HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore

Gretta Duleba; Eliezer Yudkowsky

[-][anonymous]2mo35-1

While I appreciate the existence of this post, and have upvoted it, I was a bit disappointed that virtually all the questions were about "get Eliezer to explain how Deeply Awesome the story was" and none of them challenged Eliezer in any way on areas of weakness in the story (or even areas of weakness in his own responses to some of the softball questions here).

[-]MondSemmel2mo491

I made a partial transcript of a WWMoR podcast episode with Eliezer from 2020, which included this part:

I feel like the largest literary flaw [in the story] is that the grand climax of the story is Harry solving what I would later call a Level 2 Intelligent Character puzzle, which is sort of like a Munchkin puzzle. The Final Exam is like 'Assemble these facts from inside the story and come up with a creative use for them.', and it's not a final challenge that holds up the thematic weight of the rest of the book. [...] It's like a thing of cleverness where the solution doesn't really have the depth that I learned to write in the rest of the story.
And that was an example of a flaw that just could not be fixed because of the number of open parentheses that had been set up and the amount of foreshadowing done going literally back to the first sentence of the book, pinpointing that exact puzzle and that exact solution. By the time I got there and could sort of see the way in which it wasn't adequate, the structure of the book was woven together so tightly that there was absolutely no way to change it.

[-]cousin_it1mo*19-2

It's hard to say what the largest literary flaw is. The story is a big mix of good and bad sides. But the final exam in particular felt weak to me even by its own standards: it's not a good description of a difficult final encounter.

For me, the gold standard for a final encounter is the ending to the video game Veil of Darkness (I haven't played it, but Ross Scott's review recounts the whole thing). Basically we're an average guy, and we need to defeat an elder vampire who had enslaved a valley of people for a thousand years and stolen all their sunlight. And here's how the final battle goes: 1) we steal the vampire's box containing all the stolen sunlight 2) we nail his coffin shut 3) wear a garlic necklace 4) eat a mushroom making us temporarily blind 5) confront him directly 6) he tries to mind-control us but fails due to our blindness 7) he tries to physically attack us but fails due to the necklace 8) we open the box with stolen sunlight at him, thus hitting him with an attack proportional to his age, nice detail isn't it? 9) he staggers, turns into a bat and flies away to rest in the coffin 10) but the coffin is shut, so we finally stake him and cut off his head. There were a few other attacks too, but these are the main ones.

See what happened? The story makes the average guy defeating a thousand-year-old vampire sound actually believable. Because that's how much work and preparation it takes to do something difficult. And this lesson you can apply in real life, unlike the lesson from HPMOR's final exam.

[-]MondSemmel1mo200

I also criticized HPMOR's Final Exam at the time, though for reasons of story consistency, rather than narrative.

That said, I don't think the particular kind of satisfying conclusion you wanted to see works for rationalist fiction like HPMOR. After all, the premise is that all characters, protagonists and antagonists alike, have their own spark of optimization, genre savvy, and so on. So they know how these stories are supposed to go (the Hero wins, the Dark Lord loses, etc.), imagine how they could be defeated, and preempt those scenarios as best they can.

So in a rationalist version of that game finale, the elder vampire takes precautions against having his precious box stolen; protects his coffin from tampering; has overcome his weakness to garlic, or found a workaround (like a gust of wind spell or something), or faked having the weakness in the first place; etc. etc.

The most likely way for a prepared adversary to lose in such a situation is through a surprise, an out-of-sample error. That may not be as narratively satisfying, but it makes a lot more sense than for an elder vampire to die because an average human learned about his weaknesses. As if the vampire wasn't aware of those weaknesses himself and didn't have ample time to compensate for them.

8Said Achmiz1mo

An instructive (and fun) example is the case of Cazador Szarr (an antagonist in Baldur’s Gate 3). (Spoilers, though not very important ones, below for anyone who hasn’t played BG3.) Cazador is a vampire lord—old and very powerful. Astarion (one of the companion characters in the player’s party, and himself one of Cazador’s spawn, formerly[1] in the vampire lord’s thrall), in the course of telling the player character about Cazador (and explaining why Cazador never turns his spawn into full-fledged independent vampires—despite this being possible and indeed very easy—and instead keeps them as thralls under his absolute command), says that “the biggest threat to a vampire… is another vampire”. In the normal course of events, it would be totally unbelievable for the player character to defeat Cazador. (Indeed, you would never even learn of his existence.) What makes Cazador’s downfall possible is the introduction of an Outside Context Problem, in the form of… well, the main plot device of the game. However, the way things proceed is not just that Cazador is happily vampire-lording along, and then one day, bam! plot device’d right in the face! No, instead what happens is that the main plot device is injected into the normal state of affairs, things get shaken up, but what this does is allow for the possibility of Cazador being defeated, by radically changing the balance of forces in a way that he could not have foreseen. Then it’s up to the good guys (i.e., the player character & friends) to take advantage of being the right people in the right place at the right time, and exploit their sudden and temporary advantage, their brief window of opportunity, to take down Cazador. Thus we get the best of both worlds: the enemy can be powerful and intelligent, but their defeat is nevertheless believable and satisfying. ---------------------------------------- 1. It’s complicated. ↩︎

6Donald Hobson1mo

Say a 1000 year old vampire that spent the first 500 years thinking of every possible adversary. They are well defended against anything that existed in the year 1500. Too bad they haven't really kept up to date with modern tech. Or, well most people don't wear a bulletproof vest every day. Often cost and convenience trumps protection when people aren't expecting to be attacked.

2MondSemmel1mo

If a powerful antagonist is dumb or shortsighted enough, anyone can kill them, but what stories go out of their way to claim that their Big Bad is dumb? That's usually the role of side characters or mooks, not of the Big Bad. Plus it takes a certain kind of survival instinct to survive for 1000 years in the first place. I agree with the tradeoff of safety vs. convenience, but there are many types of preparation that require a one-off investment, rather than an ongoing inconvenience. Cost, though, should not matter to most antagonists, since they typically far exceed the protagonists' resources.

2[comment deleted]1mo

[-]Said Achmiz1mo146

Hmm… this setup seems to cheat by withholding from vampires one of their most well-known and archetypal powers, namely the ability to turn into mist. (Dracula in Bram Stoker’s depiction can do this, vampires in D&D can do this, lots and lots of other examples.)

It also cheats by making the vampire stupid:

Why is the coffin in an accessible location—rather than, say, sealed away in a secret chamber that is accessible only via a small passage that can be navigated only by a creature the size of a bat? (Or, if we let the vampire have a mist form ability, a chamber accessible only via tiny, carefully concealed air holes, through which only a gaseous entity can pass.)
Why is there only one coffin, instead of several? (Once again, this particular failure mode is completely absent from Bram Stoker’s novel, for example, where Dracula, who needs to sleep in grave soil from the place where he was buried, has fifty containers of such soil distributed throughout the city; if one is compromised, well, he’ll just use the next one! Such tricks are likewise used by e.g. Strahd von Zarovich—D&D’s most famous vampire—and by many other fictional vampires.)

A thousand years is a long time... (read more)

3cousin_it1mo

Yeah. There were several other attacks that I omitted - something with holy water, something with a book, something with the vampire's true name - maybe one of them did something about the mist form, or maybe not, I don't know the lore that well tbh. And yeah, in a thousand years a vampire could probably figure out how to protect themselves pretty well, so to write a story where the average guy wins, there must be a bit of stretch somewhere. Anyway, my point is that this is still a more realistic depiction of how hard problems get solved. Or a more actionable one, at least.

[-]gwern1mo592

And yeah, in a thousand years a vampire could probably figure out how to protect themselves pretty well, so to write a story where the average guy wins, there must be a bit of stretch somewhere.

Interestingly, this is another point in which Bram Stoker's Dracula is very well thought-out. Stoker is well aware that with his rules, Dracula ought to be invincible... But Dracula has the liability that he's been stultified mentally by centuries of quasi-imprisonment, and so hasn't yet understood or experiments with his powers.

He is slowly waking up, and doing so, and starting to understand that he can eg. move his coffins himself without hirelings, but only right as the protagonists hunt him down. It is only by hours or minutes do they manage to cut him off from each resource. With another day or two, Dracula would have realized he could, say, just bury a bunch of coffins deep underground in the dirt, and he would be immune from discovery or attack.

Really, the novel is shockingly rationalist, and that's why I call it 'the Vampire Singularity'. Dracula is undergoing a hard takeoff, as it were, which is just barely interrupted by the protagonists.

[-]cousin_it1mo13-6

I just read the novel at your recommendation, it's great! And your analysis of Susanne Delage is cool too. However, I just saw that you added a pretty nasty AI slop picture at the top of the article. It's a puzzling thing about you: you have a good nose for LLM slop, and rightly hate it, but you don't have the same reaction to slop from image models (which feels just as much a visceral turn-off to some people - for example, me).

[-]gwern17d*175

I don't believe it is "AI slop", much less that it is "pretty nasty". I consider AI slop to be low-meaning and low-effort generative media which adds little or nothing to the experience

I assume you are referring to the German Expressionism, alluding to Nosferatu (which is highly relevant for at least two reasons), image illustrating the narrator's childhood iceskating in a New England Protestant town in decline due to Dracula taking it over; I generated it in MJ after cracking SD, to sum up the horrifying reality of my solution. I put several hours of thought and effort into the concept and creating it, and got what I wanted, so I think this is just a case of de gustibus non est disputandum. I felt it cleverly visually encapsulated the mood of the horror that Gene Wolfe meant to lurk underneath the harmless nearly-bucolic appearance of SD and enhanced the experience.

So I think it satisfies my 3 criteria: it is not low-meaning, was not low-effort, and adds something. But I don't think this is a good place to discuss it, so I have added a more detailed discussion of that image's process & meaning to my image slop blog post as an example of how I think I get good image samples.

ED... (read more)

9rsaarelm17d

People dropping in on an unfamiliar website can have very hair-trigger reactions on any sort of AI art. I heard someone say they felt like immediately writing off a (good) Substack post as fake content they should ignore because of the AI art illustration at the top of the post. And I think the illustration generator is a built-in option on Substack because I see constant AI illustrations on Substacks of people who are purely writers who as far as I can tell who aren't very interested in art or web design. But this person wasn't familiar with Substack, so their brain just went "random AI slop site, ignore".

[-]gwern17d*157

I think that it's a pity if people write off my SD page because they failed to understand the meaningful illustration I put effort into creating and didn't, say, check the alt text to see if they were missing something or wonder why such an unusual website would have "AI slop"; and I agree that this may be a case of "things you can't countersignal".

However, I refuse to submit to the tyranny of the lowest common denominator and dumb down my writings or illustrations. I don't usually write for such readers, and I definitely do not write my Gene Wolfe essays for them!

So unless people can point to something actually bad about the illustration, which makes it fail to satisfy my intent - as opposed to something bad about the readers like being dumb and ignorant and writing it off as "AI slop" when it's not - then I decline to change it.

3cousin_it14d

Sorry, I wrote a response and deleted it. Let me try again. I don't know what exactly makes AI images so off-putting to me. The bare fact is that this image to me looks obviously AI-made and really unpleasant to see. I don't know why some people react to AI images this way and others don't. My best guess is that AI images would begin to look more "cursed" to you if you spent some days or weeks drawing stuff with pencil and paper, maybe starting with some Betty Edwards exercises. But that's just a guess, and maybe you've done that already.

3MinusGix14d

I have some of the same feeling, but internally I've mostly pinned it to two prongs of repetition and ~status. ChatGPT's writing is increasingly disliked by those who recognize it. The prose is poor in various ways, but I've certainly read worse and not been so off-put. Nor am I as off-put when I first use a new model, but then I increasingly notice its flaws over the next few weeks. The main aspect is that the generated prose is repetitive across the writings which ensures we can pick up on the pattern. Such as making it easy to predict flaws. Just as I avoid many generic power fantasy fiction as much of it is very predictable in how it will fall short even though many are still positive value if I didn't have other things to do with my time. So, I think a substantial part is that of recognizing the style, there being flaws you've seen in many images in the past, and then regardless of whether this specific actual image is that problematic, the mind associates it with negative instances and also being overly predictable. Status-wise this is not entirely in a negative status game sense. A generated image is a sign that it was probably not that much effort for the person making it, and the mind has learned to associate art with effort + status to a degree, even if indirect effort + status by the original artist the article is referencing. And so it is easy to learn a negative feeling towards these, which attaches itself to the noticeable shared repetition/tone. Just like some people dislike pop in part due to status considerations like being made by celebrities or countersignaling of not wanting to go for the most popular thing, and then that feeds into an actual dislike for that style of musical art. But this activates too easily, a misfiring set of instincts, so I've deliberately tamped it down on myself; because I realized that there are plenty of images which five years ago I would have been simply impressed and find them visually appealing. I think this is a

7gwern7d

'Repetition' is certainly a drawback to the ChatGPT style: we have lost em dashes and tricolons for a generation. But it can't in its own right explain the reaction to the SD image, because... 'German Expressionist linocut' just doesn't describe a default, or even a common, output style of any image generative model ever. (That's part of why I like to use 'linocut' as a keyword, and for better or worse, people who might reach for 'German Expressionist' these days typically reach for Corporate Memphis instead.) It could however be a kneejerk reaction: "oh no, this is a generated image, therefore it is exhaustingly overused and boring [even if it isn't actually]".

2[comment deleted]17d

4Kaj_Sotala1mo

On the other hand, a vampire who had gone undefeated for a thousand years might also get overconfident and sloppy.

[-]Gretta Duleba2mo110

You are welcome to ask your own questions here and I will try to solicit answers, though I make no promises -- it's a busy time. I'm interested to hear what you want to know!

[-][anonymous]2mo7523

Alright. Long stream-of-consciousness comment incoming. I do apologize for my tone below a bit, but refining it to make it more neutral would have taken even more of my time than this did; unfortunately, it has ended up as less of a compilation of questions and more just bullet points where I complain about what I disliked. Many of my own criticisms of and disappointments with HPMOR reflect parts of what su3su2u1 wrote about a long time ago.^[1] Unsurprisingly, HPMOR fans find it tough to read such obviously sneery commentary, so I think Alexander Wales's excellent review of the story serves as a more than worthwhile replacement (and perhaps useful background reading for my comment here). But to write out my own thoughts explicitly and perhaps focus on what seem to me like the key topics:

In Who's the Main Character, Eliezer repeats part of what he wrote about a long time ago, namely asserting that HPMOR is not about one person, one character, one guy against the whole world made of NPCs (even though Harry thinks of himself that way sometimes), but is instead significantly more complex and realistic. Specifically, Eliezer claims there are 4 characters which make decisions that m

... (read more)

[-]Gretta Duleba1mo231

Thanks, this is great and I unironically enjoyed reading it. (I personally wasn't following HPMOR discourse back in the day. Maybe lots of people wrote lots of great critiques, but I wasn't there then and didn't read them, so I don't already know all this stuff.)

As you already admitted, there are only a few actual questions here, but there are a few. When I get a chance I will attempt to extract the questions and see if I can get a response from Eliezer for you. Please do not hold your breath, it will be at least several days and possibly longer (or forever), because as I said, it's a busy time.

But I do appreciate you writing this up, thanks.

9[anonymous]1mo

As a partial illustration of how HPMOR could have been improved, I want to point to Following the Phoenix as an excellent alternative ending for the story (starting at the time of Hermione's trial at the Wizengamot). It's not perfect, of course; and, in particular, the lore/worldbuilding has more contradictions and problems than HPMOR's did (unsurprising, given it's Eliezer's world, so he knows its internal logic best). But, without spoiling anything, it solves several of the problems I have pointed to: the Harry/Quirrell conflict is organic and not artificially constructed, nobody holds the Idiot Ball,[1] Harry and Dumbledore and Hermione and many other characters actually do relevant stuff that becomes critical for the plot, and the ending is just... so fun and interesting and exciting compared to the one-flash-of-brilliant-thinking we got in chapter 114 of HPMOR. 1. ^ Not even the side that ends up losing! It's quite remarkable in that way

7Mikhail Samin1mo

HPMOR does have some problems, notably, the climax being overdetermined by the story that had it in mind but not living up to how well the story was executed; and also causing a sort of allergy in some people; but HPMOR is one of the coolest pieces of literature out there, with its ending still being great for the reasons awesome literature is great; Following the Phoenix is a nice piece of fanfiction, but it’s just that- fanfiction[1]. I think the conflict between Harry and Voldemort makes a huge ton less sense in that alternative ending. And there are straightforwardly terrible pieces of worldbuilding, characters being stupid, etc.; e.g., I don’t see how random muggles without gov authorization SENDING NUCLEAR MISSILES to Scotland could be related to the author not being aware of the internal logic of Eliezer’s world. 1. ^ To be clear, it’s great if people enjoy it, but this is normal fanfiction with some fun parts; it is not on the level of interesting books, and definitely not at the level of HPMOR.

7[anonymous]1mo

Awesome literature is typically considered great for reasons such as: * great character arcs * multiple characters having agency and changing the outcome of the story through their actions * the conflicts between characters having at their root core fundamentally incompatible approaches to life, as opposed to external events forcing them to be at each other throats ("fiction isn't about what happened, once; fiction is about what happens) * compelling writing * powerful themes that get reflected in the logic of the world being created HPMOR fails at the first 3 for reasons I have explained in detail in my previous comment. The writing is sometimes compelling, in moments where the Rule of Cool applies (the Dementors = Death scene, for example) and when there are action scenes (Azkaban, Chapter 104). But for the rest of it, dialogues are George Lucas-level stilted ("General of Chaos," "Most Ancient House," inappropriate half-baked jargon-dense explanations of Intro to Psych experiments, etc.), and the story is extremely long and slow-moving, with a very low density of plot-relevant events per word count. HPMOR is as long as the first 5 Harry Potter books combined, but covers significantly fewer plot points, and persistently analyzes and re-analyzes every event that happens from all possible angles. It's quantity over quality, magnified to the 3rd power. HPMOR has interesting themes, but the way it approaches them (for reasons reflected both in my writing and in the explanations given by the two reviewers I linked in my previous comment) is badly flawed. What the book does do right is world-building.[1] And that's fine. Some people care a lot more about this than about all the other stuff I've mentioned. And as I wrote above, those people are typically considered "nerds" in pop culture. I won't begrudge nerds for liking their nerd power fantasy, since taste is mostly subjective, but comparing it to the rest of great "literature" necessarily brings in other st

[-]Mikhail Samin1mo114

Not even arguing with these points, I am sure there is a lot of acclaimed literature that tells stories where nothing happens or characters have no agency or change little. One might enjoy the writing for many different reasons; literature can be great even if you don’t see something you enjoy in it.

The moments that stood out to me in HPMOR were not those of action. HPMOR teaches its readers to want to think better; and makes them value life. Our children’s children’s children won’t learn that Death once existed on the ancient Earth until they’re old enough to bear that. That sort of thing. There are also scenes of well-crafted comedy and of stargazing and of doing the impossible; there are beautifully executed plots and more Easter eggs than you imagine.

One of the quotes I use to sell the idea of reading HPMOR to people is one of a literary critic who says she distinguishes HPMOR from all other fanfiction and thinks everyone should read it.

Literature is not often crafted the way HPMOR was crafted. There are moments of appreciation of what the author did there, which are rare in books; and HPMOR is full of that.

Even without the whole thing of making people more culturally rationalist, the book is great just because it’s an awesome piece of fiction.

[-]Czynski1mo136

What is Dumbledore doing, that carries the Idiot Ball in the Mirror scene?

It begins with him having Quirrell hostage in an inescapable trap, proceeds through a conversation in which nothing of consequence occurs (nor is anything of consequence concealed), and ends with his assumption about the trap being invalidated by a cause nothing he could have done would have affected.

Or, with foreknowledge, it begins with the appearance of a trap, which Dumbledore knows will fail because he will fall very soon and Voldemort will not be beaten by his own hand. It proceeds through a conversation that is for show for both of them, possibly directed by prophecy because Harry is a hidden audience. And it ends where Dumbledore knows it must, without any action he could have taken to affect it.

8[anonymous]1mo

Chapter 110 Dumbledore is an over-the-top caricature of himself who has months to set up the perfect trap, while having access to both his century-old deep knowledge of magic and to some of the most powerful artifacts in the world (Elder Wand, Mirror of Erised, Line of Merlin Unbroken, etc.), but he gets wiped off the gameboard in minutes. This happens in a way that fulfills his enemy's ideal scenario, any countermeasures destroyed immediately by the artifact he himself introduces into the plot. Readers at the time thought this was so out of character for Dumbledore that this was likely all fake, and the Mirror was simply showing Quirrell his CEV (see also 2, 3, among others): And before you think or say that this was intentional or designed by Eliezer to generate one more layer of mystery in the story's final arc, note that we know it wasn't:

[-]ACCount1mo224

Knowing what we know now, the one answer that stands out to me is that Dumbledore's heart just wasn't in it.

Dumbledore put together a legitimate trap, he did try to stop Voldemort all by himself, but he didn't do his absolute best. This is why:

If you are reading this, Harry Potter, then I have fallen to Voldemort, and the quest now lies in your hands.
Though it may shock you to learn, this was the end that I wished in my heart would come to pass. For as I write this, it yet seems possible that Voldemort may fall by my own hand. And then, in time, I shall myself become the darkness you must overcome, to enter fully into your power. For it was said once that you might need to raise your hand against your mentor, the one who made you, who you loved; it was said that you might be my downfall. If you are reading this, then that shall never come to pass, and I am glad of it.

Dumbledore though that if he won against Voldemort, it would mean that he would go on to become the evil wizard Harry Potter would have to defeat. And it sure seems like Dumbledore spent a lot of time thinking about that.

This insecurity of his shows in his past interactions with Harry. Every time Dumbledore and Harry c... (read more)

1Czynski1mo

I still do not know what you think he should have done, either in the scenario where he knows he will fail due to prophecy, or the one where he does not.

-3[anonymous]1mo

... almost anything but what he did? "Better than the approximately-worst option used" is a low bar to clear.

1Czynski1mo

In the scenario where he knows that prophecy foretells an outcome incompatible with his success here, his major decision point is long-past; he has reason to do it anyway (presumably prophetic reason). I see nothing he could do which is obviously better, and the conversation may itself be part of the keyhole future path. If he doesn't, this is still far from an "approximately-worst option." It's still a really good trap unless Quirrell knows the Mirror is going to be the trap, knows Harry's Cloak is the genuine article that will still hide him from the Mirror, and can trick and coerce Harry into coming with him, which is three different things Dumbledore has good reason to think he probably doesn't know. The latter two are both achieved only through adventures Dumbledore doesn't know about - Azkaban, and Harry using up his time-loop password on the first day. As Lucius told Draco - any plan that relies on three things going right for you is at the limit of possible plans, and the real limit is two.

1EniScien1mo

I was in interesting in reading the first time to think and also haven't thought that all the chaos is only my own stupidity. But on further rereads it seems very strange that Quirrell says "My immortal existence must depend on discovering what trap you have set, and finding a way to escape from it, as soon as possible. But let us pointlessly delay to talk of other matters first." and Dumbledore just... goes along with that. Shouldn't it be incredibly suspicious? Pointing out that Voldemort is completely sure that it's safe for him. As I guess, Voldemort is indeed just much smarter than Dumbledore. Just as Voldemort said. And Dumbledore himself said. And everyone said. Harry just didn't believe that because why then Voldemort didn't win in 3 days? And in previous chapters we had found the answer: Voldemort was just a role, Riddle just liked played into all that war more than wanted to win. So I suspect that Riddle said that knowing that Dumbledore isn't actually cunning, he pointed attention to Weasley twins etc. So Riddle sure he will not notice. So Dumbledore is being stupid, but very predictably stupid, not suddenly stupid. So I think that is how it can be not an Idiot Ball. Though I don't dare to actually claim that because I didn't actually predict that in advance (in my first read, I mean). P.S. Oh, also he should (falsely) thought that trap will work before strange Quirrell phrase because he doesn't know that Harry leaked Resurrection Stone to Voldemort. About cloak not sure, maybe Dumbledore didn't think about it, maybe didn't expect that Voldemort will be able to get it, or maybe the cloak will not be able to save Voldemort and Dumbledore just didn't want to lose Harry.

[-]pku1mo104

Minor comment but Quirrel doesn't have a time turner; he just figured out a way to hack the protective shell around Harry's (which, given it was made to protect against interference by an eleven year old, it's pretty reasonable he can do).

3[anonymous]1mo

Fair point!

7dirk1mo

To be fair here, there was a diegetic reason Harry couldn't just kill him (hundreds of horcruxes in unknown locations), so really it was between crucio'ing him into insanity vs obliviating him; both are equally effective so the crucio would've been just torturing him for fun, which Harry didn't want to do. (Also he did feel really bad about the Death Eaters the next day when he found out he'd killed like half the Slytherins' parents including Draco's, though admittedly he seemed to find Draco's sorrow in particular the most upsetting.)

9[anonymous]1mo

I acknowledge there is an in-universe explanation, but I have two responses. The first is the fact that there is a reason Harry can't just kill Quirrell doesn't affect the overall vibe and ethos of the scene. I'm not trying to critique specific plot holes,[1] but instead to point to something different in that bullet point. It acts as a deflection and distraction, a Sunshine-glorified backtracking that's thematically inappropriate because it doesn't fit with the literal text of what Chapter 114 was about previously. But secondly, and more importantly, this unfortunately just leads to the problem I mentioned in the final bullet point. Namely that it turns this entire interaction, this interpersonal conflict, this moment of narrative tension... into yet another Puzzle with External Constraints that must be Solved through Intelligence. It once again glorifies the only actual virtue worth the piece of paper it's printed on in the world of HPMOR,[2] and once again depersonalizes the scenario and has the main character overcome something extrinsic instead of confronting his own flaws/fears/uncertainties. 1. ^ It wouldn't be particularly fun to do that, and it would come across as nitpicky. Separately, I acknowledge that HPMOR, as the nerdy story it is, tries quite hard (and generally succeeds!) to maintain good internal logic 2. ^ Namely intelligence

5dr_s1mo

To me it feels like the issue is just, killing someone actively threatening your life in self-defence is acceptable, and killing someone who is entirely in your power just as a means to further some other goal is not. Which is actually a fairly common moral standard (e.g.: any country that does not have the death penalty). It's not ground breaking but neither it feels contradictory to me. Harry explicitly also feels guilty about the fact that to some extent he thinks killing the Death Eaters was also instrumentally beneficial, even though in that context it was also totally self defence. But it turns out self defence gave him a chance to do something that his darker desires wanted anyway, and he does feel guilty over that (perhaps unreasonably so). Quirrell of course is now immortal so anyway the question of whether he should be killed or not is purely academic.

1ProgramCrafter1mo

Not necessarily? "What magic can make, magic can corrupt", also there's no need[1] to know[2] locations of horcruxes - for all we know, a rare version of Summoning Charm could work. 1. ^ "He is in his sixth year at Hogwarts and he cast a high-level Dark curse without knowing what it did.", chapter 26 2. ^ "If she knew in very vague terms what the spell was supposed to do, or she was only partially wrong, then the spell would work as originally described in the book, not the way she'd been told it should.", chapter 22

7ACCount1mo

We know for certain that there are types of magic that could be used to get information about the locations of Horcruxes. Because Hermione had one. It's clearly not common knowledge. But if some secret spells could spot that Hermione's soul is displaced, there is likely other magic that could be used to divine the location more precisely. Even if reliable means of locating Horcruxes could be obtained, dismantling Voldemort's network would still be a megaproject.

1ProgramCrafter1mo

If spell returns the actual distance instead of "is the distance greater than a fixed threshold built into the spell", then relevant technomagic already exists under name "trilateration" (what GPS does, essentially). Totally within power of Harry's generation, in my opinion, so they could take that option. "And it is not our part here to take thought only for a season, or for a few lives of Men, or for a passing age of the world. We should seek a final end of this menace, even if we do not hope to make one," as Gandalf said at the council deciding what to do with the One Ring.

4Eli Tyre18d

Some other criticisms: * Harry talks a big game about the scientific method and how a priori reasoning doesn't actually work for coming to grips with how reality actually works—you have to test things, and you should expect to be really confused a lot of the time. But in the actual text of the story he repeatedly encounters a situation, reasons about how the world must be (sometimes on the basis of scientific knowledge like timeless physics[1] or "astrology is fake, obviously"[2] which he should be legitimately way less certain of after chapter 1, and often via extremely flimsy lines of reasoning or speculation[3]), and comes to confident conclusions about how the world must be. And repeatedly, the story has it that his first guess/hypothesis/a priori conclusion is correct, and he either gets a new munchkin-superpower (which no one in the world had previously discovered), or impresses the other characters, and the audience with his brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like deductions. * The only only place where his a priori reasoning clearly doesn't work, because reality is more confusing than his theories is about the nature of magic. But the after a few scenes, the story basically completely drops that thread. There's no payoff. * Overall, the story gives lip service what real science and rationality and entails, but doesn't reliably live up to that standard. 1. ^ "Quantum mechanics wasn't enough," Harry said. "I had to go all the way down to timeless physics before it took. Had to see the wand as enforcing a relation between separate past and future realities, instead of changing anything over time - but I did it, Hermione, I saw past the illusion of objects, and I bet there's not a single other wizard in the world who could have. Even if some Muggleborn knew about timeless formulations of quantum mechanics, it would just be a weird belief about strange distant quantum stuff, they wouldn't see that it was reality, accept that the world they knew w

3maia1mo

Thank you for this description of why Hermione isn't really a second protagonist, I was struggling to put a very similar feeling into words. She simply doesn't resonate in the same way that Harry does, even though in various ways she is set up to do "protagonisty things" taken at face value.

2Sodium1mo

Harry is proactively moving the plot forward--he decided very early on that he was going to try turn Draco to the light side and succeeds in the task.

[-][anonymous]1mo*1813

This is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, because Draco is irrelevant to the final confrontation in HPMOR.^[1] (If turning Draco to the light side counted, then Harry has done a dozen other things "moving the plot forward" - but he hasn't! The plot doesn't move forward unless either Quirrell sets up an adventure or Trelawney gives her second prophecy).

It does, however, accomplish something actually good, namely giving Draco an actual character arc. I'd say he's the only character in HPMOR that gets a solid character arc. Too bad he doesn't matter.

^{^}
What in the story changes if Draco never existed? A few chats with Lucius have their lines removed, Hermione gets framed for killing another one of her acquaintances, Neville or whomever gets Legilimensed into opening the forbidden door in Chapter 104, and... what else? Harry had mostly figured out the genetic laws of magic himself already

8Sodium1mo

I don't think it's fair to say that Draco doesn't matter. There's more than one plot line than the final confrontation. Also, the fact that Draco is sympathetic to Harry and got his mother back affects the valence of the ending and where we expect the story to go afterwards (compared to, e.g., if Draco still sees himself the same way he did in the beginning).

8[anonymous]1mo

None of this affects whether Draco is one of the characters who get the check mark for "proactively moving the plot forward." Snape also has story threads about him, but notice that he didn't receive a check mark in the post.

3Popug1mo

Ender's Game battles go another way entirely. More science with Hermione instead of Draco. Hermione doesn't get framed because the only reason she was is to remove Lucius and protect Harry from his retribution for messing with Draco. Hermione doesn't die. Trelawney gives no prophecies as Harry is not driven to extremes this year. Final confrontation doesn't happen at all. Harry helps Quirrell obtain the Stone to save his life, he has no reason to suspect him as nobody has died. I think Azkaban arc stays the same, the rest is completely different.

[-][anonymous]1mo147

Trelawney gives no prophecies as Harry is not driven to extremes this year

I don't think the text as-written supports this inference at all. Harry being driven to extremes^[1] is the cause of bringing apart the very stars in heaven? The latter is an extreme action and much more likely the result of his drive to fight against Death and to enact World Optimization, which he would do anyway, not because of Draco or any specific events that Hermione went through. Harry knew the magical world in HPMOR was crazy and exploitable all the way from the beginning (with his arbitrage scheme).

Hermione doesn't get framed because the only reason she was is to remove Lucius and protect Harry from his retribution for messing with Draco.

Except there's also this, from Chapter 108:

"And you also thought," Harry said, even with his dark side's patterns he had to work to keep his voice level and cool, "that two weeks in Azkaban would improve Miss Granger's disposition, and get her to stop being a bad influence on me. So you somehow arranged for there to be newspaper stories calling for her to be sent to Azkaban, rather than some other penalty."

Professor Quirrell's lips drew up in a thin smile. "Good c... (read more)

2MinusGix1mo

But, turning Draco is a part of the plot to move forward. There is a main plot-thread that things center around, but it seems odd to me to say that just because he didn't matter for the big ending he is thus irrelevant. Stories have multiple branches.

4[anonymous]1mo

There is a much more fundamental disagreement here between us than whether Draco is "part of the plot to move forward." The best way I can summarize it is I disagree that there even is a "main plot-thread that things center around." In the interest of time, I'll quote another important part of Alexander Wales's review: Draco doesn't proactively move the plot forward because he does not change the structure/environment/ethos of the story through any of his actions. Same for Harry, same for Hermione; they are reactive and go along with the flow instead of changing anything. Dumbledore changes stuff, but that's all prior to the start of the story and it happens in a way he doesn't himself understand (after viewing the Halls of Prophecy, he serves a conduit for Fate as opposed to an agent optimizing for his own goals). Quirrell, on the other hand, is the one that actually acts intentionally to change the structure of what's going on. Also note that even if I granted you everything you wrote in your comment (which I don't), the fact that Draco would be part of the plot to move forward wouldn't even imply Draco is a character moving the plot forward. The example you've given is of stuff happening to Draco, as opposed to by Draco.

1MinusGix1mo

I agree Draco wasn't moving the plot forward much by himself, but I was going with the focus of the comment you were replying to, in which this is Harry moving a part of the plot forward—the plot-point being that people like Draco can have their beliefs challenged and learn, that people are products of their environment to varying degrees but that doesn't mean you should ignore them, and also showing off the various ways people react to differences in belief. That is, while this doesn't have huge effects in story, though I disagree that it has none, it was a core plot point with a specific message it was trying to extol. And so Harry pushing this through does affect things.

2Raemon1mo

(I'm interested in reading this but the lack of line-breaks makes it pretty hard)

5[anonymous]1mo

Hope it's better now!

7philh1mo

Okay, gonna ask a hardball question. Ch 59: But! Back in ch 30: How did you miss this glaring oversight?

3momom21mo

Brooms accelerate and decelerate (until they reach cruising speed in a few seconds, or they stop). But they don't accelerate faster down than up; in that sense, they're don't work on classical physics.

3Bridgett Kay1mo

I always wondered why, at the before-Christmas battle, Hermione didn't give her wish to Sunshine to incentivize them to work together instead of defecting and turning traitor (that is to say- make the wish for sunshine and announce it before the battle.) It think it was the obvious course to unite the army, and it was the obvious Hermione thing to do. Did she fail to do this just because Dumbledore got to her first, or was this a true blind spot on her part?

7Gretta Duleba1mo

Eliezer says: "There are always infinite policies to consider. I didn't consider that one and neither did young Hermione."

1Bridgett Kay1mo

Ah- thank you. In retrospect what seems like "the obvious thing" to me is not always so.

[-]Tulip1mo3212

One question which this interview touches on a bit but doesn't address directly, which I find myself curious about: what were the core elements of the story which were The Point, which the rest of the story got built around? Which is to say: some parts of the story, like the SPHEW arc, were added as setup for later parts which needed to be there. But it doesn't make sense to write something for the sake of setting up something else, if the regress doesn't end with something you've outlined for reasons other than setting up something else. The terminal story-elements, so to speak, as opposed to instrumental ones. I'd be interested to know which elements of the story were, in the relevant sense, terminal.

[-]Gretta Duleba1mo190

Eliezer's reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in:

This is really complicated because there was a central plot bunny of "what if my own version of this" that burped into my head after reading a couple of million words of Harry Potter fanfiction. But the very very first version involved young Harry watching in horror as Snape crucioed into permanent insanity Voldemort's face on the back of Quirrell's head. The second version was more like, in Death Note metaphor and the way I phrased it inside my own head, "Light Yagami (Voldemort) is older and smarter and has 300 horcruxes, Headmaster L (Dumbledore) is pretending to be insane, and then into the middle of their duel wanders a young Miles Vorkosigan (Harry) starting his first year at Hogwarts." This one will sound more familiar if you know Death Note and Vorkosigan.

But the things that start as bunnies in their own right, rather than things on the way to other things, have their origins in "my own take on Harry Potter fanfiction" rather than some grand scheme or ordering by importance. I knew, from the moment I first thought about "what do I do with the canon plot beat of the troll", that Hermione was going to be e... (read more)

2Said Achmiz1mo

What is a “plot bunny”?

8Zack_M_Davis1mo

(Evocative synonym for "story idea".)

[-]ACCount1mo2510

Magic-by-default has some amusing implications.

We know that, according to prophecies, the world is overwhelmingly likely to be destroyed. If wizards don't destroy the world, then Muggles will. One obvious way for the latter to happen would be an out-of-control-AI disaster.

But if magic is the universal default, then a sufficiently advanced AI would be capable of spellcasting. Which is not a failure mode any sane AI researcher would see coming.

[-]Lucius Bushnaq1mo259

And the answer was: “All right. There is a curse on the Defence Professor position. There has always been a curse on the Defence Professor position. The school has adapted to it. Harry has gotten into just the right kind of shenanigan to cause McGonagall to panic about this, and give Harry the instructions he needs to hear to prevent him from just taking certain matters to McGonagall.”

The question I always had here was “But what was Voldemort’s original plan for dealing with this issue when he decided to teach at Hogwarts?”

Because I don't think he would have wanted to stake all his plans for the stone and Harry on McGonagall coincidentally saying this just in time, and Harry coincidentally being in a state where he obeys her instruction and never rethinks that decision. And Voldemort would have definitely known about the resonance problem before coming to Hogwarts. Even if he thought it would be somehow gone after ten years, he would have realised after the encounter with Harry in Diagon Alley at the very latest that that wasn’t true. So what was his original plan for making sure Harry wouldn’t talk about the resonance to anyone important? Between the vow and the resonan... (read more)

[-]Gretta Duleba1mo171

Eliezer's reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in:

Voldemort was flatly not expecting Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres. He was expecting Tom Riddle Jr. Jr. Voldemort knew how to handle Himself v2, and it at no point occurred to Voldemort that, for example, Harry would run off and tell McGonagall about the Parseltongue whisper telling him to seek out the Chamber of Secrets. It's not like Voldemort had ever previously been a dad, and he was not calibrated on kids being surprising.

[-]Jozdien1mo1315

The question I always had here was “But what was Voldemort’s original plan for dealing with this issue when he decided to teach at Hogwarts?”

My guess was that he never considered the possibility that Harry would do something like report it to an authority figure. For example, consider this from chapter 49:

Professor Quirrell was smiling thinly now. "Well now, let us suppose that there was a Parselmouth in this year's crop of students, a potential Heir of Slytherin. You must admit, Mr. Potter, that you stand out as a possibility whenever extraordinary people are considered. And if I then further ask myself which new Slytherin would be most likely to have his mental privacy invaded by the Headmaster, specifically hunting the memories of his Sorting, why, you stand out even more." The smile vanished. "So you see, Mr. Potter, it was not I who invaded your mind, though I will not ask you to apologize. It is not your fault that you believed Dumbledore's protestations of respecting your mental privacy."
"My sincere apologies," Harry said, keeping his face expressionless. The rigid control was a confession in its own right, as was the sweat beading his forehead; but he didn't think the Defen

... (read more)

7Lucius Bushnaq1mo

For me that fell under ‘My simulation of Voldemort isn’t buying that he can rely on this, not for something so crucial.’

8Jozdien1mo

That would depend on whether he actively considers it as something to rely on, as opposed to an assumption so baked in he forgets to question it, right? If questioned I think Quirrell would rightfully consider the Chamber to be something critical enough to be worth having other contingencies for, but he just never considered it necessary.

5CronoDAS1mo

And the basilisk is already dead, so there's nothing useful to find there anyway.

3espoire1mo

I figured Harry himself was just aro/ace and it was showing through even at a young age. I admit this was a bit of typical mind fallacious reasoning; people could tell I was unusual like that when I was 10.

3nooch1mo

Frankly the plot to stay undiscovered within Hogwarts stretches credulity regardless of whether Harry gets clues about Quirrel's real identity. As readers we forgive it because 1. it's part of the setup, where luck and coincidence are more forgivable and 2. it's also in the canon books. But I suppose to steelman it one might suppose that Voldemort simply accepts a high risk of being discovered, has a plan to escape if that occurs, and is fortunate to not need it. Both Harry and The Stone are in Hogwarts, there's no risk-free method of accessing them.

2CronoDAS1mo

If you want a retroactive justification, it would be that even if Harry did talk about the resonance, nobody other than Quirrell would know what it actually meant. And they also wanted to have a Defense Professor last to the end of the year for once...

3Lucius Bushnaq1mo

Dumbledore likely would have known what it meant, and I think Alastor at the very least would have put together the most crucial parts as well.

2CronoDAS1mo

But did Quirrell know that Dumbledore would have realized? (I mean, there's also a reasonable chance that Dumbledore was already well aware that Quirrel was Voldemort when he hired him but did it anyway, not least because if Voldemort was teaching Defense Against the Dark Arts he wasn't going around leading Death Eaters and killing people.)

1Popug1mo

I wondered about that as well. I think the answer has to be something along the lines of "He could do nothing to conceal it, he new it was a longshot, he lost nothing on the attempt, he had a backup plan he never told Harry about." Imagine: Harry tells Dumbledore, Dumbledore confronts Quirrell, he dramatically reveals his identity as David Monroe, as well as a lightning-shaped scar on his chest and a fantastical story about dual fates or prophecy twins or something. Actually, do we know that McGonagall threatened to painfully kill Harry if he reveals Voldemort's secrets? It could be a fake memory.

[-]Ben Pace1mo211

Woo! Curated. I got a better understanding of how I could write fiction that was great like HPMOR is great, especially don't-give-your-characters-weaknesses, give-their-rivals-strengths, and also making sure that almost every character's viewpoint makes sense if they're viewing the story with them as the main character.

I also had a lot of fun learning about details of HPMOR I didn't know about, which I am sure many HPMOR readers on this site are also interested in.

Thanks for the post, and here's to the epilogues being published before the end of humanity!

[-]cousin_it1mo134

I got a better understanding of how I could write fiction that was great like HPMOR is great

Wow, yeah, your comment is a perfect place to reply with something that was bothering me for awhile.

I'd really like more folks on LW to write fiction, because HPMOR and other stuff was indeed a kind of writing workshop. Even if it loses much in retrospect, at the time it did show a lot of people that writing could be cool. But I very much don't want more of the kind of sad writing that goes on on r/rational - taking the explicit lessons and striving for borrowed awesomeness and all that.

The make-or-break factor in writing (or at least, any writing that gets called "great") is not about thinking up plot, world, or characters. It's "liking sentences" as Annie Dillard put it. It's voice. You cannot write with the same voice as EY, and nobody wants you to. What you can do is find your voice, your own way of liking sentences. And then all the superstructure will fit itself to that. Maybe it will ask for rational characters rationally doing rational things, but maybe it will be humor, or absurdism, or magical realism, or social commentary, or any number of things. Before you get the voice, you can't know.

[-]Vaniver1mo213

Hermione's mask does not, so far as I noticed, move to Dumbledore.

What about the mask of

captured person offstage to be rescued?

1deep1mo

I was thinking the mask of "person who's read more books than Harry ever will"

[-]Adam Zerner1mo178

Excellent facilitation Gretta. There are so many times when I was confused and then you asked Eliezer to clarify the thing I was confused about. I'm writing this after encountering the following, but there were others:

Gretta: Please explain Mary Sue, because some people aren't going to know what that is.

[-]Константин Токмаков1mo163

"But by the end of the story the mysterious old wizard mask has moved from Dumbledore to Harry, and Harry's brash young hero mask has moved to Hermione. (Hermione's mask does not, so far as I noticed, move to Dumbledore.)"

Just imagine: thousands of years later, Dumbledore is pulled out of the mirror and finds himself in a completely alien transhumanist future built by Harry. Young (only a hundred years old!), inexperienced, armed with principles and ideas about reality that are completely inappropriate for this world and society... Just like Hermione at the beginning of the story, isn't it?

[-]philh1mo132

The viewpoint character table has Dumbledore with (✅) and Quirrel with ((✅)). These look to me like "rare" and "even rarer". I'm surprised because I thought Dumbledore was approximately as rare a viewpoint character as Quirrel. (Offhand I can think of 0 and 1 examples for them, respectively, though ch 6 aftermath could be Dumbledore - I read it as McGonagall.) When was Dumbledore viewpoint?

5Gretta Duleba1mo

The most likely explanation is simply that I messed up. As I was reading back the text in that section I felt a little confused and decided to make a diagram for it. I showed the diagram to Eliezer and said, "Should I include this? It's practically begging for people to point out all the things I got wrong." He made a few corrections of his own and then we decided to ship it. Anyway, keep nitpicking[1], I'll revise/fix the mistakes as a batch in a few days. (Busy this weekend.) 1. ^ Where "nitpicking" here is not meant negatively, I appreciate constructive criticism a lot and prefer for my articles to be correct!

7pku1mo

Another nitpick, but footnote 14 is wrong: Tonks was a metamorphmagus, not using polyjuice.

2Gretta Duleba1mo

Fixed, thank you!

4Gretta Duleba1mo

I have now fixed the chart, thanks again!

3JenniferRM1mo

The way I read it: "✅" is "this is a viewpoint character because they are interesting and their mental state is consistent with the Authors intended sequence of Reader revelations". "(✅)" is "this person isn't interesting enough, in their mental states, choices, or whatever, for the juice to be worth the squeeze of describing their minds in detail over time". "((✅))" is "this person's mental state contains spoilers, that, if leaked to the Reader, would ruin the Author's plan for what is supposed to be a mystery, and hard to understand, vs not (probably because some more interesting viewpoint character's lack knowledge of the mental state of the villain or whoever is actually plot critical such that the plot would just be totally over if a viewpoint character was telepathic)". I think your comment fixed the chart, and now it shows ((Dumbledore)) and ((Quirrel)) and I feel like this is better than before :-) Also, I think it is kinda interesting to try to map this framework farther out, to Mysteries, or to the Romance genre (especially love triangles?) because it probably needs more levels than these three (or maybe three levels, but make it a vector of them, that do "this, but in different dimensions of knowledge the viewpoint character can, themselves, understand"?) in a super critical way? Like something about "each character's own interiority and self understanding" can't be breached (differently for each character?) in some genres because in many a Romance too much (mutual?) clarity about how and why each person would react to different possible world's they might be in, or might actualize with their choices... would mess up the Story. (This is also a sort of useful frame for Planecrash, which is a Romance of a sort.) You could still have interesting art... if you mess up the Story too much with super high levels of insight, but then the Story won't be inside genre conventions that tend to ensure the reader gets the payoff they expected to get, from readin

[-]maia1mo124

My own belief about why so many people didn't want to believe Quirrell was Voldemort is that Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike (perhaps due to, as mentioned: "make every character awesome," "give characters understandable flaws drawn from real life").

See also: Ferrer Maillol, a guy who literally orders the main(ish) character to be tortured and was still quite likable!

[-]Czynski1mo124

Why does nobody ever ask about the Project Lawful / Planecrash epilogue? I still have to finish that one too!

Because we assume that you care more about HPMoR's epilogue, I suspect. Also some amount of 'nobody ever finishes promised epilogues for rationalfics', which has not proven to be a law of nature but is certainly a strong prior.

[-]eggsyntax1mo108

Can't speak for anyone else, but I want the Project Lawful epilogue at least as badly as the HPMOR epilogue!

[-]trade_apprentice1mo1211

While we're at it, I might as well wish for the "flashback: this is not a threat" lecture.

1Urs20d

Wait, what? Project Lawful is incomplete? I just picked it up as my big summer read. Though I probably won't make it past part 1:MICatWoA while it is still summer. Will I miss much when I read it as is without the missing parts you mentioned?

3Gretta Duleba19d

No, you will not miss much, carry on reading!

[-]ProgramCrafter1mo111

As an implication of magic-as-default, we can infer that

Voldemort did not figure these genetics out: in the scene of reviving Hermione, he does not know if magic would return to her or be lost forever.

> "Girl'ss body iss resstored. Ssubstance iss repaired. But not magic, or life... thiss iss body of dead Muggle."

In foresight, there's one more hint for magic-as-default:

Muggles have problems seeing magical things, and probably using them too.

> There were no questions about his father accompanying him to the magical side of King's Cross Station. Dad had trouble just looking at Harry's trunk directly.

> Wizards, Squibs, and Muggles. Two copies and you can cast spells, one copy and you can still use potions or magic devices, and zero copies means you might even have trouble looking straight at magic.

Recalling that continuing to look directly is a default action for anything alive: it means that something must disrupt the signals so that a nonmagical would look to the side. It would make sense a Muggle complex would do it, in contrast to some charm on the item itself, because the former is closer to brain architecture.

(Hiding quotes because, in most probability, these comme... (read more)

[-]antanaclasis2mo104

Thank you for making and publishing this! It's interesting to see some more of the background and process that goes into works like HPMOR, both for the sake of appreciation of the work, and for reference in my own story-crafting.

[-]eggsyntax1mo93

Would someone^[1] kindly hurry up and solve alignment so that Eliezer can fully turn his attention to his true vocation as an author (with a side gig as a decision theorist)?

^{^}
I'll keep working on it too, but I don't currently have a clear line-of-sight on a robust solution.

[-]eggsyntax1mo108

PS -- it would be phenomenal if the two of you did another one of these but for Project Lawful!

2trade_apprentice1mo

Seconded

4Adrià Garriga-alonso18d

Well that's a good motivation if I ever saw one. Nothing I've read in the intervening years is as good as HPMOR. It might be the pinnacle of Western literature. It will be many years before an AI, never mind another human, can write something that is this good. (Except for the wacky names that people paid for, which I guess is on character for the civilization that spawned it.)

6[comment deleted]1mo

[-]Mikhail Samin2mo9-5

Wow, this is awesome, thanks for doing it!

We literally cannot fit enough possibilities in our head for the truth to reliably be inside our considered hypothesis space

If I understand correctly what it’s referring to, this is not relevantly true; infra-bayesianism solves non-realizability formally, and seems much closer than Bayesian agents to how humans formulate hypotheses (i.e., convex sets of probability distributions over states of the world instead of just probability distributions over states of the world; that allows us to have a hypothesis about some part of the world that we can assign probabilities to independently from other parts of the world).

[-]Thecommexokid1mo*86

I’d love an interview about Planecrash also, especially if both Eliezer and linta participated. I’ve read the whole thing twice but it’s been a while, so exact topics don’t spring readily to mind, but I recall while reading (esp. the second time) having tons of questions about the writing process.

Generally, I’m curious to know about the collaboration between the authors. Glowfic in general usually gives the vibe of being made-up-as-it-goes-along, and that each author has autonomy over their own contributions. But the sections between the gods, for ex... (read more)

[-]Czynski1mo71

I have two questions that come to mind, both about Chapter 86:

What else did the Dark Mark do? Did you work any of it out?

As many people have probably wondered since they read

"But as you can see, the Dark Lord was quite cunning." His gaze grew more distant. "Oh," Severus breathed, "he was very cunning indeed..."

and

If Harry hadn't been interrupted by Mad-Eye arriving, would he have conceded enough of the point, and explained enough about how dangerous he would be fighting a war, to shock McGonagall and Snape into believing him? Would this have been cat

... (read more)

6Gretta Duleba1mo

Eliezer says he doesn't recall ever contemplating either of these questions. (Sorry!)

[-]AnthonyC1mo60

Hermione's mask does not, so far as I noticed, move to Dumbledore.)

I would've never thought of it this way, but in the end, doesn't Dumbledore reveal to himself to have been trying to complete a quest given to him by his own set of Mysterious Old Wizards, while still acting within the rules and aiming to achieve selfless and omnibenevolent ends? That's seeing things in narrative presentation order, instead of his own subjective timeline, though.

[-]Nition1mo50

From what I remember it was the jump to Azkaban that seemed like a jarring escalation when I read the story, more than the Quirrell thing. Felt like it should be more overwhelming to Harry, going from relatively normal magic school life to terrifying evil prison.

[-]Towards_Keeperhood1mo50

Seems like a fine time to share my speculations about yet unresolved easter eggs from the story. I'm not overly confident on either of those.

I present some hints first in case you want to try to think about it yourself.

The core (and power) of the Elder Wand

From chapter 122:

Harry took the Elder Wand out of his robes, gazed again at the dark-grey wood that Dumbledore had passed down to him. Harry had tried to think faster this time, he'd tried to complete the pattern implied by the Cloak of Invisibility and the Resurrection Stone. The Cloak of Invisibility h

... (read more)

[-]Thecommexokid1mo40

Add’l question: In the Sorting Hat chapter, there was originally an authors’s note stating that if anyone could guess what would happen at the start of the next chapter, Eliezer would tell them “the rest of the plot” (might not be the exact phrasing, can’t remember). As far as I know, that went unredeemed, but if he had needed to pay out, what would he have said? Curious to know how the “rest of the plot” was conceptualized in his head as of chapter, like, 9 or something.

2Gretta Duleba1mo

Eliezer's reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in: Hard to say at this point! In my head it would've included breaking Black out of Azkaban, Hermione being eaten by the troll, Quirrell and Harry descending together to go after the Philosopher's Stone, the final duel between Harry and the Death Eaters foreshadowed in Ch. 1, Dumbledore's prophecies, and Harry's ascent over magical Britain. I don't know if I would've revealed every one of those beats to the winning reader, but those are the most central plot beats as I saw them.

[-]Error1mo41

Why does nobody ever ask about the Project Lawful / Planecrash epilogue? I still have to finish that one too!

Datum: I want to see a Planecrash epilogue, but after the second case of missing-epilogue I began to suspect that the "missing" part was purposeful -- some combination of trolling the reader and encouraging meta-fanfiction to continue the story -- and that I should treat both stories as completed.

I have no idea if others have the same impression. I didn't read HPMOR until long after it and its discussions were done, and all Planecrash discussion happened on platforms I don't use.

2Gretta Duleba1mo

Thanks for telling us your inferences! While I can see how you got there, I believe you're just straight-up wrong in this case. From many conversations with Eliezer about these epilogues over multiple years, I believe he absolutely does want to write and publish them and there's basically no feinting-for-the-purpose-of-trolling or feinting-for-the-purpose-of-encouraging-fanfiction at all.

[-]CronoDAS1mo41

I didn't know there was going to be any more to Planecrash/Project Lawful.

[-]JenniferRM1mo30

Neat! This part of it helped me get a better model of Eliezer's model of the lowest levels of subjectively accessible and controllable thinking!

There's that stuff in the middle of the 30ms to 300,000ms zone where a thought that takes 4 seconds to happen (and which necessarily must have some underlying neurological basis) can sometimes need 4 minutes to explain to a third party... or can't be transmitted that fast. Or can be explained but not turned into something they could repeat in 4 seconds on their own... or whatever.

Harry’s dark side, as I model it, i

... (read more)

[-]Fiora Sunshine1mo*32

(I parenthetically mention that one of my deflationary hypotheses for why people say they get new thoughts when they’re on drugs, is just that some drugs, like psychedelics, disrupt patterned chains of thought. Normally whenever we think thought X, we then go on to think thoughts Y and Z in a familiar pattern. But taking psychedelics is one way to disrupt those patterns and think new thoughts instead. The deflationary hypothesis is that any kind of mental disruption would do it, that the results are not specific to the drug; you'd need to demonstrate some

... (read more)

[-]Donald Hobson1mo22

I had the broken tool hypothesis.

At some point, there was a non-magical universe. That universe probably didn't have the laws of physics as we know them, but it could have had something similar maybe? The life within that universe developed technology. They made some sort of high tech omnitool (like ambient nanobots). That tool was designed to be used by sentient intelligent beings, which explains why magic focuses on sentient beings. The tool had a help function. Which explains the effect where if you think about roughly what you want to do, magic w... (read more)

[-]deep1mo21

And especially, maybe you remember how at the time it didn't seem like a flaw to you. You were not going around being like, “And today I shall be a flawed character.”

A therapist once gave me the insight that character weaknesses are strengths taken too far. Harry's energetic and clever and knowledgeable, he's inspired and energized by competition, and he can meme people into doing things -- and he can be a know-it-all who assumes first principles & cleverness trump empirics and experience, someone who's unwilling to lose, and irresponsible or annoying in how he leads others.

[-]Lorec1mo20

I knew you had to have some kind of magic-related rationalization for the PG-motivated preemptive redaction of Quirrell's sexuality back in 2009 before you knew ace people existed, but WoG-ing that after you learn ace people actually exist and didn't do anything wrong to be like this, doesn't feel like the move.

Possibly relatedly, can you speak on why you deleted your old "Headcanon accepted" comment under Harry Potter and the Methods of Catgirls?

2Lorec1mo

Re '?' react: [ — Inadequate Equilibria ] [ earlier Facebook post introducing status-blindness concept ]

[-]codingquark1mo20

Under the Nested Nerfing Hypothesis, the laws of physics themselves are just a spell

Given this, Chapter 21: Rationalization section with Harry and Draco meeting is HILARIOUS!

[-]Константин Токмаков1mo20

About the magical chromosome. I once wrote a critical note about this on the Russian analogue of TVtropes (paragraphs one and three, marked 1, remark 2 from another person). I still don't understand how the appearance of wizards from the connection of a wizard and an unambiguous Muggle should work.

"1 And again, genetics. In fact, the author's error in the genetic part is much more critical: it follows directly from the text that a wizard is only a person who has inherited the "magic gene" from both his father and mother. That is, a wizard can only be... (read more)

[-]Three-Monkey Mind1mo21

This is probably pretty close to a bookkeeping request, but I visited https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ThoseTwoBadGuys and the page at the bottom says "If a direct wick has led you here, please correct the link so that it points to the corresponding article.”

I could use some sort of correction because there are a bunch of Those Two Bad Guys types listed on the page and I’m not sure which one Eliezer is pointing at.

5Eliezer Yudkowsky1mo

It's the one for Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar from Neverwhere, for example, or Guido and Nunzio from Myth Adventures. I think TV Tropes used to be plainer about this being the meaning of the Those Two Bad Guys trope, but now the page redirects to somewhere else? Consider it a dead link to a trope that apparently got renamed to I-don't-know-what.

2Kaj_Sotala1mo

Early 2021 version of the page that didn't redirect yet.

1David Joshua Sartor1mo

I think it's this. https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BanteringBaddieBuddies

1rsaarelm1mo

Croup and Vandemar, where one is a talky weasel and the other is a simple-minded bruiser, seem to be the Evil Duo subtype.

1Raemon1mo

I was briefly disoriented but it seemed fairly obviously Bumbling Henchmen Duo.

[-]HoVY1mo22

I didn't know there was (going to be?) an epilogue to planecrash, but it didn't leave me nearly as thirsty for more as hpmor did. With hpmor, I wanted to see what everyone would do next, as they're still pretty young, whereas with planecrash, it felt like everything I was curious about was explored to my satisfaction. Sure, we don't get a lot of specifics on the new society(s) on golarion, but that's pretty fine with me. It would be interesting to see maybe what The Future holds, or where the language guy ends up, but the former feels right as a mystery, while the latter seemed pretty well foreshadowed

[-]Askwho1mo20

I know it's probably rebuilding an audio file that already exists, but I absorb information better through audio, so I've created a multi-voice AI podcast version of this (fantastic) interview: https://open.substack.com/pub/askwhocastsai/p/hpmor-the-probably-untold-lore-by

[-]Alexei1mo20

So why would the ancient Atlanteans program magic to be responsive to phrases that would not exist for several thousand years in their future?

My guess is that they saw into the future, or at least some parts of the future. Maybe directly, maybe via prophecies. So their language (or the language they designed for spells) actually pulls on all the languages that existed and will exist on the planet.

[-]temporary_user1mo1415

There are some story hints that imply spells are not discovered, but invented.

Quirrell at one point tries to make sure Harry cannot read any books about how spells are made (because he is scared he will attempt it and accidentally destroy the world).

He also brags about having created a dark ritual, with saying he had to spend a lot of time envisioning it mentally and implying that the act of creation was very dangerous.

"I kept that ritual burning in my mind for years, perfecting it in imagination, pondering its meaning and making fine adjustments, waiting for the intention to stabilise. At last I dared to invoke my ritual, an invented sacrificial ritual, based on a principle untested by all known magic. And I lived, and yet live."

Later: "Liked falsse desscription of previousss horcrux sspell sso much, sso dissappointed when realissed truth of it, thoughtss of improved verssion came out in that sshape."

My conclusion: Wizards invent spells through some process, tying a particular outcome with a particular action (waving a wand just so, saying the right words, performing a ritual). This process is, however, incredibly dangerous and most people who try to do thi... (read more)

8philh1mo

Hm, so, how many spells are there that don't seem to be drawn from any known language? If the answer is none, while there are several drawn from modern languages... that's a little ominous.

3sam1mo

My headcanon is that the words for certain things came from spells, rather than the other way around

[-]philh1mo20

a Squib is a person with at least one magical parent but who is themselves non-magical.

I not-super-confidently think this is compatible with canon, but not explicit or even particularly hinted at in canon. My memory is that the squibs we see in canon are Filch and the neighbor, and we don't know either of their ancestry.

5pku1mo

Iirc when they discover filch is a squib Ron explicitly says this is what a squib is ("like muggle born wizards, but in reverse and much rarer").

2philh1mo

Oh, I apparently wasn't paying attention to the words I quoted. I thought they were saying a squib is born to a muggle and a wizard.

[-]EniScien1mo10

Sort of question: I have read once about some drafts of "Not your usual Riddle fic" or something like that which iirc EY had written and was going to publish as well as epilogue. When I heard about it I became really interested about those, what it was exactly about, are they finished, can we see finished of those, can we see just drafts? I just hope to ever read them (as well as epilogues) before we all will die.

And also I am interested about other works, esp Well Bound Demons. What is with them? Is there some central page with info on such questions?

I am... (read more)

[-]itaibn01mo10

Why does nobody ever ask about the Project Lawful / Planecrash epilogue? I still have to finish that one too!

I didn'r know that was planned! Or maybe I heard it and forgot. Now I'm looking forward to it

[-]deep1mo10

It's like trying to compress a file that was generated by a random device —

Gretta: You can't losslessly compress a truly random file.

I don't think this is strictly true. You can't a priori build a compression scheme that will work for an arbitrary random file (No Free Lunch Theorem). But you can ex post identify the particular patterns in a particular random file, and pick a compression scheme that picks up on those patterns. You probably end up with a pretty ugly scheme that doesn't generalize, and so is unsati... (read more)

[-]Eliezer Yudkowsky1mo107

The code of the compressor counts against your message length if you didn't pick the compressor before seeing the message. (In standard epistemology about compression and simplicity priors. See eg Minimum Message Length.)

2Adrià Garriga-alonso18d

It's still true that a posteriori you can compress random files. For example, if I randomly get the file "all zeros", it's a very compressible file, even if I have to write the program. It's just that on average a priori you can't do better than just writing out the file.

-4deep1mo

In context, I guess your claim is: "if the 'compressor' is post-hoc trying a bunch of algorithms and picking the best one, the full complexity of that process should count against the compressor." Totally agree with that as far as epistemology is concerned! But I don't think the epistemological point carries over to the realm of rational-fic. * In part that's because I think of JKR-magic as in fact having a bunch of structure that makes it much easier to explain than it would be to explain a truly randomly-generated set of spells and effects (e.g. the pseudo-Latin stuff; the fact that wands are typically used). So I expect an retrofitted explanation wouldn't be crazy tortured (wouldn't require having a compression process that tests a ridiculous number N of patterns, or incorporates a ridiculous amount of fiat random bits). * In part I'm just making a tedious "nerds have different aesthetic intuitions about stuff" point, where I think a reasonably simple well-retrofitted explanation is aesthetically very cool even if it's clearly not the actual thing used to generate the system (and maybe required a bunch of search to find).

[-]Urs1mo10

With regards of the call to preorder the new book, here, once again, is the question if it will be available DRM free in any way.

The stores listed on the website are DRMed and at least two of them don't even have a download option.

Nate, Elizier, any hope for that?

3Gretta Duleba1mo

Per Nate's best guess without re-reviewing the contract: unfortunately, you'll have to take it up with the publisher; they own the relevant copyrights (as is standard in any trad publishing deal). [Note: I originally overstated Nate's confidence here; the error was mine.] I can add that at least in the US, I wouldn't hold my breath; Little, Brown is a division/imprint of Hachette, which is famous for supporting DRM.

3Raemon1mo

this sounds like either you dropped a "not" or is sarcastic (in a way it otherwise didn't quite vibe)

5Gretta Duleba1mo

... I don't think so? Urs wants DRM-free. Hachette likes DRM. We're working with Hachette. Therefore Urs shouldn't hold their breath. I think that all just straightforwardly adds up? I certainly wasn't aiming to be sarcastic.

3Raemon1mo

Oh, my bad. I saw the word "support" and my brain silly-ly classified it as "Hatchet wants to do the nice thing" when the thing they were supporting was DRM.

1Urs20d

Thanks, Gretta, that's good to know even though I would have preferred another answer.

2Algon19d

IIRC, it's just the epilogue that's missing. So it's about as incomplete as HPMOR is. Personally, I didn't even notice the lack of an epilogue whilst reading. The ending basically stands on its own IMO.

[-]pku1mo10

My open question is: how did Dumbledore know Voldemort was Tom Riddle? When he set himself up as dark Lord he presumably didn't intend to leave a trace (he didn't with his David Monroe persona). Did Dumbledore discover it in some plot? Did he conclude it because Voldemort openly use parseltongue somewhere? Was it in the prophecies?

4pku1mo

Actually now I want to write a spin off short story about this. It always bothered me that hpmor Dumbledore didn't really get any onscreen moments of awesome, I want to write a story set early in the Voldemort war where, for the first time, a relatively young inexperienced Voldemort has someone pull a successful plot against him by being proactive and he barely escapes (and rewrites some of his list with lessons).

3Gretta Duleba1mo

Eliezer's reply, sent to me and copy-pasted in: Riddle having set up Hagrid, having asked Dumbledore for an introduction to Flamel, and his general demeanor etc, was more than sufficient info for Dumbledore. There were not two candidates for who Voldemort could possibly be.

1pku1mo

After thinking about this a bit more, this says something about Voldemort's perfect occlumancy in that while he could convincingly become a lot of different characters, there were still parts of his underlying person (CEV?) that genuinely were so unlike other people he couldn't easily fake not having them. (Which I guess is semi-confirmed in-story in that it says occlumancy and veritaserum enters the mind through specific surfaces that can be defended, but powerful methods like unbreakable vows/parseltongue/the mirror can't be blocked with it)

[+][comment deleted]1mo10

^{^}

The Real Story: The Gap into Conflict (2009)

^{^}

Eliezer adds more context to the difference between drama and melodrama: “A drama is a play or a story and it can potentially be high prestige, whereas a melodrama is exaggerated, unsubtle, low status. Stephen R. Donaldson is offering a hypothesis about what distinguishes the shouty thing from the potentially subtle thing, though I do not think this is a full explanation of the difference, it’s just an aspect.”

^{^}

Donaldson: “Melodrama presents a Victim, a Villain, and a Rescuer. Drama offers the same characters and then studies the process by which they change roles.”

^{^}

Amusingly, if you read the afterword to Donaldson’s book, it is all about how frustrated Donaldson was with his attempts to implement the victim / villain / rescuer triangle in his writing. He wrote the story once, it came out extremely lopsided, he put it in a drawer for a few years. He rewrote it at least six times, trying to balance the triangle, but never quite got it up to his own standards. He writes, “And eventually I came to the conclusion that I was never going to be able to make it ‘aesthetically perfect.’ Judged by the standard of my original intentions, this book would always be a failure.”

^{^}

Eliezer is correct that Orson Scott Card did say something like this in chapter eight of Writing Fantasy & Science Fiction:

“The most daring course, yet the one most likely to transform your audience, is to keep [the anti-hero] sympathetic throughout, while facing him with an opponent who is also sympathetic throughout the story. The audience will like both characters — a lot — and as [the anti-hero] and his opponent come into deadly conflict, your readers will be emotionally torn.

This is anguish, perhaps the strongest of emotions you can make your audience experience directly (as opposed to sympathetically mirroring what your characters feel). Neither character is at all confused about what he wants to have happen, yet your audience, emotionally involved with both of them, cannot bear to have either character lose. The emotional stakes are raised to much greater intensity, and yet the moral issues will again be removed from a matter of mere sympathy; in having to choose between characters they love, the readers will be forced to decide on the basis of the moral issues between them. Who really should prevail?”

^{^}

For example, at the end of chapter 68:
"If I want to be a hero too," said Hermione, "if I've decided to be a hero too, is there anything you can do to help?"

^{^}

This happens right after the previous citation, at the beginning of chapter 69.

^{^}

OP = gamer slang for “overpowered”

^{^}

There’s more about epilogues at the end of this article!

^{^}

Eliezer remembers correctly! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Sue

^{^}

“Professor McGonagall was holding Hermione so firmly that you might have thought it was a mother holding her daughter, or maybe granddaughter.” – Chapter 81

^{^}

For example: “Now what?” Dumbledore echoed. “Why, now the hero wins, of course.”

^{^}

Hermione wakes up one morning in Chapter 72 and finds a “small slip of parchment” under her pillow telling her where to find a bully.

^{^}

Nymphadora Tonks is metamorphagused into Susan Bones’ form.

^{^}

Slashfic is fan-fiction jargon for a story that focuses on unconventional romantic or sexual pairings between characters, most often male-male pairings, that were not present in the original story.

^{^}

In chapter 18, we see Snape being cruel, but we also learn that Snape is working with Dumbledore and McGonagall in the conspiracy — he is, in at least some senses, one of the good guys. And Harry infers that it is necessary, according to the tropes, to have an evil-seeming Potions professor, and Dumbledore allows him to believe that. As a result, Snape’s cruelty begins to look cooperative rather than insane, and it doesn’t serve as an adequate warm-up for Quirrell’s cruelty.

^{^}

“Word of God” is fanfiction lingo for an authorial ruling on how to interpret ambiguous text; this is not Eliezer elevating himself to godhood.

^{^}

Chapter 44

^{^}

Chapter 36

^{^}

The Oxford Languages / Google definition: “attempt to explain or justify (one's own or another's behavior or attitude) with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate.”

^{^}

Nerfing is gamer slang for taking something powerful and hobbling it to be much less powerful.

^{^}

As a reminder, some terminology:

a wizard or witch is a magical person;

a Muggle is a non-magical person;

a Muggleborn is a wizard or witch who is born to Muggle parents;

a Squib is a person with at least one magical parent but who is themselves non-magical.

^{^}

Harry tries hard to reason about this at the beginning of chapter 25. We’ll say more about what Harry figured out in the next section.

^{^}

The Weasleys falsify that there is a limit of 1-2 children per magical family. The existence of the Weasleys says: “There is variance; small wizard families are not universal.” In evolutionary biology, the rate of evolution of anything is proportional to its variance (and equal to its heritable covariance with fitness). So when I look at the Weasleys, I see variance, and of course very direct covariance with fitness, with heritability not established but usually personality traits are partially heritable; and then my evolutionary biology goggles tell me, "Well, there's variance (and covariance via sheer identity), so probably this characteristic will not change all that slowly." So over a timespan of thousands of years, if there are any genes that produce heritable tendencies to have lots of kids like the Weasleys despite being a wizard, and there's otherwise enough resources around to support those kids, there will be more and more Weasleys with large wizard families. "All the wizards just decide to have very few kids even though they could easily have more" is not something that explains the persistence of low wizard populations for thousands of years, because you'd have some wizards with a heritable tendency to have more kids than that.

^{^}

For example, Harry Potter and the Wastelands of Time

^{^}

“which stops anyone from getting knowledge of powerful spells out of books, even if you find and read a powerful wizard’s notes they won’t make sense to you, it has to go from one living mind to another.” (Chapter 23)

LESSWRONG
LW

415

HPMOR: The (Probably) Untold Lore

415

415

The core (and power) of the Elder Wand

Characters

Masks

Imperfect Characters

Make All the Characters Awesome

Hermione as Mary Sue

Who’s the Main Character?

Plot

Characters interfering with plot

Setting up Plot Twists

Time-Turner Plots

Slashfic?

Why doesn't Harry like-like Hermione?

Setting

The Truth of Magic in HPMOR

Magical Genetics

An Aside: What did Harry Figure Out?

Nested Nerfing Hypothesis

Epilogues

Character	Sees self as protagonist	Viewpoint character	Makes decisions that move the story	Main character according to prophecy
Harry	✅	✅	✅	✅
Quirrell	✅	((✅))	✅
Hermione	✅	✅	✅
Draco	✅	✅
Dumbledore		((✅))	✅
McGonagall		(✅)
Snape		(✅)
Neville		(✅)
Pansy (e.g.)	✅	((✅))