There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.
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Eliezer Yudkowsky which is not supposed to be publicly available (which includes public statements by Eliezer that have been retracted).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.
Funny thing about this chapter: up until now, I was growing fairly convinced that if any major character was going to die early, the most logical choice would be Harry. His character arc was plateauing while Hermione's was growing ever larger, many loose ends about himself were being tied up, and new ordeals were arising which propped up either-or-both Draco and Hermione as potential candidates for being the true protagonist(s) of the story. Unfortunately, the events of this chapter have at least given an appearance of permanently closing that path forward. I'm afraid this leaves us with - I claim at my own risk - a more predictable story than I was anticipating.
Granted, I don't mean to claim the author has shot himself in his own foot. Although I will comment that he appears to be doing everything in his power to try. Given two stories with happy endings - one where Hermione dies early and one where Harry dies early - the second story is clearly the most interesting challenge, presents the more exciting of the two puzzles, and is much harder to predict for the reader.
But to be fair, that doesn't mean the first isn't also worth reading. After all, I recognize that the primary goal of the story is to advance lessons about using rationality, which is far easier to accomplish when your main character is a rational actor already, rather than someone on the road to becoming a rational actor. As such, it may have simply been outside of Eliezer's skill-set to effectively or confidently continue imparting lessons while impaired with the further challenge of working with developing - rather than developed - rationalists as the main characters driving the story onward. Even if this were not the case and Eliezer does have the means for crafting that story, it still would be reasonable to predict that such a challenge would take the story much, much longer to write than perhaps the author was willing to consider acceptable. A disappointing decision, no doubt, but we all have to manage our time.
Still, what a fascinating challenge that would have been...
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 88-89. The previous thread has passed 500 comments.
There is now a site dedicated to the story at hpmor.com, which is now the place to go to find the authors notes and all sorts of other goodies. AdeleneDawner has kept an archive of Author’s Notes. (This goes up to the notes for chapter 76, and is now not updating. The authors notes from chapter 77 onwards are on hpmor.com.)
The first 5 discussion threads are on the main page under the harry_potter tag. Threads 6 and on (including this one) are in the discussion section using its separate tag system. Also: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18.
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: