Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 120

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 120.

Plans for next chapter release:

The next update will be on March 13th, 2015 at 12PM Pacific (7PM 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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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 120.

Plans for next chapter release:

The next update will be on March 13th, 2015 at 12PM Pacific (7PM 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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.

"You're my friend, but I can't let you know that I killed your father, because you might tell that to someone else and that would be unpleasant for me."

Tell you what, I've made peace with this chapter. It shows Harry as a flawed protagonist, and in a more interesting way than Eliezer's usual "I was flawed because I was not smart enough".

Harry may be shown as flawed in this chapter, but choosing to keep extremely important secrets secure is not one of the reasons.

6gjm11y

Perhaps that's Harry's real motivation (or: Eliezer intends us to understand that it is; or: an actual person who behaved as Eliezer describes Harry behaving would likely have such motivation) but it actually seems more likely to me that it's "... and that would risk destabilizing the government, messing up my plans for doing away with serious illness and death, and preventing me from stopping the end of the world wiping out human life as it seems to be prophesied I might be able to do and no one else can". Which would be a damn good reason, all things considered. (Of course Draco, and Harry, and we, should consider the possibility that that's all just rationalization. But given what else we've been told in HPMOR it seems like something of the kind is in fact correct.)

4DanArmak11y

"If there's even a small chance that letting you know will reduce my ability, down the line, to save the world, then I am physically incapable of letting you know."