Harry Potter series unless you are posting insider information from Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).

If there is evidence for X in MOR and/or canon then it’s fine to post about X without rot13, even if you also have heard privately from Eliezer that X is true. But you should not post that “Eliezer said X is true” unless you use rot13.

That argument as explanation doesn't really work: first of all, many of Harry's discoveries are low-hanging fruit, and it seems pretty clear that there are a lot of those. Second of all, Harry only has some aspects of TR. He grew up a (relatively normal) child without any of the procedural or other memories of TR. As far as we can tell, the primary way that Harry is akin to TR is close to the same starting minds and being raised in different ways.

Moreover, smart children make discoveries even in our world where there are a lot of scientists. Here a 16 year old discovered a novel method of quickly killing ticks. 11 and 12 year olds have discovered supernovas, and now a 10 year old has now granted that's observational, but that's still the same pattern. Young children have also published math papers.

Finally, this doesn't help because the concern is at a meta-level. Dumbledore, Harry, Voldemort, and Draco all got massive resource and power boosts. But not Hermione.

I don't really know how the whole 'HP is TR' thing works. I mean, on the one hand no 11 year, however gifted, old works out a way to run hypercomputing algorithms on a closed timelike curve provided by time-turners. On the other, Harry presumably didn't start talking with an adult vocabulary when he was an infant, so... I dunno.

And sure, I can buy 11 or 12 year olds making observational discoveries. But for an actual, highly intellegent 11 year old who isn't sharing her mind with fragments of an adult's psyche, the correct tactic is to learn as much as pos... (read more)