New chapter!
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 102.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
I may be pointing out the obvious, but...
This is how the troll was smuggled into Hogwarts without the wards going off. In all likelihood, Quirrell had the transfigured troll on his person when Dumbledore identified to the Hogwarts wards "The Defense Professor stands within this circle". Trolls self-transfigure as a form of regeneration, so the transfiguration would not kill the troll or be detectable.
This suggests that the troll was known to Hogwarts as "The Defense Professor", and so explains what the wards reported:
I would take you up on that, but in my memory palace one of the walls is occupied by a large chalkboard covered with lines of "I will not underestimate Eliezer Yudkowsky".
Sounds fair enough. So we have a bet?
We have a bet. It's on!
I think Yudkowsky is enough of a non-asshole that if that's the case, he'll consent to say whether Baba Yaga had anything to do with Hat & Cloak. Remember, he endorses betting on beliefs.
Lets see: Data and implications, assuming Quirrelmort is keeping up his habit of only rarely telling direct lies: Dark and sacrificial magic tends to kill you in the end, and neither the original Voldemort, nor Quirrelmort had a fix for this. The horcrux spell forks your identity, imperfectly, and also carries wholly unacceptable costs to anyone moral. So, you know, nothing voldy cares about.
Theory: Facing his own inevitable demise from accumulated sacrifice damage, Voldy attempted to fix the flaws in the horcrux process - First he attempted to bypass the loss of knowledge by targeting a strong wizard as the possession target - heck, that might have been part of the point of the campaign of terror - to draw out wizards with real power from obscurity. And so he ended up fighting both sides of that war, because he took Monroe's body while still remaining Voldemort full time. The personality divergence from imprinting himself on a mind that strong, however, was more than Voldemort considered acceptable, and thus he targeted Harry. At a guess, he worked out how to remove the carrier object from the spell so that the death of Harry's mother would copy him directly into the mind of baby ... (read more)
Harry seems to have forgotten the fact that he rescued Bellatrix from Azkaban. It one of those things he should ask about when asked for unsaid stuff between the two. Given Harry's knowledge of wizard medicine Quirrell could simply die the next week and take all the knowledge about Bellatrix with him to his grave.
This chapter confirms earlier speculations that horcruxes work by making backup copies of brain states (with the caveat that actually using the horcrux will merge its memories and personality with those of its host body, resulting in a hybrid entity). The theory that Harry James Potter-Evans-Verres is an instance of Tom Riddle (or, rather, a hybrid of Tom Riddle and the original Harry Potter) now seems very, very probable. It explains why Harry is as smart as Tom's other instances (the original Riddle/Monroe/Voldemort and the Quirrell/Riddle hybrid), and why the remember-ball glowed like the sun (Harry forgot Riddle's memories because he was too young to remember them).
Parseltongue has a word for "horcrux"?
Voldemort used horcruxes, obviously (that's what the five hidden items in the elemental pattern are), but between the missing memories and the hybridization Quirrellmort doesn't consider them to be worth the trouble. Keep in mind that there is a nice theory about not being able to lie in pars... (read more)
No, the unicorn will, but by the time Quirrell drinks it blood it won't be transfigured any more, so he will be fine.
I think McGonagall doubts Quirrell's goodness more than his knowledge.
It's still not a lie.
He considered it long ago and then he did it. He doesn't want to try it again because he's already got some and/or they wouldn't fix his current situation. Literally truthful but appropriately misleading.
Other words you wouldn't expect snakes to use: ritual, schoolmaster, spell, sacrifice, world, meaningless, murder, obscuration, device, continuity, Merlin's freaking Interdict...
yeah.
I think we're seeing the set up of the end game of the upload of Quirrellmort to Harry.
David Monroe, last descendant of a Noble House, family killed by Voldemort, the great champion to save Magical Britain against Voldemort. But instead of having the mass of Magical Britain rally around him, they generally make his difficult. When that plan of being a savior fails.
He then disappears. Poof.
Where is our champion now?
And poof! Harry Potter, last descendant of a Noble House, family killed by Voldemort, miraculously ends Voldemort rampage.
Years later, Monroe reappears as Quirrell, just in time to be the Defense Professor and mentor for this miraculous Harry Potter, who in fact is miraculous, for his age, or really any age. With a secret Dark Side that gives him great power. With so many similarities to Quirrell in personality and intelligence. With such a natural bond.
But if the victim is already very similar, perhaps more to his taste?
David Monroe, 2.0. Prepared as a baby to be a host. Prepared with a better history to be Savior of Magical Britain... (read more)
So this is why this forum is dying, EY casting AK v2.0.
A true EY fact!
To cite a facebook post from last Wednesday by XiXiDu (LW-name):
Any ideas on what the Philosopher's Stone does? My favorite idea so far, seen in the fanfiction.net reviews, is that it's a device for making transfiguration permanent. That would account for both gold and healing powers.
Oh, I guess I can post this then: V jnf ng n jrqqvat cnegl guvat n srj lrnef onpx jurer Ryvrmre pbasvezrq gung lbh pna'g yvr va Cnefrygbathr; gur engvbanyr tvira jnf gung Fnynmne jvfurq gb sbfgre pbbeqvangvba orgjrra uvf urvef. V'z abg 100% fher V'z erzrzorevat pbeerpgyl ohg V'z cerggl fher.
Sorry, but I'm not a fan of this part - its not like Britain has immigration policies that ban certain races or religions, so I can only assume EY is arguing in favour of totally unrestricted immigration. But the UK has only a certain amount of room, and there are non-xenophobic economic arguments against unrestricted immigration, e.g. putting too much strain on the NHS. But regardless of the arguments for and against, arguing against immigration is not the same as being indifferent to the lives of everyone who lives in a different country.
I did enjoy the rest of the chapter however. Quirrel's statements about horcruxes were initially surprising - if he is telling the truth, then how is he still alive? If not, then wouldn't he want Harry experimenting with horcruxes in order to turn him to the dark side?
The most plausible possibility is that he wants Harry's help to g... (read more)
I was surprised by that passage. If anything, it seems magical Britain is more exclusivist. Magical Britain only invited Hermione in because she's a British witch. The 99.9% of people who are born muggle are excluded completely. I also don't get the impression that foreign born wizards/witches are automatically invited to Hogwarts. So they are magic-nationalists as well.
They even forbid beneficial muggle-wizard trade, which probably results in the deaths of millions of muggles.
I'm not either. It lands with such a clunk. Maybe Magical Britain lets anyone in, but it's clear that muggles have few rights that Wizards feel they need to respect.
And that last line - ugh:
It doesn't even make sense. You "have a right to look someone in the eye" based on the totality of who you are versus what they are. Selecting out one point on which you are in error and they aren't really invalidates the metaphor.
Given all that Harry finds objectionable and even barbaric about Magical Britain, how much indifference they have to the suffering of others, and how his allegiance is more to a scientific culture with rule of law, that last line seems largely just false to Harry's character. Whatever faults he sees in muggle Britain, he sees as many of more in Magical Britain.
And why is universalist Harry all of a sudden in a twist over muggle Britain, especially?
It seems much more like the line is a gratuitous crack of the riding crop to one of the author's favorite hobby horses. All pissed off about UKIP's recent strong showing in elections?
I find open borders consistent with Harry in general, but making that a particular outrage, and particularly aimed at Muggle Britain as compared to Wizards, really doesn't work for the story or for making the moral point.
Perhaps he is a Horcrux transfer (as long speculated) but a failed one; introspecting about how different he is from his memories of 'himself', he would realize 'he' hadn't survived and all that was left was a weird mishmash of Monroe's personality and Voldemort's memories, and this was entirely worthless as immortality.
What argument could be more convincing to Quirrel than personally embodying the failure of horcruxes as an immortality strategy?
We learn a number of very interesting things in this chapter. I'll focus on one area
So it's confirmed it exists and that it isn't what people think and that it's power / mechanism isn't what people think.
This is important because thinking back to Harry's early experiments with Hermione, he discovered that if you don't know what a spell does or have been told something completely in the wrong space the spell doesn't work at all. If you know generally what it does, it still works as long as you pronounce it correctly. (The later is also confirmed by the 'for enemies' spell).
In the library Hermione told Harry that the spell is published but no one has been able to actually perform it (nominally due to difficulty). If they all think it does something other than what it actually does, that explains it and is consistent with the book's theory of magic.
Also worth noting, Hermione was killed shortly after she began looking into the stone in earnest.
... (read more)I don't know where else to post this, but I've been entertaining a hypothesis about HPMOR's version of magic. Has anyone already made the connection between magic and Outcome Pumps? During the first chapters in Hogwarts, Harry talks a lot about expectations, and about magic being able to match them, and it ocurred to me that HPMOR's magic was a mechanism to force your universe to branch into one that matches your expectation. Then I read somewhere, in old threads, that EY was at one point in the past planning to write a story about a device to "squeez... (read more)
Harry totally expected them to work. The idea that the universe should actually care about the way you pronounce oogely-boogely is absurd. He planned out a nice long series of experiments, and then had to scrap them after the first one falsified his theory.
Has anyone compiled a list of Chekhov's guns that haven't been fired yet in the story so far? Off the top of my head, I have:
Anything else?
Of course, that rule does not apply if the artifact was hidden by a man who thinks in story plots.
Chapter 12:
... (read more)So here's an obvious way to fix all known problems of the horcrux spell. You need a variant that kills the caster and moves their ghost into the victim's body. To avoid personality conflicts, the victim should be a baby who doesn't have much of a personality yet. And since the spell doesn't use an intermediate item, knowledge is not lost. Sounds like what happened to baby Harry, right?
Harry seems to have neglected the possibility that the Philosopher's Stone is a general-purpose transmutation device, thus explaining why it would be able to produce both gold and the elixir of life.
And since Fullmetal Alchemist was plagiarized from wizard lore, you'd think this would be a reasonably common hypothesis.
Hypothesis:
Some semi-random observations/conjectures supporting the hypothesis:
... (read more)The 6-hour information transfer limit is tied to the Interdict of Merlin. A 6-hour timeframe seems rather arbitrary in terms of describing a purely natural constraint of the underlying physical reality. It makes perfect sense, on the other hand, as a human-designed complementary measure of enforcing the Interdict as otherwise wizards would be traveling back in time to learn from old masters before their dea
/u/solipsist, in another comment on this thread:
If Quirrell can't lie in Parseltongue (and not just Harry, since Harry's speaking as a standard Parselmouth but Quirrell is speaking as a sentient snake), and if that prohibition enforces the sincerity of imperative commands and not just declarative statements, then clearly what Quirrell is s... (read more)
Not related to CH102, but I just realized that "Slytherin System" messages are a physical implementation of Tor. Entry node who knows only the sender and the middle node, middle node who knows only the entry and exit nodes, exit node who knows only the middle node and the receiver.
What's the deal with spells and age? If Harry is really so far ahead of his class and can already cast spells nobody else can, why is it just now that he can cast "second-year" spells effortlessly?
Canon or not, this reminds me too much of the public school system of a certain country where kids are verboten to use words "they shouldn't know yet".
These seem to be the relevant quotes:
and
-both hpmor ch.78
So from this it seems magic power increases with age, spells cast and time since first getting your wand (though the third could simply be due to the second)
So the reason Harry can only just now cast second year spells, is that he has only recently become sufficiently powerful. His partial transfiguration and patronous v2.0 don't actually require a lot of spell power they only require you to do clever things.
I've always modeled it as a physiological "mana capacity" aspect akin to muscle mass -- something that grows both naturally as a developing body matures, and as a result of exercise.
Anyone else find the stuff about indifference to be rather deepish? Indifference has no power at all, it's the absence of power.
And now we learn that to cast Avada Kevada, you have to either want the person dead, or not care whether they live or die? So, I guess that means the only condition in which you can't cast is if you want the person to live, in which case you wouldn't want to cast it anyway.
That's an interesting reflection of our recent discussion about the value of the term consciousness (http://lesswrong.com/lw/ki1/confused_as_to_usefulness_of_consciousness_as_a/) and how some languages probably don't have it.
This problem could be fixed, in principle:
You need two cooperating Dark Wizards. (I know, much easier said than done.) They share knowledge of all spells. One of them makes a horcrux, the other teaches him all the spells again. Then the other makes a horcrux, and the former teaches him.
Or maybe you just need one Dark Wizard, and one loyal servant, willing to make the U... (read more)
As horcruxes were explained they are quite substantial evidence that quirrel is not voldermort.
If voldermort could use them then he would take over world in year, He would first kidnap two wizards to make copy of himself which would be loyal to him and would quickly relearn all spells and kindap four other wizards and grow exponentially.
So likely explanation is as Quirrel said personality is completely different and after first forking to quirrel decided to fight voldermort and they do not try copy himself again.
Rereading chapter 100 reminds me of the Twilight Sparkle lookalike among the unicorns.
it added nothing but confusion and awkwardness. If it were cut, no one who hadn't been told would ever realize that something had once been there. And now with this chapter we've got some pretty good confirmation that they're not sapient, so any inferences one might have drawn from it were false.
I was under the impression the unicorn was Alicorn's cameo. Alicorn asked for a cameo as a unicorn, Eliezer agreed and even promised to make it plot relevant. I'm not sure what actually happened was quite what Alicorn had in mind.
I think quirrel is Harry from the future. Harry decided not to mess with time until he's older, but maybe once he's older he realized that he can break the time travel restriction rules and travel years into the past. This could possibly explain why quirrel knows so much about Harry. It also explains their magic interaction possibly. This would also explain how quirrel is so rational, whereas it would be surprising that Harry would randomly run into someone as rational as himself in the small number of people he's met in the wizarding world. Quirrel could'... (read more)
Hypothesis: Harry lives in a close to post-singularity universe. The source of magic is a boxed AI, created by the Atlanteans and Harry himself.
Currently, the boxed AI can be manipulated by means of spells, potions and rituals and is acting as a limited outcome pump. Harry, in his quest to end death, will release the AI from the box, thus bringing about a true singularity end state and the foretold end of the universe as we know it.
The method through which Harry will achieve this (releasing the boxed AI while simultaneously being partly responsible for i... (read more)
There is speculation that the philosopher's stone is a device that makes transfiguration permanent.
We know that there is a prophesy that someone, probably Harry, will destroy the stars.
I'm not a physicist, but... is there any chance that Harry could transfigure some sort of exotic matter that could collapse the quantum vacuum or otherwise destroy stars without requiring an interstellar spaceship?
Just a silly idea: Is there a relationship between Philosopher Stone and Philosophical Zombie?
Perhaps the Stone can provide immortality in combination with Horcrux. Step 1: use Philosopher Stone to remove the victim's qualia, changing them into a Philosphical Zombie. Step 2: use Horcrux to copy yourself into the victim's body. Now your qualia will not mix with their, so the new person is definitely you.
I go camping for a weekend and HUGE PLOT STUFF happens. Brain dump of how this chapter affects my pet predictions.
Mr. Hat & Cloak is Baba Yaga
If I didn't have self-monitoring against becoming a quack, I would have great confidence in this theory. My state of cognitive dissonance remains unchanged.
Mr. Hat & Cloak is Nicholas Flamel
From 102:
Best guess: the person who holds the stone now (Baba Yaga) not born to the name now used (Nicholas ... (read more)
I go camping for a weekend and HUGE PLOT STUFF happens. Brain dump of how this affects my pet predictions.
Mr. Hat & Cloak is Baba Yaga
If I didn't have self-monitoring against becoming a quack, I would have great confidence in this theory. My state of cognitive dissonance is roughly unchanged.
Mr. Hat & Cloak is Nicholas Flamel
From 102:
Best guess: the person who holds the stone now (Baba Yaga) not born to the name now used (Nicholas Flame... (read more)
Something I haven't heard discussed elsewhere:
Merlin created the Interdict because he believed, based on prophecy, that this would prevent the otherwise inevitable end of the world and its magic.
If resolved!Harry is "the end of the world", as per Trelawney's prophecy, then whatever he is going to do must therefore involve bypassing the Interdict of Merlin.
The only way we presently know to do that is Salazar's basilisk-transmitted lore, which is now probably only available via Quirrell (assuming he is Tom Riddle and Tom Riddle was the Heir of Slyt... (read more)