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 109.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
now I feel stupid for not doing a google search to see if parts of that sentence were recognised phrases. Of course that's what it means. In fairness though, this is simply a FAI refinement of my first reading- it doesn't show what it thinks you want, but somehow scans your utility function and calculates what to show you.
Either way, the Mirror of Erised still seems to be pretty much standard.
Not quite. It won't show you what you think you want, or even what you really truly want this second - it shows you what you would want, if you were were better, smarter, and more the person you wished to be. It's coherent - you should never look into the Mirror and go "on second thought, that's a terrible universe."
For example, Ron would not see himself becoming Prefect or being Head Boy, because in a decade or less he'll have outgrown such ambitions.