Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality discussion thread, March 2015, chapter 117

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 117.

Plans for next chapter release:

Ch. 118 will post on March 9th, 2015, at 12pm Pacific (7pm UTC).

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

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 117.

Plans for next chapter release:

Ch. 118 will post on March 9th, 2015, at 12pm Pacific (7pm UTC).

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Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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

Does anyone else feel like /r/hpmor (but not LW, thankfully) has been suffering from a lot of hindsight bias lately? First "Dumbledore was stupid with the mirror", then "Harry/Voldemort was stupid with the Riddle curse", then "Voldemort was stupid with letting Harry keep his wand", and now "Harry should've thought to preserve the Death Eaters' heads"? Apart from the wand thing (which I believe was pointed out by a few commenters before Chapter 114 was posted), pretty much all of those complaints were made after the fact. (No one talked about preserving the Death Eaters' heads until after Chapter 117 came out, for example.) I don't post on the subreddit, but I do read the comments there, and some of the complaints have honestly been fairly cringeworthy.

"Harry should've thought to preserve the Death Eaters' heads" pretty much all of those complaints were made after the fact.

Did you even go to r/hpmor after Chapter 114? A bunch of people were saying that he should at least cool them, or try to revive them after he uses his time-turner or то incapacitate instead of kill or anything. Given that it also occurred to me immediately and was discussed multiple times on ##HPMOR, I'm pretty sure there was no hindsight involved..

3MathiasZaman11y

With the hype surrounding the final arc, the quality of /r/HPMOR is declining in general.

0[anonymous]11y

I fail to see how "Harry should've thought to preserve the Death Eaters' heads" thing has anything to do with hindsight bias. These comments were a response to current events, not to a later outcome making it look like a better idea than it seemed at the time.