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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

This is both an incredible strawman and not at all relevant to what's even being discussed. The article you linked to discusses that average human male is strength is higher than average human female strength. That's accurate and utterly irrelevant to the characterizations in question.

Heck, I'll even spot you that average male IQ is higher than average female IQ and that male standard deviation is higher than female standard deviation of IQ so there are more very intelligent males than there are very intelligent females.

Still wouldn't matter.

We are talking about A) giving people a power boost. B) that Hermione didn't get any boost even as other major players, not just Harry, but Dumbeldore and Draco did and C) that this is in the context of her being killed off ignominiously.

If you think your comment is at all relevant to any of these issues, I'd be very much interested in hearing an explanation.

*sigh*

My observation that a significant amount of mind-killing has and is occurring in this thread has not changed, and in fact has been reinforced. In particular, I see that there's a great deal of back-and-forth happening, but very few unusually pertinent or clear-headed arguments have been put forth, by either side. I haven't seen a single argument which I would describe as "well-articulated"; it's all just anecdotal data and branching discussion, moving on to topics more and more tangential to the original one at each branching point. (Exampl... (read more)