= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Good_Burning_Plastic comments on [FINAL CHAPTER] Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 122 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d){kind=logo}
Comments (162)
Nothing about Atlantis and the Source of magic?
I have come to the conclusion that keeping the ultimate Source of Magic an unknown (for the scope of HPMoR) was probably a premise taken by EY early on. Otherwise we would have seen much more experiments to discover it (and more foreshadowing). That many (me included) have been waiting for it patiently is probably more a sign of our wishful thinking and neglect of evidence to the contrary than an oversight by EY.
ADDED: I wonder whether there is such a thing as negative foreshadowing, i.e. indications the some information will not be revealed later. Could be a smart literary device to reduce disappointment in these cases. Can one make reader go "Aha, Harry's quote about the difficulty of experimets fits nicely to Hermiones final remark that their schedule will take six years when taking outside view estimates into account"...
This is really the only sense in which I am disappointed in this story. One of the things that really got me excited about HPMOR was that the protagonist did not just shrug and accept that magic is magic, he sought to untangle how it's laws work, and the results were as bewildering as I imagine quantum must have been to scientists of the early 20th century. That is one of the puzzles that I really wanted to solve about this story, almost more than I wanted to know how the cloak and dagger mysteries resolved. It felt to me like we were promised that magic would be somehow logical, even if it did not initially appear so. It may in fact still be, but we have few answers about this fundamental and intriguing aspect of the universe. In short: HOW DOES IT WORK??? HOW?!? TELL ME!!!
But the premise of the grand-parent comment is that we weren't promised that, or if we were, we weren't promised that the true mechanism would be discovered within the scope of the story.