[FINAL CHAPTER] Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 122

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 122, which is the final chapter of the story.

Happy once-in-a-century Pi Day! (3/14/15 == 3.1415)

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Happy once-in-a-century Pi Day! (3/14/15 == 3.1415)

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

I wasn't really concerned with his points against the story, and his points against the story's didactic purposes felt weak at best. What I found most pertinent in his critiques were the points about HPMoR's science. I'm no physicist, but from what I could tell, most of it seemed pretty sound (though the thing about the levitation vs. cat transformation in Chapter 1 was, I felt, pretty lazy reading). Any domain experts around here that could chime in, specifically on the physics?

EDIT: Poor wording in the above paragraph. What I meant was that the guy's critiques seem pretty sound, not that the science in HPMoR seems pretty sound.

Sure, the problems with the physics are right in there with bothersome things that Harry says that you could still justify, starting with the non sequiturs about conservation of energy when McGonogall turns into a cat.

I disagree with su3su2u1 (the tumblr author) about levitation; that doesn't violate conservation of energy if it's mediated by a force, and why shouldn't it be? On the other hand, turning into a cat violates conservation of mass (or would appear to, and that should be easy to check with a bathroom scale), which (via E = mc²) translates into ... (read more)

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[FINAL CHAPTER] Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 122

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[FINAL CHAPTER] Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 122

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