Well, this chapter is just full of delicious puns, apart from the entire plot advancement thing.
Auxiliary Protective Special Committee.
APSC
Absurdly Powerful Student Council.
Daphne worried that Draco would be skinned and turned into Leather Pants.
Draco returns "at the turn of the tide" wearing white (silver) robes. He's Draco the White.. err.. Silver.
Considering the short length of the chapter, and combined with the call forward to Book V's Ministerial Education Decrees, that's a good number of references.
The real question is where does it go from here.
Where it goes from here: If the enemy actually wants to defeat this coalition, nothing happens. This is a temporary alliance against an outside threat, and if said threat goes away, the alliance will probably collapse of its own accord. (It may bring some lasting changes to the leadership of Hogwarts, but people will chafe against the strict security, and old and new grudges will emerge, and the coalition will break.)
If the enemy has been breeding Harry/Draco as the future leader of Magical Britain (much more likely), they will continue to attack or otherwise be active, probably conceding many victories to the new Kids' Coalition.
it was the reason for the old tradition of the Noble families synchronizing the birth of their heirs, to put them in the same year of Hogwarts, if they could
This is a nice solution to "magical Britain is much too small for Hogwarts to be this big" and "why is everyone important in Harry's class?". Go cicadas!
It reads like a very forced solution - there would be significant gains to one noble house going against the tradition, so their heir could have several years of Hogwarts students rally behind them - and also kind of impossible to implement, given that we don't know much about their birth control methods, and the Noble Houses are unlikely to all marry at the same time etc.
That said, the HP universe which Eliezer took on as his setting is full of such bugs, and this is a reasonable patch.
I don't quite get it. Why are children making all these announcements, and not a member of the faculty or the Board? Why is Susan Bones giving orders to an Auror? (And why is nobody rolling their eyes at all the trying-to-be-cool?)
I think that people may be confused as to what's happening with this announcement.
The early phase details of the agreement were negotiated first between Harry and Lucius. Harry represented house Potter here because he's the entirety of house Potter. Lucius negotiated with Harry because Harry (as the boy who lived) has a lot of clout and credibility and he offered to throw that behind Draco. On an emotional level, HP also offers revenge against whoever attacked Draco and the possibility of revenge against Dumbledore.
Step two, the adults negotiate amongst themselves. In this second phase Lucius goes to the board of Governors with the agreement he and Harry made as a starting point.
The Knott and Greengrass votes are naturally inclined to go with Malfoy by faction alliance. Knott is also incentivized to go with the plan for other reasons. His son is a friend and chief lieutenant of Harry Potter. That's a potentially very valuable connection, but its a connection that can't be used when the votes are split death eater v Dumbledore. Realignment effectively "monetized" that asset. Greengrass doesn't have that and so asks for a few sweeteners on its deal. Also, the plan reduce...
Seconded. It is repeatedly implied in MoR that a noble child is, by default, a legitimate representative of their family, and anything that they do, or is done to them, is as if it was done by/to the family. For example, noble Slytherins get private chambers, even though they've done nothing to earn them within the context of the school's own regulations. Pretty much everything Draco does is considered to be a reflection on the House of Malfoy. It is considered natural for prepubescent children to know spells and rules of challenge designed for formal duels between noble houses.
In general, Rowling's universe assigns improbable values of agency and responsibility to children (socially speaking), and Eliezer only enhances this trend. Let's not forget that the Wizengamot doesn't blink an eyelid at sentencing a twelve-year old girl to die of slow torture for her crimes, or at a twelve-year old boy spontaneously giving away one of Britain's bigger fortunes to settle a blood debt. Death is an acceptable risk in exchange for having your child study at a wizarding school, with Hogwarts's no-deaths-for-fifty-years being seen as an amazing exception rather than a reasonable standard. Powerful magics are taught to children as soon as they are physically and mentally capable of casting them, with no reference to issues of maturity.
Am I the only one with the feeling that it's just too easy, too fast ? Harry uniting all of Hogwarts and most of Magical Britain, despite generation old hostilities, remaining hatred from a war that only ended 10 years ago, personal quarrels, and frontal opposition in terminal values (I don't see how persons sharing Dumbledore ethics can so easily accept to side with wizards who just voted to torture to death a 11yo girl, nor how blood purists can easily side with muggleborn).
I can get Harry, the ultra-rational boy who wants to save Hermione at all cost putting back his rightful horror at siding with people who voted to send her to Azkhaban, but I just can't see how the whole magical Britain letting aside their personal quarrels, hatred, and value conflicts that easily, just for one death, especially since "that still made Hogwarts safer than Beauxbatons, let alone Durmstrang".
The alliance is so far just in the Hogwarts board, not in the Wizengamot. Perhaps they feel it's a limited alliance with a limited purpose, and can be broken off if the purpose at hand changes - safety of the students in Hogwarts.
Even so, I agree that we haven't seen what exactly the people outside Lucius's faction and the House of Greengrass got as an inducement to enter the alliance.
I've felt like the whole story is too fast, but there are apparently reasons EY wanted to cram the story into a single year. To have only one defense professor? To avoid having to deal with Harry's sex life? I'm not quite sure what all the reasons are (I imagine they're multiple, and that some have probably been mentioned by EY and I'm forgetting), but while I think I would have preferred having Harry develop over 7 years as in canon instead of solving everything as an 11 year old, it's obvious that as the story is actually set up some things just are going to have to happen implausibly quickly.
Hardly the most important thing in the chapter, but I was delighted to see a moratorium on house points.
I wonder if this will somehow play into Quirrell's plot to have both Ravenclaw and Slytherin win the house cup.
I think the moratorium on house point is one of the most important details this chapter. I'd been wondering for a long time how QQ would have both Slytherin and Ravenclaw win the house cup. The points lock seems to be a way to make that happen.
The reason that's so important is that it means this is part of the plan. Harry, Draco and the rest are all in place playing their assigned roles. If they had gone off script, then they wouldn't be advancing QQ's scheme.
They see you as small and helpless, They see you as just a child...
Wow. I expect that from Harry at this point, but this just rubbed in the fact that the eleven-year-old protagonists are very much more heroic than most of the adults.
So, here's a question: Aside from uniting Malfoy and Bones, and in general every House in Hogwarts, and the Boy-Who-Lived on top of that in to a single anti-childkilling power bloc, what else is going on here?
The first thing that comes to mind is that this is probably part of Quirrell's plot to set up Harry as Light Lord...
War. With children.
I fear the consequences if we don't solve this.
Edit: I'm serious:
This was actually intended as a dry run for a later, serious “Solve this or the story ends sadly” puzzle
Draco seems insufficiently clever--he's gotten a lot of character development, and could be an agent in the story, but so far he just reacts. (He's already too clever for a 10-year old, but Harry is far too clever for a 10-year-old, so fair's fair.)
I can imagine an alternate HPMoR in which instead of Hermione, Harry had died--preferably later in the story, say at a false climax in the middle of a full-scale war--and Hermione and Draco had to step up to being the protagonists. Possibly I'm just getting tired of Harry's perfection, but seeing them develop to...
Is Theodore Nott wearing his scary face because he learned it was a good idea to do so in Chaos, or because there is also a conspiracy of Green Slytherin: those who can cast Avada Kedavra, the green spell?
Harry courted the company of both Draco and Hermione. He adjusted his presentation to meet their expectations, as he understood them. Draco could be doing the same because why have one secret power base when you could have two?
I don't consider this terribly likely. It came up in that pattern-matching way, but feels like it's needlessly complicated.
Hopefully someone else can undermine it more decisively or support it better.
Even ignoring the rest of the post, the idea of a Green Slytherin based off of Avada Kedavra is interesting for many reasons.
Let's look at some of the implications:
Avada Kedavra and the Patronus Charm (2.0) are basically mutually exclusive. In order to cast the first, you must want someone dead for the sake of being dead, and in order to cast the latter you must value all life to the point of denying death altogether.
Avada Kedavra and the Patronus Charm (2.0) cancel each other out. We saw this in Azkaban, and at the time we probably assumed it was just a result of Quirrell and Harry's magic going out of control, but on closer inspection it seems that both simply destroy the other, matter and antimatter style, which makes sense considering what type of magic they are created from. A magically created preference for death over life, and a magically created preference for life over death.
They both also follow the political lines, as you mention above. Avada Kedavra is more likely to be known and cast by those desperate for someone to hate, and the True Patronus is more likely to be cast by those who are trying to cooperate, simply because those mindsets are more likely to lead
So, speculation for what Harry wants the twins to buy for him. After thinking about this for 5 minutes by the clock, this is what I came up with:
1) A nuclear device (foreshadowed, one of the few things Quirrel fears, useful as a bargaining chip/MAD)
2) Some other form of muggle weapon (superset of #1)
3) Some muggle tech that can speed up Hermione's resurrection process if the main plan fails
4) Related to #3 - ingredients for a magical ritual/potion which will resurrect Hermione if the main plan fails (foreshadowed)
My guess is computer hardware and a source of electricity, so he can finally get started on one of those big projects to gain large amounts of personal power / resources.
The economy-disrupting arbitrage scheme was introduced as early as chapter 4. Lots of money would have helped Harry in pretty much every arc. He could think of many, many other schemes to help him finally start world optimisation in earnest. But he never did that. In story logic, he never got round to doing it due to interference from all sides. In writing logic, this can only happen in the final arc because otherwise, the story will be known as "Harry Potter gets really rich" and cease to be about the methods of rationality anymore.
That doesn't necessarily point to computer hardware, but chapter 87 mentions them as a powerful tool that wizards lack ("If there's a money-making method in this book that sounds difficult for a wizard, but it's easy if we can use Dad's old Mac Plus, then we'd have a plan.") and I have a hard time thinking about world optimisation plans that wouldn't benefit from at least some sensible organisation of data, scheduling and on-the-fly printing.
Most of the ideas listed so far are either much too nasty, better done with magic, or both. Mostly both. So, what contingencies could Harry procure from the world for a reasonably modest amount of money that do things he cannot just transfigure, or do by wand, and which the twins would not recognize?
First thing that comes to mind are various non-lethal drugs, since those are going into the targets body, which means transfiguration is out if you want the subject to live. So, LSD (lethal dose absurdly higher than effective dose. .which is useful if you want to dose a crowd) Tranquilizers think this fits on all counts?
Lets see, what else would it be a bad idea/impractical to transfigure. Muggle photography gear? But the twins would recognize that.
Smoke grenades. (Not subject to finite, a counter for every spell that requires you to see your target.)
Protective kit good enough to count as valid precautions for transfiguration stunts.. would break the budget given.
Id say bugging kit, but a purely mechanical recording device would be a museum piece, and cabinet size..
1) A nuclear device
You can't buy nuclear or other WMDs for a hundred Galleons. And the instruction implied buying, not to stealing (and what wizard capable of stealing nuclear warheads would want or need such a paltry payment?)
More to the point, Harry - or any wizard - can just Transfigure WMDs. Quick, free, and no need to carry dangerous stuff around.
He can also Transfigure antimatter. If he can come up with a reliable remote trigger, that is gram per gram the deadliest thing known to Muggle science. It was also foreshadowed a bit (chapter 14):
Say, Professor McGonagall, did you know that time-reversed ordinary matter looks just like antimatter? Why yes it does! Did you know that one kilogram of antimatter encountering one kilogram of matter will annihilate in an explosion equivalent to 43 million tons of TNT? Do you realise that I myself weigh 41 kilograms and that the resulting blast would leave A GIANT SMOKING CRATER WHERE THERE USED TO BE SCOTLAND?
2) Some other form of muggle weapon
As above for any weapon I can think of. Antimatter and nuclear weapons trump any area-effect attack. Poisons and biological or chemical agents can be Transfigured too, unless you need them to...
Guns are unlikely because the twins would have heard of them.
Consensus on /r/HPMOR was that Harry would have specified a type of gun and its ammo, since if he just said "guns" the twins would probably have brought muskets.
Canon!ArthurWeasley isn't very knowledgeable, but he at least had an interesting in electrical power, heavy-than-air non-magical flight, and chemical fueled engines. I think we can expect him to be of similar intelligence or smarter in MoR.
I don't think so, per chapter 61:
Madam Bones's voice continued. "We brought in Arthur Weasley from Misuse of Muggle Artifacts - he knows more about Muggle artifacts than any wizard alive - and gave him the descriptions from the Aurors on the scene, and he cracked it. It was a Muggle artifact called a rocker, and they call it that because you'd have to be off your rocker to ride one. Just six years ago one of their rockers blew up, killed hundreds of Muggles in a flash and almost set fire to the Moon. Weasley says that rockers use a special kind of science called opposite reaction, so the plan is to develop a jinx which will prevent that science from working around Azkaban."
...
"Severus?" the old wizard said. "What was it actually?"
"A rocket," said the half-blood Potions Master, who had grown up in the Muggle town of Spinner's End. "One of the most impressive Muggle technologies."
It seems pretty clear from chapter 61 that MOR!ArthurWeasley knows precious little about the muggle world.
Having a futuristic, nonexistent technology which can reliably, reversibly, demonstrably execute suspended animation, is not the same as the realization that mere modern-day liquid nitrogen works to preserve brain state right now and future tech can grab it later.
If you kill the prisoners, and you don't harm the Dementors, what's the point of attacking at all? The idea is to rescue the prisoners and destroy the prison, and the prison is just the Dementors - a non-magical building is easy to replace.
Why doesn't the magical world have something resembling the internet? There are a few things resembling closed networks--the dark mark, Quirrell's monitors and other tricks for the battles, and canon Hermione's trick with the DA Galleons--and there are simple two-way communication methods, like the floo and the two-way mirrors, but the only military use of networking that we know of is the dark mark (and the DA Galleons in canon). This makes me wonder if the power of the dark mark wasn't just that it was terrifying and exerted mental influences, but that i...
When Harry lists all the ways he could have prevented Hermione's death to McG, he is quite upset and mentions that he could have asked for everyone to get communication mirrors. This is overheard by Dumbledore, as we learn later in the chapter. However, as far as we know, Harry has seen communication mirrors only once: when he was in Azkaban. Dumbledore should be able to deduce this and thus that Harry was indeed involved in the break out.
Hey folks!
I just got twigged back to MoR after having wandered away for a long while -- I think the chapter I had left off with before was 'Interview with the Confessor' -- so I spent most of last week re-reading the story and then working my way through the discussion threads here (most of them, anyway -- it was around the Chap. 84 discussions when the pressure of "arrrgh I just want to go back and tell all these people in the past that Hermione's trial ain't nothing on what's coming!"). Along the way I made some notes and I'd like to dump them...
A rather obvious clash I hadn't noticed before, and don't recall seeing discussed on LW:
In chapter 46, after going in front of the Dementor and (apparently) remembering his parents' death, Harry abruptly comes up with a rather complicated set of deductions about the events surrounding Voldemort's learning of the prophecy about him. It all seems plausible enough (though who'd trust so long a series of merely probable deductions?), and a key point is that McGonagall must have been the one who heard the prophecy, she must have told Dumbledore, and Dumbledore ...
I really need to start collecting these, as they are so blatant.
Foreshadowing Alert:
“You’re nuts,” Daphne stated with conviction. “Even if you had kissed him first, you know what that would make you? The sad little lovestruck girl who dies in the hero’s arms at the end of Act Two.”
And it just so happen that the little girl who kissed Harry first in fact does die in his arms.
...“One of my classmates gets bitten by a horrible monster, and as I scrabble frantically in my mokeskin pouch for something that could help her, she looks at me sadly and with her la
"Remind me to buy you a copy of the Muggle novel Atlas Shrugged," the sourceless voice said. "I'm starting to understand what sort of person can benefit from reading it."
I don't understand this statement, given the preceding paragraphs. Why would the twins benefit from it?
Atlas Shrugged spends a sizable period of time criticizing the flaws of Comte's positivism, considering it destruction of the ego and involuntary servitude for the sake of psuedo-Catholic guilt-based mysticism. The twins' thought processes echo Comte's ethics system very heavily, as do the Weasleys in general: they'd do anything for Rationalist!Harry without asking payment because they consider him worth serving without regard for themselves.
The resulting rule morality is directly in conflict with Rationalist!Harry's desire for preference utilitarianism, in addition to being rather risky on its own level.
Rand's Objectivism identifies reasons to do things without cash payment, despite the pop history version of her viewpoints. See Dagny and Galt, or for a platonic version (despite the HoYay) D'Antonio and Rearden. But that's done because you think the other person or their requires are worth the cost.
Yvain's All Debates are Bravery Debates might be useful to read here. (and possibly inspired that). Basically, Harry thinks that it would be healthy for the twins to realize that they don't have to be selfless all the time, always. Yvain writes that he had met someone who had been raised in a family that demanded ridiculous selflessness and reading Rand changed his life.
Susan Bones, who stood beside and anext to Daphne Greengrass, beside whom she had fought
Google refuses to recognize "anext" as an English word.
Roles has given me all sorts of troubling thoughts about my life.
I think I've always tried to be a good student, a good friend and a good scientist, but, McGonagall fulfilling her image of a good teacher got one of her students killed.
That's what it took to break her out of her vision of her role. I know there's something that important to me, something that I'd act outside of my picture of myself to protect, and regret not doing it earlier.
But I don't know what it is, or how to look for it, and I don't even seem motivated to look for it
I think I figured out Quirrel's ultimate scheme.
Va pnaba, Ibyqrzbeg cbffrffrf Uneel, gnxvat pbageby bs uvf obql.
Va ZbE, gur ernfba Dhveeryzbeg jnagf Uneel nyvir, fgebat naq vasyhragvny vf fb ur pna znxr uvz vagb uvf arkg ubfg, guhf nyybjvat Zntvpny Oevgnva gb tebj haqre n fgebat yrnqre. Gur Qrzragngvba ng gur ortvaavat bs gur lrne jnf fb gung Uneel'f zragny qrsrafrf jbhyq or jrnxrarq sbe shgher nohfr. Dhveery'f fngvfsnpgvba ng Urezvbar'f qrngu (orsber urnevat gur hcqngrq cebcurpl) jnf va nagvpvcngvba ng shegure ihyarenovyvgl.
I'm beginning to think the/a final enemy might be Dumbledore after all.
(1) Wouldn't Dumbledore, when he was invisibly following HP to the graveyard, have seen the millennia-old stone alight with prophecy?
(2) What if it was Dumbledore's troll, and Quirrel can prove it or, Dumbledore has had a troll guard and he can make it seem like this was it?
It has occured to me that IF harry does obtain the sorcerer's stone...it's quite likely that quirrel will have been the one to get it out of the mirror, WITHOUT utilizing his leet magical skills.
So, I recall coming across one of the fanfictions based off of Methods of Rationality, but I can't seem to find it anymore. Perhaps someone here is familiar with it? I only remember two things. 1: it included a battle between the three armies. 2: The battle had something to do with fire (it was mentioned that this was to complete the elemental trend the battles had been following; the forest battles representing earth, the battles high up in Hogwarts being air, and the underwater battle naturally being water).
Just occurred to me that if D-Zbeg vf chggvat na njshy ybg bs rssbeg, naq nccnerag npghny pbaprea, vagb funcvat Uneel'f zvaqfrg gbjneq gur 'Qnex Fvqr', vs uvf cyna vf gb whfg gnxr cbffrffvba bs gur xvq yngre. Gung frrzf gb zr gb vzcyl svir cbffvovyvgvrf, va nfpraqvat beqre bs yvxryvubbq:
D. pnerf jurgure Uneel'f orunivbe nccrnef cuvybfbcuvpnyyl pbafvfgrag;
Fbzr fbeg bs 'flzcngul' orgjrra zvaqf vf arprffnel gb rssrpg cbffrffvba, be creuncf gb 'njnxra' gur fbhy-sentzrag vafvqr Uneel;
D.vf irel qrqvpngrq gb uvf cuvybfbcul naq ungrf gb unir vg synhagrq ol f
Doubtless this is my sleeping brain messing with me, but I seem to have had a dream that Harry would go on some sort of training course/vision quest in which his patronis would instruct him to cast the killing curse. Except this is somewhere in Hogwarts (probably the second floor?), and he figures based on the angle of the curse that it's going to hit the great hall... so he runs down in time to see it hit Neville. But on the way to DUmbledore's office with Neville's body, he casts "Accio Neville's Soul", then does something with Patronis 2.0 and...
Does Bellatrix have a horcrux backup, and if not, why not? You'd think that if Voldemort thought enough of her importance to remove her from Azkaban, he'd have made sure to back her up beforehand?
Evil Overlord List, revised edition:
After discovering the secret to immortality, I will not share it with the world's third most powerful wizard (or so), no matter how certain I am of her loyalty to me, or of her ability to keep secrets. The worst case scenario then is having to train up a new powerful lieutenant, rather than having to kill an immortal ex-lieutenant or trying to contain the secret once it's out.
Early in the fic, Draco tells Harry that you can't apparate to somewhere you have never been. This would suggest that Quirrell's Pioneer Horcrux is unreachable to anyone but himself. But, if Harry has something of Voldemort in him, "Harry" has technically been on the Pioneer probe, so he should be able to apparate to it.
"Remind me to buy you a copy of the Muggle novel Atlas Shrugged," the sourceless voice said. "I'm starting to understand what sort of person can benefit from reading it."
Although the Weasley twins are extremely willing to repay perceived debts, it would seem to me that this inclination is more likely, given their usual inclination towards public action, to be of positive utility in the long-run.
The incantation "Crucio" seems to be a reference to Roman crucifixion, which postdates Atlantis by several thousand years according to Plato's dating. There are probably lots of other examples of recent words in magic.
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 98. The previous thread is at nearly 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, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26.
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.