New chapter, and the end is now in sight!
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 103.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
Confirmation the prophecy isn't about Neville:
AND THE DARK LORD WILL MARK HIM AS HIS EQUAL
As was first proposed on /r/rational (and EY has confirmed that he got the idea from that proposal)
Here was the original thread proposing this as a solution to the prophecy and here is the comment by Eliezer Yudkowsky confirming to be influenced by that thread.
Not a spoiler, but rot13'd for explaining the joke:
Gur bayl tenqr ybjre guna Qernqshy vf "Gebyy".
I wonder what, in Harry's model of the world, has been going on with Bellatrix all this time, and why he never inquired about her.
If someone wishes to give their readers the choice of whether or not to access a piece of information, it is in very bad taste for a third party to then take that choice away for no good reason.
Draco's plan at the start of the chapter is entirely correct and Harry should have been doing it on his own. They will find out that Hermione was reading about the stone before she was killed.
In fact she was probably killed precisely because she was getting too close to the stone in her readings. She may even have said something out loud like "eureka" that gave away that she had gotten it. This, by the way, points to her being killed by someone other than QQ, since he would want her to succeed since she would tell Harry and harry would tell him.
I question the wisdom of reading books that someone was potentially killed for reading without better opsec than Malfoy was demonstrating.
I originally interpreted the following as subtly implying the students were using prediction markets
But it seems more likely that eleven days is how long the year has left.
As a comment on the story as a whole, I used to think it was likely that the story would cumulate with Harry finding the source of magic. But with only one arc left, there simply isn't the time. It would be like the hobbits setting off to Mordor halfway through 'the return of the king'.
I also thought there might be a hunt for the horocruxes, but I doubt there will be time for that either. Without the horocruxes destroyed, Quirrelmort will at least partially survive. I'm guessing Harry will too. Dumbledore might be killed, either by Quirrel or by Harry, wh... (read more)
If he manages to fit everything in the last arc, then never mind 'quickly escalate' its going to be a literary singularity.
I'd suggest not so much subtle as overinterpreting. Carrow is shallow-minded and status-driven, he thinks he'll sound more deatheaterish if he puts on a particularly grim voice, and Malfoy sees right through him and tells him to stop being silly. This is simple, compatible with everything else we're told, and sufficient to explain Draco's memory described here.
Any guesses about these "certain organizations beyond Britain's shores" that Quirrell finds capable of completing his students' training?
Wasn't that Dumbledore who gave Harry the portkey and told him it led to the US, and then Quirrell who checked it and told Harry it led to somewhere local? Or are we thinking about different points in the story?
Any ideas on what this is alluding to? Shrieking Eels are from The Princess Bride.
How did the grading work? My first guess was that Quirrell was telling the truth, but this seems unlikely, and would mean that the EE+ he gave Harry couldn't mean anything. My second guess was that Quirrell came up with the grades before-hand, but all he knows is how well they could actually defend themselves, and real-world ability is not a good indicator of how well you'd do on a written test. My third guess is that a Time-Turner is involved, and he'll have Harry deliver the tests to him in the past.
He ignored the test results entirely. That's why "what an amazing spell" is a joke that made the Ravenclaws indignant, and made the Slytherins chuckle.
Registering some predictions and observations before the next chapter comes out:
Predictions:
The snippet at the start of Chapter 1 is from somewhere in the final chapter. 40%
Lily wasn’t making up the "excuses" Petunia mentioned in Chapter 1; she was indeed warned through some form of Divination that the world would end if she made Petunia pretty, and a centaur did actually tell her not to do so. 95%
Magic’s full power allows the user to rewrite reality. 99% (Look at Harry’s reaction to McGonagall’s Animagus transformation: "Magic isn't enough... (read more)
I realized why Quirrell gave Hermione a Dreadful grade, rather than just failing her. Recall from canon that there are three failing grades:
But a Poor grade indicates that the student can repeat the course. Death is final, there are no do-overs.
Anybody wish to provide arguments for why this decision of Quirrell's was a wrong one?
Public excoriation of failures usually lowers everyone's performance (in complex tasks or those that require creativity, like the candle/drawing pins test). If, in dangerous situations, his students are afraid that they will fail by dying, they're going to be less effective at defending themselves.
ch14
Wait, is the message Harry got with his cloak from Dumbledore? (edit: he admits that in ch79). I thought Dumbledore refused to lie? And yet he's letting the cloak escape his grasp while saying that.
(For a moment I thought he might be saying he wouldn't let the chance escape his grasp, rather than the cloak itself, but that's just silly, and there's no particular reason why that would even be true, if the other isn't.)
Not that it matters, but I don't really understand Quirrell's grading criteria. Is Neville's score 'outstanding' because he alone made the sensible move of escaping to safety of his home from life-threatening dangers of Hogwarts and Hermione's grade low because she failed the 'ultimate' test? If so, does Harry's surivival to-date 'exceed' Quirrell's expectations?
Alternatively, is Neville's score a reflection of his rate of improvement over the term, which admittedly was outstanding, relative to Harry's (or Hermione's)?
Perhaps, grades other than OWL's and NEWT's do not matter academically, so Quirrell's grading is purely subjective/random?
I rot13d it in my comment just because it's funnier if you figure it out yourself, and like many stealth jokes, it's easy to figure out once you know there's a joke to look for (if you've read canon). If it was an actual spoiler for the chapter that would facilitate discussion because it wasn't just a random throwaway joke, then I wouldn't rot13 it.
A spell to grade tests is probably not an old spell that's been around forever since no one else seems to use it, but QQ may have invented it for this purpose.
Either way, it's existence is a further hint to the nature of magic in the world of HPMOR. It involves some pretty sophiscated natural languge processing. The fact that magic can do natural language processing is hinted as significant in chapter 6 while Harry is studying the retrieval charm and trying diffent phrases that point to "bag of gold". If we knew how magic could read a test and p... (read more)
Quirrell is joking. He doesn't care about the results of the ministry-mandated test, as he already knew what grades his students had earned from him regardless.
There's a much simpler explanation: The tests came pre-graded and QQ just cast a spell to reveal the invisible grades and ignored all the answers.
The Pythagorean theorem hasn't been mentioned in HPMOR. Given this, would anyone bet me at 100-to-1 odds that future chapters will reveal that Harry rederived the Pythagorean theorem, in secret, while a student at Hogwarts, before April, and had fun?
I have a very, very long, not very likely, crazy theory. Here it goes.
If you recall, Harry made a number of TODOs when he started the year.
... (read more)cough