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 88-89. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now 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.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
Pretty sure that's what Ritalin was complaining about. It made the scene seem flat/tropy. Not that I can necessarily propose a better way of doing it. Also no, it would have been at most later that day. But still.
Especially since the tension up to that point had been incredibly generic. Honestly, I found that the chapter was a bore, an incredibly standard race-against-the-clock Hollywoodish action sequence, and never, at any point, did the narrative properly convey that this situation was any different from the myriad other situations where the hero bypasses a traffic jam by driving his car through a mall so that he can get to his beloved in time. The only other instance I can remember of something like this happening was in The Dark Knight, and there too it felt like an unnatural cheat, but at least we had the Joker's malice to blame.